Benazir Bhutto's Martyrdom

Yesterday morning when I heard Amy Goodman’s voice saying, “We just received a news from Pakistan that Benazir Bhutto …” I stopped breathing for a second. I did not want her to finish her sentence, which she did after an eternity: “was murdered.”


Benazir, was one of my heroines, not for her being perfect, which she was not, but for her existence and for her dynamism. She was especially appealing to me for being from that part of the world, being half Iranian, being the daughter of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, being so shrewd, being so courageous that in such a male-dominated society even daring to dream of becoming what she became, her amazing strength, her exotic beauty, her conflicted personality, her passion for politics and, finally, her willingness to fight, her amazing drive for life, her freshness and ever-lasing youth, her originality and, finally, being the daughter of an Ali Bhutto, being proud of him and still refusing to be his relic. She was an engaging novel which I could not stop reading.

Of course, we all came to know her from her father, one of two democratically-elected premier in this turbulent part of the world. He did not finish his term. A military coup lead by Muhammad Zia ul-Haque ended him in an execution, and that was when Benazir made her debut in politics as the head of the Pakistan People’s Party.

I became interested in Pakistani politics since Ali Bhutto’s time. He was the "event" of our time in that part of the world, where everything was meant to stay in the status quo and where a heavy curtain had shielded it from the world’s events. Ali Bhutto came as a hope, a new voice, democracy vs. coup, campaign, election, people, votes, everything which was supposed to belong only to the West was now in our neighborhood. He made such a contrast with General Yahya Khan, who looked like a giant lobster. (He was always drunk, and the only person in the world who found him charming was Empress Farah!) In addition to all that, I also had a personal reason to think about Pakistan. My sister was a student in the University of Karachi, and so Pakistan was part of our daily conversation.

When Benazir was campaigning, I was in the United States, and my good friend Nafisa Hoodbhoy, a journalist in the Pakistani daily English language newspaper Dawn, with her annual trips to the New York, brought to us Pakistan’s news, front and center. I still possess a taped interview of Benazir right before her election. She was talking about democracy, about the people, about the judiciary, although not about the military. (I also recall how disappointed I was in her hasty marriage to a man who caused her downfall.)

Having a political father, Benazir was considered a Pakistani Indira Gandhi, though it was not to be so. While Indira Gandhi always remained the daughter of Nehru, and remained a conventional symbolic women politician who continues an existing tradition, Benazir’s inner zeal made her anything but another Ghandi. She was born as a genuine politician who incidentally had a politician as a father. She rightly admired her own father and wanted to follow his legacy. (Was there any other worthwhile legacy in Pakistan?)

Her passion for politics and public life was an avalanche, nothing could stop it, just as nothing could stop her from being a women. I recall that it was in the middle of the bloody protests between her two terms that it was discovered that she was five months into her second pregnancy. (She went through three pregnancies during her premiership or campaigning.)

Her voice became the voice of people, the voice of those of whose very existence we did not know. When she won the election, after Zia’s aircraft accident, when there was no time for the military to substitute another dictator in his place and when there was no time to intimidate the people, we noticed the masses participated and elected a young woman of only thirty-six years without any reluctance, as if it is the most natural thing. That was when we saw another face of Pakistan in the form of the premier they elected, modern, educated, active, and progressive, with an ideal which was the people’s ideal, democracy.

Politically, she was shrewd and sharp, though she made many mistakes. During her premiership she was not able to fulfill her promises; she was not able to bring about that much of the social justice and the rule of law to the country. During her trip to the United States, in one of her interviews, with Charlie Rose, she explained the kind of society she has to deal with. It was a society in which Islamic law permits an eighty years old man to marry a nine years old girl in return for unpaid debts her parents owe him; in which women have been pushed into the cruel laws of “marriage to the Koran” just to keep them out of actual marriage to prevent the ownership of land transfer to another family; in which you cannot even report rape in a newspaper, for it is considered obscene; in which rape victims are indeed punished as fornicators; in which she was not permitted to talk in public with her own people about these problems. And it was in this vicious circle that she was supposed to live, to govern, and to find a way out.

There is a song I like very much by my favorite singer, Rod Stewart, Forever Young. Whenever I hear it, only a few people come to my mind and Benazir is one of them. For over quarter of century in politics, dealing with sharks every day, she lived relentlessly, in the male-dominated politics of Pakistan and its military, which is indeed the country’s most corrupt institution; the country in which almost every premier is toppled or assassinated or hung; the country in which some part of it is not under any rule or law, and the other part is under harsh sharia law; the country which is surrounded by hostile forces; and the country which, in its short life, has been more involved in war than in peace. I heard part of her speech right before her assassination; the voice was as energetic and as fresh of the same young women who, with her stunning beauty, addressed a joint session of the American legislature. I do recall her speech very well “We are here to tell to the democratic nations of the world that yes we can be a democratic state, to the Islamic world, yes we can be a democratic Muslim nation, and to the women, yes, yes, we can be there too.” I will never forget her proud poise. Although speeches of this kind are written and are well-crafted by teams of speech writers, I think this particular statement was from the depth of Benazir’s personality, a striking personality, which struck us all with all her genius as well as all her mishaps and faults. She was the most unconventional, as a Muslim woman,  or as a Pakistani of her age. Her passion for politics transfixed  those of us interested in her as if we were watching a tight-rope walker. We followed her, holding our breath lest she fall. Ah, alas she fell!

While speculation on the identity of her murderers continues, while the parties who seemed to be interested in her elimination each try to divert attention to someone else, we feel acutely that a creature of legendary proportion has ceased to live with us and, like all her kind, she is more dangerous to her enemies as a martyr than when she lived amongst us. While my heart is with her family, particularly her children, still I have a hard time thinking of people like Benazir as dead. Such heroes are forever alive.

P.S. On a personal note, my deep condolences to my friends Nafisa and Javid and Nadia. I hope Benazir’s martyrdom represents is a new page on your country’s history, not as and bleak as Tariq Ali predicted this morning in his interview with Amy Goodman.