A Gift For Inviting Disaster

Benazir Bhutto has now earned the distinction of being the only Pakistani leader to have been voted twice to power and to have been dismissed twice from office. She has become adept at blaming dark and sinister forces for conspiring against democracy—whose highest embodiment she naturally takes herself to be—but both during her first stint in office and now, she has been her own worst enemy.

Even her loyalists would have a hard time denying that Benazir presided over a government that broke all records of incompetence and corruption. Real decision-making power lay not with the Cabinet but with a shadowy group of bureaucrats and wheeler-dealers grouped around her husband, the ubiquitous Asif Ali Zardari. Major appointments were okayed by him; major deals had to go through him. In 1988-90, Zardari had earned the title of ‘Mr 10 Per Cent’. During Benazir’s second coming corruption levels soared to such levels that 10 per cent became a derisory figure.

But despite Zardari’s near-legendary capacity to put his fingers into everything, corruption was not the principal reason for Benazir’s downfall. What eventually got her was arrogance and a stubborn refusal to recognise reality. Since she and her husband were carrying a good deal of unwholesome baggage on their shoulders, common sense should have dictated the need to tread warily and softly. Instead of which Benazir sought a needless quarrel with the Supreme Court which as time passed also led to open confrontation with President Farooq Leghari.

This was the ultimate irony. Both were her men. Sajjad Ali Shah was picked by her as chief justice over the heads of two senior colleagues. He was even helpful to the prime minister but she expected him to do her bidding in everything. When the chief justice balked at the limits of loyalty demanded of him, Bhutto was indignant. For six months she sat over a Supreme Court judgement which struck down the appointment of party loyalists as high court judges, creating in the process a crisis which ultimately dragged her down.

Much the same arrogance coloured her attitude towards the President. Leghari was her man, a PPP loyalist for many years. For two years he stood by the prime minister, earning because of his obvious bias heated attacks from the opposition. But Bhutto took him too much for granted. She simply could not abide the notion that someone who should be beholden to her for life should ever take the responsibilities of his office seriously. When he tried to mend matters between Benazir and the Supreme Court, she would not listen to him. Thus an issue which had no relevance to Benazir’s survival in office (which arguably should have been her first priority) was allowed to balloon into a major cause of confrontation between two important pillars of the state.

The killing of her brother, Murtaza Bhutto, with whom her relations during his lifetime were far from exemplary, rattled Benazir completely. While refraining from taking swift action against the policemen present on the scene of the killing, Benazir spoke shrilly of a conspiracy to eliminate the Bhuttos. She even went so far as to insinuate that Murtaza’s killing and the President’s move against her (a reference in the Supreme Court asking it to clarify her powers regarding the appointment of judges and a letter to Parliament asking it to set up an independent judicial tribunal to look into allegations of corruption) as being part of a common time-table.

Wrestling with these self-created challenges, Benazir’s government was paralysed, unable to function and living increasingly in a world of its own. The end when it came was surprising only because of the haste which accompanied it. Rumours had been rife in Islamabad that Benazir’s government would not see the end of November. But the midnight strike on November 4 was an ill-prepared affair, with the Presidency tying up loose threads till the last minute and waking up prospective ministers in the caretaker set-up from their beds.

What was it that precipitated the president’s action? Did anything dramatic happen on the evening of November 4? The received wisdom in Islamabad is that failing to persuade Benazir to resign (which was the preferred solution of the Presidency) the fear had arisen that First Spouse Zardari and cronies would slip the net and flee abroad. In the event it was the army which helped put the dismissal of the government into effect: putting a guard around the prime minister’s house and other key installations in the capital, sealing airports, arresting Zardari and the intelligence chief, Masood Sharif, a Zardari crony.

Despite Zardari’s near legendary corruption, that was not the principal reason for Benazir’s downfall. What eventually got her was her arrogance. What is the outlook for the future? Benazir has vowed to make a fight of it. She has already denounced the president and accused him of treachery. It takes little imagination to see that in the days ahead the noise from the Benazir camp will rise. But will it impress the Pakistani people? Benazir still has her vote bank but in the Punjab, the power-house of Pakistani politics, her support has visibly dropped, and in Sindh, her home province, she now has to contend with the ghost of her brother, the responsibility for whose slaying in the common mind is being put at her husband’s door.

More important than Benazir’s prospects is the question of the coming polls: will they be held on time? There are many voices in the country saying that the political stables should first be cleaned. But Pakistanis are shy of the word ‘accountability’. General Zia-ul-Haq used it to postpone elections and stretch 90 days into 11 and a half years. Are the present caretakers thinking of treading the same path? Although suspicions on this count in Pakistan are currently strong they are perhaps misplaced. Short of violating the Constitution, there is no way that the election date, February 3, can be set aside. From experience Pakistanis also know that such a course once embarked upon usually creates more problems that it resolves.

(The writer is a columnist with the Dawn, Karachi.)