Fatima Bhutto
‘Pakistan will welcome the Duke and Duchess with open arms’
The name Bhutto is synonymous with a bygone age, when Western elites and Eastern dynasties mingled in the same circles. At Oxford, Benazir Bhutto had been friends with Theresa May. A chance meeting in 1989 in the royal box at Wimbledon between the Princess of Wales and Benazir, who was then Pakistan’s prime minister, led to an invitation – and Diana would make her first solo trip to Pakistan two years after that. Today, I am meeting Benazir’s niece, Fatima. It is still a few weeks away from the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s arrival in Islamabad for their five-day tour, which began on Monday, but with a population of 1.2 million people of Pakistani descent – including the Chancellor, Sajid Javid, and London mayor Sadiq Khan – Britain’s ties with its former colony remain close.
While the Foreign Office warns Britons not to travel to some areas of the country, the royal couple will be protected by a massive security operation involving more than 1,000 police. Whatever threat militants may pose, Fatima assures me they will be welcomed by the masses. “Pakistani people are among the warmest in the world,” she says, “and have always received visitors with kindness and hospitality, wherever they come from and whoever they are.”
We meet at her publisher’s office in London ahead of her latest book being published – New Kings of the World. Her English has the porcelain colonial accent typical of South Asia’s traditional ruling class, but with the slight American lilt common among the younger generations, who are international by birth and upbringing. Born in Kabul to an Afghan mother – her parents divorced when she was three – Bhutto was raised, from the age of seven, mostly among Pakistan’s ruling class in her father’s ancestral compound in Karachi’s Clifton area.
A multicultural polyglot, she grew up in several countries. After attending the exclusive Karachi American School, Fatima went on to gain a degree from Barnard, the elite women’s college in New York, after which she took South Asian Studies at the London School of Oriental and African Studies.
Her social network has reflected her lifestyle. While she has never met the Cambridges, she is a friend of Jemima Goldsmith, ex-wife of Imran Khan, the current Pakistan prime minister, and was also rumoured to have bewitched George Clooney before he finally found love with Amal. She is exactly the sort of “citizen of the world” that Mrs May scoffed is a “citizen of nowhere”.
How does that feel? “When I was younger, it caused me a lot of grief,” she admits, “this idea of not belonging anywhere. But I find it liberating now.”
However, the one thing she cannot escape is her name and its bloodsoaked legacy. Fatima was 14 years old when her father, Murtaza Bhutto, was gunned down in what many, including Fatima, believe was an assassination ordered by his older sister Benazir, or someone in her government.
Her father had been a loud critic of Pakistan’s government, then led by Benazir, and particularly of her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, accusing him of corruption. He was 42 when he died. Zardari was indicted for the murder, but later cleared, while Benazir was herself assassinated in 2007; the last victim, so far, in a tumultuous Pakistani family drama that began with the hanging of the murdered siblings’ father, Zulfikar – himself a prime minister, ousted in a coup – in 1979.
I comment that, the scale of loss in her family is extraordinary.
“It is,” Fatima concedes. “I’m 37 now, but every September 20th [the anniversary of her father’s death] is like the first September 20. It doesn’t matter where I am or how much older I am, I feel incredible pain on that day.
“It was my father who looked after me. He took me to school, read to me at night, took me for walks, came to talk to my teachers. He was the kindest and most supportive father…”
Her sense of betrayal remains raw. “Legally and morally, my aunt has a responsibility in the murder of her brother. I was and am heartbroken by that, I didn’t just lose my father with his death – I lost my entire family. When Benazir herself was killed, I grieved for her, too. I grieved for the aunt whom I loved so fiercely as a child. I grieved for the fact that this is a family that never loses anyone naturally.”
Composed and eloquent, Fatima’s voice hums with the firm assurance of one born into one of the most powerful families in Pakistan. The risks with that haven’t fully disappeared. A highprofile supporter of women’s rights and minorities in Pakistan and bold critic of Mr Khan (she describes his politics as “one of opportunism and obeisance” to both the Islamists and the generals), does she worry that she will share her father’s fate?
“No. What has to happen, happens. You can’t stop what will be. When you speak about the powerful, you put yourself at certain risks… In Pakistan, I’m not able to just walk around on the streets as I wish. I have to be careful and I do have security, but at the same time I know that it doesn’t matter if you have security. If they want to hurt you, they will.”
Despite having 2.5 million Twitter followers and having written two novels and a memoir, Bhutto reveals nothing of her personal life. I sense that, while intensely involved with the outside world, her deeper self is held back.
Today, she would prefer to focus on her literary achievements, particularly her latest book, which is an intimate journey through the new internet-enabled global pop culture. In it, Bhutto investigates the housewives in Peru addicted to Turkish television sagas, the worldwide appeal of Hindi movies and the Gen-z craze for Korean boy bands, painting a convincing picture of a rapidly changing, cosmopolitan planet in which Hollywood and the West are being usurped by other narratives.
What does she make of the West’s position in the world, especially in the era of Trump and Brexit?
“It’s dangerous when a country looks so much to its past,” she replies. “It’s because it can’t see a future. It’s going to be an interesting few years, but I don’t think there’s going to be any great Hollywood ending… It’s the end of the Western century.”
But, she concedes, South Asia has its own tensions. In August, the Indian government revoked the semi-autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir – long claimed by Pakistan – outraging the Pakistani government. “It’s very dangerous,” says Bhutto of the situation. “It has the ability to destabilise the whole region, not just the border but well beyond.”
Her father, I suspect, remains her constant presence in a world which, for many, seems increasingly in turmoil. “I learnt to engage in a sort of magical thinking,” she confirms, “that if I’m here, he’s here. That might be absurd, except that it’s no more absurd than death, no more absurd than life… No more absurd than loss.”
It is a sentiment, which, of course, could be shared this week by the Duke of Cambridge as he retraces his late mother’s steps in a country that brought her as much pleasure as it did pain.
‘I have grieved for the fact that mine is a family which never loses anyone naturally’