YOU FIND Murtaza Bhutto nowadays through a Dubai-based business consultancy firm owned bya Pakistani woman, Husna Sheikh, and her daughter and chief executive, Shahmeen - a woman in her mid-thirties, who is happy for the world to believe that her father was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the late prime minister of Pakistan. The Sheikhs, mother and daughter, are just one more complication in the story of the Bhutto legacy. Husna Sheikh was, for more than 15 years, Zulfakir Ali Bhutto's mistress, according to an account of their relationship she gave the American historian Stanley Wolpert, whose biography of Bhutto was published this year. From the time Bhutto took power in December 1971 until the coup in 1977, when she fled to London, Husna Sheikh ran a virtual kitchen cabinet within the Pakistan government. Salman Taseer, a leading People's Party politician in Punjab province and supporter of Benazir, said Husna Sheikh was the Madame de Pompadour of Pakistan.
Husna Sheikh and Mr Bhutto met in 1961 in Dhaka, capital of what was then East Pakistan, when Mr Bhutto was 34. Mr Wolpert's account of their relationship reads like Barbara Cartland out of Bertrand Russell. A ravishing beauty even now, according to Pakistanis who have shared her company, it was not simply her physical charms that hypnotised him then. She told Wolpert she was the first woman the philandering politician had ever loved who could think, talk and understand power politics as he did. Even as she sated Bhutto, Wolpert said, she stimulated his mind, body and spirit, 'rousing him to peaks of excitement he had never known'. We are told how she pandered to his large ego and discussed politics and world affairs after 'the flames of passion had died down'. 'For Zulfi's (Mr Bhutto's) proud, vain, arrogant, insecure, clever, scheming, easily bored, spoiled psyche nothing was as comforting as a beautiful woman who devoted herself fully to his needs, desires, and dreams, rousing his hopes and calming his darkest fears . . .'
Husna Sheikh then claimed she eventually married Bhutto to become his third wife. (His first marriage was an arranged marriage with a cousin when he was a teenager. His second was to Nusrat.) However, no evidence of a third has been forthcoming, either when the army raided Mr Bhutto's residences and took away his private papers at the time of the coup, or from Husna Sheikh herself. Not surprisingly, she is hated by Murtaza's mother and sisters. Husna remains in touch with Murtaza, and, like so many disenchanted with Benazir, sees an opportunity to regain some of her old control through her old lover's son. For Benazir the presence of Husna Sheikh is doubly offensive. Husna was close in business and politics to Jam Sadiq Ali, the chief minister of Sind province from 1990 until his death last year. Jam Sadiq was given the post by president Ghulam Ishaq Khan, the man who sacked Benazir and her government 20 months after she was elected for the first time in 1988. His allotted task was to crush Benazir and the PPP in Sind. He brought extortion and kidnapping charges against her husband, Asif Zadari, which kept him in jail without trial for two years (but didn't stop him giving Benazir a daughter). "UNQUOTE"
"QUOTE"
Q: It is said that Madame tried to drive a wedge between you and Yahya Khan?
A: I don’t want to say anything on this issue. If Rani catered to Agha Jani’s every whim, there is no question that she was royally compensated. During Yahya Khan’s time, General Rani prospered way beyond her wildest expectations. There are endless reports of how she would use her ’special relationship’ with Yahya to fill her coffers. She would ask for a plot of land or a house in return for a favour and those desperate for a job or promotion would readily fulfill her demands. During this time, politicians were also eager to win her approval and among the many who carried her favour where Mustafa Khar and Z. A. Bhutto.
General Rani describes her relationship with these two men: “Both Mustafa Khar and Z. A. Bhutto would come and sit at my house for hours on end, begging me to introduce them to the General. Mustafa Khar was particularly fond of listening to the poems I used to write. In fact if you compare Yahya Khan to these two, I would say that I was closer to Bhutto and Khar and arranged more parties for them than I did for Agha Jani.” It was a closeness that was not to endure. As soon as Bhutto came to power, General Rani was put under house arrest and her telephone connection was cancelled. Her crime in the words of an eminent lawyer was that, “she knew too much.” Thus began General Rani’s downfall. Once the issue of house arrest was resolved (courtesy S. M. Zafar) and her subsequent jail terms ended (the most recent for drug-trafficking), General Rani never really reverted to her former glory. By now the money that had so freely flowed into her hands had also freely flowed out. Financially wrecked, socially ostracised, dependent only on the kindness of a few whose affections for her have endured, General Rani lives largely in the past – in the memory of days of wine and roses. R
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