Benazir Bhutto’s Posthumous Autobiography
Good public educational opportunity is the key to the economic and political progress of nations, and it can be so in the Islamic world as well. But in Pakistan $4.5 billion is spent on the military each year – an astounding 1,400 per cent more than on education. This is what Benazir Bhutto says in her posthumous book, Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West, (to be published by Simon & Schuster on February 12).
Some of the excerpts from the book published in The Sunday Times: “When I returned (to Pakistan) I did not know whether I would live or die. I knew that the same elements of Pakistani society that had colluded to destroy my father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and end democracy in Pakistan in 1977, were now arrayed against me for the same purpose exactly 30 years later”.
The slain Pakistani leader revealed she worried whether Pakistan could survive the threat of disintegration and cited India as an example of how a nation can forge ahead.
“Democracy cannot be sustained in the absence of a stable and growing middle class. The growth of India into a regional and international economic power occurred – not coincidentally – as its middle class exploded into a huge economic and political force.”
Describing Pakistan as “a tinder-box that could catch fire quickly”, she said: “Sixty years after its creation, the case study of its record with democracy is a sad chronicle of steps forward and huge steps backwards.” And militants had “made many inroads into the very structure of governance” – through supporters and sympathisers – since the overthrow of her government in 1996.
