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Aboard the Democracy Train

A Journey through Pakistan's Last Decade of Democracy

Wimbledon Publishing Company

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 reporting 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.

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 the 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.

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.

For Benazir Bhutto – whose enormous political rallies had become the biggest challenge to Gen. Zia – the moment had arrived.

Evidently, for my editor, it was also a time to make some changes. Like Benazir, I was a young woman newly returned from the West and determined to see a better future for my nation. Sensing my enthusiasm for a woman prime minister, the editor of my newspaper bypassed senior male reporters and nominated me, the only female reporter at Dawn, to cover Benazir Bhutto.

In October 1988, I became one of four journalists to ride for a day with Benazir and her PPP entourage aboard the "Democracy Train." It was the start of her party's campaign in interior Sindh to mobilize millions of voters for the national elections announced after Gen. Zia's death. Just one day on the train was enough to suffuse my senses with the enormity of the welcome Benazir received from the dispossessed people of the province.

As we traveled through the dry, hot desert terrain of Sindh – which spreads north of Karachi to India's border – I got a bird's eye view of a region in which nothing has moved for centuries.

The British colonial explorers, who set foot in Sindh in 1843, described the Sindhi peasantry as the "wretched of the earth." The twenty-first century has not brought them relief. Today, peasants still live in mud houses in dry, dusty wastelands, without electricity, clean drinking water or roads. They tend the farm lands of big feudal lords for meager wages and live with archaic social customs and customary laws that degrade women.

As the train draped in red, black and green PPP flags sped through the Sindh desert, I peeked out of the window to see barefoot peasants and children run alongside the tracks.

They mobbed the platforms. Young men and boys fought over each other's heads to catch a glimpse of Benazir's tall silhouette. They had heard that she had come back to fulfill her father's mission of "Roti, Kapra aur Makaan" (Food, Clothing and Shelter) for the millions of landless poor.

My male colleagues, all upcoming journalists – Zafar Abbas, Abbas Nasir and Ibrahim Sajid – and I traveled in a glass compartment, especially reserved for the press. We were ambitious and looked for scoops on this turning point in Pakistan's history. Armed with typewriters and tape-recorders, we were poised to tell the world how Pakistan's first woman candidate for prime minister was received by the masses.

At the platform stops, the Sindhi villagers greeted Benazir Bhutto with unadulterated joy. Welcoming villagers beat large drums strapped across their shoulders to frenzy and spun like dervishes on the railway platform. They chanted "Marvi, Malir Ji – Benazir, Benazir," likening Benazir's image to that of a beloved Sindhi heroine whose love for her people is painted in traditional folklore by the Sindhi mystic poet, Shah Latif Bhitai.

The atmosphere rang with joy as PPP activists from Karachi got out from the train to clap and dance to the tune of Urdu slogans:

"Ab Aai, Aai Benazir" (Now she's coming, coming – Benazir)

"Wazir-i-Azam Benazir" (Prime Minister Benazir)

Many of Benazir's PPP workers were Mohajirs who seemed not to mind that they were campaigning for a woman prime minister who drew her strength mainly from interior Sindh. This, notwithstanding that Mohajirs had joined the ethnocentric political party Mohajir Qaumi Movement (MQM) in great numbers.

Inside the moving train, Benazir made her way through the crush of PPP bodies to stand at the doorway. Her party workers created a bubble around her to separate her from her fans.

Standing behind the tall, slender and stately young woman, I saw Benazir's pink complexion turn red with effort as she bellowed into the loudspeaker in the apparently unfamiliar language of Urdu – the lingua franca of Pakistan – and the even more unfamiliar Sindhi – the language of Sindh.

Focusing on the sea of upturned faces on the platform she cried into the loudspeaker: "The dark days of dictatorship are over; we have come to bring you democracy." Although she mixed the past and present tense, no one seemed to care.

Indeed, Benazir's election campaign in the dusty wastelands of Sindh was a far cry from the oratory skills she had polished as president of the Oxford Debating Society. Although a fluent English speaker, she struggled with the indigenous languages – Urdu and Sindhi – in which she had never been formally trained.

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Excerpted from Aboard the Democracy Train by Nafisa Hoodbhoy. Copyright © 2011 Nafisa Hoodbhoy. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
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