Bhutto’s homeland has little love for Zardari
Hasan Mansoor
NAUDERO: Every wall and roadside along the dusty country lanes surrounding the southern ancestral home of Benazir Bhutto is adorned with her image. Large, framed portraits of the slain two-time former premier loom large beside the faces of her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and brothers, Shahnawaz and Murtaza, who also died violent deaths. It is a visual testament to a dynasty whose legacy continues to rule the hearts and minds of the people.
In Naudero, as with citizens across Pakistan, Benazir’s assassination remains locked in the mind amid the imminent prospect of her widower, Asif Ali Zardari, becoming president of the nuclear-armed nation on Saturday. “I love Benazir and would die for her cause,” said Ameer Ali, sweat pouring from his skin and clutching the spade he uses to mix muddy earth into bricks, earning just 200 rupees ($2.6) a day.
But to him, Saturday’s election is an irrelevance that caps a disappointing six months since democracy returned to Pakistan. “I have no interest whatsoever in whether Asif Ali Zardari becomes our ‘Badsha’ or not,” the 24-year-old said, using the Pakistani term for king. “We voted for Benazir but what have we got in return? We cannot afford to buy food for our children, let alone education for them,” he added, referring to the rampant inflation and rising prices endemic in a backsliding economy.
Having taken control of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) after Bhutto’s death, Zardari led it to victory in national polls in February, a win attributed in large part to a sympathy vote in the wake of his wife’s killing. Zardari is now on the brink of sealing a political ascendancy considered unthinkable nine months ago, and is expected to win a secret ballot among the country’s lawmakers to become president.
But it will be a hollow victory in the eyes of many. “We voted for the PPP because Bhutto told us that democracy is the best revenge,” said Oghan Jatoi, a security guard in Larkana, a neighboring town of Naudero, where portraits of Zardari are conspicuous by their absence. “Those who have succeeded her are little concerned about her promises of providing food, clothes and shelter to everyone,” said the 26-year-old, who earns just 100 rupees a day. “Food has become too expensive.”
And at the Bhutto mausoleum in Garhi Khuda Bakhsh, a village 15 kilometers away from Naudero, the feeling was that Zardari is continuing his ride to power on the back of his wife’s popularity. “It is the greatness of the legacy of Bhutto that will see Zardari become the president,” said Ijaz Bhutto, a common Pakistani name, who queues up daily in the hope of gaining a laboring job. “Zardari’s own credentials are extremely murky and hardly inspire me,” he added.
A vendor of photographs and other memorabilia near the Bhutto family tomb was brutally frank. “I sell mainly Benazir portraits and the photographs of other Bhutto members, but no one purchases Zardari’s,” said Abdur Razzak. “People don’t like him so they don’t buy his photographs and we don’t put them on sale.”
courtesy: Arab news
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