ON THE ASSASSINATION OF BENAZIR BHUTTO





She deserved better. For someone who in her personal life was so elegant and fastidious about her appearance, she deserved better than a stark wooden box for a coffin and a used ajrak shawl, thrown hurriedly over its square glass window, as a makeshift pall.


For someone who in her public life had stared death in the face on more occasions that even Death had lost count, she lay inert and helpless while strangers - whom had she been alive, she would have kept at a distance - peered inquisitively at her through that glass window for a last glimpse of the face that had launched a million dreams. For no face in the history of modern South Asian politics - with the possible exception of Mrs Indira Gandhi – was as instantly recognisable as that of the late Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto.


Just as Indira Gandhi had crafted an image of herself with its almost contrived, distinctive plume of white hair, Benazir Bhutto had adopted the white dopatta as her own personal emblem. It more than framed her face; it delineated her public persona. And like Mrs Gandhi, she knew when and how to use it to her advantage.


To anyone familiar with the classics, the lives and deaths of Mrs Gandhi and Ms Bhutto contain all the elements of a Greek tragedy. Both were heroines condemned by Fate to follow a path not of their own choosing; both were granted a reprieve by Destiny and allowed to succeed despite the slimmest of odds. Both suffered on occasions and in varying degrees from hubris, and both paid the ultimate price for their flawed moment of judgement.


In Mrs Gandhi’s case, it was her deliberate deployment of Sikh guards for her personal security even after the attack she had ordered on their Golden Temple at Amritrsar; in Benazir Bhutto’s case, it was the momentary, spontaneous error of standing up through the sunroof of her otherwise bullet-proof Landcruiser. And both of them paid for those innocuous mistakes with their lives.


Mrs Gandhi’s ashes have dissolved in the waters of the Ganges and mixed with the earth of India. Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto’s body lies buried next to that of her father. She shared his name, she shared his ideals, and now she shares with him a mausoleum at Garhi Khuda Bukhsh Shah. They leave behind them the Pakistan People’s Party, the party he founded and she nurtured, a party that has grass-roots support but no stem, and now no flower.


Many both inside and outside her party today ask, with the benefit of hindsight, why she felt it necessary to return to Pakistan, first cautiously in October and then again with increased determination and bravado to contest in the forthcoming January 2008 elections. Was it to activate her wilting party? Was it out of loyalty to her rudderless party workers? Was it as a flagrant challenge to her adversaries, a dare to do their worst when she intended to do what she did best – to fight them through public speeches, through public rallies, and finally on 8th January through the ballot box?


Who could have given her the assurance, renewed after the suicide bomb attack in Karachi on 18th October, that she would be safe? And who would have given her the guarantee that her diligent, exhausting electioneering campaign would yield the laurels of a third prime ministership and not the ashes of an unwanted Opposition? No-one will ever truly know. These secrets go with her to her grave. Meanwhile, the memory of her courage will remain, as will the image of a fearless political leader who paid the price even when knowing the cost.


If Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto was fortunate, it was to be born in an age when the media is the midwife of public opinion. She knew all too well its uses, and had endured its abuses. She knew her own strengths and its weaknesses, and above all she knew how to package and market a product that would sell.


A measure of her success in marketing herself was the coverage her death evoked in every media everywhere in the world. To the networks who had ignored her for the past eight years, the State Department that fobbed her off with junior staffers when she visited it during her years in the wilderness, and to the television anchorpersons who found her an articulate guest, she had graduated from being the Daughter of the East to becoming the Darling of the West.


Today, and from now on, the image that Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto presented to the world during her lifetime will gradually ossify into an icon. What she and her supporters and admirers had not anticipated was the suddenness with which her white veil would become a white shroud.








Published in DAWN, 31Dec. 2007.