The appointment of Benazir Bhutto’s son

and husband to the leadership of

the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP)

is a stark reminder of the absurdity

of Pakistan’s condition

How can democracy thrive while

feudalism remains so dominant in society?

Mumtaz Bhutto, head of the Bhutto tribe in Pakistan's Sindh province and former rival of Benazir Bhutto, receiving visitors at the family ancestral home at Mirpur Bhutto, six miles from Benazir Bhutto's home in Naudero.

Pakistan’s feudals are extremely westernized and secular,

with their overseas education, ready access to money

and access to elite international circles

Oxford-educated Benazir herself spoke English

much better than either Urdu or the Sindhi

of her feudal subjects in and around

the grand family estate in Larkana

Ordinary Pakistanis remember the arrogance

she projected when in power, more queen than prime minister,

a blood-line successor to her deposed

and executed father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto

The Bhutto Clan Falls Apart [Original]

Mumtaz Bhutto sat back on the cool marble veranda of his sprawling country mansion in rural Sindh province.

A guard brandishing a Kalashnikov stood behind him. A servant fanned the chocolate cake on the table to keep the flies at bay. He was dismayed.

The rise of Asif Zardari, Benazir Bhutto's husband, to the leadership of the Pakistan People's party, was nothing less than a disaster, said Mumtaz, the sprightly 74-year-old head of the Bhutto clan.

"Zardari is an illiterate man. He has no political background or experience. He will not be able to conduct himself as the same level as Benazir," he said with barely concealed disdain. "Most unfortunate."

Family feuds are never pretty but for the Bhuttos, Pakistan's dominant political dynasty, they are played out with the same intensity that characterises the rest of the family's Greek tragedy-style history.

As Pakistan's opposition has fractured, so Bhutto's family has been rent asunder by discord. There are several rival wings, mostly defined in terms of support or opposition to Benazir. Now that she is dead, though, that may be about to change.

Mumtaz Bhutto fell out with Benazir more than 15 years ago. He said she had led the PPP astray; she said he was jealous of her power.

His house is just six miles from Benazir's Naudero home, but the last time they met was in 1995. "It was a lunch in Islamabad. We didn't agree on anything," he recalled.

Mumtaz retreated to start his own political party from his elegant home amid the salt-encrusted fields. But it won little support, so he concentrated on his duties as an old-style feudal lord. Critics call him a relic of another age.

Peasants surround his magnificent house with its fleet of four-wheel-drive vehicles and ornate private mosque.

Two sleek hunting dogs, recently imported from Britain, roam the garden where servants trim the grass with a donkey-drawn mower. A domineering Raj-era portrait in the hall shows his grandfather brandishing a curved sword and a Purdey gun.

By Mumtaz's estimates, his land is worth £12m and he makes approximately £23 per acre from his landholdings, which he estimates at about 15,000 acres.

Summers are spent in London, where he rents flats in Mayfair or Knightsbridge, or on Italy's Amalfi coast. "Absolutely heaven," he said. "But this year we went to Portofino - the Hotel Splendido."

Otherwise he sits on the veranda of his home, solving the problems of his peasant tenants. Up to 100 supplicants stream in every day, bringing a variety of grievances to be solved.

"There is total lawlessness here. Someone gets shot, someone is murdered, marriage disputes, wife eloping - I have to find a solution," he said.

But the one dispute he could never solve was the one with Benazir, whose tomb he has just visited.

Now he is angry that control of the PPP - considered synonymous with the Bhutto family - has passed to her son Bilawal, and he has dared to take to the Bhutto name.

"He is a Zardari, you can't just change it like that," he said. The mantle should have passed to a Bhutto, he said, because "it came into existence and survived on the name and sweat and blood of the Bhutto family."

Asif Zardari, he said, "made no sacrifices for the party".

"He has become a billionaire with bank balances and studs and ranches all over the world. That should have been enough for him." Instead, he said, the title should have passed to the "real" Bhuttos.

In life Benazir was a great rival to her sister-in-law, Ghinwa Bhutto, the widow of Benazir's brother, Murtaza, who was gunned down on a Karachi street in 1996 while she was prime minister.

Ghinwa comes from northern Lebanon and met her husband during his exile in Syria, where she worked as a ballet teacher. Benazir disparaged her as the "Lebanese bellydancer". Ghinwa blamed Benazir for the death of her husband.

"I place the moral responsibility on Benazir. If she did not kill him, certainly his death was very convenient for her party of cronies," Ghinwa told the Guardian last October.

Benazir denied the accusation, saying the shooting had been engineered by the country's intelligence agencies to undermine her rule and divided her clan. "Kill a Bhutto to get a Bhutto," she would tell friends.

But the conflict passed to the next generation through Fatima, Murtaza's 25-year-old daughter and newspaper columnist.

Clever and impassioned, Fatima was considered a possible heir to the Bhutto political dynasty. But she has not entered politics and her mother's party, a splinter from Bhutto's PPP - lacks even one seat in the provincial assembly.

Until recently, they were campaigning for a seat in Larkana, the heartland of Bhutto power.

Fatima had tried to avoid living in the shadow of her more famous aunt.

"The fact that she's my aunt is just a footnote," she said in October. "Benazir always gives these interviews saying that we are brainwashed and mummy's a bellydancer. But I don't engage in that. We don't respond to her petty diatribes and attacks."

After Benazir returned to Pakistan, surviving a suicide bombing, Fatima issued scathing criticism of her aunt, whom she referred to as "Mrs Zardari".

Benazir had recklessly exposed hundreds of people for the sake of her "personal theatre", she charged. "She insisted on this grand show, she bears a responsibility for these deaths and these injuries."

But this week, all that changed. Traumatised by her aunt's killing, Fatima dropped the fiery rhetoric for wistful memories. "Honestly, I am at a loss," she wrote in a heartfelt column in The News, a Pakistani daily, this week. "I am compounded in a state of shock."

Bhutto's death reminded her of her own ghosts, she said. "I have yet to bury a family member who has died a natural death," she said, recalling her father, who was shot, her uncle Shahnawaz who was poisoned, and her aunt Benazir, assassinated.

"This isn't about me, it's about those whom we have lost," she wrote.

"It's about the graveyard ... that is just too full".

Pakistan & Feudalism

The appointment of Benazir Bhutto’s son and husband to the leadership of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) in the aftermath of her assassination may seem unexceptional given the dynastic tendencies of most south Asian democracies.

But in Pakistan’s case, hereditary succession does more than confirm that name recognition is often more valuable than either personality or policy in a family incumbent.

It is also a stark reminder of two other troubling aspects of Pakistan’s condition. First, is the link between democracy and feudal society, of which the Bhuttos – among others ‑ have long been a part.

Second, is the tendency for elected governments, including those of Bhutto and former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, to be significantly more corrupt than their military counterparts, a concern given added weight now by the role of Bhutto’s husband, Asif Ali Zardari, as the effective leader of the PPP, with their son as titular head.

Pakistan’s feudals are also extremely westernized and secular, with their overseas education, ready access to money and access to elite international circles. Oxford-educated Benazir herself spoke English much better than either Urdu or the Sindhi of her feudal subjects in and around the grand family estate in Larkana.

While some remember her as an open-minded woman, at home either in Oxford rooms or shopping at Harrods, others remember the arrogance she projected when in power, more queen than prime minister, a blood-line successor to her deposed and executed father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was himself born to a prominent politician whose writ extended back to British colonial times.

The secularism and internationalism of the Bhuttos was always real enough. Benazir’s grandfather married a Hindu who converted only on marriage and, though a Muslim, played an important role at the time of partition in enabling one of the Muslim-ruled princely states in what is now Gujarat to accede to the majority’s wishes and join India.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s second wife and the mother of all his children was Iranian.

The secularism adds to the Bhutto appeal in the west, and the feudalism helps sustain the vote base.

But neither characteristic is much help in addressing Pakistan’s many divisions, whether between the Punjab and Sindh, between religious zealots and the pious but un-fanatic majority.

Or in dealing with Baluchi separatism or the Pushtu-speaking, Taliban-supporting tribes of the tribal areas and the North West Frontier Province.

It is the inability of Pakistan’s democratic governments in general to focus on the multifarious problems rather than money-making and politicking that have from time to time led to military interventions that may be welcomed for a time but engender their own sets of problems.

Nor have the Bhuttos always been friends of democracy. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto got his first ministerial job under the first military ruler, Ayub Khan, and made his name as Ayub’s firebrand foreign minister before quitting to form the PPP.

Projected into power in the wake of the loss of East Pakistan, Zulfikar Bhutto’s agenda was a mix of nationalism and a populist socialism that saw the nationalization – with predictably negative effects ‑ of much of Pakistan’s industry and commerce while making token efforts to end the feudal land-owning system.

But the elder Bhutto was at least a charismatic leader until he was ousted by General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq and executed in 1979 on blatantly political conspiracy to commit murder charges.

His daughter’s two terms as prime minister were marked by a distinct lack of achievement and many allegations of corruption. But she also proved tough and courageous in exile and always fought to regain what she saw as her rightful position.

It is hard to see her husband inheriting much of his wife’s positive legacy. First, there are the corruption allegations – which have surfaced in Swiss and English courts, not just in Pakistan.

Benazir and Zardari were convicted in absentia in a Swiss court of accepting bribes from two Swiss companies.

They were given prison sentences and ordered to return US$11 million to the Pakistan government. A huge estate in England, whose ownership by Zardari was initially denied, is also subject to court proceedings.

Perhaps as important there is the shadow of Murtaza, Benazir’s brother, who was murdered outside his house in 1996.

Murtaza had been at odds with Benazir, the prime minister, both over policies and the behavior of Zardari, who was a minister in her government. An inquiry into Murtaza’s death concluded that it had been an extra-judicial killing conducted by the police on orders from higher up.

The identity of the higher authority was never established, but Murtaza’s daughter Fatima accused Zardari of complicity.