I told her that she sounded disappointed.
She laughed. “We are totally disillusioned, if any of us had any illusions.”
What Benazir could never accept is that many who disagreed with her, or even despised her, nonetheless wanted her to succeed, not for herself but for the country. If she had accepted this, if she had been able to detach the idea of democracy from herself, she might at least have lasted longer in office.
On the day before she was thrown out as prime minister, I went to see another formidable Pakistani woman in Islamabad, Maleeha Lodhi, a contemporary of Benazir’s and a newspaper editor who is one of the country’s brightest political writers. Neither of us knew what was to happen the next afternoon, but you could sense that the end was near.
“Her father deliberately set out to undermine and destroy independent institutions—the party, trade unions, any other sort of independent power,” she said. “Benazir has behaved in the same way but for different reasons. He came in through the institutions and struck back against them. She came from the outside. It’s the great-leader syndrome. Everything has to be me.... ‘Compromise’ is a dirty word in her vocabulary. During the martial law period, yes, that can be a very successful strategy, but not now. Half these people around her she saw as her father’s murderers. It couldn’t have been easy. She’s an emotional person anyway. I just feel so sorry for her, personally. She had such an opportunity and she’s come very close to blowing it for herself. I guess you need a different kind of leader to handle that.”
Shortly afterward, in Lahore, I met Mubashir Hassan, who served as finance minister in the government of Benazir’s father and has known the family for several decades. I asked him why he thought Benazir had failed.
“The phenomenon of Benazir cannot be properly understood unless we note that for the last ten years, the state structure in Pakistan has been rapidly collapsing,” he answered. “It’s not just a problem of a leader going this way or that. The police are no longer the police. The magistracy is no longer the magistracy and the tax collector can no longer collect taxes. The collapse of the state has given rise to kidnappers, murderers, bank robbers, drug dealers. At least the old-time feudal lord was a stabilizing power. But now these emerging money powers need new political backing. They poured enormous amounts of money into the coffers of Benazir and Nawaz Sharif. The whole scene has become a bazaar. Previously the top leadership was never so corrupt. But now, you name it—the top ministers, public corporations, heads of banks. They’re all corrupt.
“I think what makes Benazir go is her conviction that she is the People’s Party and she finds justification in the crowds she attracts. And anyone who tries to tell her that this is not politics, that it won’t last, she simply doesn’t believe them.”
I asked why he thought, as all of this unraveled around her, Benazir seemed to find a kind of refuge in paranoia. Like so many in the South Asian elites, Hassan referred to his countrymen as “they,” as if he were some sort of nineteenth-century colonial officer.
“Indo-Pakistan society is paranoiac by nature,” he answered. “They are extremely insecure. They have always been ruled by force and power. They have yet to learn to rule over themselves. The more they learn, the more they become afraid of what will happen to them. They keep looking for protectors at every level.... Salvaging the Pakistani state might require a combination of a Caesar and a Plato. But Benazir is not even in the running.”
In the national Pakistani elections of October 1990, after she was thrown out of office, Benazir and her party were defeated in a landslide vote. She announced immediately that the tally had been secretly and systematically rigged to ensure her defeat. Outside election monitors looked carefully at this charge, and while they found irregularities, they could find little evidence to support the broader charge of a big fix. These days, Benazir crosses Pakistan with a diminished train of courtiers, still seeking solace in the crowds. She may yet make a comeback; she relishes the public role of victim, and her enemies oblige her with persecution. Her husband has been charged with serious crimes and cannot possibly count on an impartial trial. Her beloved party—the embodiment of herself—is splintered. To compensate, she has been meeting recently with Islamic fundamentalists to talk about a new alliance. Sometimes, perhaps for rejuvenation, she flies off to America or Britain for a lecture tour. She appears dressed in pearls on talk shows like
Good Morning America.
If you are inclined to optimism about South Asia, then you might say that in time, if Pakistan finds a way to sustain parliamentary democracy as an antidote to its spasms of military rule, the repetition of elections will slowly file the edges off this story and gradually mute all the high drama and despair. Anything is possible, and of course there is much greater strength and resiliency at the base of Pakistani society than those on top can see or credit. But for now, watching Benazir and her rival claimants for the right to rule wandering among their crowds, it is difficult to imagine that the promise of modernity she made with such charming conviction will be realized anytime soon.
8
Crossed Lines
On one side the whole world is after us and [on] another side the
internal enemies are going to finish us. But at least we have one
satisfaction, that from one end to the other end we have made
other people sleepless.
—A Q. Khan, father of the Pakistani nuclear program, to a colleague
T
he West misunderstood Benazir, but Benazir also misunderstood the West. She seemed so often to believe that a key to the successful governance of Pakistan was to seduce the foreign policy crowds in Boston, New York, Washington, and London. Given the magnitude of the U.S. economic and military aid program in Pakistan, her impulse to foster cordial relations was understandable. But Benazir’s relationship with the West, like that of so many others in the South Asian elites, moved beyond calculation into pathos. The Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid reported the story of how, near the end of her reign as prime minister, in the midst of a dispute with her enemies in the Pakistan army, Benazir turned up one night at the door of the U.S. ambassador in Islamabad, asking him to please intervene and tell the generals to behave. Manipulated by Benazir’s opponents, the image eventually angered many Pakistanis and helped to feed a surge in angry nationalist politics beginning late in 1990 that contributed to a near-total break in the U.S.-Pakistani alliance.
The misunderstanding between South Asia and the West plays itself out as overwrought tragedy or exaggerated comedy, but it is rarely inconsequential, at least for South Asians. For two hundred years the political economy of the Indian subcontinent has been shaped in decisive ways by the ambitious power of Western armies and Western ideas. If the South Asian political classes today seem entangled in obsessions and misperceptions about the West, that is at least partly because they have been forced continually to reckon with Western political interests at crucial moments of a volatile and rapidly evolving history. But the converse is not true at all; the relationship is terribly unequal. The West today ignores, misunderstands, or tramples over South Asia at no great expense to itself. The occasional exceptions are relished with pride by South Asians, even when they turn out badly. The construction of nuclear weapons, perhaps the most popular government-sponsored endeavor on the subcontinent after cricket, is one example. The Bank of Commerce and Credit International was another.
The BCCI story erupted in the summer of 1991 when the Bank of England led a raid against BCCI’s London headquarters and many of its branches, accusing the bank’s officers of massive criminal fraud. A
$20
billion financial empire with branches in seventy-two countries, BCCI was now broke, and with the Bank of England’s raid its millions of ordinary depositors became overnight victims of what New York district attorney Robert Morgenthau called “the largest bank fraud in world financial history.” Suddenly all the world wanted to know about BCCI and its founder, Agha Hasan Abedi, a Muslim financier of Indian origin who built his reputation and his bank in Pakistan. Congress convened hearings to explore the bank’s links to organized crime and to its financial allies in the United States, particularly Clark Clifford, the Washington political fixer and elder statesman who was an adviser to several presidents before finding wealth in partnership with a South Asian entrepreneur. The Western media went berserk over the story. It was an otherwise slow summer, and the BCCI tale was one of those amorphous, sinister scandals that seem to link up, to those of a conspiratorial bent, many disparate phenomena—drug trafficking, gun running, political corruption, intelligence gathering, and financial fraud. BCCI was said to have run a “black network” out of its Karachi branch that performed dirty tricks, even murder, in service of such evil entities as the Saudi Arabian monarchy, the Colombian cocaine cartel, the CIA, the Pakistani nuclear establishment, the Iranian revolutionaries, the Nicaraguan contras, and so on. If you looked at it from a certain angle, you could believe that BCCI was the link that bound all the scandals of the 1980s into one. Or so it seemed in the humidity of a slow-news summer. And at the center of it all was a man who fit neatly Western preconceptions and prejudices about South Asia, a swarthy Pakistani with a name few knew how to pronounce. (AH-behdee is correct.)
Abedi was depicted in the West as one of the great criminals of the twentieth century. In truth, he probably was. Prosecutors indicted him on fraud charges and the Federal Reserve Board named him in an action seeking his permanent exclusion from U.S. banking. In these documents, Abedi was described as a swindler who stole billions from his depositors, gave away money recklessly to friends and cronies, laundered illegal drug profits, lied repeatedly to regulators, and covered up his crimes by currying favor with prominent political figures around the world. That Abedi did all this, and more, is indisputable. But fraud itself is prosaic; Abedi is not. What was most interesting about him, as a criminal and a contemporary South Asian, was his struggle to reconcile South Asia’s past with its future. Like Benazir, Abedi was suspended between two incompatible worlds. He fell because he found it profitable for a time not to reconcile the contradictions.
Abedi was born and raised in Mahmudabad, an isolated Muslim kingdom in what is now north-central India that was alive fifty years ago with intrigue, wealth, and idealistic politics. His ancestors served for generations as courtiers to the once-powerful Mahmudabad rajas. Besides Abedi, dozens of other senior and mid-level BCCI managers were raised in or trace their roots to Mahmudabad. As Benazir learned about politics in Larkana, so Abedi first learned about finance, wealth, power, and law in Mahmudabad’s centuries-old feudal world. In Mahmudabad a series of bejeweled Muslim rajas administered great tracts of land from a gold and silver throne. They financed idealistic politicians such as the Mahatma Gandhi and Pakistan founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah. They doled out gifts to their subjects, paid stipends to renowned poets and intellectuals, plotted against the British Empire, and finally witnessed the birth of independent India and Pakistan in a bloody spasm of post-Partition riots. Abedi and nearly all of BCCI’s senior executives migrated as young adults from what is now India to newly independent Islamic Pakistan in 1947 and 1948, when the kingdoms that the British had employed to rule South Asia fell. In Pakistan, Abedi and other refugees confronted the challenge of building twentieth-century institutions from scratch in a culture still rooted in seventeenth-century feudalism. Among other things, Pakistan at its birth had no large banks and very few bankers.
Abedi set out to change that. Driven by high ambitions and relying on the loyalty of young men from his Mahmudabad clan—a clan knit by family, religion, ethnicity, and a shared, convulsive history—he erected an international banking empire that sought to carry into the realm of modern finance the romantic idealism of a lost feudal kingdom. Along the way, Abedi and his clan achieved a degree of wealth and fame befitting the decadent Mahmudabad rajas he and his ancestors had served for generations. To the West, Abedi was merely a criminal. To some Pakistanis, he was a man born into a family of minor royal servants who became obsessed with transforming himself into a king.
In 1922, when Abedi was born, Mahmudabad was the second or third largest princely state in northern India, encompassing 530 villages and thousands of hamlets and generating half a million pounds sterling in annual income. Its line of Shia Muslim rajas dated to the seventeenth century and commanded respect from the British colonial officers they served, as well as from Indians struggling for liberation from the British Empire. The Mahmudabad rajas lived in exorbitant luxury and owned several palaces in the countryside and the city of Lucknow. But they were also deeply involved in anticolonial politics and Shiite religious movements. As far back as the mid-nineteenth century, Abedi’s family served the rajas as revenue officers, administrators, and private secretaries. Their position as courtiers provided them comfort, stability, and middle-class status. Abedi’s father and grandfather were confidants of the rajas, although not among the most senior advisers. Abedi himself grew up hearing stories of royal splendor and fierce anticolonial struggle against the British. Mahmudabad lore has it that his great-great-grandfather participated in the legendary Mutiny of 1857, when Muslim soldiers in northern India revolted against the British, only to be slaughtered when the rebellion was quashed in short order. Abedi’s ancestor was subsequently hung in a cage by the British on the streets of Lucknow to serve as an example to the population, the story goes. Whatever the truth of that, it secured the Abedi family’s stalwart reputation among the Muslims of Mahmudabad. The kingdom was at once extravagant and impoverished. Landless peasants tilled the fields for subsistence and paid tithes to revenue officers, who filled the rajas’ coffers with treasure. Neighboring minor princes also paid stipends to the Mahmudabad rulers. The rajas, in turn, prided themselves on their philanthropy and devotion to high culture. They toured the countryside in times of trouble to hand out donations to the poor, provided shelter and finance to independence-movement leaders, and paid stipends to Muslim poets, intellectuals, and religious scholars.