On that ill-fated night of July 4th and 5th, 1977, Pakistan suffered a ferocious blow of counter-revolution by a military coup, the scars of which are still felt today. The coup led by General Ziaul Haq brought in the most vicious and brutal regime ever in the country’s history. The country’s prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was deposed and incarcerated. In April 1979, he was assassinated on the gallows by the state through its judiciary subservient to the army.
An orgy of unprecedented violence and brutality was unleashed against the oppressed classes of Pakistan. The tyrant Ziaul Haq’s 11-year despotic rule was a nightmare. Thousands were flogged and lashed publicly, hundreds were strung up on the gallows and tortured in the notorious centres of state repression and incarceration. The main targets were the left wing and PPP activists, trade unionists, poor peasants, oppressed nationalities, women and other sections of the deprived and the impoverished. There was a spate of massacres, from the mass killing of the workers of the Colony Textile Mills in Multan in 1978 to the genocide of the peasants and youth during the 1983 movement in Sindh.
These harrowing atrocities were in fact the revenge of Pakistan’s ruling classes and the state against the workers, peasants and the youth of the country who had dared to revolt against the existing exploitative order and challenge the relations of property and ownership of wealth, land and the means of production of Pakistan a decade earlier. Bhutto, who had bruised sections of the ruling elite through the reforms that were the by-product of the pressure of the 1968-69 revolution, was humiliated and executed with a vengeance.
Art, literature, music, culture, cinema and social life as a whole were strangled by the obscurantist repression of the Zia regime. However, most industrialists and landlords were ecstatic. Not only did they get back the industries nationalised by Bhutto with hefty compensation, the military dictatorship promoted openly pro-capitalist policies in the economy and society.
All this was done in the name of Islam. American and European imperialism not only endorsed this vicious dictatorship, they sponsored and supported its cruelty. Yet today they have the cheek to shout about democracy, human rights and freedom. What the imperialists mean by “democracy” is freedom for capital and the privileges of the market economy, not for human beings. The Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) and other religious parties played the role of an auxiliary team of this bigoted regime. They spied on the workers and students in the resistance and facilitated their arrests, torture and murder.
Before the coup, the right wing had launched a movement in the name of Islam that was sponsored by the CIA against Bhutto’s PPP government. In spite of the fact that there was discontent in society as the reforms had inevitably fizzled out in a crisis-ridden state capitalism, that movement had failed to dislodge Bhutto. Zia used Islam to justify his martial law to gain the support of the petty bourgeoisie and the primitive sections of society. He came out clearly standing on the theocratic basis of the state. In December 1981 he said, “Pakistan is like Israel, an ideological state. Take out Judaism from Israel and it will collapse like a house of cards. Take Islam out of Pakistan and make it a secular state: it will collapse.” Official religiosity was imposed in the army, bureaucracy and institutions of the state and society. The JI and other religious parties infiltrated their cadres into the state institutions, from the judiciary to the armed forces. Its effects are still evident in society today. Ziaul Haq wrapped his contempt for the deprived in the garb of the piety he flaunted so much. On the question of the responsibility of the state to fulfil the basic needs of the poor he had this to say, “Any increase or decrease in your sustenance comes from him. Trust in God and He will bestow upon you an abundance of good things in life.”
But power and religious fanaticism drove Zia into a state of insanity. He had the delusion of hoisting the crescent and star in Central Asian capitals. He thought he was invulnerable. His megalomania was becoming a liability for the Americans. Hence his dramatic elimination, like many of the imperialist stooges in the past, became inevitable.
Twenty-three years after his demise his poisonous legacy prevails in the state and politics of Pakistan. The Islamic parties were his partners in repression. The MQM and other ethnic-based groups were promoted by the intelligence agencies under his command to fracture the class unity of the workers, especially in Karachi, the bastion of the Pakistani proletariat. The leaders of all Muslim Leagues are his protégés. But the most ironic position is that of the PPP where several of Zia’s political descendants, including Yousaf Raza Gilani, are the stalwarts of today’s party. It is not just a question of individuals but the policies of the tyrant that continue to dominate and weigh down on society. The blasphemy laws, the Hudood Ordinances and other draconian laws against women and the oppressed are flourishing. None of the subsequent pseudo-democratic regimes have been able to repeal them. Nor can they in this socio-economic set up.
One of the tragedies of the movements in the neo-colonial world is the exaggerated role of the individual. This in fact reflects a certain cultural primitiveness. When individuals are made the ultimate focal points of movements, it becomes easier for the ruling political elites to manipulate these revolts after the fall of these personalities. They can limit and restrict the movements to the status quo if there is no revolutionary party to give leadership and a revolutionary perspective to the mass upsurge. Similarly, when movements get personified in individuals, again they can be diverted and destroyed by the elimination of those individual leaders. Dictatorship or democracy, the oligarchy of finance capital continues its crushing domination.
Ted Grant wrote in the 1960s: “In the history of society there have been many methods of class rule. This is especially true for capitalist society, with many peculiar and variegated forms: republic, monarchy, fascism, democracy, Bonapartist, centralised and federal…”
Unless and until the social and economic system for the preservation of which the Zia brutality was inflicted upon the people of Pakistan is not transformed, the wounds under the scars of July will continue to fester. The idea of having a secular, progressive, democratic and prosperous Pakistan within the confines of this rotten capitalist feudal system will remain a utopia and a deception for the masses.
The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and International Secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at [email protected]