Benazir: A song half-sung
Benazir: A song half-sung
By Tariq Islam
ON a
cold winter evening, an explosion from hell ushered in the permanent permafrost
in ordinary lives. One assassin, one macabre moment of madness, one frightening
flash and the dawn of hope faded, as her spirit sailed into the sunset. On
December 27, 2007, in the blink of an eye, lives had sunk into an abyss of
darkness.
I
mourn today a woman who to me was more than a first cousin. Hers was a presence
powerful and pervasive; she remained an all-embracing blanket of security and
strength. She filled so many vacuums in one’s life that the thought of life
without her is yet to crystallise into accepted reality.
Books
will be written on her. She will be idolised, myths will be spun. It is also
inevitable that there will be a rush to capture and canonise her memory. But in
all the colourful stories that are told about her, one hopes that her true
essence is not destroyed.
One
hopes that lament rather than lucre remains the motivating factor in recalling
her memory.
My
earliest memories take me to the time when we were children all, playing
hide-and-seek, climbing hills and having our usual spats. I recall how as kids
we would be prancing around the lobby of 70 Clifton and her father would
suddenly walk in.
After
greeting the other children, he would head to his library, a sacred and
out-of-bounds area. He would always pluck Pinkie, as we called her then, out of
our small crowd and take her into his library. While we were reading comic
books, Pinkie was being tutored in the art of politics and world affairs.
In
1970, Benazir went to Radcliffe in America, and it was there that her ideas and
intellect found enduring sustenance. After Radcliffe, Benazir came to Oxford to
begin a new and an even more fulfilling journey. This was her father’s alma
mater, and from here she returned home looking forward to a new beginning.
Her
father was the all-powerful Prime Minister and the world was at her feet. But
trial and tragedy were written in the stars. A military coup overthrew the
elected government of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and a period of relentless
victimisation began. This was a period of unremitting hardships for the Bhutto
family and their supporters, who were flogged, tortured and jailed with
impunity.
This
was also the time of Benazir’s political education in practical terms. She
regularly visited her father at Rawalpindi Central Jail, where he would pass
instructions and guidance. Benazir was beginning to kick up a political storm
all on her own, and fearful of her fiery style and popularity, the martial law
administration would frequently place her in confinement.
All
international appeals to spare Bhutto’s life fell on deaf ears, and the moment
of eternal darkness arrived without notice. On April 3, 1979 Benazir and her
mother were abruptly taken from their confinement to the death cell. This was
not their day for a visit. Something in the air smelled foul. It was time for
the final goodbye.
Bravely,
Benazir held on and fought on. Bhutto’s judicial murder sent millions of PPP
supporters into deep shock and grief. She met everyone, no one was turned away.
This was the making of the future chairperson of the PPP.
In the
summer of 1985, she joined the rest of her family in Cannes. For the first time
after many, many years they were once again united as a family and were happy
to be together. But time and tragedy interacted once again as a reminder that
in the lives of the Bhuttos mirth was a mirage. The family was woken up in the
early hours of that summer morning to the news that Shahnawaz, in the very
prime of youth, had been murdered. Of all her siblings, Shahnawaz was the
closest to her. She was devastated. Risking arrest and persecution, she took
her brother back to Garhi Khuda Bakhsh to sleep in peace.
Benazir
returned to England and immersed herself in work, endless meetings and foreign
tours. From her Barbican flat, she and her typewriter waged war on dictator
Zia. She was restless and wanted to return home but was conscious that as a
single woman in Pakistani politics, the path forward would always be uphill.
Her
proposal for marriage to Asif came through my mother while she was in London.
After her initial meeting with him at our flat, she nominated me to
"interview" Asif. I arranged to meet Asif over lunch and it seemed I
was more nervous than him. I was given a long list of questions to ask and had
to commit these to memory. And also retain Asif’s responses in minute detail.
Later
that evening I had to undergo so thorough a debriefing that I joked with her,
"Are you going into battle or marriage?"
Benazir
pursued her political struggle with a primal sense of purpose, which finally
bore fruit when she took oath as the Muslim world’s first woman Prime Minister
in December 1988.
The
old men from the old, rusted order plotted and planned. Uninterrupted excoriation
was followed by vilification. Benazir was ousted from power followed by a
plethora of corruption charges. Benazir surmounted impossible odds to vanquish
her foes and win power for a second time in November 1993. But treachery was
waiting in the wings. Her own Brutus stabbed her in the back and it was back to
the battlefield. To compound the pain and perfidy, her brother Mir was killed
in an encounter for which her government stood accused. There now followed a
period of unrelenting trial and persecution. Asif was once again back in jail
while Benazir ran around from one court to another to fight her own cases and
Asif’s. The persecution became so intense that she was forced into self-exile
in Dubai and London.
She
spent her summers in London when her children had their vacations from school
in Dubai. She enjoyed a stroll in Hyde Park, was happy spending the afternoon
at the movies or at the Bayswater skating rink, watching her children and
nephews and nieces bowl while she dug into her favourite peppermint-flavour Ben
& Jerry’s ice cream.
Well,
that was Benazir. Everyone knew her name but very, very few really knew her.
Comparisons
are often made between Bhutto and Benazir. Such comparisons are tenuous and
tedious. For one, they lived and governed at different times. Bhutto’s was an
era of socialism. It was an era of rebellions and marches. It was the era of
non-alignment and fierce nationalism. It was an era of idealism.
Bhutto
ruled with an absolute majority and authority. There were few challenges to him
and he ruled with an iron fist. Benazir had to constantly seek compromises and
suffer coalitions and dilutions of power. Bhutto was the catalyst of change,
she its champion. Conditions and compulsions, the forces and the dynamics, were
too different to merit a meaningful comparison. They were both brilliant and
tireless. Both had untapped reserves of energy and vitality. Both had a
formidable aura. Both father and daughter turned the word Bhutto into a brand
name, a national political website for Pakistan.
ALL
great people carry the infection of inherent contradiction. It makes them
engaging, more compelling. Like her father before her, Benazir’s personality
was a constant interplay of light and shade. Such a life could not be ordered
into supine routine.
History’s
greatest triumphs are followed by tragedy. Her death has enshrined her and will
remain a fixing moment in all our lives. We will always remember where we were
and who we were with when we heard news of her death.
She
gave the outer appearance of being strong and stringent but she was immensely
sensitive and vulnerable. Her very essence, her core, was defined by the
suffering she had undergone. Though she came across as a strong-willed and
confident politician, the trauma and trial of her father had left her with a
shaky inner core. Her inherent sadness and pain connected her instantly to the
poor.
Benazir
was intrinsically versatile. From Madonna to markets, she could converse with
ease. She was remarkable in how easily she could mingle and mix with those who
represented the sorrow of this land. Like her father, she could easily blend
into their world. Like her father, she connected with the constituency of the
rejected. For the Pakistani youth, she was the zeitgeist queen.
Her fearless
soul remained a prisoner to her legacy and the overpowering but self-imposed
sense of duty. She was a people’s person and spent endless hours with them,
even when those hours were duty without dividend.
Her
laugh was infectious as was her warmth. The girlie giggle, the mischievous
wisecracks and, above all, the sympathy and solicitude carried in a tender
heart were her hallmarks. Though bruised by reality, she never stopped dreaming
those dreams. She was supremely unique, sublimely human.
Though
always comfortable among the poor and supremely confident amongst intellectuals
and dignitaries, she remained strangely insecure and shy whenever she had to
make an appearance before the social elite. She felt that they were peering at
her through a magnifying glass and were judgmental.
She
was alert to the fact that her life had often been invaded by predators and
parasites, creating the smoke and saga till the truth lay in tatters. The
Bhuttos were considered the nation’s best-known soap opera, and she knew it.
Benazir
was many, many things. And among those she was Don Quixote’s fantasy adventurer
who was the slayer of all dragons met on a tortuous journey. And she spent much
of her life tilting at windmills. Ironically, the dragons in her life were not
delusional.
In the
summer of 2007, we were having dinner one evening at her flat the discussion
led to books and poetry. She asked me if I had read Anna Akhmatova, a Russian
poetess who together with her son and husband had suffered horrible persecution
during the Stalinist pogrom.
I had
not, but made it a point to buy her book. I did not get around to opening its
pages in any seriousness until after her assassination. When I started flipping
through the pages, I stopped. I was startled when my eyes fell on the following
passage:
"How
terribly the body has changed/ How withered the tormented mouth/ I didn’t want
a death like this/ I didn’t set the date./ It seemed to me that storm-cloud
with storm-cloud/ Collided with something on high/ And a flying flash of
lightning/ Descended like angels, upon me."
Was
this death foretold?
She
was determined to return home and all our imploring and protests did not deter
her. She came back knowing the dangers that awaited her — she came hugging the
delusive phantom of hope.
When
she returned from exile on October 18, I stood alongside her on the truck
journey; she turned to me while waving to the crowds and said, "Isn’t this
great… I can feel their love." And after a pause, "I can never let
them down." The change had already begun to manifest itself.
Moments
later, a deadly and devastating bomb blast tried to tear out the soul of a
nation. One moment there was a sea of cheering, clapping, dancing humanity and
in another there was the gruesome spectacle of smouldering embers, the odour of
burnt flesh and charred bodies. The tunes of love had died in the din of the
dying. The terrorists had come out singing their hymn of hate.
She
could have cut and run. If she wished to retreat to the safety of Dubai, the
doors were open. But bravery was bred in her marrow. She would stand and fight,
she would fight till her last breath.
On
subsequent visits to her at Bilawal House, where a very few of us would be
around her in the wee hours of the night as she tried to unwind and reflect on
the day’s happenings, she talked but her talk was soliloquy. She was seeing a
vision. The look in her eyes, the beat of her pulse, the song of her soul, all
conveyed a different message.
She
had travelled a great distance to reach here. The traveller had transformed
during the journey. She was clearing her decks, reiterating her belief in the
higher things of life. And as though in recognition of its consequences, she
was bidding farewell to all of us.
She
knew that from the moment she landed in Karachi, notwithstanding her deal with
the general and the powers that be, the entire dynamics of the political power
balance had changed. She was recalling her father’s message in that famous
letter when he had told her that there is much merit in pragmatism, but to
never forget that the "paradise of politics lies at the feet of the
people". She knew too that there was deception in the air; the dice had
been rolled, so let the chips fall where they may.
On
December 27, 2007, she left for Rawalpindi’s Liaquat Bagh, not far from the
site of her father’s hanging 28 years ago. She looked royal and radiant as she
smiled and waved at the euphoric crowds. But tragedy was blowing in on the tail
of a treacherous wind. An assassin was lying in wait.
Benazir
on that day left the stage she never wanted. Circumstances threw her into the
dirty, murky world of politics where she had to deal with the sleaze that
breeds in the political ghettos and gutters of Pakistan.
She
had been trained to walk the corridors of power and fame, mingle with kings and
queens. Her life took her into the backyards of an unpleasant world where she
had to deal with carpetbaggers and kerb-crawlers. She was forced to learn about
their ways and deal with factors that were external to her ethos.
It was
repellent to her nature but she accepted the challenge. She had to deal with
troublesome "uncles," men who lurked in the shadows and elements from
the country’s ubiquitous security apparatus. She vanquished them all along her
tortured journey but laid her life gallantly before treachery’s final bugle.
Her
assassination may yet prove to be the catalyst of the change she predicted. But
more importantly, her blood has mingled with the soil of this land and
nourished a legend more powerful than the legend of Marvi whom she recalled in
a poem she wrote to mark her 50th birthday.
How
would she like to be remembered? She would be the warrior princess who battled
dictators and overcame them. She would be the great reformer and emancipator.
She would be the redeemer with the healing touch. She would be the poet who
wrote stirring verses. She would be the Joan of Arc who raised her party’s
standard against oppression. She would be the flower whose fragrance never
faded.
She
was all these things. But above all, she was what she most wanted to be. She
was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s daughter. To her family she was the giant oak whose
shade we have been shorn of. When the tide of time washes ashore, people will remember
her for her kindness, they will remember her with affection. She died before
she was meant to. She was a song half-sung, a verse half-written, an incomplete
life, a story half-told.
This
then is the story of Benazir, Pakistan’s princess.
Courtesy:
Dawn, Karachi
URL: