Aunt and niece’s war with pens
Jackie Kabir
William Darlymple has perhaps rightly commented that if there is anyone born to write Bhutto family’s story, it is Fatima Bhutto. Songs of Blood and Sword, published by Penguin and Viking, is a sad but un-putdownable work which is a memoir. Fatima is the granddaughter of Zulfiker Ali Bhutto, Pakistan’s first democratically elected Prime Minister - ousted by General Zia to be imprisoned and finally hanged in 1997. She is also the niece to the first female prime minister in the Muslim world, Benazir Bhutto, assassinated in 2007. The writer lost both her uncle and her father in 1985 and 1996 respectively. As I was devouring through the pages with eagerness I couldn’t help remembering yet another book with similar backgrounds written by Fatima’s aunt Benazir, The Daughter of the East an autobiography.
Some of the episodes from the books were like looking at the same picture from different angles.
Fatima was barely in her teens when her father was brutally assassinated near their home in Karachi. So she followed the trails left by him all around the world to find out more about her father. It was a huge ordeal for her to know about her father’s past and meet all the people who loved him. It was like broadening her horizon. She even met her father’s ex-fiancée who was a married woman at the time she was going out with Mir Murtaza. While the Bhutto brothers were living in Kabul which was as close as they could get to Pakistan, they married two Afghan sisters Fauzia and Rehana. Fatima was conceived even before her parents were married. Political turmoil made the brothers to emigrate to France while Benazir was in England. The youngest of them all died “mysteriously” in his own apartment France. This eventually broke Murtaza’s marriage with Fauzia. Later he met a Lebanese woman named Ghinwa in Syria whom he married and had a son whom he named Zulfiker Ali Bhutto Junior. He came back to Pakistan while Benazir was running for election for the second time. Murtaza was refused when he asked for a ticket from Pakistan People’s Party [PPP], hence decided to run independently. Benazir claimed that she loved her brothers but acted different when it came to sharing the power. Her actions were described by the former PPP vice president Aftab Sherpo in an interview with Fatima in Songs of Blood and Sword:
“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.”
Murtaza returned to Pakistan on 3 November 1993. He won the election as an independent candidate. His plane was turned back from Karachi airport later he was arrested. Hundred of supporters who came to receive him that night didn’t get to see him as he was taken by the side exit to Ladhi jail. When asked by the media if there were any problems between the siblings Benazir answered
“He’s in jail, yes I had him arrested, but aside from my brother being a terrorist we have no problems, only personal ones here and there.”
She projected their differences as trivial, familial ones.
“There is no conflict between me and Benazir,” Murtaza answered - sometimes he called her Mrs Zardari, because he said she had long since stopped behaving like a Bhutto. I’m a feminist, I kept my name, Benazir would return. The argument usually met its end at this point: “There, however, exist differences in political perceptions, concepts and method.”
But there were other differences as well Murtaza didn’t like the way Benazir was running PPP and Benazir did whatever she could to keep her brother out of PPP. As Fatima explored her father’s life it was quite a shock for her to find answers to many unanswered questions.
Fatima quotes Sohail, a friend of her father:
“Its not about heirs or patriarchy…….. Mir had the same background as Benazir- he was a Bhutto, had strong relationship with his father too, and also struggled against a dictator. But that’s all Benazir had. Murtaza had clean hands, the corruption- and compromise free record, and the ideological understanding of socialist politics. That’s what threatened his sister.”
For Benezir, writing the book was a kind of heroic depiction of the Bhutto legacy Fatima Bhutto tried to bring out the injustice done by her family. It is said that she publicly accused Benazir of murdering of her father.
Benazir’s book starts with the chapter Assassination of my Father where as Fatima Bhutto begins her tale talking about her surroundings in Karachi in 2008. Later she goes on to describe the intricacies of political arena of present day Pakistan, before going on the day of 20th September 1996 when her father was killed. There is a tale about her great grandfather named Murtaza who was so good-looking that all the English women stared at him as he walked passed. One such lady, wife of a British emissary, fell in love with him and was poisoned by the husband when found out about the dalliance. Both Fatima and Benazir give this account while describing the family legacy. Benazir described the story in some what different tone in The Daughter of the East:
As the British officer came down to Larkana to punish Mir Ghulam Murtaza Bhutto, a handsome and dashing man with a whip
“Your great grandfather seized the whip and lashed the officer instead.”
But later he was caught and poisoned by the British in his hookah till it killed him when he was only twenty-seven.
Both the writers had unanimously agreed that the Pakistan rulers from the east wing were maltreated by the West. Fatima says about 1971
“The violence of conflict was staggering. Reports from East Pakistan placed the number of civilian casualties in the millions, citing around 3 million killed.
In addition to reports of sanctioned violence towards women, there were charges leveled against the Pakistani Army for its use of violence towards intellectuals, academics and minorities, Hindus specially.”
Benazir was studying at Harvard at the time and had supported her father’s endeavor to keep Pakistan intact and putting the blame on India as an aggressor. Even though she admitted that the Bengalis were the denied their rights, 80 percent of the government jobs were allocated to the West, 90 percent of the arm forces also came from there. Urdu was declared as the national language which only a few Bengalis understood. She goes on to write about the surrender of General Niazi
“As television cameras focused in, General Niazi approached his Indian counterpart, general Aurora, on the race course at Dacca. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw General Niazi exchange swords with the conqueror of Dacca(They had been at Sundhurst together), and embrace him. Embrace him! Even the Nazis did not surrender in such a humiliating manner. As commander of a defeated army, Niazi would have acted for more honorably if he had shot himself.”
In the introduction of Daughter of the East, Benazir writes she always believed that keeping historical records. She said a friend had suggested that:
“What is not recorded is not remembered” which prompted her to write this book.
“They killed my father in the early morning hours of 4 April1979 inside the Rawalpindi jail.”
She compared her family to the Kennedy family of the United States who like the Bhuttos rarely had natural deaths in their family.
The hanging of Zulfiker Ali Bhutto was the traumatic even in Benazir’s life, she described the moments when her father was supposed to be hung like this
“5.00 came and went. 6.00. Each breath I took reminded me of the last breaths of my father. ‘God, let there be a miracle,’ my mother and I prayed together.
How do moments pass in the countdown towards death? My mother and I just sat. Sometimes we cried. When we lost the strength to sit up, we fell onto the pillows in our bed. They will snuff out his life. I kept thinking. They will snuff out his life. How alone he must be feeling in that cell, with no one near him……………. My throat tightened until I wanted to rip it open.”
Fatima Bhutto described her feelings at finding out about her father’s death.
“I don’t remember how we got to Mideast or how we found ourselves in the large recovery room that Papa had been placed in.
I cried from the very rawest part of me, with my lungs and my soul fighting for the air. I wanted to black out, to fall and awake when this was all over. I couldn’t say goodbye to my father, I couldn’t accept that he had left me. My throat burnt and my body shook.”
She said that when she called her Wadi (Benazir) on the night of her father’s murder she was not given the phone as Zardari said
“She can’t speak, she’s hysterical….. As if on cue there was a loud wailing at the background. It had been quiet before, with no indication that anyone was in the room with Zardari.”
It was Zardari who informed her that her father was shot. She had criticized her aunt in many fronts saying:
“As Pri-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 women folk at home and behind closed doors………. Benazir’s choice was 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 Jamiet e Ulema Islami- a constant election ally on her side.”
The first time Benazir was made to wear Burkah she described it like this in Daughter of the East
“We had been on the train from Karachi to Larkana when my mother took the black, gauzy cloth out of her bag and draped it over me. ’you are no longer a child’ she told me with a tinge of regret. As she performed this age old rite of passage for the daughters of conservative landowning families.”
Benazir’s mother also wore purdah after her marriage with other Bhutto women but things changed as time passed.
Benazir’s father always wanted her to be part of the greater world. He would take the children to visit foreign dignitaries and also he took them to foreign visits. He emphasized on getting good education and wrote numerous letters to both Benazir and Murtaza giving them political advice while he was in jail. Benazir and her mother’s house arrest was described in the autobiography with vivid details. Her brother’s party Al Zulfikar was considered to be the armed wing of PPP. And the papers reported that it was Murtaza who hijacked a plane, an act of terrorism.
In Daughter of the East, Benazir described her life during and after the assassination of her father Zulfiker Ali Bhutto. She stayed in different jails in till 1984. Solitary confinement for seven years had given her an aliment in her ear and left her frail physically. On her release from her solitary confinement on 10th January 1984 she and her sister took a Swiss flight to Switzerland and then to London for her treatment. It was here that she campaigned against the military dictator and waited for the time to come back to her country. She published a paper named Amul from there. In 1985 Zia decided to go for an election. But the oppression and killing of political prisoners were continued. Finally she went back to Karachi in August 1985 to bury her brother Shahnawaz in their ancestral home in Larkana. Five days later she was again arrested by the military regime in Karachi to be released in November to attend French Court for her brother’s murder inquiry. She finally came back to Lahore in 1985. There were millions of people to receive her that day she writes. She describes her arranged marriage to Zardari and her son’s birth in the last few chapters. She completed her book in 1988.
Fatima’s book, however, finishes with a sad note saying that she must move away from the shadows, the ghosts of her family. But she said that she could never leave behind her father for whom she started writing this book. That no matter how hard she tried to move away from the Pakistan she could never do so.
An abridged version was published in The Daily Star Book review Page on 5th June 2010.
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