Resurgent Garcia, purged Deng and comeback politics
Alan Garcia left the country in fear that he might be charged with crime and brought to trial. It would not be quite a while before he would return, declare his willingness to be president once more and in actuality regain the old office. To all intents and purposes, the restoration of the Garcia presidency has been a remarkable feat. Whether the feat at the ballot box translates into coruscating performance in office is a question the future will deal with.
When you think of Garcia's comeback, you cannot but dwell at leisure on all or some of the other men who have in our times made it back to popular acceptability in their own political ambience. The most glittering instance of a dramatic comeback remains, of course, that of Richard Nixon. He lost the presidency to John Kennedy narrowly in 1960 (there are people who will remind you even today that the Kennedys had Chicago Mayor Richard Daley steal the election for JFK and so deprived Nixon of an office that should rightfully have been his). Nixon was young, only forty seven, which in essence meant he could not be expected to walk away into the sunset. Which is when he decided to take the first important step to a return by challenging California governor Edmund 'Pat' Brown at the gubernatorial election in 1962. It was an election few expected Nixon to lose, but he did lose in what was clearly a shock victory for Brown. A bitter Nixon then informed newsmen that they would not have him to 'kick around any more' because that was his 'last' press conference.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel. In the event, that press conference was to be followed by many more press conferences over the subsequent four years. Nixon went around the world dispensing wisdom to politicians and statesmen all the way from Asia to Europe. He wrote on foreign policy for prestigious journals. And at the 1966 Congressional elections, he campaigned long and hard for Republican nominees for office, work that was soon rewarded through the gains his party made in the Senate and House of Representatives. That Nixon could not be written off came through in Charles de Gaulle's belief in a future for the former American vice president. By 1968, Nixon had declared his availability for the White House once more, beat then front runner George Romney at the New Hampshire primary and then went on to clobber Hubert Humphrey at the presidential election in November.
Closer home, the inevitable drama that comes with politicians trying to recapture the spotlight was nowhere felt more acutely than in Indira Gandhi's determined, calculated upset of the Janata cart in 1980. When she and her party lost power in 1977, following a troubled period of emergency rule, characterised again by the notoriety achieved in the process by her son Sanjay, everyone knew she was gone for good. The government of Morarji Desai, however, ensured through its follies and the tantrums of the gerontocracy running the show that Gandhi came back to office sooner than anyone expected her to. Desai and his colleagues went out of their way to humiliate the fallen prime minister, hauled her before the Shah Commission and gave the country to understand the vindictive streak working in them. They simply could not comprehend the shrewdness with which Indira Gandhi was considering it all, even if the price she was paying was high. Desai fell soon enough, to be supplanted by Chaudhry Charan Singh. His ministry collapsed when Indira's people pulled the rug from under him in Parliament, prompting him to quit office. It was a resurgent Indira Gandhi who reclaimed the prime ministerial prize in 1980.
Contrast her return to high office with the attempts made by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to reclaim power in Pakistan after he was ousted in the Ziaul Haq coup of July 1977. When the deposed prime minister was freed by the army in what was ostensibly a condition towards the beginning of an election campaign, it quickly became obvious that Bhutto and his Pakistan People's Party were back on the road to office. The discontent and hate generated toward Bhutto in the aftermath of the rigged elections of March that year were seen to be giving way to a renewal of sympathy for the man. It was at this point that General Zia had a change of mind. A Bhutto return could spell danger for him, for he had through his coup committed a treasonable offence punishable by death.
It was thus a matter of the general's neck, or Bhutto's. He decided to save his and then have Bhutto's snap on the gallows. That was in April 1979. Pakistan, always a sad country, turned into a lugubrious place.
Sure, in later and more banal times, Bhutto's daughter Benazir, as also Nawaz Sharif, gained power, lost it and then got it back, only to lose it all again. But the drama, the sheer excitement which has often touched the lives of other politicians as they have tried to plough their way back to high ground was missing in these two instances. You might entertain similar sentiments about Jean-Bertrand Aristide's return to presidential office in Haiti or Reza Pahlavi's recapture of the throne in Tehran because both men saw their comeback engineered by the Americans. The perspectives, though, were different. The Eisenhower administration restored an unpopular monarch in Iran by simply throwing out a nationalist prime minister. In Haiti, it was a popular president who got back his position once the usurper Raoul Cedras had been ejected by the Clinton White House. Be that as it may, the process of political return, whenever it has taken place (and it does not always or often happen that way), has been characterised by the peculiarity of conditions in a given place at a given time.
The liberation of France in the 1940s catapulted De Gaulle to political leadership and then threatened to clip his wings through the razor sharpness of the squabbling, divisive Fourth Republic. He quit, retreated to Colombey les deux Eglises, and decided to bide his time until France called him again. A decade later, in 1958, the call came. An authoritative De Gaulle took charge, made sweeping changes in the constitution, established the Fifth Republic and generally dealt with the world in his own way. His vision of French grandeur, bolstered by the urbanity of such men as Andre Malraux and the sexiness of such women as Brigitte Bardot, is an idea Frenchmen have never let go of. Even Jacques Chirac is obsessed by it.
In our troubled times, Juan Domingo Peron took over Argentina in the 1940s, lost it in the mid 1950s and then saw it fall into his lap again in the early 1970s. When he died, his second wife Isabel took his place as president, quickly made a chaos of it and then was deposed in a coup by a military that felt no guilt in murdering and 'disappearing' political dissidents. But Peronism, in its variations of meaning and necessary adjustments to circumstances, has survived as political faith. President Nestor Kirchner is a devoted Peronist today.
On the scale of disbelief, the rise and fall and rise of China's Deng Xiao-ping has been unprecedented, at least up to this point in time. Denounced as a capitalist roader in the course of the Cultural Revolution set in motion in 1966, Deng was purged by Mao Zedong. He had earlier made it known that it mattered little whether or not a cat was black or white as long as it caught mice. Rehabilitated with the obvious support of his mentor Zhou En-lai, Deng was soon purged a second time. He re-emerged as a political force in the late 1970s, to send Hua Guo-feng and the so-called Gang of Four packing and assume full authority over the state. Clearly the last of the great Chinese revolutionaries, Deng Xiao-ping died in February 1997. His economic legacy continues to sustain his successors.
Alan Garcia's legacy, this time around, will need to be different. It is a changed country he will govern. Not even the once popular Alejandro Toledo could make Peru a nation of happy people.