The night takes us all
When his father lay dying, the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, wrote one of the immortal poems of our time, Do Not go Gentle Into That Good Night. In it he urges his father:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
In the last question to Yudhishtra at the lakeside, the Yaksha asks: “What is the greatest wonder?” Yudhishtra replies: “Day after day countless people die. Yet the living wish to live forever. O Lord, what can be a greater wonder?” This wisdom seems to elude leaders. The waning days of a leader’s life are always plagued with questions about the individual’s health and, by implication, longevity. The nearness of the end of life, in effect, makes the leader, however powerful he or she might seem, a lame duck leader. The term “lame duck” is an Americanism that refers to an elected official who is approaching the end of his or her tenure, and especially an official whose successor has already been elected. A lame duck status invariably entails a swift loss of political legitimacy and authority, making official power a weak instrument. Leaders fear this more than death itself.
Today the official website of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei says he went hiking in the mountains north of Tehran just one month after undergoing prostate surgery. It reports: “The 75-year-old Ayatollah, who is known to be fond of walks and hiking, was acc-ompanied by his entourage on the hike early on Friday morning.” It also quotes the top leader as saying the hike was arranged on the recommendations of his physicians as physical exercise beneficial to the recovery process.
Ayatollah Khamenei, who has the final say on all state matters, has been Iran’s top leader since 1989. He is a powerful defender of Iran’s theocracy established by his predecessor, the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The purpose of this little peep into the Ayatollah’s otherwise strictly guarded privacy is meant to send a message, that nothing has changed and that he is still the man to do business with in Iran.
The Ayatollah’s hike brings to mind Chairman Mao Zedong’s famous swim in the Yangtze, also when he was well into his 70s. In the early 1960s, after Mao’s disastrous “Great Leap Forward”, China faced economic catastrophe and a famine that was taking millions of lives. Mao had to contend with mounting criticism from within the party and Beijing swirled with rumours about his health. The Great Helmsman then retreated to Hangzhou to plot how to regain political legitimacy and full authority. He came up with the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” to deal with his rivals and once again seize full control of the Communist Party. But first he had to show he was well and kicking.
Mao resurfaced in Wuhan in the summer of 1966 to stage one of his greatest acts of political theatre. On July 16, he “took” a vigorous and well-reported swim in the Yangtze river by the Wuhan Bridge. It was to signal that Mao was in robust health and that his rivals had better take note. Although Mao was in his early 70s, party propagandists claimed that the Chairman had swum nearly 15 km in a record 65 minutes. Even if the speed was believable, the crude cut and paste photograph that was shared made sure that outside China it was taken as political buffoonery and a sign that China was soon to descend into a new madness.
Then why go to this extent when all that it usually does is raise more questions? That has more to do with the desires of those close to the leadership to retain the power that closeness confers and the jockeying for better positioning after a succession that also happens simultaneously. The story of Empress Nur Jahan is well known. As Emperor Jahangir grew increasingly addicted to liquor and opium, she ran the empire in his name. Nur Jahan struck coins in her own name during the last years of Jahangir’s reign when he was totally incapacitated. She was in charge when the Persians besieged Kandahar. She ordered Prince Khurram (later Emperor Shah Jahan) to march to Kandahar, but the latter refused to do so. The prince suspected that the Empress was sending him to his doom, or at the very least to distance him from Agra. He rightly suspected that she was favouring her stepson and son-in-law, Prince Shahryar.
The future Shah Jahan rebelled against his father and abandoned Kandahar to the Persians. Jahangir died on the way back from Kashmir near Sarai Saadabad in 1627. To preserve his body, the entrails were removed and buried in the Chingus Fort, near Rajouri. The legend goes that to keep her political rivals at bay, the Emperor’s preserved body was displayed as if he were still alive as the royal caravan made its way to Lahore. That performance didn’t last long, and Khurram succeeded to the throne. The rest of Jahangir is now buried in a rather elegant mausoleum in Shahdara Bagh in Lahore.
Yuri Andropov became general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and President of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) after the death of Leonid Brezhnev in November 1982. Andropov was the first Russian leader to realise how precarious the economic position of the USSR actually was and how untenable its claims to be a superpower. Andropov also realised how Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” programme was actually an elaborate hoax to drive the USSR to economic ruin by trying to develop costly weapons to match those that didn’t exist. In August 1983, Andropov called off the Soviet space-weapons programme.
But earlier that year Andropov suffered a total renal failure. It was one of the most closely guarded secrets of the Cold War. The Soviet leader had to be tethered to a dialysis machine and was actually living in a Moscow hospital. This made a mountain hike or a swim in a river in full flow an impossibility. No one is still quite sure when Andropov actually died. He officially died on February 9, 1984. He didn’t go gently, but in the end the night takes us all.
The writer is a policy analyst of economic and security issues.
He also specialises in the Chinese economy.
