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My first memory of Benazir Bhutto is a joke. It went something like this: A guy walks up to Benazir and says, “Mohtarma, although you carry a tasbih, you only take a few seconds on each bead.” Benazir replies, “For the first bead, I read the Aital Kursi. After that I just say kursi, kursi, kursi.”
The politician-as-power-crazed-megalomaniac joke rings true because we have been conditioned to accept our elected representatives as masters in the art of equivocation, compromise and even venality. Benazir, since her assassination, has been exempted from that depiction. In death, she has taken on saintly powers. Her rhetoric and achievement have been celebrated; her flaws papered over. In ascribing to her powers she never earned, we are doing a great disservice to Benazir.
Like her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Benazir was an outsider held in contempt by Pakistan’s permanent established. To get anything done, she had to fight multiple, internal battles. As the Taliban started taking over Afghanistan, for example, Benazir’s instincts were reflexively opposed to the retrograde regime. But foreign policy was largely controlled by the military and Benazir was never able to wrest that power away from it. There is also no doubting that Benazir was in favour of women’s rights but even on an issue as important as ‘honour’ killings she was unable to get her ANP allies and even some in the PPP from condemning it in the Senate. Had Benazir been willing to expend some political capital on this issue, she may have had some success. But, like any other politician, she prioritised and was willing to ignore certain issues if it would benefit her down the line.
Since Benazir has been mythologised since her death, we tend to forget that she was the consummate deal-maker. The image of the scheming politician, willing to forge an alliance with anyone to get back into power, doesn’t jive with the aura ascribed to Benazir after her assassination. So it is simply been airbrushed out of history by her supporters. To form coalition governments Benazir toadied up to the likes of Maulana Fazlur Rehman, a man who stood in stark contrast to all her ideals and, with the NRO, even came to terms with a military that she had always fought against. Again, this is not meant to be critical of Benazir. It is simply to show that she made the compromises that politicians are faced with every day.
On the flip side, those who have always nursed a special hatred for Benazir have, since her death, made her out to be a uniquely evil politician. Benazir’s corruption, we are told, was far worse than that of anyone else. Other assorted misdeeds are ascribed to her. These critics, too, are forgetting that Benazir the politician was no worse than those who surrounded and opposed her.
In Pakistan, we are used to treating politics as entertainment, so we want the cast of characters to fit into easily defined hero and villain archetypes. The reality of politics escapes us. We are not willing to accept that Benazir’s rhetoric was often transcendent but she was unable to translate that into legislative reality. She, like every politician that has ever existed, often fell prey to her basest desires. By seeing Benazir as a saviour we are abdicating our own responsibility in the democratic experiment. If we accept politicians as self-serving, we then have to take it upon ourselves to push them into doing the right thing. But if we accept the myth, then all we have to do is sit back and let the magical leader take care of all our problems.
Nadir Hassan is a journalist based in Karachi.
The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.
