| January 03, 2008 | Thursday | Zilhaj 23, 1428 |
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As good neighbours should
INDIAN leaders responded to Benazir Bhutto’s assassination with spontaneous grief, which was not the case when her father was hanged in 1979. At that time Atal Behari Vajpayee was foreign minister and neither he nor Prime Minister Morarji Desai was eager to intervene with Gen Ziaul Haq to save Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
Indira Gandhi, then in opposition, did, as did nearly all the world leaders, approach Zia with a strong appeal for clemency. She spared no effort to get her interlocutor from the Shimla summit reprieve from what was essentially to be his judicial murder.
The divergent official responses to the two Bhutto tragedies sum up in a way the tectonic shift in the global power play between 1979 and 2007. Indira Gandhi’s India and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s Pakistan, though at loggerheads with each other over bilateral issues, were both opposed to American hegemony in South Asia. In a way the two leaders paid with their lives for holding true to their ideals. Today, in a curious departure from the path prescribed by them, their heirs have rationalised or perhaps internalised the new global reality. The odd thing about this scenario is that the ruling groups and those in the opposition in both countries, barring mostly the left of all hues in India and the mostly right-wing mullahs in Pakistan, everyone seems to swear by their trans-Atlantic connections.
In the shadow of the Cold War sympathies were neatly assigned. Apart from the Nehru-Gandhi affinity with the Bhuttos, India’s ruling family played favourites with Mujibur Rehman and Sirimavo Bandaranaike and their offspring. All those equations have changed and South Asia’s dramatis personae appear like the surreal characters in the closing chapters of Orwell’s Animal Farm.
If Vajpayee from the political right had abstained from commenting on ZAB’s execution, Lal Kishan Advani, Vajpayee’s heir apparent, was the foremost to extend his personal sympathy to the bereaved Bhutto family within hours of Benazir’s death. Advani spoke of family ties with Asif Zardari and his children. Vajpayee’s national security adviser Brajesh Mishra revealed that though he didn’t know BB that well she asked him recently to meet her in Dubai. This was an indication that her party believed the BJP had a role to play in South Asia in the near future. The meeting was to take place soon but the assassination has pre-empted it.
This of course could not prevent the other wing of Indian officialdom from dispensing with the niceties and coming to the point as only they can do. National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan, usually a discreet person, vented his anguish for India in a disturbed neighbourhood. Such fears are usually expressed at that level in the back channels. Anyhow, the two-pronged approach was reflected in the Indian media. There were some sensitive editorials and there were the usual hectoring ones, where the told-you-sos had a field day.
‘Pakistan at the edge’, said left-liberal daily The Hindu in its editorial the following day. “With this body blow to democracy in Pakistan, what is clear is that epic struggles lie ahead for its hard-pressed people. Some analysts fear the assassination will spell the end of the tentative movement towards democracy witnessed in recent months. While such an outcome will suit the military establishment as well as the Islamists, it will have dangerously destabilising consequences.”
The Hindu said her death illustrates in stark relief “the failure of Pervez Musharraf’s regime, which continues to be underwritten by the United States, to confront Al Qaeda- and Taliban-linked religious neoconservatives who are working to obliterate the last traces of democracy in Pakistan”.
The Times of India described the assassination as “an enormous tragedy not just for Pakistan but also for all of South Asia. Indeed, perhaps the world”. It said the world needs to be extremely anxious about the state of Pakistan following this heinous murder. This is not a routine assassination, because it snuffs out whatever faint hope there was of free and fair elections in 2008.
Of late, Indian newspapers always have a word of advice for Pakistan, words that are often laced with the emotions expressed abroad. “Only last week, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates said that the prime focus of Al Qaeda is now Pakistan. It was already the most dangerous nation on earth, with nuclear weapons, a record of proliferation, and Islamic terrorists rampaging in its tribal areas. Cut it whichever way you like, the assassination of Benazir is a shot in the arm of Al Qaeda. It would have been mortified by the idea of a democratic, moderate state in Pakistan, even more by a pro-western, woman leader in charge,” the Times said.
The Indian Express, in tune with the dominant global agenda for the region, spoke of the difficult balance between democracy and stability, a euphemism for continued military rule in Pakistan. “For Pakistan, the implications of this assassination will be felt for many years to come. The Benazir assassination is only more evidence that what Pakistan needs most of all is stability and democracy. But it also indicates how difficult it will be to achieve this,” the Express said. The fortitude with which Benazir Bhutto underwent the imposed house arrest, the courage with which she faced the obvious dangers to her life and the commitment she invested in her public campaigning will long be remembered by her compatriots who have had few instances of public figures taking on an entrenched establishment in quite such an energetic fashion, the Express said. “The extremists need a dictatorship and a dictatorship needs extremists,” it quoted Benazir as saying.
The Asian Age, which occasionally breaches the official Indian paradigm, observed that after the mourning period is over, it will be time for Pakistan to sit up and introspect. What is going wrong? What can be done to set it right? “These are the questions that are already emerging from the debris of the attack, with Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf now facing the brunt of the reaction. The first hurdle before him is the Jan 8 election, as he has to take a decision whether to hold it or not. It has become a Catch-22 situation for him, because if he postpones the elections he will be accused of being anti-democratic, and if he holds the polls he will be inviting violence at this present point in time.”
So the Indian reaction to Benazir’s murder was by and large spontaneous and sympathetic, a far cry from 1979. In some ways it reminds me of what Fidel Castro said when he was once asked why he was the one leader still defying the United States so steadfastly. His reply is relevant to the present context of the equations in South Asia. “As the world increasingly moves to the right, I move that much to the left by standing where I was.”
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in New Delhi.
jawednaqvi@gmail.com
