Trump, Musk & the powerful parting company

Donald Trump and Elon Musk have spectacularly had a falling out in their relationship. Two of the world's arrogant men are now after each other, and that too only months into their unusual friendship. In these few months since Trump was inaugurated as President of the United States for a second time, these two men have done damage to America that is certainly incalculable. They have gone after reputed organisations and departments, an act which went so far as to undermine Americans' right to academic freedom. The assault on education, on USAID, on Harvard will forever be a taint on the presidency of the current occupant of the White House. Worse, history will record how an unelected individual, one holding a government position without undergoing Senate approval, brazenly was allowed to have a chainsaw slice through government services.

Of course, there have been global instances of powerful figures falling out with each other, but not of the melodramatic sort that Trump and Musk have just demonstrated. The President is now in a mood to withdraw all the privileges he has granted Musk, while Musk has gone so far as to call for Trump's impeachment. In essence, it has been good theatre for Americans this past week. The motto of 'Make America Great Again' was quite pushed aside as the world watched this comedy unfold in Washington a mere week after Trump handed over a symbolic key to the White House to the man who contributed as much as $260 million to his 2024 election campaign. It will be for journalists and historians to focus on the episode and leave a record of it for the future.

In our times, instances of the powerful going through a falling-out have been quite a few. In early 1977, once Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had withdrawn the emergency and announced new elections, her long-time ally and defence minister Jagjivan Ram quickly deserted her and allied himself with the opposition then trying to dislodge her. Ram could have resigned, assuming he did not agree with the emergency, when Mrs Gandhi imposed the measure on India in June 1975. He did not do that but stayed with her till the very end, which was rather opportunistic on his part.

Opportunism was a defining aspect of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's political character. Once he had been inducted into the cabinet by President Iskandar Mirza soon after Mirza and General Ayub Khan imposed martial law in Pakistan on 7 October 1958, Bhutto wrote a fulsome thank-you letter to the President, highlighting his view of Mirza's place in history and even suggesting that Mirza would be remembered more than Mohammad Ali Jinnah would be remembered in Pakistan's history. Twenty days later, after Ayub had forced Mirza to resign and go into exile, Bhutto switched sides and went out on a limb to convince Ayub of his loyalty to the new President. In 1963, as Minister for Industries and Natural Resources, Bhutto publicly suggested that Ayub Khan be made President for life.

And then came the falling out. Following the signing of the Tashkent Agreement in January 1966 by Indian Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri and Ayub Khan, Bhutto went around the country complaining of a secret clause in the agreement. He was simply insinuating that through that clause, which was actually non-existent, Ayub had capitulated to the Indians. In July 1966, President Ayub Khan forced Bhutto to leave the government. Ingratitude was not welcome. In Bhutto's own days in power in the early 1970s, he was unable to have such stalwarts in his party and government as J.A. Rahim and Mairaj Mohammad Khan remain loyal to him fundamentally because of his hubris and narcissism.

In Bangladesh, the history of the movement for regional autonomy in the 1960s and the armed struggle for national liberation rested on the principled approach to these issues adopted by Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Tajuddin Ahmad. Together they charted the course of Bangladesh's emergence as a sovereign state. By 1974, though, a chasm came into their relationship, fuelled in no small measure by the young elements who had never reconciled to Tajuddin's leadership of the Mujibnagar government and its handling of the war against Pakistan in 1971. Bangabandhu instructed Tajuddin to resign from the government in October 1974, a directive the latter swiftly carried out.

The chasm between Bangabandhu and Tajuddin was to prove catastrophic for Bangladesh. History would be stood on its head in the period following August 1975.

A significant falling out in Pakistan occurred in 1957, when Moulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani, in open disagreement with Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy over the latter's pro-American foreign policy, made his way out of the Awami League and formed the National Awami Party (NAP). In the 1940s, Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Shere Bangla A.K. Fazlul Huq went their separate ways as the Muslim League went forth into the campaign for the creation of Pakistan.

In 1969, Indira Gandhi, determined to sever her links with the old men of the Congress, notably K. Kamaraj and others who thought they could dominate her, went her separate way with her faction of the Congress, which eventually became the real Congress. In 1966, once Bangabandhu had announced the Six Points, a chunk of the Awami League headed by Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan parted ways with him to register its disagreement over Bangabandhu's initiative. In the Soviet Union, once Lenin was dead, Stalin and Trotsky saw their disagreement on policy widen, to a point where they parted ways. Trotsky went into exile in Mexico, where apparently on instructions from Stalin he was brutally murdered.

US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance quit the Jimmy Carter administration when the President's attempt to spirit the American embassy hostages out of captivity in Tehran collapsed in the Iranian desert. Attorney General Elliot Richardson parted company with President Nixon when the latter dismissed the special prosecutor assigned to investigate the Watergate scandal. In March 1971, Vice Admiral S.M. Ahsan and Lt Gen Sahibzada Yaqub Khan quit their positions as Governor and Martial Law Administrator of East Pakistan, in that order, in protest against the Yahya Khan regime's chicanery related to the postponement of the National Assembly session in Dhaka.

Powerful individuals have fallen out with each other in nearly every era in history. Kings and royal counsellors have gone their separate ways, with the latter class often paying a heavy price at the behest of their erstwhile benefactors. Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers, notably the Islamic Republic's first President Abolhasan Bani Sadr, fell out, plunging the country into political uncertainty. And remember 6 January 2021, when Donald Trump fell out with Vice President Mike Pence when the latter refused to accede to his wishes to deny the certification of Joe Biden as President of the United States?

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