:: Farrukh Dhondy

Mughal lessons in politics, morality

Farrukh Dhondy

"A diet of flattery

Ensures spiritual anorexia".

From The Proverbs

of Bachchoo

Sept.05 : Ian MacAskill, the Scottish minister of justice, explained to the nation why he had set Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, the convicted killer of 270 people in the bombing of the Pan Am flight over the town of Lockerbie, free to go home to Libya.

Megrahi, a convicted bomber, had been sentenced to die in a Scottish jail but was now suffering from virulent prostate cancer and was a man condemned, as Mr MacAskill said, by a "higher power". The prison doctors gave him weeks if not days.

He said he was tempering the demands of justice with compassion and allowing Megrahi to be repatriated to Libya to die with his family around him. US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, no less, had been on the phone to Mr MacAskill expressing American disapproval. Most of Megrahi’s victims had been Americans.

There was something strange about Mr MacAskill’s protestations of extending mercy. Though he didn’t use the words, Mr MacAskill was reproducing the arguments of Portia in the courtroom scene of The Merchant of Venice. The quality of mercy is not strained, he seemed to be saying; it blesses the Scottish nation as well as Megrahi; it becomes a politician better than the powers vested in him which include showing mercy to sick prisoners and releasing them if conscience dictates.

It was an unusual stance, an unusual intrusion of a purely moral consideration into politics, I thought, and went to bed thinking it.

The next day we saw pictures of Megrahi being greeted in Libya by crowds of people as though he were Wellington returning to London from Waterloo. Colonel Gaddafi’s son was there officially to greet him. People were waving the flag of the Scottish Parliament.

Political analysts began to state the obvious. US President Barack Obama had condemned the decision. Scotland was part of the United Kingdom and could not have acted without the consent of the British government. Was the Scottish administration, run by the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP), opposed to the New Labour government, asserting its independence from Westminster?

Megrahi has always maintained his innocence and there is some doubt about the safeness of his conviction. On the day he was released his lawyers agreed to drop the appeal they were preparing. A successful appeal would have meant that the case had to be reopened and the Scottish courts which convicted Megrahi would suffer some disrepute. Better, perhaps, to let the guilty verdict stand and demonstrate the capability for compassion of Scottish justice.

So far, so moralistic! Then considerations beyond the moral come into play. Enter Britain’s roving representative and resident Machiavelli, Peter Mandelson. Mandy had a meeting with Colonel Gaddafi’s son a few months ago to discuss oil deals between Britain and Libya and to attract Libyan investment in the UK. Was there a link?

I normally disdain all conspiracy theories about Jews staying away from the Twin Towers on 9/11, RAW (Research and Analysis Wing) killing Kashmiri Sikhs to impress Bill Clinton or that a French policewoman is the direct descendant of Jesus. I make an exception. When Mandy is involved and things behave as though there is a conspiracy, there is no need of a conspiracy.

Back to realpolitik and oil-cum-investment-deals in a trade-off for what can be represented as compassion?

Let me tell you a story: Some years ago I was in India shooting a film with an Indo-British film crew. I had with me a friend called Darcus Howe, a Trinidadian journalist, broadcaster, Left-wing agitator, pamphleteer, TV personality and general man-about-town with whom I have consorted, so to speak, since we courted arrest on London’s streets for one or other forgotten cause.

Our film crew had several Brits and the Indian producer decided to give them a break and take them to see the Taj and Fatehpur Sikri. We went off in a coach party.

Looking around the pavilions (why Indians call it a "city" has always been a mystery) at Fatehpur, Darcus asked me to explain who built it and why, and with my schoolbook knowledge of history I told the story of Salim Chishti, the blessing and the birth of the young prince named after him. I spoke of Akbar’s religious eclecticism.

"So no tragedy, then?" Darcus asks.

"Ah, there was", I said, getting into my story-telling stride. The team had gathered round to listen and I told, as best I could, the story of Anarkali and Prince Salim’s wish to marry her for love.

In my telling of it, when Salim asks Akbar for permission to marry the courtesan, Akbar replies that he is negotiating for Salim to marry a Persian princess and bring honour and alliances to the Mughal throne. I elaborated what I remembered of Mughal-e-Azam and ended with the tragedy of Anarkali who refuses Akbar’s command to take a bribe and disappear from his son’s life. I said she defies the Emperor (I even sang a line from "Jab pyaar kiyaa tho darna kya?") and reasserts her love for Salim. Akbar, infuriated, orders her execution by entombment in the pillars of the palace. It is done.

By the time I wind up my tale, the young women of the crew, moved by this sacrifice for love and my immaculate telling of it, are wiping their eyes (at least that’s how I choose to remember it). The story becomes a subject of discussion. Darcus says nothing.

That night, returning on the coach, he pipes up, addressing all.

"But wait! The boy come to me and say he want to bring a whore in the house. I say, ‘You can’t do that. Do what you like with her but she can’t be Empress of India’. The boy say he love her. I say, ‘These are not matters of love, these are matters of social and political arrangement!’ I send the boy off to war but he comes back and says he still in love so I throw him in jail and call the woman and say, ‘Take some money and go’. She say, ‘No’, she love him. You know what I say? I say, ‘Wall the bitch!’"

Darcus, typically, logically, was saying that at a particular level of political engagement, the personal morality which applies between individuals takes second place.

Britain could, and perhaps did, ask itself: which is better, a piece of Libyan dead meat in a jail in Scotland or a lucrative oil and investment deal with a bit of British mercy thrown in as window dressing?