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Lahore dust and a
London sale
 Like
all great political figures, Benazir Bhutto was far from perfect. In
more than a decade of knowing her, as a reporter on the Pakistan
beat, I often found her exasperating - as when, in the middle of an
interview, she would digress from mouthing the juiciest lines about
her pet hate Zia-ul-Haq and start reading off totally irrelevant
figures on Pakistan's economy. Or when she would keep you waiting
for hours after fixing time for a meeting - and this could happen
irrespective of whether she was in power or not.
She was also sometimes irrational, as in her May 1990 attack on
India over Kashmir. She delivered the famous speech in Muzaffarabad
where she exhorted Kashmiris to cut Jagmohan (then J&K Governor)
into pieces: Jagmohan ko jag-jag momo han-han kar do, she said,
making a furious chopping gesture with her left palm on to her right
hand. She could also be stupid in speaking so openly against her
army to Rajiv Gandhi in what was hailed as the "honeymoon" summit in
the winter of 1988. Stupid, because she had not even cared to get
her own rooms swept for bugs. As you would expect, the ISI had the
room nicely wired and tapes of that damning conversation were
liberally leaked to justify her sacking by the Establishment - that
remarkable Pakistani institution, the trinity of the army,
intelligence and bureaucracy which I have always spelt with capital
E. She could be corrupt, as her fortunes overseas would tell you.
And, finally, she could also be desperate for power as evident in
the compromises she lately made with Musharraf.
But while she could be exasperating, confused, insecure, loud,
immature, vicious, venal, desperate, whatever - one weakness you
would never associate with Benazir was physical cowardice.
At a time when the Indian Prime Minister would not step out of the
SPG's embrace, I have seen her not only having dinner with her
family in the Islamabad Marriott's open coffee shop, but even invite
me, an Indian journalist at a loose end, to join them for an ice
cream at a Baskin Robbins or an equivalent on a nightly family
drive.
She lived in Karachi, travelled often to Larkana and those lands are
not for the lily- ivered. For the most part, she showed such
nonchalance for the army establishment. In the 1993 election, when
she was a frontrunner, one morning in her Karachi home, she told me:
"So you keep saying you have never been to Larkana? Come there
tomorrow with me." I said I had no visa for Larkana and wouldn't
risk venturing so deep inside very sensitive Sindh without
documentation. "What will happen? At worse, they will jail you. Then
in a week I will be Prime Minister and will send you home and if I
could last in Sukkur jail for so long, can't you survive for just
one week?"
I did travel with her to Larkana, perhaps the first Indian
journalist to do so in a long time, the local right-wing press went
to town with Benazir's dodgy friendships in the Indian media. But
she wasn't bothered.
You have to experience Pakistan's street politics to understand how
chaotic and dangerous it can be. Ours has mellowed hugely in
comparison. At the best of times, a popular politician in Pakistan
takes huge physical risks. Crowds, chaos, din, drums and dust, just
the raw energy of the Pakistani street leaves India far behind.
Perhaps it is because of the spasmodic nature of that democratic
process, each rally is some kind of mass catharsis. Or, perhaps, as
a Pakistan journo once told me, "It is just that we are a mostly
Punjabi nation."
 But
in so many years of covering politics, I have never seen such a
crowd, so much energy, noise, dust and adrenalin as while following
Benazir from Lahore airport when she returned from exile in the
summer of 1986. It was the first time ever that I was lost. I, who
had seen so much chaos from Indira Gandhi's rallies to JP Narayan's
and the mass defiance of curfew by a million people in Guwahati.
After an hour, I had no idea where I was, my shirt was torn. My face
and head were covered in dust like everybody else's but nobody
seemed to mind. For a nation starved of any democracy for nearly a
decade, this was a moment to savour.
And the frail, then 35-year-old, who had brought it to them, the
freedom of the street, the safety of numbers, and hence the courage
to shout slogans against Zia and America, stood for those hours - in
that dust storm - on top of a totally unprotected open truck. The
truck was to become her campaign vehicle for ever.
But, if Benazir wasn't so exasperating, she wouldn't be such an
original. She could swallow so much dust from the top of a truck,
mingle with crowds, court danger, disease, inconvenience, anything.
But read a disclosure in Pakistan's National Assembly after her
second term as PM - for the short term for which was in power she
spent nearly $6 million of taxpayer's money to import Evian mineral
water from France for her household.
At a personal level, I was privileged to have not just access and
attention from her, but also a degree of informality. In 1993, as
results came in anointing her as the new PM, she sat chatting in her
home with a small group of foreign journos she was friendly with and
turned to one from a British paper. "Christopher," she said in mock
lament, "How awful I have to become PM now when so many great sales
are on in London. I had to buy so much for my family."
She came to attend Rajiv Gandhi's funeral and was put up in New
Delhi's Ashok Hotel. She had her people seek me out and while we
were walking though the grand lobby, she said to me,"What a great
building and what a terrible hotel." Then she added with a wink and
a nudge,"Tell your friend Nawaz Sharif (Nwaz shreef much like a
Punjabi that she sure wasn't) and he will sell it to some private
bidder in three hours." Nawaz, then PM, was also in Delhi at that
time.
Often, when she came to Delhi, she sought me out.
Our last longish conversation was at TV anchor and her close friend
Karan Thapar's home a couple of years ago. Some of the prominent
editors Karan had invited did not quite know her rather feudal,
personal style. Outlook editor-inchief Vinod Mehta happened to be
sitting to her left and as the conversation got more animated, he,
as his friends and TV audiences well know, leaned forward to make
his point, often touching her by now ample arm in a wonderfully warm
gesture of informality. Benazir stopped me for a five-minute tattle
as we were all leaving. She talked about this and that, and then
said: "I did not know your Delhi journalists get so familiar with
leaders. Tell me how would Sonia Gandhi handle that?"
Shekhar Gupta is the celebrated Editor In Chief of The Indian
Express. This piece is being published here, courtesy The Indian
Express.
2 January 2008
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