When Benazir Bhutto comes back to Pakistan, Mukesh Kumar will get a better job. His family will reclaim the 36 fertile acres of rice paddies that they lost to squatters six years ago. His father will be cured of his paralysis. Kumar, an illiterate, 35-year-old gas station janitor, believes all of these things because, like many people in this tumbledown town on the sunbaked plains of southern Pakistan, he holds an almost religious devotion to Bhutto. “When she comes, she will solve all of our problems,” Kumar said.But one thing the former Prime Minister is not expected to do Thursday — when she flies back to Pakistan after eight years in exile — is dislodge the nation’s deeply unpopular President, General Pervez Musharraf. Indeed, she may have helped to save him.Bhutto, 54, has built her dramatic and controversial political career on fighting the military establishment that has run Pakistan for more than half its history. But this fall, with Musharraf at his most vulnerable point since he seized power in an army-led coup in 1999, Bhutto cut a deal.Bhutto’s cooperation with the general, which was encouraged by the United States, has left even many of her supporters confused about what she represents and what she intends to do after her flight lands in Karachi, the nation’s largest city.The homecoming will inevitably be compared to her last return from exile, in 1986, when she flew to the eastern city of Lahore and up to 1 million Pakistanis turned out to hear her preach revolution against the military dictator of the day, General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq. Aides say the crowds this time could be nearly as large. But it is unlikely there will be any calls for revolution, and it is still unclear how Bhutto’s return will play outside of her traditional strongholds.But here in the city of Larkana, the Bhutto family’s ancestral homeland, that hardly seems to matter.“We have blind faith in her,” said Ayaz Soomro, the local president of Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party. “Our future is wrapped up in hers. Without her, we are empty-handed, empty-minded. We are out of power and out of jobs.” If Bhutto told the people of Larkana to vote for a dog, Soomro said, they would do it in a heartbeat.
