All other are alike. Made of the same stuff. Mediocrity. Greed. Ambition. Self-interest. Hypocrisy. Duality of character. And a sense of contentment in their state of ignorance.
Only Benazir Bhutto Shaheed was different. One great edge she had over them all, was her intellect. Also her class.
She did have her faults and her shortcomings. And she did pay a heavy price for these. But for these faults and shortcomings, the need for the notorious NRO would not have arisen.
Having known her as much (or as little) as I did, I hold a strong belief that had she been able to exercise her own choice in the matters which led to the developments that culminated in the sad compromises under the NRO banner, she wouldn’t probably have to lay down her life in order to earn the adoration and the esteem of the people. By nature she had a strong sense of self-esteem, in the presence of which no person can feel comfortable doing things beyond his or her dignity.
But it was her destiny to live a kind of divided life — one that of the inspired daughter of ZAB, and the other of the struggling wife of a man whose attributes were virtually of a diagonally opposite nature.
Even in this ‘inescapable’ destiny, she was able to create some space for the brilliant brave lady she by birth was. Though she returned to Pakistan on the 18th of October 2007 as a consequence of a ‘compromise’, she was not to be cowed down by the hubris and the arrogance of power that General ® Pervez Musharraf ‘housed’ in his frame. It didn’t take her long to decide that she couldn’t afford to die a spiritual death at the hands of the “NRO.” The better and far more honourable option would be to face a bullet.
Today she stands much taller than she stood in her life time.
But isn’t this nation duty–bound to find her killers and to make them meet their deserved end?
It is an irony that the party she had led, is basking in the joy of the power her murder brought to it —- too busy in matters of more mundane nature to find time to go for those who killed her.
But there is no harm in hoping that the committee that the PM has set up to investigate the crucial issue of the ‘prompt’ washing of the scene of the crime succeeds in triggering an unavoidable need to take the investigations further and farther….
Note: This column was first published on 26-04-2010.
