Taimur Rehman January 18, 1999

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href="/tag/Pakistan">Pakistan and the AGHS fame) is the leading human rights activist of
Pakistan and has won great international recognition for her good
work. She invited my parents and myself to come and meet
Benazir. Well, I must admit I was very excited by the idea.

At first I found her very attractive and I found her confidence to be very
solid. She engaged openly in discussion. Several times people would
even cut her off and argue something else but she didn't mind. But she
did not let them do it often. Usually she asserted herself very
strongly and to her credit everyone else shut up quite quickly. Her
Urdu was still quite poor and she preferred to speak in English. She
took a keen interest in the young people present (there were three of
us, two other boys and myself). Several times she stopped to ask our
opinions. Basically, as far as her personal appearance and all is
concerned, she was a charmer.

Now about her politics. As smooth and graceful as she was personally,
she was terse, simplistic and rough politically. I was shocked to hear
how free-market oriented she was. In fact how foreign capital she
was. Or maybe I should say how pro-imperialist capital she was. Milton
Freedman would have loved to be with her. A person tried to make the
argument that some limitations on the market should be placed. He
said, "Even in America one finds anti-trust laws." But BB (Benazir
Bhutto) wanted none of that. She said "Why should there be any
limitations on the number of factories one owns or the amount of land
one owns? That is restricting freedom." So obviously she doesn't
really care about the freedom of those who have to work on those
fields for starvation wages, or in the factories for subsistence
wages. It was quite dissappointing for me to hear that. I thought that
there were still some socialist tendencies left in the PPP, but I was
wrong. It's more capitalist than the Republican party in the US. Plus,
her examples were really poor and her understanding of world politics
overly simplistic. According to her there are only two models of
development "The closed model (Iran, Syria, and Libya) and the open
model (Indonesia and Malaysia)". Furthermore her belief is that the
closed models have failed and the open models are successful. (All of
East Asia is in a crisis as everyone knows!).

Anyway, I found her politics very revolting and because of that her
charisma, which was beginning to wear thin on me, completely vanished.
But I came away from the meeting feeling very happy because I had learnt
something.

I also saw how fake and shallow the intellegensia of Lahore really
is. Everyone was trying to impress her with arguments that sounded
clever and smart but were nonsensical in reality. They were just
talking for the sake of sounding smart. It was quite pathetic. People
were trying to butter her up but in my eyes they were just disgracing
themselves.