The Age of Kali

by William Dalrymple

  With a last proud flourish at Benazir’s chandeliers, my minder led me out of the Prime Minister’s Residence and in to the garden, where the interview was to take place. There we sat for ten minutes in mock-Regency chairs beneath the mock-Mexican hacienda, before the familiar silhouette appeared at the top of the lawns. On instinct, like schoolboys waiting for the headmistress, we stood up.

  If Benazir’s campaigning style verges on the frenzied – all hectoring speeches and raucous motorcades – her manner face-to-face is deliberately measured and regal. She took a full three minutes to float down the hundred yards of lawn separating the house from the chairs where we had been sitting. Her eyebrows were heavily darkened, and scarlet lipstick had been generously applied to her lips; her hair was arranged in a sort of baroque beehive topped by a white gauze dupatta. The whole painted vision, wrapped in folds of orange silk, reminded me of one of those haughty Roman princesses in Caligula or 7, Claudius. After such a majestic entrance it seemed only right, when I enquired about her new hacienda, that, Thatcher-like, she should answer using the Royal ‘we’. ‘We didn’t want the design to be too palatial,’ she said, in a slow, heavily accented purr that managed to make the word palatial sound as if it had about five syllables. ‘The original [architect’s] design was extremely grand – so we modified it, tremendously.’

  There followed an interlude when Benazir found the sun was not shining in quite the way she wanted it to: ‘The sun is in the wrong direction,’ she announced. We all rose and circled one stop around the table, which left her press secretary in the prime ministerial throne, squinting in to the sun. Once Benazir had indicated that she was ready, I opened by asking if, after her time at Oxford, she still regarded herself as an Anglophile.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said brightly. ‘London is like a second home for me. I know London well. I know where the theatres are, I know where the shops are, I know where the hairdressers are. I love to browse through Harrods and W.H. Smith in Sloane Square. I know all my favourite ice cream parlours: I used to particularly love going to the one at Marble Arch: Baskin Robbins. Sometimes I used to drive all the way down from Oxford just for an ice cream, and then drive back again. That was my idea of sin.’

  ‘So you enjoyed your time at Oxford?’

  ‘I suppose in retrospect it was a happy time, because it was free from responsibility and so it had an air of innocence about it …’

  ‘Innoc …?’

  ‘… It was free from all the Machiavellian twists that life can take, free of deception. I think at university one doesn’t have the deception or the betrayal which comes about in every career …’

  ‘You think …?’

  ‘… Moreover for me it was a time of security because my father was alive, and he was the anchor in my life. I felt that there was no problem that would be too great for him to solve so I was not worried ever, or too anxious, because I always felt I always had my father to fall back on.’

  From the beginning of the interview it was clear that trying to halt Benazir in mid-flow was no easier than stopping Lady Thatcher, whom she has frequently cited as her role model (and with whom, incidentally, she had tea and scones at the Dorchester on her last visit to London). She has clearly studied her mentor’s interview manner. There was no question of any sort of dialogue: Benazir conducts an interview in much the same manner as she might a public rally, pointedly ignoring all attempts to interrupt her, and treating the interviewer as if he were some persistent heckler.

  Her reference to her father also set the tone for the rest of the interview. Benazir tends to mention her father in relation to almost every topic you raise with her. Carrying on her father’s flame is still her raison d’être, and she often refers to him with almost mystical reverence as ‘the Shaheed’, or martyr. Recently, in the course of the current Bhutto family feud, Benazir’s estranged mother had denied that Benazir was in fact her father’s first choice as successor, so I asked if she was actually the closest to him of all her siblings.

  ‘Certainly,’ she replied. ‘He always had a tremendous sense of pride in me. In terms of politics he would always want to train me. He took me with him to Simla at the time of the historic meeting after the division of Bangladesh, so that I could see history at first hand. He took me to Moscow, to America, to the funeral of President Pompidou in France. In terms of books, also, both of us would be reading books together …’

  ‘What sort of boo …?’

  ‘… I remember when I came back from university I always used to buy him books as gifts, and he always used to buy me books as gifts. Once I came back for the summer and I gave him a book called Freedom at Midnight by Dominique Lapierre. On that same occasion Papa gave me a book, and do you know what it was? Freedom at Midnight by Dominique Lapierre!’

  Was she being serious? Freedom at Midnight is terrible schlock pop-history – the Indian Independence Movement for Imbeciles – hardly the sort of book you would expect to find a senior South Asian statesman admitting to reading. Moreover, its account of the events of 1947 is deeply biased against Pakistan, and presents Jinnah as little more than a crazed megalomaniac. Assuming she was joking and now regarded the purchase as an embarrassing mistake, I laughed – only for it to become immediately clear that she was in fact entirely serious.

  ‘… So it was really rather nice: we were obviously reading the same reviews. We shared a lot in the political, historical, intellectual sense.’

  ‘I never really liked that book,’ I ventured. ‘I thought …’

  ‘Well, I rather enjoyed it,’ she said firmly, before returning to her flow of paternal reminiscences. ‘As a child I used to love going through my father’s library and sitting and reading the different books. He inculcated in me this tremendous love of reading.’

  What about Benazir’s siblings, I asked. How did they get on with their father?

  ‘He always spoiled my younger sister, Sanam; he literally didn’t have any expectations of her,’ she said. ‘She was born a little prematurely so she was smaller in size than the rest of us. My father was more protective of her, as if she was a little fragile doll who could not weather the storms of life. He thought I had a toughness that would enable me to weather the storms.’

  And her brothers?

  ‘They would not be there,’ she said, her velvety tone now becoming distinctly chilly. ‘They would not be sitting with my father or me discussing these things.’

  Throughout our conversation it was very striking, the ease with which Benazir could shift from being Zulfi Bhutto’s bubbly, slightly sentimental daughter with a highly developed taste for mint choc-chip ice cream, to the tough, sometimes frosty Prime Minister of Pakistan, heavy with the gravitas of office. Her 1988 autobiography Daughter of the East contains innumerable swings of this sort, most memorably in the chapter in which she describes her father’s death. After a brave and genuinely moving passage recording the last meeting of father and daughter, she blows it all by describing how ‘my little cat, Chun-Chun, abandoned her kittens’ in sympathy. There follows a scene when she suddenly wakes up on the night of her father’s hanging. Georgette Heyer or even Barbara Cartland at her most excitable could not have improved on Benazir’s rendering of the scene:

  ‘No!’ the scream burst through the knots in my throat. ‘No!’ I couldn’t breathe, didn’t want to breathe. Papa! Papa! I felt cold, so cold. I felt as if my body was literally being torn apart. How could I go on?… The skies rained tears of ice that night …

  Those who know her say that there have always been these two quite distinct Benazir Bhuttos. The emotional socialite from the wealthy background is generally the Benazir remembered by her Oxford friends: a glitzy, good-looking Asian babe who drove to lectures in a yellow MG, wintered in Gstaad, and who to this day still talks of the thrill of walking down the Cannes lido with her hunky younger brother and being ‘the centre of envy: wherever Shahnawaz went, women would be bowled over’. This Benazir – known to her friends as ‘Bibi’ or ‘Pinky’ �
� adores royal biographies and slushy romances (in her old Karachi bedroom I found stacks of well-thumbed Mills & Boons, including An Affair to Forget, Stolen Heart, Sweet Impostor, The Winds of Winter and two copies of The Butterfly and the Baron). This Benazir still has a weakness for dodgy seventies easy listening (‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree’ is apparently at the top of her frequent-play list) and weepy seventies movies (her favourite, one of her London friends told me, is Barbra Streisand’s remake of A Star is Born). This is the Benazir who has an enviable line in red-rimmed fashion specs, who still goes weak at the knees at the sight of marrons glacés and who deep down, so I was assured by her best friend in Karachi, is still ‘as soft as a marshmallow’.

  The other Benazir Bhutto is a very different kettle of fish. This is the ambitious Ms Bhutto who stayed on a whole year at Oxford after taking her degree, lobbying relentlessly for months on end to make sure that she would become President of the Union. After martial law was declared in Pakistan in 1979, this Ms Bhutto led marches, fought stave-wielding riot police and sustained long periods of imprisonment in squalid jails in an attempt to save her father from General Zia’s noose; then after he was hanged and she was released, she bravely took on Zia and rallied the opposition. This Ms Bhutto did not let herself cry in front of her father’s guards after she was led away for the last time from his death cell; nor did she break three years later, when her beloved brother Shahnawaz was poisoned, possibly by Zia’s agents. She fought hard for seven long years, until Zia’s death and the elections that made her, at the age of thirty-five, the first woman to head a Muslim state since Raziyya Sultana, Queen of Delhi in the early thirteenth century. This Ms Bhutto, Thatcher-like, is today renowned throughout Islamabad for chairing twelve-hour cabinet meetings and for surviving on four hours’ sleep. This Benazir Bhutto is, in other words, fearless – sometimes heroically so – and as hard as nails.

  In the interview, this side of Benazir emerged most forcefully when we talked about her great bête noire – India, and especially India’s policy of brutally suppressing the separatist movement in the Kashmir Valley.

  ‘India tries to gloss over its policy of repression in Kashmir, claiming that Pakistan has infiltrated militants,’ she said, only minutes after describing the different flavours she used to order at Baskin Robbins. ‘India has been quite unable to substantiate these claims.’

  ‘But is it really worth coming in to conflict with India over the matter?’ I asked. ‘India will never let Kashmir go. Isn’t it a no-win situation?’

  ‘I don’t see it as a no-win situation,’ replied Benazir, swinging in to Great World Statesman mode, ‘because I don’t believe that history is the story of Might winning against Right. No matter how great a tyranny is, over time it erodes; and if a struggle is just, and is one in which its people will give sacrifices, then I believe that that struggle will eventually be successful. Might didn’t work in Vietnam, it didn’t work in Afghanistan. It didn’t work in tyrannies all over the world. India does have Might – it has five hundred thousand troops and a hundred thousand armed paramilitary personnel in the Valley – but still it has been unable to crush the people of Kashmir.’

  ‘But by taking on the Kashmiris’ cause, aren’t you committing both countries to massive defence expenditure that neither can afford?’

  ‘We are prepared to negotiate arms reductions with India, but that doesn’t mean that we keep silent, and by our silence collude with the repression which is going on. That would be impossible – particularly for the Pakistan People’s Party, which fought so hard for freedom and human rights in Pakistan. It is simply not possible for us to keep silent in the face of Indian atrocities.’

  ‘But isn’t the Indian repression in Kashmir not entirely dissimilar to your father’s actions in Baluchistan?’

  This was a mistake. Benazir glowered – the velvety veneer no longer masking the steely toughness beneath – and set off on a lengthy explanation of why the Pakistan army’s murder of around ten thousand separatist Baluchis was in no way comparable to the Indian army’s murder of a similar number of separatist Kashmiris.

  It was only towards the very end of the interview that I was able to quiz Benazir about her other current bugbears, her brother Murtaza and her mother, Begum Nusrat Bhutto.

  The Bhuttos’ increasingly acrimonious family squabbles are beginning to resemble one of the bloody succession disputes that plagued the area that is now Pakistan during the time of the Great Moghuls. Like many of the Moghuls’ fratricidal disputes, that of the Bhuttos has long roots. In 1979, on Zulfi Bhutto’s death, his children disagreed about the best method with which to carry on his legacy and return Pakistan to democracy. Benazir believed the struggle should be peaceful. Her brothers Shahnawaz and Murtaza disagreed, and turned to terrorism. They flew to Beirut, where they were supported by Yasser Arafat. Under his guidance they received the arms and training necessary to form the Pakistan Liberation Army, later renamed Al-Zulfiqar, ‘The Sword’.

  In actual fact, for all its PLO training, Al-Zulfiqar achieved little except for a handful of assassinations and murders, and the hijacking of a Pakistan International Airways flight in 1981. This secured the release of some fifty-five political prisoners, but resulted in the death of an innocent passenger. Zia used this as an excuse to crack down on the PPP, and Benazir was forced to distance herself from her brothers, even though they denied sanctioning the hijack. After Shahnawaz was poisoned in July 1985, Murtaza stayed in exile in Damascus as a guest of President Assad, unable to return home due to the multiple charges of murder, sabotage, conspiracy and robbery which had been registered against him.

  So things remained until, quite suddenly in October 1993, Murtaza announced his intention of contesting the elections in Pakistan. He remained in Damascus, but registered his name as an independent candidate for nine constituencies, standing for both the provincial Sindh assembly and the national parliament. Begum Nusrat Bhutto, although remaining chairwoman of the PPP, campaigned for her son, often against the official PPP candidate. There were confident predictions that the Bhuttos’ followers would defect to Murtaza en masse, but in the event Murtaza won only a single provincial assembly seat, while his sister was returned to Islamabad in triumph. Undaunted, Murtaza flew in from Syria on the night of 3 November, only to be arrested at Karachi airport. After his mother protested, she was unceremoniously sacked as chairwoman of the PPP. She hit back by giving a series of interviews in which she denounced her daughter in the most florid Urdu: ‘I had no idea I had nourished a viper in my breast,’ she told one interviewer. ‘If I had known that she would be so poisonous, I would never have given the powers [of the PPP] to her … I will never forgive her.’

  I asked Benazir whether she had been upset by her mother’s words.

  ‘I am extremely saddened,’ she replied in her most dove-like voice. ‘But I have been an extremely dutiful daughter, a loving daughter, over many years, and I feel that in due course, given this fact, that she will come back to where the love for her and the respect for her has always been. She says these awful, awful, awful things against me and I get mad reading them. But in the end because she is my mother and I know her frailties, in my heart I can’t even hold it against her.’

  And what about Murtaza, who was threatening to topple her from her position on the Bhutto throne, the brother whom she had left to languish in jail?

  ‘I love my brother and I always wanted him to return,’ she purred innocently. ‘I was the one who gave him his passport: he didn’t even have a Pakistani passport until I gave him one. I was bitterly criticised for doing so, but I felt it was his right, and I said I would do justice for him.’

  At this point Benazir’s smooth press secretary tactfully intervened, saying that in five minutes I would be ‘ushered out’. I could, he said, put one last question.

  ‘Don’t you feel that political power is increasingly becoming a poisoned chalice for your family?’ I asked. ‘It has already claimed your fath
er and younger brother, and led to your estrangement from your mother and eldest brother. Do you sometimes feel that the price you are all having to pay personally is just too great?’

  Benazir paused for a second before answering.

  ‘Yes. It is extremely difficult. During the election campaign when I found that Murtaza was contesting these seats I thought of my father. I thought how deeply affected he would be to see his children fighting. I was even prepared to step out myself to prevent this ugly family scene. But in the end I had to make a choice: between having this ugly showdown, or being blackmailed by it and submitting. In the end I felt I couldn’t do that to my father’s political legacy, to his political memory.’

  As Benazir rose to go, I asked if there was any hope of continuing the interview for a few more minutes, perhaps the following day.

  ‘Tomorrow the Prime Minister is going to Lahore and Karachi,’ said the smooth press secretary.

  ‘But I suppose you could always come too,’ said Benazir. ‘If you wanted to.’

  I was on the tarmac of the military airbase by nine the following morning, being thoroughly frisked by a huge military policeman, when a black Mercedes pulled up beside the Prime Minister’s jet. Out of it piled two of Benazir’s Filipino nannies, a pile of Louis Vuitton bags, a crate of Evian water and Benazir’s youngest child, the beautiful ten-month-old Asifa, decked out in a red OshKosh B’Gosh designer jumpsuit. After the nursery party had been ushered on board, an ADC showed me to my place behind various party functionaries and across the aisle from the Filipino nannies.

  Benazir rolled up to the airport a cool twenty minutes behind schedule. She floated up the gangway and appeared, flanked by a pair of liveried ADCs, at the top of the aisle. The entire planeload of passengers rose; a few of the older functionaries actually bowed. The Prime Minister nodded and without a word took her seat. Then she picked up a Vogue from the pile of glossies which had been left on the seat beside her and gave a signal; the plane taxied along the runway.