Top politicians in the dock in the West

Politics in Western democracies seems to be going through a whirlpool of sorts. Yesterday, former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson had resigned from the House of Commons in a huff because he felt that he was being harassed by his colleagues in parliament, especially fellow-Conservatives, for parties at 10 Downing Street during the Covid-19 lockdown time. A parliamentary privileges committee was set to find him guilty.

On Sunday, former Scotland Prime Minister Nicola Sturgeon has been arrested during police investigation into Scottish National Party (SNO) funding. It was found that £600,000 was to be accounted for. Earlier, Sturgeon’s husband Peter Murrell and party’s then treasurer Colin Beattie were interrogated and arrested and then let off even as investigation continued. Similarly, former French president Nicola Sarkozy faced interrogation and inquiry in a case of embezzlement which could end up in a prison verdict.

And the investigations against former US president Donald Trump is now a familiar story across the world. It seemed that investigations against political leaders who have led their countries was the fate of Third World countries politicians who did not seem to have the stature and calibre needed to be national leaders. But now the phenomenon is to be seen increasingly in the Western countries, especially in the so-called mature democracies and advanced economies. We have to assume that the quality of democracy in the European and North American has deteriorated and it has fallen low enough for it to be compared with other Third World countries.There is of course another way of looking at these developments. One of them is to see the transparency in these Western countries where top leaders are in the dock that the justice system is transparent in these countries, and even the top leaders are held responsible for things that could have gone wrong. And as in the case of Sturgeon, she had agreed to cooperate with the police investigation, and she has cooperated with the police, and she did not protest the arrest. Murrell, her husband, was arrested too but he was let out even as investigation continues. The same pattern could be played out in the case of Sturgeon as well. The other aspect of the matter is that the process of police investigation seems to follow an independent path, and there is no interference in the inquiry process.

In a Third World country, the arrest of a top political comes with fierce sense of animosity, and the government of the day would be involved in the matter. And the arrested political personality would have faced a tough time in getting out of prison once arrested. We can see it in the case of Alexander Navalny in Russia. His arrest was a purely political act and it was to destroy his political career. But this will not be the case with Trump, Johnson, Sturgeon and Sarkozy. The cases do not always mark the end of the political careers of these leaders. There is no sense of political vendetta in the prosecution of these cases against the politicians. It also shows that in Western countries, if you are a politician, you will not enjoy any privileged position and there are no immunities. At least on the face of it, Trump et al have to face the charges brought against them. In contrast, former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan faces a perilous situation, where the corruption charges are believed to be only a political pretext to end Khan’s political career. The inquiry process does not have the markings of fairness and impartiality. This is where the top political leaders facing police investigation do not cause much anxiety about the future of democracy.