Even in death, Pakistan’s Bhutto leads her party in campaign
ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN— The most popular politician in Pakistan’s largest party won’t be staging any rallies or participating in debates as May’s historic national election nears. The reason: she’s dead. Yet Benazir Bhutto, assassinated more than five years ago, is still the standard bearer of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). In its TV commercials and banners, she has been pushed to the forefront of the party’s uphill campaign to return to power in Parliament after a widely criticized five-year term.
Hers is the face of the party on its official manifesto. She looms over smaller photos of her widower, President Asif Ali Zardari, and their son Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, who lead the party but are rarely seen in public.
The PPP’s campaign in the run-up to the May 11 vote has been proscribed by security concerns. The Pakistani Taliban has warned the secular party that its candidates and rallies will be attacked.
On Friday, a bomb exploded near the office of another main party, killing nine people. A Pakistani Taliban spokesman claimed responsibility for the attack on the Awami National Party office.
Bhutto’s party has no other option but to stress its lineage, analysts say. The newly ended government was marred by an economic meltdown and persistent corruption cases against top officials.
Even though the party and its coalition partners made history as the first civilian government in Pakistan’s 65-year history to complete a full term — thereby shepherding a democratic transition of power — that accomplishment hasn’t lowered the price of wheat or gasoline, created jobs or diminished poverty.
Zardari polls miserably. The former prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, was drummed from office by Pakistan’s Supreme Court last year for refusing to submit to its orders to reopen a money laundering case against Zardari. And the public blames Gilani’s successor, Raja Pervez Ashraf, for crippling electrical and natural gas shortages. Bhutto-Zardari, 24, is too young to run for a seat in the May 11 election — the minimum age is 25. So the party is left with only ghosts to burnish its image. Meanwhile, an anti-terrorism court placed Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s former military leader, under arrest Friday on charges related to Bhutto’s death, adding to a tangle of legal woes that have hobbled his hopes for a political comeback. Musharraf is already under house arrest in a case involving his detention and firing of senior judges after imposing emergency rule in 2007. The prosecution’s case rests on a statement by Mark Siegel, a Washington lobbyist and friend of Bhutto’s, who alleges that Musharraf made a threatening phone call to her before she returned to Pakistan in 2007 from self-imposed exile, said Salman Safdar, one of his lawyers. Prosecutors will question Musharraf about Siegel’s statement, as well as about allegations that he sent a threatening email to Bhutto and failed to provide security to her, special prosecutor Zulfiqar Ali was quoted as saying in local news media. With files from Star wire services