Fatima Bhutto bares her famous, jinxed family

: In the September of 1996, the day her father turned 42, Fatima Bhutto said to him: “Write a book about your life, Papa. It would be so interesting.” He laughed and then said quietly, “You’ll do it for me.” His eyes were sad. A growing nervousness had been rumbling inside her for days. Two days later, Mir Murtaza Bhutto was dead. On the 12th anniversary of Murtaza’s death, Asif Zardari was sworn in as President of Pakistan. He had been acquitted of Murtaza’s murder in the build-up to the presidency.

As Fatima’s ode to her father grains traction, she has been tweeting about all the difficulties of getting an Indian visa to publicise it here. The visa finally came through. FE got to interview her. It’s a book that will have special interest for Indians. For good or bad, we too have an abiding interest in the Bhutto name and its fortunes. Also, for us as well, the narrative of nation has been intimately intertwined with the story of a dynasty. Our dynasty too has seen a peculiar mix of political longevity and indecorous deaths, which have seemed sort of presaged. Songs of Blood and Swords lays out elaborate intimations of untimely mortality experienced by the Bhuttos—Murtaza and Benazir included. It also etches out the uniquely internecine quality of such intimations with great, intimate poignancy.

The Bhuttos don’t like to share, Fatima says. Hence her aunt’s paranoia about her father. Hence too, the reader easily deduces, Fatima’s resistance to Zardaris claiming the Bhutto tag. She questions how Benazir came to see herself as synonymous with Pakistan. Yet, understandably, for Fatima, unveiling her father’s life becomes the same as narrating Pakistan’s history.

“I am not my father’s keeper,” Fatima persuades a hesitating source. A credible effort to complicate the hagiography still leaves us with the same in our hands. Ultimately, it is predisposed in favour of judgments such as the following: “Mir had the same background as Benazir—he was a Bhutto, had a strong relationship with his father too, and also struggled against a dictator. But that’s all Benazir had. Murtaza had the clean hands and corruption- and compromise-free record, and the ideological understanding of socialist politics. That’s what threatened his sister.” So, this is not the book to turn to for a deep analysis of Pakistan’s history or policymaking. It stands and falls as a : family memoir. No amount of respectable footnoting can disguise this.

Source:

http://www.financialexpress.com/news/fatimabhuttobaresherfamous-jinxedfamily/599588/2