Kings & Cabbages

It was like a replay of another celebrity death. As when Diana died, there was the morning wakeup, the hurried relating of the news, and shortly afterwards, the television blare filtering through the house. Montages of an elegant woman killed in a brutal fashion. Death’s shock factor of “now she’s here and now she’s not”, never so vivid as when someone famous passes. Dark hints of political conspiracy or terrorist reapers evoked. All this might have been shared with any other viewer of the morning news. But for a Pakistani American, there is an added dimension to the shock. A staple of the Pakistani political world had been shot down. It was almost as if Coca Cola had been killed.

Condolences have poured in from world leaders. Mostly, she is portrayed as a martyr, a fallen redeemer of Pakistan’s democratic soul, a toppled champion. Benazir was at her attractive 54 year old prime and pop culture is prone to painting her passing as a Joan of Arc going down in a blaze of political virtue. The emotion and violence surging across Pakistan, with brown skinned people weeping, shouting, rioting, seems to support the dapper mourning of the international political leaders. But does it?

Benazir was an able television president. She looked good; her austere features, regal bearing, and erudition made her standout from the regular mass of beefy and barely literate Pakistani politicos. Her father’s roti, kapra, makaan rhetoric gave her some ability in the line of populist outreach. Her training in Radcliff College and Oxford University in the 1970s gave her requisite familiarity with discourses of democracy and feminism that are the passports for winning international legitimacy since the United States became a world superpower. She made a far better impression when giving speeches in English rather than in Urdu.

Benazir’s image as a feminist leader injected a splash of exoticism to a highly traditional formula of power building followed by third world women political leaders. The daughter of a landlord family in Pakistan’s Sindh province, she cemented her alliance to Pakistan’s traditional elite by marrying Asif Ali Zardari, a landlord from the neighboring Baluchistan province. She was also instrumental in reinforcing Pakistan’s status as an American ally in the post-Cold War era. Her two terms as Prime Minister were darkened by charges of corruption. As reported by a 1998 New York Times article, a corruption inquiry found over $100 million channeled in real estate and foreign bank accounts.

Many of her ardent supporters became incredibly disillusioned by her administration’s corruption, preferential politics, and Pakistan’s growing indebtedness to the World Bank and IMF. While she emphatically denied the corruption charges, her lavish lifestyle in the United States and England was compromising. While exiled, she supported the United States’ 1998 missile attacks on Afghanistan, and on her 2007 return, promised to crackdown on terrorists and extremists in her country. Given the massive political will that Musharraf has lost through the the army’s summary arrests, detentions, and various raids on the citizenry in the name of the War on Terror, its unclear how her contribution to Pakistan’s people would have been distinguished from the Army General’s. This is of course, if we evaluate work for democratization as building true representative institutions and safeguarding people’s civic liberties, rather than merely a round of elections.

An informal poll in the people of Pakistan before this tragic event would have revealed a desire to elect anyone who was not Musharraf. If this poll probed deeper, it would uncover a wish for a true and independent leader unstained by scandal and betrayed hopes. The real tragedy of the Pakistan is not that democracy has been snuffed out by the death of a charismatic politician. It is in the growing fear and uncertainty in the people. It is in the downward spiraling quality of life, where cooking oil has become a luxury and jobs and opportunities for education for the children have graduated from being a dream to a chimera. It is in the iron clamp on their rights by a General charged with lassoing in quotas of terrorists by the US government and still accused of unsatisfactory results. Benazir’s death is a tragedy, but more so is the lives lost in the mayhem. The tragedy of Pakistan is in the conditions of a people whose political sponsors are losing the game of nations.