I was in Pakistan the day after Benazir Bhutto was assassinated, and I was talking to Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, the country’s former prime minister, and his cousin Chaudhry Pervez Elahi, who was then the chief minister of Punjab. The country was in uproar: members of their political party were being attacked by members of Benazir’s Pakistan People’s Party, who suspected them of involvement in the plot.
Ch. Pervez introduced me to his son Moonis, the next generation of leadership for their Pakistan Muslim League (Quaid) party. Then we talked about what would become of the Pakistan Peoples Party – who would lead it now? I expected him to mention names like the veteran caretaker, Makhdoom Amin Fahim. But no: Benazir’s son, Bilawal, he said, will be the next leader.
At that time Bilawal was barely 19, studying at Oxford, and had shown no interest in politics. What could such a young man offer, I asked? “In Pakistan, politics is a family business,” he replied.
So this Saturday, the Bhutto-Zardari family will present Bilawal Zardari, or “Bilawal Bhutto Zardari” as he is now known, as the PPP’s new leader, head of the family business, at a party rally in Birmingham. Despite his tender age and minimal experience of Pakistan, the young scion of one of the country’s wealthiest feudal families will take over the reins of the country’s largest political party.
It’s an alarming state of affairs. As leader he will have influence over how the war on terror is waged and will play a key role in negotiating relations between civil society and the military, which looms menacingly over the country’s shaky democracy.
It’s a position for which there was neither contest nor welcome contestants. While the PPP has a number of promising up-and-coming MPs, like Palwasha Khan, or inspirational and able veterans like Aitzaz Ahsan (the former interior minister who led the successful lawyers’ movement to reinstate the deposed chief justice), merit simply doesn’t come into it.
If ever a country needed its leaders to be elected on merit, or an environment where the best talent can rise to the top, it’s Pakistan.
Yet Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto played a key role in the “East Pakistan” fiasco which led to the creation of Bangladesh; his daughter Benazir dragged the country to the edge of bankruptcy; and her husband treated the country’s customs and excise departments as part of the family business. Pakistan, it seems, is doomed to be saddled with Bhuttos forever, regardless of how good they are at governing.
It is often forgotten that Bhutto Pere was a tyrant, and that it was Benazir who aided the rise of the Taliban, despite warnings from women’s rights campaigners who let her know just how brutal its leaders were. It’s also forgotten that it was not the beautiful “daughter of the east” who abolished the Hudood Ordinance, under which rape victims were jailed for adultery, but the whisky-loving dictator, General Musharraf.
While there was a sense of inevitability about Bilawal’s eventual leadership, his nomination – as the party mourned his mother’s death – surprised many, just as her own nomination of Zardari as interim leader baffled her closest aides.
Zardari had been frozen out of the PPP leadership by Benazir, and until her death they were living separate lives in different continents. She is said to have regarded him as tainted reminder of the corruption in her previous two terms in office. Yet when her widower produced Benazir’s will, her closest supporters were astonished to see him described as a man “of courage and honour”. She wrote:
I would like my husband Asif Ali Zardari to lead you in this interim period until you and he decide what is best. I say this because he is a man of courage and honor. He spent 11½ years in prison without bending despite torture. He has the political stature to keep our party united.
Although she never mentioned Bilawal in the will, Zardari suggested he serve as co-chairman, and later purged Benazir’s closest supporters from the party’s leadership.
Sadly, Pakistan is not alone in its fatal attraction to dynasty. Jarwaharlal Nehru made his daughter Indira a minister -she succeeded him as prime minister and in turn groomed her son Sanjay to do the same. Sanjay played a key role in her notorious emergency rule, in which thousands of opponents were jailed. When he died in a plane crash, she groomed his brother Rajiv for the Congress leadership. Like his mother, he was assassinated. Today his widow Sonia holds the fort while their son Rahul learns the ropes as Congress general secretary.
There is no doubt Rahul will succeed Manmohan Singh as prime minister, despite having no ministerial experience himself, and despite the fact that those who know them regard his sister Priyanka as the more natural politician.
A few years ago I met Rahul Gandhi and joined him on the stump in his mother’s Uttar Pradesh constituency. He was shy, reticent, and more bookish than charismatic. But the reception he got from ecstatic villagers as we crawled through in his convoy showed he was regarded more like a living God than a man. In India, being a Gandhi is more than enough.
A family friend explained that the subcontinent’s politics are dynastic because the “brands” built by those nations’ founders were so strong, and because their names had become so widely recognised in countries where illiteracy and ignorance are so prevalent.
So on Saturday Bilawal Bhutto Zardari will stand in the shadow of his assassinated mother, his executed grandfather, and his two murdered uncles, and succeed them not as the best man for the job or the best hope for saving one of the world’s most fragile countries, but simply as his mother’s son: the inheritor of the family firm.
