Benazir Bhutto - SZABIST

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 80s 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. Her husband Asif, her mother
Nusrat and her 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 they laughed over it at dinner.
“Rajeev”, as she always pronounced his name, adopting a misplaced Punjabi accent for a Westernised
Sindhi, “is so handsome,” she said when I next met her. And then she added, “But he’s equally
tough.”
During the BJP years, Benazir forged a link with the Advani family with equal facility and friendship.
A few months after her first meeting with L.K. Advani, we were together in Washington for the
Prayer Breakfast of 2002. During a break in one of the sessions, she insisted that I accompany her
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 to him through me.
I know that as Prime Minister, her two terms in office disillusioned many. Her fans were disappointed
whilst her critics felt justified. But between 1989 and 2007 the change that characterised her attitude to
India and Kashmir in particular steadily progressed and didn’t falter. From the young prime minister
who would shout on television “Azadi, Azadi, Azadi!”, 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. Musharraf’s concept of self-governance and joint management draws
heavily upon her original thinking.
When I last interviewed her in September, 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 militias
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 Hafiz Mohammed Sayeed and Masood
Azhar.
In private conversation, she would readily admit that the strident prime minister of 1988-89 was a
mistake. In fact, she came close to saying as much on television as well. Had she lived to become
Prime Minister, I feel certain she would have fulfilled this commitment. This is why she was so upset,
actually angry, at the National Security Advisor’s scepticism of her. Her death is, therefore, an
irreparable loss for India as well.
The two months since her return to Pakistan have proved beyond doubt her incredible bravery. But it
wasn’t just death that she refused to be frightened of. She was equally fearless of failure. In 1986, at