Daughter of the east by benazir bhutto

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In spite of the regime’s blatant stacking of the vote, the Muslim League did not always get the desired result. In our constituency in Larkana, which also happened to be home to Junejo’s relatives, the Muslim League was anxious to claim that the Bhuttos couldn’t even win an election in their home constituency. When their attempts to intimidate and bribe our candidate into withdrawing failed, they cut 600 solid PPP votes from a housing project built for the poor by my father. Yet we still won the seat.

The first tier elections in which councillors were elected were followed by second tier elections in which the councillors voted for the chairmen of the districts and municipalities. The second tier elections, too, were manipulated. When we had a majority, the regime through their hand-picked election machinery, disqualified our councillors to give the ’major-ity’ to the Muslim League. When their mathematics failed, they changed the result anyway, as in the case of the second tier Larkana district election where the PPP-backed candidate was elected Chairman. After the count the District Commissioner serving as the Election officer left the room, and when he returned he demanded a recount. Several votes were mysteri-ously found to be ’spoilt’, and the Muslim Leaguer was declared the winner. When the PPP councillors berated the District Commissioner he apologised, saying he was helpless.

In Shahadkot Municipality, the regime used a different tactic. On the eve of the elections for the Municipal Chairmanship, two PPP councillors were kidnapped. Members of a paramilitary group known as the Magsi Force broke into the homes of the other councillors and threatened them. ’If any of you file nominations against the Muslim League candidate tomor-row, you will also be kidnapped and Benazir cannot recover you,’ they were told. Intimidated, the councillors did not file their nominations, and the Muslim League was declared the winner.

The regime trumpeted the 1987 local elections as a huge success for them. When we charged them with election manipulation, they replied ’sour grapes’.

’Realities keep changing,’ my father argued at the United Nations in 1971 when Dacca was on the brink of

falling to the Indian army in East Pakistan. Nazi forces were once at the gates of Moscow, he pointed out, France under German occupation, China under the occupation of Japan, Ethiopia under the domination of Fascists. But instead of accepting these ’realities’, the people of these countries fought back and changed the course of history. His speech before the Security Council had had a pro-found effect on me as an eighteen-year-old university student and kept me going through all the ensuing years of tyranny and persecution under General Zia. ’Realities change,’ I kept hearing my father say.

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Visions can be dreams. Or they can be predictions. Nobody who loves Pakistan can help dreaming of a great and prosperous future for our country and for the people. But drastic steps must be taken to preserve that vision. By the year 2000, Pakistan’s population is expected to grow to 155 million from the present count of 100 -million. Fully 44 per cent of the projected population will be below the age of fifteen. With the ill-conceived policies of the current regime, it will be impossible to provide even the minimum facilities of health, housing and transport.

By conservative estimates, the urban population of Pakistan will be three times what it is today. Even now, 85-90 per cent of Pakistanis have no access to clean, hygienic water. The same percentage lives without proper sanitation or drainage in over-crowded temporary shacks or hut-ments in slums. In some areas of Baluchistan and the Northwest Frontier Province, people still live in caves. Yet only 0.5 per cent of the regime’s annual budget is devoted to housing.

Instead of educating the people, the regime is ignoring them. According to one of the internationally accepted standards of literacy, 90 per cent of Pakistanis are illiterate. By another standard, which counts any person who can write his or her own name as literate, 73 per cent remain classifed as illiterate. Yet only 45 per cent of children between the ages of five and ten are enrolled in schools and, among these, four out of five are forced by economic exigencies to drop out before reaching the age of ten. The statistics are not only shocking but crippling. Pakistan is currently adding 1.5 million illiterates to its population every year. Under General Zia, the literacy rate is falling rather than increasing.

Our national priorities are tragically skewed. Under Zia’s regime, defence spending has more than doubled, resulting in Pakistan having a higher per capita expenditure on the military than any other country in South Asia. Our per capita expenditure on education, housing and health is

among the lowest. According to the United Nation’s Children Fund, about 600,000 of the four million children born every year in Pakistan during the 1980s are destined to die before the age of one, another 750,000 before reaching the age of five. Compared to an equal number of births in the West, about 700,000 more children die annually in Pakistan. Yet the people have little or no voice in their future.
Free and impartial elections. We are still working towards the- day de-

mocracy will return to Pakistan. My father had dedicated his life to it, in

giving constitutional equality to rich and poor, men and women, all ethnic

groups and religious minorities. Through education and economic develop-

ment he had benefited the whole country, and brought the voice of
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democracy to a population which cried out for it. He had paid the ultimate price for his vision.

’Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph,’ wrote Thomas Paine in The American Crisis in 1776. We have been through the hell of Martial Law in Pakistan and are prepared to face any oppression that might still await us. We have suffered and sacrificed, seen members of our own families die and paid condolences to the children and parents in otner families. We may have to again. But, through it all, we have kept the flame of democracy alive. No victory will be more glorious than the day the dictator is finally vanquished and the dream of democracy once more becomes a reality in Pakistan.

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EPILOGUE

MARRIED FROM MY FATHER’S HOME

My personal life took a dramatic turn on July 29, 1987, when I agreed to an arranged marriage on the prompting of my family. An arranged mar-riage was the price in personal choice I had to pay for the political path my life had taken. My high profile in Pakistan precluded the possibility of my meeting a man in the normal course of events, getting to know him, and then getting married. Even the most discreet relationship would have fuelled the gossip and rumour that already circulated around my every move.

To many Easterners, an arranged marriage is the norm rather than the exception. But my own parents had married for love, and I had grown up believing the day would come when I would fall in love and marry a man of my own choosing. Still, inquiries about my marriage plans and avail-ability had begun while I was at Radcliffe. I came from one of the oldest and most well-known families in Pakistan and was, by then, the daughter of the Prime Minister.

As an undergraduate in America during the flowering of the Women’s

Movement, I was convinced that marriage and a career were compatible, that one didn’t preclude the other. I believed then, and still do, that a woman can aim for and attain all: a satisfying professional life, a satisfying marriage, and the satisfaction of children. I looked forward to marriage with a man who would pursue his goals just as I pursued mine.

The military coup d’etat changed all that. Although the inquiries con-tinued during the first few years of Martial Law, I refused even to consider marriage at that time. How could I reconcile myself to the joy and happi-ness of marriage when my father was in jail and his life was in danger?

Marriage became even more remote after his assassination. Tradi-tionally, when a senior or highly respected member of the Bhutto family dies, no one in the family marries for a year. But I was so traumatised by my father’s death and thought of him as such a special person that, when the subject of marriage was again broached by my mother in 1980, I said no. I wanted to wait for two years. Not only did I want to pay my own tribute to my father, I couldn’t think of marriage with happiness when I was so filled with pain.

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So many of my father’s childhood stories to us had revolved around our future weddings. ’I don’t want you to get married, but of course you will,’ my father used to say to Sanam and me. ’I’ll be waiting for the day you come back and, if there’s one tear in your eye or one crack in your voice, I’ll go to your husband and beat him up and bring you home to me.’ He was teasing, of course, but the subject of marriage would remind me of my childhood and fill me with sadness. I hadn’t reconciled my grief.

By the time the two years had passed, I was in prison. Marriage then was obviously out of the question. When I was released three years later in 1984 and went into exile in England, the marriage probes resumed, but again I said no to my mother. I was too nervous, too tense after the years of solitary confinement to feel comfortable with people, let alone a hus-band. Conversations, even with my family, often made my heart pound and left me with a feeling of breathlessness. The smallest noise made me jump. ’I have to find myself before I am ready to marry,’ I told my mother. ’I have to find a relative calm. I need time to recover.’

Slowly but steadily over the next year in England, I began to mend. Meanwhile the inquiries about marriage never stopped: different members of the family had their own candidates for me, and my friends had sug-gestions as well. Soon before the family was to gather in Cannes in July, 1985, my mother and

Auntie Manna approached me with a proposal from the land-owning Zardari family on behalf of their son, Asif. Auntie Manna, I learned later, had done careful research into the prospective groom before passing on the request to Mummy, asking the Zardaris to answer such questions as Asif’s academic qualifications (Petaro Cadet Col-lege, the London Centre of Economic and Political Studies), his profession (real-estate, agriculture and the family construction business), his hobbies (swimming, squash and his own polo team, the Zardari Four) and even whether he liked books!

’Well, he can’t compete with Benazir, but he does like reading,’ said his father Hakim Ali, a former member of the National Assembly and now vice-president of the Awami National Party, a member of the MRD. Auntie Manna, an old friend of Asif’s family, wanted a personal inspection of the prospective groom as well. Asif was brought to her house where he evidently passed muster, appearing slim and smart in his polo outfit. Satisfied on all counts, Auntie Manna then contacted my mother in Eng-land. But once more tragedy intervened.

Within a month, my brother Shah Nawaz was murdered. I was shat-tered, as were we all. I told my mother and my aunt that I didn’t want even to think of marriage for at least a year if not two. I didn’t even ask the name of the intended groom from the Zardari clan.

Auntie Manna was determined, however, to pursue her candidate. When I returned to Pakistan in April, 1986, she kept badgering me to

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consider the Zardari son, heir to the chiefdom of the 100,000-strong Zardari tribe. Originally from Iranian Baluchistan, the Zardari clan had resettled in the Nawabshah district of Sindh several centuries ago where Asif now oversaw his family’s farms. ’He’s very nice. He’s your sort of age. He comes from a landowning family. His family is political. Families from the business class in Lahore and Peshawar have approached me, but I don’t think that’s suitable for you. It’s better for you to marry someone from Sindh who understands local customs and traditions . . .’ On and on she went, but I wasn’t interested. For the first time for nine years, I was enjoying my own country, free to go out and see my friends, to travel, to work. ’Just let me enjoy my freedom for a while,’ I kept telling her.

But Auntie Manna didn’t give up. Without telling me, she arranged for my cousin Fakhri to invite Asif to a dinner party in November of 1986, seven months after I’d returned to Pakistan. She even made him wear a suit so he’d make a good impression on me, instead of wearing the wild Baloachi robes he much prefers, even on

the streets of London. Auntie Manna evidently waited at the dinner until there were only a few people around me to introduce him. When I heard the name Asif, nothing clicked. I had no idea who he was and remember only that we immediately got into an argument. Auntie Manna was more concerned that he was sitting by me for too long and that it would lead to conjecture. She sent someone to take him away which was a great relief to me. After spending all day listening to arguments within the party, I hardly wanted to spend the evening arguing as well.

At the same time, I wondered what future husband would be able to tolerate a life as demanding as mine. When I was at home, my political meetings often ran well into the night. And I was very often away from home, constantly travelling the length and breadth of Pakistan. What husband would accept that my time was not my own, so it could not be his? Was there a man in existence who could break with tradition enough to adjust to the fact that my first commitment would always be to the people of Pakistan and not to him?

I was concerned, as well, about the feelings of the people were I to

marry. Because I was young, had spent so many years in prison and had

had so much tragedy in my life, I had been told by friends that the people

thought of me as some sort of saint. The sacrifices my family had made

for a democratic Pakistan, leaving me to live alone without the protection

of a father, a mother, or even my brothers, had also led the people to

think of themselves as my family. A basic strength of the PPP lay in that

sense of protectiveness people had towards me. If I married, would they

think I no longer needed them?

On the other hand, I argued with myself, remaining single could work against me politically both inside and outside Pakistan. In the male chauvi-

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nist society we live in, little thought is given to a man who remains a bachelor. But a single woman is suspect. ’Why aren’t you married?’ jour-nalists often asked me. Irritated, I wanted to ask if they would put the same question to a single man, but I restrained myself. The journalists were not used to dealing with single women in traditional Muslim societies, and the unusual circumstances dictated the unusual question.

Inherent in the question, and representative of a whole school of male thought, was the bias that there must be something wrong with a woman who wasn’t married. Who knew if she would make a reliable leader? What would she do under pressure? Instead of considering my qualifications and the party platform, the unspoken reservations were that a single woman might be too neurotic to lead the country,

or too aggressive, or too timid. This was especially true in a Muslim society, where marriage was regarded as the fruition of a man and a woman’s life and children as its natural consequence.

Asif Zardari. Asif Zardari. Asif Zardari. Two years after his family’s initial inquiry, neither he nor his family had given up. In the past, my tactic with other proposals had been to draw out the process for so long that the other person either lost interest or thought we were not interested. But not the Zardaris. In February, 1987, I went to London to take part in a television discussion on Afghanistan. Asif’s stepmother unexpectedly turned up in London at the same time to pay a call on her old school friend, my Auntie Behjat. ’Asif’s so kind, so courteous, so generous,’ Auntie Behjat reported their conversation to me. ’Persuade Benazir to meet him.’ Auntie Manna joined in the family persuasion. ’He’s seen you. You’re a real person to him, not just an image. He really wants to marry you.’

My mother added pressure of her own. We know the family,’ she told me. ’He’s thirty-four, your age. He’s from Sindh, so he knows our customs and courtesies. He’s not a rootless phenomenon like the urban professional people who can pack their bags and go anywhere. He’s a rural, with commitments to his family and tribe, so he’ll understand your commitments, too.’

Her lobbying only made me more sceptical. She usually promoted in-sipid characters, claiming they made devoted and caring husbands, while those who were more dashing and debonair would always be chased by other women and my marriage would never be peaceful. I knew I would be bored to tears with the insipids.

Auntie Behjat begged me to join her and Asif’s stepmother for tea. I declined. Even a meeting could be seen as some kind of commitment and, though I was reconciling myself to the concept of getting married, the, reality of it filled me with panic. ’Give me until June,’ I pleaded with my relatives. ’I’m not ready yet.’

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’How do you marry a perfect stranger?’ I asked a friend in Lahore when I returned to Pakistan. ’Once you’re married, you look at the person with different eyes,’ she said. I asked another friend the same question. ’Even if you’ve never met him, you start to love him because he’s your husband,’ she said. ’You know the saying: first comes marriage, then comes love.’

I did some investigating on my own. Someone told me Asif had taken a bad fall from his polo pony and would limp for the rest of his life. That turned out not to be true, but even so it wouldn’t have bothered me. A limp was not a character flaw. I spoke with someone close to Asif who

told me he was generous to a fault, always giving money to his friends when they were in financial trouble. I liked generosity. Another mutual friend used an Urdu saying to describe Asif’s strong will and loyalty: ’He’s a friend’s friend, and an enemy’s enemy,’ he told me. The description reminded me of my brothers and was appealing.

For all that I was inhumanly busy, I was lonely at times. 70 Clifton is a big house, built to contain several generations of Bhuttos at a time. Al-Murtaza, too, is large. Yet, often at night, the only room with lights on was mine. I felt a degree of insecurity about the houses as well. Neither property belonged to me. Mir would undoubtedly remarry and return to Pakistan as soon as it was possible. What would my position be in the home of my brother and his new wife? I needed my own home, I decided.

I needed my own family as well. My sister was married and had a child. My brothers, too, had had children. We, who had been the nuclear family, had given way to other nuclear families. Where did that leave me in the swirl of all these new families? Death, too, was weighing on my mind. Before Shah’s murder I felt we were a big family but, when there were just three of us, the family seemed small. With only one brother, the balance was upset. The idea of having my own children seemed more and more appealing to me.

I had promised my relatives that I would meet Asif in June in England, but a meeting with the Parliamentary Opposition Group in Islamabad delayed my trip. When I returned from Islamabad to Karachi, I found a handwritten request to call on me from Asif’s stepmother. Takhri, Fakhri, what do I do?’ I phoned my cousin. ’Meet her,’ she urged. ’If you like, I’ll stay with you. Besides, you can ask her about all those doubts you keep expressing to us.’

’It would be such an honour if you would consider Asif,’ the impeccably dressed Cambridge graduate said to me in the living room at 70 Clifton. ’Marriage would give you a new dimension.’ I restrained myself from saying that a woman doesn’t need marriage to give herself a new dimen-sion and instead proceeded to tell Asif’s stepmother every reason why
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marriage to me would not, in fact, be an honour for a man, but a night-mare.

’My life in politics is not an ordinary one,’ I told her. ’I don’t have the luxury of calmly waiting for elections every five years. My politics are a commitment to freedom and the meaning of my life. How would a man feel, knowing that his wife’s life does not revolve around him?’

’My dear, Asif is a very confident young man. He understands what he’s in for,’ Asif’s stepmother assured me. I rushed

on.

’I have to travel a lot, and I can’t always take a husband with me.’

’Asif has his own work, my dear, and won’t always be able to travel with you,’ she countered.

’I hear he loves going out to parties and socialising,’ I said. ’In the little private time I have, I prefer to stay at home with a few friends.’

’That’s not a problem,’ she said simply. ’When a man settles down he likes to stay at home with his wife and family.’

Feeling encouraged, I took a deep breath and broached the most difficult subject of all. ’In spite of custom, I cannot live with my in-laws,’ I said. ’There are political workers and meetings in the house day and night, which take up the living room and the dining room. I will need my own house.’

’I agree, and so does Asif,’ she said unbelievably. ’AsiPs mother and sisters will need privacy, too.’

Who is this extraordinary man, I thought. And I rescheduled my trip to meet him in London, far away from the intelligence vans and the watchful eyes of the Zia regime.

Thank God for the political appointments which occupied my mind in London during the day of July 22, 1987. Not until evening did my stom-ach start to chum with anxiety as I realised that there was no escape from meeting Asif.

Auntie Manna sipped her coffee nervously as Asif and his stepmother rang the doorbell of my cousin Tariq’s flat. From the security of an arm-chair in the drawing room, I tried to look casual, but my heart pounded harder and harder as each step of Asif’s brought him nearer. They must have been excruciating steps for him, too, though he looked confident in the one glance I gave him. Everyone present talked politely of impersonal matters. No one mentioned marriage at all.

Asif and I didn’t have a conversation by ourselves during the entire evening. He was wearing glasses, and I couldn’t even see the expression in his eyes. I didn’t have a single feeling about him at all after the evening ended, even when he sent me a dozen roses the next day. The crate of mangoes he sent me from Fortnum and Mason, however, along with a
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box of marrons glaces, my favourite sweet, were delicious. So was the crate of cherries he sent to Sunny.

’What’s the answer, Pinkie?’ asked my mother, Auntie Behjat and Auntie Manna that morning, and the next and the next. ’I don’t know yet,’ I said.

I felt tom apart. I knew my friends in the West would find it difficult to understand the peculiar cultural and political circumstances that were leading me towards an arranged marriage. Feminism in the West was also very different from that in the East, where religious and family obligations remained

central. And there was also the personal side of the question. In my position as the leader of the largest opposition party in Pakistan, I could not risk the scandal of breaking any engagement or ever getting divorced, except in the most extreme circumstances. I was being asked to make up my mind about living the rest of my life with a man who I had met only three days before, and at that always in the company of our respective families.