The irresistible exuberance of Benazir Bhutto

Prof. Rajiva WIJESINHA

Benazir Bhutto came up to Oxford in October 1973, at the beginning of the Michaelmas term of that academic year. She was initially expected to stay just two years, as she already had a degree from Harvard and was therefore exempt from the first year Preliminary Exam for a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics.

Two years, it was thought, would be enough to enable her to become President of the Oxford Union. Her father, who had been at Christ Church, had not thought he could achieve the Presidency in the period available, and had not even tried.

But he expected his daughter now to succeed, and supported her to the hilt. This was apparent from the telegram he sent her when, at the end of her third year, she finally won office.

She had told us she was in two minds about staying on for another year, but in congratulating her he added that she would certainly now be President.

So she stayed on, to follow the Foreign Service course that Oxford put on for diplomats from other countries, and ran a scintillating campaign in the Michaelmas of 1976 to finally achieve her goal.

Though these reminiscences are not about the minutiae of her Oxford political career, while reading about her return to Pakistan last year I was reminded of the dogged determination of the student politician I had known, the girl who had kept herself in contention through long periods of disappointment, and finally triumphed.

Later, when I heard her old friend (and successor as Union President), Victoria Schofield, excuse the inadequacies of her first two terms as Prime Minister on grounds of inexperience, I thought that was simplistic, given the heavy-handed vested interests that had hemmed her in, especially during her first term in office.

But this time, I had thought, she was old enough and wise enough to overcome them, as she had through sheer energy ensured that her term as President of the Union was a triumph, ignoring the advice of the more conservative elements who had thought they could control her.

I saw her little in those days, for I had been involved in the campaign of the candidate she had defeated, a star of a very different sort whose own life came to a very different sort of end just a couple of months before Benazir’s.

But I was impressed by her achievements, and told her so when we met and she twitted me about my absence from the Union; and when we met at length to talk, twenty years later, the warmness and exuberance was as it had been in those wonderful summers when the world seemed to lie at our feet.

She fed me (she had remembered that I found it irresistible) chocolate cake in her house in Karachi, not the old family mansion which she explained had gone to her brother, but the newer house in which she lived, waiting for her next opportunity, having two years earlier been unfairly removed for a second time from the Premiership.

There was no bitterness, though she did suggest that I might like to write about the unfairness of the allegations of corruption that dogged her.

Later, when she had been driven into exile by those allegations, friends who met her said they thought there could be little truth in them, for she lived relatively simply and explained, they would have preferred her to be amongst them in her exile?

It is of course possible that money had been made for the party, just as it is in very different ways in the West.

But I suspect the idea that Benazir would have made money for herself is laughable, given her background and the thousand different ways in which her needs were otherwise met, a fact that she realized Western critics would be slow to understand.

She was never mean or grasping, bubbling over rather with generosity and enthusiasm, for new friends, new ideas, new initiatives.

We spent hours in the summer of 1975 planning to drive home overland, knowing from the start that her parents would disapprove (though they referred to the idea indulgently it seems when they met mine in Colombo, having gently squashed it earlier).

The previous summer she had generously put her car at my disposal as she did for many others, since unlike in America most students could not conceive of such luxury. This journey however was of no interest to her whatsoever, which is why it still sticks in my mind as an example of both kindness and good sense.

It had been suggested by Ravi Tennekoon, our last Rhodes Scholar but one, now teaching at Trinity College after his postgraduate degree.

The wife of his mentor Vernon Wijetunge was now working at Abingdon College, in one of those strange escapades Sri Lankans had to engage in during those restrictive days to educate their children aborad. She had wanted to see me, and Ravi suggested that I ask Benazir to drive us out, and we could all have tea together at the College.

I was na‹ve in those days and did not think to connect the request with Ravi’s reputation for sexual sophistication. Benazir was wiser.

She insisted that Ravi travel in the luggage compartment (it was a two seater sports car that she drove) and, having taken us to Abingdon, said she would do her own thing and pick us up later. I was sorry that she had been put to such double inconvenience, but later I realised how sensible she was.

Her own impositions were much more fun. She turned up suddenly in my rooms in University College in the summer vacation of 1974, asking if I could put up her brother. She had not been able to get a guest room, and in those capacious days my sitting room had a sofa on which many friends unable to get back home after a good evening had spent the night.

That was not a problem, and Shah Nawaz, an astonishingly handsome teenager, kept me up late with talk of hawking in Larcana, the family fiefdom. Later, when I read Paul Scott, I was reminded of him by the character of Ahmed, a thought that was to recur when Shah Nawaz died suddenly in France, killed by forces that demanded sacrificial victims.

The visit was entertaining for another reason, for Benazir, with the kindness of a dominant elder sister, decided that Shah Nawaz needed to be taken to a show in London. I thought this meant theatre, but what a youthful Pakistani aristocrat needed, it was made clear, was a girly show.

This was not my area of expertise, but I had friends who were more sophisticated, so we arranged a little charabanc to Raymond?s Revue Bar, the height of British decadence in those distant days, and Shah Nawaz was duly entranced.

That was a fun-filled summer, for I was following a four year course and had no exams whereas most of my peers had to deal with finals. I was thrown therefore on the company of those younger than me, with the occasional older graduate such as Benazir and the dominant Union personality of the day, the Australian Robert Scoble, to provide ballast.

The long summer evenings stretched on into the night in smoke-filled rooms where we discussed Union politics at interminable length and also rediscovered board games, Monopoly I remember when Shah Nawaz was there.

Earlier there had been a memorable evening when we first played Diplomacy, and Benazir’s cries of anguish at being double-crossed after lengthy negotiations filled the night, coming to mind when the establishment imposed on her an unsympathetic Foreign Minister in her first stint in office, when the President she had selected dismissed her in 1996.

In 1974 the consequences were less grave, though worrying at the time, for I was berated by the Senior Tutor after I had let out my guests (he was a polite man, and Univ had a reputation for hospitality).

I thought the tongue-lashing would have sufficed, but it transpired the next day that he had also reported me to the Dean, and I had to pay a fine of ten pounds, a massive amount in those days for an impoverished student.

I tried to argue this down to five, but the Dean proved adamant, in spite of his understanding that Asians needed indulgence. A third of a century later, he wrote to me as follows after the tragedy of her assassination.

You may recall that she had reason to be in Univ quite a lot, and I can hear that loud confident voice shouting Good morning, Dr Mitchell across several quads. Victorian Schofield has been writing a lot in the English papers about LMH and all that.

Presumably, you saw her at work in the Union. The last time I saw her was about ten years ago when Hasan and Nasreen put on an exhibition of Pakistani crafts in London. She had become reserved and matronly.

I looked in vain for the bustling undergraduette. Now, that poor boy at Christ Church has got to take up the poisoned chalice. I do think that they might have given him time to grow up, but perhaps there is an inexorability about dynastic politics in South Asia which I don’t quite understand.

Anyway, her passing will not make things easier. Of course I want Oxford people to govern the world always, and she was sane when too many others are not?.

But, however proper she may have been in Pakistani politics, and in London, the enthusiasm and grace that characterised her in Oxford continued on the few occasions I saw her afterwards, in Karachi in 1998, and before that in Sri Lanka where she had held an audience of youngsters entranced.

She had withdrawn hastily when I tried to kiss her, and then a couple of minutes later, from across the table, she shrieked, it’s you.

I was wondering who this strange bearded man who was trying to kiss me was. But her exuberance was accompanied by thoughtful analysis, which the young politicians present, Sajith Premadasa and Navin Dissanayake, impressive too in their own responses, seemed to appreciate.

And long before that I had seen her in Pakistan as Prime Minister in a mode I found heartening. I was in Islamabad in 1988 for a Conference on English, and as usual took the opportunity to travel before and afterwards.

I was waiting for a plane to Peshawar, and we were delayed because it turned out that the Prime Minister was traveling. I stood there in the waiting room, hoping to catch a glimpse of her, and I did, running up the gangway, in marked contrast to the sedate officials who preceded and followed her.

A week earlier, on a bus going up the Karakoram Highway, I had begun to realise the problems she faced. I had been talking to two very articulate young men, harshly critical of the recently dead General Zia, pleased that democracy had come back to Pakistan. I assumed they would approve of Benazir Bhutto and said so.

They looked at each other, and then the taller one turned back to me. We are Pathans he said simply. For the Punjabis, it is all right. But for us, to have a woman as our leader it is a deep disgrace.

That thought remained with me, and made me more aware of the deep cleavage in Pakistan, the different cultures in one Islamic state that were so difficult to reconcile. She had an impossible task, but she had taken to it with commitment and keenness.

The polls suggested that, after so many years, a solid majority had realised that without her there could be no unity in Pakistan.

As the Dean put it, her passing will not make things easier but the memory of her running up the gangway, eager to face the world whatever the odds, abides as a symbol of a humanity that cannot be suppressed.