Ms Bhutto’s Date with Death
By Mohammad Ashraf Chaudhry
Pittsburg, CA
Once a lady said that second thoughts are always best, and most men amusedly agreed with her. Then she explained what she meant, “Man was God’s first thought; woman was His second”. Ms. Bhutto was God’s one such “Second Thought”.
In her God had ideally combined all the three most desirable human attributes in abundance: namely, a most personable physique; a most well-rounded fund of education obtained at dream-institutes, Harvard and Oxford; and on top of these two, an extremely sharp and intelligent mind. Alas, what God didn’t give her was not even as much of a lease of life as He so generously grants in routine to most in Pakistan.
Could the 18th October suicidal attack on her that killed more than 148 people be termed as a second chance given to her, a kind of stern warning, and a sort of last extension to her life-lease? Perhaps it could be. The path she had chosen to tread in a world in which only men matter, it was no less than a miracle that she had lived even that long. Joseph Conrad, the famous British author is right when he says, “Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade, since it consists principally of dealing with men”. It is hard to buy the age-old dictum that she was fated to meet such an end; it were men who surrounded her, and goaded her, conjured her, and convinced her to have this rendezvous with death.
By living in the West, she must have learned that there are better ways of conducting political campaign than those she chose to follow, and that were not safe even in the 50’s when the first PM of Pakistan was assassinated.
Feeling like fish out of water, for having been out of power for long, these men who surrounded her in different roles (friends and foes), finally pushed her for this second fateful plunge on December 27, for their sake in the den of blood-thirsty brutes, making her believe that all the beasts down there were defanged. The price she paid was too high. A little caution, an ounce of discretion, even a stray wise counsel given to her in time could have saved this finest human specimen, and the country from the ensuing loss of over 47 human beings, and the nation of the destruction and mayhem that followed.
Today, she could have been alive, readying herself to lead the nation for the third time. After all, she was a highly educated and intelligent politician, and was every inch her father’s daughter, who, while at Berkeley as a student once gave way to Moodi, who later became his fast friend, on a narrow stair-case, and justified his action by famously saying, “Discretion is a better part of valor”. Why did she ignore this side of her father?
ARE WE PROGRAMMED TO BE DESTRUCTIVE? Most in Pakistan now tend to think so. Their religion and their chemistry both, however, speak differently. Science proves that we as humans are equipped with a moral programming, but this does not mean that we will practice moral behavior automatically. “Something still has to boot up that software and configure it properly, and that something is the community”. It is basically the culture of the community that is rotten and has become anti-ethical. There is nothing at home, in school, in the playing fields, at the working and worshipping places that may readily acknowledge and appreciate, encourage and reward those who attempt to be upright and honest and just in life. On the contrary, this culture regards the honest as naïve and stupid, not even worth a worn-out pair of shoes. To be dishonest and to get away with dishonesty is what is being termed as smart. It is not bad to murder others or to bully the weak; what is bad is to do all this and get caught. The field of politics thrives in this culture. They played politics on her when she was alive; and they are playing politics on her when she is dead.
The whole society has ceased to recognize and bring in play the deepest phenomenon which God has embedded in our basic nature - the phenomenon of empathy, the feeling and understanding that what hurts others also hurts us. Even chimps and apes, far less complex than we are, amply display this generous spirit of empathy. Call it empathy or reciprocal altruism, or Taqwa, God has sufficiently equipped us with it. Only we chose to bury it under the thick layers of greed, selfishness and cutthroat competitiveness.
A young chimpanzee, reports Nadia Kohts, a Russian behaviorist would make his way to the roof of the house and would not come down. All strategic steps like calling him and scolding him and offering him food would rarely work. But if Kohts sat down and pretended to cry, the chimp would go to her immediately, would run around her as if looking for the offender, would tenderly take her chin in his palm … as if trying to understanding what is happening.
Remember another gorilla in New York Zoo, called Binta Jua in 1996 rescued a three-year boy who had tumbled into her zoo enclosure, rocking him gently in her arms and carrying him to a door where trainers could enter and collect him. Are we now worse than the chimps and animals? Finger pointing at each other and the blame-game on who killed Benazir has already begun. The “empathy” showed by her followers and others in her grief resulted in the burning, looting and damaging of 43 railway stations, 22 locomotives, 18 bridges, three track-machines, five cranes, 149 coaches, 150 branches of banks(41 alone of Allied Bank), dozens of post offices, factories, over 100 gas stations(one gas station costs 1 crore rupees), 3-4 ATM machines (one costs 30-40 million rupees), and a loss of over 47 precious lives. Binta Jua, the gorilla, and the chimpanzees act more honorably than these followers of Prophet Muhammad.
The irony of the whole matter is that the government waited for three days to employ the army, to score a point that it is the army that is the savior of the country; the leadership of the PPP took three days to make the appeal for sanity, again to obtain as much political mileage out of this tragedy as possible. The religious leaders and mullahs, good only at offering fatehas, have remained mysteriously reticent like before. Perhaps, we celebrate by killing, be in grief or in jubilation.
THE CULTURE OF SCUIDES: Death has danced so much around the Pakistani people that now they hardly find it scary. There is a whole crop of “death-trend’ setters who create attractive suicidal fantasies and allure those who are sick in mind and are frustrated with life. Just as the first athlete who breaks the barrier of the four-minute mile makes it easier for those who come after him; same way one suicide encourages another.
Two years ago, the trend was fashionable in the Middle East, then it came to Afghanistan, and now it is thriving in Pakistan. We thought that this monster would kill only the “infidels”. Now it is backfiring on the “momineens” as well. Those who are responsible for netting these merchants of death are heard saying, “No one can stop a person from blowing himself up, not even America.”
To support their point of view they shame-facedly cite the suicidal attempts made three times on the President, one time on the PM, and two times on the former Interior Minister. Failures are being used as rationale. And people like (R) Brig. Javed Iqbal Cheema who just reads a list of fatalities which even a menial clerk can do better; keeps retaining the job of securing the people from such mayhems. Government’s helplessness has never been so obvious. When the governor of Punjab tells the people on the TV, “We should stop befooling ourselves that there are no native suicidal killers in our midst; that there are native patrons of such people who are sent on missions to blow themselves up and kill innocent people; that half-hearted measures would not serve us anymore”. He was speaking the truth but to the wrong people. He should have told this to his boss way back.
If Brig. Javed Iqbal can procure the tapes of Baitullah Mahsud and of one unknown Mulla engaged in conversation, hinting that the killing of Ms. Benazir was done on their behest, why would he and his agency waste time and not arrest Mahsud and his accomplices. Mahsud still rides his white steed, and saunters in the hills of Swat with complete immunity. How did the picturesque Swat Valley become a haven for the terrorists? And why did the Lal Mosque become a training center for fanaticism? These two places did not become so overnight.
In the list of South-Asian fallen leaders, Benazir is the latest in the list. Chandrika Kumaratunga, the ex PM of Sri Lanka, and the daughter of two prime ministers, lost her one eye after a suicide bomber attacked her minutes after she had finished addressing a rally in the heart of Colombo in December, 1999. It was a last question from a TV reporter that delayed her and saved her from taking the full impact of the blast. Ms. Benazir was not so lucky. Had she not peeped out of her car, she would have escaped the bullet or the lever impact, and would have been there to lead her party.
Some equate her destiny to the Kennedys; some to the Nehru family. In any case it was a terrible price which she had to pay. Mary Anne Weaver, in her book”Pakistan: in the shadow of Jihad and Afghanistan”, quotes one conversation with Ms. Benazir. “I asked Benazir what her most difficult moment in prison had been”. She didn’t answer immediately. Then she said, “The day that a jailed official told me” –“that I was to be tried inside the jail, by a special military tribunal, and sentenced to death. I was stunned - I couldn’t believe that they’d do it, though one side of me said that they would. A few hours later, someone left a bottle of poison inside my cell”…. Then she said, “You have tremendous mood swings in prison. Sometimes I would think of myself; my father is dead, my brother is dead, my mother has cancer, and I’m rotting away in this cell. I have suffered and made sacrifices- and for what?” I asked her, “What had sustained her during those years?” She responded without hesitation. “Anger”.
The party that she headed stood for open-ness, for liberalism, for religious tolerance, and above all for the democratic values. Her supporters and her husband, did not take much take much time to crown her political successor on Sunday, her 19-year-old son, Bilawal. Sonia Gandhi took more time to bring in her son, Ruhul before she inducted him into Indian politics. She herself stoically abandoned the seat of prime minister and chose the ablest of the time, Mr. Man Mohan Singh. Things in Pakistan hardly ever take a right turn. Only time can prove that Zardari with his soiled past, can be to Pakistan what Sonia had been to India. As regards the dawn of democracy in Pakistan via Ms. Benazir (Bilawal, quoting his mother called it, “The best revenge”), once again became a big embarrassment as once again it played the wrong cards. Will it now support a 19-year lad who can hardly name four cities in Pakistan as being the Chairman of the party whose charismatic leader it sacrificed so cheaply? “They sent in the soldier to the battlefield but forgot to equip him with the necessary war-withal”. Sending Benazir to Pakistan in the present scenario, without ensuring her security, has been like the soldier quoted above.
Senator Baber Awan, being present in the truck that Ms. Benazir rode on 18th October, quotes her saying, “Is the God above this truck different from the God inside it”. Well, Baber forgot to remind her that it is the same God’s Prophet who most wisely has said, “Trust in God, but tie your camel”.
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