Fri 28 Dec 2007
Mohandas Gandhi, shot dead at prayer meeting by Nathuram Godse a year after partition of India. 1948.
Liaqat Ali Khan, PM of Pakistan, assassinated at public meeting in Rawalpindi. 1951.
Solomon Bandaranaike, President of Sri Lanka, shot dead by Buddhist monk. 1959.
Sheikh Mujib, first PM of independent Bangladesh after 1971 breakup of Pakistan, killed in military coup. Also killed are his entire family of twenty two, including heir apparents Sheikh Kamal, Sheikh Jamal and Sheikh Fazlul Huq Moni. 1975.
Mujib’s four closest advisors Nazrul Islam, Tajuddin Ahmed, Mansur Ali and Kamruzzaman killed in their jail cell by coup leaders. 1975.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, architect of breakdown leading to 1971 Bangladesh genocide and first PM of divided Pakistan, hanged by military court convened by General Zia-ul Haque. 1979.
Sanjay Gandhi, son of Indira and Rasputin-like Emergency period Advisor, killed in plane crash. 1980.
General Zia ur Rahman, President of Bangladesh since 1977 counter-coups, killed in military coup. 1981.
Indira Gandhi, PM of India, assassinated by Sikh bodyguards avenging her brutal attack on Amritsar Golden Temple. 1984.
Shahnawaz Bhutto, leader of anti-Zia-ul Haque groups in exile with links to Soviet-funded militant group al-Zulfiqar (formed to avenge hanging of Zulfiqar Bhutto), found dead in France. 1985.
General Zia-ul Haque, iron-fist military ruler of Pakistan, killed in mysterious plane crash that also kills top Generals & US Ambassador. 1988
Rajiv Gandhi, PM of India, killed by LTTE suicide bomber protesting Indian intervention in Sri Lanka. 1991.
Ranasinghe Premadasa, President of Sri Lanka, killed by Tamil Tiger suicide bomber at May Day rally. 1993.
Lionel Gamini Dissanayake, Sri Lankan presidential candidate and opposition leader, killed in suicide attack. 1994.
Murtaza Bhutto, leader of breakaway faction of PPP that campaigned against then PM Benazir, shot dead by Karachi police. 1996.
Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, President of Sri Lanka, survives LTTE suicide attack but loses one eye. 1999.
King Birendra, Nepalese king, wife and family members shot dead during a rampage by Crown Prince Dipendra. 2001.
Sheikh Hasina, leader of Bangladesh opposition AL, survives bomb attack that kills Ivy Rahman. 2004.
Benazir Bhutto, returns from a decade long exile and immediately survives bomb blast that kills hundreds of supporters. 2007.
Benazir Bhutto, shot dead at rally. 2007.
December 28th, 2007 at 6:45 am
So what does this say about the sub-continent politics and politicians? The circumstances of each of these assassinations are completely different but the results are the same, someone didn’t like what they were doing or saying so strongly that s/he had to die for it.
December 28th, 2007 at 8:02 am
I think it says that the extremist factions in the sub-continent do not want to engage with those who do not share their views and would rather silence anyone with views opposing their own.
December 28th, 2007 at 8:08 am
Ironic that Ms Bhutto was killed in the same spot as Liaquat Ali Khan.
December 28th, 2007 at 8:11 am
The S.Asian region probably has more assassinations than any other region in the world.
Makes me wonder whether this is a cultural anomaly of past regional history, a copycat disorder, or an abnormal propensity for conflict in the region.
Conflicts like hindu-muslim, Kashmir, AL-BNP, etc. once ignited never seem to close, but drags on forever. And the region seems to have more conflicts than anywhere else - leading to NUCLEAR borders! May explain the under-developed pre-condition, and never-ending resolutions for dysfunctional civilian govt (non-democracy).
Such conflicts lead to the biggest tragedy, that assassinations are done not by the enemy, but usually their OWN people.
December 28th, 2007 at 9:22 pm
I’m not so sure the South Asian region is more assassination-prone than other areas.
Middle East in the 1950s and 1960s saw regular political violence. In Iraq, the entire royal family was killed in 1958. In Lebanon, a top politician was killed in 2005 in similar circumstances as Benazir. In Afghanistan before the Soviet invasion, communist factions killed a bunch of presidents in coups and countercoups.
Africa too has had a lot of assassinations. In Latin America, coups had traditionally been bloodless, with the deposed leaders being exiled. But even there Pinochet killed Allende. And even in the United States, Kennedy brothers and Dr King were killed by assassins in the 1960s.
Assassinations can happen anywhere. If someone is determined to die in order to kill there is not much one can do about it. While the death is tragedy, for policy the important thing is what happens after the assassination. In democracies, power is handed over to the constitutional successor, there are investigations and usually the killers are brought to justice. In dictatorships and military coups, these don’t happen. That Mahatma’s killer was brought to justice while Liaquat’s was not tells volumes about the state India and Pakistan are in.
December 29th, 2007 at 3:08 am
Well, the above list clearly shows that since 1975, there has been a major death or attempt by assassination every 1 to 4 years, in SAsia region. And that has happened 15 times since 1975 (in 32 years).
Can we show such a list in any other region, since 1900?
Not trying to create another conflict here, between military and civilian
.
But my main issue is that a clear image is visible to me, that SAsia region is prone to long term conflicts, and public admin and leadership are chronically weak in CONFLICT MANAGEMENT.
December 29th, 2007 at 8:21 am
(contd. from #6)
And this weakness in conflict management creates internal frustrations and lingering conflicts, leading to greater frequency of assassinations.
December 31st, 2007 at 4:41 am
Please remove the photo of Sheikh Hasina from the list. She is still alive and active poilitician. It looks very bad to to see her photo along with all these slain leaders.
December 31st, 2007 at 12:28 pm
You are mixing up people. Keep on the list only heads of people who were assasinated, otherwise context is lost.
I agree, Hasina should be removed. Also, people killed inside prison should be removed, as those killings have STATE APPROVAL.
In each case, the Supreme Commander of the STATE who was assadinated is at fault. Look at the most oppressive of all regimes like North Korea (Kim Sung), Iraq (Saddam Hussain).
December 31st, 2007 at 1:30 pm
In that case, Chandrika Kumaratunga is alive too.
December 31st, 2007 at 9:07 pm
Yes, Please kindly remove Sheikh Hasina from this list.It feels bad to to see her photo along with all these slain leaders.
January 1st, 2008 at 11:11 pm
Add Solomon Bandarnayeke, father of Kumaratunga.
Shaymal Ganguli,
you wrote, “In each case, the Supreme Commander of the STATE who was assasinated is at fault.” So your logic is rather trying them in court, blow them with grenade. We all regular people need to stay away from people like you.
January 5th, 2008 at 6:44 pm
The following is closer to my personal assessment of the Bhutto Saga.
Bhutto’s Deadly Legacy
New York Times: January 4, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
By WILLIAM DALRYMPLE
New Delhi
WHEN, in May 1991, former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi of India was killed by a suicide bomber, there was an international outpouring of grief. Recent days have seen the same with the death of Benazir Bhutto: another glamorous, Western-educated scion of a great South Asian political dynasty tragically assassinated at an election rally.
There is, however, an important difference between the two deaths: while Mr. Gandhi was assassinated by Sri Lankan Hindu extremists because of his policy of confronting them, Ms. Bhutto was apparently the victim of Islamist militant groups that she allowed to flourish under her administrations in the 1980s and 1990s.
It was under Ms. Bhutto’s watch that the Pakistani intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, first installed the Taliban in Afghanistan. It was also at that time that hundreds of young Islamic militants were recruited from the madrassas to do the agency’s dirty work in Indian Kashmir. It seems that, like some terrorist equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster, the extremists turned on both the person and the state that had helped bring them into being.
While it is true that the recruitment of jihadists had started before she took office and that Ms. Bhutto was insufficiently strong — or competent — to have had full control over either the intelligence services or the Pakistani Army when she was in office, it is equally naïve to believe she had no influence over her country’s foreign policy toward its two most important neighbors, India and Afghanistan.
Everyone now knows how disastrous the rule of the Taliban turned out to be in Afghanistan, how brutally it subjected women and how it allowed Al Qaeda to train in camps within its territory. But another, and in the long term perhaps equally perilous, legacy of Ms. Bhutto’s tenure is often forgotten: the turning of Kashmir into a jihadist playground.
In 1989, when the insurgency in the Indian portion of the disputed region first began, it was largely an amateur affair of young, secular-minded Kashmiri Muslims rising village by village and wielding homemade weapons — firearms fashioned from the steering shafts of rickshaws and so on. By the early ’90s, however, Pakistan was sending over the border thousands of well-trained, heavily armed and ideologically hardened jihadis. Some were the same sorts of exiled Arab radicals who were at the same time forming Al Qaeda in Peshawar, in northwestern Pakistan.
By 1993, during Ms. Bhutto’s second term, the Arab and Afghan jihadis (and their Inter-Services Intelligence masters) had really begun to take over the uprising from the locals. It was at this stage that the secular leadership of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front began losing ground to hard-line Islamist outfits like Hizbul Mujahedeen.
I asked Benazir Bhutto about her Kashmir policy and the potential dangers of the growing role of religious extremists in the conflict during an interview in 1994. “India tries to gloss over its policy of repression in Kashmir,” she replied. “India does have might, but has been unable to crush the people of Kashmir. We are not prepared to keep silent, and collude with repression.”
Hamid Gul, who was the head of the intelligence agency during her first administration, was more forthcoming still. “The Kashmiri people have risen up,” he told me, “and it is the national purpose of Pakistan to help liberate them.” He continued, “If the jihadis go out and contain India, tying down their army on their own soil, for a legitimate cause, why should we not support them?”
Benazir Bhutto’s death is, of course, a calamity, particularly as she embodied the hopes of so many liberal Pakistanis. But, contrary to the commentary we’ve seen in the last week, she was not comparable to Myanmar’s Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. Ms. Bhutto’s governments were widely criticized by Amnesty International and other groups for their use of death squads and terrible record on deaths in police custody, abductions and torture. As for her democratic bona fides, she had no qualms about banning rallies by opposing political parties while in power.
Within her own party, she declared herself the president for life and controlled all decisions. She rejected her brother Murtaza’s bid to challenge her for its leadership and when he persisted, he was shot dead in highly suspicious circumstances during a police ambush outside the Bhutto family home.
Benazir Bhutto was certainly a brave and secular-minded woman. But the obituaries painting her as dying to save democracy distort history. Instead, she was a natural autocrat who did little for human rights, a calculating politician who was complicit in Pakistan’s becoming the region’s principal jihadi paymaster while she also ramped up an insurgency in Kashmir that has brought two nuclear powers to the brink of war.
William Dalrymple is the author, most recently, of “The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857.”
January 13th, 2008 at 3:44 am
[...] It is difficult to write about people who have just died. Many are grief stricken at the untimely death of the former prime minister. Even her critics are shocked by the way she was hunted down. An insensitive piece would aggravate their pain, and one doesn’t generally speak ill of the dead. I remember as a child asking my mother “Amma. Do bad people never die?” A man not known for his strength of character had died, and newspaper reports had described him as an honest social worker. I am no longer of the age to get away with such questions. But even for those who have loved Benazir, I believe the questions need to be asked if this cycle is to ever stop. [...]