Thirty-three years have passed since Pakistan’s Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was assassinated by a military dictator. But history has not killed him. He and his legacy live on, giving rise to numerous stories and speculations on the circumstances in which he was framed in a false case and subjected to judicial murder. One of the questions that continues to be asked is how, why and when General Zia decided to eliminate Bhutto. He was hanged on April 4, 1979 pursuant to a split decision of the Supreme Court (SC) holding him guilty in Nawab Mohammad Ahmad Khan’s murder case. The then military ruler General Ziaul Haq had made up his mind to eliminate him as early as August 1978, eight months before the SC decision. The chain of events following the release of Bhutto from his detention at Murree, especially after the acceptance of his bail application by the Lahore High Court, convinced Zia that Bhutto was a formidable enemy who, unless eliminated, posed a lethal threat to the dictator.
In the beginning, Zia did not feel compelled to execute Bhutto as he shared the Pakistan National Alliance’s (PNA) misplaced belief that once out of power Bhutto would lose political support. This is why troops storming the PM House on the night of July 5, 1977 did not misbehave with Bhutto and his family. Rather, he was quietly whisked away to the nearby hill resort of Murree and kept in a neatly furnished guesthouse. On July 15, Zia visited Murree and called on Bhutto in the guesthouse. The picture of the meeting between the two appeared in the national newspapers, which showed Bhutto seated tensely in the sofa and Zia sitting meekly in the chair before him. In fact, the whole operation was carried out so smoothly that it led to speculations in certain quarters, including the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) that the military had taken over at the behest of Bhutto to frustrate the opposition’s designs to grab power and settle scores with him afterward. There were reservations in the opposition camp too. The initial reaction of the PNA was that of suspicion about Bhutto’s hand in the military coup with the objective of backing out of the agreement reached between him and the PNA on holding new elections for the assemblies.
The announcement of the decision to hold elections in October-November 1977 betrayed Zia’s confidence that Bhutto’s popularity was on the wane and the PPP stood no chance to regain power. After all, the whole PNA movement was based on their strongly touted propaganda that Bhutto won in 1977 only through rigging and fair elections would guarantee a landslide victory for the PNA. But the crowd-pulling election rallies of the PPP addressed by Maulana Kausar Niazi, Begum Nusrat Bhutto and other PPP leaders, despite the fact that Bhutto had been re-arrested and put behind bars, forced the general and his allies in the PNA to think otherwise. Bhutto himself was encouraged if not surprised by the massive surge in popular support for him after being overthrown. Bhutto out of power was emerging more powerful than when he was in power. He clearly saw that people had not deserted him; Bhutto was quick to judge the mood of the people. When after accepting his bail application, Justice Samdani of the Lahore High Court asked Bhutto what the date for the next hearing could be. “Any date after elections, My Lord,” answered Bhutto, brimming with confidence.
Some people hold that Bhutto had behaved rudely with Zia when the latter met him in Murree and threatened to try him for a treason charge under Article 6 of the Constitution. And that Bhutto had made belligerent speeches against Zia and the military takeover. In this regard, his address to the party workers and former legislators at Leghari House in Lahore on August 3 is particularly noted. These statements and the belligerent posture adopted by Bhutto, it is claimed, disappointed Zia, who initially was not hostile to Bhutto. It is true that Bhutto was angry over the coup. But it is doubtful that Bhutto would have alienated the military, whose strength he had rebuilt with generous allocations of funds after the demoralising defeat in 1971.
The real turning point in Zia-Bhutto relations was August 8, 1978. Mr. Bhutto arrived in Lahore by air from Karachi. At the airport, he was received by a massive crowd that included workers, students, shopkeepers, journalists, university professors, intellectuals and lawyers. These people had come from places like Shahdara and other suburban areas of Lahore. They walked on foot and converged on the Lahore airport to accord a rousing welcome to their leader. One could see long queues of mostly poor people proceeding towards the airport. The turnout of the people who came to receive Mr Bhutto at the airport was so large that it frightened Zia, and as Hafeez Pirzada said in a TV interview, on that day Zia took the cowardly decision to physically eliminate Bhutto. His martial law had failed to kill him politically.
It was not only Zia who feared Bhutto’s success in the elections; his PNA friends also reached the same conclusion. Had elections taken place as scheduled, Bhutto and his party would have won with a clear majority. This would have discredited PNA and its whole movement. But much more than that, Zia could have faced action under Article 6 of the constitution, which holds any person subverting or trying to subvert the constitution guilty of high treason. In order to save his own skin, Zia decided to re-arrest Bhutto. For this purpose, the Lahore high Court bench for Bhutto’s trial was reconstituted. This bench presided over by the Acting Chief Justice Maulvi Mushtaq Husain cancelled Bhutto’s bail and sent him to Kot Lakhpat Jail in Lahore. After a long trial during which Chief Justice Mushtaq left no stone unturned in humiliating Bhutto, the court sentenced him to death. After the verdict, Bhutto, while coming out of the court in the open under the police custody stopped and with a sombre expression on his face looked up at the sky for a moment before being led by the police to the van that took him to jail as a murder convict. Being a lawyer himself and an intelligent student of history, perhaps Bhutto had realised what fate awaited him after the High Court verdict. After that, Bhutto was never seen as a free man.
The writer is a professor of International Relations at Sargodha University and can be reached at [email protected]