On the Grand Trunk Road (23 page)
Read On the Grand Trunk Road Online
Authors: Steve Coll
All this seemed frequently to confuse the outside world, particularly the West. The West wanted to believe in Rajiv the airline pilot, the track-shoed scientific modernist, elected leader of the world’s most populous democracy, etc., etc. It did not want to believe in, or sometimes could not apprehend, Rajiv the boy-king, whose tantrums and manipulations flowed through the autocratic machinery he sat atop, occasionally expressing themselves at the far end as sticks wielded on skulls or large sums of hard currency transferred by wire to front companies banking in Switzerland.
During much of my time in South Asia, Rajiv was mainly a shadow. An Indian electorate fed up with his manipulations and the steady deterioration of the state machinery threw him out of office late in 1989, only to find his successors worse than many imagined possible. Because of this and in spite of himself, Rajiv seemed on the verge of a modest comeback when Dhanu blew him up in the late spring of 1991. The West would miss him, but not much. It was distracted as always, busy with Saddam and the end of communism. Besides, by the turn of the decade, the West was once burned, twice wary in South Asia. It had fallen in love with another democratic modernist, gone right off the deep end. But that affair had turned out badly.
I first saw Benazir Bhutto in New York’s Grand Hyatt Hotel in 1989, on a June night of driving rain. She had been elected seven months earlier as Pakistan’s first democratic prime minister since the overthrow of her father in 1977. She stood that night in the hotel’s third-floor ballroom, a striking figure with her flowing robes and cascading black hair, preaching to the converted, as she so frequently did in the West. In this case the assembly was a tuxedoed convocation of the Asia Society, big spenders and big thinkers in the stylish foreign policy set. Benazir wowed them with a prepared text about her plans for privatization and capitalism in Pakistan, plans she spoke about convincingly to Western faithful but did little to implement at home.
Toward the end of her speech, warming to the theme of democracy’s recent and triumphant return to Pakistan, she departed from her text to tell a story about a recent political tour she made in Sind, Jam’s country, where she was raised. Benazir described it as a long, blistering hot day of political rallies before “the masses,” as she so frequently called them. In an unnamed dusty provincial backwater, she paused for rest. As she sat in the shade, panting, a small boy brought her a Coca-Cola. She drank gratefully and then asked him how much it had cost. The boy said two rupees. She asked what the boy did for a living. He said he put air in bicycle tires. She asked what he earned. He said thirty rupees in a month, the equivalent of about $1.25. At this point, Benazir turned to her New York audience in white ties and gowns and said with utter seriousness, “This boy, he gave so much of his salary to buy me a Coca-Cola because he believed in an idea—an idea of freedom and democracy.” And then Benazir concluded to an ovation.
I stood listening in the back of the ballroom. I was leaving for South Asia in a couple of weeks and I had come to hear Benazir mainly out of curiosity. This Coca-Cola story made me very curious indeed. Fealty equals democracy and freedom.
But the story makes perfect sense when you set eyes on the feudal world where Benazir was raised on a sprawling estate as a landlord-politician’s daughter, whose birth signaled to all around her that she was entitled to rule should she choose to try. The acute misunderstanding of Benazir in the West—where throughout her long exile during the 1980s she courted opinion makers and the public with her smart looks, her credentials from Harvard and Oxford, her poise, and her undeniable courage—arose from the West’s inability or unwillingness to see this other Benazir, the princess-from-birth.
Ian Buruma proposes two Benazir Bhuttos, one whom he calls the “Radcliffe Benazir,” the other the “Larkana Benazir,” after the feudal Sind town of her birth. “So much about the Larkana Benazir smacks of kitsch; so much of the Radcliffe Benazir strikes one as half-baked,” Buruma wrote. That’s an apt formulation. Her autobiography brims with Larkana kitsch. Detained during martial law on a family estate, she writes with earnest outrage that the martial law regime is causing flowers in her family gardens to die because the regime has cut the number of gardeners from ten to three. “I join in the struggle to keep the gardens alive,” she writes. “I will them to survive, seeing in their struggle to live denied adequate water and nourishment my own struggle to survive denied freedom.” Ultimately, for all her courage and accomplishment, the most important prisons in Benazir Bhutto’s life have turned out to be not the physical jails in which she and her family were held at various points during the 1980s by the Zia martial law regime but the prisons of perception erected by her feudal origins.
Buruma and others wrote early on about the schizophrenia in Benazir’s outlook, contrasting among other things the privileged liberalism imparted by her Western university professors with the mythical romanticism taught by her father, who studied the life of Napoleon and modeled himself upon the French emperor. But few in the West paid attention. Benazir helped to promote this myopia not only with her dazzling charm but with her plausible insistence that there was no middle ground in Pakistan, that either you believed in Benazir and thus in democracy, or you believed in Zia and in the regressive, U.S. government-backed authoritarian rule of the Pakistan army’s martial law. People in and out of Pakistan who should have known better initially accepted her personalization of democratic politics, partly because, for as long as Zia refused to yield and hold elections, Benazir was a symbol of change and hope rather than a vessel of Sind’s traditional autocracies. But when Benazir was elected prime minister in 1989, after Zia’s death, the balance of her identity began to tilt.
As a young woman at Harvard and Oxford during the 1960s and 1970s, Benazir moved with ease through the Western liberal upper-middle classes, rewarded by that world’s admiration for individual achievement, even if it is propelled by privileged birth. She adapted like a chameleon to the West’s emerging emphases on appearance, style, wit, strength, feminist independence. She often said what those around her wanted to hear. But beginning in 1989, she adapted less well to the complexities of governing Pakistan after twelve years of martial law. She still told those around her what they wanted to hear, but this did not promote effective administration of a large, diverse, and impoverished country. More important, the longer she was in Pakistan, the more she seemed drawn psychologically and in very practical ways to Larkana, to the culture of the old estates. She embraced many of the Jams around her, doling out political franchises to the minor thug-rulers, including convicted murderers. She sanctioned corruption by refusing to act against, or even investigate, senior ministers and allies accused of stealing from the state. She did nothing to discipline a “student wing” in her party that waged an open, sustained war with automatic weapons against a rival ethnic group in Karachi. She rationalized these failures by trying to draw a distinction between corruption and patronage, saying the former was unacceptable but the latter was just part of business as usual in South Asia. But some of the deals she considered mere patronage certainly would have landed her in prison had she attempted to put them together in the West, whose democratic values she so conspicuously promoted in Pakistan. In any event, before this question could be fully resolved, Benazir succumbed, as Indira Gandhi did, to the paranoia of the court, seeing her enemies at work in every administrative frustration. She felt from the beginning of her reign as prime minister that she was being “destabilized from within,” as she put it in one conversation.
In response to this perceived destabilization campaign, Benazir and her allies in the Pakistan People’s Party undertook during the nineteen months they held office an elaborate game of “Spy versus Spy” in the capital of Islamabad with their enemies in the army and with the former political allies of Benazir’s arch-enemy, Zia. They spent their time and energy setting up videotaped “sting” operations to capture army officers attempting to bribe politicians into defecting from Benazir’s coalition. In fairness, having been persecuted by the army and having seen her father hanged and one brother murdered in exile, Benazir had far more reason than Indira ever did to believe in conspiracies. But like Rajiv, with whom she said she felt a kinship, Benazir wished to believe in the future, yet she could not shake off her past.
Each time I sat down with Benazir to talk in detail about her predicament in office, the conversation drifted toward the conspiracies she saw around her in her court. I would press her to elaborate, looking for facts that might yield an interesting story. She would begin cautiously, worried about being lured into foolishness or dangerous disclosure. Then she would plunge in, talking enthusiastically but often vaguely about the combinations at work against her. Over time, this tendency grew worse and worse. On August 6, 1990, the night she was finally thrown out of office by her opponents on corruption charges relating to the business activities of her husband and her senior ministers, she sat stunned on a couch in her brightly lit official home on a wooded hill in Islamabad. By now there was a single conspiracy and the leaders of this grand plot were merely “they.” “They killed my father because they knew that he would win any election he stood for,” she told us, the reporters gathered at her feet. “They know that I will win any election that I stand for.” Moreover, “they” made certain that she could not govern and now were determined to ruin her once and for all. “I repeatedly received reports about the attempts being made by certain quarters to destabilize my government,” she announced.
Would “they” ever give her another chance? “I doubt it. I doubt it,” she answered. “I don’t believe that they can face me politically. They couldn’t face me politically yesterday and they can’t face me politically today.”
By the fall of 1990, campaigning to regain office in a national election and fighting off a series of kangeroo-court corruption hearings, she reached the point where she apparently believed that her opponents were releasing secret gasses to cause her to faint in public. This particular allegation surfaced in October, when Benazir was crushed by one of the usual maddening crowds at a court hearing in Lahore. All of us inside the courtroom fought for our lives to get out of that crowd; it was killing, suffocating. But it did not seem terribly mysterious. Benazir fainted. So did others. But at a friend’s house the next day, she told us that she thought “it might have been some gas. I’ve been in much larger crowds. But I started blacking out. I would have fallen and been totally trampled. Not only myself but my former adviser felt he was getting heart failure. We feel that something was planned by the authorities.”
By that time it was hard not to feel sorry for Benazir, after all she had been through, after all she had once symbolized. Many of her former friends around the world were writing her off as a self-deluding despot, telling her to get help before it was too late. Her husband was in jail. Her father was dead. Her party was falling apart, breaking under the pressure of its opponents. All Benazir had left was her disintegrating court and her courage. But her courtiers were incompetent and her courage only gave her the strength to believe in fantasies. So you thought of her, blacking out in the midst of the crowd that for so many years had sustained her courage and ambition, feeling that she was having a heart attack, suffocating, and believing that it was all the work of her enemies.
Pakistanis tend to be far less tolerant of Benazir, remembering, as they do, her father’s opportunistic demogoguery twenty years ago while he ran his populist campaign for office. They remember, too, Zulfikar’s decidedly authoritarian streak as prime minister—his persecution of opponents, his assertion of personal power at the expense of democratic institutions, his princely self-image. These characteristics contributed to the bloody breakup of Pakistan in 1971, when Bangladesh gained independence. Pakistanis are also aware intuitively of what the Bhutto family’s attitudes, rooted in their status as feudal landlords and imperial servants, represent: the enduring power of land, and the susceptibility of the weak Pakistani polity to manipulation.
Around the time of Benazir’s dismissal from office, I went to see Tahira Abdullah, a women’s rights activist in Islamabad who felt thoroughly betrayed by Benazir’s reign. Tahira sneered articulately about the princess. “Have you seen her on American TV? She’s young, she’s charming, she’s Harvard and Oxford. She’s what the media dreamed of. Charm just oozes out of her. On
60 Minutes,
with Ed Bradley, there she was in her diamonds and pearls, talking about the poor women of Pakistan. It stinks. It’s hypocrisy of the highest order.”
60 Minutes,
with Ed Bradley, there she was in her diamonds and pearls, talking about the poor women of Pakistan. It stinks. It’s hypocrisy of the highest order.”
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