Arranged marriages can be a messy business designed principally as a means of accumulating wealth, circumventing undesirable flirtations or transcending clandestine love affairs, they often don’t work.

Where both parties are known to loathe each other, only a rash parent desensitised by the short term gain, will continue with the process knowing full well  that each will end in misery and possibly violence. That this is equally true in political life became clear in the recent attempt by Washington to tie Benazir Bhutto to Parvez Musharraf.

The single strong parent in this case was a desperate State department….” of US government, of course.

This is what Tariq Ali, the well-known activist, columnist and historian seems to have written for one of his upcoming pieces  before Benazir Bhutto’s dastardly assassination. 

The mystery behind Benazir’s assassination is growing thicker by the hour. Inspite of several witnesses vouching that she fell down to the bullets fired by suicide bombers, when she was departing after having delivered an election address, the Pakistan government does not agree. Subsequently, the Pakistani interior ministry came out with, perhaps, one of the most outrageously unacceptable explanations. According to them, Benazir was victim of an accidental crash of her head against the lever of the rooftop of her vehicle in trying to avoid the impact of the blast.

That later they again rubbished their own version and claimed that she was, actually, hit by a bullet is creating an impression that this attempt to find the assassins is fast degenerating into a farce. But this was not  all. The same interior ministry again changed its tack and reverted back to their original version. If any legitimacy remained of the Musharraf-led administration, this aspect alone would be the final nail in its coffin.

There have been quite a bit of writing on this great tragedy of momentous proportions. Generally, unlike its wont, the Indian media has been quite sober in its coverage of this tragedy. However, the broad thrust of the western media coverage has  also left its imprint with emphasis on pinpointing the identity of the “executioner”.

But, it seems what is much more important, and, of course relevant, is the process and the forces which has led to it. Because, most importantly for us, there is a very important lesson to be derived from Benazir’s assassination for our own foreign policy establishment.

Without going much into the history of Pakistan, Indian discerning readers would be aware that the biggest problem with processes in Pakistan lie not only in the conspicuous absence of democracy, but rather in the very absence of institutions which instrumentalise democracy. In the mid-fifties itself, the political process in Pakistan was hijacked by a military-bureaucracy nexus. The political parties failed to evolve and institutions failed to mature.

Whenever this has been interrupted with a breath of freshness that had been most ruthlessly stifled by the army – more often than none backed to the hilt by the United States. So long as the Cold War was on, the “evil” Soviet empire provided the justification.

From Ayub Khan to Yahya Khan and the most despotic of them all – Zia-ul Haq – formed the long list of military dictators who ensured that democracy in Pakistan do not flourish.

The US was not even wary of creating, aiding, abetting and arming the Taliban in Afghanistan through the most dreadful instrument of the Pakistani military dictatorship – the ISI. In fighting the Soviet army, the ISI was the blue-eyed boy of the CIA and the political masters in Washington.  

After the Soviet’s left, the  situation had changed radically. 9/11 showed that the creation can turn against the master. Parvez Musharraf was needed to carry out the US strategic gameplan. But as days go by, people have seen the resurgence of Taliban and the Pakistani army inextricably drawn into the vortex of the spiral of violence in North West Frontier Province and other regions of Pak-Afghan border. It was becoming increasingly evident that Musharraf was did not have the legitimacy to carry on the role that Washington had in mind for Pakistan.

Hence the arranged marriage that Tariq Ali speaks about. The tragedy of Benazir Bhutto lies in the fact that she was the leader of, perhaps, the most popular political party in Pakistan. She also inherited the legacy of by far the most pro-people tradition in the otherwise elite-oriented political process of the country.

Before coming back to Pakistan, she, herself, observed that there were two most important battles going on in the country. One, between dictatorship and democracy, the other, between moderation and extremism.

But what she did not understand was these two battles were not mutually exclusive, but interconnected. The forces of dictatorship are bound to reinforce extremism and vice versa. There is a need to establish the identity of the “executioner”. But, more importantly, that undermining of democracy strengthens extremism has become tragically clear from the grotesque end that Benazir has come to face. And, that this, the US and other allies failed to understand, is clear from the irresponsibility they showed in brokering the “marriage”.

It is sad that a person of Benazir’s physical courage would fail to comprehend the myopic political ambitions of Washington. Tragic, that she is no more. But, that should finally force our own foreign policy establishment in India that the US, in its blind drive for global hegemony, is betraying its lack of capacity in intervention and far less in influencing of events in distant lands. 

(The writer is a Central Secratariat member of the CPM.)