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What do Rahul Gandhi, Imran Khan and Donald Trump have in common? No, this is not the opening line of some ill-advised wisecrack joke. These three commanding political figures – two of them former heads of government aiming to make a comeback and the third aspiring to lead his country – are joined by a common misfortune.
All three have got caught up in messy court cases which – in the view of the defendants – have a sinister political purpose. That motive is, of course, disputed by the powers that be in all three countries, but the potential political impact of these cases is enormous.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
It does seem that, in some democracies, the courtroom is taking the place of the hustings. That’s most evident with the imprisonment of Imran Khan, widely seen as Pakistan’s most popular politician. He’s been convicted of selling gifts received when he was in office and failing to declare the proceeds.
Khan’s three-year jail sentence will disqualify him from contesting elections due later in the year. Pakistan’s all-powerful army has ensured that their ally-turned-critic won’t make a return to power in those elections. And just to make doubly sure, they have disembowelled Imran Khan’s party, encouraging PTI leaders to abandon Khan, and hobbled the country’s news media.
The battery of court cases facing Donald Trump – he’s been indicted in three criminal cases, with a fourth said to be imminent – are altogether more complex and serious. He appeared in court in New York last week and declared that he was not guilty of the most grievous of the charges he faces, that he allegedly conspired to overturn the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
As you would expect from this political street fighter, Trump is complaining loudly that it’s all a political set-up to weaken his bid to return to the White House and that there’s no way he will get a fair trial. It’s certainly the case that Trump is far-and-away the frontrunner to win the Republican nomination and so stand against Joe Biden in the November 2024 presidential election. And among his support base, the flurry of litigation has strengthened his standing. Even his rivals for the Republican nomination have suggested that the court cases have a political motive.
Donald Trump is the biter bit. In his first presidential contest, he repeatedly disparaged his opponent as ‘Crooked Hillary’ and encouraged his followers to chant: Lock Her Up! Hillary Clinton’s supposed offence was to use a private email server for official communications when serving as secretary of state. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) head ruled that Clinton had been ‘extremely careless’ but advised against prosecution because there had been no criminal intent.
Of late, Trump has redirected his venom towards Joe Biden, whom he has described – without offering any evidence – as the most corrupt ever. He has also made frequent reference to the Biden ‘crime family’, seeking to tie the president into the controversy about the conduct of his at times wayward son, Hunter Biden.
This is part of a populist pattern, in which rivals are not simply challenged on their policies, competence and political experience but denounced in hyperbolic fashion as corrupt and criminal. It coarsens politics and deadens normal democratic debate.
The White House insists that it has had no role at all in instigating the prosecution of Donald Trump and that all decisions have been taken free of any political pressure. Perhaps that’s so. And no one wants top politicians to be immune from prosecution. But the perception of many in America will be that this slew of legal action against a former president, with the cases likely to be rumbling on through the presidential election campaign, is designed to ease Joe Biden’s re-election.
In the United States, Democrats have done their fair amount of demonising and mud-slinging. Their initial attempt to impeach President Trump in 2019, alleging that he had solicited foreign interference in the presidential election, was particularly unfortunate. It was never likely to lead to conviction and gave the impression that the losing party was behaving ungracefully in defeat. And this took some of the moral high ground away from the second – and much more substantial – move to impeach Trump in the wake of the storming of the Capitol building alleging incitement to insurrection.
As the Economist has argued, only politics, not the law, can stop Donald Trump’s return to power.
Rahul Gandhi, with his disqualification from Parliament lifted, is in a better place than his two fellow defendants. Whatever the merits of the case against him, whatever the wisdom of the words he uttered, whatever your view of his competence as an opposition leader, a prominent politician is now back on his home ground: Parliament.
The issues about which politics revolves – who governs and to whose benefit – are best resolved by politics, not prosecution.
Andrew Whitehead is an honorary professor at the University of Nottingham in the UK and a former BBC India Correspondent.
