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The Predictable Failure of Benazir Bhutto
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18146 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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11 / 1990 |
3,781 Words |
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Khalid Duran
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Pakistan's Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, democratically elected only two years ago, was deposed in August by decree of President Ghulam Ishaq Khan. The President made use of his constitutional powers, but his alliance with the military leadership left no doubt that this amounted to another army takeover. Benazir Bhutto called it a “quasi-coup”; others speak of a “constitutional coup.”
President Khan charged the Bhutto government with “corruption and inefficiency.” It is a unique case of a government's being dismissed because of such failures so shortly after coming to power. Granted that some of Benazir's cronies could not resist the temptation to amass a fortune, 20 months was too short a time to do so, even while in government.
Few observers have come to Benazir's defense, and it is difficult indeed to be an apologist for her erratic handling of a traditionally unruly nation in a period of heightened turmoil. Pakistan's recent troubles include that chaos in Afghanistan and its spillover into Pakistan, the uprising in Indian-held Kashmir, and Sikh separatism across the border in India's Punjab.
The sacked prime minister has a number of qualities that make it hard to lament her downfall. She seems possessed by a self-conceited sense of mission and an inflated ego that tends to erupt in bouts of hysteria, shrouding the sound judgment of an ambitious young woman who otherwise does not lack political acumen. It matters little whether these traits were instilled in her by her father, executed Prime Minister Z.A. Bhutto, or inherited from him outright.
Her professed love for the downtrodden is a political ploy, not a genuine compassion. However, all these and other negative traits of her personality, as well as her political conduct, have little to do with what she is being accused of by her enemies.
The type of corruption Benazir and her clan are being blamed for is a well-known characteristic of her opponents. The Bhuttos generally stood out as being less rapacious than their peers among the country's monied oligarchs. Benazir's father owed much of his electoral success to a simple logic: Common folks used to reason that since this man was so rich, he would feel no need to further enrich himself at the expense of the poor. More or less the same could be said about Asif Zardari, Benazir's husband, and his family, who have now become the chief targets of corruption charges.
Z.A. Bhutto won landslide victories in the elections of 1970 and 1976 because he we forceful in exposing the corruption of the class that has ruled Pakistan since independence in 1947 - particularly “the notorious 22 families” he singled out of his acerbic criticism. (Strictly speaking, the Bhutto's themselves are one of the 22 richest families, or at least No. 23.)
The oligarchs are now turning the tables and level against Bhutto's daughter the very allegations that had made them the butt of popular wrath in the early seventies. The BBC and other media have avidly picked up the label given to Benazir's closest associates; they are being called “the dirty dozen” in Pakistan's Islamist press. Some familiarity with Pakistan's recent history is needed to understand that this label echoes the propagandistic term “22 families” Benazir's father
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