Why Benazir Bhutto still lives

It has been one year since Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in broad daylight outside the killing fields of Liaqat Bagh. Like many of us, I never thought I would be visiting her at Garhi Khuda Bux. But like many others, I too am unwilling, or perhaps unable, to face a world without Benazir Bhutto.
Yet here's the thing: her shadow cut such a wide swathe that if we look around us we will still see her everywhere, in her vision, in her message, in her party and in her children. She was truly larger than life, which is perhaps why she has never really left us. If you look at the pictures of her last few weeks after she landed in Pakistan on a wing and prayer, you'll see her face lit up with the incandescence of her dream. That dream is very much with us.
That is why Benazir Bhutto mattered so much in her life, yet even more in her death. When I first met MBB in a sustained encounter, which was when she was prime minister, she was well on her way to becoming the Benazir Bhutto that the right-wing security establishment hated. She had risen to take up her father's challenge, and did not seem like a woman who could be thwarted.
As a journalist who worked through the turbulent 1980s, I recall a strong media discourse about the anti-democratic forces that always sprung up to marginalise the PPP. At some point after she returned to Pakistan, at the Herald, which I edited then, we wrote a cover story on her called 'Who's afraid of Benazir Bhutto'.
This title embodied all the forces that were arrayed against the PPP then, and were working against her until her last day. They were afraid of her because she was the only politician in Pakistan, whose power was based outside their back-rooms and auqafs. Her power was based on the people of Pakistan and she could invoke passions in the street that no one other politician except her father could.
She and her lineage stood for something much larger than anyone else, which evoked an almost childlike devotion, and that kind of love from the people no slush funds could buy over.
That was the problem. She was the people's mirror to their forced power, as her legitimacy posed a potent challenge to their fleeting, sarkari power. The problem for her enemies is that by eliminating her, they have made her bigger, more relevant than she was in her life.
Throughout her life, after her first exile, the first and then second government, the Bhutto in her kept taking on new challenges, kept pushing the limits of a hawkish security establishment that watched her every move. They called her a security risk because she pioneered a foreign policy that made peace with neighbours its cornerstone, ending the cold war that consumed all of South Asia.
She wanted to reconcile grass roots passions and the imperatives of a peace dividend and a common market for this region. At home her drive to harness the power of the private sector for growth brought Pakistan into one of the ten emerging markets in the world, and gave it the surplus energy that we survive on today. But for that too her enemies faulted her. Yet without her vision for energy surpluses, the whole country would be in darkness.
I worked as her public policy president well before becoming her information secretary. It was intellectually rewarding working with her, as she was always informed and stimulated by new ideas and established principles. We all know how she fought for regaining space for democracy.
We all know that she had the courage of a Titan and the tenacity of a gladiator, but it was her human rights record that went largely unsung in her lifetime even though she worked tirelessly to promote it. In every policy paper or speech we wrote, she fought for women, she fought for the dispossessed and she fought for the homeless. In every policy guideline, she worked the unemployed in, she worked the labour in, she worked the farmer in.
While writing the last manifesto, we were in a constant policy dialogue. Her basic humanity always came through. One day she woke me up at two in the morning on a call from Dubai, when she wanted a boarding school system devised for poor children and basic nutrition provided for public schools. Another night she argued for two hours on the phone over why we could not have higher public spending to generate employment.
The conversation ended with our devising a public works program for providing guaranteed employment to the lowest-income poor families. She wanted Pakistan to be a welfare state on the lines of the Scandinavian social democracy model, with social nets for the poor and a strong market economy that provided jobs and raised a middle class.
Her sense of timing was both acute and often prescient. It was almost as if she knew that her destiny was calling her to fulfil her legacy. She was a woman in a hurry, on a mission to transform Pakistan. She made us build a 100 days action program for her next cabinet so the PPP could deliver more on her promises before the axe fell on us.
She worked non-stop to ensure that her vision was translated into our laptops and mental hard drives, almost as if there was no time left. Until her last day, she worked over 18 hours a day. Her last email to her senior staffers from the blackberry would often be between 2.30 and 3.30 am. The next round in the morning would start at 6.30, before she ventured out to cut a huge swathe into the day.
But she was a leader whose vision went farther than any others. Why? Because she was ahead of her times, and because she had extraordinary courage. She was the only leader who saw that if we don't step in the way, the fires of extremism will engulf Pakistan. This was the challenge that kept her awake at nights as much as dictatorship did, as much as mass hunger did.
She dabbled in the waters of realpolitik, but remained clear-eyed about legitimacy. Any dialogue with any political players was always for ensuring a level playing field. That was all she asked for: an open contest and a fair election. Nobody had or could predict that her death would turn the wheel that brought the country to her goal of a transition to democracy.
This was the PPP's strength, which she had turned into a clear brand for the party. Her father had given his life for it, and she always said that one day she too would have to. Her fear was not that she would be snuffed out in the prime of her life. It was that she would not be able to make Pakistan safe again for its children.
Shaheed MBB was the only leader who owned the battle against religious orthodoxy and militancy as Pakistan's internal challenge. And she was the only one willing to mark clear lines in the sand for it. There was to be no compromise with women's freedoms, no compromises with those who hijacked army boys and blew up children's buses.
She was going to fix it by a reform package and tough security measures. She was bent on giving habeas corpus to the tribal areas and she had moved court to give them the right to adult franchise. To her this was never another country's war. It was Pakistan's battle for survival.
I end by quoting one of the speeches I wrote for her at a global forum: "I still push for a new deal for women and men all over the world, not just the Muslim world. I still have a new dream for Pakistan in my head. But like so many other women in the world, I have opportunity in one hand, and its opponent forcing my other. It is choices that move us forward, and the judicious exercise of our choices that make the difference. Women and men are here to make their mark on the world, and I will always be the first to show them the way."
Bibi, you are still showing us the way and history has bowed its head before you. The writer is the Central Information Secretary of the Pakistan Peoples Party and Federal Minister for Information and Broadcasting.