New Delhi: Clad in a navy blue kurta pyjama, the heir to one of the most high-profile political dynasties in South Asia set foot on a tarmac in New Delhi. The year was 2012, and Bilawal Bhutto Zardari — the Oxford-educated prince of Sindh — was on his first trip to India, accompanying his father and then president Asif Ali Zardari on a one-day private visit.
During their visit, the father-son duo at the helm of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), had a “lovely (read four-course) meal” with then-Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi. Bilawal, 23 at the time, made headlines with his tweet in which he lamented how India and Pakistan “spend so much on weapons” when such large segments of the population of both countries “live in desperate poverty”.
Eleven years later, the scion of the Bhutto-Zardari clan is likely to embark on his first official visit to India — as foreign minister of the Shehbaz Sharif-led PML-N government — to attend the foreign ministers’ meet of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in Goa on 4-5 May.
This will be the first time a Pakistani foreign minister sets foot in India since Sataj Aziz’s December 2016 visit to Amritsar for the Heart of Asia Conference. The invitation to Pakistan, according to a report by The Indian Express, was extended through the Indian High Commission in Islamabad on behalf of External Affairs Minister (EAM) S Jaishankar.
Much has changed since Bilawal’s last visit to India. Over the past decade, he declared his intention to “take back Kashmir”, castigated his then-political rival Nawaz Sharif by calling him “Modi ka yaar (Modi’s friend)” and referred to PM Narendra Modi as the “butcher of Gujarat”.
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Prince of Sindh
Bilawal took over as co-chairman of the PPP three days after his mother and former Pakistan PM Benazir Bhutto’s assassination in December 2007. He took the plunge into politics after completing his history degree at Oxford University and contested his first parliamentary election in 2018.
Heir to the political legacy of his grandfather, former president and prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Bilawal had told NPR in 2014, “It is the assassination of my mother that drives me. The very forces that people are scared of in this country assassinated my mother, so I am not scared of them. I want to defeat them.”
As was the case with his grandfather and mother, Bilawal too did not shy away from using India to make headway with the Pakistani electorate.
During his first jalsa (public rally) in October 2014, Bilawal had told a mass of supporters, “When I raise Kashmir, the entire Hindustan screams. They know when a Bhutto speaks, they (Indians) have no answer.”
He had further declared, “I will take back Kashmir, all of it, and I will not leave behind a single inch of it because, like the other provinces, it belongs to Pakistan.”
Cut to March 2023 and Bilawal’s faux pas at a news conference at the UN headquarters in New York became headlines the world over.
Appointed foreign minister in April 2022, Bilawal referred to India and Pakistan as “friends”, before quickly eating his own words and settling for “neighbouring countries”.
Though these utterances reveal little about Bilawal’s bent of mind, one cannot rule out that his attendance at the SCO meet is likely to make waves like his mother Benazir’s visit to New Delhi did ahead of the SAARC Summit in 2003 — for which she was fiercely criticised by her country’s government as someone who was “well known for having a lust for power” and someone who “never wanted normalisation of relations between India and Pakistan”.
(Edited by Anurag Chaubey)