The alarming situation in Egypt will be debated no less across democracy zones than in Muslim societies around the globe, including India. On Saturday an estimated 120 supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, the pre-eminent party of political Islam that took rise in Egypt decades ago, were shot dead by armed police as they demonstrated against the military-backed interim government.
The Brotherhood demands the restoration of the presidency of imprisoned Mohamed Morsi, its leader who was elected through a strong popular national vote but was overthrown in a putsch three weeks ago. The putsch, it is true, enjoyed the support not only of secular and liberal Egyptians, but also of Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority, the head of the Al-Azhar University renowned for its Islamic scholarship, and the heavily Islamist Al-Nour Party. It is also true that Mr Morsi had messed up badly during his short time in office, becoming increasingly authoritarian and threatening to alter the Constitution to favour Islamist ideas.
Nevertheless, it is plain that the signal for the future is bleak. In the eyes of participants, no democratic election is likely to have meaning unless the outcome is going to be acceptable to the country’s ultra-secularist but domineering and authoritarian military. The armed forces ran their deeply repressive rule since the late 1940s until the overthrow in 2011 of the Hosni Mobarak regime through the non-violent Tahrir Square insurrection started by the nation’s liberals and secular elements of civil society. But the election that followed was bagged by the Brotherhood, an extremely experienced, well-oiled political outfit that is quite unlike the civil society liberals who have no organisation worth the name and have made common cause with the military to eject the Brotherhood from power.
No political reconciliation looks likely in the current tense atmosphere. The Brotherhood could well take to armed resistance (it has considerable experience of the use of political violence) or go underground to avoid being targeted. Its political opponents are not without a following. A day before Saturday’s violence unleashed by the security forces, hundreds of thousands had spilled into Cairo’s streets to back the military’s call for a popular mandate to deal with terrorism (the not-so-subtle description of the Brotherhood’s approach).
The United States has been two-faced. It has avoided referring to Mr Morsi’s ouster a coup and continues to bankroll the military. In 2011, it had strongly backed the Tahrir “revolution” and the overthrow of Mr Mubarak, although he had been a staunch ally. It’s worse than Egypt being back to square one. Political anger and violence are now part of the discourse, and this could spread extremist thought in the region as a whole, given Egypt’s standing.