Oxbridge friends remember ‘Pinky’

LONDON: In her later years the world saw her as a brave politician, a clever and eloquent diplomatic, a glamorous and demure woman and a devoted mother to her three children, but her friends from her Oxford University days remember a very different Benazir Bhutto.

“She wasn’t someone who was buried away in a library. She used to go socialising, she had a lot of friends,” said Victoria Schofield, writer and Benazir’s closest friend from Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford. “It was her friendships from Oxford that she thought back to in later life, because it was a very happy period for her,” added Schofield, author of a book on the trial and execution of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

After obtaining her early education in Pakistan from an English governess and Catholic nuns, at the age of 16, Benazir was sent to study politics at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachussetts. Coming from a wealthy and powerful family, it was here that she faced the first hardships of her young life — having to walk to school for the first time in her life. It was cold and Benazir admitted that life was difficult without a chauffeur.

‘Pinky’, as Benazir was called by family and friends, was a thoroughly Westernised teenager, living a life of ‘idyllic ease’. She dressed in clothes from Saks Fifth Avenue and enjoyed the lifestyle of any “spoiled daughter of a wealthy foreign potentate”.

From Radcliffe Benazir went across the Atlantic to study international law and politics at Oxford. At her alma mater she was known for throwing the best parties which were always well attended and liberally supplied with alcohol — although she later denied this. Her friends recall that she loved to dance at these events — something that her detractors would certainly find scandalous.

“Her Oxford lifestyle was almost a parody of the rich Islamic girl released from the constraints of a rigid Muslim home,” said an Oxford contemporary. As a 20 year-old student Benazir tore around the small university town in a yellow MG sports car. “Stories of her exotic love life abounded, and when she stood for the presidency of the Oxford Union, she skillfully used the rumours about her un-Islamic activities to flutter her eyelashes at the male voters,” said a fellow student.
 
“At the same time, she rallied the feminists with the suggestion that she would be held back by the male chauvinists and reactionaries — even though they were the kind of men with whom she enjoyed her leisure time,” continued the fellow student. In her first attempt at the Oxford presidency, Benazir came third. But after graduating with a second in politics, philosophy and economics in 1976, she stood again and won. She was the first Asian female to hold the position in the Union’s history.

Conservative MP Alan Duncan, who ran her campaign at Oxford called her “fiery, determined and a whirlwind of energy”. Less than 72 hours before she was assassinated, Benazir told Duncan in an e-mail from Pakistan that “it was better to be an optimist”. “She knew there was a risk of being killed, but she was never going to compromise,” said Duncan of his life-long friend.