Hence, no surprise that this incisive warts-and-all story of one of Pakistan’s famous modern political dynasties emerges from the hand of a seasoned foreign observer. Owen Bennett-Jones, former BBC foreign correspondent is also known globally as the sometime host of BBC World Service’s Newshour. He is the author of Pakistan in the Eye of the Storm, a comprehensive analysis of Pakistan’s role in the global war on terror. His knowledge of this terrain also led him into a foray into fiction with a thriller Target Britain that ties Balochistan and London into an intercontinental web of intrigue and danger.
His new book tells the necessary and important story of how a new political party, the Pakistan People’s Party, emerged in the late 1960s to displace a military dictatorship in Pakistan and gradually transmogrified itself into a dynastic order rooted in the feudal roots of its founder Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. It is a riveting tale based on deep reportage and sleuthing, laced with delicious and titillating details that verge on the edge of gossip, except that he bolsters his narrative with citations and telling details, the hallmark of a trained journalist.
Bennett-Jones masterfully weaves together the disparate strands of the modern, cosmopolitan, and urbane Bhutto with his strong nationalistic streak on the one hand and a socialist yearning on the other
Bennet-Jones begins with the gripping recounting of the final journey of Benazir Bhutto from exile into the maelstrom of Pakistan’s election campaign, under the aegis of the Transatlantic cousins, the United States and the United Kingdom, but against the wishes and threats of the military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf. Unafraid and fatalistic, the two-time former prime minister was ready to take on the entrenched “liberal autocrat” who had run Pakistan on the strength of his dual role as army chief and president. In doing so, she also opened the door for the return of another two-time former prime minister Mian Mohammed Nawaz Sharif, the head of the other leading political party, the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) or PML-N, a creature of the Pakistan military during the Ziaul Haq era. Benazir Bhutto simultaneously threw a challenge to the emerging forces of terrorism that mixed religion and nationalism under the banner of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. In doing so, she handicapped herself even before setting foot on Pakistani soil and was met with a rousing and literally explosive reception in Karachi that Bennet-Jones reports in telling detail. Her journey culminated in her own death as a result of a terrorist attack in Liaquat Bagh (formerly Company Bagh), Rawalpindi in the hazy evening of December 27, 2007. The second time that a national leader was assassinated on that site, the first being the country’s first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, on October 16, 1951. Clearly the Musharraf regime failed to protect her despite the fact that its own intelligence chief was aware of the death threats against her. But surprisingly, contends Bennett-Jones, her own party may have failed her too, as its security measures proved inadequate. Her security advisor, Rehman Malik, according to both Bennet-Jones and the United Nations’ Ambassador Heraldo Munoz, inexplicably removed himself from the scene of the attack that took her life and ended up in Islamabad rather than turning to assist his wounded leader, as others tried to take her to a hospital. Then, as the later United Nations’ investigation into the assassination detailed, the Musharraf regime massively interfered in the crime scene, literally washing away the forensic evidence from the crime scene on Murree Road. The real cause of her death became murky and subject to much speculation after the local police chief and then her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, reportedly refused an autopsy, recounts the UN investigator. Did she suffer bullet wounds or did her head hit a latch as she fell through the open hatch of her vehicle on to the seat? The death certificate had left the cause of death open, to be decided by an autopsy. In a morbid coincidence, one of the senior doctors who worked on Benazir Bhutto that evening was the son of a doctor who had worked in vain on Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan in 1951. Bennett-Jones plies his craft with care, building his story by carefully sifting evidence and corroborating information from different sources. The death of Benazir Bhutto also became the basis of his earlier award-winning and powerful podcast.
The conclusion one draws from this story is that dynastic politics has become engrained in the culture of entitlement that governs and sustains political life in Pakistan today
From this dramatic introduction, he takes the reader into the feudal back story of the Bhutto clan in Sindh in British India as its elder, Sir Shah Nawaz Bhutto, entered Sindh politics and the Pakistan Movement and then served the ruler of the small state of Junagadh at the time of the partition of British India. Later, we see the rise of his son, the young Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who ended up on the West Coast of the United States for his undergraduate studies, first at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and then at the University of California at Berkeley. Bhutto took to absorbing as much as he could of Western civilization, socialism, and international relations even while pursuing a full and colorful social life. Bennett-Jones traces Bhutto’s first contact with his future second wife, Nusrat Sabunchi Isphahani (sic), during a trip back to Karachi (he had been forcibly married to an elder relative before heading abroad). Her father was a soap merchant in Karachi of Kurdish Iranian descent. They were married after he returned from the United States and before he left for the University of Oxford in 1951. Nusrat went with him but was unhappy in Britain and returned to Pakistan after three months, while the brilliant and determined Bhutto completed his Oxford studies in two instead of three years and was called to the Bar at Lincoln’s Inn, London. While he was away, Benazir was born on June 21, 1953 in Larkana. Her father returned home in September that year, ready for politics.
His meteoric political rise began under the tutelage of former military-man turned politician Iskander Mirza, who inducted him into his cabinet. Bhutto’s deft political moves and ability to play to his superiors’ vanity endeared him to both Mirza and his successor the army chief General Muhammad Ayub Khan who took over via a Coup d’état in 1958.
Bennett-Jones masterfully weaves together the disparate strands of the modern, cosmopolitan, and urbane Bhutto with his strong nationalistic streak on the one hand and a socialist yearning on the other. All leavened with an angry dose of raw feudalism that was barely skin deep. The idealistic and privileged young lad who wrote to the founder of Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, in 1945 at the age of 17 “that the time would come when he would sacrifice his life for Pakistan,” ended up owning the slogan of Roti, Kapra, aur Makan as the cornerstone of his philosophy of Islamic Socialism. He gave Pakistan, and especially its struggling masses and youth, hope with a new constitution in 1973 that survives in some form even today. He also laid the seeds of Pakistan’s emergence as a nuclear power. And, he resisted the religious right most of his life (as did his daughter). But, in his waning days Bhutto conceded massively to them as he tried to buy off their public protests against a rigged election in 1977 by banning alcohol, declaring Friday as the official weekend holiday, and making the Ahmadi sect a non-Muslim minority. In effect, he thus laid the foundation for the rightward swing of the State under his successor, the military usurper General Ziaul Haq, who overthrew him in July 1977. Haq ended up hanging Bhutto in 1979 after reviving a case of murder of the father of an upstart party man, Ahmed Raza Kasuri. Over the next decade, Haq empowered the Mullahs and gave birth to a new breed of politicians from the business class of the Punjab in the form of the Sharif family. The rest, as they say, is history.
This book is a superb story of the schizoid nature of Pakistani politics and its so-called upper class, including the nouveau riche. Feudalistic behavior hides beneath a veneer of Western education and ritualistic calls for democracy. Politics as a family business, fed by institutional corruption that has left few institutions clear of its taint, continues to weaken the foundations of Pakistani democracy. Even the occasional reformers, like the current Prime Minister Imran Khan, who ventured into politics ostensibly to fight corruption, have to seek, one way or the other, the sponsorship and support of the powerful military and its intelligence services and make unsavory alliances. Meanwhile, the absence of clearly defined political and economic philosophies among the many opportunistic political parties has produced a perennial army of turncoats from different parties and pressure groups. They continue to populate successive governments in Islamabad. That is the structural weakness of the fractured current regime and it is compounded by its misalliance with and reliance on the powerful military. Yet, Pakistan struggles on, kept afloat by the diminishing ranks of honest and hardworking bureaucrats, professional military men and women, and some smart second-tier politicians in many of the dynastic parties, who surprisingly refuse to break away from the shackles of dynastic politics.
The conclusion one draws from this story is that dynastic politics has become engrained in the culture of entitlement that governs and sustains political life in Pakistan today. The major parties speak of democracy but do not practice it within their own parties. Nepotism thrives. Politics as family business will likely survive until the Pakistani intelligentsia and middle class join hands with the business community to stake a claim on their country’s future, and the military returns to its primary role of defending the country against external threat and domestic insurgencies.
An argument can be made that the Bhutto dynasty effectively ended with the murder of Benazir Bhutto. Her brothers had died or been murdered while she was alive; the elder, Murtaza, on her own watch as prime minister. The only other relative on the public stage at home, though reluctant to enter active politics, is her intellectual author and niece Fatima, an apt inheritor of her grandfather’s superb library in the family home in Clifton, Karachi. Benazir’s own legacy and party were taken over by her husband, who reshaped everything to his liking, even while attempting to co-opt her family name by making his son Bilawal a front man for the PPP. Meanwhile, he continues to call the shots from behind the scenes. Zardari is ailing and under constant legal threat. We have yet to see if Bilawal can match his mother and grandfather’s intellect and courage, or their ability to attract and charm intellectuals and the ordinary men and women on Pakistan alike. In Pakistan’s uncertain politics, we must bear in mind Bennett-Jones assessment of the future of the PPP under the novice Bilawal Bhutto Zardari: “the Bhuttos have always believed that, when the ultimate prize of power is at stake, a deal can be done.”
The writer is a Distinguished Fellow at the South Asia Center of the Atlantic Council in Washington DC. He was the Center’s founding director in 2009. His latest book is The Battle for Pakistan: The Bitter US Friendship and a Tough Neighbourhood (Penguin Random House 2019, Liberty Books, Pakistan 2019, and Rowman and Littlefield 2020). His previous book, Crossed Swords: Pakistan, its Army, and the Wars Within (2008 and 2017), is currently being reprinted by Oxford University Press