Hope is a memory of Benazir

Indian Express, January 10, 2008

Hope is a memory of Benazir

Beena Sarwar

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto has left a huge vacuum in
Pakistani politics at a juncture where her presence was vital to the
transition towards democracy. The widespread riots following her
death provided the government with a pretext to postpone the
elections, initially scheduled for January 8. The rioters damaged
some election offices and equipment in Bhutto's home province, Sindh.
Analysts note that elections could have been held in the few
constituencies where this had happened. Critics also argue that the
government should have taken the opposition parties into confidence
regarding the election date. When the main parties, including the
bereaved Pakistan People's Party (PPP) of Benazir Bhutto, as well as
its former rival the Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) led by Nawaz
Sharif, were willing to participate in the polls, there was no reason
to postpone them.

The delay hardly came as a surprise. Many hold the Musharraf-led
government responsible for Bhutto's death, either directly or because
of negligence. The sympathy vote for her party, given that she was
killed just twelve days before the elections, would have swept it to
victory. The PPP's electoral alliance with PML-N also challenges the
PML-Q, the "king's party" that has ruled the country with the
military's backing for the past five years. The rise of public anger
against the PML-Q, as evident in its electoral posters and banners
being torn down and damaged all over the country, made it clear that
the party would have a hard time at the polls.

The Q League has attempted to regain ground through subsequently
published newspaper advertisements that blatantly attempt to use the
post-assassination riots and destruction to foment ethnic strife. The
undoubtedly tragic loss of lives and property during the post-
assassination chaos has also provided the administration an excuse to
target the PPP by registering thousands of cases against their
workers and electoral candidates (500,000, according to some
newspaper reports) in Sindh.

Meanwhile, there is great public indignation at how the government
dealt with the assassination — quickly hosing down the scene of the
crime, just as it had done after the October 18 attack on Bhutto's
welcome procession, then claiming that "Al-Qaeda" carried out the
attack, followed by the ridiculous "sun-roof" theory that the
caretaker prime minister had to subsequently apologise for.

The attempt to pin the blame on Al-Qaeda omits the historic and
widely known linkage between these "agencies" and the "Taliban" or Al-
Qaeda that Benazir herself believed was still alive, a sort of "state
within a state". This linkage has caused great damage not only to the
world but also to us here in Pakistan. Following the first attempt on
her life the day she returned to Pakistan after almost nine years of
self-exile on October 18, Benazir herself accused that
these "remnants of Zia", as she put it, attempted to kill her. In an
email made public since her death, she named three people from among
these remnants as being behind this attempt: an intelligence chief
and two political leaders from the "king's party".

The Zia reference stems from events almost three decades ago, when
America and other countries propped up another military dictator Gen
Zia-ul-Haq who seized power in a military coup of 1977 and led
Pakistan as a front-line state against the war on Communism in
neighbouring Afghanistan. Zia hanged Bhutto's father, the elected
prime minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, in 1979 on trumped-up murder
charges. The young Benazir spent five years in prison, and was later
exiled. She was finally allowed to return when the Afghan war was
over and the world began pressuring Zia towards democracy.

Zia's death in a mid-air explosion in 1988 sparked off spontaneous
street celebrations because of his repressive policies and his
handing over of Pakistan to the forces of religious extremism. To
many of us, Benazir Bhutto represented hope against these forces —
despite accusations that her government had encouraged the Taliban
during her second stint as prime minister.

As the world's first Muslim woman prime minister, Bhutto was also a
role model for the youth, especially women. Now, when asked what she
wanted to be when she grew up, a Pakistani school girl could
reply: "a prime minister." Not that Bhutto was an ordinary Pakistani
woman. She was the daughter of an elected prime minister, hailing
from a powerful and wealthy feudal family. Within these identities,
there were multiple contradictions — starting with her identity as a
woman. At the end of the day she was the best hope for democracy in
Pakistan, representing the aspirations of millions for liberal
politics in the country. She paid the ultimate price for her
insistence on engaging with such politics.

Her assassination has dealt these aspirations a severe blow. But as
her son Bilawal bravely said in his press conference in London on
January 9, "Pakistan has lost its best hope for democracy, but not
its only hope." If her assassination does finally draw attention to
the dangers posed by a "state within the state" that she herself had
drawn attention to, we can still hope for a better future.