The feudal Bhuttos of Larkana are amongst the most affluent, charismatic, and controversial political families of the Indian sub-continent.

Khan Bahadur Sir Shah Nawaz Bhutto is believed to have owned 250,000 acres of land around independence and participated in a thriving political life that saw him get knighted. His precocious son, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was studying at the prestigious Cathedral and John Connon School at Bombay when moved by the tumult preceding the partition.

The 15 year old Zulfikar wrote a fiery letter to Mohammed Ali Jinnah. The letter was an early insight into the mind of a ruthlessly ambitious, passionate, and a clearly unhinged mind that were to be its own worst enemy, over time.

Zulfikar wrote, “Musalmans should realize that Hindus can never and will never unite with us, they are the deadliest enemies of our Koran and our Prophet”. Despite public claims of secularity, measure and education at places like University of California, Oxford and having been admitted to the Bar at Lincoln’s Inn, the curse of foundational bigotry, duplicitousness and manipulations never left Zulfikar Ali Bhutto or even his progeny.

The favoured and youngest Minister in Field Marshal Ayub Khan’s Cabinet was hardly loyal to Ayub. It is believed when Lal Bahadur Shastri died of a heart attack at Tashkent and when Bhutto’s assistant woke him to break the news by saying, “Sir, the bastard has died” ~ Zulfikar is believed to have asked, “Which one?” It was Zulfikar’s ill-fated advice to trigger ‘Operation Gibraltar’ that led to Pakistan’s defeat in 1965, and he was amongst the first to blame the military immediately after.

The double-crossing politician infamously and publicly threatened to ‘break the legs’ of any legislator who dared to recognise the Awami League Government whilst attempting side-deals with Awami supremo Mujibur Rahman, with his shameful formulation ‘edhar hum, udhar tum’ (us here and you there). After release from house arrest post the General Zia led coup in 1977, General Yahya Khan had said, “It was Bhutto, not Mujib, who broke Pakistan”.

It was also Bhutto who championed the surreptitious Pakistan nuclear programme, stoked unrest in Afghanistan’s internal affairs, pandered to religious extremism by declaring Ahmadiyyas as heretics, etc.

Britain’s High Commissioner during those years, Sir Morrice James, noted about Bhutto a certain, “ruthlessness and a capacity for illdoing which went far beyond what is natural”. In a relentless saga of deceit and amorality, dark elements like Zia-ul-haq who were patronized and unleashed by Bhutto himself ultimately sent him to the gallows. In 1988, another HarvardOxford educated and proverbial ‘Daughter of the East’, Benazir Bhutto, rose from the Bhutto stables and became the Pakistani Prime Minister.

The populist was soon given to accusations of corruption, nepotism (her husband was infamous as ‘Mr 10%’) and cut-throat ambition in the exact same mould as her father. Rivals within her family like her brothers met with gruesome ends.

Her own mother Nusrat told the New York Times, “She’s talked a lot about democracy, but she’s become a little dictator”. It was Benazir whose fingerprints were all over in ratcheting up the Kashmir issue and in the shadowy creation of the Taliban (through her Interior Minister, Nasrallah Babar). She shared her father’s penchant for claiming one thing and doing the exact opposite and she too was killed by extremist forces (supposedly masterminded by Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban) that were supported and created by her own vile politics.

Bilawal Bhutto is the fourth in the dynastic Bhutto family (and another Oxfordian). He became the Chairman of the Pakistan’s People Party (PPP), following Benazir’s assassination in 2007. Nearly sixty years after his maternal grandfather Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had become the Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1963, young Bilawal occupies the same ministerial job.

The Bhutto DNA of obsequiousness towards China that had led to handing over parts of occupied J&K land to Beijing by the grandfather, was met by an equally theatrical and servile statement by the grandson on becoming Foreign Minister i.e., “Any Attack on China is an Attack on Pakistan”.

Constantly ridiculed by rival Imran Khan for his entitled and ignorant ways, Bilawal has taken the slippery path of populism, religiosity and bigotry that had ultimately claimed the lives of his family members.

Bilawal has tried desperately to curry favour with his undiplomatic, uncivilised and no-holds barred commentary on India and its Prime Minister. Indian authorities noted that Bilawal’s comments, “are a new low, even for Pakistan… perpetrators of the 26/11 attacks as well as mastermind of the 1993 Mumbai blasts, all remain free in that country”.

The quest to show himself and his government as being more patriotic and more fundamentalist vis-à-vis the similarly westernized-turned-bigot, Imran Khan, carries echoes of a past that had proved to the undoing of each and every Bhutto prior to Bilawal. Bilawal’s earlier grandstanding, “When I raise Kashmir, the entire Hindustan screams.

They know when a Bhutto speaks, they (Indians) have no answer” is typical bluster from the family playbook and especially rich for the grandson of the man who negotiated the return of 93,000 Pakistani prisoners of war (POW) at Shimla.

Now Bilawal has ostensibly agreed to attend the foreign ministers’ meet of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in Goa on 4-5 May. It’s been a long time coming given the last time a Pakistani Foreign Minister (Sartaj Aziz) came to India was for the Heart of Asia Conference in December 2016 ~ a controversial and prickly engagement that had given way to an even more serious fracture of downgraded diplomatic ties post the revocation of Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir.

The Bhuttos have historically struggled to live up to the expectations people have of educated, erudite and well-versed political families who could have learnt important lessons from their own missteps. But history and the ensuing narrative demonstrates that they have remained incorrigible, short-term, and ambitious to a fatal fault.

There is nothing in Bilawal’s personal conduct or short history in governance to suggest that he is a better and more sincere bet than the Bhuttos who had preceded him.

Should India even entertain him or engage is a matter of separate enquiry but to repose faith and hope in the Bhutto template, and that too from an unashamed chip of the old block, is certainly imprudent.

(The writer is Lt Gen PVSM, AVSM (Retd), and former Lt Governor of Andaman & Nicobar Islands and Puducherry)