For a country that is no stranger to violence, the assassination of Benazir or Bibi as she is popularly known here, has affected the entire nation.
LAHORE: In death Benazir Bhutto may just have managed to transform Pakistan in a manner she could not in her lifetime.
Her brutal assassination has unleashed a strong sense of outrage and anger against extremists and dictators. It also appears to have united Pakistan in its grief and in opposition to army rule.
For a country that is no stranger to violence, the assassination of Benazir or Bibi as she is popularly known here, has affected the entire nation. You can feel it everywhere.
From the passengers on the Pakistan Airlines flight to Lahore to intellectuals, academicians and ordinary citizens. Old timers in Lahore do not recall a time in the last three decades when the entire country has been completely shut down.
“It is as if there has been a death in every family,” says ZU Khan a Lahore-based business executive. It’s a sentiment that is echoed by even the former Foreign Minister of Pakistan Khursheed Kasuri “the entire nation is poorer in her death. She was without doubt a courageous leader”, he told this correspondent.
Pakistan at the best of times is a fractious society divided by ethnic and regional loyalties. Benazir in death appears to have transcended them.
“When Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was hanged sweets were distributed in some parts of the country, but her killing has affected us like few things have in the past,” says 72-year-old Hussain Nizami, a resident of old Lahore.
The tragic event, much like Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, has unleashed a huge sympathy wave for her party, even among people who were not particularly fond of her.
Salauddin Chaudhray held Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto responsible for spiking his chances of becoming an Air Marshal. Now sitting in the library of his bungalow in an upmarket Lahore residential area, he cannot conceal his anger or tears.
“I’m aghast. Whatever her shortcomings she was a liberal and stood for democracy. If the PPP decides to contest the elections I will be the first person to cast his vote for them,” he says. Chaudhrary’s is not an isolated case.
Rasheed Anjum, an Islamabad-based writer and a self confessed cynic, doesn’t remember crying even when his own father died. Today he is shaken man.
“I was driving when I got to hear of the assassination, initially I was numbed, and I called my wife and just broke down.”
The heartland of Punjab is not known to be a PPP stronghold ever. Traditionally in the event of a death of a near and dear one, women in the villages sit on rice husk praying for the dead till their period of mourning is over.
“I’ve just got back from campaigning and in village after village they have rice husk all over the place,” says a candidate of the king’s party, the PML( Q ).
For the PPP faithful, Benazir has already assumed mythical status, and they make no pretence about hiding what they think about her. She is being held up as a “martyr” in the cause of democracy.
Outside a PPP office in Lahore workers were chanting slogans today. “Bibi tere khoon se hum inqalab layenge” (Bibi your death will give birth to a revolution).
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