Benazir Bhutto clambered onto the rear seat of a Toyota Cruiser to stick her head out of the sunroof hatch. She waved with practised cheer to a crowd of charged supporters. It was early evening of December 27, 2007, she had just finished a stump speech at the Liaquat Bagh in Rawalpindi, as part of her comeback campaign, given the imminent end of the Musharraf era. She had made a strong pitch for support to her party to more than ten thousand people at the traditional rallying ground where Pakistan’s first prime minister Liaquat Khan had been assassinated in 1951.
At 5.10 pm, a 15-year-old boy called Bilal, who had been fitted with a suicide jacket by his Taliban handlers, and promised paradise for what he was about to accomplish, pumped three bullets into Benazir, before blowing himself up. The young assassin had added another bloody chapter to the Bhutto dynasty’s tragic saga. Benazir, it turned out, had been warned of the specific threat by no less than the DG of the ISI, Lieutenant General Nadeem Taj, just 15 hours before being killed. But she saw no option to the path she had chosen: risking her life for the larger cause of pulling Pakistan back to normalcy.
A cruel December killed the hope for stability in Pakistan that the ascendance of the civilians had stirred. Musharraf called for a three-day mourning period, even as many pointed fingers at the army for a premeditated murder. Did Musharraf just brutally eliminate Benazir, many asked, as Zia had erased her father three decades earlier? For many liberal Pakistanis, all hope was interred with the end of Bhutto. To some others, after Benazir’s funeral on December 27, it was her benign ghost that would run the country, with her husband Asif Zardari as a proxy, a placeholder till her son and heir, Bilawal Bhutto, came of political age. At the same time, public revulsion rose against domestic militancy, as the army tried to take on the splinter group of the Taliban, the TTP.
Benazir’s death saw the spontaneous eruption of grief and empathy in India. This killing of a promising leader from a political dynasty was a subcontinental tragedy, with familiar historical parallels in India. Less than two decades earlier, a young, popular former prime minister from a violence-hit political dynasty had been assassinated in India while working on a political comeback. Apart from the analogous destinies of Rajiv Gandhi and Benazir Bhutto, commentators cited the parallel loss to political violence of a parent in both cases, Indira Gandhi and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. The Hindustan Times commented that the light had gone out of Pakistan, invoking a phrase used by Nehru for the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948.
India’s president, Pratibha Patil, said in a message that the assassination was a “tragedy not just for Pakistan but for our entire region”. PM Manmohan Singh extolled Benazir’s “contributions to a previous moment of hope in India-Pakistan relations, and her intent to break India-Pakistan relations out of the sterile patterns of the past,” adding that “the subcontinent has lost an outstanding leader who worked for democracy and reconciliation in her country”.
India was increasingly worried about Pakistan’s implosion. Apart from fears of a takeover in Pakistan by mullahs, in a situation akin to the Taliban capture of power in Afghanistan in the 1990s, New Delhi was concerned about the physical safety of its Islamabad mission. An intelligence report in January 2008 warned of a suicide bomber planning to target the Indian high commission in Islamabad. The threat came from a banned militant group, called Tehreek Nifaz-e-Shariat Mohammadi, meaning “movement for the enforcement of Prophet Mohammad’s Islamic laws”. The group specialized in suicide missions, had been running a parallel government in Pakistan’s Swat district, and now wanted to demonstrate its reach in Islamabad. High Commissioner Satyabrata Pal asked for extra security from the Pakistan government for the mission.
To many Pakistanis, Benazir’s assassination signalled the victory of darker forces over both the military and civilian politicians; militant groups had now got emboldened, with the writ of the state challenged all over Pakistan. The killing demoralized the nation but led to a strong sympathy wave for Benazir’s PPP, which emerged as the single largest party when the postponed general elections were finally held on February 18, 2008. With Musharraf still president, the two largest parties – the PPP now led by Benazir’s widower, Asif Zardari; and the PML-N, helmed by Nawaz Sharif – cobbled together a coalition to work under the dictator.
Taking credit for the elections, Musharraf said an “era of democracy” had begun in Pakistan and that he had now put the country “on the track of development and progress”. Since Zardari had not contested the elections, the PPP, on March 22, named a former parliament speaker, a political lightweight, Yousaf Raza Gilani, to lead the coalition government as prime minister.
As Satyabrata Pal watched the bewildering politics in his host country, an attack came dangerously close to home on a Monday afternoon. Around 12.10 pm on June 2, a man drove a speeding Toyota Corolla with diplomatic registration plates into Islamabad’s F6 sector, passing in front of India House and the entrance of the Danish embassy located next door, to stop at the parking lot in front of the embassy complex. Seconds later, the vehicle exploded, killing six and wounding several others. The residences of the Dutch ambassador and the Australian defence attaché, located nearby, were damaged. Windowpanes were shattered in Ambassador Pal’s home. Both Pal, who happened to be home, and his wife, got cuts from the glass that shattered. The target this time was the Danish embassy, the explosion was a reprisal for cartoons published in a Danish newspaper insulting the Prophet of Islam.
Another blast, specifically targeted at India, came in the middle of the year. This bombing took place not in Islamabad but ripped through the heart of Kabul. In the morning office rush hour, on July 7, a suicide bomber drove a heavy vehicle packed with explosives towards the gate of the Indian embassy, where he detonated his load. The blast outside the embassy killed 58 people and wounded 141, mostly Afghan visa seekers. It destroyed two embassy vehicles entering the compound.
In Delhi, Malti, a teacher at Sanskriti School, got a call that morning, saying that the media was reporting an explosion near the Indian embassy in Kabul. Malti’s first reaction was that such explosions were pretty much routine for Kabul, but nevertheless rang up her husband, Venkat Rao, press counsellor at the Kabul mission, to check if he was OK. The phone rang, but Venkat did not answer. It was only later that Malti learnt that her worst fears had come true: Rao was in the car that was blown up that day, his mobile phone intact as it was flung far by the explosion. Soon, Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee announced that among others, India had lost two diplomats, Counsellor Venkat Rao and Brigadier Rajesh Mehta, the military attaché. Mukherjee said two Indian security guards and an Afghan national who worked at the embassy were also killed.
The needle of suspicion initially pointed towards the Taliban, which had been attacking the Kabul regime in a wave of suicide attacks across the country, since the US had moved in seven years earlier. However, evidence soon emerged of Pakistani involvement from Indian, Afghan, and US intelligence agencies. Taliban sources started saying they would never mount an attack where the majority of those killed were Afghan civilians. The Afghan government said the attack was the work of “regional influences”; Afghanistan expert Ahmed Rashid told Al Jazeera that the Kabul government was implicitly linking Pakistan to the attack.
Pakistan’s agencies had been worried about India’s growing profile in Afghanistan, and particularly the collaboration between Indian and Afghan security agencies. Pakistan’s paranoia about being squeezed on both borders by Indian influence might have instigated it to take desperate and violent measures. Rangeen Spanta, the Afghan foreign minister, visited the Indian embassy in Kabul soon after the attack in a show of support; his spokesman said that the “enemies of Afghanistan and India’s relationship” were behind the attacks. Rao’s killing, the first of a diplomat in Pakistan-related violence since Ravindra Mhatre’s abduction and death in London in 1984, was a grim reminder that when Pakistan gave a free run to violence, Indian diplomats were unsafe not just in Islamabad, but everywhere.
Excerpted with permission from Anger Management: The Troubled Diplomatic Relationship between India and Pakistan, Ajay Bisaria, Aleph Book Company.