Azif Ali Zardari, widower of former premier Benazir Bhutto, has said he will be an advisory figure like Congress president Sonia Gandhi.
LONDON: Azif Ali Zardari, widower of former premier Benazir Bhutto, has said he will be an advisory figure like Congress president Sonia Gandhi, but without a seat in parliament, if his Pakistan People's Party is voted to power in the next month's elections.
"If our party wins a majority in next month's elections, I will not take a cabinet post but will act like Sonia Gandhi, as an advisory figure without a seat in Parliament," the PPP leader, who was made the party's co-chairman following the assassination of his wife, said in an interview published in The Sunday Times on Sunday.
At the same time, he expressed his apprehensions about the election being held at all. "We don't have any faith that there will be elections. They might make another huge incident. Anyone could be a target," he said.
The elections which were earlier scheduled for Jan 8 were put off till Feb 18 following Bhutto's assassination on Dec 27 and the ensuing violence that left scores of people dead.
Zardari said the night before Benazir Bhutto was assassinated he had begged his wife on the phone to stop holding election rallies and let him take her place.
"She had just addressed this public meeting in Peshawar where they'd caught this suicide bomber," Zardari said.
"I told her, for God's sake be careful, but she said, 'what can I do? I have to go and meet my people.' I pleaded with her: you stay home and I'll go do the rallies. You're the mother".
"I always used to tell her that as long as the queen bee is alive we workers will always live... but I guess it wasn't so...," Zardari said.
That telephone call was to be the couple's last conversation.
Zardari said "after she survived the Karachi bus bombing (on her return from eight years in exile last October), we were all of the opinion that she was Superwoman and could survive anything, but it turns out she wasn't."
Zardari was speaking at Bhutto's ancestral home in Naudero, in rural Sindh province, where he flew with her body nine days ago to bury her in the mausoleum that she had built for her father and brothers, all of whom have been killed.
He explained that the document read last Sunday to the central committee of the PPP, naming him as her successor, was only her political will.
"There's this whole handwritten document in which she even says who to give her clothes and shoes to - which servant to give what to - the trust she wanted set up and how it should be run."
Zardari had been unaware that she had drawn it up. "The day her remains came to Naudero a person came from Dubai and said, 'I have this document that madam left with me'."
The will was dated October 16, two days before Bhutto had returned to Pakistan. "That was the day she's been warned not to go back and she wrote that letter to President (Pervez) Musharraf showing her apprehensions about certain people."
The message that she left for the party asked for the leadership to pass to Zardari until it can be run by their son Bilawal.
Aged only 19, Bilawal will return to Christ Church, Oxford, this week, for his second term as an undergraduate and has freely admitted that he was more interested in Facebook and movies than politics.
It is his youngest sister Asifa, 14, who has always said that she wants to follow in her mother's footsteps to be prime minister.
Zardari said "it's very hard as a father. But how can you stop a tradition where so many people have knowingly given their lives as she did?"
Zardari is convinced that Bilawal will grow into the job as Benazir - known as Bibi - did after her father, the former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was ousted in a military coup in 1977 and hanged two years later.
He admitted that he is a controversial figure clouded by corruption allegations that often see him referred to as 'Mr Ten Percent'.
But he points out that he has spent 11 years in jail on charges of which he was never convicted and insisted that he is the victim of a long-term smear campaign.
"The day I got engaged to her was when they planned this move. They didn't want to give the PPP two leaders so they planned this negative image.
"Look, this is a country where the chief justice gets arrested, gets criminal charges put on him, gets reinstated, then gets arrested again. Now after Benazir's death, the world knows the lengths to which the establishment of Pakistan will go."
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