How perilous to national unity the situation that tends to obtain in the wake of Benazir Bhutto's assassination can become, some evidence was available within hours of the fateful happening. Life has come to a complete standstill, as arsonists cashing in on the PPP workers' anger and anguish have resorted to extensive looting and burning of public and private property throughout the country.
Rail tracks have been uprooted, trains burnt, bus terminals shut down and air travel suspended. Bazaars are deserted, with even the outlets for basic health care and, minimum food requirement shuttered up. As fear stalks, people are holed up in their homes, their movement made all the more difficult by the non-availability of motor fuel. There are reports of clashes between police and mobs in which 27 persons were killed while rioters torched six trains, 200 banks and 650 vehicles.
This newspaper has put the losses suffered by the business and trade in Karachi alone at Rs 10 billion. Dispatch of rangers and regular troops to some hot spots is likely to bring calm there but normality appears to be weeks and months away. Rail travel between the north and south of Pakistan is not likely to be restored for quite some time. Pakistan is burning.
This being the size and severity of the turmoil buffeting Pakistan, looking to the post-Benazir Bhutto scenario the people of Pakistan find themselves confronted by huge uncertainties. They look askance as to who killed her, their confusion compounded by contradictory positions taken by the government and the PPP.
The Interior Ministry spokesman says the crime can be traced to Baitullah Mehsud, the militants' leader in the tribal area. Rejecting earlier versions - one given by the doctor who attended to her that she was hit by a bullet and the other by the Interior Minister that a shrapnel killed her - the spokesman asserted that she died of the injury caused by the lever in the sky-roof vent she was pushed into by the shock-waves from the bomb-blast. The slain leader's party men do not accept the official version, nor do they have any trust in the two investigation commissions announced by the government.
They are intrigued by the promptness with which the government has come up with an all-encompassing report offering answers to all plausible questions about the incident. Therefore, it is very likely that the PPP may demand foreign investigators to probe, as they did for the October 18 bombing of her arrival rally in Karachi. If almost all previous high-profile assassinations have remained untold stories that does not essentially mean that murder of Benazir Bhutto too would be a forgotten story soon.
Then there is the question who will lead the PPP. Our Establishment, which has acquired the unenviable notoriety of breaking up political parties and when desired siring new ones, may be tempted to restructure the PPP. Given the dynastic dimension to political inheritance in South Asia, the PPP may find it problematic, to some extent, in choosing its new leader, but it is the party's internal issue, and should be allowed to be so.
What everyone, including the Establishment, should be hoping is to see that the PPP remains in one piece. It is the largest if not the only party, which is truly federal in nature and reach.
The fact that it has vote banks in all four provinces, Azad Kashmir, FATA and the Northern Areas, is an edge that it has over all its contemporaries. It was Benazir Bhutto who restored the PPP's federalist outlook which had disappeared in the wake of Z.A. Bhutto's hanging widely blamed by the Sindhis on the Punjabi judiciary. It was not for nothing that there was this slogan "Charon Subon Ki Zanjeer, Benazir Benazir".
Another question being asked with increasing frequency is whether elections would be postponed. The caretaker Prime Minister Muhammadmian Soomro, said the other day elections are not being postponed but hastened to add that all the parties would be consulted. Of all the parties he has in mind half of the opposition, in the form of All Parties Democratic Movement (APDM), is already on boycott. Of the rest of the opposition the PML (N) led by Nawaz Sharif too reported to be mulling the boycott option. The PPP has not yet made its mind known to the people on the question of boycott, but its joining the boycotters is very likely. Should that be the case it would not be advisable on the part of the government to go ahead with the election schedule.
Of course, the nightmare of Ziaul Haq's 90-days interregnum still haunts the people. But the fact is that the results of the elections conducted at such a time as Pakistan faces today will not produce democracy. After all elections are only the means, not the end, to achieve an abiding ambience of democratic way of life. These are trying times, for the people to show patience and for the leadership on both sides of the political divide to cope with sagacity and forbearance.