If anyone personified the feminist debate in Pakistan, it was Benazir Bhutto. Personally she challenged tradition, patriarchal norms and defied cultural boundaries. Politically her identity remained confined within the limits of male-defined politics, marital norms and religious faith. She kept her maiden name but also kept the dupatta. These contradictions made her simultaneously the repository of hope and target of criticism on the womanÕs question. Men will argue that she was assassinated for her politics but the feminist perspective will necessarily see her death as a comment on the personal struggle of women in politics and in public service.
Few politically conscious women around the world will deny the importance of women in leadership roles, however limited their scope or disappointing their policies. While Bhutto did not personally emerge from a class-based or feminist consciousness, she represented the politics of liberal democracy and womenÕs rights in principle. To this end, her time in office made the most important contribution on the basis of her iconoclastic symbol as a woman prime minister and the stands she took as a woman and the subsequent backlash as a result.
It can be argued that as prime minister Bhutto would take the most radical stands on womenÕs liberal issues but not on feminist ones. Hence, the issue of womenÕs rights took ascendancy symbolically and informed the political discourse, especially during her second time in office. However, structurally there is little to attribute to her political record that meaningfully challenged masculinity, the military or organised religion. Therefore, more than any other government, at grass-roots levels, her government introduced women-specific programmes such as Lady Health Visitors and womenÕs credit schemes, highlighting the issue of violence against women, the signing of CEDAW and a high-profile role in international arenas on womenÕs issues. At the same time, BhuttoÕs government could not demonstrate enough strength to remove the Hudood Ordinances, the military from politics and increase womenÕs participation in the political process Ð all crucial demands from the womenÕs movement.
In many ways Bhutto transcended the personal-political divide. Every personal action — from maintaining her maiden name, the choice of covering her head with a dupatta, the clothes she wore, the man she married, the children she bore, male hands she shook — was considered political and towards garnering political advantage. Feminists have been arguing the relevance of personal choices determining and being determined by the political and never managed to successfully demonstrate this as Bhutto did. She also managed to highlight the impossible standards expected of women in their domestic roles as well as public ones, by men and women — particularly by women. Precisely because she was symbolic of so much hope and possibility, the support and disappointment was equally vehement.
Along the years, feminist expectations may have been thwarted by the limitations demonstrated by Bhutto. This was particularly true with reference to the last round of political decisions made by her, including negotiations with a state that exemplifies every political formulation that women activists have historically fought against. It was equally problematic to reconcile the feminist principle of non-hierarchical power structures, with her feudal background, her position as chairperson for life and when other non-democratic arrangements dominated her partyÕs politics.
Unfortunately, the division between women’s issues and the feminist approach to politics is such that ÔempowermentÕ of women can take place outside of the democratic framework. We have seen this under previous dictators in Pakistan. This is also why under the Musharraf regime women can argue that we have gained unprecedented rights, including ones BhuttoÕs government could not deliver. The difference is, however, that if these rights emerge out of a well-intentioned, rights-based discourse rather than a personal consciousness and democratic debate, they remain unsustainable and meaningless.
What a democratic, constituency-entrenched leadership committed to womenÕs issues can offer instead, is this process of contention, challenge, failure, questioning and accountability beyond the rhetoric. Most of all, as a politician Bhutto was answerable as a woman — often unfairly, sometimes falsely but always with an expectation that makes politics feminised. Her personal stand on womenÕs issues still held that symbolic possibility for the womenÕs movement to intervene, pressurize and make spaces for rights.
The criticism against her politics is a valid part of a democratic process. To inject too much into her symbolic relevance is outside of the realm of pragmatic politics. In terms of a political contribution, Benazir did, however, give women the hope for political possibility. In that, she brought other strong, politicized women in to the political mainstream and caught their democratic imagination at the domestic levels, at the same time. The challenge remains of whether this can now be sustained as her legacy within her party and at the national level too.