Daughter of the east by benazir bhutto

My mother’s face is deathly pale. Papa found out about the coup, she whispers to me, from a policeman who saw the military forces beginning to surround the Prime Minister’s residence. Risking his

life, he had stolen through the ranks and inched his way to the front door on his stomach. ’Tell Mr Bhutto the army is coming to kill him!’ he had urgently told Urs, my father’s valet. ’He must hide quickly! Hide!’ My father had evidently taken the message calmly. ’My life is in God’s hands,’ he had told Urs. ’If the army is going to kill me, they’ll kill me. There is no point in hiding. Nor in any of you resisting. Let them come.’ The policeman’s warning, however, probably saved all our lives.

’The Prime Minister wishes to speak to the Chief-of-Army-Staff,’ my father is saying on Sanam’s phone, the private line on which she speaks endlessly to her friends. Miraculously, the line is still intact.

Zia takes the call immediately, astonished that my father has found out about the coup.

’I’m sorry, Sir, I had to do it,’ Zia blurts out, making no reference to the peaceful agreement just concluded. We have to hold you in protective custody for a while. But in ninety days I’ll hold new elections. You’ll be elected Prime Minister again, of course, Sir, and I’ll be saluting you.’

Now my father knows who is heading the coup. His eyes narrow as Zia tells him he can be taken anywhere he wants, to the Prime Minister’s rest house in nearby Murree, to our own home in Larkana, anywhere. Zia would like the family to stay at the Prime Minister’s residence in Rawal-pindi for a month. The army will come for him at 2.30.

’I will go to Larkana, and my family will return to Karachi,’ my father says. ’This is the residence of the Prime Minister. As it appears that I am no longer the Prime Minister, my family will be gone by nightfall.’

My father’s face is grim when he hangs up. When he lifts the receiver to place another call, Sanam’s line, too, is dead.

My brothers, Mir and Shah Nawaz, rush into the room. They had obviously dressed very hurriedly.

THE YEARS OF DETENTION THE HIGH TREASON OF ZIA UL-HAQ

’We must resist,’ Mir says.

’Never resist a military coup,’ my father says quietly. ’The Generals want us dead. We must give them no pretext to justify our murders.’

I shudder, remembering the coup and assassination two years before of President Mujib and almost his entire family gathered at his home in Bangladesh. The Bangladesh Army was the breakaway Pakistani Army of yesterday. Why should that army act any differently from ours?

’Zia has instigated the coup,’ my mother tells my brothers, filling them in on the little we know. ’Asghar Khan and the other PNA leaders have been arrested. So have Ministers Pirzada, Mumtaz, Niazi and Khar. Zia says he’s going to try Asghar Khan for treason and won’t spare Niazi and Khar. He says he’ll

hold elections in ninety days.’

’He’ll do all that and hold elections in ninety days?’ says Shah, who as the youngest has spent more time at home than the rest of us in recent years and is more politically astute. More unanswerable questions hang in the air. Why has Zia singled out these political leaders for arrest? Is it a cover-up? Are they in fact in cahoots with him? We try to absorb the bits of information, to make sense of a world where suddenly there seems to be no sense.

Why had Zia waited so long to launch the coup? The agitation had petered out in April. The talks with the PNA had been successfully com-pleted just a few hours ago.

’Zia miscalculated,’ my father says. ’He thought the talks with the PNA. would break down and he would have a pretext to take over. He struck before the formal agreement could be signed.’

’God knows what will happen to us,’ my mother says quietly. She goes into her dressing room, opens her safe and returns with some money. ’You’re already scheduled to leave for Karachi early in the morning,’ she says to my brothers, giving them the money. ’Benazir, Sanam and I will join you there. If we don’t arrive by evening, leave the country.’

It is almost 2.00 am. We wait for the Army to come and take Papa away. None of us wants to leave the bedroom to get ready for our own departures. We are still unsure of what lies ahead. Was General Zia waiting for all of us to return home to Pakistan so the whole family could be wiped out together? Such macabre thoughts. I try to push them away, but I can’t. Two of President Mujib’s daughters had survived the massacre, as they were out of the country at the time. One had gone on to become the leader of the Opposition. Did the Pakistani Army want not to make the same mistake with us?

My brothers, sister and I had all flown home separately: Shah from school in Switzerland, Sanam from Harvard, Mir and I from Oxford. Our parents did not permit us to travel together for fear of an accident. ’Thank God you’ve completed your education and are home,’ my father had greeted me just ten days ago. ’Now you can help me.’
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I had moved into an office near his at the Prime Minister’s Secretariat, taken the Official Secrets Act oath, and begun summarising the contents of some of his files, making my own observations in the summaries. How much could change in a week. In hours.

My mother turns on the radio, looking for any news, though it is rare to have any broadcasts at such an early hour. There are none. As we continue to wait for the Army, my father seems almost relieved. ’The burden of responsibility is off my shoulders,’ he says. ’Government

is a trust and I upheld it faithfully. Now the burden is no longer on me.’

We sit numbly on the sofa in my parents’ bedroom while my father calmly follows his customary routine of reading the files piled high on the table behind his armchair. One black file he doesn’t read at all, but just signs all the contents. ’My first act as Prime Minister was to commute the death sentences of the condemned,’ he says. ’My last act will be the same. I always hated reading appeals for life.’ I reach to hug him, but he gently pushes me away. ’There is no time for sentimentality,’ he tells me. ’This is a time to be tough.’

2.30 comes and goes. 3.30. No one comes for my father. I feel increas-ingly uncomfortable. What is the Army planning? Around 4.00 am my father’s Military Secretary arrives. His eyes are red and he looks shocked. He has just come from General Headquarters where he had been sum-moned by General Zia, he explains. General Zia regrets that it is not possible for my father to go to Larkana. If it is not too much of an inconvenience, my father will be taken to the Prime Minister’s rest house in Murree instead where he will be held in accordance with the dignity of his office. Arrangements have been made for a 6.00 am departure.

’I wonder why they keep changing the plans?’ Sanam asks. ’My phone call must have thrown Zia off balance,’ my father says. ’He’s probably wondering if I had time to alert loyalist officers to mount a counter-attack before I spoke to him.’

And so we begin the uncomfortable wait again. An hour later, one of our bearers tells us that the Household Manager has been awakened and asked to proceed to Murree to prepare the Prime Minister’s rest house.

’General Zia said they were going to come for me at 2.30. Now it’s 6.00. They hadn’t even prepared the rest house. They’d made plans for the arrests of the rest of them, but not for me,’ Papa says quietly.

The significance of the words sits in the silence of the room.

’The bastard was planning to murder us all in our beds,’ Shah whispers to me.

’Go and pack,’ my mother tells my brothers. ’Your flight leaves at 7.00.’ We tune in to the BBC early morning Urdu report to hear the bare news that the Army has taken over the government of Pakistan.

’You are a student of world government,’ my father says to me. ’Do you think Zia will hold elections?’

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’Yes, I do, Papa,’ I tell him, still full of student idealism and academic logic. ’By supervising the elections himself, Zia will be able to deprive the opposition of any claim they were rigged and the pretext to start new agi-tations.’

’Don’t be an’ idiot, Pinkie,’ my father says in

a quiet voice. ’Armies do not take over power to relinquish it. Nor do Generals commit high treason in order to hold elections and restore democratic constitutions.’

Reluctantly I leave my parents’ room to pack. My father had prepared us for the moment of leaving the Prime Minister’s residence for years, though I had never thought it would be at the point of a gun. We were not to think of the residence as home, he had insisted, but as an official government building. When he was voted out of office, he wanted us to be able to leave the official residence quickly, unlike his military pre-decessor Yahya Khan who had stayed on for months after he left office. ’Don’t keep any more here than you can pack in a day,’ my father had always told us. But I had broken this cardinal rule. I had come straight to Rawalpindi from Oxford two weeks before with my accumulation of books and clothes. I had planned to ship them on to our home in Karachi, but I hadn’t got round to it. I had been too busy working for my father.

I feel totally distracted while I pack, rushing back and forth between my bedroom and my parents’ bedroom to make sure my father isn’t taken away without my knowing. I keep tripping over my Persian cat, Sugar, who senses the tension and persists in meowing and rubbing herself against my legs. The room is almost bare when Mummy comes in.

’It’s 8.00,’ she says, ’and the Army still hasn’t come. The aide-de-camp tells us that they’re still preparing the Murree rest house. But who knows? Thank God the boys were allowed to leave.’

Somehow daylight has brought an element of calm. My own tension has been eased somewhat by the mundane task of packing. My mother and I go through the interconnecting door to Sanam’s room to find her throwing all her clothes, pictures and record albums into her trunk, even her back copies of Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. ’I don’t want them touching any of my things,’ she says angrily, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, her long hair still uncombed.

’Pinkie! Sunny! Come quickly. Papa is leaving,’ I hear my mother shout just before 9.00.

Jaldi. Hurry! Sahib is leaving!’ a turbaned member of staff says at my door, wearing the red and white uniform of the Prime Minister’s house. He has tears in his eyes.

I feel a rush of tears spring to my own eyes. Sanam’s eyes are also red. ’How can we say good-bye to Papa looking like this?’ I say. ’Quickly. I have some eye drops,’ Sanam says. We rush to her dressing room and, with shaking hands, put eye-drops in each other’s eyes. Blinking hard, we

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run down the white and gold panelled corridor to the front entrance. I can

hear the sound of wailing from the lawn where the staff has gathered.

Papa is already seated in the Prime Minister’s black Mercedes. As the car begins to move, Sunny and I rush past the weeping staff to the front porch. ’Good-bye, Papa!’ I cry out, frantically waving my arms. He turns and gives a half-smile as the car sweeps through the gates of the Prime Minister’s residence, the early morning sun glinting off the Prime Minister-ial gold seal of entwined leaves on the licence plate.

My father is taken to Murree in a convoy of army vehicles where he is placed under ’protective custody’, a term coined by Zia to justify the arrest of his political opponents. He will be held there for three weeks, in the white colonial rest house built by the British in the hills leading to Kashmir. We had spent summer holidays there as a family, passing idle hours playing Scrabble on the colonnaded front porch. Now my father is returning to Murree in the custody of the Army. My father’s civilian government has ceased to exist. Once again the Generals are ruling Pakis-tan.

I should have realised that the coup was final, that my father’s first arrest marked the end of democracy in Pakistan. The Constitution of 1973 was suspended, Martial Law imposed. But I clung stubbornly to my academic reasoning and personal naivety that Zia would hold the elections he prom-ised the country over and over again in the next few weeks. ’I want to make it absolutely clear that I have no political ambitions nor does the Army want to be taken away from its profession of soldiering,’ Zia had announced to the country the morning of the coup. ’. . . My sole aim is to organise free and fair elections which will be held in October this year. Soon after the polls, power will be transferred to the elected repre-sentatives of the people. I give solemn assurances that I will not deviate from this schedule.’ He was lying.
Martial Law Order No. 5: Anyone organising or attending a meeting of a trade union, student union, or political party without permission from the Martial Law Administrator will receive up to ten lashes and five years im-prisonment.

Martial Law Order No. 13: Criticising the army in speech or writing punish-able by ten lashes and five years imprisonment.

Martial Law Order No. 16: ’Seducing’ a member of the army from his duty to the Chief Martial Law Administrator, General Zia ul-Haq, is punishable by death.

’No person shall loot,’ read Martial Law Order No. 6 issued on the day of the coup. ’Maximum punishment: amputation of hand.’

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To further intimidate the people, Zia unleashed the forces of the religi-ous

fundamentalists. Whether or not to fast during the holy month of Ramazan had always been the personal choice of Muslims in Pakistan. Under Zia, public restaurants and food concessions were ordered to close from sunrise to sundown. At the universities, water was shut off in the campus water fountains and even the bathrooms to prevent anyone from taking a drink during the fast. Fundamentalist gangs roamed the streets freely, banging on doors in the middle of the night to make sure people were preparing sehri, the pre-dawn meal. Smoking cigarettes, drinking water or eating in public was punishable by arrest. There was to be no room for personal choice in Pakistan any more, only the strong arm of the supposedly religious regime.

Anxious about my father’s detention and the darkness overtaking Pakis-tan, PPP supporters crowded into our garden at 70 Clifton when we returned from Rawalpindi. While Mir talked to the men, my mother who was suffering from her recurring struggle with low blood pressure, sent me to meet the women. ’Just say ”howsla rakho - keep your spirits up”,’ my mother told me. ’Howsla rakho, howsla rakho,’ I repeated to one visitor after another, stumbling in the Urdu which had dwindled during my eight years abroad.

Zia took his campaign to discredit my father to the newspapers. ’Bhutto tried to kill me.’ ’Bhutto kidnapped me,’ ran the headlines from my father’s political opponents, all of whom were obviously alive and free. ’You have to brace yourself for a smear campaign. It’s part of ”Operation Fairplay’”,’ my father said drily in one of his daily phone calls from Murree, referring to the term which Zia had used to describe the coup. Zia was also cutting the staff at Murree one by one - ’as though that bothers me,’ my father said.

My father’s spirit remained high, as did his sense of humour. ’A journa-list phoned today and asked me how I was passing the time,’ he reported one day. ’I told him I was reading a lot of Napoleon to learn how he had kept his Generals in line when I couldn’t control mine.’

My father’s high spirits helped all of us to keep a sense of balance at home. Rather than feeling depressed, we felt strong, confident and on top. First, my father was alive. Second, the people were supporting him. Also, the PPP was as popular as ever. While Papa sent Mir off to Larkana to look after his constituency, Shah and I had meetings with the scores of people who continued to come daily to 70 Clifton to reiterate their sup-port. A reporter and photographer from our family-owned newspaper, Musawaat, recorded each session. The next day, Musawaat, the only paper carrying the PPP point

of view, would report what was going on in PPP circles and debunk the anti-PPP propaganda in the regime-backed papers.

After my father’s detention, the circulation of Musawaat swelled dram-

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atically, from a few thousand to 100,000 in Lahore alone. When the presses couldn’t keep up with the demand, clever entrepreneurs began to sell copies of Musawaat at ever higher prices under the counter in the bazaars. ’Musawaat is selling for rupees ten on the black market,’ I reported to my father in delight, rupees ten being more than the average Pakistani earned in a day. These circulation figures were even more phenomenal in a society with a high rate of illiteracy and where the lack of official patronage in terms of advertisments and distribution restricted sales.

’Zia is coming to see me today,’ my father said on the telephone on July 15. In the photograph in the paper the next day, my father looked grim, his face reflecting the political situation confronting the country. Zia, in turn, looked guilty, his hand half-held across his chest, an obsequi-ous smile on his face. ’Zia reiterated his intention to hold elections and to act as an honest referee between the political parties,’ my father rang to tell us after their meeting. Why did Zia feel it necessary to tell us he was going to be honest? My father didn’t believe Zia was going to be even-minded and fair. Nor did we. Given the climate of hysteria being created against my father and the PPP in the media controlled by the regime, this was a little hard for us to believe.

There were just too many unknowns. For the first time in the history of Pakistan and its two earlier periods of Martial Law, public servants had been arrested, including Afzal Saeed, Secretary to the Prime Minister, Rao Rasheed, Adviser to the Prime Minister, Khalid Ahmed, Deputy Com-missioner of our home district of Larkana, Masood Mahmood, head of the 500 strong Federal Security Force, and many others. What did public servants have to do with politics? What was the regime up to?

Zia had gone on to state in interviews that the Army had ’contingency plans’ for a coup, thus admitting that the coup had been planned well in advance. This indicated that the arrest of the public servants was not a spur of the moment action, but part of a well-conceived military plan. Who was behind it7 The military plan to concoct slanderous stories about us in the press was also puzzling. If Zia was planning to hold fair and impartial elections, it didn’t make sense.

Meanwhile, journalists were ringing up 70 Clifton asking for informa-tion about my father, about the PPP, about the elections Zia

was still promising to hold. ’Invite them all to tea,’ Papa suggested. I did. And to my amazement, the dining room at 70 Clifton was packed, so packed that the air conditioning barely dented the heat. My cousins Fakhri and Laleh came to help, as did Samiya and her sister. I was very nervous as I tried to answer the journalists’ questions. But one shocked me completely.

’Is it true that Mr Bhutto and General Zia planned this coup together to bolster Mr Bhutto’s popularity?’ a journalist asked over tea and samo-sas.
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’Of course not,’ was all I could think of to say, recalling the fear and uncertainty of the night of my father’s arrest. But when I repeated the story to PPP visitors the next day, I was even more surprised to learn that this was a widespread rumour, apparently spread by the Army to confuse our supporters and defuse hostility to the military takeover. That rumour, and many others, persisted.

In a country like Pakistan where literacy rates are low, rumour and bazaar gossip often substitute for the truth. No matter how illogical, rumours gain a force of their own, even among the educated upper classes. ’Is it really true that you carry a miniature video-tape camera in your handbag to film meetings with political leaders?’ an old school friend asked me one day. I couldn’t believe it. ’How on earth could a camera film through a handbag?’ I asked her. ’Oh, I didn’t think of that,’ she conceded. ’I read it in the newspaper.’

Even the particularly heavy summer rains which began two weeks after the coup, were blamed on my father. ’The fundamentalists are spreading the story that Bhutto Sahib caused the rains as revenge for his overthrow,’ a PPP visitor told me. Some people probably believed the rumour, looking for some explanation for the flooding that washed away homes and de-stroyed crops. But not in the underprivileged section of Lahore, a bastion of PPP support, which was particularly hard hit by the floods.

’Go to Lahore as a gesture of solidarity with the people who have suffered during the rains,’ my father said. ’The flooding there has been devastating.’

Go to Lahore on my own? I had never been on a party assignment before. My stomach churned with nervousness. ’Announce your pro-gramme in Musawaat and take Shah with you,’ my father told me. Within twenty-four hours Shah and I arrived in Lahore.

Hundreds of PPP supporters greeted us at the airport shouting PPP slogans in spite of Martial Law Order No. 5 which threatened those attending or organising a political meeting with five years imprisonment. The crowd was so enthusiastic that Shah and I had difficulty

making our way through the supporters to reach our car. My eighteen-year-old brother and I were both a bit overwhelmed by the unexpected demonstra-tion. We were just the Prime Minister’s children, not political figures.

The crowds were even bigger at the bungalow of Begum Khakwani, the President of the Women’s Wing in Punjab, where the people spilled out of her huge gardens into the street. Shah and I were soon sweating profusely from the crush in the reception room and blinded by camera lights as people took endless photographs of us. In the middle of the reception, I was called to the telephone. ’It’s Prime Minister Bhutto,’ the message rippled around the hushed crowd. ’Chairman Bhutto is calling.’

Scores of people crowded into the living room with me. ’How are
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you?’ my father asked, unaware of the reception Shah and I were receiving. When I told him about the hundreds of people at the airport and now here in Lahore, he was very pleased. ’Give them a message from me,’ he told me. When I hung up the phone, I turned to the expectant crowd. ’My father sends his condolences to all those who have suffered the loss of home and crops,’ I stumbled along in Urdu. ’The PPP calls for relief assistance to the affected families.’

In the face of the obvious support for my father and the PPP, Zia moved to show the popularity of the PNA. The detained leaders of all parties, he announced in the middle of July, could now receive visitors. But his gamble didn’t work. Bigger and bigger crowds gathered every day outside the Prime Minister’s rest house in Murree to see my father, while the detention houses of the opposition leaders were ignored. Quickly Zia fabricated a reason to cut short his losses. ’Due to misuse, the right of the people to visit political leaders in detention is revoked,’ the Chief Martial Law Administrator proclaimed on July 19.

The coup was not going according to Zia’s plan. Traditionally, the people of Pakistan had always deserted any leader who had fallen from power and transferred their support to the perceived winner and new leader. But in this instance, Zia’s overthrow of my father was backfiring. Instead of deserting my father, the people’s loyalty was returning one hundred fold. When Zia released my father and the other political leaders three weeks after the coup, millions, literally millions of people violated Martial Law to greet my father as he visited the major cities of Pakistan. No crowds in the West ever come close to the size of Asian crowds. But even by our standards, the crowds who came to hear my father were overwhelming.

He had returned first