₦airaland Forum

I picked up a sudden interest in Benazir Bhutto and the events surrounding her and Pakistan in 2007 after reading Tariq Ali’s Clash of Civilisations. So I was very happy to come across Benazir Bhutto: Daughter of the East, her autobiography. Autobiographies usually have angles and insider views that are absent in biographies.

Benazir Bhutto came from a very privileged family. Her family’s wealth was so vast that before the first land reforms in Pakistan, it was among the largest employers of agricultural workers in Sindh Province. Their land was measured in square miles and not acres and in Pakistan land automatically means power and wealth. She recounted in the book how as children they loved to hear the story of the British conqueror of Sindh, Charles Napier. In 1843 while touring the Province, he repeatedly asked his driver whose lands they were passing and the driver kept answering Bhutto’s. The conqueror eventually said-“wake me up when we are off Bhutto’s lands”. He was surprised when he woke up on his own after a while and asked whose lands they were passing and still heard “Bhutto’s”.

Benazir was born in Karachi in 1953.For most part of her life, her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had been in Government. He founded the Pakistani Peoples Party in 1967 which till today remains the largest and most influential political party in Pakistan. She was twenty years old when he got elected as the Prime Minister of Pakistan becoming the first person to be directly elected by the people of Pakistan. Benazir attended Harvard and just like her father before her proceeded to Oxford. In 1976 she was elected President of the Oxford Union making her the first woman of Asian descent to head the prestigious debating society. This was where she met Tariq Ali when he was invited for a debate by the society. Surprisingly, contrary to the criticism he levelled against her Government and family in his book, she only referred to him in glowing terms in hers.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was overthrown by his Chief of Army, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in 1977 and from then, the lives of the Bhuttos became a struggle. Her father was kept in protective custody and subsequently charged for conspiracy in a political murder. Benazir and her mother were kept under house arrest while her father languished in jail. After a kangaroo trial, he was subsequently sentenced to death. An international campaign was led against the sentence and despite worldwide appeal for clemency from several quarters, Zilfikar Ali Bhutto was killed in April, 1979.Benazir Bhutto described in detail, the painful last visit she and her mother paid him in his prison cell some hours before his execution.

After her father’s execution, they were subjected to several arrests and detention spanning months at a time for several years. She described how she used to pour water all over her body to find some respite from the scorching heat in her prison cell .She and her mother were both refused to travel outside the country for medical treatment even in the face of glaring evidence that Mrs Bhutto was suffering from cancer. It took some time before General Zia-ul-Haq eventually succumbed to pressure and allowed them both to travel abroad for medical treatment. In 1984 Benazir became the leader in exile of the Pakistani People’s Party in the United Kingdom and continued exposing the terror P, http://questionmarkmag.com/2010/10/benazir-bhutto-daughter-of-the-east/