Aboard the Democracy Train Page 3

  In 1973, while I was still in college, thousands of school and college teachers in Karachi held a massive demonstration to demand higher wages. I was part of the rally, where wave after wave of teachers kept marching toward a menacing police cordon. Suddenly, the police – ordered by Bhutto’s government – swung into action, lashed at the teachers and cracked tear gas shells in the air.

  I felt my eyes stream and my head implode with pain. Blinded by tears, my friend and I jumped over the wall of a house in the neighborhood. Luckily, we found a big pond, where we washed our eyes and freed them from the stinging pain.

  It was the first incident of harsh repression that I experienced under the populist Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. It shocked me into realizing that Bhutto’s reputation as a firebrand and a rabble-rouser may have been just that: mere rhetoric to attract votes from a people desperate to find a way out of burgeoning poverty.

  Fifteen years later, the forces of history would catapult his daughter, Benazir Bhutto into becoming the only female prime minister of the Muslim world. Like millions of people all over the world, I was inspired by the possibility of change. Surely, the Western educated Benazir who spoke convincingly of her determination to change the course of Pakistan’s history would make a difference. As a journalist on the front seat, it fell on me to find out.

  The End of Populist Rule

  I was a college student in Karachi in 1977 when an alliance of political parties, called the Pakistan National Alliance (PNA), mobilized thousands of people to demand Bhutto’s removal. The PNA movement was largely led by the Islamic political parties who, in spite of the concessions made by the secular Sindhi prime minister, accused him of straying away from the raison d’etre of Pakistan.

  As the PNA movement gathered steam and their wheel jam strikes paralyzed the city for unending weeks, Bhutto challenged the Islamic fundamentalists at a massive rally: “Yes, I drink alcohol, but I don’t drink the blood of the people.”

  But whilst the Jamaat-i-Islami had forced Bhutto toward Islamization, the PNA had now grown into a political movement with a single point agent of removing Bhutto. The crowds kept growing around the Old Exhibition roundabout – near Jinnah’s mausoleum. For weeks, we endured “wheel jam strikes” as the masses kept up the pressure for Bhutto’s resignation. Driving back home, I would spot increasingly large crowds milling around Jinnah’s mausoleum, forcing me to make a detour to reach home.

  And then came the moment that people in Pakistan dreaded. On July 5, 1977, the Chief of Army Staff, General Zia ul Haq declared martial law, abrogated the 1973 constitution, suspended fundamental rights and put the elected Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto under house arrest.

  Six months later, as I flew to Boston to study history at Northeastern University, Bhutto was to be tried for murder. His wife, Nusrat and their daughter, Benazir were put under house arrest. In April 1979, General Zia turned a deaf ear to international calls for clemency and despite a split verdict in the supreme court, hanged the sitting prime minister.

  I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts when a retired supreme court judge who delivered the dissenting verdict on Bhutto’s execution, Justice Safdar Shah, came to MIT to talk about the case. We heard the Pashtun judge speak in a voice choked with emotion against General Zia’s “politically motivated” decision to have Bhutto executed. In a tone full of foreboding, Shah warned about how Bhutto’s execution would further divide and destroy Pakistan.

  “Go back, go back and serve your country,” Justice Shah told us in a tone of voice that I took to heart.

  The Only Woman Reporter at Dawn Newspaper

  In February 1984, I returned to Pakistan to fulfill my childhood dream of being a journalist in my home country. In the six years that I had studied and worked in the US, I kept my eyes on Pakistan. Only days after my return from America, I applied for a reporting position in the nation’s premier English language newspaper, Dawn in Karachi.

  In those days, women journalists worked behind closed doors as sub-editors, columnists and magazine editors and within different sections of the newspaper. My request to become a reporter baffled Dawn’s hierarchy. The assistant news editor – Zubeida Mustafa – who knew me as a schoolgirl warned me rather cautiously that there was hardly any precedent for a woman reporter. “Would you like to be a sub-editor?” she asked.

  The thought of working behind the desk to edit copy while male reporters traveled, met people and wrote breaking news stories was not particularly appealing. I had returned from the US to fulfill a childhood dream of reporting in the nation’s most established newspaper and was reluctant to settle for less. Even as a young girl, I used to thumb through Dawn, fancying that I could write better than its reporters. Unwilling to take a back seat because the newspaper had to date not hired any women reporters, I asked: “Can’t I be the first?”

  My youth, enthusiasm and Western schooling paid off, as the editor of Dawn appointed me “staff reporter.” I was shown into the bustling city room, which with its old furniture, antique typewriters and older staff, exuded a sense of purpose. Indeed, the staid manner in which Dawn’s senior reporters wrote was reflected in the newspaper, which was begun before partition in Dehli, India by Pakistan’s founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah. As the nation’s most established English newspaper, Dawn carried an image of sobriety and a reputation for credibility.

  Although nobody said it, I knew they thought I wouldn’t last. They expected that, like other educated women from urban areas, I would get married, have children and stay home, leaving men to do the serious business of covering breaking news.

  In fact, I stayed for 16 years, carefully breaking stereotypes of what I, as a woman, was capable of achieving. While the public space for women in Pakistan had shrunk, I had returned from the US with a greater taste for freedom.

  My journey as the only woman reporter for Dawn coincided with that of Pakistan’s first female prime minister. In 1986, while the nation was still under military rule, Benazir returned to Lahore, Pakistan to an historic welcome that demonstrated the deep antipathy to military rule.

  As Benazir mobilized millions of people who hungered for democracy, I too jumped into covering politics for my newspaper. It would allow me to witness the machinations of the establishment and become privy to the fragile nature of democracy in Pakistan.

  PART I

  Politics and Journalism

  in Pakistan

  Chapter 1

  ABOARD THE

  DEMOCRACY

  TRAIN

  Getting to Know Benazir Bhutto

  On August 17, 1988, I was on vacation in Vermont, USA when news came that the C-130 plane carrying Pakistan’s military dictator, President Gen. Zia ul Haq, had exploded in mid-air. Also on board were the nation’s top military generals and the US ambassador to Pakistan, Arnold Raphael, who had just returned from watching a military parade in southern Pakistan. Everyone was killed.

  Stunned, I listened over and over to the news report, which had been taped by one of my engineer friends while I was out of the house. I could not believe that the crafty, self-effacing chief martial law administrator (CMLA), Gen. Zia – who had taken over in a military coup on July 5, 1977 and had been nicknamed “Canceled My Last Announcement” because of his repeated postponements of elections – was actually dead.

  In the misty hills of Bennington, Vermont, I found it even more surreal that the strong man, who had come to symbolize harsh military rule for the last 11½ years, could vanish into thin air.

  That night I got a phone call from the Pacifica News service, the US based radio for which I reported from Pakistan. They wanted more details on Gen. Zia’s plane crash. It turned out that Pacifica had contacted my parents in Karachi, Pakistan and they had forwarded them my US number.

  “What are you doing in the US? Why aren’t you in Pakistan?” they wanted to know.

  Well for one, I told them I had no idea that Gen. Zia ul Haq would be killed while I was taking a break from the hectic rep
orting assignments from my newspaper, Dawn, in Karachi. For the last four years, I had been covering the gory incidents of ethnic violence that had kept erupting despite Gen. Zia’s iron-fisted rule.

  Those sporadic incidents of bloodshed that had kept me rushing from hospital to hospital in Karachi made Vermont, with its radiant autumnal colors, feel like another planet.

  Immediately, I felt the urgency of returning home. The sense of deprivation among different classes and ethnic groups had simmered for the whole of Gen. Zia’s rule and in the last four years had reached boiling point.

  The Sindhis, who mainly comprise the peasantry from rural Sindh, had never really forgiven Gen. Zia for executing their populist leader, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in April 1979. Conversely, the better-educated Muslim migrants from India (Mohajirs) who grew into a majority in Karachi had become impatient with Gen. Zia’s failure to solve their problems. Given that every ethnic group had engaged in the proliferation of arms and ammunition that flooded the region in those heady Cold War days, there seemed to be no end in sight.

  Mostly, as I booked my flight home, my thoughts were filled with what Gen. Zia’s death would mean for Benazir Bhutto, daughter of Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. After the military executed her father on April 4, 1979, Benazir and her mother, Nusrat had been put under house arrest. Hundreds of thousands of Sindhis, shocked by the execution, had thronged to the Bhutto residence for condolence.

  Thereafter, in a cruel twist, Gen. Zia threw the mother and daughter into prison, where they endured years of harsh confinement. As Benazir developed medical problems, the dictator allowed her to briefly leave the country for treatment.

  I had been a reporter in Dawn for only two years when Benazir returned from a brief exile in London to an unprecedented welcome in Lahore, Punjab in 1986. She was then the co-chairperson of the Pakistan Peoples Party, a position she shared with her mother.

  The turnout of people was unlike anything seen in Pakistan’s recent history. Millions of people lined the roads from the Lahore airport; they climbed rooftops and trees to catch a glimpse of Benazir, and afterwards heard her denounce Gen. Zia for the murder of her father. Her meteoric rise would lead journalists to predict that the PPP would come to power and Benazir Bhutto would become the next prime minister of Pakistan.

  In 1986, I met Benazir for the first time at a select gathering of judges, lawyers and politicians invited to her late father ’s ancestral mansion, 70 Clifton in Karachi. After her triumphant return to Pakistan, she had invited us for moral support and consultations on her bid for power. Although her family home was styled on feudal mansions in interior Sindh, it was adorned with the expensive Western furniture and oil paintings that put it a notch above the decor of other elite homes in Karachi.

  Inside, my eyes were drawn to a picture of her fiery father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a Mao cap on his head and fist clenched as he roared before a vast blur of faces. He had left a lasting impression on millions of Pakistanis as the savior of the oppressed classes and his execution by Gen. Zia in 1979 wounded millions of Sindhis and created a lasting antipathy toward the military.

  The Sindhi-speaking servants, who flitted around serving drinks to visitors, tip-toed with their eyes down, demonstrating how privileged they felt to serve the Bhuttos.

  The room buzzed with conversation from Western-educated intellectuals. Gen. Zia ul Haq was still in power but he had loosened his grip on the administration, leading to a demand for elections. The pressure from the electorate and Benazir’s supporters would build until the military convened elections two years later.

  Figure 1 Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto addresses public meeting in Pishin, Baluchistan on March 1, 1977 (Dawn photo).

  Benazir’s guests included the late Supreme Court judge, Justice Dorab Patel – a Parsi who had cast the dissenting vote against executing her father. Justice Patel later became chairman of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, of which I was a council member for a decade. Keen to establish rule of law, Justice Patel was initially supportive of her bid to lead the nation.

  Benazir, who appeared poised to change the course of Pakistan’s history, intrigued me. She exuded a steely determination as we discussed politics in her elegant living room. Tall and stately, she was elegantly dressed in heavy, embroidered fabrics stitched into a traditional shalwar kameez and dupatta.

  Even then, I had misgivings about Benazir’s ability to lead. Watching her make small talk, with her manicured nails and matching make-up, I couldn’t help but wonder whether she would be no different from the Westernized elites who live in a cocoon in this deeply class-divided country.

  From my own experience, I knew that upper class Pakistanis in the cities know more about Western trends and fashions than their own archaic customary laws and traditions. Indeed, these Pakistanis often treat their national language Urdu with studied indifference, embellishing it with large doses of English. Benazir seemed no different. Her familiarity with high-class Western circles was immediately apparent in her conversations and mannerisms.

  At home, Benazir dressed in a way befitting a woman who planned to enter politics in a Muslim nation. Early into her political career, she had taken to wearing the dupatta over her head and she made sure never to shake hands with men. It was a far cry from other Western-educated women in Pakistan, who rarely cover their heads.

  A PPP sympathizer and friend referred to her appearance with good humor: “Benazir has taken to wearing all the veils of women, so they don’t have to wear them.”

  Only occasionally did I see glimpses of the carefree life Benazir apparently led at Oxford University in England. Early in her political career, Benazir criticized her chief political opponent, Nawaz Sharif, for his plans to build a motorway through the Punjab. She had argued at a press conference that an impoverished developing country like Pakistan could not afford such extravagant ventures and instead needed to spend money on health and education.

  Carried away by the heat of the moment, Benazir unselfconsciously told our small group of reporters at the Karachi Gymkhana, “I, too, enjoyed driving fast cars on motorways in London.”

  Pleasantly surprised at her forthright manner and wanting to hear more, I bent forward. But at that point, Benazir had pulled the veil more tightly around her face. Surrounded by male politicians from feudal backgrounds, she looked the part of a Western-educated woman who trained to become the prime minister of a conservative Muslim country. Predictably, her guard came up the next minute.

  “But that doesn’t mean that we as a poor nation we should build motorways,” she added primly.

  In speaking to me – obviously a free spirit in the manner I dressed and traveled – Benazir swiftly stomped out any suggestions that she might have had a liberated life-style in the West or, God forbid, have had male friends.

  Benazir had adopted her father’s demagogic style of speaking to the masses. Often, she was the only woman in the hinterlands who addressed a sea of men. Her voice blared out of the microphones as, fist raised, she challenged the military dictator Gen. Zia ul Haq to stop being afraid of her and hold elections.

  At times, her sheer tenacity and courage overrode my misgivings as to whether her sheltered, feudal background would allow her to stomach the complex, chaotic and dangerous world of Pakistani politics.

  At one such event in interior Sindh, where the stage had been especially decorated for Benazir, I traveled in a caravan of PPP workers through miles of pitch-black rural wastelands. The cries of the poor, dispossessed Sindhi masses that had traveled from remote areas of Sindh to attend the rally rang in the blackness of the night.

  “Shaheed ki Baitee – Benazir” (Daughter of the Martyr – Benazir)

  “Ab Aai Aai –Benazir” (Now She’s Coming, Coming – Benazir)

  As we reached the rally site, the party workers hoisted me – the only other female on the scene – onto a makeshift stage. To my surprise, I found myself sitting next to Benazir. Evidently astonished to see me in t
he middle of nowhere, she turned to me and said: “You’re very brave, Nafisa.”

  There was a sheer determination in Benazir as she traveled day in, day out to mobilize humongous crowds. Having lost her illustrious father to Gen. Zia less than a decade ago, she had dried her tears and appeared to be filled with a grim determination to step in her father’s shoes. The humiliating way in which Gen. Zia’s regime had treated her only hardened her resolve to lead PPP workers who had suffered long years of imprisonment under Zia.

  In my interviews with Benazir, she vowed to take the nation out of the dark ages and transform it into a modern industrialized state. Even if this was rhetoric – as I sometimes suspected – it lifted my spirits to think that a modern, educated woman was ready to lead a nation in which women were largely poor, pregnant and powerless.

  Moreover, as a woman from a cultured background, Benazir had a gentility that was missing from the seasoned male players who dominated Pakistan’s politics. If I had any doubts about her regal airs, these were quieted by thoughts that the nation needed a woman with the arrogance of the feudal class to cut through the entrenched power of the military and the bureaucracy.

  Figure 2 Benazir Bhutto in her ancestral home town of Larkana, Sindh (Photograph courtesy of Dr Shafqat Soomro).

  The Democracy Train Takes Off

  The mid-air explosion of the C-130 plane which killed Gen. Zia ul Haq and the top military brass in Pakistan was a turning point in my life. It was also the start of a new chapter in the lives of millions of Pakistanis. The military went ahead with its scheduled plan to hold elections, albeit without the old dictator.