The limits of Bushra Bibi’s power |
The limits of Bushra Bibi’s power
“You have to admit that most women who do something with their lives have been disliked by almost everyone.” — Françoise Gilot, the French painter who loved Picasso, left him on her own terms, and refused to be remembered just as his muse.
“You have to admit that most women who do something with their lives have been disliked by almost everyone.” — Françoise Gilot, the French painter who loved Picasso, left him on her own terms, and refused to be remembered just as his muse.
There are many who would assert that Pakistan’s former first lady Bushra Bibi should be dismissed as a woman of no substance. She did not, they argue, earn a place in the national imagination by winning over crowds with her speeches or marching for the downtrodden. They would rather say she just weasled her way to the top through wedlock.
Her new husband, former Prime Minister Imran Khan, and her previous one, Khawar Maneka, were both men who loomed large in the public eye. One was a cricketing legend who had abandoned his storied appetite for pretty white women and the world’s attention in order to pursue political rebirth back home. The other was a shrine-through-town aristocrat from Pakpattan, known as much for his influence as for his oddities.
Bushra Bibi’s effacement began with whispers that Maneka had “offered” his wife to Imran out of a sense of sacrifice and devotion to the country. In this version of the rumour, Bushra Bibi is reduced to be an object passed between two powerful men. The optics that accompanied this story strengthened an impression that she was a silent and passive figure.
The scandalous and the sacred persist side by side, as they do in Pakistan, a country propelled more by superstition than socioeconomic sensibilities.
Another story went something like this: By early 2018, Imran, restless and on the verge of electoral triumph, turned to Bushra for spiritual counsel. But this time the lore was that she came to him through another reference: Providence. We hear that she has a numinous vision in which Imran would become Prime Minister — but only if he married her. Indeed, he did, albeit in a staged drawing room, set against off-colour drapes and uncertainty. The act was accomplished in haste as her mandatory post-divorce iddat period, investigations later revealed, had barely ended. What of it, some said? Bushra subsequently ascended to become the First Lady. The prediction had come true.
But it would not be long before myth would outlast propriety, as it often does in Pakistan.
The slim window between her divorce and re-marriage fractured........