Some of Stanford’s nearly two dozen undergraduate and graduate students from Pakistan missed the first few days of winter quarter due to the South Asian state’s recent political upheaval.

After Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf declared a “state of emergency” military rule last November, which silenced nearly all voices of opposition in the political arena, the international media portrayed a country crumbling into violence and chaos.

The disorder reached a peak after former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated on Dec. 27. Bhutto, widely revered in Pakistan, had recently returned to her home country with a professed desire to remove Musharraf from power.

For five consecutive days after the incident, looters, rioters and mobsters stormed the streets. All flights out of Pakistan were delayed, causing some of Stanford’s Pakistani students to miss their first days of class at the University.

Shams Shaikh ‘09 and Fahad Mahmood ‘10 were both in Pakistan visiting family when Bhutto was assassinated and the worst of the riots broke out.

“After Benazir was killed, there were four days of national mourning, which meant four days of chaos,” said Shaikh, who is also a photo editor for The Daily. “Though usually there are protests when someone dies, most of the rioters weren’t even Benazir’s supporters — this was mobsters, rioters and looters, picking up whatever they wanted. Everyone from 10 year-old kids to old men.

“There was a lot of anti-government sentiment going around because the people assumed the government had something to do with [the killing],” Shaikh added. “Since people had really strong sentiments against law and order, the police were afraid to be out on the streets. That’s why there was chaos.”

Mahmood described civilian families afraid to leave their homes who were, in some cases, running out of groceries.

“The roads were all blocked, the buses weren’t running, I had to stay an extra four days,” Mahmood said.

Both students had to re-schedule their flights back to Stanford. After the police returned to the streets on the fifth day of the riots, however, Shaikh said the situation returned to normal almost immediately.

The students, now back at Stanford, said their experiences in Pakistan, both over winter break and growing up, contrast with American media reports of the country.

“The U.S. media exaggerates everything,” Shaikh said. “They only report what they care about, which is terrorism. I hear on the news that there is an emergency, but when I call home, my mom says everything is fine, things are normal. Average people are going about their daily lives. As long as a man can earn his wage, he is content.”

What struck Shaikh most about his return home was not the national upheaval, but rather the infrastructure progress that had been made at the local grassroots level.

“There were bridges, buildings, offices built that were not there when I left [in 2005]” he said, noting that the mayor of his hometown, Karachi, was actually more effective at managing local affairs than ever before.

“The media isn’t going to report things like that,” he said.

Mahmood agreed that the American media’s depiction of Pakistan is different from his own experience growing up in the country.

“The city, it’s like a bubble,” he said. “I actually feel like now that my main connection to home is via what I see on the news, I get a bigger picture. I see more of the division and conflict with fundamentalists than I encountered growing up. At home, we referred to extremists and people from tribal areas as ‘the other.’ Here [at Stanford], I have more of a sense of the whole, I know more about the racial and ethnic issues. It’s eye-opening.”

Despite the relative calm that has come over the country since the initial rioting following Bhutto’s death, the political crisis is far from over. Bhutto’s 19 year-old son, a freshman at Oxford University, has assumed control of Pakistan’s lead opposition party, and analysts in the United States are already predicting fraud in the upcoming Feb. 18 elections.

Both Shaikh and Mahmood agreed that there was a sense of disillusionment among average Pakistanis regarding the upcoming election.

“You have corruption just embedded in Pakistani politics,” Shaikh said.

“Even if I could vote, I wouldn’t,” added Mahmood, who was not yet 18 when registration was held. “Like most people, I think even if I vote for the person I believe in, the big politicians are going to manipulate everything.”