The author claims that the book contains one major revelation. In a conversation with him in Dubai in 2003, Bhutto is said to have confessed that on one occasion she was directly involved in the nuclear-secrets-for-missile technology deal between Pakistan and North Korea. The story is that early in her second term as Prime Minister, she had carried on her person computer disks with nuclear secrets that were handed over to her hosts in Pyongyang. Bhatia might have got this information in 2003 but he was beaten to the scoop by the authors of Deception — Pakistan, the United States and the Global Nuclear Weapon Conspiracy, who had put this information out in the public domain in 2007.

There are some discrepancies between the two versions. Unlike Bhatia, the authors of Deception, Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, claim that the disks were carried in a bag and not inside the pockets of a newly bought overcoat. The two books also differ in terms of the direction in which Bhutto performed the courier service. Levy and Scott-Clark say that the Pakistani leader took the missile blueprints home with her rather than convey the nuclear secrets to Pyongyang. Whatever might have been the cloak-and-diskette stuff, the fact is that the information about Bhutto’s involvement is not such a unique revelation.

It is not just a matter of Bhatia being upstaged in terms of the timing of the revelation. In fact, the timing might have actually helped him since his book, which was released after Bhutto’s assassination, ran into controversy when the Pakistan Peoples Party’s spokesman denied the “allegation”. What is irritating is that a snippet of conversation between two friends that was buried for six years is now being held up as a journalistic coup when a far more detailed enquiry into the clandestine nuclear trade is already available.

That is the problem with much of Shahzadi. The book might serve as a handy primer for those, especially in the West, who began to take an interest in Pakistan’s late Prime Minister only after her assassination. For anyone who had followed Bhutto’s career for a bit longer there is almost nothing. She had put out her version of what drew and kept her in politics in her autobiography Daughter of the East. Bhatia adds nothing to the mass of material available in the archives of Pakistani newspapers about the PPP leader’s two terms as Prime Minister. The corruption charges, the ways in which Bhutto defended herself and her husband, the difficulty of arriving at an objective assessment of the civilian governments of Pakistan when they are forced to operate within parameters defined by the permanent establishment —all these have been written about at length.

As a friend of Bhutto from her Oxford days, Bhatia was better placed than most others to draw out information on topics of real importance. How does a woman politician who needs to be rooted in the traditional societies of South Asia strike a balance between her private and public life? Do equations between the spouses change in these circumstances or if they did not in her particular case, does it say anything about her inability to control Asif Ali Zardari? Bhatia tells the reader what Bhutto felt about Zia ul Haq obsequiousness or Pervez Musharraf’s surface charm. But, the reader would have surely benefited more if the author had been able to throw light on the ways in which the permanent establishment stymies the civilian leadership. That would certainly have been more useful than the information that “Pinky” could do a very good impersonation of “Cobra Eyes”.

All in all, this is a disappointing book especially since the author had better access than most Indian journalists could ever have to Bhutto’s associates. With opportunities wasted, this narrative of the author’s encounters with Bhutto becomes little more than an example of the peculiar hubris that journalists acquire just because they hobnob with the famous or powerful. Anyone who wants something more than a frivolous study of Pakistan and the Bhuttos would be well advised to look elsewhere.

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