V V: Fatima Bhutto's seasons in hell

A memoir is not, strictly speaking, an autobiography. It is an account of the author’s relations with some interesting people who have left an indelible impression on his/her mind. Fatima Bhutto’s Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter’s Memoir (Penguin/Viking, Rs 699) is a description of life under the Bhuttos, one of the six most powerful landed aristocracies of Pakistan that controlled the destinies of the country. At one level, it is a microcosm of state and society in Pakistan; at another, a history of the family that is also the history of the nation, a fractured memoir that embodies in an equally fractured form the political life of Pakistan. At a personal level, it reminds me of Tolstoy’s observation that while all happy families are alike, all unhappy families are unhappy in their own special ways. Bhuttos were unhappy, not because they had an embarrassment of riches but because of the violence that riddled the lives of each successive generation. The masthead on the cover tells it all:

Fatima Bhutto:
Granddaughter of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (President 1970-73 and Prime Minister (1973-77): Assassinated
Niece to Shahnawaz Bhutto — Murdered 1985
Daughter of Mir Murtaza Bhutto — Assassinated 1966
Niece to Benazir Bhutto — Assassinated 2007

So, Fatima said in a recent newspaper interview that the history of the dynasty could be read as a kind of Greek tragedy: “It seems like every 10 years we bury a Bhutto killed violently and way before their time.”

The book is specifically centred on the assassination of her father, Murtaza who was shot dead outside his house in Karachi’s fashionable residential district. The news of the shooting is first broken to her over the telephone by Asif Zardari who says, “casually, ‘Your father’s been shot.’” and puts the phone down. Nothing more; as cool as that, as if nothing much had happened. Fatima describes in great detail the commotion and confusion that followed, who came and went and the conversations that always follow after death — so much noise at the edge of silence.

Fatima doesn’t mince words; she calls the assassination a cold-blooded murder and provides a pile of evidence including eyewitness accounts, backed by interviews and documentation. The needle of suspicion points to Zardari, who, in fact, was investigated but later let off, presumably because of lack of evidence but more because he could pull the punches, backed by enormous financial resources which he had accumulated during his wife’s tenure as prime minister. Fatima tells it all without flinching.

Fatima adds that her aunt (the two could never get along) “years later in an interview before her own death said that it was Murtaza’s own fault that he was killed. Besides, she changed the facts about his injuries, rambling incoherently, claiming he was shot in the back by his own guards, that his guards opened fire on the police and Murtaza had a death wish”. There were just too many loose ends which more than suggest that Zardari, aided and abetted by his wife had a hand in the murder. In the murky world of Pakistan’s politics of intrigue and counter-intrigues, murder is not too heavy a price to pay for the goodies of office.

And there is one bit of solid circumstantial evidence that makes the case against Zardari almost foolproof: corruption charges and his cut in every government contract, the accumulation of assets abroad which Murtaza had unearthed. Could this have forced Zardari’s hand?

Investigations into murders always leave unanswered question even in serious crime fiction. We have to go by circumstantial evidence and fill in the blanks ourselves which Fatima tries to do. And the most substantial evidence is that Murtaza had become “inconvenient” and was probably done away with. But this leads to further conjectures for which we can have no answers as with other political assassinations in Pakistan’s turbulent history. Everything gets hushed up till one assassination fades into the next.

Indian readers will lap up Fatima’s memoirs for the gossipy side of the palace intrigues that haunt Pakistani high society. Most of them ring true and they are told with a novelist’s touch backed by all the paraphernalia of scholarship — footnotes, interviews and documentation of sources. It is not a quickie, stretching over 20 chapters backed by family photographs and other memorabilia. But she doesn’t relate the lives of the Bhuttos to larger questions of Pakistani state and society. Maybe this wasn’t the place or the time to do so in what is a highly personal and painful memoir of her family.

Source : http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/v-v-fatima-bhutto%5Cs-seasons-in-hell/390583/