Pakistan's dynastic legacy

Owen Bennet-Jones spots and fills gaps in the vast literature available on the Bhuttos

Dynasties in South Asia have provided a compelling narrative of their own as a means of understanding contemporary politics. India’s case is well known but it is striking how much it is replicated over the region. In Bangladesh, Mujibur Rahman and Sheikh Hasina, in Sri Lanka the Bhandaranayakes, in Myanmar Aung San and Aung San Suu Kyi; and in Pakistan the Bhuttos.

In each charisma, tragedy and politics merge seamlessly to make much larger-than-life stories, intriguing political scientists and tempting biographers. But the story of a dynasty is at its most compelling only when it also tells the story of the polity in which it is embedded. So to succeed, a dynastic biography of the Bhuttos has to be as much a history of Pakistan.

In both the history as also the biography Owen Bennet-Jones succeeds admirably. He is also well equipped to tell this story. As a journalist he has lived in Pakistan and reported on it for major media platforms for a long period. His first book on Pakistan appeared almost two decades ago and remains a gripping account of its tensions, aspirations and politics at the turn of the millennium. The Bhutto Dynasty  is not an authorised biography, but covering Pakistan enabled Bennet-Jones to gain access to some of the important players who figure in it. There is, in any case, a vast literature available on the Bhuttos – particularly on Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Benazir Bhutto. Bennet-Jones’s knowledge of Pakistan has enabled him to ask the right questions, spot the gaps, fill them to whatever extent is possible and then weave a story that is as gripping as it is well written.

The author explains at the outset, “The Bhutto story is so full of passion, talent, suffering, courage, violence and money that it never lacks a strong narrative thrust. And the family story provides a good vehicle for telling the history of Pakistan as a whole – from before the time the country was created up to the present day.” Unlike some other major clans of Sindh that trace their origins to nobles from Afghanistan, central Asia or Iran or even the Arabian peninsula who chose to settle in India, the Bhutto ancestors had no difficulty asserting their indigenous Hindu Rajput origins. By colonial times the family was well established in Larkana, Sindh and that remains their citadel to this day.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was not the first Bhutto to play a role in the subcontinent’s tangled operatic history. That credit goes to his father Nawaz Shah Bhutto when as acting Dewan of Junagadh as partition and independence neared, and contrary to what was widely expected, got the government of Junagadh to accede to Pakistan. The rest, as they say, is history but also one that plays out in our own times.

Though his political beliefs may well have been sectarian, Shah Nawaz was open-minded in his personal life – he married a young Hindu girl of humble background who was to be the mother of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Many in the family were scandalised and, possibly, she was ostracised. This had a great impact on the young Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. “Poverty was her only crime,” he once said and he apparently developed “a sense of inferiority that he was always fighting”. Bennet-Jones, however, suggests another outcome of these antecedents was that “even if … Zulfikar later failed the Ahmadi minority … he led the family to become much less sectarian... .”

Inevitably, the bulk of the book is engrossed with the next two generations. If much of the detail is known the story remains of interest. Bhutto’s role is instigating the 1965 war with India and his resignation post-Tashkent all contributed to the troubles that engulfed Pakistan from the late 1960s. In the elections in 1970 – incidentally, Pakistan’s first country-wide general election – Bhutto had a majority of seats from West Pakistan but that was not enough to deny Mujibur Rahman in East Pakistan having a clear majority at the national level. The margin of Mujib’s victory meant that the scope for negotiation was reduced and Ayub Khan, now in retirement, correctly analysed that Mujib was now “the prisoner of his vast support”. Bennet-Jones correctly summarises: “Had he won an overall majority, Zulfikar would not have hesitated to form a government. But he considered Mujibur Rahman’s insistence that he be allowed to do just that ‘intolerably rigid’.”

Zulfikar, in fact, now expected that the inevitable crackdown by the military on the Bengalis would pave his own way to power.

As the curtains came down on a united Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, much as he had done in 1965, was able to capture the imagination of a demoralised West Pakistan. His grandstanding in the United Nations Security Council obscured “his personal role in a national defeat”.

Bennet-Jones’s verdict on 1971 is also worth citing: “… had Pakistan’s two most legitimate politicians combined forces to limit the power of the army, the history of the country could have taken a different course… Mujib said he was ready to do it. But for once Zulfikar did not see the big picture, and he let the moment pass. It was a missed opportunity.” Bennet-Jones’s also quotes General Yahya Khan describing Bhutto as a “venomous toad” and “far more responsible than Mujib” for the fall of Dacca.

Reconciling the Pakistani people to the loss of half their country was Bhutto’s great challenge in the years after 1971. Alongside this his great achievement was undoubtedly the 1973 Constitution of Pakistan: “By using all his political skills – bribery included – Zulfikar had made a significant contribution to Pakistan’s national story,” Bennet-Jones writes. As the 1970s progressed Pakistan’s other contradictions surfaced: Islamist pressures, Baluchistan, and the weaknesses of institutions. Bhutto’s own vanities, his intolerance of criticism, whether from his own party, the opposition or the press, combined with these. “Zulfikar failed to build democratic institutions, despite having had an opportunity to do so: When he took over the military lay powerless before him. Maybe no Pakistani politician could ever prevail over the military, but Zulfikar had a better chance than any other. And it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that some of the failures behind his failure were of his own making,” says Bennet-Jones.

Benazir’s life story against the background of Pakistan’s conflicted politics and the constant, brooding presence of the army, forms a larger part of the book. Within less than a decade of her father’s assassination she was prime minister in December 1988 only to be ousted before she had completed two years in office. It is easy to overlook just how difficult the process would have been – she was 35 and the first female prime minister of an Islamic country and a deeply conservative and patriarchal society. Certainly, Benazir believed that her gender would be a weapon to be used against her. For instance, Bennet-Jones records, “the date of the 1988 election had been chosen to coincide with the expected birth date of her first child. In the event Bilawal was premature…. The issue arose again with her second pregnancy which came during her first term in office…. Her solution was to have a caesarian section earlier than anyone was expecting.”

The 1990s saw Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif simultaneously dancing and dueling with the military. Both were prime ministers twice over but both could cooperate with the generals who deposed them if a return to power was a possibility -- only to fall out again. The 1990s provide, in fact, a pathology sample of Pakistan’s deep-rooted internal contradictions and structural constraints.

Her final comeback was towards the close of the Musharraf’s era and ended with her assassination – something she may have anticipated. Bennet-Jones is at his most perceptive when he notes that “Those who criticize her fail to appreciate that her death was, at least to some extent, an act of redemption in which should be weighed in the balance.”

A part of the Bhutto legacy lies is in their citadel in Larkana in the family mausoleum in Garhi Khuda Baksh, which Benazir transformed in her lifetime into a unique hybrid evocatively described elsewhere as part-Mughal monument, part-Sufi shrine. In larger part the legacy lives on through her son who is now weighing once again the Bhutto options vis-à-vis the army and Nawaz Sharif’s rival dynasty in the making.

Book Details:
 

The Bhutto Dynasty: The Struggle for Power in Pakistan
 

Author: Owen Bennet-Jones:

Publisher: Penguin Random House

Pages: ix+319

Price: Rs 999

The reviewer is a former High Commissioner to Pakistan and author of The People Next Door: The Curious History of India’s Relations With Pakistan. 

A shorter version of this review appears in print on October 31