It is curious that when the Bhuttos are pushed into a corner they tend to become melodramatic. In 1977, after ZA Bhutto assailed the generals for bouncing him out of Islamabad, he was obviously looking for more trouble. In the treacherous world of Pakistani politics no one forgives or forgets in a hurry, least of all a deadly coup-making junta.
Last August, when the daughter met the same fate as her father, we were dismayed. Democracy was off the rails again. We sympathised with her conundrum. We condemned the President: the way to hell was apparently not paved with good intentions. And we wondered whether or not this nasty jolt might have a sobering effect on her.
Good politicians weight their words, especially when they’re in trouble. If you shoot your mouth off, there is no respite. Miss Bhutto, sadly, is still desperately long on rhetoric. And we have been at a loss to understand her precise strategy. What did she hope to gain last month by focussing her wrath upon the invisible hand of “military intelligence”? Gen Beg was bristling with contempt when he smashed her back handed lob out of the court. Yesterday, she atoned for her impulsiveness: “I cannot blame anybody because levelling allegations without proof is un-Islamic and unethical”. Well, well.
Against all the rules of the game, Miss Bhutto has often demonstrated a penchant for jumping out of her political crease and having a go at the establishment’s fearful pace attack. Despite many self-inflicted misfortunes, she has been painfully slow to learn. Now she has unleashed a hail of missives at President Ishaq Khan. Speaking before a charged crowd in Larkana last Wednesday, she denounced him and demanded a judicial commission to “enquire into his activities since the time he was finance minister in the Zia-Junejo regime”. Yesterday, she thundered again: “Ishaq should resign. He too should be held accountable, especially for patronising his friends and relatives.”
Which, of course, prompts a diffident query: Pray, who, dear Benazir, is going to hold the President accountable? Gen Mirza Aslam Beg?
Is Miss Bhutto whistling in the dark again? Or does she seriously believe the President has been so thoroughly discredited his time is running out faster than hers? In either case it is a dangerously skimpy peg upon which she stakes her chances. Ghulam Ishaq is a fiercely stubborn survivor. Despite the legal snags, the references pile up. Obviously, this mess has to be cleaned up and a few heads will roll. But whose? No one, least of all Miss Bhutto, can afford to miscalculate.
If benazir Bhutto wants to piggyback it to Islamabad next October, in much the same compromising circumstances as in 1988, she might be advised to concentrate on building bridges instead of trying to blow them up. As matters stood last August, there was no love lost between her and the President. Since then, both have drifted apart almost irrevocably. And her latest attempt to attack the President and woo the General is fraught with doubtful consequences.
Part of the problem, we suspect, lies in Benazir Bhutto’s religious belief in her own propaganda. Which is why her rhetoric is fierce and she is very good at whipping up a crowd. But her tragedy lies in allowing herself to be swept away by it, in imagining she is storming the barricades like a true republican heroine, which she is not. The metamorphosis is thankfully brief but acutely problematic: her delusions do more harm to her own political career than to anyone else’s.
Her momentous struggles in opposition apart, the ebullient Miss Bhutto is definitely not the stuff of history. Not even, if she should insist upon it, as a patch upon the fiery father who fluttered briefly in 1968. The sooner she comes to accept this, the easier she will find it in herself to serve her own unexceptional purpose of being prime minister of this country again.
Which is why all this bitter posturing may not help matters much. For sure, the mohtarma has been wronged and deserves better, if only because the crowds chant she is Pakistan Ki Awaaz. But she should remember that in a tunnel the Voice of Pakistan can sound ominously like a voice in the wilderness.