January 25, 2008...11:52 am
Benazir Bhutto: The fog of a legacy
SINCE Benazir Bhutto was assassinated on Dec 27, inevitably a lot of discussion has eddied about her legacy. Historian William Dalrymple, in an article in The Observer, has said that Ms Bhutto introduced a strange strand of democracy in Pakistan, which in essence was “elective feudalism” and “helped fuel the current, apparently unstoppable, growth of the Islamists”.
Abbas Rashid has called Ms Bhutto “a symbol of deliverance … committed to fighting the growing perils of extremism and militancy that threatened Pakistan …” These are rivalling countenances of Ms Bhutto obfuscating her real legacy. A common motif running through opinions of Ms Bhutto is the perception that her two governments were corrupt and yet another motif is that the main reason she was celebrated in the West was because she was seen as ‘one of us’ — western, modern, liberal and anti-Islamist — conducting western-oriented politics at the cost of the nation state’s.
Understanding Ms Bhutto’s legacy requires a deep understanding of Pakistani politics — as it stands, not what it ought to be. Pakistan is a feudal society where from the beginning the feudals have wielded power. Most people in Pakistan cherish feudal tradition pivoted around a family name, cohering and structuring a community. Of course, in an egalitarian society people should not blindly support a person just because of which family they happen to be born into. But this is the stark truth in Pakistan.
As historian Barbara Ramusack has shown through her work, the Indian princely states were stable societies because they established a system based on a patron-client nexus. The prince, and in this case the landlord, provided the client, the peasant or the labourer, with certain basic guarantees — life, food and shelter and in return the client provided support for the patron. Not too dissimilar from the classic version of a state’s social contract with its citizens.
This much is certain that the patron-client system will remain rooted until and unless there is qualitative human development and growth of the economically marginalised and dispossessed. Notwithstanding the corruption allegations levelled against Ms Bhutto, she maintained an enigmatic effect on countless Sindhis and rural Punjabis, and indeed the federation as a whole. That was in large part a result of her father’s brilliantly populist slogan, ‘Roti, kapra aur makan’, which she reintroduced for the recent campaign blitz, encapsulating the necessities many tens of thousands of ordinary Pakistanis were bereft of.
By renewing and reaffirming that slogan so integral to the idea of the Pakistan People’s Party, Ms Bhutto shrewdly tapped into the appeal of populism, reviving an elusive hope. A country with pervasive corruption has, with the exception of its founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, had many of its political animals associated with the awful C word. Hence, for a great number of Pakistanis, sadly but verily, corruption is not a yardstick for public support.
Terming Ms Bhutto ‘westernised’ and claiming that this in turn made her the ‘darling of the West’ is perhaps true. But when this aspect of Ms Bhutto is appropriated by her detractors, such as the loquacious Imran Khan, to downplay her grass-roots-level popularity, presenting a zero-sum game in which a pro-western mooring may come at the disadvantage of the nation state, then that points to a facile response to a far complex context.
While the shared academic experiences and social interaction Ms Bhutto had in Harvard and Oxford moulded her into a person considered ‘like-minded’ by her western colleagues — accepting the exigencies of great-power politics and making, at times, some controversial statements — that still fails to explain the Eucharistic bond between Ms Bhutto and the tens of thousands who welcomed her with roaring street parties in Lahore in April of 1986 and in Karachi last October.
History demonstrates that politics in Pakistan has always been one of charisma. Western values, outlook and sartorial sense are not obstacles to the public’s acceptance of a leader or politician in this country. Mr Dalrymple criticised Ms Bhutto’s lack of finesse in the vernacular languages, but in Mr Jinnah’s case the lack of finesse in Urdu was particularly acute and he could barely even string a sentence together in his native Gujarati.
Like Ms Bhutto, Mr Jinnah was vastly shaped by his education in the West and, arguably, was even more westernised than Benazir in his day and age. That did not in turn preclude a connection between Mr Jinnah and the larger public. The Muslim League, a failed party in the 1937 elections, swept the 1946 polls under the westernised Jinnah. Of course this is not to say that non-westernised people do not have an appeal in Pakistan. It is important to note, however, that the western element does add that extra touch of flair and charisma.
The morning after Ms Bhutto was assassinated, what struck us was that almost immediately everyone began referring to her as ‘Shaheed’, a martyr. This was not a title used by only her party; most people on news channels and even in the street were referring to her as such. Why? We realise that people are circumspect using the word because of its Islamic aura but in Pakistan, as elsewhere, the word’s meaning has evolved into the secular realm. In Pakistan, soldiers who die on the battlefield are conferred the status of ‘Shaheed’. When a soldier goes into battle, he knows that he might not come out alive but he goes in with the purpose of serving his country even with his blood.
Ms Bhutto’s heroic homecoming last October was pock-marked with two massive suicide bombings but she, to paraphrase Stanley Wolpert, remained the soil’s ‘dauntless daughter’ even after all these years abroad, cognizant of the cost she may personally bear. Ms Bhutto went unhindered on the campaign trail, never sure if assassins were shadowing her. She was finally felled by their bullets, haunting the nation forever with her sacrifice.
All this she did because she believed in democracy and its virtues for the oppressed and victimised. We are not arguing that she was right in all her policies but that she was sincere in her aim to serve the country and its people. Many professors and friends of ours, post 27/12, inquired from us as to why she put her life in danger knowing the threat. The answer is simply that she was committed to her cause which had been enshrined by her father in the 1973 Constitution — a democratic and welfare state that kept being derailed by long bouts of dictatorship.
She wished to help recreate that vision. She went into the election campaign armed with intelligence briefs knowing that she may not come out of it but she did it for her country, for our great country, just as Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan’s first prime minister, who was assassinated in almost the same place. That is why she is a martyr. Maybe things are coming full circle now. But her story is not over yet.
Razi U. Ahmed is a Lahore-based businessman and Yaqoob K. Bangash is a historian at Keble College, Oxford.
Courtesy: DAWN
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