Daughter of the east by benazir bhutto



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Letters and telegrams piled up welcoming me to India. One even sug-gested that my father appoint me Ambassador to India! Journalists and feature writers scrambled to interview me and I was invited to speak on All India Radio. To my chagrin, my clothes became a national fashion event, an embarrassment to me not only because they were all borrowed from Samiya’s sister, my own wardrobe consisting mostly of informal khameezes and jeans and sweatshirts, but because I considered clothes ir-relevant. I fancied myself more of a Harvard intellectual whose mind was occupied with the serious questions of war and peace, but the press persis-ted in asking me question after question about my clothes. ’Fashions are a
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bourgeois pastime,’ I finally said in exasperation to one interviewer. But

the story the next day had me blazing a new fashion path.

My father and the others among the Pakistani delegation couldn’t under-stand either why I was receiving so much attention. ’You must be a diversion from the seriousness of the issues here,’ my father decided one morning, looking at the front page picture of me waving at the crowd in the newspaper. ’Better be careful,’ he teased me. ’You look like Mussolini.’

His diversion theory

was probably right. The talks were being con-
ducted in total secrecy, leaving the legions of international press gathered in Simla with little to focus on, except me. But I felt my overwhelming

reception also represented something else.

I symbolised a new generation. I had never been an Indian. I had been born in independent Pakistan. I was free of the complexes and prejudices
which had tom Indians and Pakistanis apart in the bloody trauma of partition. Perhaps the people were hoping that a new generation could avoid the hostility that had now led to three wars, burying the bitter past
of our parents and grandparents to live together as friends. And I certainly felt it was possible as I walked the warm and welcoming streets of Simla. Did we have to be divided by walls of hatred or could we, like the once warring countries of Europe, come to terms with each other?

The answer to that question lay deep inside the panelled conference

rooms of the British Raj buildings where the long and weary hours of negotiating were going nowhere. My father extended his stay, hoping for
a breakthrough. But he wasn’t optimistic. The Indians continued to refuse even to acknowledge Pakistan’s position on Kashmir: a plebiscite to allow
the Kashmiris themselves to decide which country they wished to join. And he was having difficulties with Mrs Gandhi. Though he had been a
great admirer of her father, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Mrs Gandhi, my father felt, did not have the vision and ideals of her father which had enabled him to build India into a ’country of international respect.

I was not at all sure myself about Mrs Gandhi. At the small working dinner she had given for our delegation on June 30, she kept staring at me, which made me quite nervous. I had followed her political career closely and admired her perseverance. After her selection as Prime Minister in 1966, the warring members of the Indian congress thought they had


selected a malleable and token leader and had called her goongi goriya, dumb doll, behind her back. But this silk and steel woman had out-
manoeuvred them all. To steady my nerves at the dinner, I tried to make conversation with her, but she was very reticent. There was a cold aloof-
ness about her and a tenseness which only eased when she smiled.

My nerves were also unsettled by the fact that I was wearing a silk sari


my mother had lent me. Even though she had given me a lesson in wrapping the yards of material securely around me, I was nervous that it
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THE YEARS OF DETENTION


would suddenly unravel. All I could remember was the story of my Auntie Mumtaz’s sari in a supermarket

in Germany. The hem had got caught in the escalator and her sari had unravelled until someone finally stopped the escalator. That memory didn’t help. And Mrs Gandhi kept on staring.

Perhaps she was recalling the diplomatic missions on which she had accompanied her own father, I thought to myself. Was she seeing herself in me, a daughter of another statesman? Was she remembering the love of a daughter for her father, a father for his daughter? She was so small and frail. Where did her famed ruthlessness come from? She had defied her father to marry a Parsi politician of whom he had not approved. Their marriage had not worked and they ended up living separate lives. Now both her father and her husband were dead. Was she lonely?

I wondered also if perhaps the presence of the Pakistani delegation in Simla sparked more historical memories. It was in this very city that her father had met with Mohammed Ali Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan to carve out the boundaries of the new state of Muslim Pakistan from Hindu India. Now, as Prime Minister herself, she could ensure the survival of that separate Muslim state. Or she could try and destroy it. Which way would she go? The answer came four days later.

’Pack,’ my father said to me on July 2. We’re going home tomorrow.’

’Without an agreement?’ I asked.

’Without an agreement,’ he said. ’I’d rather go back to Pakistan with no agreement than with one imposed by India. The Indians think I can’t afford to go home without a treaty and will therefore give in to their demands. But I’m calling their bluff. I’d rather face disillusionment in Pakis-tan than a treaty which sells out our country.’

A gloom fell over the exhausted delegation in Himachal Bhavan. Only the shuffling of papers being packed up broke the silence. All that was left was the courtesy call my father was going to pay on Mrs Gandhi at 4.30 and the dinner our delegation was giving for the Indians that night. Then we would be off to Islamabad.

I was sitting on the floor of my bedroom when my father suddenly appeared in the doorway. ’Don’t tell anybody,’ he said with a new gleam in his eyes, ’but I’m going to use this protocol visit to try one last time with Mrs Gandhi. I have an idea. But don’t be disappointed if there are no results.’ And he was gone.

I kept going to the window to watch for his return, looking out at the mist that blurred the pine trees on the hills, the curving mountain roads, the wooden lodges. Simla was so like Murree, yet the people who lived on either side of the border couldn’t even visit the other. And suddenly my father was back.

’Hope has returned,’ he said with a huge smile. We’ll

get the agreement,

Insha’allah.’
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MY FIRST TASTE OF DEMOCRACY
’How did you do it, Papa?’ I asked him as the sombre silence in the house lifted to be replaced by the humming sound of one delegate passing on the news to another.

’I saw that she was very tense during our visit,’ my father told me. ’After all, failure was not only a setback for us, but for her, too. Both our political opponents would use it against us. She kept fiddling with her handbag and gave the impression that her tongue did not relish the taste of the hot tea in her cup. So I took a deep breath and talked non-stop for half an hour.’

We are both democratic leaders with a mandate from our people, my father had told her. We can take the region to a peace which has eluded it since Partition or we can fail, deepening the already existing wounds. Military conquests are part of history, but it is statesmanship which finds an enduring place in it. Statesmanship requires looking to the future and making concessions at the moment for the rewards they will reap. As the victor, it is India, not Pakistan, who must make those concessions for the reward of peace.

’Did she agree?’ I asked my father with mounting excitement.

’She didn’t disagree,’ he said, lighting a cigar. ’She said she would consult her personal advisers and let us know at the dinner tonight.’

How we all got through the banquet toasts, the speeches, the pleas-antries, I will never know. This time I was the one to keep glancing at Mrs Gandhi, but could read nothing from her face. After dinner, my father and Mrs Gandhi went into a small side sitting room while their negotiating teams went into the billiard room, the largest room available. They used the billiard table as a massive desk. Whenever they completed a point, or had a disagreement, one of the delegates would take the papers into the sitting room to elicit a ’yes’ or ’no’ from the two leaders.

The drafts and re-drafts, amendments and modifications, took hours. The house got more and more crowded with journalists, television camera-men and representatives from both countries. I kept coming and going between the press of people downstairs to my bedroom upstairs. ’Any-thing happened yet?’ I periodically called from the staircase. Because no announcement could be made unless it was official, the Pakistani delega-tion devised a code to enable each other to know how things were going. ’If there is an agreement, we’ll say a boy has been born. If there is no agreement, we’ll say a girl has been born.’ ’How chauvinistic,’ I com-mented, but no one was listening.

’Make sure you’re downstairs if and when an agreement is signed,’ my father had said to me

before going into the sitting room. ’It will be an historic moment.’ As it turned out, I was upstairs in my bedroom when ’Larka hai! Larka hai! A boy has been born! A boy has been born!’ rang out through the house at 12.40 am. I ran downstairs but in the crush of
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THE YEARS OF DETENTION


journalists and television cameramen I couldn’t get into the room in time to see my father and Mrs Gandhi sign what would become known as the Simla Accord. But what did it matter? The longest lasting peace on the sub-continent had been ushered in.

The Simla Accord returned the 5,000 square miles taken from us by India. It laid the foundation for the restoration of communication and trade between our two countries and did not prejudice the stand of Pakistan or India on the Jammu and Kashmir disputes. The Accord also paved the way for the return of our prisoners-of-war without the humilia-tion of the war trials that Mujib was threatening in Bangladesh. But it didn’t provide for their immediate return.

’Mrs Gandhi agreed to return either the prisoners-of-war or the ter-ritory,’ my father said to me when he came upstairs later. ’Why do you think I chose the territory?’

’I really don’t know, Papa,’ I said, quite shocked. ’The people in Pakistan would have been much happier if the prisoners had been freed.’

’And they will be freed,’ he assured me. ’Prisoners are a human problem. The magnitude is increased when there are 93,000 of them. It would be inhuman for India to keep them indefinitely. And it will also be a problem to keep on feeding and housing them. Territory, on the other hand, is not a human problem. Territory can be assimilated. Prisoners cannot. The Arabs have still not succeeded in regaining the territory lost in the 1967 war. But the capturing of land doesn’t cry out for international attention the same way prisoners do.’

Returning without an agreement to free the prisoners was a hard decis-ion for my father to make, and predictably, there were many protests from opposing Pakistani politicians and the prisoners’ families. Perhaps the Indian side was banking on the inevitable turmoil to force him to capitulate. But he didn’t. And all 93,000 prisoners were released after Pakistan’s recognition of Bangladesh in 1974.

As we flew back to Rawalpindi on July 3, the mood was jubilant, a far cry from the sombreness that had accompanied us to India. Thousands of people were at the airport to welcome my father as we stepped out onto the red carpet. ’Today is a great day,’ my father addressed the crowd. ’There has been a great victory. This is not my victory. Nor is it a victory of Mrs Gandhi’s. It is a victory for the

people of Pakistan and India who have won peace after three wars.’

On July 4, 1972, the Simla Accord won the unanimous approval of the National Assembly; even the opposition joined in the tributes. The Simla Accord still stands today.

Unfortunately, the Constitution of 1973, Pakistan’s first democratic con-stitution framed by genuinely elected representatives of the people, does not. A year later, on August 14, 1973, while our whole family watched


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MY FIRST TASTE OF DEMOCRACY
from the Prime Minister’s box, the National Assembly unanimously adop-ted the Islamic charter which, unbelievably, had been supported by national consensus, by our regional and religious leaders, and by my father’s opposition. As the leader of the majority in the National Assembly, my father became the Prime Minister of Pakistan.

Until Zia overthrew my father and suspended the Constitution four years later, the people of Pakistan enjoyed the first constitution in Pakis-tan’s history to introduce fundamental human rights and ensure their pro-tection. The Constitution of 1973 forbade discrimination on the basis of race, sex, or religion. It guaranteed the independence of the judiciary and its separation from the executive. The first representative government of Pakistan finally had the legal framework within which to govern: the sanctioned authority that Professor Womack had brought home to me so clearly in his seminar.

As I prepared to leave Harvard in the spring of 1973, the strength of the United States Constitution was being graphically demonstrated. In spite of the balmy weather and the Frisbee games in Harvard Yard, many of us were rooted to the televised Watergate hearings. My God, I thought. The American people are removing their president through democratic, constitutional means. Even a powerful president like Richard Nixon who had put an end to the Vietnam war and opened the pathway to China could not escape the law of his land. I had read Locke, Rousseau and John Stuart Mill on the nature of society and the state, the need to guarantee the rights of the people. But theory was one thing. Seeing it unfold in practice was quite another.

The Watergate process left me with a profound sense of the importance of nationally accepted laws, rather than whimsical or arbitrary laws im-posed by individuals. When President Nixon resigned his office a year later in August 1974, the succession of power was smooth and peaceful. The leaders in a democracy like America’s might come and go, but the United States Constitution remained. We would not be so fortunate in Pakistan.

As my Harvard graduation drew near, I grew increasingly sad

at the thought of leaving Cambridge, of leaving America. I had been accepted at Oxford, as had several of my friends including Peter Galbraith, but I didn’t want to go. I knew my way around Cambridge and Boston and had finally mastered the subway routes on the MTA. I knew and under-stood the people. I pleaded with my father to let me go on to the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts before returning to Pakistan. But he was adamant that I go to Oxford. Four years in one place is more than enough, he wrote to me. If you stay longer in America you will begin to put down roots there. It is time for you to move on.

For the first time I felt my father was pushing me. But what could I do?
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THE YEARS OF DETENTION


It was he, after all, who was paying for my tuition and expenses. I had no choice. And I was a practical person.

My mother came to graduation and she and my brother Mir who had just finished his first year at Harvard helped me pack. My roommate, Yolanda Kodrzycki and I gave away our furniture and took down our posters. Our rooms looked bare, as did Harvard Yard and the shelves at the Co-op bookshop. Maybe it was time to move on.

As the plane lifted off from Logan Airport, I strained to catch a last glimpse of the Boston skyline. Shopping at Filene’s basement. Eating at the communal tables at Durgin Park. Going to the Casablanca to forget our hockey loss to Boston University. Man had reached the moon and I had seen the moon dust at MIT. With the lyrics to Peter, Paul and Mary’s song - ’I’m leaving on a jet plane, don’t know when I’ll be back again’ -running through my mind, I flew home to Pakistan.
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REFLECTIONS FROM AL-MURTAZA:

THE DREAMING SPIRES OF OXFORD


January, 1980. In our third month of detention at Al-Murtaza, my ear starts to bother me again. Click. Click. The noises begin as they had during an earlier detention in 1978. Then the doctor called in by the Martial Law authorities in Karachi had diagnosed the problem as a sinus condition aggravated by the plane flights I’d taken every two weeks to visit my father in jail, and he’d cauterised the inside of my nose to open the Eustachian tube. Now, I start to feel the familiar buzzing in my ear and the build-up of pressure. The local doctor visits, but the noises con-tinue. I ask the prison authorities to bring the doctor who had operated on me in Karachi. I’m surprised when they bring in someone I don’t know instead. He is gentle and has a soothing voice. ’Relax. You have been under a lot of stress,’ he consoles me as he examines my ear.

’Ouch!’ I cry out. ’You’re hurting me.’

’You’re just imagining it,’ he replies. ’I’m just taking a look

inside your ear.’

When I wake up the next morning, there are three drops of blood on my pillow.

’You’ve perforated your ear-drum. You must have done it with a hairpin,’ the doctor says when he returns. Hairpin? Why would I put a hairpin in my ear? He writes out a prescription for two drugs which he tells me to take three times a day. But all the pills do is make me sleep, and when I’m awake I’m depressed. My mother is shocked when by the third day I no longer get up at sunrise to go into the garden, care about eating, or even brush my teeth. She gets so upset she throws the medicine away.

For days afterward, the pain comes and goes while the noises increase. Click. Click. Click. Click. I can’t sleep, can’t get any peace at all. Has the regime’s doctor deliberately punctured my ear-drum, or was it a mistake? Click. Click. Click. My ear feels full and I cannot hear properly.

I try to distract myself during the day by working harder in the garden. Sweat trickles through the hole in my ear-drum. Water from the showers I take seeps into my ear. I don’t realise, and was not told by the doctor, that I should keep my ear dry, that water going into a perforated ear can make it septic. Click. Click.

Unable to sleep at night, I walk around inside Al-Murtaza. Like 70

THE YEARS OF DETENTION


Clifton, Al-Murtaza has been raided so many times that everything has either been moved or has vanished. My father’s collection of antique guns passed down from my great-grandfather has been impounded by the regime and sealed in a storeroom in the garden. The Martial Law auth-orities come to’Al-Murtaza every week to see whether the storeroom seal has been tampered with, as if they expect my mother and me to blast our way out with antique muskets.

I pass the now empty gunroom which we used as a family dining room and go on to the wood-panelled billiard room where my brothers used to challenge friends visiting me from Oxford. A small ceramic of a fat Chinese man surrounded by many children is sitting on a table in the billiard room, though it belongs in the drawing room. I pick it up to return it. My father loved the figurine, often joking that he wanted enough children to make up a cricket team, but educating eleven children in the modem world was too expensive, so he’d settled on the four of us.

Oxford, Oxford, Oxford, he’d drummed into all of us. Oxford was one of the best and most respected universities in the world. Oxford was steeped in English history. English literature, the church, the monarchy, parliament all had some connection with Oxford. American education was very good, he’d allowed, but was conducted in a more relaxed manner. Oxford

would give us all a new horizon and a sense of discipline. He’d entered all four of us at birth. As the oldest, I was the only one who had the luxury of completing my Oxford education before the coup turned our lives upside-down. Mir left Oxford shortly after the beginning of his second year to fight for my father’s life in England, while Sanam never got there at all. My years in my father’s beloved Alma Mater meant a great deal to him.


’I feel a strange sensation in imagining you walking on the footprints I left behind at Oxford over twenty-two years ago,’ my father wrote to me from the Prime Minister’s House in Rawalpindi soon after I arrived at Oxford in the autumn of 1973. ’I was [made] happy by your presence at Radcliffe but, since I was not at Harvard, I could not picture you there through the same camera. Here I see your presence like mine in flesh and blood, over every cobble of the streets of Oxford, over every step you take on the frozen stone ladders, through every portal of learning you enter. Your being at Oxford is a dream come true. We pray and hope that this dream turned into reality will grow into a magnificent career in the service of your people.’

He had been far happier at Oxford than, at first, I was. Unlike Harvard, where my roommate and I had our own suite of rooms, my single room at Lady Margaret Hall was tiny with a communal bathroom down the


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THE DREAMING SPIRES OF OXFORD
passage. I missed having my own telephone, and had to rely instead on Oxford’s antiquated message system which generally took two days. And I found the English reserved compared to my friends at Harvard who were instantly friendly. For weeks I sought out the company of my Ameri-can classmates who had come on to Oxford. But my father kept after me, sending me a print of ancient Rome which had hung in his room at Christ Church in 1950. ’Before you went to Oxford this print could not have had any meaning for you,’ he wrote from Al-Murtaza. ’Now I am sending it to you in case you want to keep it in your room.’ I hung it on my wall, warming to the sense of continuity that now stretched from the dust of Pakistan to the clean-swept streets of Oxford.

My father had warned me that, compared to Harvard, Oxford would teach me to work under pressure. As I struggled to write the required two essays a week for my tutorials in Politics, Philosophy and Economics, I had to admit he was right. He was right, as well, in urging me to join the Oxford Union.

Of all the various societies at Oxford, and there were many - ranging from socialist, Conservative and Liberal political clubs to those focusing on rowing and beagling - the

most well-known was the Oxford Union Debat-ing Society. Established in 1823 and modelled on the House of Commons, the Union was seen as the training ground for future politicians. I had no intention of becoming a politician, having seen first-hand the pressures and strains of life in politics. I was aiming for a career in Pakistan’s Foreign Service. Nevertheless, I joined the Oxford Union to please my father.

As well as fulfilling my father’s wishes, I was drawn by the art of debate. The power of oratory had always been a great force on the Asian sub-continent where so many were illiterate. Millions had been swayed by the words of Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohammed Ali Jinnah and, indeed, my father. Story-telling, poetry and oratory were part of our tradition. I didn’t realise then that my experience gained in the polite and panelled walls of the Oxford Union would translate into speaking before millions in the fields of Pakistan.

For my three years reading PPE and the fourth year when I returned to take a post-graduate course in international law and diplomacy, the Oxford Union was one of the most important and pleasant focal points of my life. Its gardens and building in the centre of Oxford with a restaurant in the cellar, two libraries, and a billiard room became as familiar to me as the rooms at AI-Murtaza. In the debating hall we listened to speakers ranging from the feminist author Germaine Greer to the trade unionist Arthur Scargill. Two former British Prime Ministers came during my time at the Oxford Union, Lord Stockton and Edward Heath. Student speakers dressed in formal clothes with carnations in their lapels, forcing me out of my jeans and into the silks of Anna Belinda. After candle-lit dinners, we set to warring with words.


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