On the threshold of change

Within hours of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, amongst the best and brightest leaders the world has ever seen, the Pervez Musharraf government was forced to lift its silly restrictions that have denied visas to Indian journalists over the last many months. Within hours, scores of writers, columnists and television reporters were on the plane from Delhi to destinations such as Lahore, Karachi and Larkana in Pakistan.

Indian journalists were denied the last weeks of Benazir's life. But they are part of the transformation that is, right this minute, taking place in Pakistan, even as Musharraf's carefully crafted control over his country crumbles, slowly but surely, every minute.

Cry, the beloved country. Thrash your arms and rail against the unfairness of life. A thunderbolt has just struck Pakistan. Benazir — in Urdu, meaning the unparalleled one — has just been cut down in her prime. Pakistan is suddenly adrift, orphaned, furious that the fat cats of the military establishment were unable to prevent her death.

As the lovingly washed body of Bhutto was lowered in the grave in her ancestral home of Larkana in Sindh, Pakistan's southern province, slogans rent the air. As long as the sun and the moon are there in the sky, Benazir, your name will be alive.

When the grief ebbs, the outrage remains. If and when elections are held in Pakistan, earlier scheduled for January 8, Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party (PPP) will surely sweep the polls.

Reunited the country

Clearly, in death, Bhutto has achieved what she had only dreamt of doing in life. Clearly, she has reunited the country, even if it is for a moment, against her senseless assassination. The people of Pakistan, devout believers and tolerant of other faiths, know that the suicide bombers — one of them, in breathing distance of her and her bullet-proof car, pulled the trigger of his shotgun just as she emerged through the sunroof to exultantly wave at her people like a latter-day goddess, while the other, shrouded in a sheet just behind, pulled the trigger of the bomb that blew both of them up — simply cannot decide the destiny of Pakistan anymore.

Already, the Musharraf establishment is running scared. They know they have no chance against Benazir's party in the elections, that the Bush administration's carefully brokered power-sharing deal between Musharraf and Bhutto, has already ended. According to the recent scenario, Bhutto would have been prime minister, but Musharraf would have retained control over the army.

Truth is, all of yesterday's hypotheses have fallen through the cracks. When Pakistan gets a new prime minister, with the ghost of Bhutto stalking every constituency during the polls, his mandate will be to curtail the spread and influence of the army, which over the last many decades has systematically sought to snuff the life out of the hurly-burly of electoral politics.

In Pakistan, for the first time in decades, hope surges in the breasts of millions of Pakistanis, that the Musharraf-controlled army will be stripped of its extraordinary power and be sent back to its barracks.

Too much to hope

Perhaps it's too much to hope right now. Perhaps the collective emotion will in time give way to a pragmatism that will allow Musharraf, as the head of the National Security Council who has his finger over Pakistan's nuclear button, and Chief of the Armed Forces Ashfaque Kiyani, to keep control over Pakistan. Perhaps the old karmic dictum about the more things change in South Asia, the more they will remain the same, will still hold good for Pakistan.

Perhaps the old corruption will return, perhaps the military-madrassah complex will continue to allow the Taliban and its deadly sisterhood of the Al Qaida and Osama Bin Laden to roam free in the badlands of the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier.

But if the last many hours that have followed the death of Bhutto are true, if the national grief and outrage is pure, then surely, a new Pakistan will rise from the ashes of religious extremism and terrorism. Remember that until the partition of India in 1947, the hero of the North-West Frontier Provinces — the very same areas which have in recent years been handed over to the Taliban-Al Qaida — was Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, also known as Frontier Gandhi because he espoused the ideals of the Mahatma.

Already, Bhutto's 19-year-old son Bilawal has been anointed heir and successor to the magic of the Bhutto dynasty. Of course Bilawal, who mostly speaks accented English because he lived the last many years of his life in England and Dubai in exile along with his mother, will cede real power to his father, Asif Zardari, while he continues his studies in Oxford. But mark Bilawal's coming-of-age line as he read out his mother's will in Larkana over the weekend: "My mother always said that democracy is the best revenge for dictatorship."

Make no mistake, the end of the Musharraf regime is nigh in Pakistan. The sooner the rest of the world decides to help the struggling forces of democracy take root in this country, the better it will also be for the world.

Jyoti Malhotra is the Diplomatic Editor of The Telegraph newspaper, India.