The on-going tragedy

Nusrat Bhutto was spared these past few years from seeing the depths to which the party has descended.

Would Nusrat Bhutto have approved? Maybe not, having put in years of dedication to the party of the people and to her country. Had she known the present condition of Pakistan, particularly on the economic front, which the experts assure us is far from rosy, would she really have approved the shutting down of the country for one day on her behalf at the cost of, again to refer to the experts, billions of rupees?

Would she rather not have spurred on the nation to work for an additional day, foregoing one of the numerous holidays it gives itself, and thus contribute, as she had done in her past life, to the welfare of the people to whom the PPP dedicated itself so long ago?

But then there are myriad factors at work in the Islamic Republic, now under thrall to a party she would no longer recognise and of which she certainly would not approve.

As for her funeral rites, would she have approved the fact that even in death, her family was unable to reconcile itself, to come together, to mourn together? Ghinwa Bhutto is as much her daughter-in-law as is Asif Zardari her son-in-law. Ghinwa is the widow of her murdered eldest son who carries Nusrat’s married name and that of her hanged husband. Zardari is not a Bhutto. His children never were, until his usurpation of the party when he tagged upon his children the Bhutto name, purely for political and expedient purposes. Ghinwa’s children are Bhuttos and are as much Nusrat’s grandchildren as are the three Zardari siblings, the children of her assassinated eldest daughter.

Nusrat Bhutto was the last living link of the political Bhuttos with the party formed by her husband over four decades ago. There was a grand finality about her death and it was sad to observe the inability of her family to unite, even temporarily. Logistically it may not have been ideal to carry her to 70 Clifton in Karachi, which had been her home for the best and the worst years of her life. But Al Murtaza in Larkanaka was also very much her home — what possible connections could she have had with the presidential camp office at Naudero?

The tragedy of the Bhutto family is not yet played out it seems and is destined to continue into the distant future until at some point Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s descendants agree to compromise — forgiving and forgetting may be too much to ask. The bitterness and suspicions nurtured by Murtaza Bhutto’s family are far too engrained, embedded.

Wajid Shamsul Hasan — Zardari’s envoy to London and his faithful servant — wrote in his obituary of Nusrat Bhutto that in the late 1970s and 1980s “she saved the party from the vultures within and kept the party flag high...”. Fortunately, she has missed the final takeover of the vultures and the pathetic flip-flopping of the party flag. She kept intact the memories of her party for which she campaigned valiantly from 1969 onwards. Whilst in those early days ZAB zoomed around Pakistan whipping up support for the 1970 elections, Nusrat and teenage daughter Benazir crossed the length of the country, focusing on the women of Pakistan and on how to get them out to vote in the elections. She later managed to galvanise the party in the dark Ziaul Haq days, keeping it intact for its two short-lived triumphs of the 1990s.

She was spared these past few years from seeing the depths to which it has descended.

Lined up in the press on October 22 were photographs of federal ministers, party people said to have been ‘suspended’ for failing to submit to the Election Commission details of their assets. A meaningless action, ‘suspension,’ as meaningless as the lists of assets when submitted because the only purpose they serve through their lying and prevarication is to provoke a snigger from a knowing public.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 29^th, 2011.