Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir (44 page)

Suhail, like all the others who spent their lives under the powerful shadow of the PPP, was disappointed by the party’s short turn in government. ‘When I met Mir in the run-up to the ’
88
elections he
was conscious that the coming time was going to be difficult – it wasn’t just time to celebrate. Now Zia was gone, the party had to deliver.’
²
When the party left office leaving nothing concrete in its wake, people snapped out of the reverie that they’d built around Benazir and her promise of democracy. It had been a government manufactured entirely around promise, not principles. A state founded on the slippery premise of potential and legacy but nothing tangible in terms of grassroots work or ideology. Benazir was out of power and her husband, Asif Zardari, began his first stint in jail for the millions he’d taken while his wife was Prime Minister. It was rumoured that Zardari, who fancied himself a polo player, had built air-conditioned stables for his ponies – all imported, of course – in a country where Karachi, the commercial capital, often went without electricity for days (and still does). The ponies were pampered and fed almonds and milk daily. Zulfikar’s cousin, Mumtaz Bhutto, the head of the Bhutto tribe, who was a founding member of the PPP, and Benazir’s paternal uncle, spoke out openly against Zardari: a criminal who has made his way to power, he called him in the press. (Within three months of Zardari ascending to the presidency in
2008
, Mumtaz was arrested. ‘He steals our name and our history and then he thinks he can eliminate us one by one,’ local newspapers quoted Mumtaz as saying.)

‘It was after Benazir and then Nawaz Sharif’s governments fell that there was immense pressure on Murtaza from his people in Pakistan. He was a political figure, he always had been, and he had political cadres behind him,’ Suhail says. ‘And they felt that the time for Murtaza had come and that he should participate in the next elections and play his due role in Pakistan’s politics.’

Maulabux, one of those political workers, speaks forcefully when I mention this idea of the prodigal son returning home. ‘In our culture, the
asl waris
, or true heir, was Mir
baba
.’
³
The assumption was that Benazir’s brothers were not in Pakistan during the time that Benazir built her political career under Zia because it was too dangerous for them to remain in their country. Zulfikar had sent his sons out of the country specifically because he saw them as the inheritors of his throne. ‘The unsaid understanding,’ Mauli continues, ‘was that whatever
Benazir did at that time she did as a representative of her family, not as Benazir the individual, but as Benazir the child of Bhuttos.’

Mauli understands how this must sound, this trying to explain to me that we are our families, nothing more defined, nothing more unique than that. He’s also talking to another eldest child, a daughter ironically. ‘Look,’ he starts again, measuring his words, ‘it’s the same in Baloch culture, in Pathan culture – even in Western cultures, isn’t it? – it’s the eldest son’s role, duty even, to take over the father’s work whether it is farming, business or politics.’ Mauli stops. ‘
Bibi
,’ he says, ‘Bhutto
ka waris
Bhutto
hai
.’ ‘Bhutto’s heir is a Bhutto’. Benazir had become a Zardari. It’s a not so subtle reminder to me too, though Mauli is taking pains to make sure I don’t take his explanation to heart – I’m single after all; there’s no reason to take it personally, not yet at least.

‘It’s not about heirs or patriarchy,’ Suhail corrects me when I put the idea to him. ‘Mir had the same background as Benazir – he was a Bhutto, had a strong relationship with his father too, and also struggled against a dictator. But that’s all Benazir had. Murtaza had the clean hands, the corruption- and compromise-free record, and the ideological understanding of socialist politics.
That’s
what threatened his sister.’

The PPP worker cadres, almost uniformly made up of men in their early thirties who had come of age under the Zia dictatorship, seemed to agree. Hameed Baloch, from the opposite end of Karachi, in Malir, had worked under Benazir during the MRD period and as an office bearer in her first government. ‘The youth elements of the party, the frontline workers in the Zia period were supporters of Murtaza and they wanted him back.’ His disillusionment with Benazir was for the same reason as most of the old-school supporters who had started to leave the party under the new leadership. ‘It had been taken over by Zardari and his corruption – there was no history to the party any more, no ideology, it had become a money-making operation.’
⁴

‘In the twenty months of his sister’s rule, Mir maintained his silence’ Suhail reminds me. ‘Even though he saw and disagreed with what was going on. He took a very political and democratic path: he decided to contest elections. He didn’t return and demand his title. He set himself up for a fight. How many people, you tell me, have
contested elections from abroad and won?’ Suhail asks, raising his eyebrows. He’s right, I only know of one.

In the summer of 1993, Murtaza made up his mind. He was going home. He called Ghinwa, who had taken Zulfi to Oklahoma for the summer to visit her elder sister, Racha, and told her to come back home; he was going to contest the election. Ghinwa cut her trip short and flew home. I was away with my grandmother, Joonam, and was also put on a flight and bundled home. Murtaza spoke to his mother, who still held – and not for much longer – an honorary chairpersonship in the party. Murtaza asked Nusrat for the application forms to file for election tickets. But it was Benazir, the active Chairperson, who along with her husband had the task of choosing the party’s candidates.

Benazir spoke to her brother directly. She refused him a ticket straight out and offered him some advice: if he was serious about coming back to Pakistan then he ought to leave Syria, a rogue state in her estimation, and settle in London for a few years, long enough to expunge any taint of socialism, and then they could talk about him running on a party ticket, maybe in an election or two. Benazir was a consummate bully; she had got her own way for too long.

Murtaza had been a card-carrying member of the People’s Party since it was founded. He had paid his dues and had given the party his life, as he saw it. No, he finally insisted to his sister, I’ll contest
this
election. Murtaza asked for nine tickets – all of which were eventually handed out to Zardari and his cronies. Benazir pushed back and rejected his request. ‘I can’t give you and your people nine seats,’ she said and offered him a provincial seat in some backwoods constituency. None of us at the time could imagine why Benazir was so frightened of her younger brother.

Explaining Benazir’s trepidation, Aftab Sherpao, a former vice-president of the PPP and the leader of his own faction now, puts it frankly. ‘She was vindictive. She got the feel for power and didn’t want to let go. She removed Begum Bhutto from the party because she was afraid of your father. She was on the weaker wicket; the Bhutto legacy was his, not hers, and this was always at the back of her mind.’
⁵
It was at the end of 1993 that Benazir ousted her mother, who had spent
the better part of the year campaigning for Murtaza, from her largely ceremonial post as honorary Chairperson and installed herself as Chairperson for Life, an actual title.

Sherpao had once been a trusted colleague of Benazir’s in the party. He would even deputize for her when she travelled, albeit watched carefully by two Benazir loyalists, who ensured he didn’t deviate from any key agenda points. It was her political insecurity, culminating in the imposition of her chairpersonship in perpetuity, that Sherpao saw as the cause of their break. ‘I even said in the press,’ he says, using the dirty P word, one Benazir never liked (especially if it was preceded by the even dirtier F word – foreign), ‘that if we had elections for party chairperson, no one would have opposed her! What’s the fear? Instead she had some mock election where the Central Committee members were asked if they opposed her life chairpersonship and the results were never shown to the party workers. The sacrifices made by the party – everyone has a limited share in them.’ Sherpao, whose brother Hayat was assassinated early in the party’s history, eventually left Benazir and formed his own PPP. ‘Whether you’ve been lashed, jailed, cast a vote, you are an asset of the party,’ he tells me over cardamom-scented tea at his home in Islamabad. ‘We’ve all contributed – my brother did, I did. This isn’t anyone’s personal fiefdom – it belongs to us all.’

But the party had become feudal turf; there wasn’t room for charismatic leaders from across the party, or indeed, the family. All the old guard of the party made allusions to Benazir’s treatment of her mother during party meetings. It was embarrassing, they would murmur, eyes downcast.

‘Nine seats in all of Pakistan,’ my mother says to me later as we stand in our kitchen and discuss our past and the book I’m writing that is making us relive it chapter by chapter. ‘It is how she sidelined him since taking over the party. She virtually eliminated Murtaza – he had become a burden to her. There was simply no space for him.’ Eventually, the seat that Murtaza had asked for as his first choice – PS 204, the Bhutto home seat of Larkana, where Zulfikar built the family home that would become Murtaza’s residence – was given to a newcomer called Munawar Abbassi. Locals knew him as the
landlord who had bestowed an
ajrak,
a Sindhi sign of hospitality, around General Zia’s neck the first time he visited Larkana.

Murtaza decided to run as an independent and began to prepare for the race of his life. It must be said, because it cannot be left out, that nothing in Pakistan moves without the pull and sway of the Intelligence service. While Benazir corralled family members like Sanam, and distant friends and acquaintances, to dissuade Murtaza from returning home, the Intelligence – it’s easy to see now, in hindsight – made some calls of its own to assess how serious the rift in the Bhutto family was. How far they reached and what influence they sought to have, I don’t know, but a public feud opened a space for those who wished to work against the family. In Benazir’s mind, her decisions always had the blessing of the all-powerful political establishment; this case was no different. In any event, the political establishment couldn’t have influenced Murtaza either way; that was their fundamental misunderstanding. If Papa won a seat in parliament, we were packing our bags. If he didn’t, we were staying put in our Damascus home. That was our family deal.

In August 1993, Ghinwa travelled to Pakistan with Zulfi to file Murtaza’s election papers as an independent candidate. Papa and I dropped them at Damascus International Airport to catch the midnight flight to Karachi. We sat in the departure lounge, eating stale mortadella and cheese sandwiches while Papa went over the process with Mummy. He told her what her schedule would be like, how to deal with the press, and mentioned the name Ali Hingoro to her – an old party worker who had once served as one of the inner core of Benazir’s security detail and had been shunted out in her post-power shakedown. Stay with Ali, Papa told Mummy, he’ll protect you. I remembered the name because it sounded incongruous, Italian almost. ‘Ali is a diehard worker,’ Papa said. Diehard.

By morning Mummy had touched down at Jinnah Airport and was met by thousands of people who had come to welcome her. ‘Zulfi got scared because of all the shouting and the slogans,’ she remembered. ‘We walked off the tarmac into Joonam’s car and went straight to Lyari to condole with some workers’ families – it was my first introduction to Pakistan’s condolence culture . . .’ (There is a bitter laugh
and a pause. We would all become very well acquainted with our country’s condolence culture.) They filed Papa’s papers first in Lyari and were mobbed by throngs of the neighbourhood women who came out to dance and celebrate the occasion. From there Mummy travelled by road to the poorest parts of Sindh, to Dadu, Badin and Thatta, and presented her husband’s candidacy. The usual six-hour drive from Karachi to Larkana took their convoy of cars an agonizing eighteen hours because of all the crowds along the way.

After a strenuous two weeks, Mummy and Zulfi returned to Damascus. I was waiting for them. We had fifteen days to regroup and then go out for the second campaign push. It was an exciting time. Papa asked me to take his photograph for the various posters that were going to be plastered across Sindh. We took sombre and serious pictures – nothing flashy, him wearing an
ajrak
, him sitting on a chair. Basic stuff, really, but I felt proud of my role as Papa’s official portrait photographer. I told my friends that I was going to Pakistan for two weeks to campaign for my father. If he won, we’d be leaving. No one took me very seriously. We always spoke of going home to this Pakistan place (Bakistan in the Syrian accent), but everyone thought of me as Syrian ultimately.

In Pakistan we hit the road running. We drove for twenty-one hours a day, stopping at small towns and villages along the way to speak at neighbourhood markets and canvass for Papa among local merchants and traders. I had, up until that point, only visited the chic suburbs of Karachi and our ancestral homeland of Larkana. I’d never been into the interior. It was a shock. We climbed the roofs of mud houses to stand on barely cemented tiles to speak to crowds; we commiserated with families who had lost children to suicide because of the lack of employment opportunities; we went to weddings at night that were punctuated not by music or dancing but by rifle fire; we ate all our meals from communal plates crawling with flies.

At one resthouse, in Thatta, we found our bedroom ceiling covered with lizards. Mummy and I slept with
ajraks
over our faces to protect ourselves from any untimely falls. In the bathroom of another resthouse, I went to brush my teeth in the morning only to find that the
bucket of water that served as our sink was also home to a family of tadpoles. I ran next door to warn Joonam that the water was contaminated only to find her washing her face. ‘There are tadpoles in the water!’ I shrieked, trying to stop her. ‘Thank God there’s water, Fati,’ Joonam responded nonchalantly and carried on washing.