All In The Family

One of the most striking aspects of the tributes to Benazir Bhutto's assassination was the amount of emphasis that people put on Bhutto being a woman. Many seemed to frame her as some kind of remarkable figure because she was a woman in the volatile world of Pakistani politics, and consequently she was portrayed in the media as some kind of feminist icon. The assumptions are lazy, and become a distraction from the regressive, dynastic politics that have dominated India, Pakistan and Bangladesh for years.
Ever since Jawaharlal Nehru yielded the mantle in India, the political dynasty has meant much more than any other factor in deciding political leadership. Indira Gandhi, Nehru's daughter, was initially made leader of Congress solely because the Congress leadership thought that her name would ensure Congress dominance. The Congress old guard believed Indira would be a kind of totemistic figure for the masses to rally around. They were not, however, prepared for Indira to have a strong political will of her own,. Indira's son, Rajiv Gandhi reluctantly became Prime Minister after his mother's assassination in 1984. Even more curiously, Rajiv Gandhi's Italian wife, Sonia, was offered the top job, but wisely turned it down.
There is a frightening similarity between the predicament of Bhutto's son, Bilawal, and that of Rajiv Gandhi. Gandhi was a commercial airline pilot who married an Italian woman, and never thought he would ever enter the world of politics. Bilawal is so westernised that he cannot even speak Urdu fluently, and has lived for most of his life in Dubai, and yet at the age of 19 he has been thrust into the limelight.
Yet again, Bangladesh's political scene has been overshadowed by the two feuding Begums, Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina. Both women are from incredibly powerful political dynasties. Both have done nothing more for the people of Bangladesh than to embezzle public money for private purposes with extraordinary gusto.
The great mistake that many commentators and media in the west make is to assume that having women in power in these countries is to be viewed as some kind of social progress; women still have enormously restricted lives in most parts of Pakistan and Bangladesh (and huge swathes of rural and working class India), and these women leaders have done very little to alleviate that position. These leaders are not symbolic of women, they are symbolic of nepotism and a crippling preoccupation with history.