Remembering Benazir Bhutto
Benazir Bhutto. Sinead Lynch AFP
Two recent books shed new light on the Bhutto family, highlighting the former prime minister’s life against the backdrop of Pakistan’s history
In
The Fragrance of Tears: My Friendship with Benazir Bhutto (2021), British journalist Victoria Schofield has written a very personal, and insightful, book on the former prime minister. “It is above all the story of a friendship between two women of different cultures, which began in the sociable environment of Oxford University but which, when transported into the real world, was marked by tragedy,” she says of the text.
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For the Bhutto dynasty, campaign publicity posters double up as family photos
Political dynasties are ubiquitous in democratic countries, even though many countries democratised to move away from hereditary rule. The Philippines, India, Brazil, Japan and Canada come to mind, and let us not forget the United States of America, which has produced political dynasties in such abundance that Stephen Hess at the Brookings Institution, wrote an op-ed titled ‘Political Dynasties: An American Tradition’. The Adams, the Tafts, the Bushes, the Kennedys, the Clintons, the Browns, and the Cuomos the list is never-ending.
British journalist and former BBC correspondent Owen Bennett-Jones is a regular contributor to Dawn and has just come out with The Bhutto Dynasty: The Struggle for Power in Pakistan. This is an examination of political dynasticism in the Pakistani tradition.