When sudden death strikes the mighty

Death sometimes strikes when one least expects it to. On Easter Sunday, Pope Francis briefly showered his blessings on the crowd gathered at the Vatican. On Easter Monday, early in the morning, he was dead. One could certainly affirm that he had been ailing, that he was aged, that he had been on medication. He was indeed facing death, but that it would come just a day after the world saw him pronounce his benediction on Christians left many wondering again about the many ways death enters our courtyards.

There have been sudden deaths in diverse regions of the world. Natural disasters, rogue soldiers shedding the blood of the innocent, air strikes, air crashes, ships and boats sinking in rivers and seas, vehicles riding roughshod over people are tales of tragedy the world has lived with. People have been put out of life in suddenness, in much the same way that men and women have suddenly succumbed to mortality through assassination and intrigue. Life, if you must seriously consider it, has always been hostage to death.

Pope Francis' sudden passing takes one back to some similar such incidents in our times. On an evening in November 1970, Charles de Gaulle watched television and certainly did not expect to die. Yet moments later he collapsed, he slumped forward, life going out of him. It breaks the heart knowing that one who was here only minutes ago, in the political world or in one's family, with little chance of taking the path to the grave anytime soon, is with alacrity gone. Adlai Stevenson, a former governor of the US state of Illinois, twice Democratic presidential candidate and serving as America's ambassador to the UN, collapsed on a London street in 1965. Life quickly went out of him.

In our part of the world, a certain degree of excitement came into people's lives when the leaders of India and Pakistan initialled the Tashkent Declaration in January 1966. Within a few hours, though, Lal Bahadur Shastri, India 's Prime Minister, breathed his last in his quarters. What would have been a triumphant return home for him became a funeral procession with Pakistan's Ayub Khan and the Soviet Union's Alexei Kosygin carrying his coffin to the aircraft that would take him to Delhi on that freezing morning. In January 1963, it was with a sense of shock that people learned of the demise of Mohammad Ali Bogra, at the time Pakistan's Minister for External Affairs and having earlier served as Prime Minister, in Dhaka. Bogra's death, though he had been ailing, would soon bring about a change in his country's foreign policy, with his successor determined to wean Pakistan away from its pro-western stance.

There is too the sad story of AK Faezul Huq, son of Sher-e-Bangla AK Fazlul Huq and a political figure in Bangladesh, dying moments after appearing on a television talk show. It was death which left people in a state of shock. Away in America, Lyndon Johnson, having left the White House in January 1969 and then seeing his successor Richard Nixon re-elected in November 1972, simply passed into the region of death in January 1973. He had earlier had a spate of heart attacks, but otherwise appeared to be in good health. Always a heavy smoker, he did not listen to his daughters imploring him to get off the habit. His life came to an unexpected end.

Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, revered by Arabs as well as Muslims around the world as a forceful politician, was a diminished leader of his country following the Israeli military victory in the June 1967 war. He bade farewell to the Emir of Kuwait on a September day in 1970 and then died rather inexplicably, leaving behind a vacuum which many thought would not be filled. And yet his successor Anwar Sadat would make his own mark on Egyptian politics before himself being put to death by renegade soldiers in October 1981.

Which brings us to the subject of political leaders felled by assassins' bullets, happenings that have left their nations and in many instances the rest of the world traumatised by such tragedy. John F. Kennedy's assassination in Dallas in November 1963 remains seared in the memory of the generation that was around at the time. Assassinations not only silence their victims but also leave nations in prolonged, sometimes permanent, states of grief. The brutality visited on Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his family in August 1975 is a wound that has never healed.

Alexander Dubcek, the architect of Prague Spring in 1968, died in a road crash in 1992. He was Speaker of the Czechoslovak parliament, following the Velvet Revolution led by Vaclav Havel, at the time. General Ziaul Haq, having brutalised Pakistan in his eleven-year dictatorship, fell literally from the sky along with others when the aircraft they were in crashed in August 1988. Nigeria's corrupt military ruler Sani Abacha, having despatched the environmentalist and intellectual Ken Saro-wiwa to the grave, had his life screech to a sudden end while he was engaged in a sex orgy with prostitutes in Lagos. Dag Hammarskjoeld fell to his death when his aircraft crashed in Congo in 1961.

Sudden death is tragedy we associate with Leon Trotsky, Mahatma Gandhi, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, Patrice Lumumba, Martin Luther King Jr, Robert Kennedy, Sardar Mohammad Daoud, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Salvador Allende, Ranasinghe Premadasa, Olof Palme, Ziaur Rahman, Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan, Benazir Bhutto, Muammar Gaddafi, Nicolae Ceausescu, Mohammad Morsi, Najibullah, Shahpour Bakhtiar and Amir Abbas Hoveyda, all of whom lost their lives in unnatural manner. Some were assassinated, some others perished as popular revolts overtook their nations and some others were summarily executed by the new regimes seizing power in their countries. Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt disappeared while swimming in the sea in 1967.

Stalin had his real or perceived enemies shot. Mao Zedong imprisoned his long-time comrade Liu Shaoqi, who died in prison from hunger in 1969. And, yes, there has been no clarity about the nature of the death of Lin Biao, once regarded as Mao's successor, in 1971. Russia's Alexei Navalny died in pitiful circumstances in Vladimir Putin's Russia. The world has never known of the fate which befell Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose in August 1945. There has consistently been a grey region between death and disappearance regarding him. Morocco's Mehdi Ben Barka, opposed to King Hassan, vanished in Paris in 1965. Neither he nor his remains were ever found. Hitler killed himself, but Hideki Tojo's suicide attempt failed. He died on the gallows.

Death remains an inscrutable circumstance, in whatever way it strikes the living. All too often we are too busy with life to reflect on the graves that are or will be. But once death makes an appearance, at home or in the neighbourhood or around the world, we sit up and take notice. All glory is fleeting.

ahsan.syedbadrul@gmail.com