If Benazir Bhutto was to be summed up in one word, that word would be kind. Indomitable though her will was, and extraordinary the courage she was gifted with, behind her sometimes steely exterior lay a deeply humane woman who felt for the poor and the deprived, a quality she had inherited from her father.

In many respects, she resembled him, but in several ways she was quite different from him. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (ZAB) found it hard to forgive those who had once crossed him, or who he thought had crossed him. Even minor incidents, sometimes quite innocent, he found hard to overlook or let go.
Benazir was forgiving. She had an amazing capacity to take personal abuse -- and that was one count on which she was never to want. She would shrug her shoulders and move on. She preferred to concentrate on the essentials of her relationships with people, not the trivia that often gets to define them. She was by nature a generous person. She did not harbor a grudge; but being a Bhutto, she was born with a photographic memory. She remembered but she did not settle scores.
As I sit here in faraway Washington trying to write this, my mind goes to and fro over the vast stretch of years that divide then from now.
She had a puckish sense of humor and there was a glint in her eye and a childlike expression of mischief on her face when she wanted to tease someone. Her loyal follower, former Senator Akbar Khawaja, who would not leave her side whenever she came to the U.S. -- and she let him do that because she obviously must have liked him -- was and remains a good friend of mine. Writing about her last visit to Washington, I took a gentle dig at Akbar Khawaja when I wrote, “Benazir Bhutto was in town for three days, but had it been left to former Senator Akbar Khawaja, who followed her like a shadow and never let her out of his sight till such time as he would be told to go home and grab some shut-eye, we would never have known she was here.That being so, if there is a prize for keeping secrets, Akbar Khawaja should get it.”
Akbar told me later that in Karachi, where he had gone with her from London, she turned around and found him standing behind her. That was at Bilawal House. She said, “Oh! it is you. I am going to tell Khalid.”
She also told him once, “Khalid is family.” I think one reason she always treated me with great affection and much respect was because I had never asked her for anything when by any measure, I should have been at least accorded what I had voluntarily turned my back on after the July 1977 coup. I was a member of the Pakistan Foreign Service and posted at London -- by ZAB personally -- and I resigned rather than serve the military government or, in Lillian Hellmann’s words, “cut my conscience to suit today’s fashion.” The only time I broached the subject with her was when I asked her several years later what I should say to those who ask me why I alone of all the Bhutto people had been left out of the camp of victory.
She did not answer that but I could see from her expression that she was sensitive to what I had said. Once someone who knew about such things and how they work, told me that she had tried both times she was in office to find me a position to suit my wishes and my experience but both times it was the ISI that had shot it down. One day, I am going to ask the ISI -- to quote Gen. Yahya Khan -- at what point did I inadvertently “untie its tethered goat.”
In Simla, Benazir who had accompanied her father because Begum (Nusrat) Bhutto was ill at the time in Karachi, was put under my charge, so to speak. She had barely turned 19 and was a big hit with the Indian media. I remember one headline that ran, “Benazir is benazir.”
Everybody wanted to interview her but I was under instructions from ZAB himself to say no to all such requests. The only exception made --after due permission from the President -- was a meeting with the late Indian journalist Dilip Mukerjee who had published a hurriedly written biography of Bhutto. He told me that more than him, it was his daughter, also Benazir’s age, who had her heart set on meeting her.
When I asked ZAB if an exception could be made in this case, he told me to go ahead as long as I remained present at the meeting. Mukerjee was thrilled when I told him that he could come along with his daughter to the Vice Regal Lodge where we were staying. The two came but Benazir paid little attention to the starry-eyed girl, instead going hammer and tongs after Mukerjee, whom she faulted for having got several facts about her father wrong. Mukerjee, one of India’s most respected journalists, and a great Bengali gentleman of the old school, spent the meeting fending off Benazir’s blows.
At one point I asked her if we had not had enough of that and if we could perhaps move on to other things. She reluctantly let go and Mukerjee heaved a sigh of relief. She then turned to the girl and spoke to her for quite some time to put her at ease.
Except for the last year and a half or so, I kept a steady to and fro email correspondence with Benazir. She was a great email sender, though the last time we spoke I said to her that for long we had not exchanged emails, whereas I often ran into people who bragged about getting emails from her all the time. “Not emails, but SMS,” she replied. I was not into SMS -- one gadget less to fiddle with -- but I had decided to SMS her from now on. But that was not to be.
She wrote to me on May 31 2003, in response to my early birthday message, “It is kind of you to remember my birthday so early on. Thank you for the good wishes for the occasion. I am going to be half a century old and that makes for reflection. I have written a poem called Banazir’s Story inspired by Marvi of Malir, written by Shah Latif. Marvi was in exile from her land and pined for it as I do too. I was moved when I read it and adapted it to the present circumstances.” Daily Times published the entire poem.
When I passed on to her a suggestion someone had made asking her to become Pakistan’s Sonia Gandhi, she wrote, “Luckily, I come from a village in Larkana rather than Italy.”
Benazir was a beautiful person. But she was not free of faults. Once she said to me -- it was her first term as prime minister -- that she was always judged harshly. I replied that she was judged harshly because much was expected of her. The never-to-go-away charges of corruption that hovered over her head bothered me deeply, as they did all those who admired her and wished her well. Although she kept denying them, the fact is that she was not pure as driven snow. Was it Asif Zardari who led her to that path? Or was it something innate to her?
But let all that is now laid to rest with her in the eternal earth of her beloved Sindh. She is one with Marvi with whom she had once compared herself. She is gone and as the Quran says, speak only well of the dead.
I recall walking on a Casablanca road, having just filed my report to my Lahore newspaper from the telegraph office, when Benazir’s prime ministerial cavalcade with sirens blaring passed me by. She saw me and had her car and the rest of the motorcade come to a stop. Khalid Shafi, then chief of protocol and ZAB’s ADC when I was his press secretary, jumped out of the car and said, “The prime minister says get Khalid in the car and bring him over.”
I spent that entire afternoon with her, talking about old times and about ZAB whom we both adored. Not always was she the best judge of people, however. In her first term, it was people like Happy Minwala who roosted around and pretended as if the sun rose every morning not from the east but from some orifice on their person. When she fell, they abandoned her without wasting a minute.
I asked Husain Haqqani to share with me briefly his memories of Benazir. He came very close to her in her last years and did a lot of work on her behalf in Washington and with the U.S. media, wrote, “Benazir Bhutto was the most amazing, loving and lovable person I have ever known. For those who only saw her as a distant political figure, her human dimension clearly did not matter.”
“For everyone whose life she touched, her humanity transcended the politics. Most powerful figures in Pakistan know how to turn friends into enemies, but Benazir Bhutto had the capacity to turn critics into admirers. When I first met her, I worked for her opponent but she won me over by her charm and persuasion, leading to fifteen years of close relations and my absolute personal loyalty to her. She was told many things about me but she never believed any and on more than one occasion put her appreciation or praise in writing. ‘I know something about vilification, Haqqani Saab’ she would say.”
“When Farah and I moved to Washington in 2002, Bibi called us and arranged a meeting every time she visited the U.S. I told her I did not have a home big enough to entertain, unlike some of her rich doctor and Pakistani businessmen supporters. She said she would be happy to meet me in my office. Everyone at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace was surprised when Benazir Bhutto arrived unannounced at the reception one morning and spent the entire day in my small cubicle. She spoke on the phone to Asif Zardari, who was still in prison and being advised by the then head of ISI’s Internal Wing to break with her and find happiness. I heard her side of the conversation and she filled me in on what was said from the other side. Then she told me, ‘You will now understand why Asif remains so precious to me.’“
“... After I became a professor at Boston University she introduced me to her American friends as ‘my favorite professor.’ I probably wasn’t but she said it anyway and it made me feel good. She had the capacity to make people feel good, which is the most important attribute of a politician -- something cold-blooded analysts and technocrats cannot understand ...”
I would like to close this tribute to that gentle lady whose like we will not see again with something my friend Ziauddin wrote for DAWN from London where he now lives: “She listened, defended and argued but never for a moment did I find her losing her patience or her cool. I had gone to (one) meeting after hearing many stories about her arrogance, hot temper and short fuse. But the Benazir I met was a person one could communicate, enter into heated debate and argue with. After this meeting I had several longish debates with her mostly in the company of the late H.K. Burki. On these occasions, I would listen mostly to the monologue of Mr. Burki who would dissect her policies and actions like a surgeon without mincing words. She would listen attentively and would never make even the slightest unpleasant response to the most unpleasant and uncharitable criticism of Mr. Burki ...”
This is a regular column by TFT’s Washington correspondent. He can be reached at khasan2@cox.net
(The Friday Times)