Two Takes on Karachi from Leading Citizens

by Steve Inskeep
Pakistan's sprawling city of Karachi is one of the world's most-populous places, growing and changing at a breakneck pace. Two of its leading citizens — the niece of a former prime minister and a colorful newspaper columnist — offer their views of how this dynamic city has changed.
Both Fatima Bhutto and Ardeshir Cowasjee have found ways to speak out — even in times of military rule and political violence.
"Karachi is a city unlike any other I've ever visited," says Bhutto. "This is a city of immense importance. But it's also a very sad city because of what's happened here, because of what continues to happen here."
She is the niece of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated in December 2007 in the city of Rawalpindi — two months after escaping an attack on her motorcade in Karachi.
A Young Bhutto
Fatima Bhutto, 26, sits in the home office formerly used by her late aunt. Her grandfather, former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, had used the same office until he was hanged in 1979.
One wall of the office features a large painting of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto addressing a crowd. His granddaughter does her shouting in print. She's a writer, and some of her newspaper columns make clear that she was a vocal opponent of her own aunt's government.
The reason for that, she says, was a series of killings in Karachi.
Her father, Mir Murtaza Bhutto, died in 1996 during the last year of Benazir Bhutto's second term in office. He died under mysterious circumstances at the hands of police, Fatima Bhutto says.
"I last spoke to my aunt about that," she says. "I called her when I found out that the witnesses had been arrested and the police reinstated, and I asked her why that was."
Fatima Bhutto was 14 at the time. "She told me that I was very young and I didn't understand the intricacies of the law and it's not like the movies. We do things differently here. So I don't feel really that she answered my questions in any way that was meaningful. I wish she had because ... these are questions that resurfaced after she was killed."
Fatima Bhutto is frequently asked if she will follow her famous relatives into public office. She has dismissed the idea so often that the question wasn't asked during the interview. But perhaps that was a mistake: The local newspaper showed her working a rope line of admirers as her mother talked about placing her in the National Assembly.