Daughter of dynasty

Dynasties have little deference for democracy. They believe it's their right to be in power. Large parts of Asia suffer from this disease, but nowhere is this malaise deeper than in Pakistan, where democracy is nothing but turf war among the 20-odd families that control everything — land, industry, banks and politics. Then there are feuds within the families — between fathers and sons, between brothers and sisters, between halfsiblings and illegitimate children.

There has been a lot of bad blood within and between the dynasties that have run Pakistan since 1947. Often, the blood has spilled on to the streets. As a 14-year-old girl, Fatima Bhutto saw her father Murtaza lying in a pool of blood in a Karachi hospital as doctors delayed taking him to the operation theatre. He bled to death. Mir Murtaza Bhutto was gunned down by police in the heart of Karachi in 1996 when his estranged sister Benazir was the country's prime minister. As the gunshots rang outside their house, Fatima called Benazir but "she did not take the call". Instead, Asif Zardari, Benazir's husband and the man who is now the president of Pakistan, took the call. "Don't you know your father has been shot?" Zardari told Fatima. With Zardari running the country, Fatima now lives with the "murder of her father" in her head.

But it was not just the murder of her father that was on Fatima's mind when she sat down to write this book. She also recounts the violent deaths of her grandfather, uncle and aunt. Benazir fell to an unknown assassin 11 years after Murtaza's murder in broad daylight. "It was like a terrible déjà vu; it's almost as if every 10 years someone in our family is violently murdered. And the way the police cleaned up the blood from her murder scene as quickly as they cleaned up my father's brought back terrible memories," Fatima writes about Benazir's assassination.

Though supposed to be a daughter's memories of her father, the book is actually the tragedy-filled story of the Bhuttos, "the ill-starred dynasty" that has dominated the political scene in Pakistan for four decades. Like a good investigative journalist, Fatima has put together an interesting, gripping story, though there are very few new revelations in the book. Almost everything, including Zardari's "role" in Murtaza's death, has been reported and written about earlier.

In fact, the book is an attack on Zardari whom Fatima blames for everything wrong with Pakistan today. And that's the problem with the book. Fatima fails to see anything wrong with the Bhuttos. They are presented as martyrs who died for Pakistan. The fact that all of them died in either pursuit of power or during internal power struggles has been ignored by the writer. With their feudal, arrogant attitude, the Bhuttos have been part of the problem and not the solution. But the writer fails to address this issue.

With her open attack on Zardari, Fatima seems to be more interested in claiming that she is the true inheritor of the Bhutto legacy. Probably that's why the book has some eerie similarities with Benazir's autobiography, Daughter of the East, in which the Bhuttos appeared as eternal victims of cruel dictators. Fatima's A Daughter's Memoirs paints an equally naïve and idealised picture of her family. In this picture, the people of Pakistan are just incidental.

Songs of Blood and Sword
By Fatima Bhutto
Viking 480 pages, Rs 699

Source:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/sunday-toi/book-mark/Daughter-of-dynasty/articleshow/5781783.cms