For Benazir Bhutto – whose enormous political rallies had become the biggest challenge to Gen. Zia – the moment had arrived.
Evidently, for my editor, it was also a time to make some changes. Like Benazir, I was a young woman newly returned from the West and determined to see a better future for my nation. Sensing my enthusiasm for a woman prime minister, the editor of my newspaper bypassed senior male reporters and nominated me, the only female reporter at Dawn, to cover Benazir Bhutto.
In October 1988, I became one of four journalists to ride for a day with Benazir and her PPP entourage aboard the “Democracy Train.” It was the start of her party’s campaign in interior Sindh to mobilize millions of voters for the national elections announced after Gen. Zia’s death. Just one day on the train was enough to suffuse my senses with the enormity of the welcome Benazir received from the dispossessed people of the province.
As we traveled through the dry, hot desert terrain of Sindh – which spreads north of Karachi to India’s border – I got a bird’s eye view of a region in which nothing has moved for centuries.
The British colonial explorers, who set foot in Sindh in 1843, described the Sindhi peasantry as the “wretched of the earth.” The twenty-first century has not brought them relief. Today, peasants still live in mud houses in dry, dusty wastelands, without electricity, clean drinking water or roads. They tend the farm lands of big feudal lords for meager wages and live with archaic social customs and customary laws that degrade women.
As the train draped in red, black and green PPP flags sped through the Sindh desert, I peeked out of the window to see barefoot peasants and children run alongside the tracks.
They mobbed the platforms. Young men and boys fought over each other’s heads to catch a glimpse of Benazir’s tall silhouette. They had heard that she had come back to fulfill her father’s mission of “Roti, Kapra aur Makaan” (Food, Clothing and Shelter) for the millions of landless poor.
My male colleagues, all upcoming journalists – Zafar Abbas, Abbas Nasir and Ibrahim Sajid – and I traveled in a glass compartment, especially reserved for the press. We were ambitious and looked for scoops on this turning point in Pakistan’s history. Armed with typewriters and tape-recorders, we were poised to tell the world how Pakistan’s first woman candidate for prime minister was received by the masses.
At the platform stops, the Sindhi villagers greeted Benazir Bhutto with unadulterated joy. Welcoming villagers beat large drums strapped across their shoulders to frenzy and spun like dervishes on the railway platform. They chanted “Marvi, Malir Ji – Benazir, Benazir,” likening Benazir’s image to that of a beloved Sindhi heroine whose love for her people is painted in traditional folklore by the Sindhi mystic poet, Shah Latif Bhitai.
The atmosphere rang with joy as PPP activists from Karachi got out from the train to clap and dance to the tune of Urdu slogans:
“Ab Aai, Aai Benazir” (Now she’s coming, coming – Benazir)
“Wazir-i-Azam Benazir” (Prime Minister Benazir)
Many of Benazir’s PPP workers were Mohajirs who seemed not to mind that they were campaigning for a woman prime minister who drew her strength mainly from interior Sindh. This, notwithstanding that Mohajirs had joined the ethnocentric political party Mohajir Qaumi Movement (MQM) in great numbers.
Inside the moving train, Benazir made her way through the crush of PPP bodies to stand at the doorway. Her party workers created a bubble around her to separate her from her fans.
Standing behind the tall, slender and stately young woman, I saw Benazir’s pink complexion turn red with effort as she bellowed into the loudspeaker in the apparently unfamiliar language of Urdu – the lingua franca of Pakistan – and the even more unfamiliar Sindhi – the language of Sindh.
Focusing on the sea of upturned faces on the platform she cried into the loudspeaker: “The dark days of dictatorship are over; we have come to bring you democracy.” Although she mixed the past and present tense, no one seemed to care.
Indeed, Benazir’s election campaign in the dusty wastelands of Sindh was a far cry from the oratory skills she had polished as president of the Oxford Debating Society. Although a fluent English speaker, she struggled with the indigenous languages – Urdu and Sindhi – in which she had never been formally trained.
But people had come to hear the mood of the message, which, after years of dictatorship under Gen. Zia, fell like rain on parched earth. As the scion of the most politically important feudal family of Sindh and daughter of an executed prime minister, Benazir carried huge symbolic presence.
Benazir wasn’t the first politician to be cheered on fare value alone. After all, people had cheered the founder of Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah as he addressed crowds in impeccable English, without understanding a word of what he said.
As Benazir spoke, thousands of peasants – whose women-folk gathered separately, wearing billowing chadors (veils) and clutching their waving children – broke into cheers that reverberated into the hot, arid Sindh desert.
Flushed with the success of her tumultuous reception, Benazir joined us in the press compartment of the “Democracy Train” to unfold her ambitious plans for change. We welcomed her as she made her unscheduled appearance in the journalists’ compartment.
“Come and sit next to me, Nafisa,” she said, patting the seat next to her. Her hand tugged her dupatta more tightly over escaping strands of hair.
I moved gladly and sat next to her. In Pakistan’s segregated society, being the only woman journalist to accompany Benazir had given me privileges that my male colleagues could only envy. My admiration and support for the enormous challenges that Benazir faced were written all over my face. It was not lost on her. Her light complexion glowed, reflecting an inner determination to overcome all hurdles to power.
As the “Democracy Train” charged through the hills and plains of the Sindh desert, Benazir unraveled the PPP manifesto to bring Pakistan into the comity of modern states. Her party planned to set up schools and colleges in rural areas to bring literacy and education to the poor of Pakistan and industrialize the primarily agrarian nation to create new jobs and bring women into the fold of daily life.
My sixth sense told me that Pakistan’s extraordinarily complex problems demanded special measures for which Benazir’s experience might prove to be woefully inadequate. Unlike the nation’s seasoned male politicians who could move freely, being a woman was bound to handicap Benazir in Pakistan’s masculine society.
And yet, Gen. Zia’s sudden plane crash had opened the nation to all sorts of possibilities. Exhilarated by my experience on board the “Democracy Train,” I sent back the dispatch on a woman who planned to defeat all odds and change the destiny of the nation.
Not only did Benazir come across as a dynamic leader, she was also the daughter of the prime minister who had introduced sweeping land reforms in 1973 – setting a ceiling for ownership.
Later in my journalistic career, I learnt how the Bhuttos had, themselves, evaded land reform. Big feudal landowners cleverly transferred land in the names of unmarried and widowed sisters and even dead peasants to avoid the ceiling. Apparently, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had winked at feudals, including his own family members, as they transferred land within the family. Back then, Benazir all too skillfully avoided using the term “reform”, even as her party pledged to bring justice to the people.
As evening fell, my three colleagues and I got off the “Democracy Train” at a remote train station in interior Sindh. We had seen enough and wanted to get back to Karachi to file our reports. While we waited for transport to take us back to the city, I pulled out my small typewriter and typed out the report for my newspaper.
Suddenly, we were surrounded by scores of young men. There I was, a young unveiled woman typing in the boondocks. I began to attract crowds of villagers whose circle grew bigger as they watched me with curious eyes.
“What is she doing?” my colleague overheard a young man inquire.
“She�
��s typing a job application,” another youth replied in seriousness.
“Why is she here?” another villager was heard asking.
The reply – which made us crack up when my colleague told us later: “Benazir has left her for our welfare.”
Rural Sindh is a World Apart
My coverage of Benazir’s election campaign took me for the first time into interior Sindh, and opened up a new world.
It was a vivid experience traveling up north from Karachi into miles of dusty terrain where the Indus River irrigates patches of cultivated green. Wearing only thin flowing head covers, peasant women dot the landscape. Driving by, one saw them harvest and drop the produce in satchels tied to their waists. They worked knee-deep in the paddy fields, took animals for grazing and cooked on firewood in front of dark mud huts.
On my travels in interior Sindh, I wore a loose shalwar kameez without the enveloping dupatta. Even so – and despite traveling unaccompanied to cover the story – I found the common Sindhi folks immensely welcoming.
Their liberal, easygoing Sufi approach was in sharp contrast to the conservative Islamic middle class of Karachi. For the Sindhi peasants – and even landowners – I was not just a woman but also a privileged journalist who could convey the deprivations of a province that lay in darkness.
Once, as I visited interior Sindh in winter – wearing a blue blazer over my shalwar kameez, hands in my pocket and looking obviously very urban – a villager asked me in Urdu: “Are you Angrez?” – the term used for a European.
I laughed and replied “No” in Urdu.
Like me, who frequently visited the US, many English-speaking urban Pakistanis who lived in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad were more comfortable wearing Western clothes. But while urban men wore Western clothes, even in some rural parts of the country, women from the city were expected to dress more traditionally.
Still, I wore what made me most comfortable. For me, my own class background – born and raised in Karachi and educated in the West – as well as my profession as a journalist, allowed me the luxury of distancing myself from customary rural traditions and examine village life much as an anthropologist.
In hindsight, I see that this is the manner in which the British explorers acted when they first set foot in Sindh to pave the way for colonization. That there was life in the dusty villages of Sindh north of Karachi had, for me, been no less dramatic than the announcement by the British colonialist, Charles Napier in 1843, that he had conquered the Indian province of Sindh. The British pronounced it Sind.
That was evidently the basis for the Latin pun, telegrammed by Napier to London when he arrived in my province: “Peccavi – I have sinned.”
Of course, I was no conqueror but rather an urban journalist who had stumbled into the darkness of her own back yard. I had grown passionately involved in explaining rural Sindh to my English-educated, city-based readers.
Benazir’s grandfather – endowed by the British with the title, Sir Shahnawaz Bhutto – had amassed land in three districts of Sindh and Balochistan. To top that, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s farcical land reforms had left the Bhuttos intact as the top landowners in Sindh.
In the absence of land reforms, peasants were born into slavery and their children died repaying their debts. If they were lucky, they fled to the cities to join the ranks of the jobless poor.
Presently, the big feudal lords in the Sindh – only five percent of whom own 22 per cent of the most fertile lands – have entirely shifted their residences from the crumbling villages to the cities. A stroll along Karachi’s Defence Society or Lahore’s Gulberg area reveals their elite mansions, armed guards, Pajero jeeps and satellite dishes. They have left the rural areas of Pakistan in neglect, without water, electricity, sewerage and roads and a deteriorated law and order situation.
In 1988, as Benazir Bhutto began her election campaign, she pledged a radical transformation of the system. The situation was not without irony. As the “Democracy Train” sped across Sindh, Benazir appealed for votes from downtrodden peasants who worked on her family’s ancestral lands. On the other hand, her privileged background seemed guaranteed to maintain the status quo.
The Masses Vote for the PPP
In January 1989, as Benazir started the year as the nation’s first woman prime minister, I flew from Karachi to her party stronghold in Khairpur. Looking between the whirring blades of the helicopter at the dusty town, dotted with palm trees, I sensed the excitement down below.
Indeed, Benazir’s presence was everywhere. Photographs of her head – modestly draped – and wide eyes lined with kohl adorned hand-painted portraits, posters and campaign banners. Although local tradition keeps Sindhi women invisible in the towns, thousands of veiled women had queued at the polls to elect their first woman prime minister.
People in the close-knit community received me warmly, hoping that I would convey the hopes they pinned on Benazir and the PPP candidates she had nominated. The names of the victors were written in bold chalk on cement teahouses while party flags adorned the mud-brick buildings in a show of joyous exuberance.
My welcome as a woman reporter appeared to be a sign of changing times. Apparently guessing that I was a journalist from Karachi, jubilant crowds, waving PPP flags on pick-up trucks, cheered as party workers escorted me to the homes of their leaders.
In silent wonder I walked into the humble, mud-walled autaq (annexe) of Pervaiz Ali Shah, the PPP candidate who had defeated Pir Pagara – the entrenched feudal lord and spiritual leader of the district.
With haughty eyes and curling moustache, Pagara looks every bit the part of a Moghul emperor. His empire consists of thousands of armed devotees known as hurs, ready to defend him at his beck and call. Pagara is a “king-maker” in Pakistan’s politics and his humiliating defeat at the hands of a PPP “commoner” like Pervaiz Ali Shah was a dramatic show of “people power.”
In 1988, Benazir’s strategy had been to allocate tickets to lower-middle-class loyalists who had been jailed by Gen. Zia ul Haq. Avoiding the term “revenge,” she had focused on rewarding candidates who had made sacrifices for the party during martial law. In turn, the masses who had suffered under military rule had poured out in their millions to elect Benazir and her party nominees.
So blind was the adulation for Benazir in rural Sindh that we journalists joked that she could have nominated a lamp post on the PPP ticket and got it elected to government.
The mood was even more ecstatic in Benazir Bhutto’s hometown, Larkana. There, the stout, bespectacled PPP lawyer, Deedar Hussein Shah had snatched victory from the quintessential feudal lord of Sindh, Mumtaz Ali Bhutto. Mumtaz was Benazir’s relative and became the chief minister of Sindh under her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. And yet, Mumtaz had contested and lost his Larkana seat to the PPP candidate Benazir nominated – Deedar Hussain Shah. Adding insult to injury, Deedar Shah had previously served as the manager for Mumtaz’s ancestral lands.
Indeed, all across Sindh, big feudal landlords discovered the bitter taste of being defeated by PPP “commoners,” nominated by Benazir. It was an experience they were not likely to forget.
The Face of Sindhi Feudals
Years later, as I flew to Larkana to interview the aristocratic Mumtaz Bhutto at his ancestral home, I found he had also not forgiven the PPP “riff raff” for their challenge to the feudal lords.
With his cool demeanor and long moustache, Mumtaz spoke slow, clipped sentences in British English. It established his credentials as a barrister-at-law from Lincoln’s Inn, UK. Well-spoken and comfortable with hosting Western diplomats in his Karachi mansion, Mumtaz was just as at ease in his sprawling estate as in the otherwise poor and underdeveloped Larkana.
The Larkana feudal had stayed away from Benazir ’s attempts to reorganize the PPP after her father was hanged by the military. Instead, he had watched incredulously as Benazir had worked her way up through the old boy network of entrenched male feudals.
Mumtaz came to receive me at his ga
tes in Larkana after my hosts dropped me off from the airport. We walked back to his magnificent estate. Rows of elderly men touched his feet in reverence all the way back to the house. I felt guilty that grown men prostrated themselves. But the Larkana feudal walked erect, scarcely looking down at the emaciated peasants. This was the traditional welcome for a man who owns land in Larkana, Jacobabad and Shahdadkot and in the adjoining Balochistan province.
Sitting in the shade in Mumtaz Bhutto’s brick courtyard where the afternoon sun gently sizzled, we chatted after I finished interviewing him. An avid reader of Dawn, he told me he was familiar with my name. It did not surprise me, knowing that Western-educated feudal politicians and bureaucrats alike read the newspaper for which I wrote. At the same time, he complained that politicians shot into prominence – and I knew he hinted at Benazir – because of the media attention they received.
Perhaps the inordinate attention Benazir had received in the press after her exile overseas had seemed excessive to her uncle. In particular, he seemed irked by how green Benazir was for Pakistan’s seamy politics.
With a sardonic smile, Mumtaz told me that when Benazir had arrived from London to lead the Pakistani nation of over 100 million, her youth and unfamiliarity in getting the top job as prime minister made her seem like “Alice in Wonderland.”
“You know that when Benazir first came to me, she didn’t know anyone. Instead, she asked that I introduce her to people,” Mumtaz told me.
“Did you?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied in his non-committal way.
But I knew that, as a political rival, Mumtaz was least likely to introduce his ambitious niece to powerbrokers.
Mumtaz was a man who belonged to another era, another system. His style was in sharp contrast to Benazir’s father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Bhutto had used his fiery speeches to empower peasants and the working class, who had, for centuries, cringed before the aristocracy. Apart from being a demagogue, Bhutto had left lasting effects. My visit to Larkana – the ancestral home of the Bhuttos – gave me an insight into the contrasting style of the rival politicians from the best-known political family of Sindh.
Aboard the Democracy Train Page 4