FAMILY FEUD: Murtaza Bhutto

Bhutto vs Bhutto in Pakistan drama

When Benazir Bhutto does her Christmas shopping this year, it’s just possible she will forget to buy a present for her 25-year-old poetess niece, Fatima Bhutto, who has become more than a thorn in her aunt’s side.

What are we to make of the fact that sweet-voiced Fatima was given valuable air time on BBC World Service last week when she was introduced, with gleeful English understatement, as “Benazir Bhutto’s niece but not her fan” and allowed to spit venom against Pakistan’s next would-be Prime Minister? Does it reflect Britain’s wariness with Benazir and desire to persist with President Pervez Musharraf?

Among the political elite, bad blood between members of the same family, especially during an emergency, is nothing new. During the Indian emergency, Indira Gandhi was bad-mouthed by her aunt, Vijay Lakshmi Pandit and by the latter’s novelist daughter, Nayantara Sahgal.

However, the enmity between Fatima and Benazir runs deeper. In an article last week in the Los Angeles Times (“Aunt Benazir’s false promises”), Fatima implies that her aunt was somehow implicated in the murder of her father, Murtaza, who was Benazir’s younger brother.

Fatima points the finger at her aunt: “My father was a member of Parliament and a vocal critic of his sister’s politics. He was killed outside our home in 1996 in a carefully planned police assassination while she was Prime Minister. There were 70 to 100 policemen at the scene, all the streetlights had been shut off and the roads were cordoned off. Six men were killed with my father. They were shot at point-blank range, suffered multiple bullet wounds and were left to bleed on the streets.”

Fatima alleges: “To this day, her role in his assassination has never been adequately answered, although the tribunal convened after his death under the leadership of three respected judges concluded that it could not have taken place without approval from a ‘much higher’ political authority.”

More damagingly, in her BBC interview, Fatima, who can use the Bhutto name as well as Benazir, was withering about her aunt whom she accused of “working with the military regime of General Pervez Musharraf”.

“They are working in tandem, it seems to me,” declared Fatima. “She is a machine that thrives on victimisation. Politics has become for her a theatre. It has become a show of personal support for her, not of any real political substance. She has embarked on what seems to be a one-woman show.”

ON SCREEN: Meera Syal plays the role of Joyti De-Laurey in The Secretary Who Stole £4 Million

Joyti’s joy

Merciful is the British state for it has allowed Joyti De-Laurey, 38, a fresh start in life, working as an assistant with the Koestler Trust, which exhibits and sells works of art by prisoners.

In August, Joyti was released from prison, having served half the seven-year sentence she received in April, 2004, for stealing £4,303,259 when she was a secretary with Goldman Sachs, the merchant bank. In court, she was described as “the Picasso of con artists” while the judge called her “duplicitous, deceitful and thoroughly dishonest”.

Joyti and her equally crooked mother, Devi, who are of Indian origin from Mauritius, used the money to buy luxury villas, an Aston Martin car and Cartier jewellery. Their case inspired the BBC to make a docu-drama, The Secretary Who Stole £4 Million, with actress Meera Syal as Joyti.

The real Joyti, who gave new meaning to the expression, “charity begins at home”, says that handling money does not form part of her new responsibility at the prisoners’ charity.

“I don’t miss the glamour,” admits Joyti. “I am very sorry for what I did and the pain I caused but I have to move on.”

Her boss, Tim Robertson, director of the Koestler, who is very generous in the way Englishmen often are, says: “We are lucky to have someone with such excellent admin skills. She is a fantastic part of the team.”

Her previous bosses also thought she was a fantastic secretary.

Murder, Asian style

Sociologists would find the British Asian murder scene fertile territory. The latest noteworthy but horrific case has cropped up in Manchester Crown Court.

On trial is a Sikh woman, Harmohinder (“Mindy”) Kaur Sanghera, 23, who is accused of killing her love rival, Sana Ali, 17, a Muslim housewife, by stabbing her 42 times. At the time of her death on May 11 this year, Sana was 11 weeks pregnant.

It is alleged that Harmohinder, a Birmingham University dentistry student, had been having an affair for two years with Sana’s husband, Sair Ali, who had married his cousin in Pakistan in December last year after an engagement lasting eight years. The court heard that Harmohinder had attacked Sana in an act of “jealousy and desperation”.

Harmohinder denies murder and the trial continues. Crimes of passion can occur anywhere but the mix of cultures in Britain too often produces a deadly cauldron.

WANDERLUST: The jacket of Wasafiri

Traveller’s tale

The good news about Wasafiri, a small circulation but valuable British literary magazine which encourages writers of South Asian, African and Caribbean origin, is that it is going up from three to four issues a year from next February — and it will be available in India.

Wasafiri (“which means traveller in Swahili”) has been going since 1984 and is proud that it published Vikram Seth, Ben Okri and other writers before they became celebrities, Sharmilla (“my father was an ardent Sharmila Tagore fan”) Beezmohun, the magazine’s assistant editor, tells me.

“It’s available in India for 1,600 rupees a year — which I think is still too high,” she says.

She describes the lovely mix offered in Wasafiri’s 100-odd pages: “We usually have four academic pieces, two interviews, three or four short stories, articles on art, and poems. They are peer reviewed before publication as we want to maintain a certain quality. We want to be at the cutting edge.”

Next week Wasafiri is throwing a party at Foyle’s, the huge bookshop near Tottenham Court Road, which I shall try and gatecrash. Getting into it may be easier than into the magazine.

STAR TREK: Sir Gulam and Mohini Noon, co-writer of Rumi, (extreme left) and family

Jumping Jemima

Another sweeping generalisation: the one person emerging with credit from the Pakistan crisis seems to me and to many others to be Jemima Khan, who is leading the protest movement in the UK.

For example, at a party given last week by businessman Sir Gulam Noon and his wife, Mohini, for the visiting cast of the play, Rumi, several Indian women volunteered how Jemima had jumped in their estimation.

“She’s really brought the whole protest movement to life,” was a typical comment. “She could have but didn’t say, ‘I’m glad Imran’s been locked up — serves him right for dumping me.’

Tittle tattle

Malta’s foreign minister Michael Frendo was chairman of the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group which met in London last week and gave President Musharraf 10 days to lift the emergency or risk having Pakistan suspended from the Commonwealth.

This extra publicity gained by Frendo won’t please India’s High Commissioner in London, Kamalesh Sharma, who is fighting the Maltese foreign minister to succeed Don McKinnon as the next Commonwealth secretary-general when heads of the 53 member states meet in Kampala from November 23-25. Sharma should still win but Frendo’s chances have improved.