Pakistan's Flawed and Feudal Princess

One of Benazir Bhutto’s more dubious legacies to Pakistan is the Prime Minister’s house in the middle of Islamabad.

The building is a giddy pseudo-Mexican ranch house with white walls and a red tile roof. There is nothing remotely Islamic about the building which, as my minder said when I went there to interview the then Prime Minister Bhutto, was "P.M's own design." Inside, it was the same story. Crystal chandeliers dangled sometimes two or three to a room; oils of sunflowers and tumbling kittens that would have looked at home on the Hyde Park railings hung below garishly gilt cornices.

The place felt as though it might be the weekend retreat of a particularly flamboyant Latin American industrialist; but in fact it could have been anywhere. Had you been shown pictures of the place on one of those T.V game-shows where you are taken around a house and then have to guess who lives there, you might have awarded this hacienda to virtually anyone except, perhaps, to the Prime Minister of an impoverished Islamic Republic situated next door to Iran.

Which is, of course, exactly why the West has always had a soft spot for Benazir Bhutto. Her neighbouring heads of state may have been figures as unpredictable and potentially alarming as President Ahmadinejad of Iran and a clutch of opium-trading Afghan warlords, but Bhutto has always seemed reassuringly familiar to Western governments- one of us. She spoke English fluently because it was her first language. She had an English governess, went to a convent run by Irish nuns, and rounded off her education with degrees from Harvard and Oxford.

"London is like a second home for me,” she once told 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 up from Oxford just for an ice cream, and then drive back again. That was my idea of sin." It was difficult to image any of her neighbouring heads of state- even India’s earnest Sikh economist, Manmohan Singh, talking like this.

For the Americans, meanwhile, what Benazir Bhutto wasn't was possibly more attractive even than what she was: she wasn't a religious fundamentalist, she didn’t have a beard, she didn't organise rallies where everyone shouts 'Death to America,' and she didn't issue fatwas against Booker-winning authors- even though Salman Rushdie went out of his way to ridicule her as the Virgin Ironpants in Shame.

However the very reasons that make the West love Benazir Bhutto are the same that leave many Pakistanis with second thoughts. Her English may be fluent, but you can't say the same about her Urdu which she spoke like a well-groomed foreigner: fluently but ungrammatically. Her Sindhi was even worse: apart from a few imperatives, she is completely at sea.

English friends who knew Benazir at Oxford remember a bubbly babe who drove to lectures in a yellow M.G, wintered in Gstaad, and who to used to talk 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- adored royal biographies and slushy romances: in her old Karachi bedroom I found stacks of well-thumbed Mills and Boons including An Affair To Forget, Sweet Imposter and two copies of The Butterfly and the Baron. This same Benazir also had a weakness for dodgy Seventies Easy Listening -Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree was apparently at the top of her frequent-play list. This is the same Benazir who had an enviable line in red-rimmed fashion specs, and who went weak at the knees at the sight of marron glacee

But there was something much more magestic- even imperial- about the Benazir I met when she was Prime Minister. She both walked and talked in a deliberately measured and regal manner, and frequently used the royal ‘we’. During my interview, she took a full three minutes to float down the hundred yards of lawns separating the Prime Minister’s house from the chairs where I had been told to wait for her. 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. Her hair was arranged in a sort of baroque beehive topped by white gauze dupatta. The whole painted vision reminded me of one of those aristocratic Roman princesses in Caligula.

This Benazir was a very different figure to that remembered by her Oxford contemporaries. This one was renowned throughout Islamabad for chairing twelve hour-long cabinet meetings and for surviving on four hours sleep. This was the Benazir who continued campaigning after the suicide bomber attacked her convoy the very day of her return to Pakistan last month, and who blithely disregarded the mortal threat to her life in order to continue fighting. This other Benazir Bhutto, in other words, was fearless- sometimes heroicly so- and as hard as nails.

More than anything, perhaps, Benazir was in the end a feudal princess with the aristocratic sense of entitlement that came with owning great tracts of the country, and the western-leaning tastes that such a background tends to give. It was this that gave her both the sophisticated gloss and the tough feudal grit which distinguished her political style.

In this, she was typical of many Pakistani politicians. Real democracy has never thrived in Pakistan in part because landowning remains the principle social base from which politicians emerge. The educated middle class—which in India gained control in 1947—in is Pakistan still largely excluded from the political process. As a result, in many of the more backward parts of Pakistan the local feudal landowner can expect his people to vote for his chosen candidate. As the writer Ahmed Rashid put it, “In some constituencies if the feudals put up their dog as a candidate, that dog would get elected with ninety-nine per cent of the vote.”

Today Benazir is being hailed as a martyr for freedom and democracy; but far from being a natural democrat, in many ways Benazir was the person who brought Pakistan’s strange variety of democracy- really a form of ‘elective feudalism’ - into disrepute, and who helped fuel the current apparently unstoppable growth of the Islamists.

For Bhutto was no Aung San Suu Kyi. During her first twenty-month long premiership, astonishingly, she failed to pass a single piece of major legislation. Amnesty International accused her government of having one of the world's worst records of custodial deaths, killings and torture.

Within her own party, she declared herself the lifetime president of the PPP, and refused to let her brother Murtaza challenge her. When he persisted in doing so, he ended up shot dead in highly suspicious circumstances outside the family home. Murtaza’s wife Ghinwa, and her daughter Fatima, as well as Benazir’s own mother, all firmly believed that Benazir gave the order to have him killed.

As recently as this Autumn, Benazir did and said nothing to stop President Musharraf ordering the US and UK-brokered “rendition” of her rival Nawaz Sharif to Saudi Arabia, and so remove from the election her most formidable rival. Many of her supporters regarded her deal with Musharraf as a betrayal of all her party stood for.

Behind Pakistan’s endless swings between military government and democracy lies a surprising continuity of elitist interests: to some extent, Pakistan’s industrial, military and landowning classes are all interrelated, and they look after each other. They do not, however, do much to look after the poor. The government education system barely functions in Pakistan, and for the poor, justice is almost impossible to come by. According to the political scientist Ayesha Siddiqa, “Both the military and the political parties have all failed to create an environment where the poor can get what they need from the state. So the poor have begun to look to alternatives for justice. In the long term, flaws in the system will create more room for the fundamentalists.”

In the West many right-wing commentators on the Islamic world such as Michael Gove and Martin Amis tend to see the march of political Islam as the triumph of an anti-liberal and irrational ‘Islamo-fascism’. Yet much of the success of the Islamists in countries such as Pakistan comes the Islamists ability to portray themselves as champions of social justice, fighting people like Benazir Bhutto from the Islamic elite that rules most of the Muslim world from Karachi to Beirut, Ramallah and Cairo. This elite the Islamists successfully depict as rich, corrupt, decadent and and westernised. Benazir in particular had a reputation for massive corruption: during her government, the anti-corruption organization Transparency International named Pakistan one of the three most corrupt countries in the world, and Bhutto and her husband, Asif Zardari—widely known as “Mr 10%”—faced allegations of plundering the country; charges were filed in Pakistan, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States to investigate their various bank accounts

When I interviewed Abdul Rashid Ghazi in the Islamabad Red Mosque shortly before his death in the storming of the complex in early July, he returned over and again to these central issues of social justice: “We want our rulers to be honest people,” he repeated. “But now the rulers are living a life of luxury while thousands of innocent children have empty stomachs and can’t even get basic necessities.”

This is the reason for the rise of the Islamists in Pakistan, and why so many people support them: they are the only force capable of taking on the country’s landowners and their military cousins. This is why in all recent elections, the Islamist parties have hugely increased their share of the vote, why they now already control both the North West Frontier Province and Baluchistan, and why it is they who are most likely to gain from the current crisis.

Benazir Bhutto was a courageous, secular, and liberal woman. But sadness at the demise of this courageous fighter should not mask the fact that as a pro-Western feudal who did little for the poor, she was as much a central part of Pakistan’s problems, as the solution to them.