Fatima Bhutto
Viking
Rs 699
Pp 480
ISBN: 9780670082803
Hardback
Blurb
In September 1996 a fourteen-year-old Fatima Bhutto hid in a windowless dressing room shielding her baby brother while shots rang out in the streets outside the family home in Karachi. This was the evening that her father, Murtaza, was murdered along with six of his associates.
In December 2007 Benazir Bhutto, Fatima’s aunt, and the woman she had publicly accused of ordering her father’s murder, was assassinated in Rawalpindi. It was the latest in a long line of tragedies for one of the world’s best known political dynasties.
Songs of Blood and Sword tells the story of the Bhuttos, a family of rich feudal landlords who became powerbrokers in the newly created state of Pakistan; the epic tale of four generations of a family and the political violence that would destroy them. It is the history of a family and nation riven by murder, corruption, conspiracy and division, written by one who has lived it, in the heart of the storm,
The history of this extraordinary family mirrors the tumultuous events of Pakistan itself, and the quest to find the truth behind her father’s murder has led Fatima to the heart of her country’s volatile political establishment. Finally Songs of Blood and Sword is about a daughter’s love for her father and her search to uncover, and to understand, the truth of his life and death.
Reviews
Bloodline Indian Express
Among the few common features shared by South Asian nations are dynastic power and political violence. The friction between the two is marked by frequent political assassinations in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. And nowhere has the intersection been bloodier than in what Pakistan’s Bhuttos had to bear. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto founded the political dynasty and gave it a powerful populist platform, the Pakistan People’s Party. More than three decades after his assassination, the PPP remains the only mass party with a following in all the provinces of Pakistan.
After he took charge as prime minister following the loss of Bangladesh in 1971, Bhutto helped promulgate a democratic constitution for Pakistan and founded its nuclear weapons programme. As ambition got the better of him, Bhutto was ousted in a coup, incarcerated and hanged by General Zia ul Haq in 1979. That was only the beginning of the Bhutto story, which is so much part of Pakistan’s larger tragedy.
In the name of the father Mint
Of all the stories available to human beings, none is as instantly fascinating as that of a powerful family riven down the middle, feuding in public view and throwing the entire world out of shape with its might. This storyline is central to our epics, and is often reprised by contemporary events, especially in feudal societies. In such cases, the testimony of any one participant inevitably turns the story into one of good versus evil—the stakes are too high for it to be anything else, but the thrill of receiving the inside story more than compensates for the lack of detachment in perspective.
Just such a story—long-awaited since the first metaphorical gunshots were fired in recent years—is served up by Songs of Blood and Sword, 28-year-old Fatima Bhutto’s angry and sometimes incoherent retelling of the macabre lives and internecine warrings of the first family of Pakistani politics, the Bhuttos of Sindh.
Fatima Bhutto bares her famous, jinxed family Financial Express
In the September of 1996, the day her father turned 42, Fatima Bhutto said to him: “Write a book about your life, Papa. It would be so interesting.” He laughed and then said quietly, “You’ll do it for me.” His eyes were sad. A growing nervousness had been rumbling inside her for days. Two days later, Mir Murtaza Bhutto was dead. On the 12th anniversary of Murtaza’s death, Asif Zardari was sworn in as President of Pakistan. He had been acquitted of Murtaza’s murder in the build-up to the presidency.
Daughter of dynasty TOI Crest
Though supposed to be a daughter's memories of her father, the book is actually the tragedy-filled story of the Bhuttos, "the ill-starred dynasty" that has dominated the political scene in Pakistan for four decades. Like a good investigative journalist, Fatima has put together an interesting, gripping story, though there are very few new revelations in the book. Almost everything, including Zardari's "role" in Murtaza's death, has been reported and written about earlier.
In fact, the book is an attack on Zardari whom Fatima blames for everything wrong with Pakistan today. And that's the problem with the book. Fatima fails to see anything wrong with the Bhuttos. They are presented as martyrs who died for Pakistan. The fact that all of them died in either pursuit of power or during internal power struggles has been ignored by the writer. With their feudal, arrogant attitude, the Bhuttos have been part of the problem and not the solution. But the writer fails to address this issue.
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