Matt Hancock's resignation from the office of Britain's Health Secretary is once again a sign of the vitality of democracy. He was caught violating the very social distancing rules in a coronavirus situation he had been urging people to follow. And he did that through holding his aide Gina Coladangelo in a close embrace, in what certainly was a situation of intimacy.
Perhaps Prime Minister Boris Johnson should have sacked Hancock. Perhaps Hancock ought to have resigned twenty four hours before he actually made the decision to quit. But that he has now left government testifies not only to the beauty of democratic governance but also to the hard taskmaster which democratic pluralism is in our times. There is the tale of John Profumo we remember only too well. In 1963, he misled parliament in London on his links with Christine Keeler. He denied any relationship with her. Days later, knowing that he had been caught lying, he resigned from the government of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan.
There are of course the many flaws which leave a whole lot to be desired in a democracy. It is a prolonged process of politics, with all the arguments and debates which politicians bring into it. Even so, it remains a system which decent, enlightened people always go back to as a way of reaffirming their confidence in the ability of politics to bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number. More significantly, democracy allows no space for lies and scandals and unchecked corruption. And it has no room for arrogance, for the good reason that it operates as the voice of the people.
Democrats --- and we do not mean those who always come forth with their platitudes about their respect for democracy without meaning a word of it --- always pay a price for the mistakes they commit and even for the mistakes people around them commit. In 1974, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt took the moral decision to resign when a communist East German mole was discovered in his office. Brandt did not have to be persuaded to quit. It was his belief that a chancellor who had no idea that a spy lurked around him simply had to go. And he went, on his own.
Brandt's decision was as much a sign of the appeal of western democracy as it was a hint of the principled statesman he was in his worldview. And when the question is one of western democracy, one cannot but be pleasantly surprised that resignations, in the political sense, have by and large been more a feature of behaviour in the West than anywhere else. Take this example: when Mahathir Mohamed assumed office as Malaysia's Prime Minister for a second time, he let the world know that after a while he would hand over power to Anwar Ibrahim. He reneged on his promise. His government came apart. And Anwar Ibrahim did not become Prime Minister.
If hypocrisy has been a feature of non-western democracies, a comprehension of a need to respect democratic norms, no matter what the heartbreak involved, has largely defined political behaviour in the West. In April 1969, President Charles de Gaulle did not have to resign when he lost a referendum on a rather minor constitutional matter in France. But he did resign, in line with his earlier promise that he would quit if the vote went against him. Today, one does not expect Belarus' Alexander Lukashenko to resign despite the rigging that has helped him stay in power. In the United States, despite the two impeachments he went through (without being convicted) Donald Trump did not leave the White House. A more decent man in his place might have acted differently. Think back on Richard Nixon, who knew by early August 1974 that his game was up, that he had to go. Watergate came to a closure when he went back to Yorba Linda, California.
In our part of the world, resignations have been few and far between. In the mid 1950s, Lal Bahadur Shastri resigned the office of India's Railways Minister in the aftermath of a train accident. But VK Krishna Menon, having presided over India's battlefield debacle with China as Defence Minister in 1962, would not go until Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru gently eased him out of the cabinet. In June 1975, with the Allahabad High Court holding Prime Minister Indira Gandhi guilty of an abuse of power at the elections of 1971, it should have been her moral responsibility to leave office and contest the judicial decision in court. That would have strengthened Indian democracy. But Mrs. Gandhi chose the option of clamping a state of emergency on the country and so hanging on to power, with disturbing results.
Pakistan does not have much of a record in resignations. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto quit the office of Foreign Minister in 1966 only after President Ayub Khan threatened to dismiss him if he did not resign on his own. For his part, Ayub Khan was compelled to resign in March 1969 by General Yahya Khan, who promptly imposed a second martial law in Pakistan. Nearly three years later, having presided over a pogrom in 'East Pakistan' and seeing the emergence of an independent Bangladesh, Yahya Khan resigned, handing over power to Bhutto. In the 1990s, Pakistan's President Farooq Leghari asked Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto to sack her husband Asif Zardari, the Investment Minister, from her cabinet over Zardari's corruption. Benazir Bhutto refused to do so. Not long after, Leghari dismissed Benazir Bhutto's government.
These resignations in Pakistan were forced affairs. Not much of a difference has been there when one studies the history of resignations in Bangladesh. Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman had Information Minister Mizanur Rahman Chowdhury resign from the cabinet in 1973. In October 1974, he directed Finance Minister Tajuddin Ahmad to submit his resignation. Tajuddin acceded to the Prime Minister's directive promptly and went home.
But two resignations were made voluntarily, those of General M.A.G. Osmany and Barrister Mainul Hosein, who resigned from Parliament when the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution was adopted in January 1975. President Hussein Muhammad Ershad, faced with growing public demands for him to quit office, handed over power to Supreme Court Chief Justice Shahabuddin Ahmed in December 1990.
Kurt Waldheim should have resigned from the office of President of Austria in light of revelations about his Nazi past. He hung on for his entire term. It was a wasted period in his country's history. Likewise, Benjamin Netanyahu, despite all those corruption cases swirling around him, refused to quit as Israel's Prime Minister. An eight-party coalition has now unseated him.
It takes an individual of courage and of democratic conviction to resign. Ministers who turn out to be incompetent or corrupt or at sea about their jobs owe it to their nations to walk away from power if they honestly believe in democratic norms. The longer they cling to office the worse gets to be the plight of their people.
Democracy is not for the faint-hearted. Neither is it for the morally depraved. Matt Hancock knew he had to go. He did it gracefully. He has lost his job, but he has given a boost to democracy.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a senior journalist and writer. [email protected]
