Benazir Bhutto - When life is light

By Ali Malik 

Anyone who followed your life would know that you had a strong spiritual inclination. In fact, to a supporter like me, it sometimes irked me. However, spirituality is not something you ever flaunted

Some debts have to be repaid, not because they matter to the one they are owed to but because they are essential for the cycle of life. It has been seven years into the end of the life that was Benazir Bhutto, a life that inspired many in my generation and the generations that followed. A life that can be marked in one word: hardship, lived with a character that too can only be summed up in one word: brave. It is tough to encompass a life as yours BB, and yet I owe it and so I will try.

You were born into a life of luxury, a life that turned upside down on a night in July 1977. What followed was a life that was marked by hardship, a disintegrated family, struggle, hopes dashed, dreams broken and the loss of near and dear ones. Such misery and hardship could make anyone insane and yet you came out of it not only sane and composed but also dignified and compassionate. What you went through could make anyone vengeful and yet revenge was never on your mind. During your second stint in power, when a few working under you attempted to resort to revenge, you would intervene and mend their approach. Bearing hardship and misery with dignity and compassion alone could qualify anyone as superhuman and yet this dignity and compassion was only the inception of your legend.

When I was a child, raised in a Muslim household with strong emphasis on good and bad, reward and punishment, I would always wonder how one could be judged on something that is not of one’s choosing. It was during later years that I reconciled with the notion that hardship comes to us for the path we choose. We choose the path and the path has a price. Once those choices are made, walking along the path, we need to deal with the troubles that come with it. The harder the path, the more the price one pays. Once chosen, abandoning it leaves us condemned; carrying on, we pay the price. But it is these choices, bit by bit, that make the universe move forward. It seems at some point in those last months in the 1970s, you chose your path too. You could have abandoned it all and lived a life of luxury in Oxford or Boston or anywhere and yet you chose to take up the fight, making it your calling. Once you did, you were ready to pay any price for it, knowing fully that it would be painful and hard, but it would be the right thing to do.

For those living larger than the ordinary, they need not do things that they desire, nor do things the social or any other code asks of them, but they should do things because they are the right things to do. Your fight was such and in your struggle the mindfulness of it oozed out of your aura. Anyone who followed your life would know that you had a strong spiritual inclination. In fact, to a supporter like me, it sometimes irked me. However, spirituality is not something you ever flaunted. You were accused of being a heretic, anti-religious, ‘westernised’ (as if the word means anything) and what not but never in response did you try to emphasise your religion or spirituality. And this is precisely how it should be. If one believes one is doing the right thing, it has to be sold on the power of the idea, for the rightness of what one is doing. It need not have crutches of piety, moral code or conformity to tread. If something is right, it will inspire on its own. If one needs to invoke (and in most cases exploitatively) religion or honour to sell an idea in the new age, the idea has something inherently wrong with it. You were not a saint but a beautiful human being who would keep working for what you believed was right, keeping your faith, belief and spiritual enlightenment to yourself, never misusing them for a fight that was yours, a fight for the right cause.

The bravery that summed up your life could not be understood better than in your last months. Mindful of the threats that were ahead, you chose to do what had to be done. You were the only leader who would openly call the Taliban a threat to Pakistan, who would openly take on the government for surrendering Pakistan’s territory to the extremists. You were the only leader who had the courage to support the operation on Lal Masjid for the writ of the state and when the dictator’s own party showed cold feet, you were the one to endorse and support the Women’s Protection Bill because all those were the right things to do. The conviction of doing the right thing was not deterred by the accusation of colluding with Musharraf or the west, neither was it deterred by the many threats to your life.

Amid these threats you moved on with a firm conviction that your idea would succeed, that time was on the side of your idea. On the one side is the force that wants to hold these lands to the regression and manipulation of ideas that have run their course but these ideas are central to their hegemony. On the other are those who are fighting for the order here that will unleash the forces of liberty, progress, human dignity and innovation: your side. You fought for it bravely and compassionately, and through your fight you have pushed us closer to attainment. The fight continues. It will have to be fought hard but we must move on with the conviction of victory, a victory that is inevitable for being on the right side of history.

These debts are to be repaid. Those pledges are to be kept. That light needs to be protected. The march continues with feet standing firm on the ground.