By PLS
According to news reports, as dusk gave way to night, the street lights that should have illuminated the route Benazir Bhutto’s homecoming cavalcade was inching along failed to do their job. Yet house lights went on as usual in the same sector.
So why were the critical streets dark?
Systematic load-shedding to make up for inadequate capacity?
Plain old third-world power failure, as some commentators have suggested?
Or sabotage, to make it possible for suicide bombers to get really close to Benazir Bhutto’s vehicle?
Those with Motive Abound
Without having access to any special information, I’d vote for the latter: sabotage by those who fear Benazir Bhutto’s return to politics. The Islamic parties have had it easy over the past few years. Because no organized secular political opposition to military rule was allowed, Islamists took advantage of the vacuum; they achieved a degree of power never possible when they had to contest elections against parties like the Pakistan People’s Party and the real Muslim League. Benazir’s return changes the equation. The Islamists lose their free ride.
And there are those who loathe this extremely articulate female politician even more than the essentially reputable Islamists do. Ever since the days of the first (recent) Afghan War, the one against the Russians, the Taliban and other violently intolerant jihadists have been goaded on, financed and protected by elements of the Pakistani military, as Bhutto herself laid out, in detail.
So plenty of people would like Bhutto dead. Arranging for a convenient power failure wouldn't have been beyond the capacity of many of them.
The Big Power Question
Aside from motive, here’s why sabotage looks plausible to me:
I spent a week in Karachi this August, in the middle of the monsoon. It was ghastly hot outside and the humidity was soaring, too. Every functional air conditioner was grinding away. Yet there was no systematic power shedding required to distribute access to electricity as fairly as possible across the city. Nor were any area-wide power failures reported in newspapers.
For that matter, not once during that week did I encounter the sort of angry letters to the editor that are commonplace when cities don’t provide the electricity that makes urban life in a hot climate bearable.
One day we had a particularly torrential rain. The street in front of the house became a fast flowing river. It was over a foot deep. We were stuck indoors for hours. Other sectors of the city were badly flooded, too. But we suffered no power failure in our neighborhood that day, and I read of none elsewhere in the city.
The Weather’s Nice Now
Karachi never gets really cold, but the winter months, as I found when I lived there, are very pleasant. By mid October the change of season is well underway. Less heat. Less humidity, even though Karachi is a sea port city. By evening at this time of year, many people turn off the AC. The power load after dark would have been far from taxing on the night of Bhutto’s return.
In short, a run-of-the-mill power failure is not a plausible explanation for the dark street. Ergo, there’s a strong possibility of foul play, it seems to me. Someone familiar with the power grid pulled the right lever (or whatever) to plunge a critical thoroughfare into darkness.
Oh yes! There's also this: why else a power failure on this particular street?
More Sympathy and Support for Bhutto?
I’m not surprised that Benazir was defiant on the morning after the bombs killed and wounded so many people. She knew there was danger. So did her supporters.
So far she’s not been excoriated for encouraging huge welcoming crowds. Even the relatives of the killed and wounded aren’t calling her nasty names, so far as I know. This is not a small thing.
If she does indeed refuse to be cowed, people who were angered over Musharraf’s refusal to permit the Muslim League’s Nawaz Sharrif to return to Pakistan and contest the upcoming election may decide to support Benazir after all, assuming elections are held as scheduled. A government led by Bhutto’s would-be assassins or their sympathizers would not be attractive to most Muslim Leaguers.* In such case, the assassination attempt would boomerang against its planners and perpetrators.
On the other hand, party loyalties are not easily transferred in Pakistan, so I'm not so sure I'd risk a wad of rupees on the odds for a People's Partly landslide in the new year.
*The Muslim League, its Islamist-sounding name notwithstanding, is actually a traditional political party whose tenets are based largely on the secular principles of governance embodied in successive, more or less democratic Constitutions for the state of Pakistan.
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