Daughter of Courage

In my reading of numerous articles about Benazir Bhutto in the last 24 hours, I came across a common thread running through several columns by journalists who knew or had met her in person. All mention Bhutto's remarkable and unusual physical courage. It is interesting that Indian journalists have noted this fact prominently, perhaps because they are well acquainted with the bloody nature of politics in that part of the world. Compared to most security conscious politicians, Bhutto's disregard for her own physical safety struck the journalists as singularly brave and now in hindsight, also a bit reckless. It is possible that women leaders in male dominated societies must prove not just their political acumen but also the lack of physical fear in order to be taken seriously by their supporters as well as detractors. Elected women leaders in the west like Angela Merkel, Margaret Thatcher and any future female US president must bear heavy political burdens and exhibit unwavering resolve in times of crises.  But women like Corazon Aquino of the Philippines and Bhutto in Pakistan have to additionally walk into physically perilous situations to earn their leadership spurs.

In the event of violent and untimely death and in the spirit of de mortuis nil nisi bonum, post mortem tributes can sometimes tend toward hagiography. Benazir Bhutto was far from perfect. But the repeated references to her steely nerve and lack of physical cowardice are entirely credible. As also is the speculation that this time around, after two unremarkable shots at power in her thirties and forties, a more mature Bhutto in her fifties (and Pakistan at the center of a storm), might indeed have managed to calm the frazzled nerves of her countrymen with her own courage and achieve what no other Pakistani leader has done so far - establish the beginnings of a free and fair democratic process in Pakistan. But now we will never know.   

Christopher Hitchens makes the following observation about Bhutto in Slate.

The sternest critic of Benazir Bhutto would not have been able to deny that she possessed an extraordinary degree of physical courage. When her father was lying in prison under sentence of death from Pakistan's military dictatorship in 1979, and other members of her family were trying to escape the country, she boldly flew back in. Her subsequent confrontation with the brutal Gen. Zia-ul-Haq cost her five years of her life, spent in prison. She seemed merely to disdain the experience, as she did the vicious little man who had inflicted it upon her.

..... It was at that famous address—70 Clifton Road—that I went to meet her in November 1988, on the last night of the election campaign, and I found out firsthand how brave she was. Taking the wheel of a jeep and scorning all bodyguards, she set off with me on a hair-raising tour of the Karachi slums. Every now and then, she would get out, climb on the roof of the jeep with a bullhorn, and harangue the mob that pressed in close enough to turn the vehicle over. On the following day, her Pakistan People's Party won in a landslide, making her, at the age of 35, the first woman to be elected the leader of a Muslim country.

Manoj Joshi, writing in Mail Today noted the same character trait.  (The reason I can't find a link to Manoj's article is because he has now moved to the brand new paper Mail Today, launched by the India Today group. MT's website is not yet up and running properly. I received the article via e-mail.)

Benazir Bhutto was the magic bullet through which Pervez Musharraf and the United States hoped to return Pakistan to normalcy. Her return from exile had been carefully choreographed to balance the interests of all three parties. However, she has now fallen to the very forces that her return was to counter. The warning that these forces gave was not a token; more than 120 people were killed and several times that number injured in the twin blasts that rocked the celebratory procession that greeted her return from exile in Karachi in October. Typical of her, she refused to be encapsulated in the bullet-proof bubble on her truck.

Bhutto did not lack courage. As a young woman she took the reins of her father's People's Party of Pakistan while he was jailed and later executed by the military regime of Zia ul Haq. She suffered five years' imprisonment, mostly in solitary confinement, in this period. Yet her great value has been that she represented secular and democratic forces in a country where both these qualities are in extremely short supply.

Shekhar Gupta, Editor, The Indian Express:

[W]hile 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-livered. For the most part, she showed such nonchalance for the army establishment. In the 1993 election, when she was a front-runner, 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?”

Karan Thapar, who knew Bhutto in Oxford writes in the Hindustan Times:

Tonight, when Benazir is dead, and so tragically killed ...   I warned her to be careful.

“Don’t take silly unnecessary risks,” I said. Benazir laughed. It was an infectious little girl laugh.

“Karan, I can’t live with fear in my heart. I can’t fight terror scared of the terrorist. And if ordinary people have to face up to death, then politicians must be ready to face that situation first.”

Update: Syndicated columnist Clarence Page echoes the same sentimets:

In our shock and sadness over Benazir Bhutto's death, a question haunts my Westernized thoughts: Why wasn't she more cautious?

She knew the odds, yet fear was a luxury she refused to afford. Bhutto was running for president after living in exile for almost a decade. Pakistanis had to see her, hear her, even touch her. She accommodated them.

Ever since her first campaign in 1988 she would climb with relish on top of a vehicle and delight crowds with a bullhorn. They loved her for that. Her undeniable courage bordered on the fanatical, some would say. But it took extraordinary zeal for her to challenge foes such as ruling dictators, religious fanatics, military conspirators, intelligence agents and, let us not forget, male supremacists.

Behind her cool upper-class, Harvard and Oxford-educated demeanor, her life was tempered by years of blood, brutality and intrigue that would make Shakespeare gasp.

Comments

[Sujatha]

I think the prison years may have had something to do with forging a physical courage and a disregard for the consequences of exposing herself to crowds with minimal security. Somewhere down the line, despite any other faults, she learned that the only thing that matters in life is to be willing and unafraid to lay that life down for her convictions.

Her words to Shekhar Gupta echo this sentiment :"“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?”- pertinent mockery that shook him out of his Cowardly Lion act.

[krishna]

In the spirit of de morturis nil nisi bonum, whatever person she was when alive, surely Pakistan is worse off with her dead, and possibly much more unstable. The people who are going to fill the power vacuum left by her demise are very likely much worse. At least for Pakistan, its chickens have begun to roost.

[kochuthresiamma P. J.]

a brave woman indeed. she threw herself into the anarchic Pakistan politics knowing fully well her life could be cut short any minute. she wrote her will two days before she headed for pakistan on a mission to restore democracy and secularism.

now that PPP is pressing for elections as scheduled, with benazir's son at the helm of affairs, adopting the bhutto sirname along with his original name, i think PPP will ride on the sympathy wave to a landslide victory.

but who's to head the country if that happens? can the projected prime ministerial candidate scale up to the mammoth responsibility?

destiny has played strange, cruel games with the bhuttos.

[Ruchira]

Kochuthresiamma:

A nineteen year old boy, with his supposedly very corrupt father pulling strings in the background? Not the greatest scenario for launching a vigorous democracy. It is really pathetic that developing nations, especially in Asia, cannot bring themselves to break out of the dynastic / feudal style of transfer of political power. The Bhutto / Gandhi axis of ruling families in the Indian subcontinent is a dispiriting
tradition. No talented and capable second tier party activist is allowed to rise to the top due to the dominance and sense of entitlement of the members of a single family, however inept or unprepared they may be. Rajeev Gandhi took on the helm of Indian politics reluctantly after his mother's death. Although a political novice, he was a man in his thirties. Bilawal Bhutto is nineteen! This is like the middle ages when children were put on the throne to act as proxies for shadowy adults.

Unlike the women leaders of the west and Golda Meir of Israel, their Asian counterparts are all dynastic successors to their fathers or husbands. But it is also true that most of these women face perils which the female leaders in the west rarely do.

I should have included the remarkable Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma in this list. That courageous wisp of a woman has been standing up to the shameless armed thugs in her country for nearly two decades.

[Sujatha]

The whole M.O. of the Bhutto clan harkens back to no less than Akbar- Shahenshah at age 13, helped by Bairam Khan as regent, though there was some bad blood between them by the time Akbar came of age.

The modern era and modern Pakistan should and ought to be a far cry from the 16th century, but human nature being what it is, there's no doubt that the whole affair will continue to play out like some ancient soap opera of intrigue, murders, assassinations and betrayals.