Mary Queen of Scots has been avenged. Her Scots have stormed the Parliament at Westminster.
A first cousin of the Protestant English Queen Elizabeth, Mary although a Catholic would have succeeded her, had she not allowed herself to be ruled by her heart instead of her mind. Elizabeth imprisoned her impatient rival for over eighteen years, finally executing her in 1587.
In 1602, Elizabeth slipped into a ‘settled and unremovable melancholy’, and died. Mary’s only son James (already King of Scotland) succeeded her, straddling both kingdoms as King James VI of Scotland and James I of England. In 1707, both kingdoms united to become the Kingdom of Great Britain.
Since then, the policy of the English ruling classes has been to let sleeping Scots lie. Dr Johnson’s condescending remarks about Scotland and the Scots have always found a ready audience across the border. Which Englishman has not chuckled over Dr Johnson’s dismissal of Scotland as a ‘vile country, though God made it, but we must remember that he made it for Scotsmen, and comparisons are odious, but God also made Hell’? Or his concession that ‘much may be made of a Scotchman, if he be caught young.’
The Scottish National Party did just that in September 2014. It caught 124,000 young Scots (mainly 16 and 17 year olds), allowing them to vote in the Referendum. At stake was whether Scotland should remain within the United Kingdom. The turnout of 86.4% - the highest in any election since adult suffrage was introduced in the United Kingdom – indicated the intense level of interest. The narrow gap between the ‘No, we should remain’ (55.3%) and ‘Yes, we should go’ (44.7%) revealed that Scots were not in two minds about separation. They were of one mind, a Scottish mind that needed more time to make up its mind.
Eight months after that Referendum, the SNP in the 2015 General Elections captured 56 out of 59 Scottish seats in Parliament. Scotland’s First Minister and SNP Leader Nicola Sturgeon’s first reaction was Churchillian: ‘In Victory, Magnanimity.’ She held out that she would not press for complete autonomy. Her colleagues in the new Parliament welcomed her declaration. Trojans tripped over each other to find her wooden horse a permanent parking bay at Westminster.
How far the SNP will push for meaningful devolution depends on Ms Sturgeon’s will, and Mr Cameron’s won’t. She has threatened him already that recourse to a second Referendum will be his fault, not hers.
Unlike Mary Queen of Scots once silenced in Fotheringay Castle in the English county of Northamptonshire, Sturgeon’s Scottish accent will now be listened to all over England. She represents a significant lobby within the Opposition, now that the parties who should be leading the Opposition are in disarray.
‘In Defeat, Resolution’, Churchill once thundered. Three opposition leaders heard it differently, as ‘In Defeat, Resignation’. Ed Milliband (Labour), Nick Clegg (Liberal Democrats) and Nigel Farage (United Kingdom Independence Party) surrendered their leaderships, leaving the SNP in a stronger bargaining position.
Every country undergoes the stress of separatism. Democracies are particularly susceptible. When divisions become unavoidable, nations (to quote the well-worn lines of Kahlil Gibran) ‘divided into fragments,/each fragment deeming itself a nation’. We know. We have been through that trauma twice – once in 1947 and again in 1971. Whether we will perform a hat-trick depends on the sagacity of our prime minister.
He rules over a nation that is gradually splitting into fragments, each deeming itself a nation. Sindh is controlled by bands of war-lords, Balochistan by tradition-bound clans, KPK by a third group of tribals, and the Punjab by a kinsman Shogun. No distinction is made in government between public policies and private pique, between bloodied buses and toy trains. The attention span of this elected government is not five years; it is fifteen minutes.
Prime ministers Narendra Modi and Nawaz Sharif share a characteristic. Both prefer to keep their cabinet ministers where they cannot see them. Who would have thought that feisty External Affairs minister Sushma Swaraj could be cowed? Or that her fellow ministers would become indistinct ciphers?
Our Federal Cabinet is equally invisible. Except for the PM’s favourites – Khawaja Asif, Saad Rafique, and the partisan Speaker Sardar Ayaz Sadiq, whose doings (and misdoings) are reported on daily – others skulk in the shadows.
It may take us 400 more years of political maturity to see our leaders accommodated peaceably in the same chamber. Today, Queen Elizabeth I and her victim Mary Queen of Scots lie on opposite sides of the central aisle in Westminster Abbey. Across the road, in the House of Commons, Cameron and Sturgeon sit on either side of the same aisle. It is not inconceivable that they might soon be sitting on either side of Hadrian’s Wall.
(c) F.S. AIJAZUDDIN
[DAWN, 21 May 2015] |
