For his part, Murtaza doted on Shah. He indulged him, never pushing away his younger brother when he had friends around, and guarded him vigilantly. Any schoolyard tussle that Shah – proud and combative towards anyone who tried to goad him or was unchivalrous about his family – found himself in always saw Murtaza standing alongside his brother. He defended Shah to their father too, pleading with him not to send Shah off to boarding school – or cadet college in the heart of Sindh when he had been especially egregious – whenever he broke some cardinal rule of Zulfikar’s. Sanam and Shah were both sent off to boarding school at one point or another and both children would manage to escape: Shah by having his brother plead for his parole on the grounds of good behaviour and Sanam by jumping the school wall and hitching a ride with a truck driver down to whichever official residence Zulfikar was living in at the time.
It wasn’t until Murtaza was twelve years old that he became aware of the political dynamics surrounding his family.
We didn’t really understand what this minister stuff was all about initially. Of course, we had policemen around all the time and the normal privileges that come with the territory, but it didn’t really seem that inspiring. I mean, we knew my father was important because we heard his name on the radio all the time, but it was only in 1966, when he came out of jail, that we realized this was serious business.9
Zulfikar was on the cusp of founding the Pakistan People’s Party and he went, overnight it seemed, from being a minister to being a political icon.
We saw all the crowds, the hysteria and the passions that were being evoked in front of our eyes, especially at the Lahore railway station (where Zulfikar had gone to launch the PPP), and it had a very powerful impact on us children. I was about twelve at the time and after that I wouldn’t miss any opportunity to go along with my father. But I was largely drawn to politics as a spectator at that time, I wasn’t thinking of myself as an actor at any stage.10
Murtaza began keeping newspaper clippings, charting the politics of Pakistan and every rise and fall of his father’s party. He hoarded newspapers as they came in, combing them hungrily, marking in pen the articles he felt worth removing first and then carefully – he was a fastidious Virgo; clean lines meant the world to him – clipping them out of the broadsheets to archive. He bought simple notebooks, some with seventies psychedelic flowers on their covers, others plain and looking like they’d belong to a chartered accountant, businesslike and austere; one of the notebooks, made by the Hamdam Book Binding Works in Karachi, has a watercolour painting of the Shalimar Gardens. There is a white box, hanging over the Shalimar pond, with the words ‘name/subject/class/sec’ written in navy blue with long lines attached to them, waiting for answers. It is empty. The answers are inside.
The clippings are from Urdu and English newspapers, kept in place with Scotch tape. Some are of photographs of Zulfikar addressing large crowds of people across the country, in Murree, in Korangi, in Kahuta. Some are pictures of riots, mainly religious Jammaat Islami gatherings pitched against Zulfikar and his new party. There are also statements, strong confident statements: ‘Mr Zulfikar Ali Bhutto said here yesterday that his party does not believe in political alliances.’ ‘Our alliance is with the people,’ reads a clipping from the Daily News, Monday, 27 July 1970. Another article from a Lahore newspaper, dated 2 October, blares the headline ‘Bhutto says: NOBODY CAN DARE . . .’ followed by the words: ‘Chairman of the People’s Party Z. A. Bhutto declared here yesterday that even if all the political parties of Pakistan joined together they could not beat the People’s Party . . . He added we will wipe out bribery, corruption and nepotism from this country.’
Murtaza kept everything. No story was too small or too large; this was a habit that stayed with Murtaza throughout his life. Later, when I was a child and we were living in exile in Damascus, my father and I would sit together in the evenings clipping newspapers. We each had our own notebooks. I cut out cartoon strips, ‘Garfield’ mainly, while Papa clipped news stories from Pakistan.
It was around this time, his early teenage years, that Murtaza discovered the world of politics and it did something to him – something strange. It consumed him and electrified how he thought of himself and the world. He began to read, to study. Che Guevara’s diaries and Mao’s dialectics were the cornerstones of his ideological material at the time. Gudu, who befriended a young Murtaza at the age of fourteen, remembers his friend as ‘quiet, pensive’ but ‘very ideological towards Pak-China friendship. He was reading a lot of Mao at the time and we’d go to the embassy and watch movies there when they had screenings.’11
Gudu and Murtaza organized Che marches to commemorate the most famous moments of their hero’s career and martydom. They wore black berets, carried Che posters and once managed to convince a bunch of Russian soldiers on leave, who were wandering around the market in Saddar, to join their procession. Otherwise, young Murtaza and Gudu followed a fairly spartan schedule. Most days they would go to swim at Clifton Beach, timing their visits to coincide with the Karachi police cavalry, who would bring their horses to the sandy beach for their afternoon plunge in the salty waters. The two friends would go to visit the Sufi shrine of Mango Pir in outer Karachi, where Mango Pir’s Sheedi disciples fed and tended to a pack of crocodiles they believed to be avatars of their saint. Murtaza would yearn to touch the crocodiles, Gudu remembers, but never did. When time was a factor, Gudu and Murtaza would bike to the shrine of Abdullah Shah Gazi, Karachi’s patron saint, or the Hindu temple near 70 Clifton. They would sit with the Muslim or Hindu devotees and eat delicious oily food before excusing themselves. When they were feeling especially maudlin or unsure of their place in the world, Murtaza and Gudu would sit in the empty black ceramic bathtub in Murtaza’s bathroom and stay up talking, knees bent and cramped, late into the night.
One day, Gudu and Murtaza took a tent and a flashlight and camped out in the garden of 70 Clifton. ‘I think he was rebelling or something,’ remembers Gudu. ‘We’d go inside for food but we were trying to live out in nature.’ As the night progressed and their conversation about Che Guevara and worldwide socialism heightened, ‘We realized we wanted to do something’, says Gudu. ‘It was a very political time – Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had just left Ayub’s government – and we wanted to do something. Let’s start a magazine, I said.’ And so they did.
They had come across printers as they travelled with Zulfikar on his campaigns across the country and Gudu and Murtaza managed to wangle a deal whereby the pages of the magazine were printed at nearly no cost, so long as they paid for the colour on the cover. They gathered friends and schoolmates who knew enough about the world to appreciate their obsession with progressive socialism and convinced them to write for the magazine. Together, Gudu and Murtaza selected the articles that would be printed in each issue. They had a vision and they worked hard to make sure the magazine reflected the idealism of their youth ‘We worked in the slums in Lyari during the elections,’ remembers Gudu. ‘We all felt for the poor people, they influenced us a lot, it was the late 1960s – a very radical time.’
Shah, too young at the time to write for the magazine, joined up as a supporter and hawker of the magazine. However young he was though, he never missed out on accompanying Murtaza on the campaign trail or on trips with their father across the country. Zulfikar encouraged his youngest child to accompany his older brother, pleased that the brothers displayed the stamina and interest to keep up with the gruelling day-to-day intricacies of local campaigning and political tours. One of their main jobs during the build up to the 1970 election, as they travelled around the country campaigning for local PPP candidates, was to help print pamphlets and posters. Murtaza found printers who were sympathetic towards the party and hostile enough to Ayub’s dictatorship for them to be willing to print party material for free. The PPP barely had any funds at the time; it was not the mega conglomerate it is today, but a young party with the poor running as its candidates – with professors and trade union act
ivists at its helm, not feudals landowners and businessmen, not yet.
Murtaza, hardly eighteen, went to Larkana, his father’s constituency, and met with villagers in panchayats. ‘Young people wanted to follow him around,’ remembers Gudu, who accompanied him to many of these gatherings. ‘They wanted to touch him, to be around him. He listened to everyone,’ says Gudu. ‘Mir spoke to the people and discussed their problems with them. His father also spoke to him a lot, it was private, between the two of them, but they had a connection when it came to the political work and Mir always listened to him.’ In time Murtaza began to receive legal petitions from workers who had no access to the law. One heading reads: ‘Lawlessness of police in Garhi Yasin in taking of my daughter illegally.’ The petitioner is a citizen of Naudero, where the Bhutto agricultural lands are based, and he submits: ‘Seeing no other source, I request your honour to kindly help me get back my daughter, Roshan Khatoon, whose suit has not been decided by the civil court of Larkana. For this I will remain ever grateful, thank you in inticipation [sic] Ali Sher.’ Murtaza spoke to all petitioners who wrote to him and did what he could. ‘It was his purpose’, explains Gudu, unfazed that such things could be asked of a young man like him. ‘His heart was in it. Mir met the people with great dignity and they trusted him, even at that young age.’ Years later, I found those petitions, sent to Papa at college in the United States in some cases, in a small cardboard box. He never threw them away.
It was with the elections in the foreground of their minds that Murtaza and Gudu decided to call the magazine Venceremos, Spanish for ‘we will overcome’ and a battle cry long associated with Castro and Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution. The first issue of Venceremos has Alberto Korda’s iconic portrait of Che, printed in block red, on the cover. It opens with a message from the two editors:
With harmonic emotions perhaps to be shattered, we publish the first edition of VENCEREMOS. It is our hope, it is our aim and determination, that VENCEREMOS will kindle into the flame . . .that a fire will start in the mind of men. VENCEREMOS we hope will make the people realize, especially the proletariat, because for them we have a message, the evils of this society, the absurdness of their lives, their useless sense of values . . . That they should break away, tear down this social structure, and thus cleansed build a new society, a new nation based on the fundamental laws of human nature: for the love of humanity. We want to put a stop to this exploitation of man by man.
The introduction’s rapid-fire internationale ended with a poem: ‘VENCEREMOS, Arise ye prisoners of starvation, Arise ye wretched of the earth, for justice thunders condemnation, a better world’s in birth.’ For all its excitement and lack of grammar, the introduction set the mood of the magazine, but it didn’t colour the content of the magazine, which was surprisingly serious. ‘Indonesia: The Downfall of a Nation’, ‘The Disastrous Policy of the Americans in Vietnam’ and ‘State of the Pakistani Economy’. Murtaza wrote articles for the magazine such as ‘God’s Forgotten Land’, which begins: ‘The Valleys of Kashmir, the most beautiful in the world, have for decades been stained by the blood of their own people . . . The people of Jammu and Kashmir must be aware that “a revolution is not a dinner party” nor is it a protest march, a revolution is more or less a war between the exploiters and the exploited.’
When I finally tracked Gudu down after months of searching and exhausting the kindness of strangers by leaving emotional voicemails for him on their answering machines, I found my father’s old teenage confidant, who now lives in Washington DC, working as a shortorder cook, as well as practising as a licensed naturopath, to fund his ambitious travels across the world to study with shamans and healers. He speaks in a light, almost frail voice, about the lift-off of the magazine. ‘At the time, there were student revolts going on against Ayub, so we went and distributed Venceremos to Karachi University students and had some copies sent to Lahore to be passed around Punjab University. Mir wanted to keep the magazine ideologically geared towards the youth.’ Gudu and I spent a spring day together, sitting on the porch of the shared house he was living in – where he still kept decade-old copies of Venceremos with him – and in Meridian Hill park, also known as Malcolm X park in the racially diverse Columbia Heights neighbourhood. The park, alternatively described on DC tourism websites as a hippie, drumbeating haven or a notorious vice den of the city’s more seedy elements, was beautiful on the sunny April day we visited. Lugging my camera bag and inadvisably wearing a sweater, I was exhausted by the time Gudu and I sat down by the park’s thirteen basin cascading fountains. I showed him pictures of my brother Zulfi. He smoked and I cried. Alternatively, every twenty minutes or so I would open my notebook to jot something down and Gudu would cry. When we parted company, I promised to send him a copy of the book I was writing. ‘I don’t know where I’ll be,’ he said in his whisper. I promised to track him down again when the book was ready; I had already found him once, after all.
Future editions of Venceremos with Ho Chi Minh on the cover and angry articles lambasting the Shah of Iran, an ally of Zulfikar’s (whom he found obnoxious and insufferable, but an ally nonetheless) inside, were taken to Saddar and distributed on the roads to workers and passers-by. The thought of the son of such a political powerhouse standing on the road, trying to foist Lenin upon whoever went by made Gudu laugh as he remembered it. ‘It was a beautiful youth,’ he said.
In the autumn of 1972, Murtaza won an academic scholarship to Harvard University. ‘Dear Mr Bhutto,’ the letter, dated 9 June 1972 read, ‘The Committee on Admissions and Scholarships’ decision to admit you is clear evidence of its belief that you are well qualified intellectually and personally for Harvard.’ Chase N. Peterson, the chairman of the committee, signed the letter with a rounded C and an elongated P. Murtaza set off from Pakistan as an independent young man for the first time.
By the late 1960s Ayub Khan’s government was beginning to lose its hold over the country. The United States cut off military aid to Pakistan in 1967.12 Ayub’s unilateral foreign policy was entirely ineffectual; Pakistan had been cut off financially and diplomatically isolated and further had lost face as the United States became closer to India, its traditional enemy. Pakistan had lost so much standing with the Americans that they did not bother to renew their base at Badebar, near Peshawar, in 1968.13
Domestically, Ayub had become the ‘symbol of inequality, of all that had gone wrong’,14 and he had begun to lose ground politically. But Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s PPP was not the only party that threatened Ayub’s stability. In East Pakistan, it was the Awami League, founded in 1949, that had become a force to reckon with.
Since Partition the ethnic Bengalis who populated most of the new country felt alienated as East Pakistanis, and the time to act, to demand more, was finally upon them. East Pakistan made up more than 50 per cent of the nation’s entire population, yet it was physically separated from West Pakistan by more than a thousand miles of Indian territory. But it was not only the distance from the central government that so estranged East Pakistanis; economically there was a tremendous disparity in the funds allocated to the various provinces, with Bengal or East Pakistan getting the short end of the stick. Culturally, East Pakistanis felt slighted by the fact that Bengali was never adopted as an official language, as Urdu – spoken by the ethnic Muhajirs who crossed over from India during Partition – and English were.
It was under the direction of Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, a former student leader active in the cause of building Pakistan and head of the Awami League, and so committed to the new country that he reportedly bicycled across the new borders to reach the promised homeland, that East Pakistan announced its political grievances with the Six Point programme of 1966. The Six Points voiced the party’s demands for a parliamentary form of government with a central parliament directly elected by the people; for the powers of the federal government to be restricted to defence and foreign policy, leaving all other affairs to constituent units; for separate fiscal policies or currencies t
o be introduced to stop the flow of capital from East Pakistan; limited powers of taxation for the federal government; provincial rights to enter into trade agreements with foreign countries and full control over its earned foreign exchange; and finally for the provinces to have their own militaries and paramilitaries if necessary.15 Essentially, politely, the Awami League was asking for more than provincial autonomy; it was asking for its own country.
None of the six points were accepted by Ayub’s government. The dictator only felt threatened by what he saw as the Awami League’s separatist leanings. In 1968 he had Mujib arrested for the treasonous act of plotting seccession from Pakistan. Zulfikar was also arrested, his new party hadn’t been asking for much less than a complete turnaround of the political system and the end to Ayub’s disastrous reign, so he too was thrown into jail in late 1968 – and was shifted from jail to jail for the next three months until his release in January 1969. On the issue of the Awami League’s six points, the PPP, as Dr Mubashir Hasan puts it, ‘accepted five and a half’, rejecting mainly the notion of separate assemblies and a new Bengali currency.
Songs of Blood and Sword Page 10
