by Karan Thapar
‘Oh, don’t worry about that.’ She laughed. ‘We’ll smuggle you out and no one will know.’ Hameed Haroon, then the young publisher of The Dawn, was at her home that evening and promised to accompany me if I agreed to go. Unfortunately, I’m not cut out for such thrills and insisted on returning safely to London. ‘Coward’ was Benazir’s verdict. She was right.
When she was getting married to Asif Zardari, Benazir rang up to ask if Nisha and I would come. Nisha couldn’t, but I stopped in Karachi on my way back for a Christmas vacation in Delhi.
Karachi was agog with anticipation. In fact, most of Pakistan was. Taxi drivers were calling it the wedding of the century and the city’s hotels were filled to capacity. ‘Congratulations to the daughter of Pakistan from the people of Pakistan,’ proclaimed the welcoming banner at the airport as guests began to arrive. Convoys of buses with the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) flag aloft, gaily dressed women packed inside and strains of the shehnai competing with noisy exhausts raced through the streets.
On the day before the wedding, schoolgirls danced and sang outside the bridal house, heralding the mehndi ceremony, the most important prenuptial ritual. Traditionally, this should have been a ‘ladies only’ event, as the cream-red-and-gold invitations maintained. But it ended up a combined evening with several of Asif’s friends joining in. Benazir’s sahelis got it off to a rollicking start, singing tapas, Sindhi and Baluch geets and teasing Asif.
‘Asif-ji, Asif-ji, honewale jijaji,’ they jibed. ‘Shaadi ke saat phere hain aur hamari saat sharte hain.’ (Asif-ji, Asif-ji, brother-in-law-to-be, you have to fulfil seven of our conditions). He readily agreed to each of them, and then joined them on the floor. As he danced, they finally clapped, symbolically accepting the marriage.
The wedding on Friday, 18 December 1987, had several thousands wonderstruck, the city at a standstill, and everyone gossiping and swapping stories till late into the night. It was an evening of massive numbers, glittering jewellery and almost unstoppable jubilation. The nikaah ceremony, held exclusively for friends and relatives in the gardens of the Bhutto family home at 70 Clifton, was the beginning. Benazir emerged radiant in a parrot-green and shocking-pink lehenga with matching emeralds and rubies. Asif was in a cream silk salwar-kameez, a Sindhi patka turban and a silk shawl to match his bride’s colours. But at the start of the ceremony he was nowhere to be seen.
With family members exuberantly ululating in the background, the bride—seated on an elegant mandap, wreathed in strings of jasmines and scarlet roses, and covered by a thin pale-pink veil—signed her marriage contract. Almost everyone noted the time: it was just before five minutes to 6. The rites accompanying the marriage ceremony were based on Iranian customs, the country where Benazir’s mother Nusrat Bhutto was said to come from.
The simple ceremony consisted of a family ‘qazi’ asking Benazir on three separate occasions if she consented to Asif’s proposal. After her third assent, she signed the contract. Then, escorted from inside the house by his sisters and cousins, Asif joined Benazir on the dais. They sat together, covered by her pink veil and a gleaming mirror was held under it so they could see each other. Finally, following Sindhi custom, first Asif’s mother, then Benazir’s aunt, touched the couple’s heads together thrice to wish them luck and happiness.
The scene then shifted to the neighbouring Clifton Gardens as the privileged guests made their way through the thousands of friendly onlookers and the Karachi crowd gathered outside for the larger reception. Here, over 1,500 more guests had turned up, dripping in jewels, clad in colourful silks, swept up by the excitement of the occasion. When the newly married Zardaris arrived to take their place on a specially crafted bigger stage, the guests surrounded them in an uncontrolled desire to see, touch and greet the couple.
As the grande dames of Karachi society jumped onto the stage, with their husbands struggling not far behind, parts of the floor sagged. For a time, the numbers, the stampede of photographers and the reflex action of desperate security men suggested an impending tragedy. It was averted—dinner was served and the food diverted the crush.
Benazir had changed for this second stage. She now wore a striking white-and-gold salwar-kameez, set off by sparkling sapphires and diamonds. The guests fought and struggled to get close to the glowing bride.
But the high point of the evening was the public reception held for the ‘ordinary people of Karachi’, as they were then called, in the vast Kakri grounds. The entire square, once a football ground, was gaily decked out with coloured lights and huge posters of the Bhuttos, both father and daughter. Kakri has a special significance for the Bhuttos. It was here that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto made his last public speech before the 1977 coup. A year before the wedding, Benazir had been arrested while addressing a rally at this site.
At a guesstimate, two lakh people had gathered to greet the newly-weds. The couple came to the venue shortly before 10 p.m. to sit on a raised platform surrounded by friends and relatives. Singers and dancers entertained and a display of colourful fireworks went on till late into the night.
It was more than a wedding; more than a celebration. It was like a festival, part private, part political, but at all times spontaneous. There were moments when the arrangements collapsed due to the excitement and the impatience. Processions of Benazir’s supporters, organized by her Pakistan Peoples Party, danced on the streets. Many hung out of cars waving the party flag and blasting songs composed in her honour. Some even fired shots in the air, in typical Sindhi feudal tradition. One of these shots accidentally killed a woman at the Kakri grounds celebration before the married couple arrived. Elsewhere, eight people who had climbed up a tree got injured when the branch snapped, sending their machan tumbling down.
I only saw Benazir briefly at the wedding itself. Not surprisingly, we hardly got to chat. But early the next morning, she called to say that she had asked a friend to bring me over for dinner. ‘You have to cancel whatever you’re doing, otherwise what was the point of coming to Karachi?’
Dinner was at her in-laws’ home, where Benazir and Asif had been given a small cottage in the garden. It was just the two of them, her friend and me. It was also the first time I got to properly meet and talk to Asif.
The first thing that struck me about him was his playful teasing. He kept pulling Benazir’s leg. No one else in Pakistan could take this liberty. But Benazir clearly liked it. She giggled each time Asif called her ‘the great one’.
Asif’s humour was in many ways his greatest asset. Referring to Benazir’s ‘battalion of sahelis’, he laughed and said: ‘I’ve told them they can visit us once a week. Beyond that, I’ve told the guards to keep the gates shut! But when it comes to Benazir, I think she may be the one to discipline me.’
I instinctively felt that this was a good way of bringing a measure of balance into Benazir’s life. Otherwise, the adulation of the crowds and the fawning of her supporters would place her on a pedestal and put her beyond human reach.
In the years that followed, Benazir was twice elected prime minister of Pakistan. This made her a person I was repeatedly keen to interview. But it also created a unique problem. She was a politician who knew things she did not wish to reveal. I was a journalist anxious to ferret out what she did not want to say. That made for an inevitable conflict of interest.
What made matters worse was that she always thought she was giving an interview to a friend. On the other hand, I was determined to prove that friendship would not weaken or undermine my journalistic principles. This added to the tension that underlay our interviews.
Now, Benazir loved ice cream. She could eat vast quantities of it. In later years, her favourite became Ben & Jerry’s. Whenever I finished a particularly acrimonious interview, she would insist that we eat ice cream together. ‘It will cool you down!’ she would joke.
There were several interviews we did that annoyed her, a few that upset her and at least one that riled her. But she never held that against me. She accepted that a jour
nalist had a job to do, just as she insisted that a politician couldn’t answer every question. She always ensured that our professional relationship—as interviewer and prime minister or opposition leader—remained separate from our friendship.
As a young politician, in the years after her father’s cruel hanging, she had often consciously modelled herself on Indira Gandhi. I remember her fascination for the traditional Indian namaste. ‘It’s dignified, friendly but not familiar,’ she once said. I suspect the adab that she made her personal greeting was, in her eyes, an equivalent.
In 1984, when Maqbool Butt was about to be hanged, Benazir wrote to Indira Gandhi, pleading he be saved. ‘Why are you doing that?’ I asked. I couldn’t understand her need to write the letter. I thought it was a mistake.
‘I have to, Karan,’ she explained. ‘I’ve lived through my father’s hanging and I know the trauma it created for the family. I can’t watch someone else go through the same misery without doing what I can to prevent it.’
Indira Gandhi never replied but Benazir didn’t hold that against her.
As a Bhutto daughter, Benazir was always conscious of her family’s similarity with the Gandhis. After Sanjay Gandhi’s plane crash and Indira’s assassination in the early 1980s were followed by her brother Shahnawaz’s mysterious death, she once commented that there was a curse on both families. At the time, Rajiv’s killing and her own were still far in the future. Today, there can be no doubt about that curse.
In 1988, when Rajiv visited Islamabad during the early weeks of her first prime ministership, she invited him and Sonia to a private family dinner on their first night there. Her husband Asif, mother Nusrat and sister Sanam were the only other people present. In those days, a common joke in both countries was that Rajiv and Benazir should marry each other and sort out their two countries’ problems. Benazir told me that they laughed over this at dinner.
‘Rajeev’—as she always pronounced his name, adopting a Punjabi accent which was clearly misplaced in a Westernized Sindhi—‘is so handsome,’ she said when I next met her. And then she added, ‘But he’s equally tough.’
During the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) years, Benazir forged a link with the Advani family with the same facility and friendship as with Rajiv. A few months after her first meeting with L.K. Advani, we were together in Washington for the annual National Prayer Breakfast in 2002. During a break in one of the sessions, she insisted that I accompany her for shopping. ‘But we’re walking, okay? I need the exercise and so do you!’
As we sauntered down Connecticut Avenue, she stopped outside an old-fashioned bookshop. Minutes later, she bought a Robert Kaplan paperback as a gift for Advani. I carried it back to Delhi. It was the first of several similar gifts she sent him.
I know that as prime minister, her two terms in office disillusioned many. Her fans were disappointed while her critics felt justified. But between 1989 and 2007, the change that characterized her attitude towards India, and Kashmir, in particular, progressed steadily and didn’t falter. From the young prime minister who would shout ‘Azadi, Azadi, Azadi!’ on television, she became the first, the most consistent and perhaps the strongest proponent of a joint India–Pakistan solution to Kashmir. As early as 2001, she began to speak about soft borders, free trade and even, perhaps unrealistically, a joint Parliament for the two halves of Kashmir. General Pervez Musharraf’s concept of self-governance and joint management drew heavily upon her thinking.
When I last interviewed her in September 2007, days before her return to Pakistan, she went further than ever before. Not only did she forcefully repeat her commitment to clamp down on all private militia and shut terrorist camps but, in addition, she promised to consider the extradition of Dawood Ibrahim and even the possibility of giving India access to men like Lashkar-e-Taiba supremo Hafiz Muhammad Saeed and Jaish-e-Mohammad founder Masood Azhar.
In private conversations, she would readily admit that the strident prime minister persona of 1988–89 was a mistake. In fact, once she even came close to saying as much on television. Had she lived to become prime minister for a third time, I feel certain she would have fulfilled her commitment to improve India–Pakistan relations.
Two months before her death, we met in Dubai. She was planning a second homecoming. When I asked if she could repeat the miracle of her first return, she shot back with the question, ‘Why do you ask?’ I told her that she was now fifty-four, had been prime minister twice, disappointed many and that Pakistan was a very different country these days.
She heard me out in silence and then softly smiled. Her eyes seemed to take on a knowing but playful look. When she spoke, her words sounded measured and well considered: ‘It will be an even bigger return home.’
In fact, it was explosive. She was clearly poised for a huge victory. Sadly, death snatched it away. But I doubt whether Benazir would have wanted to die of old age. Instead, she died a hero, a martyr and an inspiration for many.
The day after her death, I received Benazir’s new year’s greeting card. It read: ‘Praying for peace in the world and happiness for your family in 2008.’ Unfortunately, both were denied to her.
7
GETTING TO KNOW SANJAY GANDHI AND AUNG SAN SUU KYI
I
can’t claim that I was close to the entire Gandhi family, but there was a time when Sanjay, Indira Gandhi’s younger son, was a good friend. In fact, he even tried to teach me to fly a plane, without success but with considerable daredevilry.
I first got to know Sanjay as my sister Shobha’s friend. It was the early 1960s, Daddy was army chief and we were living in Army House on what was still called King George’s Avenue (now Rajaji Marg) in Delhi. At the time, Sanjay was the prime minister’s grandson and studying at St Columba’s School. He was at least six years younger, but he developed a liking for Shobha that I suppose was calf-love.
Shobha was around twenty and Sanjay probably not more than fourteen. That age gap should have been an obstacle to any friendship, but it wasn’t for him. Every afternoon after school, Sanjay would drop by to meet her. He wasn’t particularly chatty and a lot of the time would simply sit in companionable silence. They would talk, play cards or listen to music. The rest of the family would be there as well. As afternoon turned to evening Indira Gandhi would ring to find out when he was coming home. She was worried that he hadn’t done his homework. Mummy often had to reassure her that after an early supper, Sanjay would be sent back. This routine, however, seemed to repeat itself day after day.
After Shobha’s marriage, Sanjay would turn up at her home in the evenings and spend hours chatting with her and her husband, Banjo. By then he was a young car mechanic building the prototype of his personally designed Maruti—which, years later, under different ownership and with a different design, came to dominate the Indian car market. He would drink countless cups of tea but there was no question of anything stronger. Even nimboo-pani seemed to be verboten. He was also a simple eater. In the early years of their marriage, when young couples are often penurious, dal-chawal was often all that Shobha could give him, but Sanjay ate it as if it was haute cuisine.
In contrast to his otherwise shy and quiet character, Sanjay was a daredevil. There was no challenge he would not accept. Once, on a warm winter afternoon, with the temperature in the comfortable twenties, my sisters insisted on being taken for a drive in his Jeep. They bullied him till he agreed. As we drove past Mehrauli, heading towards Chhatarpur, Shobha suddenly asked if he had the guts to drive up one of the hills on either side. She meant it as a taunt. He took it as a challenge.
Seconds later, he turned off the road and began driving uphill. The jeep started groaning but Sanjay kept changing gears to give it more power. Halfway up, it stalled. We were perched precariously and stationary upon a hillside. We could sense that the jeep would soon start slipping and sliding backwards. Panic began to overtake us. ‘Get the hell out of here, Sanjay,’ Shobha shouted. ‘I was only joking, for Christ’s sake.’
But Sanjay was made of sterner stuff. He was now enjoying this. The more precarious the situation seemed and the greater the fear, the bolder he seemed to become. Pushing the jeep into the four-wheel-drive mode and pressing the accelerator right to the floor, he drove on. But for every three feet we moved forward the jeep seemed to slide back one or two. By then everyone was screaming.
I’m not sure how it ended, but we got off the hill intact. Sanjay laughed all the way home. The rest of us sat ashen-faced and silent.
The jump from being Shobha’s kid brother to one of Sanjay’s friends only happened in the mid-1970s. And it seemed to take place almost accidentally.
After Daddy’s sudden death in 1975 two days before the Emergency was declared—he died of a heart attack at the age of sixty-nine—Sanjay started to drop in frequently. At first, Shobha was there but even after she left to go back to her own home in Moscow, where Banjo was posted with the embassy, Sanjay continued to visit. Mummy would ask him to fix door handles that had come undone or her transistor, which frequently gave trouble. For some reason that I never discovered, he would always sit on the floor, tackling the task he’d been given. But it was also the ideal opportunity for Sanjay and I to chat. That’s how we got to know each other.
Over the next two years, whenever I was back on holiday, I saw a lot of him and his wife Maneka. As a result, I also got to meet Indira Gandhi. The most striking thing about her was how different her public persona was to the private individual. During the Emergency, many thought of her as a political monster but she was also a delightful personality. Sanjay was very protective of his mother and she clearly adored him.
The Indira Gandhi most people remember is the political virago who decimated the Syndicate, defeated Pakistan, stood up to America, appointed chief ministers at will, damaged institutions and imposed the Emergency. This was the forbidding side of her. It led Atal Bihari Vajpayee to call her ‘Durga’ and the Western media to label her ‘The Empress of India’.
