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Monday, December 31, 2007

[chottala.com] The India Doctorine - By Barrister MBI Munshi , review by Isha Khan, pls read

dear mr Isha Khan,
                 many thanks.you are not only a book reviewer but also an industrious reader who can depict a true picture of a book.The book includes articles by writers from other south asian countries.Reader of such research work is rare now in our country, where the pro indians dominates the printing and Electronic media sector.
Your review will attract many people like me to go through the book.
Good wishes to the patriotic writer and reviewer
 
 
 
 
Book Review - ' The India Doctrine'
by Isha Khan
Adorned in a saffron red jacket and embellished with a detailed map of South Asia the concept of an India Doctrine has been introduced to the readers in Bangladesh recently. The book 'The India Doctrine' has been published by the Bangladesh Research Forum and edited by Barrister M.B.I. Munshi and is priced at Tk. 300. Munshi's contribution to the book constitutes the largest section with several other writers from Bangladesh , Nepal and Sri Lanka providing some useful and informative chapters.

The book comes complete with a foreword written by esteemed scholar, Professor Ataur Rahman of
Dhaka University who sets the theme of the book. We are reminded by Prof. Rahman that while India might have its own rationale for framing its regional policy compatible with its national interests, the fact remains that constant apprehensions, mistrust and tensions between India and the smaller neighbors including Bangladesh had its negative effects on any meaningful cooperation and security in the region.

This introduction neatly moves us into the chapters written by Munshi which are a series of discussions that covers the relations between
India and East Pakistan/Bangladesh from 1947 to the present. It attempts a historical and geo-strategic appraisal of relations between the two countries but also offers a more wide ranging analysis involving the Indian external intelligence operations in Bangladesh and outside. The central idea of the chapters when taken as a whole appears to be that the India Doctrine as implemented by successive administrations in India is not limited to simply harming the economic interests of its neighbours but also has a historical and intellectual underpinning that comes from the thoughts and writings of Jawaharlal Nehru and Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar amongst others. The idea of a United India (or an 'Akhand Bharat') according to the author is still a goal of Indian policy making in South Asia .

Prof. Rahman is forced in his foreword to contend that this thesis may seem implausible and 'far-fetched' but also points out that Munshi supplements his ideas with an exhaustive and elaborate set of references and notes to back up his argument. However, a defect in this intricate framework of references is that the chapters lack a bibliography which would have made it easier to verify the arguments advanced by the author. The chapters also seems to be hampered by the fact that they were written originally as a 3 part article and the author clearly has had some difficulty in framing his arguments within this constriction. However, as we all know Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington both started their seminal works in a similar manner with articles in prominent journals before they were rendered into book form and this does not seem to have affected the stream of their discussion and thoughts.

As this may be, the principle cause of disquiet will certainly be Munshi's interpretation of significant historical events and his commentary on the motivations of characters such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Ayub Khan who are all now long dead. I was certainly surprised by some of his findings but it was difficult to find fault here as most of his views are backed-up with thorough research and investigation. His chapters on the 1971 war and the insurgency in the CHT are probably the most tantalizing in terms of historical data and comparisons.

Some of Munshi's arguments are further buttressed by a short chapter by Khodeza Begum who makes reference to events that occurred during the 1990's related to clandestine meetings held in Dhaka concerning the reunification of the subcontinent. In her chapter, there is an extensive discussion on the policies being pursued by the Indian government that according to her is detrimental to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of
Bangladesh . She analyses the concept of a United Bengal that has featured in some of the Indian political literature in recent years. She has also summarized the tactics and strategies adopted by the Indian government and its intelligence agency to undermine the unity of Bangladesh and to inculcate the population of the country with a perspective adverse to the nations integrity.

Although solidly written there is a problem with the length of the chapter as well as the dated materials used by the author. A more contemporary approach may have served better but the evidence seems irrefutable and the author should update her research before a second edition is considered.

In a sudden change of location Brig. Gen. M. Sakhawat Hossain inexplicably takes us all the way to the
Indian Ocean and the emerging strategic scenarios being played out in the area. One may legitimately question the relevance to the overall context and theme of the book but the author makes this abundantly clear when he remarks that rivalries in the South Asian region are primarily based on events in 1971 and India's intent on dominating the region has had to appreciate the ground realities that this cannot be achieved alone. Hossain expertly explains the intricate alliances being forged in the region and the importance of the Indian Ocean in the strategic thinking of India , China , the USA and Pakistan . His comments on the North-East insurgency and the recent uprising in Nepal are highly commendable and very insightful especially in the latter case where he had visited prior to writing the chapter.

Following the chapters by the Bangladeshi authors mentioned above come the section written by the Nepali writers. In the case of Madan Prasad Khanal, Nishchal Basnyat and Sanjay Upadhya their contributions to the book are highly articulate, elegant and almost near impeccable. Each author discusses differing aspects of Indian interference and intervention in Nepali internal affairs and in some cases provides possible solutions to these problems. But with a clear conception of the implications of Indian domination on
Nepal Dr. Shastra Dutta Pant appeared a little confused in his expressions.

The final chapters of the book are by two Sri Lankan writers Dr Rohan Gunaratna and Arbinda Acharya. Both writers collaborated to produce a single chapter on the Sri Lankan attitude to Indian interference or as the authors themselves put it, "India's involvement in Sri Lankan ethnic imbroglio has been one of the most controversial, ironic as well as tragic aspects of New Delhi's foreign policy." While concentrating on the Sri Lankan situation the writers also manage to draw in examples from
Bangladesh , Pakistan , Nepal and Bhutan to back up their case on Indian aspirations in South Asia . Of significance is the Indian involvement in the protracted and apparently insoluble conflict with the Tamils. The chapter also involves a geostrategic appraisal of Sri Lanka and its growing relationship with China and Pakistan . It is unfortunate therefore that the authors were not as forceful about Indian interventions in Sri Lanka especially during the time of the premiership of Rajiv Gandhi. The chapter seems somewhat apologetic about Indian intervention rather than condemnatory which would have been an appropriate response from Sri Lankan nationals.
 
The India Doctrine
Edited by MBI Munshi  ( mbimunshi@gmail.com )
Published by Bangladesh Research Forum
Dhaka    July 2006
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[chottala.com] Re: [uttorshuri] Re: Ph(n)aakistan

Thanks for your nice comments and critical observation.
Please also read yesterday's (31.12.07) article of Abdul Gaffar Choudhury in the Jugantor:
 
Who is after Benajir?
 
 
 
"Sustha thakon, nirapade thakon ebong valo thakon"

Shuvechhante,

Shafiqur Rahman Bhuiyan (ANU)
NEW ZEALAND.

Phone: 00-64-9-828 2435 (Res), 00-64-0274  500 277 (mobile)
E-mail: srbanunz@gmail.com

N.B.: If any one is offended by content of this e-mail, please ignore & delete this e-mail. I also request you to inform me by an e- mail - to delete your name from my contact list.


 
On Dec 31, 2007 5:59 AM, Rahman" <"Azizur> wrote:


Benzir's killing in Pakistan became a political threat for the whole region. Paksitan has been patronizing the Islamic militant for long and Bangladesh experienced several attacks in the past. All those attack patterns are identical and their targets were the same. The granade attack on Sheikh Hasina on 21 August of 2004 was similar to the recent attack on B Bhutto.

Benzir took the challange to resist violent attack on human lives in the name of relegion. She also managed to convience the western powerful nations to mantain their mission on terrorism. She was even very vocal against it and campainged for it. She knew the threat and demanded for her protection repetedly but Musharaf's government ignored her demand. Pakistan government also destroyed the evidences that might have been the sorce to find the killer. Now Pakistan does not have a leader to take over the leadership and upcoming election has been jeprodized. Only Allah can say what is going to be happened there.

These militants are also active in Bangladesh. We can only tell about their presence when some shocking incidents occured only. Bangladeshi secular leaderships are also being threatened and government has been consistantly refused to bring them to justice. These militants have also been trained in Pakistan and they have been receiving funds from them.

Keeping in mind Bhutto's killing in Pakistan our secular leaderships need to be protected. We don't want any such tragic incident again in Bangladesh.


Azizur Rahman (Prince)
Toronto, Canada




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[chottala.com] Re - Despicable Indians raise rice export price to $500 per ton

Dear All,

According to an Indian High Commission statement clarifying the price
hike in rice they content that the measures are not country specific
but apply to all countries. What this fails to address is the fact
that the humanitarian gesture for export of rice was country specific
to offset the hardship caused by Cyclone Sidr in Bangladesh. If this
was really meant as a humanitarian and friendly gesture than exports
to Bangladesh should be at concessionary rates until the situation in
the Sidr affected areas have achieved some semblance of normality. My
contention is that India uses food as an instrument of their foreign
policy and we should not expect any favours from them. This was their
attitude during the 1971 war and this has not changed in the last 36
years. In fact, their objective in 1971 was merely to create a
impotent vassal state to their east which was probably successful
until 1975 when Bangladesh decided to show that it had teeth –

India clarifies reports on rice export

UNB, Dhaka

The New Nation – January 1, 2008

The Indian High Commission here Monday admitted that its government
raised the minimum export price of rice to US$ 500 from US$ 425 per
ton.

Clarifying the actual position a press release said the enhanced
export price is applicable not only to Bangladesh but all importing
countries. The minimum export price of rice raising 75 dollars per ton
was notified on December 27 is not country-specific. It said export
restriction was imposed by India on non-basmati rice with effect from
October 9, 2007, taking into account availability and prices of rice
in the Indian domestic market.

External Affairs Minister of India Pranab Mukherjee during his visit
to Bangladesh in early December had announced that Indian government
will waive ban on export of 5 lakh tonnes of rice to Bangladesh.

http://nation.ittefaq.com/issues/2008/01/01/news0033.htm


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[chottala.com] Happy New Year

Happy New Year 2008
Shahid
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[chottala.com] Pakistan showed sixteenth century mentality while Bhutto son takes leadership

Pakistan showed sixteenth century mentality while Bhutto son takes leadership
 
 
Don't forget to leave comments


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[chottala.com] In India, a terrible place to be born a girl

In India, a terrible place to be born a girl
Women stand in a doorway of a home in the village of Magrihawa in the Shravasti district of Uttar Pradesh. (Christie Johnston for the International Herald Tribune)

In India, a terrible place to be born a girl

 Across India, as many as 10 million female fetuses may have been aborted over the past 20 years, according to a study published in the British medical journal, the Lancet, last year.

Published: November 30, 2007
 

MACHRIHWA, India : The birth of a boy in Machrihwa is celebrated with the purchase of sweetmeats, distributed with joy to fellow villagers.

The birth of a girl is, for the most part, not celebrated at all.

Women in this village are not eager to dwell on the subject, but many of those with daughters grudgingly admit that worse than the pain of childbirth was the misery of realizing that they had delivered a girl.

Juganti Prasad, 30, remembers the reproachful silence that settled over the room where she gave birth to her third daughter. Her mother-in-law handed her the child, and said curtly, "It's a girl, again," before leaving her.

"There was no one even to give me a glass of water," Prasad said. "No one bothered to look after me or feed me because it was a girl."

As she lay recovering, she could hear relatives in the next-door hut lamenting the calamity. A few weeks afterward, her husband threw her and their three daughters out of his home.

A five-hour drive along ill-maintained roads from Lucknow, the capital of the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, the surrounding district of Shravasti is, according to calculations by Unicef, the worst place in India to be born a girl.

Across large swaths of rural northern India, away from the rapid development that is tearing up traditional attitudes toward women in the cities, India's economic boom is virtually invisible and prospects for young girls remain highly restricted.

In November, India was ranked 114th out of 128 nations in a gender-gap survey conducted by the World Economic Forum, scoring poorly on equality in education, health and the economy. Unicef used three statistical parameters - the age at which girls are married off, the level of female literacy and the imbalance between the number of boys and girls - when it judged that there is no unluckier spot than Shravasti for a girl.

Nothing in the outward appearance of Machrihwa, in the north of Shravasti near the border with Nepal, hints at this dubious statistical triumph.

Wood smoke curls from beneath thatched roofs and girls sit with their mothers, sifting rice at the doorway to their mud huts in the peace that characterizes villages where no one owns a car. Families here scratch out an existence through agricultural subsistence, without the benefit of running water or electricity.

"We are dazzled by what is happening in the cities but there are these remote rural areas where development has not yet reached in any way," said Rekha Bezboruah, director of Ekatra, a women's rights organization based in Delhi.

The ambivalence that women here feel toward their daughters is rooted in the traditional Indian marriage system, which dictates, first, that girls leave the homes of their parents permanently on their wedding day for their new husband's family and, second, that they do so accompanied by a large dowry.

In private, the village women explain that the mothers' sense of resentment toward their newborn girls comes as the result of a hard financial calculation.

"The minimum is 25,000 rupees for dowry, which includes the price of a bicycle that you have to give to the groom and various ornaments. And then there's the cost of the wedding itself, another 20,000. Even when you look at the baby for the first time you have these thoughts," said Shanta Devi, 35, the mother of two girls and two boys.

The total of 45,000 rupees, equivalent to $1,150, is a backbreaking sum for landless laborers earning an irregular daily wage of around 30 rupees a day. "One likes to have a girl, but one also likes to have money," she added.

The practice of giving and receiving dowry in India is illegal under the Constitution. But successive governments here have had little success in implementing the law.

"Dowry is the key social evil for us," said Renuka Chowdhury, the minister for women and child development, in an interview. "The moment a woman has a daughter she feels she has let her family down."

Even in the cities the preference for sons remains powerful. A new culture of ostentatious consumption has pushed dowry prices up, further eroding enthusiasm among middle-class families for daughters.

In urban areas, the traditional bias has morphed into an efficient modern form, with the arrival of ultrasound technology that allows women to avoid giving birth to girls. Prenatal sex determination is illegal, but widely practiced . Across India, as many as 10 million female fetuses may have been aborted over the past 20 years, according to a study published in the British medical journal, the Lancet, last year.

"We have found female fetuses by the sackful, floating down drains," Chowdhury said.

In remote rural areas, a machine that can determine sex before birth remains an unheard-of luxury. Despite the reluctance of mothers here to give birth to girls, the ratio of girls to boys in this district is higher than in more prosperous areas of the India: 941 girls for every 1,000 boys at birth, higher than the national average of 927.

Here, it is the low literacy and the abnormally early age of marriage that drag Shravasti down to the country's worst place for girls, in Unicef's rankings, which were based on 2001 census data.

A few huts away from Shanta Devi, Santo, who goes by just one name, lives alone with her fifth daughter in a bare hut made of straw. The hut has no door and village dogs walk in and out. Inside there are no possessions except for a bed of knotted rope and a few clothes hanging from the ceiling. She too was cast out by her husband two weeks after the birth of the fifth girl.

Santo's third and fourth daughters died in early infancy of apparently curable illnesses - one of measles, the other of an undiagnosed fever. Neither child was taken to the doctor.

"I know my husband would have given me money to take them to hospital had they been boys," she said.

The local health worker, Hardayal Wishwakarma, based in a neighboring village, was not surprised. "If a girl falls ill, her parents don't bother so much with treatment. If a boy falls ill, then they will sell their house to treat him," he said.

Santo's two elder surviving daughters were married off when they were around seven years old, to relieve the family of the cost of feeding them.

"Marriage is seen as the best social security in these regions where there are no other options," Rama Subrahmanian, a social policy specialist with Unicef, said. Official figures put the average age at which girls were married here between 1996-2001 at 16.

Although government programs aiming for universal education are in place - girls and boys have the right to free education and are theoretically required to stay in school until the age of 14 - she said the problem was that they were often poorly implemented, particularly in India's more impoverished northern states.

On the walls of the village school, a painted image of a girl in pigtails sitting next to a boy astride an outsized red pencil, declares, "An educated woman is the light of the house." But the attendance roll tells a different story. While the number of girls and boys is almost even at the start, the girls swiftly drop out and their parents tend to stop sending them once they reach puberty.

The low female literacy here - 22.6 percent for girls aged between 15 and 24, a fraction of the national dual-gender average of 67.7 percent for the same age group - is also a reflection of a society that does not see the need to invest in its daughters.

The five worst districts to be born a girl in India are all located in northern rural areas, which are struggling economically, depend entirely on agriculture and lack basic infrastructure.

Change is slow, said Subrahmanian of Unicef.

"It is not possible for these places not to change. But the absorption into the mainstream is not happening fast."

Juganti Prasad said she would have had an abortion had she had access to a prenatal sex test.

"My husband used to get very angry and ask me 'What am I going to do with three daughters?' He even talked about selling them off," she said in the rural silence, as a tiny frog hopped across the mud floor of her hut.

"If my last child had been a boy, then the father would have provided for us," she said. "Now as it is, he doesn't care. It's so obvious: girls are a curse."

 

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/11/30/asia/girls.php

    « View all web results for INDIA 10 million female fetuses aborted in 20 years

In India's north, the worst place to be born a girl
International Herald Tribune, France - Nov 30, 2007
Across India, as many as 10 million female fetuses may have been aborted over the past 20 years, according to a study published in the British medical ...
 
Dowry Law Making Us the Victims, Says India's Men's Movement
Buzzle, CA - Dec 12, 2007
Less than half of the women in India can read or write, compared with 75% of men. In the past 20 years more than 10 million female fetuses have been aborted ...
 

 

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[chottala.com] Happy New Year

Happy New Year
My Friend



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[chottala.com] Happy New Year

 

Lets welcome 2008...... walk to the future.....together.....side by side.....Happy New Year

 

 

 

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[chottala.com] Happy New Year...

May be I am the 1st one to wish...


 


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[chottala.com] Creation of Pakistan ''Biggest Mistake'',Partition of India a Blunder - Altaf Hussain

 
 
Altaf Hussain calls creation of Pakistan ''Biggest Mistake''
 
 
Partition of India a Blunder - Altaf Hussain
 
 
 
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[chottala.com] Tariq Ali: Pakistan deserves better than this feudal charade

My heart bleeds for Pakistan. It deserves better than this grotesque feudal charade

By Tariq Ali, Pakistan-born writer, broadcaster and commentator

Published: 31 December 2007

Six hours before she was executed, Mary, Queen of Scots wrote to her brother-in-law, Henry III of France: "...As for my son, I commend him to you in so far as he deserves, for I cannot answer for him." The year was 1587.

On 30 December 2007, a conclave of feudal potentates gathered in the home of the slain Benazir Bhutto to hear her last will and testament being read out and its contents subsequently announced to the world media. Where Mary was tentative, her modern-day equivalent left no room for doubt. She could certainly answer for her son.

A triumvirate consisting of her husband, Asif Zardari (one of the most venal and discredited politicians in the country and still facing corruption charges in three European courts) and two ciphers will run the party till Benazir's 19-year-old son, Bilawal, comes of age. He will then become chairperson-for-life and, no doubt, pass it on to his children. The fact that this is now official does not make it any less grotesque. The Pakistan People's Party is being treated as a family heirloom, a property to be disposed of at the will of its leader.

Nothing more, nothing less. Poor Pakistan. Poor People's Party supporters. Both deserve better than this disgusting, medieval charade.

Benazir's last decision was in the same autocratic mode as its predecessors, an approach that would cost her – tragically – her own life. Had she heeded the advice of some party leaders and not agreed to the Washington-brokered deal with Pervez Musharraf or, even later, decided to boycott his parliamentary election she might still have been alive. Her last gift to the country does not augur well for its future.

How can Western-backed politicians be taken seriously if they treat their party as a fiefdom and their supporters as serfs, while their courtiers abroad mouth sycophantic niceties concerning the young prince and his future.

That most of the PPP inner circle consists of spineless timeservers leading frustrated and melancholy lives is no excuse. All this could be transformed if inner-party democracy was implemented. There is a tiny layer of incorruptible and principled politicians inside the party, but they have been sidelined. Dynastic politics is a sign of weakness, not strength. Benazir was fond of comparing her family to the Kennedys, but chose to ignore that the Democratic Party, despite an addiction to big money, was not the instrument of any one family.

The issue of democracy is enormously important in a country that has been governed by the military for over half of its life. Pakistan is not a "failed state" in the sense of the Congo or Rwanda. It is a dysfunctional state and has been in this situation for almost four decades.

At the heart of this dysfunctionality is the domination by the army and each period of military rule has made things worse. It is this that has prevented political stability and the emergence of stable institutions. Here the US bears direct responsibility, since it has always regarded the military as the only institution it can do business with and, unfortunately, still does so. This is the rock that has focused choppy waters into a headlong torrent.

The military's weaknesses are well known and have been amply documented. But the politicians are not in a position to cast stones. After all, Mr Musharraf did not pioneer the assault on the judiciary so conveniently overlooked by the US Deputy Secretary of State, John Negroponte, and the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband. The first attack on the Supreme Court was mounted by Nawaz Sharif's goons who physically assaulted judges because they were angered by a decision that ran counter to their master's interests when he was prime minister.

Some of us had hoped that, with her death, the People's Party might start a new chapter. After all, one of its main leaders, Aitzaz Ahsan, president of the Bar Association, played a heroic role in the popular movement against the dismissal of the chief justice. Mr Ahsan was arrested during the emergency and kept in solitary confinement. He is still under house arrest in Lahore. Had Benazir been capable of thinking beyond family and faction she should have appointed him chairperson pending elections within the party. No such luck.

The result almost certainly will be a split in the party sooner rather than later. Mr Zardari was loathed by many activists and held responsible for his wife's downfall. Once emotions have subsided, the horror of the succession will hit the many traditional PPP followers except for its most reactionary segment: bandwagon careerists desperate to make a fortune.

All this could have been avoided, but the deadly angel who guided her when she was alive was, alas, not too concerned with democracy. And now he is in effect leader of the party.

Meanwhile there is a country in crisis. Having succeeded in saving his own political skin by imposing a state of emergency, Mr Musharraf still lacks legitimacy. Even a rigged election is no longer possible on 8 January despite the stern admonitions of President George Bush and his unconvincing Downing Street adjutant. What is clear is that the official consensus on who killed Benazir is breaking down, except on BBC television. It has now been made public that, when Benazir asked the US for a Karzai-style phalanx of privately contracted former US Marine bodyguards, the suggestion was contemptuously rejected by the Pakistan government, which saw it as a breach of sovereignty.

Now both Hillary Clinton and Senator Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, are pinning the convict's badge on Mr Musharraf and not al-Qa'ida for the murder, a sure sign that sections of the US establishment are thinking of dumping the President.

Their problem is that, with Benazir dead, the only other alternative for them is General Ashraf Kiyani, head of the army. Nawaz Sharif is seen as a Saudi poodle and hence unreliable, though, given the US-Saudi alliance, poor Mr Sharif is puzzled as to why this should be the case. For his part, he is ready to do Washiongton's bidding but would prefer the Saudi King rather than Mr Musharraf to be the imperial message-boy.

A solution to the crisis is available. This would require Mr Musharraf's replacement by a less contentious figure, an all-party government of unity to prepare the basis for genuine elections within six months, and the reinstatement of the sacked Supreme Court judges to investigate Benazir's murder without fear or favour. It would be a start.

http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article3295851.ece

 

 

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[chottala.com] Pakistan after Benazir Bhutto by Ayesha Siddiqa

Pakistan after Benazir Bhutto

Pakistan's opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was killed by an assassin on 27 December 2007 in Rawalpindi, just after making a speech to supporters of her Pakistan People's Party (PPP). This makes her the fourth in the Bhutto family to have died violently. Her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was hanged in 1979, following his overthrow by the military dictator General Zia-ul-Haq. Benazir's younger brother Shahnawaz was murdered in 1985, and her second brother Murtaza killed in Karachi in 1996 (during her second tenure as prime minister). Many believe that both brothers were killed by Pakistan's intelligence agencies, just as they are ready to see some covert hand in Benazir's assassination.
Benazir Bhutto's political career began in 1977 after her father, prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was sacked. The death of Zia ul-Haq himself in an air crash in August 1988 opened the way to her own accession to power. Her own politics were far from radical; in any case, once in power she soon realised the strength of the military, which was instrumental in twice ousting her from the prime ministership (which she held December 1988-August 1990 and July 1993-November 1996).
 
After years in exile during the rule of Pakistan's military president, Pervez Musharraf, Benazir returned to Pakistan on 18 October 2007. The dangers were immediately apparent in an attack on her motorcade in Karachi which killed more than 140 people and narrowly missed Benazir herself. She threw herself into the effort to secure a return to power by mobilising her forces in the campaign for the elections scheduled for January 2008.
The lesson of tragedy
It was always going to be a tough struggle against many odds. For many urban and educated Pakistanis, Benazir Bhutto 's political career was finished in 1996 when for a second time a government she led was overthrown. the grounds for her removal - charges of corruption - were never proved. Moreover, the political deal she had struck with Pervez Musharraf (no longer a general, but still Pakistan's president) meant that cases against her in the Swiss, Spanish and British courts were in the process of being withdrawn.
Among openDemocracy's many articles on Pakistan under Pervez Musharraf:

Ehsan Masood, " Pakistan: the army as the state" (12 April 2007)

Anatol Lieven, " At the Red Mosque in Islamabad" (4 June 2007)

Paul Rogers, " Pakistan's peril" (19 July 2007)

Maruf Khwaja, " The war for Pakistan" (24 July 2007)

Irfan Husain, " Pakistan's poker-game" (14 September 2007)

Shaun Gregory, " Pakistan: farewell to democracy" (29 October 2007)

Irfan Husain, " Pervez Musharraf's desperate gamble" (5 November 2007)

Iftikhar H Malik, " Pakistan: misgovernance to meltdown " (19 November 2007)

Irfan Husain, " Pakistan: the election and after" (10 December 2007)
Many people in Pakistan criticised Benazir's decision to negotiate and forge an agreement with the military dictator. However, many others approved of her political move. They argued that since the military in Pakistan cannot be wished away, political forces have to negotiate their way to power with the defence forces and then try to change the system from within. This was termed the country's "transition to democracy".
Others disagreed; they believed that such a transition was not possible without some basic changes in Pakistan's governance structures - including the military's withdrawal from politics. The country could not transit to democracy unless a fresh balance was established among the various institutions of the state (especially between military and civilian institutions). Those who embraced the first view (transition without transformation) laughed at those who supported the second.
Sadly, Benazir Bhutto's tragic death proves that no transition to democracy is possible without some fundamental changes in the political system. The negative forces are too strong to allow any political player to establish himself or herself.
The day after the assassination - which in the accompanying suicide-bombing that followed took around sixteen more lives, and has been followed by violence across the country that (at the time of writing) has seen nineteen people killed - is one of intense speculation about the identity of the Benazir Bhutto's murderers. But a clear political judgment can already be made: that in the end, it was not necessarily the religious extremists but a different set of equally intolerant forces - what I call the political fundamentalists - who took her life.
In any case, "al-Qaida" is just a name which can be used to mean everything or nothing. It will now be difficult to find out who exactly killed Benazir - especially when the government made sure they washed away all forensic evidence in the twelve hours after the murder.
But this is not just an individual's death; it is also the killing of the only national party in the country. The fact that Benazir had held the Pakistan People's Party together also means that the party - in a condition emblematic of Pakistan as a whole - suffered from over-centralisation and over-personalisation. This combination of institutional and political failure underlines how important it is that politicians and civil society in Pakistan now carefully consider their options. The military and its cronies have to be forced to withdraw before democracy takes root in the country. As long as they refuse, the path of politics in Pakistan will remain extremely bloody.
 
 
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[* Moderator's Note - CHOTTALA is a non-profit, non-religious, non-political and non-discriminatory organization.

* Disclaimer: Any posting to the CHOTTALA are the opinion of the author. Authors of the messages to the CHOTTALA are responsible for the accuracy of their information and the conformance of their material with applicable copyright and other laws. Many people will read your post, and it will be archived for a very long time. The act of posting to the CHOTTALA indicates the subscriber's agreement to accept the adjudications of the moderator]




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