“Oh, she’s a lovely girl” exclaimed Mani Shankar Aiyar, Congress MP who has known the new Pakistani Ambassador to the United States, Sherry Rehman, for many years. “But mind you, she’s a Pakistani” he added, “cast very much in the mould of Mohammad Ali Jinnah of August 1947”.
What Aiyar was trying to say was that despite Rehman’s enthusiastic support for India-Pakistan friendship, Rehman is an intensely patriotic Pakistani who will do everything to advance her country’s interests in its currently fraught relationship with the United States.
In the past, the US-Pakistan relationship may have been as comfortable as well-washed old clothes. No longer. The average Pakistani is as much a conspiracy theorist as the average Indian. And there is a widespread belief that while claiming to be a well-wisher of Pakistan and its civilian government, the US is actually doing everything it can to undermine both. The recent attack by the Afghanistan-based NATO forces that cost more than 20 Pakistani soldiers their lives has put unbearable stress on a relationship already strained after Osama bin Laden was hunted down and killed in Abbottabad.
Sherry Rehman has done her bit to fuel paranoia about the US. Writing in Pakistani newspaper Dawn after President Obama’s India visit, she said: “There are no two views in Pakistan that the endorsement of a permanent UN Security Council seat for India by President Obama on his Indian visit will have a clear fallout in destabilising a region vexed by conflict....With a nuclear deterrence mechanism already in tatters after the 2005 signing of a civil-nuclear deal between the US and India, this new public push to support India as it grows more aggressive in Kashmir and in the region is widely seen as misplaced and ill-advised. The worry in Islamabad is that it may be irreversible.”
On other occasions too, Rehman has held the official Pakistani view as her own—whether on Kashmir or the Indus Waters Treaty or that MFN was all very well but India must lift non-tariff barriers if trade between the countries was really to take off.
But is this the only lens through which India and Indians should see Rehman? In many ways she is a victim in her own country. She is one of Pakistan’s most prominent liberal politicians, whose support for a repeal of the country’s blasphemy laws and struggle for womens’ empowerment has in recent months led her to fear for her life.
She has much in common with Benazir Bhutto, her political ideal who was assassinated in 2008—both glamourous, independently wealthy and woman parliamentarians in one of the most conservative countries in the world.
Educated in the US and UK (at the University of Sussex, described once as a haven for immature Left wingers) Rehman has been a journalist—she was editor-in-chief of Pakistan’s leading news magazine, The Herald, and anchored a television current affairs programme in 1999. Becoming Minister for Information and Broadcasting in 2008 was a natural progression. As Minister, she campaigned against honour killings and domestic violence. She quit the Asif Zardari government because of differences in 2009 over the government’s refusal to reinstate judges sacked by President Musharraf.
But in late 2010, she sprang into the limelight again when she fought to abolish the death penalty for blasphemy when a Christian woman with small children was sentenced to death under the blasphemy law. Her friend and colleague Salman Taseer was gunned down by his bodyguard for speaking against exactly this. Minister Shahbaz Bhatti followed. Pakistani Islamists made it clear she would be next.
She is safe for now, since her new job will take her out of Pakistan. It also means that Pakistan will have an articulate spokesman who will know the right language to use with both Republicans and Democrats.
Whether earlier or now, a Pakistani Ambassador in Washington has a heavy load of frenetic socialising. A typical day begins with a power breakfast at 8 am and ends at 11 pm with the third dinner party. Rehman not only has the stamina to carry off this punishing schedule but can also call a spade a spade with charm. “you could say she is Pakistan’s Mani Shankar Aiyar” said Aiyar.
