by Ali, Tariq
What would happen to a remaindered Pakistan? The overwhelming electoral success of the Awami League had stunned Bhutto. It utterly upset his plans for taking power. He had emerged as the most vociferous defender of the traditional hegemony of West Pakistan, had hysterically denounced the Six Points, and after confabulations with top army generals had whipped up an intensely chauvinistic atmosphere in Punjab to prepare his supporters for war.
In the 1970 elections in West Pakistan, Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) had emerged as the largest Western party in the new constituent assembly. But smaller parties had also emerged with significant regional bases in Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier, and Bhutto knew that at best he would be a junior partner in any coalition government at the center. If the Awami League chose to govern alone, he would be acknowledged only as the leader of West Pakistan. Bhutto had won the elections in Punjab and Sind after his party had campaigned on a radical platform promising massive land reforms, extensive nationalization, food, clothing, and shelter for all, universal education, and an end to the economic power of the twenty-two families who, according to the Planning Commission, controlled 70 percent of the country’s industrial capital, 80 percent of banking, and 90 percent of the insurance industry. These were improbable promises. Because of the virtual eclipse of the left, he was able, for a while, to don the socialist mantle. People close to him at the time, experienced veterans of the caliber of Meraj Mohammad Khan, Mukhtar Rana, Dr. Mubashir Hassan (the first finance minister in the PPP government), would later reveal that the radical rhetoric was little more than a mask designed to win and retain power. It was never meant seriously, and Bhutto would often laugh at the early descriptions of him in the Western press as an Asian Fidel Castro. It undoubtedly tickled his vanity, but his ideas and plans were far removed from any revolution. If anything, he believed in a form of social autocracy on the Lee Kuan Yew pattern in Singapore. A city-state could not, however, provide a model for even the new, reduced Pakistan.
Bhutto’s party organization was an improvised assemblage of feudalists, racketeers, lawyers, and bandwagon petit bourgeois together with some of the most dedicated student activists who had helped topple the dictatorship. Its electoral success owed a great deal to Bhutto’s deals with powerful landlord cliques in the provinces (his pact with leading Sindhi feudalists, of which he was one, was particularly notorious). However, the PPP also reflected, captured, and confiscated the genuine popular aspirations for social transformation of towns and villages. He made his party the only possible conduit for change and had destroyed the stranglehold of traditional landlord politics in the Punjab. For the first time peasants defied their patrons and voted for Bhutto.
According to the wits in Lahore’s teahouses, “even a rabid dog on the PPP ticket” would have won that year. This was proved by the election of Ahmed Raza Kasuri, one of Bhutto’s early and more eccentric supporters, who would later be a turncoat and accuse his former leader of murder. I remember well, in 1969, Bhutto arriving at a wedding in Lahore, preceded by Ahmed Raza in butler mode announcing, “Everyone, please rise for Chairman Bhutto, who is about to arrive,” a remark that caused much merriment and was greeted with ribaldry.
So great was the enthusiasm and so deep the desire for social change that in those early months a great deal could have been accomplished. That the chairman of the Peoples Party was no visionary was revealed by his attitude to East Pakistan. Serious class tensions within Bhutto’s electoral bloc and the hollowness of its party organization meant that the only cement to hold it together was a popular national chauvinism as embodied in the language and style of its leader.
The generals who had lost the war and some of their junior officers hated references to themselves by critics of every hue as “wine-soaked generals and bloodthirsty colonels.” Nor were they alone. West Pakistani bureaucrats, state television executives, and numerous others who had been caught up in the euphoria unleashed by the chauvinism were now afflicted with a deep melancholy. Instead of calmly evaluating what had happened, they retreated into a fantasy world, occasionally quoting the poetry of Faiz to enliven otherwise dull and dreadful memoirs. They were careful never to mention the three grief-stricken poems Faiz wrote about blood-soaked East Bengal after 1971, the voice of a nation that had lost its tongue. The second of these was a bittersweet plea for truth and forgiveness:
This is how my sorrow became visible:
Its dust, piling up for years in my heart,
finally reached my eyes,
the bitterness now so clear that
I had to listen when my friend
told me to wash my eyes with blood.
Everything at once was tangled in blood—
each face, each idol, red everywhere.
Blood swept over the sun, washing away its gold.
The moon erupted with blood, its silver extinguished.
The sky promised a morning of blood,
and the night wept only blood.
The trees hardened into crimson pillars.
All flowers filled their eyes with blood.
and every glance was an arrow,
each pierced image blood. This blood
—a river crying out for martyrs—
flows on in longing. And in sorrow, in rage, in love.
*
Let it flow. Should it be dammed up,
there will only be hatred cloaked in colours of death.
Don’t let this happen, friends,
bring all my tears back instead,
a flood to purify my dust-filled eyes,
to wash this blood forever from my eyes.
Finally realizing the scale of the disaster they had brought on themselves, a battered army leadership now turned to a patrician political leader, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, to manage the rump state and help them out of their mess. At this point the “relative autonomy” of the military had ceased to exist. That they would ever return to power seemed unimaginable. It is not often in history that a political leader is given a chance to look ahead and stamp a vision, a new imprint, on the future of his country. History offered Bhutto that chance. Would he take it?
5
THE WASHINGTON QUARTET
The Soldier of Islam
THE HEADLINES IN THE YEAR 1972 WERE GRABBED BY EAST PAKistan becoming Bangladesh. But the impact of the disintegration of the old state on West Pakistan should not be underestimated. The three minority provinces—Baluchistan, Frontier, and Sind—felt orphaned and began to resent the center. The presence of Bengal in Pakistan had provided them with a protective umbrella in the sense that they always felt that if they combined with Bengal, they could outvote the Punjab. Now they were alone. Nor should it be imagined that everyone in the Punjab was happy with what had taken place. The enthusiasm for Bhutto demonstrated in the 1970 elections never entirely disappeared, but it began to wane. The passionate social and political atmosphere I had experienced immediately after the fall of the dictatorship in 1969 had become polluted by the knowledge of the atrocities in East Pakistan. The racism directed against the darker-skinned Bengalis was much stronger among sections of the English-educated elite. The common people were troubled. Their living conditions were no different from those of their former compatriots in East Pakistan.
The war had diminished the revolutionary ardor of the students, workers, and urban poor. They had demonstrated that the power of a military dictatorship and its capacity to resist popular pressures had been greatly overrated. It was they who had sacrificed lives to wrest the instruments of power from the dictatorship, only to experience their own leaders collaborating with the generals to crush an insurgent population of East Pakistan, with disastrous results. The effect of this was twofold. It created enormous political confusion and led to the disappearance of the mass spontaneity that had characterized the uprising of 1968–69.
The PPP’s politics too had become tangled up in the blood of Bengal. However it was justified to their supporters, it still did not seem righ
t. But despite the change in mood, their supporters still expected something positive from the PPP. The longing for social change, for freer intellectual and political life and space to breathe, would never disappear.
In 1972, Bhutto was the unchallengeable leader of a truncated Pakistan. He knew that the only way to rekindle the movement and enthuse his supporters was by implementing the reforms that had been promised in the election manifesto of the Peoples Party, the demands that had been summarized in a popular chant against the Jamaat-e-Islami. When Islamist sloganeers asked, “What does Pakistan mean?” their activists would reply in unison, “There is only one Allah and he is Allah.” The response of PPP militants to the same question was less abstract: “Food, clothing, and shelter.” This had become the electoral battle cry of Bhutto’s party, had won him the majority in West Pakistan, had left the Islamists fuming but impotent. In his first address to the new Pakistan, Bhutto pledged, “My dear countrymen, my dear friends, my dear students, laborers, peasants... all those of you who fought for Pakistan.... We are facing the worst crisis in our country’s life, a deadly crisis. We have to pick up the pieces, very small pieces, but we will make a new Pakistan, a prosperous and progressive Pakistan.”
HOW WOULD THIS deadly crisis be resolved? Everything favored Bhutto and the Pakistan Peoples Party. The military high command was totally discredited, the right-wing parties isolated, and the two provinces not under PPP control—Frontier and Baluchistan—were governed by a coalition of secular nationalists led by the National Awami Party (now the Awami National Party—ANP) and the JUI, which were both committed to social reforms and an independent foreign policy. The JUI was not at that time making the implementation of the Sharia (Islamic laws) a precondition for anything.
Despite the promises and the propitious circumstances for honoring them, little was actually delivered to the majority of citizens. The country became oversaturated with PPP propaganda, the cult of the leader, and dehydrated ideas. Change was purely cosmetic, as symbolized by Bhutto’s decision to design special military-style uniforms for party leaders and members of the government that were compulsory for official occasions. The sight of some overweight ministers ridiculously garbed created a great deal of amusement. Few were aware that the inspiration for this artificial grandeur came from Benito Mussolini rather than local bandleaders. The nub of the matter was that Bhutto was a man of few convictions. His opinions were never firm and settled. What he lacked in this department was overcompensated for by his sharp wit and intelligence, but that was never enough.
The balance sheet of Bhutto’s five years in office is not edifying. From January to April 1972, he ruled the country as chief martial law administrator, and in that capacity he issued the Economic Reform Order on January 3, 1972, under which the banks, insurance companies, and seventy other industrial enterprises, large and small, were nationalized by the government. These included the medium-size steel foundry in Lahore owned by the Sharif family, which made them Bhutto’s enemies for the rest of his life. Simultaneously, trade unions were given more rights than ever before and encouraged to keep a watch on industry. This was undoubtedly radical and broke the power of the twenty-two families that had dominated the country’s economy, but was it effective without more generalized reforms in other spheres of life?
In domestic politics, two key issues mattered most to people at the time. A majority of the population was rural, and the stranglehold of landlords in the countryside stifled agriculture. The land ceiling (amount of land permitted to large landowners) was reduced, but in such a way as to make the change ineffective, and the usual allowances were made exempting orchards, stud farms, stock rearing, and shikargahs (hunting grounds) from the new assessments.* Even staunchly pro-PPP commentators in the press expressed their disappointment. They had hoped that, if nothing else, Bhutto would free Pakistan (as Nehru had done in India) from the multifarious survivors of feudalism that impeded the country’s modernization.
Why did he not do so? The size of his own landholdings was not a deterrent. His cousin Mumtaz Bhutto was the big landowner in the family. He was a leader of the PPP and at the time favored radical reforms. What held Bhutto back was political opportunism. He had defeated the Punjabi landlords electorally. The loyalty of this social layer was to itself and its property. Many of them happily jumped ship and clambered aboard Bhutto’s shiny, new vessel. Within six months some of the largest landlords in the country had aligned themselves with Bhutto. To keep them in line, the threat of land reform was used as the sword of Damocles. It was one of Bhutto’s more serious errors. It had been taken for granted that health care, child care, and education would improve under the new dispensation. The statistics suggested otherwise. The infant mortality rate in 1972, one of the highest on the continent, was 120 per 1,000 live births. The figures were exactly the same in 1977. There was a marginal rise in literacy, but the elite structure of education remained unchanged.
In the absence of change, the indiscriminate nationalizations antagonized capitalists large and small without bringing any real improvement to the lives of urban dwellers. It resulted in increasing the weight of the state bureaucracy, encouraged cronyism and massive corruption, and scared off the industrialists, who fled with their capital to the Gulf, East Africa, London, and New York. Some would never return. Industrial output declined. This suggested that piecemeal reform would not work. Selective nationalizations of public utilities together with a stringent tax regime and tough regulation might have been more beneficial.
The second issue related to the army. The army’s political role was never that of a lobby trying to influence government, as is the case, for instance, in the United States, but a permanent conspiracy trying to replace the government. Bhutto knew this better than most. Yet he did little to change the existing structures, instead setting up his own paramilitary organization, the Federal Security Force, a praetorian guard led by ex-general and fantasist Akbar Khan, who had been imprisoned for planning a coup in league with Communist intellectuals in the fifties. This antagonized the military high command while leaving it intact. There were purges, with a thousand officers prematurely retired from the army and several hundred civil servants sacked for “corruption.” Recognition that the two institutions needed reform was not enough. Its overall impact was to subordinate the civilian bureaucracy to executive power, which made things worse, not better.
A new constitution was drafted by one of the country’s most distinguished lawyers, Mian Mahmud Ali Kasuri, who, as minister of law, was one of the few people capable of resisting Bhutto. Kasuri strongly opposed a presidential system and pressed for a federal parliamentary solution that made the executive accountable to parliament. Bhutto finally accepted this but insisted on provisions that made it virtually impossible for the National Assembly to remove a prime minister, a task assumed happily later on by the army. The new constitution came into force in August 1973. Despite the recent experience of losing Bengal, the Peoples Party leadership backed Bhutto when he dismissed the elected governments in Frontier and Baluchistan, accusing the National Awami Party leaders of “treason,” and had them arrested and tried on spurious charges. They were accused of being involved in a plot with the Soviet Union and Iraq to break up Pakistan and Iran. The only plot that existed had been hatched by the Iranian and Pakistani intelligence services to crush the autonomous governments in Pakistan because the Shah of Iran regarded them as “subversive.”
Bhutto’s fatal flaw was a refusal to share power within his party and without. Had he done so with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, it would have made it difficult, if not impossible, for the army to invade Bengal and destroy the old state. Had he been more farsighted he would have brought the provincial leaders of the National Awami Party into the central government. His refusal to surrender a monopoly of power would be his undoing. Its immediate consequences were disastrous.
The two elected leaders of Baluchistan, Ghaus Bux Bizenjo and Ataullah Mengal, the governor and chief minister of their
province, were in prison. I knew both of them well, and during a lengthy conversation with Mengal in 1981, he described the problems that had confronted them:
When I was in Mach jail in Baluchistan, our situation was brought home to me very vividly. A prison warder is the lowest-paid government employee. There were one hundred twenty warders in this prison, but only eleven of them were Baluch. If anyone had stated this, he would have been denounced as a traitor. When we took office in 1972, there was a total of twelve thousand government employees in twenty-two grades. Only three thousand were Baluch. There are only a few hundred Baluch in the entire Pakistan army. The Baluch regiment has no Baluch in it! The Kalat Scouts was a paramilitary force raised during the Ayub dictatorship. There were only two people from Kalat recruited to its ranks.... If you land at Quetta airport today and visit the city, you will soon realize that ninety-five percent of the police constables have been brought from the outside. When we tried to correct the balance, Bhutto and his Punjabi aide Khar organized a police strike against our government. This merely added fuel to the fire of nationalism. The students, in particular, wanted to go the whole way. Bizenjo and I told them, “These are temporary phases. We don’t have another alternative.” Governments, military regimes, have come and gone, but they have shared one attitude in common. They have mistreated and oppressed the Baluch.
The Baluch resented the overthrow of their government in 1973 and within weeks several hundred students and activists had fled to the mountains. The more radical nationalists among them led by the Marxist-Leninist-Guevarist leaders of the Marri tribe organized the Baluch Peoples Liberation Front (BPLF) and fought back by unleashing an insurgency that lasted four years. Bhutto sent in the predominantly Punjabi army, thus revealing his own incapacity to deal with a political crisis for which he was responsible. The rehabilitation of the discredited military that this represented was another serious error. To achieve victory the army required help, which came in the shape of HueyCobra helicopter gunships supplied by the Shah of Iran and flown by Iranian pilots. In the nineteenth century the British had imposed national boundaries dividing Baluchistan into Iranian, Afghan, and British Indian segments, disrupting the easygoing tribal nomadism of the region. The Shah was fearful that the rebellion would cross borders and disrupt his kingdom. The West backed Bhutto because it feared an autonomous Baluchistan might come under Soviet influence and the Soviet navy might use the port at Gwadar to further its global ambitions. The army finally succeeded in crushing the rebellion, but at some cost. The brutality of the campaign left the province smoldering with resentment.*
