There’s no reason why I should have picked up her book. I am not from her age group. I don’t follow her religion. I am not interested in her field – Politics. And our respective countries are always at war with each other – overt or covert – since 1947. Still, I picked up her book. The book is called “Daughter of the East”. And she is Benazir Bhutto.
I am not sure exactly what I feel about Pakistan. The feelings are a curious bundle of – hate, anger, sadness, helplessness and curiosity. My hatred for it reaches its zenith when I read about an Indian soldier perishing at the border and I might as well admit, when their cricket team is playing against ours. I feel angry at the British who played the first half of their “divide and rule” dirty trick even as they left, at the fact that there are so many Indians still languishing in Pakistani jails and at Pakistan’s cheek of accusing India of terrorist acts while they themselves continue sponsoring terrorism on Indian soil. God knows, at the height of Kargil war I couldn’t even stand the sight of the Pakistani developer in my office who used to drop in for an occassional chat with the Indians in my project group.
I am sad thinking that there might be people on that side of the border who like some of us Indians don’t want anything other than a peaceful happy life and I feel helpless that neither they nor us can do anything to turn it into reality. I would never forget the face of the old Pakistani gentleman who was delighted to see 3 of us Indians in his eatery in Nice, France. When we went to dine there for the last time we gave him a card and he made us all write our names in Hindi on it. I still have his address.
And sometimes I feel curious about these people who could have been part of my country if it were not for the British.
Benazir Bhutto was one of those people. I still remember the day she was assassinated and my thinking “why did she go back? She knew there was a threat to her life. Was the lure of absolute power so irresistible or was there really any noble motive of bringing the democracy to her country?” So when I saw her book I picked it up in vague hopes of getting some answers, some clues to what made her tick. I also thought it would be interesting to read her thoughts in the light of the recent happenings in Pakistan.
The book goes back and forth between her young carefree days and the days after the execution of her father. I couldn’t help but feel the similarity between her young life and that of the late Mrs. Indira Gandhi. Benazir didn’t have to go through life without her mother but she does refer to it being lonely sometimes because she was the eldest child. Mrs. Gandhi who was the only child and who had to take care of her sick mother must have had a lonelier one. Benazir was being groomed for an important political role much the same way young Indira was. It was interesting to read though that politics wasn’t what interested her then but a career in Pakistan’s foreign service. You feel sad when she says that her “future was all neat, clean and laid out before her” – till fate intervened in the form of Zia.
India has never had a dictator though a few politicians come close to behaving as one! It was interesting and scary to read about how the media was controlled to feed false information to the populace prior to the 1977 elections in Pakistan. I remember reading about similar tactics practiced in Germany during Hitler’s reign.
The episode of Pakistan’s partition into Bangladesh maddened me though. Benazir paints India in such a villainous way and that coming from someone whose country is engaging in such villainy itself is a bit too much to digest. My reaction to Zulphikar Ali Bhutto’s comment - “He must have died of happiness” - on the late Lal Bahadur Shastri’s sudden death at Tashkent was a mixed one – I laughed but I also felt angry. Same goes for my reaction on the shrewd way Mr. Bhutto went for Pakistan’s territory than the Prisoners of war in the Simla Accord, I admired him for his fore-sight in gauging correctly that the Prisoners of war will get more international attention later than the territory claimed by India thus securing their eventual release. But I was angry that his country still holds many Indian POWs and claims to know nothing about them.
Is this what Benazir meant when she said that the generation that was born after partition didn’t have to carry the same bitterness as the generation that went through it? The partition-era generation would have found nothing funny about Mr. Bhutto’s comment. And very few among them would have found it in their hearts to admire his political savvy.
Having said that, I must confess that my anger was more powerful than my sense of humor or admiration. Is it that for the successive generations the bitterness will not be there in the beginning but if God Forbid, there is another Kargil, then all the bitterness will come flooding back in double intensity? That in this age of information superhighway, the internet, countless blogs, TV channels and mobile phones will open the floodgates for hatred and distrust to walk through? Are both nations condemned to perpetual enmity? I am afraid that there will not be any tearing down of the Berlin wall here because the wall is invisible and hence very difficult to tear down.
The new Airtel ad says so poignantly that there is no wall, no barrier that can keep us apart if we only talk. That two-lettered word “if’ is the key. I fear that we will probably never talk. Or rather common people on both sides who have immense potential to really improve the relations will never get to talk. There will always be a “No man’s land” in between.
Will I be proven wrong?
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