Daily Times

The young debonair foreign minister would often come to visit the club house that lay across the street from our house in the Barrage Colony in Sukkur.

One day my class at St. Mary’s was marched to the train station to greet the motorcade. President Ayub was campaigning for re-election. We waved and chanted as the black limousine went past us, flags flying. Ayub and Bhutto were seated in the rear seat. They were smiling and waving back at us. Along the road, the banners proclaimed Bhutto to be the Lion of Sindh.

After Tashkent, Zulfi turned on Ayub, created the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), and promised to bring “bread, clothing, and shelter” to every person. Who could resist that clarion call?

But in my first year at the University of Karachi, doubts arose in my mind. Was he not a wealthy landlord pretending to be the champion of the poor? Was he not a socialist who wore the Mao cap but sent his children to study in the US, the heartland of capitalism which had perpetrated the Vietnam War that he had opposed?

With all the panache of an 18-year old, I pointed out these contradictions to him in a letter in May 1971 and requested a meeting. I did not expect a response. Just two months prior, commenting on the army action in Dhaka, he had declared that “God had saved Pakistan.” Weightier issues must be on his mind.

But he found time to write to me: “When the history of this country is written it will be admitted by our people and by the world outside that no individual has rendered so much service to the cause of socialism in Pakistan as I have done. A few years ago it would have been impossible to challenge the dark forces of reaction. Within a period of three years we have defeated these formidable forces. There is no parallel in contemporary times to match this spectacular progress toward mass awakening.”  And then he dismissed my objections as being fatuous. We never met.

In December, he lashed out at the world powers at the UN. After the breakup of Pakistan, the army installed him as the president.

Zia is summoned. As he enters the room, Bhutto begins to pull him in on an imaginary string, much to the amazement of the guests. Zia seems to comply with the hand movements in what appears to be a rehearsed performance. And then, to their horror, Bhutto interjects: ‘Let me introduce you to my monkey general’

In April 1972, the Italian journalist Oriana Fallachi asked him how he could “be very rich and yet a socialist, live like a Westerner and yet have two wives?”

He replied: “There are many conflicts in me. I try to reconcile them, overcome them, but I don’t succeed and I remain this strange mixture of Asia and Europe. I have a layman’s education and a Muslim’s upbringing. My mind is Western and my soul Eastern. I call myself a Marxist in the economic sense; that is, I confine myself to accepting Marxist doctrine so far as it concerns economics. What I reject in Marxism are its dialectical interpretation of history, its theories of life, and the question whether God exists or not. As a good Muslim, I believe in God.”

He said he admired Sukarno to the point of worship, and also Nasser, Stalin and Chou. She closed the interview by asking, “Will you last?”

He said “I could be finished tomorrow, but I think I’ll last longer than anyone else who’s governed Pakistan.” And then he elaborated why: “I know the fundamental rule of this profession. What is the rule? Well, in politics you sometimes have to pretend to be stupid and make others believe they’re the only intelligent ones. But to do this you have to have light and flexible fingers, and … Have you ever seen a bird sitting on its eggs in the nest? Well, a politician must have fairly light, fairly flexible fingers, to insinuate them under the bird and take away the eggs. One by one. Without the bird realising it.”

A few years later, he appointed Ziaul Haq, not the senior-most general officer, as the army chief, thinking that the docile man would be forever indebted to him. Zia would henceforth salute him with a warm and reassuring smile.

In his biography, Stanley Wolpert describes what happened at a dinner that Bhutto hosted for foreign dignitaries. At one point, Bhutto tells the guests that he is about to introduce his army chief to them.

Zia is summoned. As he enters the room, Bhutto begins to pull him in on an imaginary string, much to the amazement of the guests. Zia seems to comply with the hand movements in what appears to be a rehearsed performance. And then, to their horror, Bhutto interjects: “Let me introduce you to my monkey general.” Zia beams and bends forward in obeisance.

Less than a year later, general elections were held and riots broke out as the opposition parties said they were rigged. All three service chiefs, including Zia, issued a stern proclamation calling on the rioters to cease and desist, saying they had sworn to defend the government “at the peril of their lives.”

But late one evening, after having come home from a Fourth of July celebration at the US embassy, Bhutto got a call from Zia telling him that we was being placed in protective custody. Consumed with hubris, he had not seen this coming.

On April 4, 1979 I had just arrived in southern California for a job interview. I grabbed a cup of coffee and it was then that my eyes fell on the headline in The Los Angeles Times. It screamed: “Pakistan hangs Premier.”

The next day, while I was driving to work, I heard Charles Osgood discussing Bhutto’s internment and hanging in his syndicated CBS radio program. He read from Richard II: “I wasted time/and now doth time waste me.”

It’s unlikely that Bhutto would have imagined that Zia would send him to the gallows. It was Pakistan’s tragedy that a man so talented, so well read, so articulate and so well known in the world’s capitals would go this way. His unfortunate end was not preordained.

It would not have happened had he not ruled with an iron fist, created the Federal Security Force to dispose of anyone who opposed him, failed to deliver on his manifesto, and rigged the elections.

Bhutto was a talented writer whose last book was penned in prison on scraps of paper. He predicted that rivers of blood would flow from Khyber to Karachi if he was “assassinated.” But there was no mass uprising to protest the hanging, and no blood in the rivers. Yet, his legacy lives on.

The writer has written widely on national security issues

Published in Daily Times, July 26^th 2018.