The World

Putin approved the NATO campaign, provided Qaddafi himself was not targeted. Anglo-French air strikes strafed the colonel’s convoy. ‘They say they don’t want to kill him,’ sneered Putin, ‘so why are they bombing him? To scare the mice?’ On 20 October, near Sirte, NATO got him. Qaddafi, wounded and hiding in a drainage pipe, was captured, wounded in the stomach, then, filmed on a smartphone, sodomized with a bayonet and finally shot dead. Watching the video of the tormented tyrant, Putin saw himself: ‘You could end up losing Russia. Qaddafi thought he’d never lose Libya but the Americans tricked him.’ So this was American freedom: ‘All the world saw him being killed, all bloodied. Is that democracy?’ He would not let it happen again: in Syria, Putin backed Assad.

As the revolution reached the suburbs of Damascus, Assad, backed by his brother Maher, his Alawite clan and secular Sunnis, treated his own country as enemy territory: ‘Assad or We Burn the Country’ was their slogan. He released Islamic jihadis from prison to taint the rebels; his secret police tortured and slaughtered many; he launched unrestrained bombing and chemical attacks. As pandemonium spread, Assad flirted with gushing girls in his office, and Asma spent $250,000 on new furniture online. While Maher led the 4th Armoured Division against the town of Homs, Asma reviewed Christian Louboutin shoes online. ‘Does anything catch your eye?’ she emailed a friend. When her friend, a Qatari princess, warned her she was in denial, Asma responded, ‘Life’s not fair, my friend, but ultimately there’s a reality we all need to deal with.’

‘If we’re strong together we’ll overcome this together. I love you,’ she wrote to her Duck, even though she may have discovered Bashar’s infidelities. He responded with a love heart and some country-and-western lyrics: ‘I’ve made a mess of me / The person that I’ve been lately / Ain’t who I wanna be.’ In 2013, returning from an end-of-Ramadan party, Assad and Asma were attacked by rebels. They survived, but now Maher was unleashed to crush the rebels, while their sister Bushra gave advice and her husband Assef Shawkat, one of the intelligence chieftains, clashed with him. Maher shot and wounded him. Later Shawkat was killed in a rebel bomb attack. Maher lost his leg in another assassination attempt. Soon afterwards Bushra al-Assad, widowed by the killing of Shawkat, left for Dubai. But Asma stayed. After the death of the matriarch Anisa, Asma became official First Lady. ‘The president is the president of all Syria,’ she announced. ‘The First Lady supports him.’ The family held on, just as the greatest democratic dynasty was subsiding.

‘She was a striking woman in her sixties,’ was how Obama described Sonia Gandhi in November 2010, ‘dressed in a traditional sari with dark, probing eyes and a quiet, regal presence.’ Sonia Gandhi had recovered from the murder of her husband, Rajiv, to assume leadership of Congress, and Obama was impressed by her ‘shrewd and forceful intelligence’ in the service of ‘the enduring … family dynasty’. After winning two elections, Sonia chose not to become premier herself, appointing an ex-finance minister, Manmohan Singh, India’s first Sikh leader.

Nicknamed Mona Lisa, Sonia dominated from behind the scenes for a decade, but Obama was less impressed by her son, Rahul, the heir. Obama wondered if this was the end: ‘Would the baton be successfully passed?’

Four years later, Rahul was routed by a Hindu nationalist from Gujarat, Narendra Modi, and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In an India long ruled by dynasty, Modi represented a self-made Hindu middle class; he liked to say he had once sold tea at Vadnagar railway station. As a boy he joined the paramilitary RSS, a believer in Hindutva. Joining its youth wing at eight, Modi became a full-time pracharak – organizer – so devoted that although he went through an arranged marriage as a boy, he never lived with his wife: politics was his sole passion. The Nehrus were declining thanks to decades of corruption, entitlement and failure to confront India’s inequalities.

The BJP’s rise was accelerated by a campaign to raze the Babri Mosque at Ayodhya, supposedly built by the first Tamerlanian emperor at the site of a Hindu shrine believed to be the birthplace of Rama. Holiness is always infectious, the holier and more hallowed for one sect, the more so for its rival. In 1992, a national campaign had mobilized a Hindu crowd to attack the mosque and demolish it, sparking riots that killed 2,000 people.