The Age of Kali (53 page)

More importantly, while she is a star performer at the sort of politics which looks best on Western TV screens – giving fighting speeches, addressing mass rallies through clouds of teargas, touring the deserts of Pakistan by steam train – she is less competent behind closed doors: she has no clear political agenda and champions no obvious political philosophy. Her father was a socialist, but she is not; yet she is no monetarist, conservative or republican either. This muddle means that once Benazir actually gets in to power she
seems to lose momentum and dissipates her energies on petty party politicking rather than getting on with the business of governing the country. Her critics say that she is an intellectual lightweight who doesn’t know what she wants to do – they would, of course – but it is certainly true that during her first twenty-month-long premiership, astonishingly, she failed to pass a single piece of legislation.

Even the basis of Benazir’s claim to fame in the West – that she fearlessly stood up to the martial law of the sinister military dictator General Zia ul-Haq, then carried on the torch of her father, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, after Zia took it upon himself to torture and hang this democratically elected Prime Minister – looks less impressive if you are a Pakistani and remember Bhutto Senior’s own anti-democratic tendencies: his propensity for rigging elections, torturing opponents and sacking any provincial assembly that dared to oppose his will. In the most notorious case, after Bhutto unconstitutionally dissolved the elected Baluchistan assembly, the Baluchi tribes rose up against him and several thousand died before the insurgency was finally, brutally, quashed. Moreover, Bhutto’s refusal to share power with the victorious Awami League after the 1970 general election led directly to Pakistan’s darkest chapter: the civil war between West and East Pakistan, the crushing defeat by India a year later, and the subsequent creation of Bangladesh.

Nor are Pakistanis over-enamoured with Benazir Bhutto’s husband, the polo-playing Karachi playboy Asif Ali Zardari, who until his marriage to Benazir was distinguished chiefly for the private discothèque he had built inside his house in an attempt to lure within the leading lights of the Karachi party set. Due to such extravagances, before his marriage in 1988 Zardari was said to be near to bankruptcy. Three years later he was fabulously wealthy – a spectacular financial turnaround that just happened to coincide with his wife’s premiership. This led to Zardari being tagged with the label ‘Mr 10 Per Cent’, and on his wife’s fall from power in 1990 he spent two years in jail on corruption and extortion charges. The charges were eventually dropped due to lack of evidence, but
rightly or wrongly the mud has stuck, and Pakistanis still perceive Zardari as being massively crooked.

What Bhuttoism represents to Pakistanis, in other words, is not virgin-white democracy fighting the black spectre of General Zia’s tyranny and the massed ranks of Pakistan’s mad mullahs: there are many shades of grey in between. In 1990, after Benazir’s first administration was dismissed by the President for ineptitude and corruption, the people of Pakistan democratically voted in a Muslim League government run by the Zia protégé Nawaz Sharif, a Punjabi industrialist. In the 1993 elections, the Muslim League again won more votes than Benazir’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), but the latter returned to power through a series of strategic alliances with small regional parties.

There is no doubt that Pakistanis are, on the whole, grateful to Benazir Bhutto for bringing back democracy, and that many regard her as a brave and impressive woman. But the fact remains that they have never felt as enthusiastic about her as we in the West would sometimes like to believe.

With a last proud flourish at Benazir’s chandeliers, my minder led me out of the Prime Minister’s Residence and in to the garden, where the interview was to take place. There we sat for ten minutes in mock-Regency chairs beneath the mock-Mexican
hacienda
, before the familiar silhouette appeared at the top of the lawns. On instinct, like schoolboys waiting for the headmistress, we stood up.

If Benazir’s campaigning style verges on the frenzied – all hectoring speeches and raucous motorcades – her manner face-to-face is deliberately measured and regal. She took a full three minutes to float down the hundred yards of lawn separating the house from the chairs where we had been sitting. Her eyebrows were heavily
darkened, and scarlet lipstick had been generously applied to her lips; her hair was arranged in a sort of baroque beehive topped by a white gauze
dupatta
. The whole painted vision, wrapped in folds of orange silk, reminded me of one of those haughty Roman princesses in
Caligula
or 7,
Claudius
. After such a majestic entrance it seemed only right, when I enquired about her new
hacienda
, that, Thatcher-like, she should answer using the Royal ‘we’. ‘We didn’t want the design to be too palatial,’ she said, in a slow, heavily accented purr that managed to make the word
palatial
sound as if it had about five syllables. ‘The original [architect’s] design was extremely grand – so we modified it,
tremendously.’

There followed an interlude when Benazir found the sun was not shining in quite the way she wanted it to: ‘The sun is in the wrong direction,’ she announced. We all rose and circled one stop around the table, which left her press secretary in the prime ministerial throne, squinting in to the sun. Once Benazir had indicated that she was ready, I opened by asking if, after her time at Oxford, she still regarded herself as an Anglophile.

‘Oh yes,’ she said brightly. ‘London is like a second home for me. I know London well. I know where the theatres are, I know where the shops are, I know where the
hairdressers
are. I love to browse through Harrods and W.H. Smith in Sloane Square. I know all my favourite ice cream parlours: I used to particularly love going to the one at Marble Arch: Baskin Robbins. Sometimes I used to drive all the way down from Oxford just for an ice cream, and then drive back again. That was my idea of sin.’

‘So you enjoyed your time at Oxford?’

‘I suppose in retrospect it
was
a happy time, because it was free from responsibility and so it had an air of innocence about it …’

‘Innoc …?’

‘… It was free from all the Machiavellian twists that life can take, free of deception. I think at university one doesn’t have the deception or the betrayal which comes about in every career …’

‘You think …?’

‘… Moreover for me it was a time of security because my father
was alive, and he was the anchor in my life. I felt that there was no problem that would be too great for him to solve so I was not worried ever, or too anxious, because I always felt I always had my father to fall back on.’

From the beginning of the interview it was clear that trying to halt Benazir in mid-flow was no easier than stopping Lady Thatcher, whom she has frequently cited as her role model (and with whom, incidentally, she had tea and scones at the Dorchester on her last visit to London). She has clearly studied her mentor’s interview manner. There was no question of any sort of dialogue: Benazir conducts an interview in much the same manner as she might a public rally, pointedly ignoring all attempts to interrupt her, and treating the interviewer as if he were some persistent heckler.

Her reference to her father also set the tone for the rest of the interview. Benazir tends to mention her father in relation to almost every topic you raise with her. Carrying on her father’s flame is still her
raison d’être
, and she often refers to him with almost mystical reverence as ‘the
Shaheed
’, or martyr. Recently, in the course of the current Bhutto family feud, Benazir’s estranged mother had denied that Benazir was in fact her father’s first choice as successor, so I asked if she was actually the closest to him of all her siblings.

‘Certainly,’ she replied. ‘He always had a tremendous sense of pride in me. In terms of politics he would always want to train me. He took me with him to Simla at the time of the historic meeting after the division of Bangladesh, so that I could see history at first hand. He took me to Moscow, to America, to the funeral of President Pompidou in France. In terms of books, also, both of us would be reading books together …’

‘What sort of boo …?’

‘… I remember when I came back from university I always used to buy him books as gifts, and he always used to buy me books as gifts. Once I came back for the summer and I gave him a book called
Freedom at Midnight
by Dominique Lapierre. On that same occasion Papa gave me a book, and do you know what
it was?
Freedom at Midnight
by Dominique Lapierre!’

Was she being serious?
Freedom at Midnight
is terrible schlock pop-history – the Indian Independence Movement for Imbeciles – hardly the sort of book you would expect to find a senior South Asian statesman admitting to reading. Moreover, its account of the events of 1947 is deeply biased against Pakistan, and presents Jinnah as little more than a crazed megalomaniac. Assuming she was joking and now regarded the purchase as an embarrassing mistake, I laughed – only for it to become immediately clear that she was in fact entirely serious.

‘… So it was really rather nice: we were obviously reading the same reviews. We shared a lot in the political, historical, intellectual sense.’

‘I never really liked that book,’ I ventured. ‘I thought …’

‘Well, I rather enjoyed it,’ she said firmly, before returning to her flow of paternal reminiscences. ‘As a child I used to love going through my father’s library and sitting and reading the different books. He inculcated in me this tremendous love of reading.’

What about Benazir’s siblings, I asked. How did they get on with their father?

‘He always spoiled my younger sister, Sanam; he literally didn’t have
any
expectations of her,’ she said. ‘She was born a little prematurely so she was smaller in size than the rest of us. My father was more protective of her, as if she was a little fragile doll who could not weather the storms of life. He thought I had a toughness that would enable me to weather the storms.’

And her brothers?

‘They would not be there,’ she said, her velvety tone now becoming distinctly chilly. ‘They would not be sitting with my father or me discussing these things.’

Throughout our conversation it was very striking, the ease with which Benazir could shift from being Zulfi Bhutto’s bubbly, slightly sentimental daughter with a highly developed taste for mint choc-chip ice cream, to the tough, sometimes frosty Prime Minister of Pakistan, heavy with the
gravitas
of office. Her 1988 autobiography
Daughter of the East
contains innumerable swings of this sort, most memorably in the chapter in which she describes her father’s death. After a brave and genuinely moving passage recording the last meeting of father and daughter, she blows it all by describing how ‘my little cat, Chun-Chun, abandoned her kittens’ in sympathy. There follows a scene when she suddenly wakes up on the night of her father’s hanging. Georgette Heyer or even Barbara Cartland at her most excitable could not have improved on Benazir’s rendering of the scene:

‘No!’ the scream burst through the knots in my throat. ‘No!’ I couldn’t breathe, didn’t want to breathe. Papa! Papa! I felt cold, so cold. I felt as if my body was literally being torn apart. How could I go on?… The skies rained tears of ice that night …

Those who know her say that there have always been these two quite distinct Benazir Bhuttos. The emotional socialite from the wealthy background is generally the Benazir remembered by her Oxford friends: a glitzy, good-looking Asian babe who drove to lectures in a yellow MG, wintered in Gstaad, and who to this day still talks of the thrill of walking down the Cannes lido with her hunky younger brother and being ‘the centre of envy: wherever Shahnawaz went, women would be bowled over’. This Benazir – known to her friends as ‘Bibi’ or ‘Pinky’ –
adores
royal biographies and slushy romances (in her old Karachi bedroom I found stacks of well-thumbed Mills & Boons, including
An Affair to Forget, Stolen Heart, Sweet Impostor, The Winds of Winter
and two copies of
The Butterfly and the Baron
). This Benazir still has a weakness for dodgy seventies easy listening (‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree’ is apparently at the top of her frequent-play list) and weepy seventies movies (her favourite, one of her London friends told me, is Barbra Streisand’s remake of
A Star is Born
). This is the Benazir who has an enviable line in red-rimmed fashion specs, who still goes weak at the knees at the sight of
marrons glacés
and who deep down, so I was assured
by her best friend in Karachi, is still ‘as soft as a marshmallow’.

The other Benazir Bhutto is a very different kettle of fish. This is the ambitious Ms Bhutto who stayed on a whole year at Oxford after taking her degree, lobbying relentlessly for months on end to make sure that she would become President of the Union. After martial law was declared in Pakistan in 1979, this Ms Bhutto led marches, fought stave-wielding riot police and sustained long periods of imprisonment in squalid jails in an attempt to save her father from General Zia’s noose; then after he was hanged and she was released, she bravely took on Zia and rallied the opposition. This Ms Bhutto did not let herself cry in front of her father’s guards after she was led away for the last time from his death cell; nor did she break three years later, when her beloved brother Shahnawaz was poisoned, possibly by Zia’s agents. She fought hard for seven long years, until Zia’s death and the elections that made her, at the age of thirty-five, the first woman to head a Muslim state since Raziyya Sultana, Queen of Delhi in the early thirteenth century. This Ms Bhutto, Thatcher-like, is today renowned throughout Islamabad for chairing twelve-hour cabinet meetings and for surviving on four hours’ sleep. This Benazir Bhutto is, in other words, fearless – sometimes heroically so – and as hard as nails.