Remembering Benazir Bhutto

I have been having a hard time with all the love Benazir Bhutto has been getting lately, particularly by the Western media and feminist groups. I find it creepy how, in death, the media has picked and chosen and carefully created a brand new caricature of Bhutto, one that I simply do not recognise. She was an ineffective leader, she was corrupt, she was most certainly not a feminist and definitely not a patriot! She belonged to a political dynasty like the Gandhis in India - bloodline has no place in democracies! Bloodlines are for monarchies!

Her death was tragic, no doubt, and left a bad taste in my mouth for days. It left me feeling depressed and largely pessimistic about the future of Pakistan as she was the only strong and viable voice of opposition, and the country needed opposition more than anything. However, she certainly was not going to be the great new hope for democratic reform, as is now widely assumed.

CNN sensationalism has got to stop, the news is akin to glorified reality shows where political leaders and foreign correspondents alike are elevated to celebrity status, allowing for an international nitpick session on whether it was a bullet or a shard.

But really, the most far-fetched for me is the notion that she somehow advanced the status of Muslim women. Sure, seeing a woman in charge of a whole nation state is inspiring, but what has changed for Pakistani women in the last couples of decades as a direct result of any of her interventions? I do not find that Bhutto is in any way an inspiring feminist leader, a woman in power should not lead to the automatic assumption that she is a feminist and has done great things for women.

Now, read the article linked for a more informed perspective [full text here] Choice quote below:

"I think Western feminists want to view Bhutto and the other women leaders as pioneers," said Muneeza Rashed, 38-year-old woman in Lahore.

"But they're not. They're more like throwbacks to the men who came before them. They practice the same kind of old-boy politics. Helping women is secondary for them," she said.

Under Bhutto, most Pakistani women still lived the impoverished, home-bound lives they had lived before. Girls still went uneducated while their brothers were sent off to school. And women who were raped still found themselves contending with laws that discriminated against the victims of sex crimes — laws that would only be changed years later by President Pervez Musharraf, who came to power in a 1999 military coup.

"In many ways women benefited very little under her," said Unaiza Malik, 64, who was born in Pakistan and now works with the Muslim Women's Society in London.