Midnight’s children come to power
Rajnarayan Chandavarkar
- Nehru: The Making of India by M.J. Akbar
Viking, 609 pp, £17.95, January 1989, ISBN 0 670 81699 X
- Daughter of the East by Benazir Bhutto
Hamish Hamilton, 333 pp, £12.95, November 1988, ISBN 0 241 12398 4
When Rajiv Gandhi and Benazir Bhutto recently signed their Islamabad accord, the similarities in their lives and backgrounds immediately attracted widespread attention. They were born, after all, to the same, Western-educated, international, urban élite in the Indian sub-continent. They were both, more and less, midnight’s children, although the younger Benazir might be more accurately attributed to the early hours of the morning. They shared an Oxbridge past. Their parents had been assassinated by their political opponents. They entered office almost as naturally as if they were claiming their inheritance. Rajiv Gandhi, who succeeded his mother, is the grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister; wearing the mantle of her father, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the former President who was deposed and then hanged by her predecessor, Benazir presents herself simply as the Daughter of the East. The pundits have been swift to discern in these lineages the peculiar weaknesses of south Asian democracy.
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Letters
Vol. 11 No. 8 · 20 April 1989
From Editors, ‘London Review’
In the last issue, a sentence in the review by Rajnarayan Chandavarkar was truncated on its way to the printers. It should have read: ‘Benazir’s description of her first meeting with Zia suggests how the Bhuttos may have underestimated him.’
Editors, ‘London Review’
Vol. 11 No. 12 · 22 June 1989
From Maqbool Aziz
Fortune has begun to smile on Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in a big way. And why, after all, not? Isn’t she the most attractive, the most graceful, the best-educated, the youngest, woman (girl, really) Head of Government in the world?
The other evening I attended a dinner at Hart House in Toronto, organised by the Oxford Society of South Ontario (yes, South Ontario). The guest speaker was none other than the Chancellor of our beloved alma mater. Lo and behold, as Lord Jenkins opened his appeal for funds for Oxford, there was Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, flanked by such other Oxford luminaries as Mr Kingsley Amis, Mrs Gandhi (pronounced by Lord Jenkins as ‘in-deera-gan-dee’) and ‘the greatest English novelist of our century’; the author of Brideshead Revisited. Oxford deserves your money, Oxford gave you, among others, Benazir Bhutto – so the logic of the appeal seemed to go. How many of these celebrants ever thought of the poor girl when she was in solitary confinement, being ruffled up by the hirelings of ‘General Zulu’ (Sara Suleri’s delightful invention), and was eventually made to wait, as it were, on the hanging of her own father?
I now see her on the cover of your issue of 30 March. As ever with this remarkably photogenic prime minister, the image is fetching. Not so, alas, your attempt, on the verso of your recto, to decipher the photograph for us. Your note claims: ‘Pakistan’s new leader Benazir Bhutto, flanked, in the days before she came to power, by an iconic poster of her father which calls for his release from prison.’ ‘Flanked’ indeed she is, but by something a great deal less dramatic than a plea for her father’s release. The Urdu writing on the poster translates into English thus: ‘Nadim Aslam, Candidate, Provincial Assembly, Lahore 6; on behalf of Khawja Saeed’. It’s an election poster.
Benazir Bhutto’s book, Daughter of the East, to be published in North America under a different title, belongs to a perfectly legitimate, American genre, sometimes called ‘election biography, autobiography’. Few of these are written by their avowed authors. Daughter of the East was actually written by the lady who did a similar biography for Geraldine Ferraro. For the better part of two years, the writer (the one who penned it) ‘worked with’, as the expression goes, the ‘author’ (the one whose authority the book carries). A nice configuration here for your literary theorists. Close to 80 per cent of what Daughter of the East contains comes from the horse’s mouth and is factually accurate. For the drama of the narrative, however, the credit or the blame (as your heartless reviewer would have it) must perhaps go to the unnamed writer.
Comparisons are always odious, yet it is with a comparison your reviewer opens his account of the two books under review. Rajiv and Benazir ‘shared an Oxbridge past’. Unless an Oxbridge affiliation has come to mean an occasional connection with either of the universities, neither young Mr Rajiv Gandhi nor his distinguished mother had much to do with the ancient universities that must now claim them as their own.
Maqbool Aziz
McMaster University, Ontario
