| June 18, 2008 | Wednesday | Jamadi-us-Sani 13, 1429 |
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Benazir’s birthday gift
IT somehow seems much longer, possibly because the first half of the year has proved unusually eventful, but it isn’t quite six months yet since the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Would her continued presence in the political sphere have substantially altered the post-electoral dynamics, or would the differences mainly have been stylistic?
There’s room for conjecture here, although any conclusions based primarily on the experience of previous Bhutto administrations are bound to be less than complimentary.
Theories about the conspiracy behind the former prime minister’s murder, meanwhile, are also restricted largely to the realm of speculation. The government’s request for an investigation by the United Nations seemed somewhat pointless, given that there has been no starring role for a foreign hand in even the wildest rumours about the dastardly act. There was, of course, never any guarantee that UN-sponsored detectives would have been able to establish anyone’s guilt beyond reasonable doubt. Given the will, a coordinated effort by Pakistan’s network of intelligence and investigative agencies could probably have succeeded in identifying the culprits.
As things stand, chances are that the whole truth will never be known, in keeping with the national norm: where such acts of violence are concerned, there is no precedent in Pakistan for complete disclosure and, consequently, no tradition of appropriate closure. Even in the case of Benazir’s father, although the identity of his murderers was hardly a secret, the precise circumstances in which he was put to death continue to be the subject of hearsay.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s judicial assassination cut short an eventful life that had barely crossed the half-century mark. His daughter would have turned 55 next Saturday. Thirty years earlier, when the political and personal burden she bore was certainly uncommon, even by subcontinental standards, for a 25-year-old, her father offered her an unusual birthday gift: a crash course in international affairs, which he hoped would come in handy for his political heir.
He was, of course, consciously emulating a politician whom he tremendously admired: Jawaharlal Nehru, whose daughter, Indira, was a frequent recipient of long, educative letters from prison during the years her father was incarcerated by India’s British rulers. Nehru’s erudite summation of global history was eventually published in book form, as the slim Letters From a Father to His Daughter and the more elaborate Glimpses of World History. Bhutto undertook a considerably less ambitious task in considerably more unpleasant circumstances, resting the sheets of writing paper on his knee in the extreme heat of his death cell.
His aim was an overview of the present rather than the past, based largely on experience and aimed primarily at enlightening his daughter about the ways of the world. It would be unfair to compare it with Nehru’s literary endeavour in terms of depth or style, but Bhutto’s effort — published as My Dearest Daughter some 10 years after it was written — is certainly not uninteresting. Apart from all else, it reflects its author’s mental processes at a time when he was well aware that his days were numbered. It is also instructive to be reminded of how remarkably different the world looked 30 years ago. But, arguably above all, the document’s pertinence lies in illuminating how Benazir eventually decided that Papa didn’t know best.
Because, if there is any overarching theme in ZAB’s somewhat rambling discourse, it is related to the foreign policy flaws of the United States. He notes time and again that the appeal of communism to nationalist sentiments in the Third World, particularly in Africa, is based not so much on Soviet, Chinese or Cuban influence as on the proclivities of elites supported and sustained by the opposing superpower.
He notes with approval the efforts of Andrew Young — a veteran of the civil rights movement appointed by Jimmy Carter as ambassador to the UN — to correct the American course in Africa, but predicts (accurately as it turned out) that his services would be dispensed with sooner rather than later.
He also refers more than once to the apparent anomaly whereby Washington was reaching out, in the spirit of détente, to Moscow and Beijing, while its approach towards non-communist Third World countries that were on good terms with the Soviet Union or China remained intolerant. Nations ostensibly in the American camp were even worse off, because even the minutest disagreement was deemed unacceptable by the US.
“In Western estimation,” he wrote, “it is preferable to be a communist leader of a communist state than to be a non-communist leader of a non-communist state having friendly relations with communist states.... It is even more dangerous to be pro-West. One disagreement in defence of a national cause and out goes that civilian leader by a coup d’etat. He gets replaced by a tinpot military dictator who would not dare to disagree about anything.”
He returns to the theme shortly afterwards, becoming more clearly self-referential: “When we try to protect the legitimate rights of our country or try to make it a more useful member of the international community, our endeavours are misunderstood. Coups are engineered and after the success of such coups, remarks are made to the effect that ‘he was getting too big for his boots’.”
Bhutto’s intention clearly was to warn his daughter about Uncle Sam’s unreliability as a friend. More broadly, he leaves little doubt about his inclination towards nonalignment. She evidently drew a different conclusion from the lesson, and became determined never to convey the impression that she was getting too big for her chappals. Hence the kowtowing to the Reagan, Bush and Clinton administrations, never more embarrassing than when she successfully lobbied the neoconservatives as a means of regaining a political foothold, in the process defending the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Chances are Bhutto would have been disappointed, perhaps even shocked, by his daughter’s misinterpretation of his warnings and her abject acquiescence in 21st-century imperialism.
My Dearest Daughter is replete with opinions that testify to Bhutto’s broadly progressive instincts (he defends Sukarno while criticising Suharto in the Indonesian context, and is complacent about the communist takeover in Kabul), but also suggests that he was incapable of acknowledging his follies, be it in relation to East Pakistan or Balochistan, even in a letter to his heir apparent. The latter tendency, at least, was genetically encoded in Benazir.
Not long after Bhutto’s murder, Salman Taseer published his political biography of ZAB in which he concluded — in a characteristically blatant effort to curry favour — that Benazir encapsulated all of her father’s redeeming features but was free of his flaws. He was way off the mark. In truth, give or take the odd quirk, it’s largely the other way around.
The writer is a journalist based in Sydney.
mahir.worldview@gmail.com
