Pervez Musharraf may have been wrong on many counts but he was right when he said the other day that he did not trust Asif Ali Zardari. This, while analysts cried hoarse that the PPP co-chairman was taking dictation from the general on all important issues; the two men are equally reviled by the public. And, then, as if reacting to the general’s view of him, Zardari walks away from Musharraf with a nasty grin.

Nursing a dual personality is an understatement, Zardari seems to be squeezing all his seven janams in one lifetime. He calls himself a political disciple of Benazir Bhutto but is very much a politician of his own making. He wants the independence of the judiciary, but not of the 60 superior court judges ousted by Musharraf on November 3 last year when he imposed emergency. He falls out with Sharif over the judges’ issue but says Sharif’s ministers will return to his cabinet because there is a bond of friendship between him and Sharif. One day he says Musharraf is part of the parliamentary system and he has made international commitments to retain the president; the next day he says Musharraf is a stumbling block between the people and their democratic aspirations, a relic of the past that he is under pressure to discard. What a multi-faceted personality.

The falling out between the president and the PPP co-chairman is centred on Zardari’s insistence on a UN probe into what he calls Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. The general called it an accident or blamed the extremist militant Baitullah Mehsud whose suicide bomber might have caused Bhutto’s death as she fell after the detonation. With Zardari forgoing an autopsy and all evidence washed clean minutes after the assault, Scotland Yard, too, had reached the same conclusions as the government investigators did on the December 27 fatal attack on Bhutto. Zardari cried foul and made a UN investigation one of the central issues in the PPP’s election campaign.

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