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Prodigal daughter
Vir Sanghvi*
 In
the end, it's the first impression that lasts. Certainly, that's how
it was for Benazir Bhutto and me. I never knew her well and what
little interaction we had was professional - a TV interview, her
visit to the HT Summit etc - but the image that has stayed in my
mind was of the first time I ever saw her.
It was in 1976.
I was an undergraduate attending his first debate at the Oxford
Union and marvelling at the verbal dexterity of the speakers.
Benazir had finished with
Oxford but had
stayed on or so it was widely believed - because she desperately
wanted to become president of the Union. At the time, her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was Prime Minister of Pakistan, and she was a
glamorous figure, hanging out with a socially-desirable set and
dressing expensively.
A Union
tradition requires the first speaker of the day to tear into all the
other speakers. On that occasion, Benazir was speaking and the first
speaker, Trevor Bench-Capon, began by outlining her many
unsuccessful attempts to become president of the
Union.
"Miss Bhutto's failures hold a lesson for us all," he boomed. "If at
first you don't succeed, then don't try and try again. Just give
up!"
The audience
laughed and Benazir managed a tight smile. But worse was to follow.
"Miss Bhutto's claim to fame," he continued, "is her father. He is a
tradesman of some description. A butcher, I gather."
The audience
roared again but I could not take my eyes off Benazir. She looked as
though somebody had slapped her. And she never recovered her
composure that evening.
I
bumped into her infrequently after that first debate (but not
memorably: when we met again many years later as interviewer and
interviewee, she had no clue who I was), and I was struck by the
persona she had chosen to adopt for her
Oxford
days. She hung around with very few South Asians, her pals were
upper to upper-middle class Brits, she dressed Western, looked
Iranian (after her mother) rather than Pakistani or Indian, and was
unfailingly charming to everyone she met at the Union bar.
But nobody could
ever forget that she was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's daughter. In 1976,
five years after the massacres that led to the creation of
Bangladesh, there were many in Oxford who held ZA Bhutto responsible
for the killings and it was common to refer to him as ‘the Butcher
of Bangladesh'.
Though the
stigma surrounding the Bhutto name was largely unfounded, it wounded
Benazir deeply. It was clear that she worshipped her father; she
drew her sense of identity almost entirely from being his daughter;
and most people believed that her relentless determination to become
president of the
Union stemmed
from a desire to emulate his political success.
At the end of
that year, Benazir did fi nally manage to get elected as president
and pretty much her first act was to get the British-Pakistani
Trotskyite Tariq Ali released from a Pakistani prison so that he
could fly back to England to take part in a debate. (It helps when
daddy runs the country).
Her
term as president was uneventful, lacklustre even. It is customary
now to refer to her debating prowess at university but as I remember
it, she was a mediocre speaker, reading out speeches from a series
of index cards in a selfrighteous nasal drone. Even the few jokes
she cracked were the usual staples of the Union circuit.
Her stint at the
helm of the
Union over, she
vanished from Oxford, strengthening the suspicion that she'd only
hung around to win the election. Her friends visited her in Pakistan
and predicted that she would be her father's political heir.
Nobody could
have predicted what happened next, though. Within months, the senior
Bhutto had called an election and had rigged it so blatantly that
riots erupted on the streets when the results were declared. The
deteriorating law and order situation led the army, under General
Zia-ul-Haq, to take control. Zia threw Bhutto in jail, tried him for
murder and, as the world watched appalled, hanged him.
Benazir Bhutto
found that her future had changed forever. The father she worshipped
was dead. The new Pakistani government was entirely hostile to her.
And as she participated in the resistance to General Zia's regime,
she was arrested.
She was 26. And
the Oxford Union seemed a long way away.
Many years
later, Benazir Bhutto told me that she believed that the moment
things began to go seriously wrong for
Pakistan was
when General Zia took over. My first reaction was to think: well,
you would say that, wouldn't you?
But the more I
thought about it, the more convinced I became that she was right.
Consider
Pakistan as it was in Bhutto's day. Visitors from
India
always commented on the absence of visible poverty. Economic
projections were optimistic. The army had returned to the barracks,
humiliated by its defeat in the 1971 war. Bhutto, it was true, was
something of a demagogue: willing to play the feudal patrician when
it suited him and then eagerly donning a Mao cap and talking the
language of the Left. But for better or for worse, Pakistan was just
another struggling Third World democracy.
It was General
Zia who changed the complexion of
Pakistan. While
military-dictators before him (Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan etc) had
believed in Scotch whisky, Zia believed in Islamism. He tinkered
with the penal code to introduce Islamic punishments, sang the
virtues of prohibition (and this from a military man!) and
Islamicised the till-then largely secular Pakistan army.
Could he have
got away with it? In the long run: probably not. But God has a way
of sending American angels to help Pakistani dictators. Just as
Pervez Musharraf benefited from 9/11, so Zia was saved by the
Russian invasion of
Afghanistan.
He offered the entire state of Pakistan up to Washington as a sort
of giant aircraft carrier from which the Americans could launch a
war against the Russians in Afghanistan.
The Americans
took up his offer with alacrity. By the early 1980s, the largest CIA
station in the world was in
Pakistan and
billions of dollars were being funnelled to the
Pakistan
army for disbursement among Afghan rebels.
The trouble was
that the rebels were not up to fighting the Russians on their own.
So, the Pakistanis and the Americans renamed the struggle against
the Soviets as a global jehad and invited rent-aIslamic-warriors
from all over the world to come and join the battle. Maniacs and
mercenaries from all over the globe zeroed in on
Pakistan. The
ISI and the CIA trained them in sabotage and assassination, and sent
them off across the border.
Such figures as
Osama bin Laden came to
Pakistan at the
behest of the US and their organisations were trained by the CIA
through the good offices of General Zia and his army - all in the
name of Islam.
Benazir told me,
many years later in an interview for the HT, that the Zia regime not
only introduced the concept of an Islamic jehad to
South Asia but
it also created a state within a state. "The generals and their sons
made millions of dollars and set up private armies which they were
ready to use for any cause - political, Islamic or just terror ist,"
she said. "It's no use blaming today's generals or the ISI. We
now have a situation in Pakistan where ex-generals run their own
armies and where no single individual is in control."
Did she accept,
I pushed her, that these jehadis were the ones now fomenting trouble
in
Kashmir?
Yes, of course, she did. But prophetically, she added, "the problems
they are causing you are nothing compared to the problems they are
causing us." I n 1988, after General Zia had been bumped off in a
plane crash (there's still no agreement over who was re sponsible),
democracy returned to
Pakistan.
Benazir won the election and became the first woman Prime Minister
of a Muslim country.
I later
suggested to her that she had not used the opportunity to de-Islamicise
the Pakistani army or to return to the more secular values her
father had represented. She did not agree but t he
truth is that her hands were tied. The army still had close links
with the Americans, the Afghan ‘jehad' continued and, in any case,
she was dismissed after just 20 months in office at the behest of
the generals.
By the time she
won re-election in 1993, she had already abandoned many of the
qualities that made Indians warm to her during her first term. By
then, the Afghan jehad was over and the unemployed mercenaries were
being diverted to
Kashmir.
There is no evidence that Benazir did anything at all to halt the
steady spread of terror into
India. In fact,
her speeches during this period were stridently anti-Indian.
She encouraged
Kashmiri militants, accused the Indian army of deliberately
destroying the Charar-e-Sharif shrine (damaged in a gun battle with
terrorists) and even went so far as to claim that a Brigadier of the
Indian army who was assigned the task of burning mosques was the
same man who had also destroyed the Golden Temple.
When the
mujaheedin-based regime in
Afghanistan
refused to take orders from Islamabad, the ISI and her govern ment
backed, armed and trained the Taliban to overthrow it. It did not
bother her in the slightest that the Islamists of the Taliban were
even worse than the mercenaries who had flocked to Zia's Pakistan
during the Afghan jehad.
I asked Benazir
about her government's role in the creation of the Taliban and about
her refusal to stand up to the army and to the rent-a-jehadis who
were now
Pakistan's principal export (the US having cracked down on the
heroin trade).
Her answers were
vague and unsatisfactory. She had not been aware of what the army
was up to. The Taliban was not her creation. No Pakistani government
has any real authority over the shadow government of retired
generals with their own agendas and their private armies.
Look at the
brighter side, she said. At least there had been no war with
India.
And then, in a revelation that made headlines all over the world,
she said that when she was Prime Minister, General Musharraf had
actually presented her with a blueprint for the Kargil invasion
which would use ‘mujaheedin' (rent-a-jehadis) backed by Pakistan
regulars.
"I turned him
down," she said.
This was
significant but it did nothing to quell the uneasy feeling that even
if she returned to office, it would be business as usual for the
jehadi establishment.
"I want to tell
the people of
India," she
declared defensively, "not to remember my second term but to think
of my first when Rajiv Gandhi and I were both young Prime Ministers
who tried to bring our two countries together." The tone and tenor
of her pronouncements was distinctly friendly. The old hatred of
India, so visible in her second term, had vanished.
W hy did she go
back to
Pakistan a few weeks ago? Did she know she was putting her life at
such risk? Was she that desperate for power?
With Benazir
gone, we can only speculate. What seems clear is that she did not
return on some whim. Her arrival in
Pakistan was
preceded by many rounds of hectic diplomacy between the US and
General Musharraf 's regime.
Like Zia before
him, Musharraf had been saved by
Afghanistan. In
the post 9/11 situation, he became
America's
key ally in the so-called War on Terror. The ISI arrested some of
the Al- Qaeda and Taliban fighters and masterminds it had trained
while helping the others escape. But Musharraf convinced the
Americans that only the Pakistan army (and he himself) stood between
the status quo and an Islamist takeover of Pakistan.
Benazir was part
of an Americanbacked slow transition to democracy. Musharraf would
have remained President but she would have been installed as Prime
Minister - assuming, of course, that her party won the election.
It was not a
terribly attractive option - playing second fiddle to Musharraf
under
Washington's
eye - but it was her only hope of returning to
Pakistan
without being jailed on corruption charges (an amnesty was part of
the deal).
She must have
been aware that she was risking her life - she said as much to
interviewers. But I suspect that she did not realise how much
Pakistan had
changed in the seven years since she had gone into exile.
All leaders risk
death - whether in
India or
Pakistan - when they campaign but most believe that adequate
security will offer some measure of protection. I think Benazir did
not understand that the cancer of Islamic militancy had eaten so
deep into Pakistani society that the normal rules of law and order
had been abandoned. The disorderly civil society she had left behind
ha d
descended into a bloody anarchy during her absence. In this kind of
society, no security can ever be enough - especially if your
assassins are willing to kill themselves along with you.
What happens
next has important consequences for
India. I am
prepared to accept the claims of her friends that she would have
softened Pakistan's hostility to India - no more safe haven for
Dawood Ibrahim, fewer terrorist training camps across the Kashmir
border etc.
What I'm not
clear about is how far she would have got with these good
intentions. She herself suggested that as private armies and jehadi
networks expanded, it was difficult for any government to function
effectively. The circumstances of her assassination suggest that the
situation is far worse than she had realised. Even the
Pakistan army,
the cornerstone of that nation's polity, seems to be groping for
authority.
So,
how will we remember Benazir Bhutto? I still think back to that
first debate at the Oxford Union, 31 years ago. I see a determined
girl, plodding away at emulating the successes of her beloved father
and being judged as little more than her father's daughter.
Like Bhutto -
and unlike Jawaharlal Nehru, founder of
India's key
dynasty - she had few core values. She stood for no clear
ideological position and did whatever she thought was best in the
circumstances. If she had to play the globe-trotting liberal, she
did so. If she had to create the Taliban, well then, that too was
okay. If she had to oppose the army, then that was her filial duty.
But if she had to do a deal with that same army, then that was fine
too.
You could argue
that because
Pakistan has no
liberal-democratic tradition, its politicians do not have the
opportunities that India's do. You could argue also that a state
created solely on the basis of religion is less equipped to fight
religious extremism than secular India.
But judging by
Benazir's record right till the moment they shot her on Thursday -
there's no real evidence that she was the great political leader
that the obituary writers claimed she was on Friday.
She was bright,
charming, decent even. But she was a dynast, doing what she needed
to do to get daddy's job for herself.
Her designation
said it all. She wasn't just chairperson of the PPP. She was
"Chairperson for Life".
And because of
her tragic and untimely demise, she may well end up being the last
Bhutto, daughter of a dynasty that tried and tried and tried again.
And never gave
up. Till it had no choice.
Vir Sanghvi is a
celebrated editor.
* Courtesy: Hindustan
Times
2
January, 2008
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