Here is an article written by Mr Kanwar Idrees, in the Daily Dawn of 5th January 2008. B.A. Rafiq

POLITICIANS do not ordinarily bequeath their party posts even when they are fading away or death looks imminent. Benazir Bhutto chose to do it, as if it was a family trust, at a time when she was riding a popular wave that was likely to carry her to the highest office of the land for the third time while still in the prime of life.

But then Benazir was no ordinary politician. She laid down her own rules of conduct, defying laws and convention, sometimes even common sense, and was always willing to pay a price for it. She was elected prime minister twice and twice dismissed before she was 45. Had she lived to occupy that office again for the third time, very likely she would have earned a third dismissal for Musharraf had put 58-2(b) back in the Constitution.

In her own casual, charming, childish way she did what she wanted to do, brushing aside any counsel to the contrary howsoever sane or sincere it might have been. Leaving matters of state policy aside, this streak of her character showed itself in her day-to-day administrative decisions. Let it be illustrated by a personal example. When she first became prime minister toward the end of 1988, she appointed me as chief secretary of her home province ignoring all advice to the contrary. But some months later went on to transfer me ignoring every advice not to.

In a brief farewell encounter at the airport, when I sensed a faint expression of regret in her on my premature transfer, I chose to thank her for appointing me in the first instance when no other prime minister would have. I can only guess that she appointed me to that much-cherished job without having ever met me only to acknowledge that as home secretary of the province in the first year of Ziaul Haq’s martial law, I had done whatever little I could do to relieve the tedium of her lonely confinement at 70 Clifton. Her father then was in Lahore’s notorious Kot Lakhpat jail awaiting trial for murder and her mother was confined elsewhere.

But then she felt no qualms in getting me out of the way for not “helping her partymen” seeking jobs, lands and other favours. A politician has one kind of expectations while in office and another, quite to the contrary, when out of it. For civil servants the book of rules remains the same in either situation. It is a common characteristic of the Bhuttos that they are ruthlessly exacting in their demands when in power but remembers and values even the slightest courtesy shown to them in adversity. That has been the experience of most public servants not with Benazir alone but with her father Zulfikar and uncle Mumtaz too.

One can imagine the same do-what-I-must quality in full play in her when President Ghulam Ishaq Khan, a stickler for rules, and later her own chosen faithful Farooq Leghari felt persuaded to dismiss her halfway through her two terms as prime minister. She seemed to relish the excitement of public office as much for its hazards as for its glamour.

The general feeling among officials in the government then was, and still remains, that her administration would have performed better and lasted longer only if she were left alone to follow her own uncomplicated, frugal instincts. The stress leading to confrontations was caused by hordes of party men demanding instant reward for their ‘sacrifices’ and the presence of a husband who wanted to have a decisive say in the affairs of the state by virtue of that relationship alone. He then had no representative character nor held a public or party office.

Out of power and accused of maladministration and corruption, her hold on the popular mind at home did not waver and internationally she gained a stature unrivalled by any other Pakistani in recent times. Whatever her failings the country will not, perhaps, see the likes of her again.

Looking back in time, it is difficult to resist the thought how the country would have been spared much rigours of extremism had she been Gen Musharraf’s partner in governance in 1999. By choosing Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, who was a professed ally of the orthodox religious groups, Musharraf has made a moderate Pakistan into a world metaphor for militancy. In the growing prospect of the PPP and the army collaborating lay Pakistan’s best hope to roll back the tide of extremism. That hope must not die with Benazir’s death.

It would be a grievous repetition of his original mistake if Musharraf now were to permit the caretaker governments, the electoral and intelligence agencies and the Q-League to manipulate the polls to keep out of power the ascendant liberal forces in the PPP and PML-N. The situation also poses immensely testing challenges for Asif Zardari who, as Benazir has willed, will be leading the PPP for the next five years. His shenanigans in her previous governments will return to haunt the party once the sympathy wave subsides notwithstanding the steadfastness that he had shown in the long incarceration that followed.

To prove equal to the role the fate has thrust on him, Mr Zardari must not let the country’s biggest party degenerate into a patronage-based family cult superseding its councils and consultative processes. Besides sticking to Benazir’s policy of cooperating with the like-minded parties, the PML-N in particular, and avoiding confrontation with the ‘establishment’, the PPP should make every effort to seek an electoral understanding with the nationalists of Sindh, sardars of Balochistan and the ANP in the NWFP. Without their support it will not be possible to check the surge of extremism in the country and warfare in the border regions.

Finally Mr Zardari as chairman of the party, if he must, should make only policy statements and not throw out taunts. His rustic reaction to President Musharraf’s announcement about Scotland Yard investigating the murder of Benazir strongly suggests that men like Makhdoom Amin Fahim, Aitzaz Ahsan and Raza Rabbani should act as the spokesmen and public face of the party.