Commentary/Mani Shankar Aiyar

Both Benazir and Jayalalitha lie buried in the ashes of their follies. Both will rise from these ashes like the legendary Phoenix:

Jayalalitha and Benazir were both destined from early youth to be figures larger than life. Both had a good academic record. Jayalalitha was forestalled, by her mother's ambitions for her, from going to university, while Benazir went all the way to Oxford. Yet, from what I have been able to glean from girls who were at school with Jayalalitha, it is clear that she was among the most outstanding students of her generation and would have done well in any profession she cared to take up.

At about the age Jayalalitha soaped to the top of the Madras film industry -- 16/17 -- Benazir accompanied her father to Shimla. Before they were out of their teens, both knew they were going to be names in the history books.

The sense of manifest destiny was only confirmed by the trauma which both were subjected to before they emerged into their own from the shadows of their respective famed associates -- her father, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, in Benazir's case; her companion, MGR in Jayalalitha's case. The trauma was worse for Benazir as she went through the gruesome experience of the hanging of her father.

Jayalalitha's trauma was more political. Through his long illness from 1984 to 1987, it remained unclear whether MGR was, in fact, prepared to anoint Jayalalitha his successor. There was a bitter war between MGR's wife Janaki and Jayalalitha which led only to the victory of their shared enemy, Karunanidhi, in the state assembly elections of January 1989.

Following her rout in those elections, Janaki decided voluntarily to remove herself to the United States, leaving Jayalalitha free to rally her political troops. She did so with astonishing success. Those five years in the white heat of politics, steeled Jayalalitha and forged her political character.

Both JJ and BB came through the furnace to attain the summit of political power at a comparable stage in their lives; the late thirties/early forties. Jayalalitha is five years older than Benazir and became chief minister nearly three years after Benazir became PM. Benazir was once dismissed, defeated, then restored before being humiliatingly worsted at the polls; Jayalalitha lost badly the first time round, won overwhelmingly at her next two outings (the Lok Sabha election of 1989 and the assembly-cum-Parliament elections of 1991) before being.

Today, both empresses lie buried in the ashes of their follies. Both, I have little doubt, will rise from these ashes like the legendary Phoenix.

Both are very wealthy women who understand the need for money. Both seem unable, however, to distinguish need from greed, or cupidity from stupidity. Both need emotional succor for the trauma they have been through. Both have found it in companions who give them solace, but, in return for extending emotional stability, demand a heavy price in unwarranted, unbridled power.

Benazir, the first time round restricted such illegitimate, if awesome power, to her husband, Asif Zardari, with whom she seemed besotted. Either because, as is rumoured in Pakistan, she was fed up with his philandering or because, in her second term, she needed, like in some Byzantine or Mughal court, to counter the power of her spouse in affairs of state, the shadowy Naheed Khan, a lady confidante, became, like Sasikala, the feared Mistress of the Household, to whom all must pay court.

As with Sasikala, so with Naheed Khan and Asif Zardari, it would be impossible to tell, without full investigation, whether the loot of the public exchequer was their private enterprise or at the behest of the principal.

Certainly, the political price for public disgust with the goings-on in the premier household had to paid, in Madras as much as in Islamabad, by the principals. Jayalalitha today has but two seats in the Tamil Nadu assembly where on the morrow of the 1991 election she commanded all but one. And the once-invincible PPP is reduced to less than 20 seats in the Pakistan national assembly, a complete wipe-out in Punjab, Baluchistan and the Frontier, and to a mere Opposition role even in Sindh.

All the party's MNAs are elected from Sindh alone, and that too from feudal-rotten boroughs increasingly under threat from urbanisation, modernisation and clan rivalries of both the inter-clan and intra-clan kind. On the face of it, both ladies, having taken their bow on the stage of history, have now bowed out. However, it takes but little scratching below the surface to recognise that they are down, yes, but no, not out, at least not yet.

Both may be expected to ride back to power on the same steed -- through prosecution in the courts of law being regarded as persecution in the court of the people.

Tell us what you think of this column