Benazir and Indira Gandhi
Farzana Versey

BRAVE and courageous. These words have not yet been applied to Nawaz Sharif who returned to a turbulent Pakistan, but Benazir Bhutto was honored with such terms. She died on what people will now see as those terms. As the first Muslim woman to become head of state, she came with a readymade bona-fide of martyr-rebel. “Despite threats of death, I will not acquiesce to tyranny, but rather lead the fight against it,” she had said recently. If she would have got the opportunity, it would have been the third time. Politics is about erring often enough to be human.
Benazir may have identified with India’s Rajiv Gandhi, but those were superficial similarities. Her real mirror, if it may be called so, was Rajiv’s mother, Indira Gandhi. Aside from the fact that both were ambitious women, they shared complete devotion to and obsession with their fathers. While Indira was India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s only child, it is rather interesting that despite the politics of the subcontinent, as indeed the world, being heavily patriarchal Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto chose his daughter over his sons as his political heir.
The two male parents became Svengali and nemesis, their ghosts continued to not merely haunt but hypnotize their daughters. When Indira first came into politics, she was called “goongi gudiya” (the dumb doll). Her whole political credo was therefore designed to hit back.
She was papa’s puppet. Naturally, in that small stage she had to move according to a pre-set rhythm. Katherine Frank’s biography talks about her paranoia regarding those she considered Nehru’s enemies. She felt they were “out to trap her father and bring him down”. What was happening is that she was fearful for herself. Even as puppet she wanted to be on center-stage. Perhaps, by getting her father to move away from the clique, she was subconsciously trying to claim complete ownership. Psychology would describe this as the Electra Complex. Neither Benazir nor Indira managed to strike out on their own in terms of policy or altering the role of the family as “monarchy”. Benazir, had she lived longer, would have brought her children into the political arena just as Indira did.
Dynastic rule in democracies or quasi democracies has been about perpetuating the name of the father. (The widow as successor is essentially legitimized only as “carrier” of the husband’s progeny.) The spouse is a prop, often a convenient one to act as buffer and even bear the brunt of blame. Indira’s marriage to Feroze Gandhi was a façade that went through moments of turmoil to keep it alive. In all likelihood, she took his name to try and be her own person and not merely the offspring of Nehru. Feroze was known to be a womanizer. Indira was aware of it. Her humiliation would be avenged only if he felt that while he had proved his manhood, he had lost out as the “nation’s son-in-law”.
Asif Ali Zardari came with similar credentials. Benazir settled into arranged matrimony and baby-producing to give Pakistan the sort of woman who did regular things and had descendants to perpetuate the royal pure blood. With such delusions, these women till the very last posed a threat only to themselves.
Indira saw imaginary demons. The result: The Emergency. Like all frightened people, she camouflaged her baseless theories about others trying to plot against her government and stall its functioning beneath self-righteousness, declaring that democracy was not more important than the nation. She could not even tolerate a peaceful resistance movement. She was found guilty of corrupt electoral practices by the Allahabad High Court.
Benazir was exiled to escape corruption charges. The pretence of being the people’s princess had to wear off once it was realized her father had been the emperor with no clothes. The veneer of statesman was wearing thin.
Is it any surprise that Benazir blatantly supported the Taleban regime in its initial years to make certain that the Afghans did not breathe down her neck? This was similar in manner to Indira propping up Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale as a leader in Punjab, when he was a non-entity. She and her younger son Sanjay used him till it was convenient.
The mistake we make is to confuse populism for popularity. There is no doubt that both these women had their ears to the ground; as opposed to the sons of the soil, they were the mothers of the earth. This again works well in the Electra Complex where the daughters aspire to replace the mother. In villages and remote towns it can have tremendous appeal. The poor and illiterate in our subcontinent like to be seen as loyal subjects being the benefactors of largesse. Political coquetry is a trait that comes with the territory.
To make the situation even better, both these women had the benefit of a Western education and an urbane lifestyle. This seems a bit ironical for they insisted on holding steadfastly to the dying socialist principles of their fathers. These principles were for the most part straw pillars meant for the masses; these families remained committed to feudalism in their own lives. They had the luxury of encouraging coteries without seeming to court anyone.
In India, Indira took away the privy purses, but kept the princes. She spoke about rationality, but had a hedonistic “godman” as a close confidante. She was suave and sophisticated, but she encouraged greasy middlemen. She spoke about “social democracy” but blatantly gave a fillip to underhand financial dealings that came to be known as “the license permit raj”. And she thrived on strife. This is how she came to support the Mukti Bahini in what was then East Pakistan and became Bangladesh.
An idol was born. A few years later, she had internalized the spook and reveled in the praise, “Indira is India, and India is Indira.” Benazir did not have to deal with such a coinage, perhaps because heading an Islamic country meant no idol worship. Instead, she deftly marketed herself as the broadminded, non-jihadi face of Pakistan. Her version of social democracy too was embedded in the old-fashioned ideals of dignity of other people’s labor while she sat back as her husband made the money and got to keep the change.
It takes some sleight of mind to master the act of playing both distressed damsel and the dominatrix-matriarch fiercely protective of everything around them and, as a consequence, their own position. While most women in “tough” roles are accused of mimicking men, as the “Only Man in the Cabinet” and “Ms. Virgin Ironpants”, Indira and Benazir demasculinized themselves. Talking about woman power, what they really did was to build a cottage industry of being wronged. Politics became not just a playground for suppressed emotions but a serious arena for catharsis.
Both women were elected to office twice. Indira Gandhi was shot dead by her most trusted bodyguard. No one has as yet suggested that it could well have been a Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) sympathizer who did Benazir in. She was the visible face of the party, but the ideology was dictated by the specter of Zulfiqar Ali. Some say that her niece Fatima Bhutto, who has made serious allegations against her aunt for the murder of her father Murtaza, could possibly play an important role.
If that were to happen, we would have one more “mind-controlled victim” avenging her father’s death and dreaming his dreams. Individual voices in Pakistan are being muffled by echoes of old thoughts. —Arab News


A born leader who straddled two worlds
Ian Jack

ONE of the hardest things to understand about Benazir Bhutto as a young woman was why she ever wanted to live again in Pakistan. It was not just that terrible things had happened to her there. So much of her seemed calibrated to the West. In 1986, when she was in her first London exile, a portrait of her had been commissioned to go with a piece I was writing. The photographer was Lord Snowdon. Most politicians, especially those from poor and chaotic countries, would have affected no great interest. Benazir was thrilled. She had a friend, Mrs Herbert Lom if I remember right, accompany us to the studio in Gloucester Road to make sure that her hair, make-up and dress were in good order. An odd assortment: Princess Margaret’s former husband behind the lens and, to the side of the camera with the lip gloss at the ready, the wife of the actor who played Peter Sellers’ twitching boss in the Pink Panther, both of them helping the 32-year-old woman, who would soon become the first elected woman leader of a Muslim country, to present her best face to the world. “Lord Snowdon!” she said in the car. “I am being photographed by Lord Snowdon!”
Together with her abiding sense of entitlement she had in those days an innocence and effervescence that made her hard to dislike. In private, she liked a gin and tonic, biographies of British royalty and English chocolates. She laughed easily — there was a generosity to her. On a visit to London after she became prime minister in 1988, she gave a little party at the Ritz and told us that Mrs Thatcher, whom she had just met, was an “amazing, marvellous woman, so kind to me”. In different circumstances, she would have come down from Oxford and landed a job in a merchant bank. In circumstances as they were, and remembering the cultural and political landscape at home, she knew to be wary. Once I asked her if she had ever danced. “No.” Never? “No.” What, a girl who had been president of the Oxford Union and joined anti-Vietnam demos at Harvard? “I used to be petrified of my father finding out and giving me hell.” I reminded her that her father had been a bit of a mover and shaker himself. She was resolute: “Good Muslim girls don’t dance with foreign men.” I pointed out that one such good Muslim girl, her own mother, had been photographed dancing with Gerald Ford at the White House. Benazir had the explanation off pat. Her mother had been taken unawares — Nixon had never asked her to dance — and it would have been insulting to say no to Ford. Her father, she said archly, had not returned the compliment by asking Betty Ford to dance.
The picture of Ford dancing with Nusrat Bhutto was big news on the streets of Pakistan in 1977, which is why I had remembered it. Photocopies taken from an American news magazine had been passed around the anti-Bhutto demonstrations, to prove that the Bhuttos were not “good Muslims”. Officially, the crowds were protesting against the rigging of the general election that had returned the Pakistan People’s Party to power with an overwhelming majority in the National Assembly. Benazir’s father was the one great politician Pakistan had produced, the son of a wealthy and influential landlord, Sir Shahnawaz Bhutto (who had married a convert from Hinduism), founder of a party that had “Roti, kapra, makan” (bread, clothing, shelter) as its slogan, whose heroes were nationalist modernisers such as Ataturk, Nasser and Sukarno. Like a previous generation of subcontinental politicians — Jinnah, Gandhi, Nehru — he had been called to the bar from a London inn of court. His showmanship and arrogance were well attested and often disliked, but in the spring of 1977 he seemed untouchable.
I first met Benazir during her father’s trial for murder. The victim was the father of a renegade People’s party member, Ahmed Raza Khan Kasuri, who had died when their car was hit by gunfire in 1974. In Punjab, the Kasuri case was well-known; long before Bhutto had been deposed and the trial announced. In court the evidence was thin and wrought from dubious confessions. The presiding judge was violently prejudiced against the accused but, even so, it seemed unlikely that the charge would stick, or, if it stuck, that Bhutto would be hung. Benazir knew better. She invited me, as she must have done with many foreign journalists, to a cosy supper in a Bhutto villa. Servants appeared only to serve the food. She was 25 then. In Pakistan, for a young woman to sit unchaperoned with a man behind closed doors was a remarkable event, and a mark of her desperation as much as of her time at Harvard and Oxford. She needed my help to save her father. It was immensely flattering, and of course entirely useless. Nothing could save her father. Benazir was the daddy’s girl — “Pinkie” to her family. Her father would return from foreign trips with dresses from Saks Fifth Avenue and tell her stories about great men and history: Alexander, Metternich, Talleyrand.
She would hear no word against him. Sometimes she would refer to him as “Papa” and at other times “Mr Bhutto” or “shaheed”, the martyr. Bhutto the autocrat and demagogue, the man who promised Pakistan would have a nuclear bomb “even if the people have to eat grass” — he made no appearance. A man without blemishes: “You see,” she said, “my father was brilliant, he was the shining star.” Leave aside the corruption charges against her and her husband: watching her on television in her later days, what struck me was her need of idolisation, the worship of crowds. She was a Bhutto, and with the name came a history of expectation and privilege brought about by generations of worshipful deference from the peasantry of Sindh. Of her bravery, there was never any question. By her early thirties, she had been imprisoned, held under house arrest, seen a younger brother die, made a last prison visit to her father, now ruined by dysentery and gum disease, on the night before his execution. But the eventual question is, what was she being brave for? “Democracy” and “the people of Pakistan” were always her answers.
The encouragement of Washington and the West may have helped rather than hindered this bravery. It maybe a cliche but it is none the less true: she lived in two worlds. In the 1980s you might meet her at her flat in the Barbican, or the mews houses of friends and relations in Swiss Cottage or Knightsbridge. There the company would be mixed, men with women, and the conversation in English and general. Then you might go to a party meeting in Hounslow, the sexes split between rooms, Benazir the only woman in a room filled with men, and the conversation in Urdu or Punjabi or Sindhi, urgent and specific. Men smiled at her, who knew with what sincerity, over their kebabs.
She was insistent that Islam awarded equal rights to men and women. At the end of one of our interviews in 1986, I asked her if the popular supposition was correct: that if and when she supplanted General Zia-ul-Haq she would become the first woman to rule a Muslim country. “Quite true,” she said and then remembered that a Queen Raziyya had ruled the Delhi sultanate in the 13th century. I checked the reference. According to a near-contemporary historian, Siraj, the queen had been “wise, just and generous” and endowed with all the qualities befitting a king. “But she was not born of the right sex, and so, in the estimation of men, all these virtues were worthless.” Eventually men had murdered her.

—Khaleej Times




Food for thought
Kelly O’Brien

LIKE most Americans, my experience with stateside Chinese food was limited the stuff we get delivered in cleverly folded cardboard tubs. Although I enjoyed my weekly mu-shu fix, I did harbor suspicions that it was not, perhaps, the most authentic culinary experience. Thus, I came to China ready for unfamiliar ingredients, determined to develop a taste for real Chinese cuisine. But my first glimpse of Chinese cooking culture actually came about a year prior to hopping my trans-Pacific flight.
Long before whetting America’s appetite for period China and Zhang Ziyi, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon director Ang Lee made an unassuming drama called Eat Drink Man Woman. The story centers on a widowed Taipei chef who struggles to hold his family together by doing the only thing he knows, cooking. With no dialogue to distract, the first five minutes follow the chef as he slices, steams, seasons, stir fries and otherwise seduces any viewer with functional taste buds.
When I rented a Chinese cooking movie, I certainly expected to see dishes I was unfamiliar with. What I did not expect was that the techniques would be just as exotic. I was captivated by the way the chef used his myriad cleavers, woks and steamers, so different from what I’d seen in Western kitchens. I knew in my heart and in my stomach that I had to learn more about Chinese cuisine. Conveniently, nine months later I found myself buying a one-way ticket to Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. Within a week I’d sampled Mongolian hotpot (with paper-thin lamb, a delicate ginger and date broth, and vegetables I couldn’t put a name to), naicha (salty Mongolian milk tea, served steaming in soup bowls) and more kinds of tofu than I had even believed possible. I had not anticipated the Chinese penchant for eating out, but I knew immediately that restaurants, from squalid to swanky, were going to be the learning experience I was looking for. Lesson number one: China does not have a food pyramid. The first time we were served potato noodles with bowls of rice on the side, my culinary sensibilities went into starch overload. I was immediately reminded of another food film, Big Night, where an Italian chef nearly expels two customers after they ask for a side of spaghetti with their risotto. After 23 years of eating meals with at least a nod to a carb-protein balance, I found myself adjusting my ideas of what foods belonged together. Adjustments, which, I soon discovered, had not gone far enough. My Chinese friends were excited by my enthusiasm for trying new foods, and thus took pleasure in ordering on my behalf. Not that I was complaining, as I couldn’t read the menus, but lunch one day with my Chinese friend Jackie sparked a conversation about culinary preconceptions. As we sat in Xiao PangPang’s, my favorite local restaurant, she ordered chaobing (fried strips of dough with pork and vegetables) and basi naipi (essentially, donuts).
When the waiter brought our meal, I laughed. I couldn’t help it. Pork and donuts were not what I was expecting when I set out for new and exciting culinary horizons. Jackie looked at me quizzically, which I’ve grown accustomed to as her mad foreign friend, and asked what was funny. As I explained about donuts and dessert, in general, I realized I’d just arrived at lesson number two: The sweet after savory rule, immutable though it may be in the West, holds no sway at Chinese tables.
Lesson number three is certainly the most profound and was actually the result of a broader realignment in my thinking. You see, along with bulging suitcases, I brought with me to China the preconception that Chinese food was the same whether you were dining in different regions.

(The Daily Mail-Beijing Review Articles Exchange Item)