The New York Times ran an unusually good piece yesterday on Benazir Bhutto. Given what’s par for the course in American media coverage, I was surprised to read a more honest and nuanced portrayal of the two-time former prime minister. Interestingly, as reporter Jane Perlez notes in her article, Bhutto has a serious grandiosity complex and a disdain for the democratic.
Following the idea of big ambition, Ms. Bhutto calls herself chairperson for life of the opposition Pakistan Peoples Party, a seemingly odd title in an organization based on democratic ideals and one she has acknowledged quarreling over with her mother, Nusrat Bhutto, in the early 1990s.
Saturday night at the diplomatic reception, Ms. Bhutto showed how she could aggrandize. Three million people came out to greet her in Karachi on her return last month, she said, calling it Pakistan’s “most historic†rally. In fact, crowd estimates were closer to 200,000, many of them provincial party members who had received small amounts of money to make the trip.
It is such flourishes that lead to questioning in Pakistan about the strength of her democratic ideals in practice, and a certain distrust, particularly amid signs of back-room deal-making with General Musharraf, the military ruler she is said to oppose.
“She believes she is the chosen one, that she is the daughter of Bhutto and everything else is secondary,†said Feisal Naqvi, a corporate lawyer in Lahore who knows Ms. Bhutto.
Then there’s the rivalry with Aitzaz Ahsan, Bhutto’s biggest competitor within the PPP. Supposedly, Bhutto has been fighting tooth-and-nail to make sure that Ahsan doesn’t take over the party leadership. Perlez notes in her article that Ahsan “was quickly frozen out by Ms. Bhutto after he was introduced around Washington last year as a possible counterbalance to General Musharraf…”
The jealous way that Bhutto has guarded her throne indicates that she considers the party to be an instrument of herself and her family, but little more. Indeed, Perlez makes this same point: besides her desire to secure herself a position of authority, “one of Ms. Bhutto’s main objectives in seeking to return to power is to restore the reputation of her husband.”