After Benazir what?

The assassination of the former Prime Minister takes away to a great extent Pakistans hopes for democracy.

in IslamabadBenazir Bhutto at

BENAZIR BHUTTO knew death. In April 1979, she had reached out to touch her father one last time through the bars of his cell hours before he was marched off to the gallows by General Zia-ul-Haq. In 1985, despite the danger of being arrested by the Zia regime, she brought back the body of her youngest brother, Shahnawaz, who she suspected had been murdered, all the way from France to Pakistan so that he could be buried at home near his father. And in 1996, when she was Prime Minister of Pakistan for the second time, she buried her other brother, Murtaza, who was gunned down by policemen outside his home in Karachis Clifton, amid charges that she was involved in his killing.

After Murtazas burial, as she, her mother and her sister received mourners in her family home in Naudero, a village in Sindh province, she told them with tears streaming down her face: There were three Bhutto men, and they are all dead, and now there are just the three of us Bhutto women.

Perhaps it was this familiarity with death that made her take chances with life, such as the one she took on the afternoon of December 27 when she popped up through the sunroof of her armoured black SUV to wave to a crowd of supporters cheering her and waving flags as she left Rawalpindis Liaquat Bagh, minutes after addressing an election rally of her Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP).

At that instant, shots rang out and a huge ball of flame went up in the air with a deafening explosion. Pakistan would never be the same again. Less than 24 hours later, another Bhutto would be buried at Garhi Khuda Buksh, this time a woman, the one who had built the marble mausoleum in the likeness of Taj Mahal to shade her fathers grave when she became the Prime Minister. She had spent two hours on December 22, the day after Id, sitting next to her fathers grave inside the mausoleum reading passages from the Koran. A week later, she was buried at almost the very spot where she had sat and prayed.

But her end was not immediately apparent. Benazirs Lexus sped away from the scene seconds after the explosion. A heap of mangled and bloodied bodies lay at the site, but most believed that she had escaped this latest attempt on her life, that she had been bundled back to her home in Islamabad just as she was raced out of the October 18 Karachi carnage. Shell-shocked PPP workers beat their head, wailing and weeping among the bodies of their friends, but consoled each other that Bibi is safe.

Within minutes, a different picture started to emerge, one that would overshadow everything else including the January 8 parliamentary elections, plunging Pakistan into confusion and more uncertainty. Benazir was critically injured in the attack and her car took her to the Rawalpindi General Hospital. There doctors battled to save her for about 40 minutes. At 6-15 p.m. (local time), Babar Awan, a senator of the PPP, came out of the hospital and announced to the party workers who had already gathered there in large numbers that their leader was dead.

The announcement sent a wave of grief and anger through PPP supporters in all of Pakistan. At the hospital, the crowd shouted slogans against President Pervez Musharraf. Enraged party workers broke glass windows and doors of vehicles as they came to terms with the death of the leader who had shepherded the PPP ever since her fathers death, leading it to election victories and through defeat and exile, and creating the possibility for a comeback after the elections.

Later that night, thousands of people fought to carry the coffin containing her body as it was brought out of the hospital or just strained to reach out and touch it. Over the plain wooden box, someone had thrown an ajrak, the traditional block-printed black-and-red Sindhi cloth that both men and women in the rural hinterland of the province wear.

It was this hinterland that erupted with fury and outrage at the killing of a woman who was perceived as a daughter of Sindh. As the coffin was being transported, first from the hospital to Rawalpindis Chaklala airbase, and from there in a C-130 aircraft to Naudero in Sindhs Larkana district, violence spread across the province. From Karachi to Jacobabad, angry mobs took to the streets, torching vehicles, trains and government buildings, blocking roads and uprooting railway tracks. As 25 people were killed and the Army had to be called out in 16 districts of the province, political pundits predicted civil war and continuing unrest.

In some places, arsonists targeted Punjabis Benazir was killed in Rawalpindi, which is in the Punjab province, the largest in Pakistan and resented for its domination of the country. The city is also the symbol of the Pakistan military, with General Headquarters located there. There was talk that Rawalpindi has sent back the bodies of three non-Punjabi Prime Ministers Liaquat Ali Khan, who was killed in 1951 as he addressed a public meeting at the same venue, which was subsequently named after him; Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was hanged a little more than kilometre away at a spot which is now being converted into a shopping-cum-restaurant complex; and now Benazir.

At the site

The violence prevented many mourners from taking part in Benazirs burial. Thousands of people were left stranded on the roads, but still, many just parked their vehicles and walked miles to get to the Bhutto ancestral home for one last look at the well-loved leader. These were the same people who had gone to Karachi to welcome Benazir back when she returned home after eight years in self-exile. That homecoming had foretold this ending for the first woman Prime Minister of the Islamic world when twin suicide blasts at the welcome rally targeting her killed more than 140 people.

In a country consumed by Islamist extremism and militancy, and where anti-Americanism is all-pervasive, Benazir was perceived even by committed PPP workers as too close to the United States, while her repeated pledges to wipe out Islamist extremism and her comments praising the Army action against militants holed up in Islamabads Lal Masjid angered many ordinary Pakistanis. Even before she arrived in Pakistan, Beithullah Meshud, the Taliban-Al Qaeda leader based in Waziristan, had made the open threat that he had hundreds of suicide bombers waiting to kill her.

But that did not stop her from reiterating her position again and again. In her last speech, too, an animated Benazir, wearing a huge garland of roses over her bluish-purple kurta, her trademark white scarf covering her head in deference to conservative notions of modesty, and red in the face, shouting into the microphone, repeated her pledge to reclaim the country from extremism.

You and I have to save this country together, she told the gathering at Liaquat Bagh. It was a thinly attended meeting. It could have been because of her unpopularity in recent months, especially in the cities where the middle classes saw her as a corrupt politician who had sold out to Musharraf and made a deal to support him in return for the dropping of all corruption charges against her. People seemed to have kept away also because of the ever-present threat of suicide attacks at crowded places. In recent months, Rawalpindi, despite being one of the most heavily guarded cities in the country owing to the presence of the military headquarters, has been particularly vulnerable.

As the dust settles down, the government will need to answer questions about the security provided to the PPP leader and two-time Prime Minister, and perhaps the most targeted public figure in Pakistan after Musharraf. In the aftermath of her assassination, the Interior Ministry said it had provided her more security than was given to any other political leader in Pakistan. Four police mobiles carrying a total of 24 policemen accompanied her bullet-proof, bomb-proof vehicle. In addition, a Senior Superintendent of Police, screened and chosen by her party, accompanied her at all times.

The government also said that it was regularly in touch with Benazir and her party in order to sensitise them to the threat that she faced. At the venue of the meeting, policemen manned the gates, frisking each person who entered, and putting them through a metal detector. Journalists sat some 15 metres away from the stage, in a high-barbed wire enclosure, and behind them were those who had come to listen to her speak. But people are asking how a gunman and a suicide bomber whether these were two people or just one were allowed to get close to her car as it left and why people were not stopped from crowding around the exit gates of Liaquat Bagh.

The PPP had repeatedly complained that the jammers provided for Benazirs security, which can prevent explosive devices from going off, were not functioning properly. The litmus test for this are the mobile phones in the vicinity of these devices. If the phones work, the jammers are not working, and the phones were working at the Rawalpindi venue. The government rightly says that jammers cannot stop suicide bombers, but it has not yet explained why these devices were not functioning.

Like her father and brothers before her, Benazir died a violent death, and many would say it was foretold. Each death has held up a mirror to Pakistans failure to build a strong, viable democracy that can answer to the aspirations of its moderate majority. Despite all her failings, Benazir, in sole charge of the Bhutto legacy, kept the hope alive for many Pakistanis that their country would somehow make it. Where other leaders are in denial about the deep roots that Islamist extremism has struck in Pakistan, she was the only one who spoke out openly against it.

She also believed in democracy and a plural, tolerant Pakistan. It is this that gave even those who had several political disagreements with her, especially of late, the conviction that she could still do something good for Pakistan. Her death and the manner of it have taken away a large measure of that hope.