Aboard the Democracy Train Read Online Free PDF Page B

suspected – it lifted my spirits to think that a modern, educated woman was ready to lead a nation in which women were largely poor, pregnant and powerless.
    Moreover, as a woman from a cultured background, Benazir had a gentility that was missing from the seasoned male players who dominated Pakistan’s politics. If I had any doubts about her regal airs, these were quieted by thoughts that the nation neededa woman with the arrogance of the feudal class to cut through the entrenched power of the military and the bureaucracy.
    Figure 2 Benazir Bhutto in her ancestral home town of Larkana, Sindh (Photograph courtesy of Dr Shafqat Soomro).

The Democracy Train Takes Off
    The mid-air explosion of the C-130 plane which killed Gen. Zia ul Haq and the top military brass in Pakistan was a turning point in my life. It was also the start of a new chapter in the lives of millions of Pakistanis. The military went ahead with its scheduled plan to hold elections, albeit without the old dictator.
    For Benazir Bhutto – whose enormous political rallies had become the biggest challenge to Gen. Zia – the moment had arrived.
    Evidently, for my editor, it was also a time to make some changes. Like Benazir, I was a young woman newly returned from the West and determined to see a better future for my nation. Sensing my enthusiasm for a woman prime minister, the editor of my newspaper bypassed senior male reporters and nominated me, the only female reporter at
Dawn,
to cover Benazir Bhutto.
    In October 1988, I became one of four journalists to ride for a day with Benazir and her PPP entourage aboard the “Democracy Train.” It was the start of her party’s campaign in interior Sindh to mobilize millions of voters for the national elections announced after Gen. Zia’s death. Just one day on the train was enough to suffuse my senses with the enormity of the welcome Benazir received from the dispossessed people of the province.
    As we traveled through the dry, hot desert terrain of Sindh – which spreads north of Karachi to India’s border – I got a bird’s eye view of a region in which nothing has moved for centuries.
    The British colonial explorers, who set foot in Sindh in 1843, described the Sindhi peasantry as the “wretched of the earth.” The twenty-first century has not brought them relief. Today, peasants still live in mud houses in dry, dusty wastelands, without electricity, clean drinking water or roads. They tend the farm lands of big feudal lords for meager wages and live with archaic social customs and customary laws that degrade women.
    As the train draped in red, black and green PPP flags sped through the Sindh desert, I peeked out of the window to see barefoot peasants and children run alongside the tracks.
    They mobbed the platforms. Young men and boys fought over each other’s heads to catch a glimpse of Benazir’s tall silhouette. They had heard that she had come back to fulfill her father’s mission of “
Roti, Kapra aur Makaan
” (Food, Clothing and Shelter) for the millions of landless poor.
    My male colleagues, all upcoming journalists – Zafar Abbas, Abbas Nasir and Ibrahim Sajid – and I traveled in a glass compartment, especially reserved for the press. We were ambitious and looked for scoops on this turning point in Pakistan’s history.Armed with typewriters and tape-recorders, we were poised to tell the world how Pakistan’s first woman candidate for prime minister was received by the masses.
    At the platform stops, the Sindhi villagers greeted Benazir Bhutto with unadulterated joy. Welcoming villagers beat large drums strapped across their shoulders to frenzy and spun like
dervishes
on the railway platform. They chanted “
Marvi, Malir Ji
–
Benazir, Benazir
,” likening Benazir’s image to that of a beloved Sindhi heroine whose love for her people is painted in traditional folklore by the Sindhi mystic poet, Shah Latif Bhitai.
    The atmosphere rang with joy as PPP activists from Karachi got out