She’s beautiful, articulate and intelligent. In her book Songs of Blood and Sword,
Fatima Bhutto does not hold back the punches
When the Sania Mirza-Shoaib Malik ‘yes-I’m-married-no-I’m-not’ controversy was raging, someone posted this on Twitter, ‘Now that Sania Mirza is going to Pakistan, can we have Fatima Bhutto in exchange?’
Humour aside, it’s easy to see why Fatima Bhutto is everyone’s darling—she comes from a powerful bloodline of a neighbouring country with whom our relationship has always been complicated, barring a fleeting envy for their cricketers and their culinary traditions. But our reaction to Fatima Bhutto has been different. She has a personal story that’s tormented by tragedy… the exile and subsequent bloody deaths of her family members, most of them untimely and gruesome and now, there is a brief flash of vindication, when she tries to resurrect her slain father, Mir Murtaza Bhutto’s image in her tell-all book Songs of Blood and Sword (SOBAS, Penguin).
In it she accuses her aunt the late Benazir Bhutto, former Prime Minister of Pakistan and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari of murdering her father. That the alleged murderer of her father is now Pakistan’s President, makes Fatima’s unequivocal stand on her father’s killers a bold admission, one that fills her readers with both a grudging pride for this young 28-year-old and a little frisson of fear for her outspoken stance. Says Fatima, “At the launch of the book in Karachi, we had 700 people attending. We fought hard despite a lot of resistance to have it at the Clifton (the area where the Bhutto house is located and Murtaza was killed). That should say something for the citizens who came out in solidarity since the book accuses their President of murder.”
Fatima is not sure how her book is being received in Pakistan or if copies have mysteriously disappeared off the shelf. “I haven’t had time to check on that. I came to India as soon as the book was launched in Pakistan on March 30. It may not attract censorship yet since the book is in English and not so many people would read it in English. I’m trying to get it translated into Urdu, Baluchi and other local languages,” says she like a woman on a mission.
It’s a tough life for a young woman like Fatima in a country like Pakistan. She seems to be the lone spokesperson from the Bhutto clan to speak out fearlessly. “Who else is there? There’s just Sassi (Shahnawaz’s daughter), Zulfikar (Fatima’s younger brother) and me.” She hasn’t met Benazir’s children for many years now. “That door closed a long time ago,” she says. But then her life has been anything but ordinary. Her earliest memories are of living with her father Murtaza, who was in exile in Damascus. She was three then. “By the time I was three years old, I was aware of words like martial law, dictatorship and gallows. I thought they were part of every child’s vocabulary,” she says.
Like the heirs of many political families in South East Asia, Fatima has had to live with the ghosts of her family members, slain in Pakistan’s violent political history. A heavy price to pay for being powerbrokers in the then newly created state of Pakistan! She’s lost a family member every decade for the last four decades. The last two deaths of her father and her aunt will always haunt her. Her aunt’s death she can’t shake off, try as she might. She will always be Benazir Bhutto’s niece.
She speaks at length of her aunt, her father’s alleged nemesis, as if she’s studied her every action, recorded it for posterity and done a near-forensic examination. Fatima says in her book that Benazir reminded her of herself. It’s a resemblance that others have noticed too. Fatima was seven when she returned to Pakistan and the first thing that fascinated her was the “nuclear green fizzy drink” that she found there.
But even as a self-confessed precocious child, Fatima says she was scared of the crowds. “When I went back, I saw Benazir surrounded by crowds. In a way, they made her inaccessible to me and yet I was scared for her. She was my wadi, who read out stories to me when I was a child. But she made a lot of compromises with regard to our foreign policy and succumbing to IMF dictates. It was a very different trajectory that she took from that of my grandfather Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, my father and uncle Shahnawaz Bhutto. They were anti-American interference and Benazir undid a lot of my grandfather’s legacy.’’
Fatima dresses unlike her wadi. During the day, as she is giving interviews, she’s in a pair of blue jeans, a black t-shirt and a long sheer printed Afghani coat. For her book launch, she comes dressed in a dull-gold sari and a halter-neck blouse, scarlet lipstick and nail paint. “My grandmother, Nusrat Bhutto, always wore saris and short sleeved blouses for official events. We were brought up in a very liberal way at home. Politics is the practice of expediency. When Benazir was free from power, she was a brave woman, who travelled to remote places and made them forget she was a woman. When she came to power she wore a scarf over her head, the first woman in the family to do so, only to keep certain people happy. For the women in Pakistan, it was a big step back.”
SOBAS is crafted like a journalist’s report. Noting an instance when Benazir returned from exile and stepped out of the plane with a dove whose wings had been clipped, Fatima says, “There’s a lot of strange use of imagery in South East Asian politics. What Benazir did to that bird was what she did to democracy.” Fatima admits that she’s always wanted to be a journalist and her heroes have always been journalists. Fatima, who studied at the Columbia University and the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, writes columns for the New Statesman and The Daily Beast among other publications.
If only she’s given a penny for every time she has been asked, ‘why not politics?’ “Legacy is a dirty word. The idea that only one line can possess history is so wrong. When Benazir was killed, we (Pakistan) started acting like 14th century France, believing that unless there was someone close to the family in power, the country would perish. They were not asking for platforms, issues, healthcare, food, water or load-shedding. They just wanted to co-opt someone from the family.” At that time, it was her 17-year-old brother Zulfikar.
Fatima avers that she is politically active and campaigns for her father’s party, Pakistan People’s Party—Shaheed Bhutto, that is now headed by Ghinwa Bhutto, Mir Murtaza’s second wife, whom Fatima calls ‘Mummy’. Fatima’s relationship with her estranged biological mother, Fowzia had been tenuous since the beginning and she now lives with Ghinwa and her half brother Zulfikar. Fatima who campaigned door to door to get women to come out and vote says, “I’ve always felt that there must be something wrong with people who campaign. It’s a tough job. But I do it since I like to travel and meet people.”
Fatima’s fight to bring her father’s killers to book through her writings has been dismissed by some of her critics as a naïve effort. When asked about this, she says, “Not at all. We see corruption everywhere. And where we see injustice, we have the freedom to fight it. It is our civic duty to raise our voice. I don’t think it is naïve at all. One should always hope for justice. Giving up hope for justice, is allowing justice to be denied to us. The road to justice is long. Mummy (Ghinwa) and I are very clear that we’re not going to use violence or revenge. We seek justice and truth. Mummy is Lebanese and she understands violence more than I do. We don’t believe in death penalty. We’re protesting the extra judicial killings of not just my father but many other people and hope that justice will be done.’’
Mir Murtaza was vehemently against American interference in Pakistan’s politics but present day Pakistan is a far cry from what he wanted. Says Fatima, “It is the new colonial power. But we have history on our side. SE Asia has a history of overthrowing colonial powers. And now with the Internet, You tube and other sources of information, more people are aware of political assassinations as game changers.”
Her tweets indicate that her reception in India has been overwhelming. “Governments have failed. People never do. We need more people to people contact. When authors come and build bridges, you realise that Pakistanis don’t have horns. I can’t remember my family portraying India or Indians as very different from us. All I remember was that there was lots of Bollywood at home, lots of Amitabh and Rekha movies, and achaar with every meal. We must see that what has happened will not happen again,” she ends hopefully.<<>
Courtesy: Society
Source:
http://www.magnamags.com/index.php/201005106179/society/society-says-so/fatima-bhutto.html
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