Welcome to the 'Old Pakistan': Stories of deception and pretension

Last week, Imran Khan was voted out of power, becoming Pakistan's first head of government to lose a no-confidence motion. Promptly after this, the 33-year-old chairperson of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) said in the National Assembly, "Welcome to Purana Pakistan." He was likely referring to the time either of his parents, Benazir Bhutto or Asif Ali Zardari, had separately ruled the country. This young chairperson, Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, is the third generation of Pakistan's Bhutto dynasty to hold the strings to power in the country.

Bilawal belongs to the South Asian political dynasty that has faced two assassinations and two murders and has had two prime ministers and a president. Its story is of palace intrigue, sibling rivalry and vendetta. This week, a new generation has taken centre stage, with Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari likely to be appointed Pakistan's new foreign minister. If appointed, Bilawal would share the sobriquet of being the youngest foreign minister with Hina Rabbani Khar, who held the post from 2011 to 2013 at age 33.

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Arguably the most charismatic prime minister, and its first one, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was deposed in 1977 by his hand-picked 'mousy' Chief of Armed Staff, General Zia-ul-Haq. Zia was so subservient to his master that once when he was having a smoke and Bhutto came along, he slid his burning cigarette into his pocket, where it continued to burn and produce a smoke ring around him. When his time came, however, ostensibly backed by Henry Kissinger's promise to Bhutto about making an example out of him, Zia did not just stop at the coup and impose the martial law. He went right ahead against all social and moral pressure and hung Bhutto by the neck and buried his body without as much as an autopsy.

For the next decade, Zia and his cronies led the Islamisation of the country, removing every semblance of modern society. He also made friends with the Indian prime minister from 1977 to 79, Morarji Desai, and apparently sweet-talked his way into receiving details of the RAW network in Pakistan from Desai. Playing the part, Zia claimed he was a user of Desai's urine therapy. Later in 1990, Morarji Desai was conferred Pakistan's highest civilian award, Nishan-e-Pakistan, becoming the only Indian to receive it.

Zia hounded the Bhutto family out of Pakistan during his time, with the two sons, Mir Murtaza and Shahnawaz, forming an extremist organisation, Al-Zulfikar, having pledged revenge from Zia. They stationed themselves in Afghanistan and later in France and Syria, finding refuge in friendly governments. Bhutto's political heir, however, was destined to be Benazir, his eldest born.

For all his smarts and shenanigans, General Zia died in an air crash in 1988 with only his jawbone available for identification, apparently due to a 'case of mangoes' left in the plane. Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan as the leader of her father's party and narrowly won the ensuing elections to become the first woman prime minister of a Muslim-majority country. Her stint was short-lived, and she was ousted by the all-powerful army and cooled her heels in the opposition for the next few years, fending off her siblings to closely guard her position as the PPP's chairperson. In the meantime, she got married to Asif Ali Zardari, the infamous 'Mr ten per cent', named so because of the allegations of corruption against him.

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In her autobiography, Songs of Blood and Sword, Fatima Bhutto talks definitively about the public murder of her father, Mir Murtaza Bhutto. She is convinced that her aunt, Benazir, in cahoots with her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, had Murtaza killed by a 'clean-up' squad. After being shot multiple times, Murtaza was dumped in front of a low-scale clinic holding his jaw in his hands and crying for help. She also quotes a former president, Farooq Leghari, who told her, "Zardari came to me and said, 'It's either Murtaza or me. He has to go'." The president also told the author about Zardari, "He has Murtaza's blood on his hands, and Allah knows how many others." Zardari went on to become Pakistan's president from 2008 to 2013, grabbing power right after his wife's assassination, days after her return to Pakistan under General Pervez Musharraf in 2007. Benazir also never opened an investigation into the mysterious murder of her youngest brother, Shahnawaz Bhutto, in Nice, France. In yet another incident, she had her mother, Nusrat Bhutto, lathi-charged in front of Bhutto's ancestral home.

It is bizarrely ironic that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's descendants have joined hands with Gen Zia-ul-Haq's proteges, Nawaz and Shehbaz Sharif, to have a go at the highest political post in the land. This only proves that if there's any country in the world that exemplifies politics as the art of the possible, it is Pakistan, where new relationships are forged every election cycle, and no prime minister has ever completed a five-year term.

As someone famously said, 'Every country has an army, but in Pakistan, an army has a country.' It remains to be seen how soon the Chief of Army Staff, Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa, will engineer a coup and become the all-powerful president. He has several precedents in his country if he needs inspiration. Going by his ambitious plan of normalising relations with the United States, he certainly has someone's ear and perhaps backing.

(The author is a former Chief of Communications with the United Nations in New York, where he worked for more than a decade)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.

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