Benazir, gold & white cabbies and me

One brief meeting in Islamabad did not make me a friend of Benazir Bhutto any more than the collective wisdom of 100 or so Pakistani taxi drivers in Abu Dhabi gives me unique insight into the woes of their country.
But I do know both that the world seems a poorer place without Bhutto's passion and eloquence and that only a minority of those cabbies will take the same view.

It is, I suppose, the ultimate straw poll, a survey restricted to the thoughts of a group of men I meet because there is no other way of getting around Abu Dhabi if you do not have private transport.

Almost all the drivers of the rather tatty gold and white cabs appear to be Pakistani. Their English is often limited (though many could talk to you in Hindi, Arabic and Farsi as well as Urdu) and the conversation during a six dirham ride across town tends to follow a formulaic pattern.

The key words, followed in parenthesis by the questions prompting them, are - or were before I came home for Christmas - Pakistan (where are you from?), Peshawar (where in Pakistan?), cricket (which do you like more - football or cricket?), very bad (what do you think of Benazir?), very good...very strong (and Musharraf?).

In the case of Bhutto, several of them would go further, even if they also professed to detest the Taliban. And they are the ones that would have been rejoicing in response to yesterday's news from Rawalpindi.

By no means all of these Pakistani drivers wanted Benazir dead as a necessary extension of their antipathy towards her. Salut! readers may recall that one, who spoke much better English than most of his colleagues, told me that although he had much admired her father, he simply regarded her as corrupt.

That conversation took place a day or two before the murderous bombing in Karachi that greeted Bhutto's return from Dubai months ago, just after I'd arrived in the UAE. But I later came across some Pakistanis who regretted that the blast had not claimed her life, too, as was intended.

Journalists are always told to avoid treating taxi drivers as accurate barometers of public opinion. My experiences merely show that while many Pakistanis clearly adored Bhutto, she excited equally strong hostility among others.

I have no inside track on the corruption allegations that dogged her in recent years. During our brief encounter nine years ago, she insisted that they were false (as you would expect) but said she was not frightened of being unjustly imprisoned. In her final few weeks, she spoke of being similarly prepared for an unjust death.

When I left a theatre in the West End of London yesterday and saw, almost immediately, a newspaper billboard announcing "Bhutto killed", I was sad but not in the least surprised. It was, unfortunately, the inevitable consequence of her brave but perilous electoral adventure in an unstable land.

But I must remember to ask my next gold and white driver if it is not deplorable that the act of barbarity that ended Benazir Bhutto's life should also have robbed the Pakistani people of the right to say Yes or No to her in the polling booths.