Very early in the morning it was when my elder daughter roused me from deep sleep and it took me some time to figure out why she was so agitated. I was still feeling a little groggy when she repeated the news. It was something that you feared was true but you still did not want to believe it.
Yes, darkness was descending on Rawalpindi when Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. But I was in faraway Los Angeles, with a time difference of thirteen hours. Since that moment when the news hit my senses like lighting, I have felt stranded between different time zones. Images that span across four decades of the Bhutto phenomenon have swirled in my mind like a movie montage.
Though I returned to Karachi early in the morning of the first day of the new year, with a heavy baggage of sleep deprivation, the jet lag has persisted longer than usual and it has laced the images that have been accumulating in my mind with a shade of unreality. For instance, I just cannot tell where it was during my air journey that I entered, time-wise, the new year.
What is certain, however, is that Pakistan is plunged into a new time zone that cannot be defined with the ticking of a clock or with the falling leaves of a wall calendar. Benazir Bhutto’s death is bound to have a more profound impact on Pakistan’s political history than what her life as a charismatic and controversial leader had ever promised. But it seems too early to begin to ponder what Pakistan will be like without a living embodiment of the Bhutto charisma in our polity because the shock of what happened on December 27 is likely to linger even beyond February 18.
As I said, I was in Los Angeles when Benazir was assassinated in Rawalpindi. Since this was a family get-together at my elder daughter Sheherbano’s house, we were together. My wife Sadiqa and I were joined by our younger daughter Aliya, who had come from London. Dazed and not readily capable of identifying with that event, we had our memories to share.
It was as a family that we had first met her in Larkana, a few weeks after the execution of her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in the summer of 1979. Our daughters, of course, were small and we had driven to Bhutto’s grave and had an unscheduled encounter with Benazir, as small delegations took turns to offer their condolences. She seemed a little surprised to learn that I was the writer of the columns she had read and could also remember some lines from them. In the summer of 1998, she came to our apartment on Zamzama in Karachi to condole my mother’s death.
During the past week or more, we have read my touching reminiscences of journalists and her political associates and old friends and I think it is too late for me to do the same. I was unable to write my column last week, overwhelmed by the onslaught of the media coverage that kept me awake at all hours, until I left for Karachi. My mind was cluttered with the images of the instantaneous and bloody aftermath of the tragedy, particularly in the interior of Sindh and in Karachi.
Back in the country, I eagerly restored contacts with colleagues and friends and had endless conversations about what had happened and who could have killed Benazir and what would happen now and if the Pakistan People’s Party would eventually retain its relevance with Asif Zardari at its helm until a newly baptised Bhutto, now a teenager, can lay claim to the charismatic legacy of his mother and his grandfather. Will this work, against the perspective of a nation in deep turmoil?
Irrespective of this barrage of unanswered questions, my first realisation was that of the extent of grief that has overtaken Pakistan. Grief and anxiety. In recent months, many of Benazir’s supporters were disturbed by the ‘deal’ that she had made, under the auspices of the United States, with Pervez Musharraf and were mystified by the highs and lows of this arrangement between potential adversaries. There, certainly, were many proclaimed critics of her politics. All of them, I found, were in a bewildered state of bereavement.
Because of how it usually happens, I had thought that the massive disruptions during the first three days of mourning had been reported with a touch of sensationalism. Yes, a total breakdown of the rail system, for instance, could not have been overstated. There was also the hard reality of how many vehicles were set on fire, how many bank branches were ransacked and how many people had died. There was surely a criminal dimension to these incidents. Still, I thought that the restoration of normalcy would not be an impossible task.
This is not what I feel now, after listening to numerous eyewitness accounts and sharing the experiences of those who were caught into that veritable intimation of anarchy. It was, I feel, a collective nervous breakdown reflecting the psyche of the ‘masses’ that has been nurtured by our recent political, social and economic developments. I sense that events that took place in Karachi and in the interior of Sindh were under-reported and need to be carefully analysed and understood.
I was in Lahore on Friday to attend a meeting of the Citizens’ Group on electoral process, organised by the Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development and Transparency (PILDAT). It became a very enlightening experience for me because of interaction with so many very distinguished and well-informed individuals who deliberated on the entire spectrum of the present state of the nation. All the obvious questions were explored in some detail and I confess that I am now a very disturbed person.
Incidentally, I am writing these words on the 80th birth anniversary of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Coming so soon after December 27, this occasion underlines the mystifications of the Bhutto phenomenon. When Bhutto was executed on April 4, 1979, his supporters were left in a passive state of helpless grief. This is not what happened when his daughter, Benazir, was murdered in the same city. How should one interpret the impact and long-term implications of both events?
Think about this in the context of what we and our rulers have made of Pakistan. One glaring feature of our recent history is the survival of a party that the establishment has steadfastly opposed. In spite of the disappointments of her two stints in power, not without some help from the ‘agencies’, Benazir was threatening to return to power. In a vicarious sense, she personified the vindication of her father. Can her own charisma be vindicated in the near future?