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Implications of Benazir’s assassination

Born in the religiously targeted mass slaughters of the innocent with the Partition of the subcontinent in 1947, Pakistan has never escaped from the cycle of violence, volatility and bloodshed. Benazir Bhutto (1953-2007) is the latest casualty of that murderous cycle. Many features of her life and death are common to South Asia: birth into and inheritance of a famous political dynasty; political triumphs punctuated with personal failings and assassination of family members; the weight of carrying the hopes and aspirations of millions of followers against the temptations of collapsing the institutions and treasury of the state into personal fiefdoms; and political parties that are vehicles of personal and family, political and financial advancement instead of repositories of competing visions and instruments of national development.

The murderers of 9/11 came out of the mountainous caves of Afghanistan where the Taliban regime, a monstrous creation of the United States and Saudi-backed mujahideen against the Soviet-installed regime and of Pakistan’s search for strategic depth against arch-enemy India, had nurtured them as a potent weapon against all infidels. For years, India had warned that the epicentre of international terrorism had shifted from the Middle East to Southwest Asia. Like the warnings of Pakistan as the centre of nuclear proliferation, these were dismissed as the self-interested rants of the regional hegemon that failed to rise above its local conflict.

Pakistan was created on the premise that the Muslims of the subcontinent could not live in peace under a Hindu-majority rule. As a territorial dispute, Kashmir could be solved by declaring the Line of Control as the international border. As the embodiment of the mutually negating principles on which India and Pakistan were founded and their respective identities forged — secularism for India, Islam for Pakistan — any resolution of the Kashmir dispute is far more problematic. Yet so long as the dispute is not resolved, like other potent symbols of Islamic jihadism, Kashmir too will nurse a bloody grievance. The existence of Pakistan and the ongoing dispute over Kashmir in turn feed Hindu extremism in India which occasionally targets Christians as well, including the arson against some churches in Orissa recently.

Westerners tend to forget that before Iraq, the biggest practitioners of suicide terrorism were the largely Hindu Tamils of Sri Lanka who had found sympathy, support and most likely funds and training grounds across the narrow strait in India. Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by a Tamil suicide terrorist in the middle of a general election campaign in 1991. The Bhutto family saga is strongly reminiscent of the Gandhi-Nehru dynasty in India in the peaks of political triumph and personal tragedies. Indira Gandhi manipulated Sikh religious extremists to discredit political opponents in Punjab; she was assassinated by her own Sikh bodyguards in 1984 in the aftermath of the worldwide anger among Sikhs after the assault on their holiest shrine, the Golden Temple in Amritsar, which had an echo in Canada with the Air India flight from Toronto being bombed in mid-air.

Across the border, similarly, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was drawn into the passion and turmoil of politics and died because of it when hanged by the military dictator who overthrew him. Whereas in India the assassinated mother was followed by her son throwing himself into the rough and tumble of subcontinental politics and being felled by an assassin in turn, in Pakistan the father was followed by his daughter who too has now been felled by a suicide terrorist. Where one military dictator hanged the father, another failed to provide adequate security for the daughter. That she was killed in the garrison town of Rawalpindi further underlines the chaos and security vacuum in contemporary Pakistan. And while Sanjay Gandhi died in an air accident, Murtaza Bhutto was killed by the police in 1996 while his sister was Prime Minister, and the other brother Shahnawaz was found dead in his apartment on the French Riviera in 1985. To complete the analogy, finally, Bhutto family members are politically estranged just as Maneka Gandhi fell out with her mother-in-law and then parted company with the Congress as well.

Like Indira and Rajiv Gandhi, Benazir did not lack in courage and accepted the risks to personal life as the necessary price of the political cause to which she was devoted. As in India, different groups in Pakistan have tried to harness religious sentiment to their own cause. Unlike in India, where the principles and institutions of democratic contestation have absorbed and buried the violence, in Pakistan the dictators themselves have pitted religious groups against the popular political parties. This was done by Zia-ul-Haq and has been repeated by Pervez Musharraf in a pathology common to most military rulers.

Pakistan is a volatile, unstable and dangerous place at serious risk of an outright civil war as the people move from shock and grief to mass violence and the authorities reply in kind. Pakistan as a failed state is not in anyone’s interest: not Pakistanis, not India, not the rest of the world. General (retd.) Musharraf is a devious and failed leader who has betrayed his people and failed to deliver because success against the terrorists would have ended his utility to the West. A New York Times article on December 24 confirmed that much of the money given to him to fight the Taliban and the Al Qaeda has been siphoned off to buy weapons systems for use against India. The starting point for Pakistan’s recovery has to be an early exit plan for Gen. Musharraf. The planned elections were a sham from the start and should be postponed in the first instance and rescheduled under genuinely free and fair conditions. Before that, the rule of law and the institutions that oversee it must be restored: the rule of law is a precondition for democracy and elections. A future role as a ceremonial President under an executive Prime Minister would not be a misplaced metaphor for ousted Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry.

Yet the army has to provide the crucial stability and underwrite law and order for a transitional period. It is the symbol and protector of national unity and indispensable for the foreseeable future. At the same time, there is no future for Pakistan unless the army begins to withdraw from politics and stays resolutely out of the political arena. Pakistan has a large, educated, capable and worldly-wise elite which must form the core of the country’s revival and regeneration.

All South Asian countries must move away from viewing, nurturing, financing and arming “the other’s” secessionists and dissidents as allies. In the present state of enmity and distrust, it might be too much to expect active cooperation among the security, law enforcement and border control agencies. But at some stage, hopefully, even the most reality-challenged and obstinate leaders will recognise that supping with the devils of terrorism has consumed far too many of them already.

India can contribute a lot if allowed to, materially and institutionally as well as by force of example. It may not be able to owing to domestic political opponents who would exploit any sign of “aiding the enemy” or deeply ingrained Pakistani distrust. Ironically, I just finished reading William Dalrymple’s brilliant and magisterial The Last Mughal on the events of 1857 in Delhi. At one stage Dalrymple comments that it is now “almost impossible to imagine that Hindu sepoys could ever have rallied to the Red Fort and the standard of a Muslim emperor, joining with their Muslim brothers in an attempt to revive the Mughal Empire” (p. 484). Such is the ultimate triumph of the Britishers’ policy of divide, rule and leave.

Other countries can assist both bilaterally and multilaterally through such institutions as the Commonwealth and the United Nations. If nothing else, progress in Afghanistan is held hostage to events in Pakistan, and Afghanistan remains critical to the international community.

India offers the best and nearest example of Islam not being inherently incompatible with democracy; Malaysia and Indonesia nearby are good models of “moderate” Islam coexisting with democratic practices; and Turkey is the best example of secularism in a Muslim majority country. For too long has Pakistan fought the realities of its geography and looked in the rear-view mirror for a glimpse of the future vision. Benazir Bhutto’s assassination provides another tragic opportunity to grasp the reality that the destinies of all South Asians are bound up with one another. They cannot change their geography, but they can escape from the trap of stoking cross-border extremist violence in order to shape a common destiny and alter the course of world history.

(Ramesh Thakur is Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation and Professor of Political Science at the University of Waterloo in Canada.)

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