Dear Kamla/Shobana, Well Said! We are not mourning her death...Jus an able, charismatic and dynamic,brave woman is no more..The attack on her was so violent....Its indeed a incident to be condemned....
Dear Vidya/Vmur We (Indians) are very emotional. Hence I did a soft peddaling yesterday. Anything negative would be disliked by our members. Why antagonise people over an issue. I thought let our feelings cool down. What we regret is over the merciless act of taking sombody's life . Leave apart how good or bad that person may be. The less we speak about Kashmir the better. We don't seem to be speaking about lesser Bhuttos in India who carry on their life after immense sacrifice in the form of spouses and children. Will we dare to hang those responsible for the Parliament attack. In what way is the life of those security personnel who guarded the Parliament less precious than Benazir?. kanaka
hi all, I have been watching this read as a silent spectator for quite some time. I condemn any action that is inhumane. Our values tell us, never wish a death so bad even to our enemies...forget the politician, as a human being she did not deserve it. See there are so many angles to the stories...even till today there are rumours about I.G. staging the accident to kill Sanjay Gandhi...we don't really know the truth. Regarding the pandits issue, we had a discussion in our friend's circle few years back, and there are mistakes on both sides...I don't want to elaborate. We, as Indians are emotional. We don't look at both the angles.....We lost people..I agree..they also lost people..what i would say is why should innocent people die for the sake of few selfish people... Value of life is the same whether it is this side of the LOC or on that side of the LOC. She was a woman of substance. she did what she thought was right to her..whether we want to agree on that or not is our prerogative... Our patriotism is coming in the way of just saying let her soul rest in peace. This does not mean I am not patriotic...but I want to be a good human being. (This is not to hurt anybody...it is my own views.....)
Hi! dear friends, Have been reading all the views.The initial shock of such gruesome acts definitely leaves us all shell shocked.Later ,we begin to analyse and wonder how much sympathy the victim deserves and did she not reap what was sown earlier etc., Whatever the case may be it is indeed a great tragedy that three teenagers have lost their charismatic mother and the fact remains that such violent acts make our planet earth more and more unsafe for the rest of us who inhabhit it .Look at the numbers who have been killed in the crossfire...did they also reap what they had sown earlier? In such catastrophies innocent bystanders pay a heavy price with their lives too. It is very very depressing to find that as we have progressed and are still progressing in all spheres of human endeavour to make our lives more comfortable like progress in the fields of science and medicine. We humans have this destructive tendency and this violent streak is getting more and more pronounced and terrorism and suicide squads are gaining momentum to make life terrible for all of us.Travel by air has become very risky and stressful...the number of restrictions imposed these days makes one feel like a criminal ....the way we are subjected to all the "searches". We have enough natural calamities to grieve about .....remember the Tsunami and its aftermath .....that was December too.This December we close 2007 with this dreadful news.Benazir 's name will arouse different emotions among different groups ...that is their prerogative .The gift of LIFE has been snatched away from one of our human race.Following that several others have gone down with her too. That is enough to be despondent about.History has several such records...as they say 'History repeats itself'......but when we are at present witnessing this it is not easy to shrug it off.It doesn't augur well for the rest of us. PAULINAshakeheadshakeheadtsktsk
Re: Benazir Killed-questions raised Hi All, Gone through each and every post....all of them were informative and I could see a lot of opinions and questions...Well I am folowing this news every hour...and what I see is different versions . Times of india said-She was killed through her car window when bullets hit her neck and that caused the death. Today I see CNN saying she died of a sharpnel and that caused her head injury when she was standing ont he sunroof of her car. There was no autopsy done.Her body was handed over to family members in hours of her death. I dnt know which one to believe in. I dont support her of what she did to the Kashmiri Pandits. But somehow had the feeling that she would have been better than other leaders and helped restart the peace process with India. Read this for more Benazir Assassination: The big questions Bipasha
Ladies, This is my last post on this topic. BB is dead and gone and the matter is finished. However let me say a few words. We are Indians and by nature are gentle and peaceloving people. So, none of us will rejoice and dance even at the demise of an enemy. But it is ludicruous to grieve and mourn the passing of someone who has hurt our Motherland. Some of us Indians will try to whitewash anything and anyone. This kind of "cognitive dissonance" may be unique to Indians in the whole world. And it is baffling to hear people say "she may be a terrorist but she was charismatic and so I am sad". Kindly take a break. I have heard that Hitler was very charismatic too. How many people mourned at his death !? Only some Indians would have done it if any ! And for the person who said "I am patriotic but there are mistakes on both sides" - I really don't know how to respond. It cannot be the words of a patriot. It is absurd beyond all words to equate a peaceloving community like Kashmiri Pandits to Pakistani terrorists. For all the people who take a cavalier attitude to terrorism, I leave you with this to ponder : "How can people with such emotion for Benazir's death be so insensitive to the death of thousands of Indian citizens, she the mother of Taliban is responsible for? Do you want your own relatives to die at hands of Pakistan bred terrorists before you are sensitized of the damage she did and continued to do to Indian people? "Janani janmabhoomischa swargaadapi gariyasi " :: The mother and the motherland have greater attraction than Heaven - Old Sanskrit saying. -Vidya
It is indeed sad. With her is gone the last good chance for democracy in Pakistan, I think. May her soul rest in peace and her family find the courage to get through this.
Democracy in pakistan or for that part in india is a joke. As long as there is a mass of population with a flock of sheep mentality who elect leaders solely on their last name basis (Gandhi, Bhutto) there can never be true democracy. Who am i to speak coming from a country which was on the verge of having a foriegner as PM?. (Here i give exception to Golda Mier and israel becuse she was involved and played a major role in that countries birth). May her soul RIP.(rest in peace) and may ALL the departed souls RIP vmur, i totally agree with you. Here too there is a sheep flock mentality, other wise would see references to what her contributions were to humanity? to Pakis? to Paki women? Because her father could afford she got an oxford\cambridge\harvard education, but here people might say she was intelligent to get admitted not knowing because of the father's PM of a country status (all these big schools have a special quota for the offsprings, future political leaaders and more PR for the schools example our own Bush here) Sigmund, Carl and Alfred: The Fraud That Is Benazir Bhutto, The Taliban And The Leftists Who Love Her
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-bhutto14nov14,0,2482408.story?coll=la-opinion-center From the Los Angeles Times Aunt Benazir's false promises Bhutto's return bodes poorly for Pakistan -- and for democracy there. By Fatima Bhutto November 14, 2007 KARACHI — We Pakistanis live in uncertain times. Emergency rule has been imposed for the 13th time in our short 60-year history. Thousands of lawyers have been arrested, some charged with sedition and treason; the chief justice has been deposed; and a draconian media law -- shutting down all private news channels -- has been drafted. Perhaps the most bizarre part of this circus has been the hijacking of the democratic cause by my aunt, the twice-disgraced former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto. While she was hashing out a deal to share power with Gen. Pervez Musharraf last month, she repeatedly insisted that without her, democracy in Pakistan would be a lost cause. Now that the situation has changed, she's saying that she wants Musharraf to step down and that she'd like to make a deal with his opponents -- but still, she says, she's the savior of democracy. The reality, however, is that there is no one better placed to benefit from emergency rule than she is. Along with the leaders of prominent Islamic parties, she has been spared the violent retributions of emergency law. Yes, she now appears to be facing seven days of house arrest, but what does that really mean? While she was supposedly under house arrest at her Islamabad residence last week, 50 or so of her party members were comfortably allowed to join her. She addressed the media twice from her garden, protected by police given to her by the state, and was not reprimanded for holding a news conference. (By contrast, the very suggestion that they might hold a news conference has placed hundreds of other political activists under real arrest, in real jails.) Ms. Bhutto's political posturing is sheer pantomime. Her negotiations with the military and her unseemly willingness until just a few days ago to take part in Musharraf's regime have signaled once and for all to the growing legions of fundamentalists across South Asia that democracy is just a guise for dictatorship. It is widely believed that Ms. Bhutto lost both her governments on grounds of massive corruption. She and her husband, a man who came to be known in Pakistan as "Mr. 10%," have been accused of stealing more than $1 billion from Pakistan's treasury. She is appealing a money-laundering conviction by the Swiss courts involving about $11 million. Corruption cases in Britain and Spain are ongoing. It was particularly unappealing of Ms. Bhutto to ask Musharraf to bypass the courts and drop the many corruption cases that still face her in Pakistan. He agreed, creating the odiously titled National Reconciliation Ordinance in order to do so. Her collaboration with him was so unsubtle that people on the streets are now calling her party, the Pakistan People's Party, the Pervez People's Party. Now she might like to distance herself, but it's too late. Why did Ms. Bhutto and her party cronies demand that her corruption cases be dropped, but not demand that the cases of activists jailed during the brutal regime of dictator Zia ul-Haq (from 1977 to 1988) not be quashed? What about the sanctity of the law? When her brother Mir Murtaza Bhutto -- my father -- returned to Pakistan in 1993, he faced 99 cases against him that had been brought by Zia's military government. The cases all carried the death penalty. Yet even though his sister was serving as prime minister, he did not ask her to drop the cases. He returned, was arrested at the airport and spent the remaining years of his life clearing his name, legally and with confidence, in the courts of Pakistan. Ms. Bhutto's repeated promises to end fundamentalism and terrorism in Pakistan strain credulity because, after all, the Taliban government that ran Afghanistan was recognized by Pakistan under her last government -- making Pakistan one of only three governments in the world to do so. And I am suspicious of her talk of ensuring peace. My father was a member of Parliament and a vocal critic of his sister's politics. He was killed outside our home in 1996 in a carefully planned police assassination while she was prime minister. There were 70 to 100 policemen at the scene, all the streetlights had been shut off and the roads were cordoned off. Six men were killed with my father. They were shot at point-blank range, suffered multiple bullet wounds and were left to bleed on the streets. My father was Benazir's younger brother. To this day, her role in his assassination has never been adequately answered, although the tribunal convened after his death under the leadership of three respected judges concluded that it could not have taken place without approval from a "much higher" political authority. I have personal reasons to fear the danger that Ms. Bhutto's presence in Pakistan brings, but I am not alone. The Islamists are waiting at the gate. They have been waiting for confirmation that the reforms for which the Pakistani people have been struggling have been a farce, propped up by the White House. Since Musharraf seized power in 1999, there has been an earnest grass-roots movement for democratic reform. The last thing we need is to be tied to a neocon agenda through a puppet "democrat" like Ms. Bhutto. By supporting Ms. Bhutto, who talks of democracy while asking to be brought to power by a military dictator, the only thing that will be accomplished is the death of the nascent secular democratic movement in my country. Democratization will forever be de-legitimized, and our progress in enacting true reforms will be quashed. We Pakistanis are certain of this. Fatima Bhutto is a Pakistani poet and writer. She is the daughter of Mir Murtaza Bhutto, who was killed in 1996 in Karachi when his sister, Benazir, was prime minister.
This is interesting thread.. When a political personality gets killed, there are all school of thoughts from supporter, from victims and from neutral crowd. I did some reading on Benazir , her family history and Pakistan 's history. My conclusions, they are reaping for what sew. And even others would reap so too. About this charismatic and so called progressive lady, If we read deeper, we will know how she politically allowed her own brother's killing too. And Not to mention that slain brother was a terrorist in his own right too. So I would say knowledge is power, Before even we associate our condolence or neutralism we should do little bit of homework to not be "Gullible, naiive crowd" I read how Pakistan was first formed and how it remained Dominion without constituiion for 8 years. So I guess we as a country are unfortunate to have unstable neighbour whose basis of formation is a "religious belief". I have no presonal feeling for this woman. However I find it enchanting to know, power can corrupt so much that these very charismatic people out their country on stake for few millions bucks in their accounts.
