Lunch with Benazir

More importantly, she indicated the dangers the US support to General Musharraf’s military regime posed to the region. According to her, supporting the general was wrought with the same dangers as the US support of the Mujahideen, who later became the dreaded Taliban. The immediate need to have an ally in Musharraf to check the terrorists in Afghanistan had made the US lose track of the long-term dangers that his regime posed to the region and to US interests. She pointed out that one of the immediate dangers was that in the name of a gradual transition to democracy, Musharraf was encouraging political parties run by mullahs, while the real harbingers of democracy — the PPP and Nawaz Sharief’s party — were being suppressed. As an illustration of the atrocities of the Musharraf regime, she gave graphic and scary details of police brutalities on her party people who had gathered to receive her husband as he returned to Pakistan this April.

Interestingly, Benazir’s plea to the US was not to leave the region. She wanted Washington to take a continued interest in the area — but in her favour. She was clearly soft on Washington. From listing the introduction of CNN and Fox television in the country as one of her achievements in striving to make Pakistan a modern progressive state, to referring to the US as the heart of freedom and democracy, she went all out to woo Washington.

And it was here that she disappointed many of us. As she stood making an autobiographical narrative of how it was at Harvard and later at Oxford that she, an Asian woman, learnt about freedom and democracy, one wished that she did not make these generalisations. For many of us South Asian women, Oxbridge and Harvard are intellectually stimulating, but we learnt our first lessons on democracy back home!

So generous was Benazir Bhutto in her pandering to the West that many in the audience wanted to know her views on the belief that democracy seems to have been hijacked in the US as well. Of course we got no answers. We were also disappointed in not getting any idea about a concrete plan that her party may have had for an ‘exit strategy’ for the general. Instead, what we got was a diatribe against the general. That was somewhat disappointing for us who had gathered to hear the ‘Daughter of the East’. After all, for many of her compatriots, the hope of a democratic Pakistan rests on her.

The writer is a visiting fellow at Harvard University