By Rajan Philips –

Rajan Philips

The attempted assassination of Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico has sent shivers down western spines. In a rare moment of unity, both Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin condemned the shooting. The identity of the arrested shooter has not been made public, but he is believed to be a 71 year old poet and writer violently protesting the Fico government’s attacks on media freedom including the replacement of Slovakia’s independent public broadcaster, RTVS, with a pro-government and ‘patriotic’ mouthpiece. The small country of five million that was born out of the 1993 dissolution of Czechoslovakia, in that famous “velvet divorce,” is now feared to be on the brink of more internal divisions and instability. And it has put Europe itself on edge.

There were forebodings at the time of the divorce about the trajectory that Slovakia would take unlike its severed twin, the Czech Republic, that was a model addition to the West. Then US Secretary of State Madeline Albright, a Czech American, called it “the black hole” of Europe. Now there is more of them and even within the old countries of Western Europe. Robert Fico has been Prime Minister twice before, between 2006 and 2010 and again from 2012 to 2018. After his defeat in 2018, he was pronounced politically dead, but he resurrected himself veering wildly from moderate left to extreme right, like so many other political leaders in Eastern Europe. The 59 year old Fico is a noted protégé of the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, who is notorious for his ideological contortions and right wing authoritarianism.

The Old Europe

The old Europe of consociational politics and electoral alternations between centre-left and centre-right political parties has virtually disappeared and the continent is now stuck in confrontations between the forces of extreme right and their new enemies, liberal elites. The old left has disappeared with the old Europe. In the continent, where Hegel first saw newspapers replacing morning Mass (now both have been replaced by the cell phone), freedom of expression and independent media are coming under threats from populist right wing governments.

Like Fico in Slovakia, Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is on course to allowing the sale of state-owned news agency AGI to a sitting lawmaker who already owns three conservative dailies and who belongs to the League Party that is a coalition partner of the Prime Minister’s Brothers of Italy party. Government supporters use the country’s draconian defamation laws to judicially harass and even jail prominent government critics. Philosophy Professor Donatella Di Cesare of Sapienza University in Rome has become the latest victim of defamation charges based on a complaint against her by Francesco Lollobrigida, brother-in-law of the Prime Minister and her Minister of Agriculture.

There are exceptions, as in Spain, where the Socialist Party is weathering opposition storm in Madrid and even won the largest share of the seats in the recent Catalonia regional election that saw, for the first time in over ten years, the pro-independence parties collectively winning fewer seats than the other parties. In Britain, the Labour is all but assured of a rampaging return to power both at Westminster and in Holyrood, Edinburgh. But a catastrophic collapse of the Conservative Party may will trigger the rise of the extreme English right as a potent force in keeping with its European Joneses, so to speak. Hopefully, what Tom Nairn called the ‘English enigma,’ to describe England’s historical indifference to nationalism, would not be fatally imperilled.

America is another story where seething social discontents are tearing apart the country’s, and the world’s oldest, democratic institutions. Adding insult to injury, Michael Johnson, the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, the third in the line of succession after the President and the Vice President, led a posey of Republicans and showed up last week in a Manhattan court room 200 km away from the capital, to show support to Donald Trump who is on trial in a criminal case involving his alleged hush-money payment to cover up his sexual dalliance with a porn star. The criminality is not about sex or even the payment, but about violating the election law and undermining election integrity by conspiring and suppressing negative information about himself public during the 2016 presidential election.

Of all the multiple indictments that Trump is facing, the porn star sex scandal is the least politically significant, but the only one that has been able to proceed to trial. All the other and far more serious indictments are mired in legal wrangling and judicial delays. The most heinous of them, Trump’s instigation of an insurrection in Washington on January 6, 2021, to overturn Biden’s election, is being held up at the Supreme Court until the Conservative Justices make up their mind about what one of them called would be “a ruling for the ages!” Hardcore Republicans believe that Trump is being unfairly subjected to politicised prosecution that they would expect to see only in third world countries. The Republicans who should know better, like Speaker Johnson, have jettisoned all political scruples and are supporting Trump to avoid falling foul of his rabid followers.

New India

In most third world countries, no political party would have someone like Trump as its presidential candidate. And against a candidate like Trump, an incumbent like Biden would not have to even campaign. But in America the race between them is close, thanks to the electoral college system that stymies the popular vote. Biden’s domestic record is exemplary – in restoring presidential stability after four years of Trump’s havoc; revamping the economy to becoming the only stable economy in the western world; and in implementing the largest slew of progressive and social welfare measures in sixty years – after Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Yet he is in a close race because of the social divisions that are frozen along party lines.

Biden’s Achilles heel is outside America. In Gaza and now potentially in Ukraine. Senator Bernie Sanders, a veteran of the 1968 antiwar protests and a progressive Democratic presidential contender in 2016 and 2020, has warned that Gaza could be Biden’s Vietnam, not because the two are comparable but because of their comparable political implications in an election year. As in 1968, when Nixon won the election promising peace in Vietnam. In stopping arms shipment to Israel, Biden has gone farther than any President after Reagan. Yet it is too little, too late. Not enough to stop Netanyahu; not enough to stop pro-Palestinian student protestors in over 130 US campuses and not enough to mitigate US’s total isolation from the rest of the world on the Palestinian question. In The recent UN General Assembly vote to give Palestinians full membership status, which received overwhelming support from 143 countries, the US was one of nine including Israel voting against the resolution.

Unlike western incumbent leaders, Prime Minister Modi has no problem about returning to power for a third term in India. The elections are now well past the halfway mark and the remaining contests are mostly in the northern states along with West Bengal and Maharashtra. Modi’s and the BJP’s problem is whether the BJP alliance will retain or exceed the 2019 tally of 353 seats (BJP alone got 303 seats). Modi started the election campaign with the call to get 400+ seats. The rhetoric has since been pegged back following indications of lower voter turnout compared to 2019. And the rhetoric has been switched to attack the Muslims to energize the subaltern Hindu vote in the Hindi belt areas dominated by (caste-based) reservation politics that gave the BJP most of its seats in the last election.

What Modi has in common with many populist leaders in the west is in demonizing the elites and the secular and liberal traditions in politics. He targets the Congress elites of the past with studied vengeance. He is also aggressive in suppressing dissent and organizing media attacks, government investigations and defamation suits against those who oppose him. He has publicly boasted that the new India will reach out and kill its enemies even in their homes.

That statement is widely believed to be a reference to Modi government’s alleged attempts to silence Sikh activists involved in the Khalistan movement abroad. Notably so in the US and in Canada, where Indian emigrants with alleged connections to the Indian government are facing criminal indictments over murder and attempted murder charges. Prime Minister Modi could have won a third term without any of this, and India would still be a growing economic power merely by virtue of its population size and natural endowments. What role would the election results have in influencing the Modi government to rethink its ways is the question now. We have less than a month to find out.      

Sri Lankan Anniversaries

Sri Lanka has a few months to go before its tryst with elections. Meanwhile, the month of May has two anniversaries that are three days apart. One marks the birth of the Republic of Sri Lanka and the adoption of the First Republican Constitution. Hence the First Republic, in Gaullist chronology. That was on May 22^nd in 1972. The First Republic and its Constitution are widely believed to have been the principal cause of Tamil political alienation and the birth of Tamil separatism in Sri Lanka.

The state’s response over the next 10 to 15 years and the violent Tamil rejoinder led to many killings, a whole pogrom and a long drawn out war that pitted the Sri Lankan army against the LTTE. The war ended with the defeat of the LTTE on May 19^th, 2009. That is the second anniversary, and it marks an event that occurred thirty seven years after the First Republic was born and thirty one years after it had been superseded by the Second Republic with its own Constitution in 1978.

There is no official or public commemoration of the May 22^nd anniversary that falls on Wednesday next week. The end of the war anniversary, on the other hand, is variously and even controversially commemorated on two different dates within Sri Lanka, and in the Tamil diaspora universe even involving foreign governments. The end of the war anniversaries have become the continuation of the war by peaceful means. One would hope that they remain peaceful forever and are not influenced or infected by the raw shenanigans such as allegedly involving the current Indian government and Khalistan Sikhs.

On the other hand, even though the anniversary of the First Republic its Constitution is now unhonoured and unsung, the political changes and consequences that flowed from them have significant implications even today, 52 years later. One of those implications has been the never-ending preoccupation with constitutional politics. The 1972 Constitution carried in its womb the seeds of its own undoing and was totally repudiated and wholly replaced by a new constitution in 1978.

The 1978 Constitution introduced the executive presidential system that undermined the parliamentary system that was in force and put Sri Lanka on an unchartered constitutional path. 46 years and 21 amendments later, the Sri Lankan Constitution is still a massive political bone of contention. How much of an issue would, or should, it be in the upcoming presidential election?