AFTER she had kissed her sister’s face and bid her farewell, my cousin Sanam Bhutto turned to me and said: “Benazir had spent a lifetime writing obituaries for loved ones. It is time now to write her obituary. I know my sister would have wanted you to write it.”

Well, where does one begin? The pain is yet too sharp, the wounds too raw and the tragedy too overwhelming. Words and tears can not flow together.

At the end of our summer vacation in London in July, we had spent a family evening together. Whilst leaving, I turned to her and said, “BB, please don’t come back … they will kill you.” She held my hand and smiled, there was sadness in her eyes. She said nothing. Her eyes said it all. She knew death awaited her upon return. She knew that somewhere, in some dark corner, a sniper was lying in wait. But she was not going to run from death. She was the daughter of the East, daughter of destiny. She was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s daughter.

I was with her on that truck on Oct 18 when the bomb blast ripped apart the soul of a nation. For any other person, it would have been an opportune time to heed the warning and retreat. But no, not her. She was what she had always been. She was Benazir.As children we grew up together. But today when I look around she is not there. In leaving us for another world, she has left us only with flashes which linger in the memory. Like us she was a teenager once and how she loved those tear-jerking, sloppy songs. How she loved listening to Bobby Gentry’s ‘Honey’, Terry Jack’s ‘Seasons in the sun’ and ‘California dreamin’’ by the Mamas & the Papas.

I have seen the roller-coaster ride that has taken her from the halcyon, blissful days of Karachi Grammar School to Radcliffe and Oxford and then the sudden, steep fall into the valley of cruel reality. Her Oxford days were marked by the carefree, windswept rides in the yellow sports MG, childish outbursts and outrageous flights of tantrum. Nothing had prepared her for the hardships and tragedies that were to follow. But travails and tragedy did come and they came in a flood.

She dealt with adversities with the disdain and abandon of her salad days. The toughness of the steel was not mellowed by the pampered indulgence of youth. She returned after graduating from university, hoping to savour the fruits of fulfilment. But a military coup overthrew her father’s government and turned her life upside down. Her father was implicated in a false and fabricated murder charge. She donned his political mantle whilst running from one legal counsel to another, from one court to another in the pursuit of justice — all in vain.

How on that dark, dreaded April night, herself in prison, she must have counted the seconds as they led her father to the gallows. How her little heart must have sunk. How, like the trembling heart of a captive bird, she shrank in her space. Yet there was a legacy to preserve, there were miles to go, promises to keep. Blackness heaped on darkness, there was no relief. The traumatic days and months in the unforgiving heat of Sukkur jail where they tormented and tortured her and damaged her left eardrum, the menacing pose of the colonels, father’s shadow gone and no one to cling to; who was there to save her now? Something within her said hold on and so she did. She was allowed to fly out for an emergency operation but only under an international outcry.

Her life has been a metaphor, bigger than her known portrait. She saw the highs and the lows of life, she met with tragedy and with triumph and Kipling-like she treated both those impostors just the same. In her brief span, she ascended pedestals and stepped into graves to bury two youths, who were your brothers.

She lived to vindicate the memory of her father and became the Islamic world’s first woman prime minister. She could have chosen the route of revenge and retribution. But she was determined not to be a prisoner to permanent prejudice. In the interest of her country and a future without hate, she quarantined the past. It was time to move on; to cross new frontiers, to meet new challenges and to dream new dreams.

For a brief shining moment, the world was hers and a brilliant star blazed over her horizon — then the moment passed. And night closed in again.

Her brief spell in government was cluttered with byzantine-like intrigues, which can be best captured by paraphrasing a passage from T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom: “The morning freshness of the world-to-be intoxicated us. We were wrought up with ideas inexpressible and vaporous, but to be fought for. We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves: yet when we achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to re-make in the likeness of the former world they knew.”

She secured the freedom of so many when she first came to power but upon losing it, she saw her own husband locked behind bars. Tales were spun, myths created and conspiracies hatched in the dark, dirty corners of sickened minds. Like metal, myths are frequently recycled — the daughter of the East had to go. But they had not mastered the art of vanquishing her. The words of Queen Elizabeth I could well have been hers when she declared, “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and the king of England too.”

She surmounted impossible obstacles to vanquish her foes and win power for a second time in 1993. She moved at a frenetic pace. There was a sense of exhilaration and she felt she was going places. The world was her oyster. With spirit renewed, with hope unhindered and a strong and clear vision, she set sail yet again on a voyage that was finally to lead her ashore. Or so she hoped. But travesty and tragedy were written in the stars. Her own appointed president stabbed her in the back. Nowhere do dreams melt so quickly as in the cauldron of politics.

Undaunted and undeterred she battled on. She fought the governments that followed; she fought her cases and returned home to fight the terrorists.

A single assassin’s bullet on that fateful December day put out a candle but fanned fires across the country. A single assassin put out every light in every home and filled our hearts with sorrow. In one bloody moment, a vision has been shattered and all our dreams wrecked on the sharp rocks of gruesome reality. There is this debilitating fog of moral relativism in the air, a miasma of guilty loathing to the point where an element belonging to the other end of the moral spectrum persuades itself to believe that the Bhuttos must vanish.

The killer has had his way and now we must learn to cope without her.

When we finally look at her life, we will see a kaleidoscope of jumbled pieces. She met with failure and she met success. She had moments of joy and laughter but all too fleetingly. She encountered more than her fair share of moral squalor and political kerb crawlers. With her martyr’s blood, she has touched the sublime but left us in spiritual emptiness. Very few will ever know where the person began and the metaphor ended. There is a Chinese proverb: “Wronged souls don’t vanish.” And vanish she won’t. Whatever she was, she has passed into sainthood.

When the final curtain falls, we will look back at her life in the immortal words of Keats,
“But I have lived and not lived in vain;
My mind may lose its force;
My blood its fire;
And my frame perish even in conquering
pain;
But there is that within me;
Which shall tire,
torture and time
And breathe when I expire”.
So farewell to you Benazir, our beloved shade. Sleep well.

THE events of Dec 27 in Rawalpindi have persuaded me to set aside the article I had written for this space. That day Pakistan lost one of the most extraordinary leaders in its history. This article is not an obituary but an assessment of the circumstances that may have led to Benazir Bhutto’s untimely death.

This is the second time that the assassination of a political leader is likely to leave a lasting effect on the country’s future. The first time this happened was in October 1951 when Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan was gunned down by an assassin at a political gathering in Rawalpindi. Now, 56 years later, Rawalpindi is once again the scene of a political assassination. The victim is Benazir Bhutto. There was the possibility that she would have become the country’s prime minister following the elections scheduled for Jan 8. Had her party, the Pakistan People’s Party, done well in the elections, she would have entered a power-sharing agreement with President Pervez Musharraf. These well-laid plans have been disrupted by the assassins who struck in Rawalpindi.

Rawalpindi was also the scene of another political killing, that of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Benazir’s father. In If I am Assassinated, a book the elder Bhutto smuggled out of his prison cell, he said that were he to be put to death it would be an act of political assassination. That said, Bhutto’s hanging in Rawalpindi in April 1979 did not have the significance of the Liaquat Ali Khan and Benazir Bhutto killings. The elder Bhutto lost his life following a highly flawed judicial process. He was eliminated by the state; the other two leaders lost their lives to acts of violence committed by shadowy people whose motives will remain the subject of speculation for a long time to come. Also, by killing Liaquat Ali Khan and Benazir Bhutto, the assassins set in motion a chain of events that produced or is likely to produce long-lasting consequences for the country.

Benazir Bhutto’s life was cut short by a sniper moments before a suicide bomber blew himself up in his bid to remove her from the political stage. The assassin may have acted alone but he most surely was part of a carefully developed plan involving many people. What could be their motive? The question is not hard to answer. The motive was possibly the perception that once Bhutto gained power, she was going to hurt the cause of Islam as the extremists understand it. They tried and failed in Karachi when she returned to Pakistan a couple of months ago but they succeeded in Rawalpindi.

Her repeated pronouncements that she was going to eliminate Islamic extremism from the country convinced the fanatics that she had to be physically removed. Now that she is gone, it is important that the forces that would like to rescue Pakistan from failing as a state take careful stock of the situation and act with resolution. Unless they move with some urgency, the country could plunge into a state of utter darkness. The destruction of the Pakistani state and the unravelling of its society would produce a political tsunami that would touch many shores.

Benazir Bhutto was a complex figure; she combined a number of attributes that attracted the following of many different people. She was the product of Sindhi feudal culture which she never fully abandoned in spite of her education in the West’s most liberal institutions. Harvard and Oxford did little to mould her politically; she remained wedded to the feudal ways of doing political business. Elections were not held regularly to select the party’s top leader. She was the chairperson for life of her party, a sort of sajada nashin.

In addition to her following in rural Sindh, which remains under the domination of a small number of very large landlords that include the extended Bhutto family, her following also included the poor and the near-poor of Pakistan. This was the constituency her father had relied upon to build his remarkable political career. His promise of “roti, kapra aur makan” not only contributed to his success in the polls of 1970, it has also continued to resonate long after his death.

That he accomplished little for the poor when he was in office did not diminish their affection for him. His failure was attributed to the power of the elites who continued to dominate the country’s political life and prevented him and his party from implementing the programme that had brought them to power.

After Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s death, his daughter inherited his political mantle and the allegiance of the poor who continued to hope that by holding power unconstrained by the elites, she would be able to deliver for them.

Following her second dismissal from office in 1996, she chose exile over continued physical presence in the country. After the terrorist attack of Sept 11, 2001 in the United States, she sought the political stage in Pakistan by aligning herself with Washington. The Americans became increasingly fearful of the rise of Islamic radicalism and militancy in Pakistan and the Middle East. She too, reflecting on the developments in and around Pakistan, was now convinced that resolute opposition to extremism was necessary for the country’s survival. It was also politically expedient.

This approach to political resurrection may have resulted in her death. By aligning herself so closely with Washington and London she only increased the determination of those who are the West’s sworn enemies to physically remove her from the stage of politics.

What comes next? The most important question relates to the future of the party that dominated Pakistan’s political stage for such a long time. Will the PPP survive the shock of Dec 27?

While Bhutto’s death was an enormous tragedy, it also presents her party and the country with an opportunity. Pakistan has repeatedly failed to develop institutions in various areas important for political, social and economic modernisation. If the PPP’s new leader promises to work for the betterment of the lives of the people who have been left behind for decades, then it is possible that the original dream of the elder Bhutto could still be realised.

What Pakistan needs at this difficult time in its history is the promise that there are leaders and institutions that are prepared to work for the good of the citizenry. It is the failure to do this that has made possible the rise of extremism which resulted in the death of Benazir Bhutto.

Do not go gentle into that good night…
Rage, rage against the dying of the light
(Dylan Thomas)

AND she did not go gentle into that good night. She raged against oppression, against exploitation, against denial and disempowerment. The metaphor was populist, the atmosphere euphoric — right until she succumbed to her silencers. That was Benazir Bhutto.

She was an astute politician, with many dimensions and great public charm. She may have had her failings and indulgences but for someone, like me, having no personal relationship, she now seemed to have matured in her perceptions of public duty. Her exuding intelligence, her capacity to comprehend and analyse, endeared her to the non-governmental intelligentsia all over the world, but may have made her that less trustworthy in the eyes of the lesser intellects running the establishments.

Her courage is borne out by her death, needing no medallions of acknowledgment. And, therefore, she is grieved by so many — family, friends, party loyalists and people at large. Her friends are wailing and her enemies are stunned. The reality will dawn upon them all, sooner than later, and hopefully their reactions will be mellowed by maturity, and emotion will have a tinge of rationality.

She died at the hands of terror, no doubt, but which terrorist did her in? A terrorist, of whatever claim, but foreign to our faith and culture and sharing no belief with us? Or a terrorist nurtured and nestled amongst us, by us? Perhaps our grand strategists got so swayed by the larger picture of the globe and the region that the picture of our own little Pakistan blurred before their eyes. While she may have paid the price of the larger picture, only the wild and the wilderness will survive to mourn the loss of a society unless individual ambitions of self-perpetuation can be buried and Pakistan is really our first concern.

She had always tried to pull all the people of this country together. Now many believe that the sharpshooter, bomber or whatever, may also have sounded the death knell of this country’s unity. Already some knee-jerk reactions have poured in and some let go of reason. Most, though, are benumbed.

She is not mourned by family and party alone, but by all those who refused to let the country wither away. The immediate mayhem after the assassination might superficially appear to subside, but this is no ordinary law and order situation. These are symptoms of a greater malaise for which we need to find a cure, not just temporary relief from its pain. It may be impossible for the party to replace her person but the party will need to securely latch itself to the ideals on which it was founded. Only then will some saner and mature leaders succeed in saving this country. And some seem willing.

She diligently cultivated the magnetic romanticism of her father and the charisma that she inherited. It is rare for progeny to get such charms in public life as a legacy. But she had it and not just in the Bhutto name itself, but equally in her persona.Let us mourn this country’s loss, remembering the causes we espouse. Even her detractors need to realise that we, the small players in this lovely little theatre called Pakistan, will have our entrances and exits only if the play continues. Long live the establishment — but the establishment cannot live longer than the country itself.

The time has now come to stop flirting with terrorism — it is difficult to arrest terrorism with controlled deliveries. Also, terrorism cannot be touted and marketed in the name of religious fundamentalism. This is one word too often profaned. We all know that the so-called fundamentalists are totally unclear about the fundamentals of Islam; their knowledge deeply entrenched in ignorance. This great humanist religion cannot be protected, propagated or proffered on the platform of destruction.

Let the perpetrators of destruction in this country know that if individuals, groups or agents wish to put out the lights on this country, shove us into the darkness of oblivion, we will not go gentle into that good night. We will rage, rage against the dying of the light — as Benazir Bhutto did.