By Dr Afzal Mirza
Via e-mail
Twenty years ago on April 4 a professional hangman named Tara Masih was commissioned to execute Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the deposed prime minister of Pakistan. ZAB was removed from his office by the-then chief of staff General Ziaul Haq in a midnight operation. Initially, he was detained for a short time and then released. On arrival at the Lahore Airport ZAB received an unprecedented welcome which sent alarming signals to the ruling junta who were under the misconception that he had lost popularity in the public.
It became obvious that if ZAB remained alive he would for sure return to power. Thus it was either his head or the head of the one who had seized power .
ZAB’s political life spanned over a period of more than two decades. On his return in 1953 after studying at Oxford and Berkley he started legal practice in Karachi as a junior to Abdus Sattar Pirzada. Due to his Iranian wife Nusrat Bhutto he was introduced to the-then President Iskandar Mirza whose second wife Naheed was also of Iranian origin. When the Mirza-Ayub duo abrogated the 1956 Constitution and formed a Martial Law government ZAB was included in the cabinet as a minister of commerce.
But as Sultan M. Khan writes in his Memoirs “Bhutto was Commerce Minister but his heart was in Foreign Affairs”. Thus when as a young and flamboyant commerce minister he came to Lahore to address the students of Punjab University the subject of his speech was “Kashmir Problem”. The most interesting thing was that students of different ideologies were united against martial law and dictatorship. They were also united in creating disturbances at the Senate Hall Lahore, the venue of the meeting. ZAB who was young and looked like a student himself not only single-handedly controlled the situation but also impressed the students with his oratory thus becoming their favorite.
Years later when he parted ways with Ayub Khan over the Tashkent Agreement he exploited his popularity among the students to topple Ayub. Bhutto had based his entire career on anti-India stance and Kashmir issue. There were conflicting views as to who was responsible for the 1965 War and who gave the false assurance to the high command that India would not dare to cross the international border. Whosoever tendered this advice was legally correct because there exists a line of control in Kashmir which is not an internationally accepted border. Bhutto denied it in “If I am Assassinated” and wrote that it was Ayub Khan’s own idea. He also blamed Ayub Khan for withdrawing Gen. Akhtar Malik from the Chamb-Jaurian Sector when victory was in sight and replacing him with Yahya Khan in order to deny the former any credit for eventual victory.
Bhutto was not a favorite of both the USA and the USSR because of his pro- China leanings. They regarded him as volatile and reckless. But Ayub Khan’s signing of Tashkent Agreement was exploited by Bhutto to the hilt in order to discredit the former. At one time, Bhutto became the favorite of both the rightists and the leftists but when he turned towards Masihur Rehman and Arif Iftikhar (both NAP MNAs) for political support he lost the rightists’ support which is the situation even today. Eventually, he also lost the support of the leftists. Some of them supported the PNA’s movement against ZAB while others remained neutral at the time of his adversity.
Why did he choose a leftist program for the party he founded in 1967? One must analyze the reasons. Undoubtedly, Bhutto was a feudal and as such had all the psychological traits of a feudal. But at the same time, he was an extremely sensitive and emotional person. He had the habit of reading a lot. His friend of Oxford days Prof. Rashid Badshah used to tell us that Bhutto was a voracious reader. He was the only political leader in Pakistan who had the knowledge and facile pen to write books like “Myth of Independence” etc. Thus he was fully aware of the political movements of his time. Those were the days of Che Guevara (Bolivia), Dushke(West Germany), and Tariq Ali (UK). The students of the West were fascinated by these personalities and the socialist ideology that they were trying to propagate. They were romantic revolutionaries. Even the communist governments of the USSR and East Europe were scared of them and their literature was suppressed in both the capitalist and communist countries.
Bhutto and his group of young comrades were convinced at that time that the only means of emancipating the Third World was by way of socializing the means of production and consumption. This prompted them to frame a socialist manifesto. Those who opposed this manifesto then were rightists and today they have been joined by the Western-educated youth who come from a bourgeois background and claim to be liberals.
Why should Bhutto be condemned for awakening the masses and making them conscious of their rights in spite of his feudal background and knowledge that he was indirectly digging his own grave? I think he knew fully well that no one could stand in the way of dialectics of history. Secondly, why should he be accused of breaking the promises when soon after coming into power he tried to implement his manifesto by nationalizing banks, insurance companies and heavy industry, by introducing land reforms, by introducing generic scheme for drugs , by nationalizing private educational institutions , by breaking the hold of CSP-mafia, by establishing Steel Mills etc.
Mr. Bhutto’s role in the East Pakistan crisis which resulted in the creation of Bangladesh has also been negatively projected by most of the writers. Two of them were Sher Ali Khan and G.W.Choudhry who were members of Yahya Khan’s cabinet. They and the other writers blame Bhutto on two counts:
1. He said “Udhar Tum, Idhar Hum” which could literally be translated as “You there, and we here”
2. Bhutto’s tearing away of the Polish Resolution in the United Nations.
Bhutto in his testimony “If I am Assassinated” rejects both these charges. He says he never uttered the words, “Udhar Tum, Idhar Hum” as given by Daily “Azad” of Lahore. The editor of “Azad,” Mr Abbas Athar, has also corroborated it by saying that actually Bhutto did not use these words but he coined this slogan from what he believed to be the implication of his speech at Iqbal Park. Mr Bhutto had warned his MNAs that he would not let them participate in the National Assembly session in Dhaka to frame the constitution unless Yahya Khan withdrew the condition of 120 days as he was sure that under the then prevailing circumstances it would not be possible to frame a constitution in 120 days and Yahya Khan would dissolve the assembly. Now it is an established fact that Yahya Khan’s game plan was to remain President of Pakistan.
As regards the Polish Resolution, it was a document of secession and surely Bhutto did not want to be a party to it and if he had accepted that he would have been blamed for accepting the secession of East Pakistan. “In brief the Polish Resolution provided for transfer of power in East Pakistan to lawfully elected representatives of the people headed by Mujibur Rehman; immediately after the beginning of that process the ceasefire would start followed by withdrawals and subsequent evacuation of Pakistani forces but the withdrawal of Indian forces was made contingent upon consultations with the newly formed government headed by Mujibur Rehman.”(Memories and Reflections of a Pakistani Diplomat).
Most of the people have not read this resolution but from the enormous propaganda carried out by the anti-Bhutto lobby they have come to believe that the real villain of the East Pakistan tragedy was Bhutto. They give a clean slate to Yahya and Mujib who were mainly responsible for East Pakistan’s secession.
Mr. Bhutto made some mistakes. His biggest mistake was the appointment of Gen. Zia as Chief of Staff superseding at least 13 officers. He was not by any standard the best of the lot nor was he a devoted soldier. Even Tikka Khan, the outgoing Chief of Staff, disagreed with Bhutto over Zia’s selection. But fate takes its own course. Bhutto’s second mistake was capitulation to fundamentalists and depending on the advice of Kausar Niazi for appeasing the clergy. This alienated the leftists and liberals and Bhutto was left with sycophant civil service officers and feudal politicians.
Much has been written on the trial of Bhutto by Ziaul Haq. The fact remains that Justice Maulvi Mushtaq had personal antagonism against the “accused” Bhutto. The fairness of justice demanded that he should not have sat on the bench. Again the death sentence was confirmed by the Supreme Court in a split decision which always goes to the benefit of the accused.
Finally, there was a person to decide the fate of Bhutto who had assumed the mantle of the President of Pakistan to ensure that the death sentence awarded to Bhutto is not commuted. In her book Breaking the Curfew, Emma Duncan writes about her conversation with Ziaul Haq,
“ ‘Why did Bhutto die?’ It says much for Zia that I asked him without much trepidation……. ‘He was tried for murder. I have always believed in the rule of law(sic).And the supreme court, the judges passed the sentence’…. ‘You could have commuted it.’ ‘I have never commuted a death sentence’. It sounded as though he were saying he never told a lie.”
So Zia, as preplanned, did not commute Bhutto’s death sentence. The final verdict, they say, was decided at a cabinet meeting where every body concurred with Zia. What else could they do in front of a dictator? Now General Chishty says that he did not agree with Zia that Bhutto should be executed and the day Bhutto was hanged he was on a tour of the northern areas.
Col. Rafiuddin in his book “The Last Days of Z.A.Bhutto” has given graphic details of the last day of his life. “At four minutes past two in the morning the executioner pulled the lever and Mr. Bhutto’s body plunged into the well over which the plank had been placed. I rushed down and could see his body suspended in the well which was open from the side. It was swinging slightly but that must have been because of the impact of fall and not because he had any life left in him…..This was a terrifyingly unforgettable sight and when I think about it today, a shiver runs through me.”
Thus ended the life of a person who had served his country in various capacities for more than two decades, who had worked day and night to pull this country out of the mire of degradation and poverty. Mr. Bhutto ended his book “If I am Assassinated” with this quotation from “How the Steel was Tempered”:
Man’s dearest possession is his life and since it is given to him but once he must so live and not be scared with shame of a cowardly and trivial past, so live as not to be tortured for years without purpose, that dying he can say’All my life and my strength were given to the first cause in the world - the liberation of mankind’.