I suppose it was inevitable that Benazir Bhutto would not die in bed. She was, after all, from a country where people still believe in terrorism, violence and murder as legitimate tools of politics, and she was also the kind of leader whose style would feed into what we would consider martyrdom.

You could not call her a saint, however. More like the Pakistani version of Margaret Thatcher, only more versed in the Pakistani way of governing (i.e. personal over parliamentary power), which meant she was not exactly a liberal/democratic politician. Allow me to quote from today’s New York Times:

When Ms. Bhutto was re-elected to a second term as prime minister, her style of government combined both the traditional and the modern, said Zafar Rathore, a senior civil servant at the time.

But her view of the role of government differed little from the classic notion in Pakistan that the state was the preserve of the ruler who dished out favors to constituents and colleagues, he recalled.

As secretary of interior, responsible for the Pakistani police force, Mr. Rathore, who is now retired, said he tried to get an appointment with Ms. Bhutto to explain the need for accountability in the force. He was always rebuffed, he said.

Finally, when he was seated next to her in a small meeting, he said to her, “I’ve been waiting to see you,” he recounted.

“Instantaneously, she said: ‘I am very busy, what do you want? I’ll order it right now.’ ”

She could not understand that a civil servant might want to talk about policies, he said. Instead, he said, “she understood that when all civil servants have access to the sovereign, they want to ask for something.”

Small wonder that when she fell from power, it was over charges of corruption. The word, in that context, becomes a mere excuse, if only because the leaders who followed Bhutto came from the same understanding of governance.

I seriously doubt that Bhutto’s death would have the same effect on either her people or her rivals as, say, Indira or Rajiv Gandhi’s. Indeed, there are now questions as to what will happen to her People’s Party; you have to wonder who could hope to lead that movement, apart from her husband Asif Ali Zadari, now that she’s gone.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 27th, 2007 at 12:46 and is filed under International, R.I.P.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.