Revenge, Politics and Blasphemy in Pakistan by Hussain Adeel;

Author:Hussain, Adeel;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hurst Publishers
Published: 2022-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

III

By the time Zia’s plane shattered into pieces near Bahawalpur, prosecutors had issued more than a thousand charges against Ahmadis under Ordinance XX.40 This is not surprising because it had become impossible for Ahmadis not to get entangled in criminal activity. Greeting someone with ‘salaam’ already constituted an attack on Islam, an attack that could warrant a lengthy prison sentence. Zia’s sudden death paved the way for a renewed glimmer of democracy in 1988. Yet over the past three decades, trust in democracy only continued to spiral downward. Only forty per cent of the electorate bothered going to the polls, a substantive decrease from the voter turnout in 1977.41 Bhutto certainly did his part to disillusion the public confidence in democratic elections. In his final act before his hanging, and what many still consider a betrayal of the socialist values he preached, Bhutto had bequeathed the Pakistan Peoples Party to his wife. Nusrat Bhutto dutifully transferred it to her eldest daughter Benazir.

Just weeks before Zia’s plane crashed, Benazir’s place in Pakistan’s political landscape looked gloomy. Her eight-party alliance to oppose Zia, the Movement for Restoration of Democracy, had lost one of its most vital members, the Pakistan National Party. But after the crash, her position improved dramatically. Exhausted by eleven years of ruling the country, Pakistan’s military establishment set general elections for November 1988. With Benazir as the new face of the election campaign, the PPP emerged as the largest party, leaving her rival Nawaz Sharif, who had been lifted into politics by Zia to promote urban industrialists, far behind in most constituencies.

During Zia’s reign, Benazir had promised Western diplomats that hers would be a secular and liberal regime to their liking. When the interim President Ghulam Ishaq Khan swore Benazir into office as Pakistan’s first female prime minister, she could not keep this promise in any meaningful way. In one of her first acts in office, Benazir asked Ghulam Ishaq Khan to release political prisoners who had been sentenced in military courts. However, she was not asking for a general amnesty, but only for those with party ties to the PPP.42 Many saw this as an early blow to her political reputation, which, at least for a short window, held the potential to transform Pakistan into a more stable democracy. In other ways, too, Benazir appeared more like a meticulous accountant rather than a reconciliatory political figure. Whoever had crossed her father was now punished. Those who had remained loyal to him received key political posts. She appointed Tikka Khan, the former Chief of Army Staff, and widely known as the ‘Butcher of Bengal’ for his excessive use of force during the military campaign in East Pakistan, as Punjab’s Governor.

Barely six months later, at the 1989 Harvard Commencement Speech in Cambridge, Benazir portrayed herself as a champion of human rights and democracy. Wrapped in a brown Pashmina stole with delicate hand-embroidered borders and a bulky pair of spectacles, Benazir recounted the following story:

I arrived here from a country that in my lifetime had not known democracy or political freedom.

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