Opposition Parties Vow To Proceed With Jan. 8 Election

NAUDERO, Pakistan — Three days after the violent killing of its leader, Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan’s largest political party on Sunday picked her 19-year-old son to succeed her as chairman and vowed to forge ahead with elections next week, immediately creating a new quandary for the government about whether to delay the vote.

Benazir Bhutto’s husband, Asif Ali Zardari, and her son, Bilawal, at a news conference in Naudero, Pakistan.

Three days after Ms. Bhutto’s assassination, security was tight in a Karachi neighborhood that is a stronghold of her support.

The moves by Ms. Bhutto’s opposition party, the Pakistan Peoples Party, were clearly aimed at marshaling an outpouring of grief and anger to electoral advantage in the Jan. 8 parliamentary election. The other main opposition party, led by Nawaz Sharif, another former prime minister, also decided Sunday to call off his previously announced boycott of the vote.

Aides to President Pervez Musharraf have suggested that the election could be postponed, perhaps for months, because of the chaos that has engulfed the country since Ms. Bhutto, the former prime minister returned from exile, was killed while campaigning Thursday. But now the prospect of a delay could further infuriate Ms. Bhutto’s supporters and allies, pressuring Mr. Musharraf to hold the vote and risk a huge defeat at the polls.

Elections officials in Pakistan said Monday that they would take another day to decide on the timing of the polls, according to The Associated Press.

The announcement that Ms. Bhutto’s first-born son, Bilawal, an Oxford undergraduate with no political experience, would lead her party was made at a chaotic news conference at the family’s ancestral home here in a southern Pakistan village.

His father, Asif Ali Zardari, said he would manage the chairmanship on his son’s behalf until he finished his university degree, for a minimum of three years.

The decision to place burden of blood and history on the son reflects not only an abiding dynastic streak in South Asian politics — three generations of the Nehru-Gandhi family have dominated politics in India, and hereditary politics pervade Sri Lanka and Bangladesh as well — but also how much the Pakistan Peoples Party relies on the Bhutto family name and legacy to bind its supporters.

In keeping with his new mantle, the new chairman took a new name, embracing his mother’s maiden name as the newly anointed Bhutto scion.

“My mother always said democracy is the best revenge,” he told reporters in a brief address.

The elder Mr. Zardari said his son would henceforth be known as Bilawal Bhutto Zardari. He instructed reporters not to ask his son any further questions, saying he was “of a tender age.”

Later, in the backyard of the family’s house, the younger Mr. Zardari said in an interview that he had been tutored by his mother to play a role in Pakistani politics, but only after he completes his university education. “There was always a sense of fear I wouldn’t be able to live up to her expectations,” he said. “I hope I will.”

Asked about his most immediate challenge, he said, “First to finish my degree.”

That would appear to rule out any possibility that Ms. Bhutto’s son could become the new leader of Pakistan until he was significantly older. Nonetheless, the elder Mr. Zardari said in an interview, “As her son, he will become a uniting force.”

The younger Mr. Zardari is a student of history at Christ Church College at Oxford University, his mother’s alma mater.

Mr. Zardari said that his wife had expressed the wish in her will that he be left in charge of the party, but that he had decided, with the consent of the executive committee, which met Sunday afternoon at the close of a three-day mourning period, to pass the baton to his son.

He said the will was written on Oct. 16, two days before her return to Pakistan, and given to him after her death, which is when he learned that she had chosen him to succeed her.

“It’s not an easy chair to sit on,” the elder Mr. Zardari said in the interview. “A, she leaves me. B, she ties me in this. To say the least, it’s overbearing.”

Senior party officials said, too, that the younger Mr. Zardari would be a far less controversial titular head than his father, who had been accused of a raft of corruption charges, jailed for a total of 11 years, and blamed in some quarters for some of Ms. Bhutto’s political woes.

It could not be a more difficult time for the party. Ms. Bhutto had held together a large and diverse organization, and even if, on the back of public grief, it were to win the elections, it would be likely to be under great pressure to bring a semblance of stability to a nation racked by a wave of extremist violence.

At the news conference, the elder Mr. Zardari said he would not run in the election and therefore would not be the party’s prime ministerial candidate.

That job, he said, would probably go to the party vice president, the veteran party leader Makhdoom Amin Fahim, but that was a decision, he added, that would have to be made by party leaders.

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