Internationally, the government carried on Zia’s policies unamended. The Afghan adventure continued, aided and abetted by the Intelligence agencies, as did Pakistan’s nuclear programme. Iqbal Akhund, one of Benazir’s foreign affairs advisors and a career diplomat who watched Benazir’s government first hand, summed up the PPP’s foreign policy perfectly: ‘On Afghanistan, Kashmir and India the government was faced with very complex and thorny issues but the decision making in all these had been taken over by the army and the intelligence agencies in Zia’s time, and there, in the ultimate analysis, it remained.’17
As Prime Minister, Benazir made the decision to cover her head with a white dupatta. She was the first member of our family to wear a hijab. Her father, so progressive that he shunned traditional Sindhi dictates of purdah, the system of keeping one’s womenfolk at home and behind closed doors so no unrelated male might eye them, and broke barriers by taking his wife and daughters to public gatherings along with his sons, never considered the headscarf necessary for public approval. Fatima Jinnah, the sister and companion of the nation’s founder, fought elections against General Ayub Khan in the 1960s and she, an unmarried woman, never covered her hair. Benazir’s choice was the first of its kind; not even her mother Nusrat covered her hair; it was a choice designed to keep the Islamic parties and leaders, like Maulana Fazlul Rehman’s Jamiat e Ulema Islami – a constant election ally – on her side. Islam was an accessory at times and at others, it seems, an ideology. Benazir did not suspend the Hudood Ordinances, that called for women who commit adultery or engage in premarital sex to be put to death; nor did she enhance women’s rights in any official way. In a two-year period, the Pakistan People’s Party government led by Benazir did not introduce any meaningful legislation. Nothing was changed, no institutions strengthened. At the start of August 1990, in the days of Zulfikar’s birth, Benazir Bhutto was sacked by President Ghulam Ishaq Khan on the grounds of massive corruption and the failure to control ethnic violence in Sindh.18 According to the historian Ian Talbot, ‘The Bhutto government had comprehensively failed to live up to expectations during its twenty months in office.’19
{ 16 }
M urtaza was overjoyed at the birth of a son. He called him Zulfi, borrowing his father’s nickname, and privately fretted over what he’d call him when he wanted to scold him – how could he yell his father’s name? In the family we called him Junior. He was a gorgeous baby. He never cried, never made a fuss, ate plenty and was exactly the companion I had been longing for. Zulfi would follow me around the house, copying me and acting like I had split the atom. As he got older, and I sterner, Mummy would intervene when I reprimanded him, only to be told, quite seriously, by Zulfi, ‘Mummy, let Fati be. She’s doing it for my own good.’ I’d never felt so protective of anyone, not even Papa, until we had Zulfi.
Papa was nostalgic and uninspired when he imagined his life for ever caught in the comfortable malaise of the Middle East. One afternoon, we drove a short way outside the city limits to eat lunch at the Ebla Hotel, for once cheating on the Sheraton. It was early spring. The weather was warm, but not yet dry and arid as the summers in Damascus become. On our way to our table in the garden, we walked past the Ebla’s large swimming pool and I saw a mischevious look in Papa’s eyes. I could feel his excitement as we rounded the corner of the pool; he wanted to push me in. I had been dressed up by Mummy, wearing nice shoes and little earrings that I was quite proud of. Papa was looking elegant, as always. My friend Nora was with us and I wasn’t in the mood for Papa’s jolly hysterics. ‘Don’t,’ I warned him as we made our way to lunch. He held himself back, but only just, and we enjoyed a perfectly forgettable lunch.
As we walked back towards the car park and passed by the pool, I was lost in earnest discussion with Nora. ‘Fati! Look!’ Papa yelled, confusing me long enough for him to pick me up and hurl me into the water. I hit the ice-cold spring water with a loud splash and almost scraped my chin on the side of the pool in an attempt to avoid being totally subermerged. After touching the bottom of the deep end with my toes I swam back up and angrily pulled myself out of the pool. Papa was bent over in laughter. Mummy was shaking her head at his shenanigans, thankful that he had spared her. Nora was giggling along with Papa. I was on the verge of tears. ‘You can’t do that to me again!’ I shouted through clenched teeth, ‘Not ever again!’ Papa was still laughing his whispery khe khe khe laugh and stopped only to say, ‘Oh come on!’ and wave his hand at me. ‘No!’ I yelled ‘You can’t.’ I thought for a minute, aware that this was what Papa and I did – we joked around, we pulled pranks, we were the only ones who enjoyed these silly sorts of games. ‘You can’t, not until I’m fourteen at least. Then you can throw me in a pool again. But not until then.’ I was nine years old. Fourteen seemed like a lifetime away. Papa’s laughter petered out and he surprised me by saying softly, ‘But Fatushki, what if I’m not alive then?’
I burst into tears. Here I was trying to reach a compromise, banning pool dunkings till the reasonable age of fourteen, and there was Papa talking about his death. I bawled and bawled. He sat me down on his lap, soaking wet and ruining his silk suit, hugging me and rocking me back and forth. He didn’t take it back. He didn’t say he was just kidding. He just wiped my eyes.
In between my tears, I shouted at my father. ‘Fourteen isn’t far. Of course you’ll be alive. You have to live till I’m a hundred!’ I wiped my nose on his shoulder. Papa kissed me and continued to rock me. ‘I hope so,’ he said.
Back in Pakistan, Benazir was now in opposition. She reprinted her stationery to signal her new posting as head of the largest party opposed to the government and set about planning her political return. Dr Ghulam Hussain was summoned to meet his former political student, who was, in late 1990, in a good mood.
‘She asked me what I thought the difference had been between her government and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s,’ he says. ‘I told her, “Leave it.” But she insisted, she was feeling quite jolly. So I told her. “In front of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto we party workers were afraid to lie – we were punished for it greatly. In front of you,” I said, “we are afraid to tell the truth.”’1
Dr Hussain is an emotional man. His eyes welled up as he spoke to me in the living room of his Islamabad home. ‘I was called to the party’s Central Committee meeting once, as the ex-Secretary-General, and I saw all these new sycophants there around the table. I told her, in front of them, “Benazir sahiba, your people are selling employment tenders, are you aware of that?” And she replied, “Oh doctor, you’re from an old time. This is a new age, we have to keep up with Nawaz Sharif”’ – Benazir’s one-time arch enemy/soon to be best friend, and Zia’s protégé who led the Pakistan Muslim League. ‘“He has tons of money,”’ she helpfully added, by way of explaining her party’s dubious financial tactics.
‘“But Benazir sahiba,” I told her,’ Dr Hussain says, having now forgone his tears for anger, his voice rising, ‘“You think you can buy credibility? You can’t! How much will it cost?”’ Dr Hussain doesn’t mince his words, but still, I’m amazed that he spoke to her like that. That she tolerated his questioning of her leadership. It was never easy to do, but Dr Hussain’s seniority afforded him his right to speak, and he continued, before the doors were closed on him for good. ‘“In my village,”’ Dr Hussain shouts, as if with my notebook and pen before him I suddenly represent Benazir, ‘“there used to be no electricity, no schools.” I told her, “If you were born in my village, you wouldn’t have got past primary school. We earned this right to criticize and we fought to speak openly. You only inherited it.”’
Suhail, like all the others who spent their lives under the powerful shadow of the PPP, was disappointed by the party’s short turn in government. ‘When I met Mir in the run-up to the ’88 elections he was conscious that the coming time was going to be difficult – it wasn’t just time to celebrate. Now Zia was gone, the party had to deliver.’2 When the party left office leaving nothing concrete in its wake, people
snapped out of the reverie that they’d built around Benazir and her promise of democracy. It had been a government manufactured entirely around promise, not principles. A state founded on the slippery premise of potential and legacy but nothing tangible in terms of grassroots work or ideology. Benazir was out of power and her husband, Asif Zardari, began his first stint in jail for the millions he’d taken while his wife was Prime Minister. It was rumoured that Zardari, who fancied himself a polo player, had built air-conditioned stables for his ponies – all imported, of course – in a country where Karachi, the commercial capital, often went without electricity for days (and still does). The ponies were pampered and fed almonds and milk daily. Zulfikar’s cousin, Mumtaz Bhutto, the head of the Bhutto tribe, who was a founding member of the PPP, and Benazir’s paternal uncle, spoke out openly against Zardari: a criminal who has made his way to power, he called him in the press. (Within three months of Zardari ascending to the presidency in 2008, Mumtaz was arrested. ‘He steals our name and our history and then he thinks he can eliminate us one by one,’ local newspapers quoted Mumtaz as saying.)
‘It was after Benazir and then Nawaz Sharif’s governments fell that there was immense pressure on Murtaza from his people in Pakistan. He was a political figure, he always had been, and he had political cadres behind him,’ Suhail says. ‘And they felt that the time for Murtaza had come and that he should participate in the next elections and play his due role in Pakistan’s politics.’
Maulabux, one of those political workers, speaks forcefully when I mention this idea of the prodigal son returning home. ‘In our culture, the asl waris, or true heir, was Mir baba.’3 The assumption was that Benazir’s brothers were not in Pakistan during the time that Benazir built her political career under Zia because it was too dangerous for them to remain in their country. Zulfikar had sent his sons out of the country specifically because he saw them as the inheritors of his throne. ‘The unsaid understanding,’ Mauli continues, ‘was that whatever Benazir did at that time she did as a representative of her family, not as Benazir the individual, but as Benazir the child of Bhuttos.’
Mauli understands how this must sound, this trying to explain to me that we are our families, nothing more defined, nothing more unique than that. He’s also talking to another eldest child, a daughter ironically. ‘Look,’ he starts again, measuring his words, ‘it’s the same in Baloch culture, in Pathan culture – even in Western cultures, isn’t it? – it’s the eldest son’s role, duty even, to take over the father’s work whether it is farming, business or politics.’ Mauli stops. ‘Bibi,’ he says, ‘Bhutto ka waris Bhutto hai.’ ‘Bhutto’s heir is a Bhutto’. Benazir had become a Zardari. It’s a not so subtle reminder to me too, though Mauli is taking pains to make sure I don’t take his explanation to heart – I’m single after all; there’s no reason to take it personally, not yet at least.
‘It’s not about heirs or patriarchy,’ Suhail corrects me when I put the idea to him. ‘Mir had the same background as Benazir – he was a Bhutto, had a strong relationship with his father too, and also struggled against a dictator. But that’s all Benazir had. Murtaza had the clean hands, the corruption- and compromise-free record, and the ideological understanding of socialist politics. That’s what threatened his sister.’
The PPP worker cadres, almost uniformly made up of men in their early thirties who had come of age under the Zia dictatorship, seemed to agree. Hameed Baloch, from the opposite end of Karachi, in Malir, had worked under Benazir during the MRD period and as an office bearer in her first government. ‘The youth elements of the party, the frontline workers in the Zia period were supporters of Murtaza and they wanted him back.’ His disillusionment with Benazir was for the same reason as most of the old-school supporters who had started to leave the party under the new leadership. ‘It had been taken over by Zardari and his corruption – there was no history to the party any more, no ideology, it had become a money-making operation.’4
‘In the twenty months of his sister’s rule, Mir maintained his silence’ Suhail reminds me. ‘Even though he saw and disagreed with what was going on. He took a very political and democratic path: he decided to contest elections. He didn’t return and demand his title. He set himself up for a fight. How many people, you tell me, have contested elections from abroad and won?’ Suhail asks, raising his eyebrows. He’s right, I only know of one.
In the summer of 1993, Murtaza made up his mind. He was going home. He called Ghinwa, who had taken Zulfi to Oklahoma for the summer to visit her elder sister, Racha, and told her to come back home; he was going to contest the election. Ghinwa cut her trip short and flew home. I was away with my grandmother, Joonam, and was also put on a flight and bundled home. Murtaza spoke to his mother, who still held – and not for much longer – an honorary chairpersonship in the party. Murtaza asked Nusrat for the application forms to file for election tickets. But it was Benazir, the active Chairperson, who along with her husband had the task of choosing the party’s candidates.
Benazir spoke to her brother directly. She refused him a ticket straight out and offered him some advice: if he was serious about coming back to Pakistan then he ought to leave Syria, a rogue state in her estimation, and settle in London for a few years, long enough to expunge any taint of socialism, and then they could talk about him running on a party ticket, maybe in an election or two. Benazir was a consummate bully; she had got her own way for too long.
Murtaza had been a card-carrying member of the People’s Party since it was founded. He had paid his dues and had given the party his life, as he saw it. No, he finally insisted to his sister, I’ll contest this election. Murtaza asked for nine tickets – all of which were eventually handed out to Zardari and his cronies. Benazir pushed back and rejected his request. ‘I can’t give you and your people nine seats,’ she said and offered him a provincial seat in some backwoods constituency. None of us at the time could imagine why Benazir was so frightened of her younger brother.
Explaining Benazir’s trepidation, Aftab Sherpao, a former vice-president of the PPP and the leader of his own faction now, puts it frankly. ‘She was vindictive. She got the feel for power and didn’t want to let go. She removed Begum Bhutto from the party because she was afraid of your father. She was on the weaker wicket; the Bhutto legacy was his, not hers, and this was always at the back of her mind.’5 It was at the end of 1993 that Benazir ousted her mother, who had spent the better part of the year campaigning for Murtaza, from her largely ceremonial post as honorary Chairperson and installed herself as Chairperson for Life, an actual title.
Sherpao had once been a trusted colleague of Benazir’s in the party. He would even deputize for her when she travelled, albeit watched carefully by two Benazir loyalists, who ensured he didn’t deviate from any key agenda points. It was her political insecurity, culminating in the imposition of her chairpersonship in perpetuity, that Sherpao saw as the cause of their break. ‘I even said in the press,’ he says, using the dirty P word, one Benazir never liked (especially if it was preceded by the even dirtier F word – foreign), ‘that if we had elections for party chairperson, no one would have opposed her! What’s the fear? Instead she had some mock election where the Central Committee members were asked if they opposed her life chairpersonship and the results were never shown to the party workers. The sacrifices made by the party – everyone has a limited share in them.’ Sherpao, whose brother Hayat was assassinated early in the party’s history, eventually left Benazir and formed his own PPP. ‘Whether you’ve been lashed, jailed, cast a vote, you are an asset of the party,’ he tells me over cardamom-scented tea at his home in Islamabad. ‘We’ve all contributed – my brother did, I did. This isn’t anyone’s personal fiefdom – it belongs to us all.’
But the party had become feudal turf; there wasn’t room for charismatic leaders from across the party, or indeed, the family. All the old guard of the party made allusions to Benazir’s treatment of her mother during party meetings. It was embarrassing, they
would murmur, eyes downcast.
‘Nine seats in all of Pakistan,’ my mother says to me later as we stand in our kitchen and discuss our past and the book I’m writing that is making us relive it chapter by chapter. ‘It is how she sidelined him since taking over the party. She virtually eliminated Murtaza – he had become a burden to her. There was simply no space for him.’ Eventually, the seat that Murtaza had asked for as his first choice – PS 204, the Bhutto home seat of Larkana, where Zulfikar built the family home that would become Murtaza’s residence – was given to a newcomer called Munawar Abbassi. Locals knew him as the landlord who had bestowed an ajrak, a Sindhi sign of hospitality, around General Zia’s neck the first time he visited Larkana.
Murtaza decided to run as an independent and began to prepare for the race of his life. It must be said, because it cannot be left out, that nothing in Pakistan moves without the pull and sway of the Intelligence service. While Benazir corralled family members like Sanam, and distant friends and acquaintances, to dissuade Murtaza from returning home, the Intelligence – it’s easy to see now, in hindsight – made some calls of its own to assess how serious the rift in the Bhutto family was. How far they reached and what influence they sought to have, I don’t know, but a public feud opened a space for those who wished to work against the family. In Benazir’s mind, her decisions always had the blessing of the all-powerful political establishment; this case was no different. In any event, the political establishment couldn’t have influenced Murtaza either way; that was their fundamental misunderstanding. If Papa won a seat in parliament, we were packing our bags. If he didn’t, we were staying put in our Damascus home. That was our family deal.
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