Daily Times

The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), an offshoot of Field Marshal Ayub Khan’s Convention Muslim League, emerged in 1967 as the single most formidable force against Ayub, under founding chairman Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Quitting the government as its youngest and about the brightest foreign minister, Bhutto, once like a son to papa Ayub, emerged as the ultimate challenge to him at the zenith of his power between 1958-1968.

It hit its nadir towards the end of 1968 in the face of virtual political revolt in East Pakistan led by the fiery Maoist, Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani and the doyen of the fledging PPP, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in West Pakistan.

The Tashkent Declaration of January 11, 1966 brokered by Soviet Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin, poisoned Ayub–Bhutto relations, in the doldrums ever since the end of the 1965 war. The field marshal’s soaring ambition had been to prove his status as a great military leader and Bhutto’s burgeoning desire to cut him to size had fuelled the engine of the 1965 war. Bhutto viewed the Tashkent Declaration between Ayub and Indian Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri as the ultimate shame, civil and military, and resolved to live it down as a political counter-force. Hence the PPP’s mushrooming like Jack’s beanstalk. Bhutto would rather have his PPP go it alone without collaborating with any other political party. Accordingly, he boycotted the RTCs convened by Ayub, to come to a working arrangement to replace his 80,000-strong electoral college of basic democrats comprising 40,000 each from the two wings — with a national parliament elected on the basis of adult franchise (one man one vote).

Ayub’s RTCs failed to stem the tide against him and threw up two uncompromising political firebrands — Bhutto in the west and Sheikh Mujibur Rehman in the east.

Ayub quit on March 25, 1968 and handed power to Yahya. Bhutto, who readily cast in his lot with Yahya, his Rawalpindi Club drinking pal, turned his political arm in the forthcoming insane power play leading to the break-up of the country after a humiliating military defeat. While Yahya and his military cannot be condoned for their sins of omission and commission causing the great national disaster, he would probably have been checkmated halfway through his mindless pursuit of power without Bhutto and his PPP acting as his veritable political arm.

The trilateral talks in Dhaka (March 21- 27) between Yahya, Bhutto and Mujib failed to pre-empt Operation Search Light planned for the night between the 25th and 26th of March. Yahya left Dhaka on March 26, after telling his local commander Lietenent General Tikka Khan to go ahead with the assault on Bengali civilians.

Bhutto saw the burning ghats (series of steps leading down to a water body) of Dhaka and heard the earth-shaking explosions from his hotel room. In the fierce display of the army’s firepower, Bhutto saw the vision of his political power rise like the proverbial sphinx from the ashes.

On his return to West Pakistan on March 27, Bhutto would be the first to bless the army action as he disembarked from his Boeing 707. “Thank God Pakistan has been saved,” he declared, to put his stamp of approval on Operation Search Light. The operation destroyed the last chance of an amicable political resolution of power transfer between the east (Awami League) and the west (PPP). It also tolled the bell for a untied Pakistan.

Bhutto’s close and catastrophic ties with Yahya’s army can be seen under three chapters. First, January 1971 to December 16 — Fall of Dhaka in the same year. Second, December 20 to March 2, 1972 — when he dismissed the army Commander-in-Chief Lieutenant General Gul Hassan Khan and the PAF Chief, Air Marshal Rahim Khan in an impetuous assertion of his authority as the supreme commander. Third, from 1972 to 1977 — when he was deposed by his hand picked Army chief, General Mohammad Ziaul Haq. He was hanged on April 4, 1979 after some two years in jail.

From 1972 to 1976 fair winds blew for Bhutto, with the smooth sailing of state and government. Bhutto enjoyed the complete loyalty of the army during General Tikka Khan’s tenure as army chief (March 1973 to March 1976). The day Bhutto assumed power as president and chief martial law administrator, he had the world believe that martial law in Pakistan had been buried once and for all.

As head of the third republic, he gave the country its third constitution. Bhutto began by harnessing the military to his political bandwagon. In this, however, he did not quite succeed. Army Chief Lieutenant General Gul Hassan exerted his institutional autonomy when he refused to deploy his troops in aid of the civil government in February 1972. Bhutto retired Gul Hassan within weeks of confirmation of his job. Lieutenant General Tikka Khan, earlier superseded, was promoted to full general and appointed army chief. Tikka served Bhutto with individual and institutional loyalty.

Gul’s compulsory retirement represented the high point of Bhutto’s political supremacy. Thereafter, however, things started changing as Bhutto realised that without the absolute support and loyalty of the armed forces he could not maintain his constitutional, but increasingly unpopular, rule. He created a crisis in Balochistan by dismissing a representative provincial government under Chief Minister Ataullah Mengal and Governor Sardar Ghous Baksh Bizenjo, and then used the military to quell local strife.

During the mass agitation against Bhutto between March and June 1977, he came to lean more and more heavily on the armed forces for his very existence as prime minister. When people took to the streets in protest, he invoked the military option and paid heavily for it in terms of the swift erosion of his own base of political power.

At the height of the protest movement, he said in one of his televised speeches that, although he was weak, his seat was strong. He thumped the arm of the chair twice to emphasise the point. It was the characteristic gesture of a man cornered and driven to desperation. Bhutto’s strong seat was nothing but the support he thought he had amongst the armed forces. Once a politician begins to depend too much on the military, he is already at the end of his rope.

The armed forces supported Bhutto until a direct confrontation between the military and the mobs looked like a grim certainty. On July 5, the armed forces, under the Chief of Army Staff General Mohammad Ziaul Haq, came into action and placed the country under martial law.

The ghost of military rule, which Bhutto believed to have exorcised, materialised once again. Bhutto’s six year rule, at the best of times, had been a twilight zone between democracy and dictatorship. He never allowed institutional democracy to take root in the country, and ended up as an unsuccessful democratic strongman.

General Zia’s martial law came on probation for a period of three months. The military’s time frame was, apparently, a reflection both of its characteristic exactitude as well as of its tendency to oversimplify matters. The soldiers initially saw no problem with setting the mess right by holding elections in three months and going back to the barracks. The enormity of the task simply shocked them, however, once they were faced with it. Elections were indefinitely postponed and the martial law regime embarked on a programme of national reconstruction, moral as well as material.

Bhutto’s PPP used the army to get Mujib out of the way only to be overthrown by the army and hanged after a dubious Supreme Court diktat.

(To be continued)

The writer is a retired brigadier and can be reached at brigsiddiqi@yahoo.co.uk