A lonely woman in exile

Benazir Bhutto's was a life lived in struggle, wallowing in misery and ending in sudden death. Shyam Bhatia, an old friend of hers from their days as students at Oxford, brings into this narrative touching glimpses of a woman who quite did not have the opportunity of going through a normal life. Her early ambition, in the days when her father presided over Pakistan's fortunes, was to be part of her country's foreign service someday. That was the impression she gave newsmen in Simla, where she accompanied Zulfikar Ali Bhutto on his critical trip for talks with Indira Gandhi.
It was an ambition soon to be overtaken by events, precipitated of course by the increasingly harsh rule of her father. But then, Benazir never for a moment, as long as she lived, believe that her father could do wrong. A glaring instance of her near-blind idea of Z.A. Bhutto as a truly heroic figure for her came early on in her Daughter of the East, where she notes her conviction that her father's missives to her on the Bangladesh situation in 1971 were more credible than what the global community was trying to project. Those who remember her from her days as a student abroad (and among them Bhatia is one) recall with clarity the feistiness with which she defended Pakistan and the deliberate way in which she ignored the genocide of Bengalis.
What is appealing about Shyam Bhatia's observation of Benazir Bhutto is that it comes without fawning and at the same time without bitterness. There are moments, and they come in aplenty, where Bhatia makes it clear that he and Benazir disagreed on many of the issues they tended to reflect on. He also makes it a point to give readers the impression that despite their differences they could sit down and have a decent conversation. How else does one explain the closeness that developed between the two despite the role Bhatia played in the early 1970s to have Oxford University desist from conferring an honorary degree on Z.A. Bhutto? Benazir was furious, but in time she got over it, enough to have Bhatia in her later years in exile in Dubai and London drop by for dinner and quiet chats.
Goodbye Shahzadi is not a run of the mill work you come across about politicians anywhere. It bores into Benazir the woman, the restless student looking for excitement at Oxford and Harvard. She is suave, the very model of sophistication among her friends. And yet, back home in Larkana on home visits, she swiftly dwindles into the insensitive daughter of a traditional feudal clan. As a friend from her days at Lady Margaret Hall recounted to Bhatia in 1974 (and she had been to the Bhutto home in Larkana with Benazir), 'I'm never going back there. When Pinkie loses her temper . . . she throws ashtrays like flying saucers at the servants.' And then came the self-satisfying. At Simla, thought the young Benazir, Indira Gandhi did not like all that 'free and favourable publicity I was getting in the Indian press.' At Oxford, as Bhatia tells us, Benazir fell 'madly in love with two extremely handsome Pakistanis.' Inquiries about the possibility of marriage with any one of them were made on her behalf. She ended up being rebuffed. Asif Zardari, says Bhatia, 'came a very poor third in the scale of her lifetime's needs and desires.'
Benazir was a lonely woman in exile. She had been hounded by Nawaz Sharif and then by Pervez Musharraf. She had suffered solitary confinement in the dark years of Ziaul Huq. When she managed to scrape an electoral victory in 1988, President Ghulam Ishaq Khan and army chief Aslam Beg did all they could to prevent her from taking office as prime minister. Within two years, she was dismissed from office. She came back in 1993. And then it was her handpicked president, Farooq Leghari, who threw her out. He was piqued that she would not act against her corrupt husband.
And that expensive necklace she was alleged to have purchased with corrupt money from London's fashionable Knightsbridge? Benazir's response was poor, unconvincing. She is reminded of Marie Antoinette, of the seeming helplessness of the eventually hapless empress of France.

Syed Badrul Ahsan is with The Daily Star.