Jehangir Pathan was at the front gate, sitting in his wheelchair.
He had been shot by police during an opposition rally several years ago. Given wheels, he kept working anyway, running errands for the daughter of his hero, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, whom the military had hanged in 1979.
Now he was at the home of that daughter-Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Pathan had heard she was in town.
Benazir Bhutto, riding in a Mercedes-Benz limousine with her close friend, Yasmin Niazi, passed through the gate to her home. Suddenly she instructed the driver to stop.
”Oh my God,” she told Niazi. ”Jehangir is there.”
Then, turning to a guard, ”Please, bring him inside.” Minutes later, Pathan sat before Bhutto, his eyes brimming.
”How are you?” she asked, and then, ”Do you need anything? Are you well?”
”I have just come to see you and say, `Salam ,` ” the crippled man said. Soon after, he quietly rolled himself out.
To Niazi the recent incident evoked memories of another scene during a far darker time 11 years ago. The military had just deposed Bhutto`s father, and his execution on conspiracy to murder charges was still a year away. No one knew what was happening.
A naive and nervous Benazir Bhutto, then 24, unknowingly was about to begin 5 1/2 years imprisonment and 2 more in exile in London. Directed by her father to rally support, she had asked Niazi`s company on her first solo political tour.
They were riding from Peshawar, in Pakistan`s western frontier, to the national capital of Islamabad. And military police were everywhere, keeping back poor Pakistanis, many of whom considered Bhutto a god, the first leader to know their needs, their desires.
Benazir chanted as her father had: ”Bread, clothing, shelter.”
And as the two women reached a village called Multan, the car slowed to a crawl, caught among the massing poor and a police cordon.
Suddenly, an apple appeared, ruby red. Bhutto couldn`t believe how red. The old man thrusting it at Bhutto`s window was fighting off police who were trying to drag him away by the head.
Bhutto told her driver to stop. She took the apple, and the police took the man. On the fruit was taped a hand-written message: ”To Mr. Bhutto. We, the poor, are with you. Please give this to Mr. Bhutto when you see him.”
Benazir Bhutto was speechless. It pushed her harder.
In her father`s footsteps
Niazi, interviewed at her home, near Bhutto`s house-nicknamed the
”Bilawal house,” after Bhutto`s six-month-old son-recently recalled these incidents.
It seemed incredible that 11 years of tumult were over, and life for the steel curtain of friends who stuck fiercely by Bhutto was almost normal.
It has been more than 100 days since Niazi and Bhutto rode triumphantly through Islamabad, Bhutto having just been sworn in as the Moslem world`s first woman national leader.
”I`ve never seen her snap at a poor man,” said Niazi, whose father lost most of his thriving dental practice because he insisted on treating Benazir. ”There is a genuine bond with the poor. You can see it. She knows most of the workers` names.
”The last six months have been like a dream. Even now when I see her on TV, I can`t believe she`s prime minister. It`s like the good people winning in the end.”
But the tumult is not really over, and Bhutto`s dream of finally avenging her father has not been altogether sweet so far. Having achieved the extraordinary, Bhutto has been almost paralyzed by Pakistan`s riot of competing interests-antagonistic religious leaders, imperious landowners, ambitious politicians and power-hungry generals, in a country stuck somewhere between the 14th and 20th Centuries.
Riding on her father`s coattails to power and living out his ambition, Bhutto now is fending off repeated sabotage by men who suffered under him and benefitted by the general who ousted him, the late Zia ul-Haq (who died last year in a plane crash).
No one who knows her has any doubts that eventually she will prevail. To the world, Bhutto presents a glamorous cross between East and West. To her friends, she is a brilliant woman of extraordinarily steely nerves and determination, truly her father`s daughter, a twinning of his and her life and thoughts.
And events seem to bear them out.
But for one tragic event, however, it probably would have been quite different. That event, of course, was her father`s execution. After that, life for Benazir Bhutto would never be the same.
Socialite to leader
Just months before his ouster, she had been tooling around London in a yellow MG wearing designer silk Anna Belinda dresses and enjoying peppermint- stick ice cream at Baskin-Robbins. She was on top of the world, having just served as president of the Oxford Union Debating Society, where budding British prime ministers polish their oratory. She was planning to enter Pakistan`s foreign service.
Suddenly, however, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was under arrest, and his socialite eldest child was in charge. She found a new, authoritative voice, surprising even herself. She learned she had inherited her father`s iron will. ”If he had not died, he would have married her off-she would have had a house full of kids,” says Samiya Waheed, Bhutto`s lifelong best friend.
”Then the coup happened, and she ate, drank and slept politics. Overnight, we changed from the young, carefree people we were. The crowds outside the house didn`t think, `Here is a young girl of 24.` They thought she could do something.”
In her autobiography, ”Daughter of the East” (Simon and Schuster, $21.95), Bhutto recalls standing outside Zulfikar`s cell with her mother, Nusrat, eight months before his hanging.
”Pinkie, I hate to put you in any danger,” he told Benazir. He was pleased when she vowed to resurrect his name.
Though there were many, many miscues, she maneuvered masterfully when it counted. These days, politically shackled, Bhutto is seeking the dividends of safe, high-profile trips abroad. In February, she met with China`s senior leader, Deng Xiaoping, in Beijing, and President George Bush in Tokyo.
Today, Bhutto is busy in her home town of Karachi, carrying on an 18-hour-a-day lifestyle that leaves even athletic companions winded. She has planned a special lunch for close friends, the handful of women whom she calls on almost daily. They are her support system, and since her prison days, they have served as her shock troops. Over the years, they began to be known collectively as the ”Clifton Mafia,” after the Bhutto family`s Karachi address, 70 Clifton, where they gathered to plan strategy.
To these friends, Bhutto`s legendary bouts of temper are softened by an enduring trait of calling afterward to say, simply, ”I`m sorry.” They`re not exactly a kitchen cabinet, but as long as they are there, Bhutto feels a comfort.
As Paree Punthakey, an advertising executive and one of the prime minister`s inner circle, says, ”Definitely Benazir is very, very committed to what she believes in, and the more committed she is, the more committed her friends are to her.”
After the lunch, Bhutto addressed a women`s group, vowing to honor a promise to erase Zia Islamization laws that, among other things, make a woman`s court testimony worth half a man`s. Then she flies north to her ancestral home in Larkana and presides over a traditional horse and cattle show.
A horse and cattle show? The need to appear on such venues must be quite a comedown for someone viewed in the same light as Jacqueline Kennedy was two decades ago, a fall for someone who took the world by storm two years ago, her photograph appearing on magazine covers internationally. Her face is known worldwide-the striking dark countenance, framed by the traditional dupatta.
But Bhutto seems resigned to the slow course. ”Either you have the huge tornado, like a storm which passes and takes everything in the way so that you have to rebuild totally,” Bhutto said in a 60-minute interview broadcast two days after her Karachi visit, ”or you can have something which, like a gentle breeze, settles down. And that`s what we`re trying to do. We don`t want to open old wounds.”
Without equal
She was born Sept. 21, 1953, in Karachi. Her name means ”without equal” in the Sindhi language, but she was quickly nicknamed ”Pinkie” because of her rosy complexion. She had a Western education from the start, attending a convent school here. She was most friendly with Samiya Waheed with whom she read stories of adventure by British author Enid Blyton. Later her father advised her to read about Napoleon, whom he called ”the most complete man in modern history.”
At 16, Bhutto set off for America. She had been accepted at Radcliffe College. In Cambridge in 1969, she quickly discarded the silk-lined traditional shalwar kameez robes and bought some jeans.
No one knew whose daughter she was. She has described it as the happiest time of her life. She wanted to go on to graduate school in the U.S., but her father said enough was enough and demanded that she head for a more rigorous environment-Oxford, England-where he had gone to school.
She took up the challenge, graduating there with degrees in philosophy, politics and economics. During the summers she headed back to Karachi, returned to the Hawke`s Bay beach hut of her girlhood and partied blissfully with Waheed and other friends. She thought she might one day become foreign minister.
On July 5, 1977, however, life became deadly serious. At 1:45 a.m., soldiers loyal to Bhutto`s new army chief of staff, Gen. Zia ul-Haq, burst into the prime minister`s residence and dragged Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to prison. A military government was declared. Bhutto sent his daughter on trips around the country on his behalf.
Soon, however, she was imprisoned, too. After he was hanged, her treatment became worse. Zia tried to break her. Sympathetic guards slipped her an occasional copy of Newsweek magazine, but nothing could soften life in Sukkur Central Jail. It was 110 degrees in the Sindh desert; stinging red and black ants crawled over Bhutto and into her watery lentil soup. Her thick hair fell out in clumps.
Then came Karachi Central Jail. And the constant threat: Marry, make a home, but forget politics or you`ll never get out.
Tough road back
In 1984, Bhutto developed an ear infection that could have left her face paralyzed. Zia let her go to London for treatment. From there, she engineered her comeback.
And the way was finally cleared last August when Zia was killed in a plane crash with 10 of his top generals.
As prime minister, she has implemented her father`s populist ideals, although more pragmatically. Even if she wanted to, she couldn`t re-enact his most radical policies: nationalization and limited land reform. The opposition is too powerful.
Like her father, she has been tough, to the extent that his reputation as a tyrant has rubbed off on her, although friends say she is simply establishing her ground.
”Initially, she has had to appear and sound very firm, putting her foot down and saying, `I`m not going to be pushed around,` ” says Maleeha Lodhi, a friend and editor of the Moslem Daily Newspaper, whose doctoral thesis at the London School of Economics covered the elder Bhutto`s years of power.
Bhutto`s political opponents have joined what amounts to a hooting and hobbling team, creating daily havoc in the National Assembly and virtually freezing the legislative process.
The atmosphere dooms, for now, Bhutto`s aim of repealing the 8th constitutional amendment instituted by Zia, which cripples legislative discretion by requiring a two-thirds assembly majority to end the martial-law decrees declared by Zia.
So Benazir`s simple majority in the assembly is virtually worthless, except to keep her in power.
According to economists and Bhutto herself, she also is in another fix. Half the budget goes to service $13 billion in foreign loans and maintain a military force of 670,000.
The army is still her biggest problem. Pakistan has been run by military governments for 25 of its 41 years. Asked after her election whether the huge military budget could be cut, she replied cooly, ”Surely . . . if you want to invite martial law.”
Thus, any real change in her country must come about slowly over her five-year term. This being said, her supporters still have faith in Bhutto, who reportedly is expecting her second child in October. (Her glamorous image attracts attention and her arranged marriage a year ago to handsome Pakistani polo aficionado Asif Zardari was the stuff of fairy tales.)
Bhutto recently named her mother as her deputy and brought four other women into her cabinet. The 24-person cabinet now includes six women, the most in Pakistan`s 41-year history.
”I know she will do it (succeed),” says a friend, Paree Punthakey. ”I have seen her at close quarters. And where she leads, I will follow.”
”She`s a political being through and through,” says Lodhi, the Moslem editor. ”She loves it.”
