Feudal politics

Songs of Blood and Sword by Fatima Bhutto; Penguin Books; Price: Rs.699; 470 pp

The large and growing number of citizens who despair about the poor development record of post-independence India’s sputtering democracy need to bear in mind that things could be worse. Much worse. As they are in the neighbouring state of Pakistan where a feudal landed aristocracy and the 750,000 strong Pakistan Army have exchanged power over a dozen times during the past 63 years, leaving the 166 million people of the ‘Land of the Pure’ stuck in a medieval time warp.

Although written as a loyal biography of the late Murtaza Bhutto (1954-96), the eldest son and second child of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who ruled Pakistan as prime minister from 1973 to 1977 before he was overthrown, imprisoned and hanged by his chief of army staff Gen. Zia-ul-Haq in 1979, Murtaza’s Columbia and SOAS-educated daughter Fatima, unwittingly chronicles a massive body of evidence, explaining why contemporary Pakistan is a mess and in imminent danger of meltdown.

The stated purpose of this history of the Bhutto family which with several interregnums has (mis)ruled Pakistan for over 20 years, is to project Murtaza as the wronged rightful heir of Zulfikar Bhutto, who made determined efforts to save his father from the gallows, and his sustained subsequent opposition to the illegal rule of Zia while in exile in London, Geneva, Tripoli and Damascus. Yet while describing the machinations and palace intrigues of Pakistan’s self-serving ruling elites — feudal landlords, army generals and the 21 business families who own, manage and/or control over 80 percent of the country’s industry, banking, trade and commerce — Fatima provides a compelling insight into Pakistan’s hothouse politics dominated by the landed gentry (Bhuttos included) and army generals, who between them have monopolised the political space and lord it over Pakistan.

Narrated through the prism of Pakistan’s turbulent politics, Songs of Blood and Sword serves the useful purpose of providing a linear history of our insecure and perennially prickly neighbour. After his triumph at the Shimla parleys (1972) with Mrs. Indira Gandhi, Zulfiqar Bhutto was riding high as prime minister of Pakistan, albeit minus Bangladesh. Yet inevitably, even as it loudly proclaimed socialist slogans, the PPP (People’s Progressive Party) government was soon mired in corruption and when elections were called in 1976, although the PPP was favoured to win, Bhutto succumbed to the temptation of rigging a large number of constitu-encies, which triggered riots across the country.

Using his political skills to safeguard against another army coup, Bhutto promoted Major General Zia-ul-Haq over the heads of ten senior generals and appointed him chief of army staff. This prophylactic move proved deadly because soon after, Zia staged a coup in Pakistan, imposed martial law, imprisoned Bhutto and after a trumped-up trial, executed him in 1979. According to the author (his granddaughter), one of Bhutto’s last instructions was to his sons Murtaza and Shanawaz to flee into exile, and declare war on the Zia regime. After a period of house arrest, their sister Benazir and mother Nusrat were also permitted by the regime to go into exile in the UK.

Gen. Zia’s rule over Pakistan lasted over a decade until his airplane mysteriously blew up in mid-air in 1988, and much of this book recounts the history in exile and  struggle of the brothers Bhutto to keep the “Bhutto legacy” alive and reclaim power in Pakistan. In the unspoken tradition of the sub-continent, the Bhutto siblings lacked nothing materially while living in exile, and easily afforded higher education at Harvard, Radcliffe and Oxford. Songs of Blood is inadvertently informative about Murtaza’s envious lifestyle in exile in London, Damascus, Dubai and Geneva where he transnationally  wooed and won a Greek lady, married an Afghan (referred to as Fatima’s “biological mother”) before marrying Ghinwa, a Lebanese national. Moreover as she smugly recounts throughout the book, unlike thousands of PPP workers who were imprisoned, tortured and even murdered by the Zia regime back in Pakistan, Fatima herself suffered little by way of material deprivation, being schooled in the best American schools in Geneva and Damascus.

Songs of Blood offers no explanation of the mysterious source of wealth of the Bhutto clan, except to admit that the family is one of the biggest landowners in Pakistan and that even Zia at the height of his power, didn’t dare to interfere with their rent incomes. And such was the blind loyalty of the ignorant masses back home that after Zia’s plane crash and Benazir’s return to Pakistan and appointment as prime minister following a general election in which she failed to secure a clear majority, Murtaza fought and won the family’s Larkana constituency while still in exile. Following electoral triumph in his home province, he returned to Pak and emerged as a rival power centre to Benazir who by that time had married the oleaginous Asif Zardari. Shortly thereafter on September 20, 1996 Murtaza was killed in a mysterious encounter between his bodyguards and the police. A judges tribunal was constituted to enquire into the encounter, but within three months Benazir was out of power, trounced by the Nawaz Sharif-led Pakistan Muslim League. A decade later Benazir became the third Bhutto to be assassinated in Pakistan.

Commendably the young author has taken great pains, travelled long distances and interviewed a large cross-section of people to put this record of the past four decades of Pakistan together. Even though its plain intent is to project Murtaza as a martyr of Pak democracy, Songs of Blood simultaneously offers a ringside view of the desperate tooth-and-claw machinations of Pakistan’s ruling classes — the entrenched feudal elite and the army — as they plot and plan for the spoils of office and power. In this power struggle, the lay people of this unfortunate country steeped in illiteracy, ignorance and primitive loyalties are mere cannon-fodder of politicians. By a quirk of fate, Benazir’s husband, the provenly corrupt Asif Zardari rules in Pakistan with Zia’s henchman Yusuf Gilani as his puppet prime minister. But as Fatima makes clear, Murtaza’s son Zulfi is waiting in the wings to assert himself as the next heir of the Bhutto legacy.

Dilip Thakore

Dangerous messianism

How to Win a Cosmic War: Confronting Radical Religion by Reza Aslan; Arrow Books; Price: Rs.413; 225 pp

Belying the predictions of secularists, who posited a rapid decline in religiosity with the onward march of capitalist ‘modernity’ and materialism, public identification with religion has failed to waver across the world. Indeed, the process of ‘globalisation’ has witnessed a remarkable resurgence of religiosity and religious-based identities even as globalisation relentlessly tears down walls that for centuries have separated religious communities from each other.

A striking manifestation of the global revival of religion, particularly in its institutionalised form and as a marker for asserting individual and communal identity, is the emergence of messianic groups in the world’s three major semitic religious traditions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. These groups, diverse in origin and belief, nevertheless share a number of common features: they believe they are engaged in a just, global struggle in the name of God and are fighting to establish his kingdom of righteousness.

These radical, war-mongering messianic movements are no longer fringe outfits, whose raving and rants can be dismissed as those of crazed fanatics. According to the author of this revealing treatise, fundamentalist Christian evangelical movements enjoy the support of more than a third of the American population. They control vast foundations, operate scores of radio and television channels, run thousands of charities and publish-ing houses, and are vigorously spreading their narrow, exclusivist understanding of Christianity around the world.

George Bush, Aslan tells us, was a passionate religious fundamentalist whose messianic beliefs shaped American foreign policy during his presidency, and prompted him to wage war against Iraq and Afghanistan and lend unstinting support to Israel. All this neatly tallies with the messianic world-view of pro-Israel Christian Zionists, who are viscerally opposed to Islam and are set to trigger a third, and final World War, this time between Muslims on the one hand, and Christians and Jews on the other, which they believe would be the precursor to the Second Coming of Christ and the end of the world as we know it.

Likewise extremist Jewish messianism, says the author, is also built on such exclusivist belief and expectations of a deliverer who will restore the promised land extending the borders of Israel to the Euphrates (modern Iraq) to the east, and the Nile to the south-west (modern Egypt), rebuild the Jewish Temple (on the spot presently occupied by a mosque) and vanquish Islam, once and for all.

Radical islamists and jihadists, too, writes the author, are driven by a similar theology of all-consuming hate, regarding Muslims who adhere to their own particular interpretation of Islam as the ‘party of God’ while branding the rest of humanity, including other Muslims, as agents of the devil, with whom no compromise is permissible. They must be fought to the finish. However Aslan makes a distinction between Islamists who seek to establish Islamic states, based on shariah law, in their own countries, and global jihadists such as the Al-Qaeda network, who are anarchists and believe that their religion endorses unending violence against the infidels.

Aslan’s rigorous research details the history and politics of Jewish, Christian and Islamist radical groups, focusing particularly on their frighteningly exclusivist and militant theological objectives which, he warns, rule out the possibility of negotiation and compromise with people of other faiths. These hard-line evangelists are hell-bent on promoting global and transnational wars, even if it results in the apocalypse.

The threat that such groups pose to world peace and to sane and stable societies is too frightening to be imagined, and that should make us more vigilant in opposing them. But unfortunately Aslan does not suggest any novel ways to win the global war against Islamist fundamentalism, despite the promising title of the book. All he has to say in this regard is that America must goad Muslim regimes allied with it to expand democratic spaces and allow moderate Islamist groups to participate in the democratic process. About tackling the maelstrom of similar Christian and Jewish fundamentalism, he says nothing at all. Nor does he recommend inter-faith dialogue.

Nevertheless this work of considerable scholarship serves the useful purpose of summarising the histories of extremist messianic groups in the semitic religions and provides insightful details of their dangerous dogmatism. It exposes the horrors of institutionalised religion based on excessive self-righteousness and hatred towards the rest of humanity. Its serious omission of excluding the radical Hindu fringe apart, its greatest failure is that despite its promising title, it doesn’t quite detail about ‘how to win a cosmic war’.

Yoginder Sikand