Elektra in Pakistan : DAUGHTER OF DESTINY <i> by Benazir Bhutto (Simon & Schuster: $19.95; 400 pp.)</i> : MEATLESS DAYS <i> by Sara Suleri (University of Chicago: Press: $17.95; 186 pp.) </i>

It is probably too much to expect an active political leader, particularly a young one from a country as volatile as Pakistan, to produce a candid, revealing, even honest, autobiography.

So no one can be too disappointed that Benazir Bhutto’s grandiosely titled “Daughter of Destiny” fails to plow new ground or reveal the complicated soul of the new prime minister of Pakistan. No one doubts that Bhutto is complicated. Those of us who watched her perform at press conferences and rallies on her willful path to power know how adroitly this Harvard- and Oxford-educated daughter of the late Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto can switch roles depending on her audience.

For her devoted followers in the populist Pakistan Peoples Party, she is fiery and vengeful, full of South Asian images of martyrdom and blood. “I have willingly taken the path of thorns and stepped into the valley of death,” she told the huge crowd of perhaps 500,000 people who welcomed her back to Pakistan in April, 1986, after years of exile and imprisonment.

For the Western press, she is charming and collegial. Her political vocabulary is mainstream U.S.A. For example, she talks about local candidates with “high recognition value.” She chats amiably about her days back in Harvard Square, attending rock concerts in jeans in Boston and marching in Vietnam-era anti-war demonstrations.

At her ancestral home in the Indus River valley of Sindh Province, she transforms into feudal ruler, final judge and jury for thousands of Pakistani serfs who live on the sprawling Bhutto properties near Larkana. One of the more interesting anecdotes in her book, produced with the help of a ghost writer whom she did not wish to credit, is a story of how she presided over audiences to settle disputes among her people.

Among the faislas , or judgments, she said she made was one ordering a couple to give a man a cow and 20,000 rupees ($12,000) as compensation for giving up his marriage rights for their 8-year-old daughter.

The key with Benazir Bhutto is to watch the position of her scarf, called a dupatta, which traditional Pakistani women use to cover their hair when they are in the company of men. With Pakistanis and strangers, the dupatta is always high on the head and closed at the neck, shrouding her long, handsome face in shadows. With Westerners, the scarf will often drop loosely to the shoulders. Conversation waxes formal or familiar depending on the height of this halyard.

The dupatta is up for most of her book. Very little is revealed about her personal life, where she is most vulnerable in a country like Pakistan. Instead, she constantly invokes the Koran, plays the dutiful daughter and sister and wife, defies her father (executed by the government after he was overthrown in a coup d’etat by the late President Mohammed Zia ul-Haq) and presents herself as a selfless, guileless patriot.

A rather clumsy example is a scene in which her father, then Pakistani envoy to the United Nations, teaches her the art of the diplomatic lie.

“One of the fundamental lessons of diplomacy is to create doubt,” Bhutto- pere supposedly said. “Never lay all your cards on the table.”

Bhutto- fille hastily interjects that she does not follow his lesson. “I always lay my cards on the table,” she says. God forbid that there would be deceit or cunning in the heart of Benazir Bhutto.

Likewise, she is careful to mention wives and girlfriends of any men she mentions in the book, lest the reader think she had romantic interludes during her vectorlike drive to power.

Still, one cannot help but admire Bhutto’s bravery and determination. From the time of her father’s execution in 1979 to her election as prime minister last November, she spent more than five years in prison or under house arrest. Her health suffered, and she remained in constant physical danger.

If anything, she sells herself short in one important way. Dozens of times in her book she describes her father, a demogogic political leader who was widely loved and widely hated in his time, as the only prime minister so far in Pakistan’s history to be elected directly by the people. In fact, this is not true.

In the 1970 Pakistani election, her father finished a distant second to East Pakistan leader Sheik Mujib ur-Rahman. Mujib’s Awami League party won a majority of seats in parliament. West Pakistan, including Bhutto, refused to honor the results of the fair election and the result was the Bangladesh war for independence, with India on the side of the Bengalis.

It was only in the ashes of the humiliating Pakistani defeat that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was installed, without another vote, to head a martial-law government in charge of the remaining western half of Pakistan. His subsequent “election” in 1977 was widely disputed, resulting in riots in many major cities. Bhutto himself must not have had too much faith in the integrity of the 1977 vote since he offered to hold new elections before he was overthrown in a bloodless coup d’etat by his army chief of staff, Gen. Zia.

The inescapable, ironic conclusion: After 42 years of independence from the British, the first elected leader of Pakistan was not Zulfikar Ali Bhutto but rather his daughter, Benazir, a modern-day Elektra bent on avenging her father’s wrongful execution.

In contrast to Benazir Bhutto’s breathless but dimly lit book, “Meatless Days” by Pakistani Sara Suleri is a jewel of insight and beauty. Although it is mainly an exquisitely wrought family memoir, “Meatless Days” (named for the traditional days, Tuesday and Wednesday, of meat-conservation and abstinence in the Pakistan week) provides much more political insight than the Bhutto book.

In fact, Suleri’s book is much better on Pakistani politics than the allegorical Salman Rushdie work “Shame” that was the most recent English literary stab at the troubled country. For one thing it is much more sympathetic. Rushdie is an ethnic Muslim, born in India. He has many relatives in Pakistan but his work lacks any appreciation for the dream of Pakistan as a Muslim homeland, not dissimilar in founding or intent to Israel.

Suleri is the daughter of a Welsh mother and a Pakistani-journalist father. Her home in Pakistan was full of her father’s vision and unrequited love for the artificial Muslim state, created during the partition of British India in 1947. Her father, Z. A. Suleri, wrote a fawning biography of Pakistan’s founding father Mohammad Ali Jinnah. He feuded with the generals and with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Several times he went to jail for his political stands.

Most of her rich book is an unraveling of family relationships and marvelous description of Pakistan cities, particularly Lahore. Lahore is one of the great secrets of Asia, a place of stunning monuments such as the Badshahi mosque on the bluffs above the Ravi River, of gardens and webs of narrow ancient streets in the old city.

The old city has not changed much since the time Rudyard Kipling so lovingly portrayed it in “Kim,” his finest novel. Suleri has that same sense of texture and smell, a feel for the first monsoon rains and the appetite for mangoes:

“I think it was the smell that so intoxicated us after those dreary months of nostril-scorching heat, the smell of dust hissing at the touch of rain and then settling down, damply placid on the ground. People could think of eating again: After the first rains, in July, they gave themselves to a study of mangoes, savoring in high seriousness the hundred varieties of that fruit. When it rained in the afternoons, children were allowed to eat their mangoes in the garden, stripped naked and dancing about, first getting sticky with mango juice and then getting sticky with rain.”

But her voice has the same authority when she speaks about Pakistani politics as it does in her literary interludes. Westerners sometimes forget that without Islam, there is no reason for Pakistan to exist. This explains why when the uneasy, competing pieces of Pakistan begin to slip, the country turns to religion, not out of faith but out of desperation to save the dream.

It helps explain a lot of other things as well: the strange “Islamization” program launched by Gen. Zia after his execution of Bhutto, and Benazir Bhutto’s way of peppering her autobiography with Koranic allusions.

Suleri, now an English teacher at Yale University, tells of the time the children in her family first encountered their father, never previously an overtly religious man, praying:

“For us it was rather as though we had come upon the children playing some forbidden titillating game and decided it was wisest to ignore it calmly. In an unspoken way, though, I think we dimly knew we were about to witness Islam’s departure from the land of Pakistan. The men would take to the streets and make it vociferate, but the great romance between the religion and the populace, the embrace that engendered Pakistan, was done. So Papa prayed, with the desperate ardor of a lover trying to infuse life back into a finished love.”

If the dream of Pakistan is in trouble, perhaps even dying, what was the telling moment? The converging point in two books reviewed here is the April 3, 1979, execution of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Again, it is Suleri who has it right, capturing the feeling of the place that lingers to this day.

“Bhutto’s hanging had the effect of making Pakistan feel unreliable,” she writes, “particularly to itself. Its landscape learned a new secretiveness, unusual for a formerly loquacious people.”