Songs of Blood and Sword Read online

  The Punjab is the seat of power in Pakistan. Most of the armed forces and bureaucrats come from the Punjab province. If you win in the Punjab, they say, you take all of Pakistan. ‘It was the status quo we were fighting,’ recalls Dr Ghulam Hussain, an elderly comrade of Zulfikar’s. ‘We wanted class consciousness, we wanted real change.’

  But this was not going to be easy, not with the military still in power. They pulled the strings in Pakistani politics – they still pull our strings – and nothing that they can defeat ever slips past them. It never happened before. It’s never happened since.

  General Ayub’s regime, meanwhile, was not coping well with the expansion of Zulfikar’s popularity since he had resigned. Those who were coming out to support him were ordinary people, activists, students and labourers – not bureaucrats or military lackeys, the kind of crowds they could control. The state consoled itself with the belief that the strength of the army and the state was far greater than any support that the people could muster; the establishment in Pakistan pays little heed to the voters (who rarely get a chance to vote, and almost never get a chance to vote freely). At that point, elections, free and fair general elections, had never been held in the twenty-year-old country. What did bother the state, however, was the support Zulfikar received internationally.

  The state in Pakistan is empowered by outside forces, by the hegemony of large countries and international agencies; these outsiders constitute a power base the establishment never ceases to cultivate. For their part, the Chinese were disturbed by Zulfikar Bhutto’s exit from government, suspecting that the split was the work of ‘US imperialists and Soviet revisionists’.49 China’s Prime Minister, Chou En-lai, made a hurried stop in Karachi on his way home from state visits to Albania and Romania, to hold talks with General Ayub to establish whether the pro-China Bhutto’s departure from government would affect China adversely. It would. With Zulfikar gone, General Ayub had no one to stand in the way of the ‘go slow’ strategy he had adopted regarding China.

  Abdul Waheed Katpar, a lawyer from Larkana, Zulfikar’s home town, recounts a story Zulfikar told him. ‘After his resignation from the government, Ayub called Mr Bhutto to come and see him. When Mr Bhutto went to see him, he was threatened by the President. Ayub spoke to him while pulling his socks up, fiddling with his dress as though the meeting was an afterthought. He told him, “Look we are Pathans, we don’t leave our enemies in peace, even when they’re in their graves.”’50 The message was clear.

  Pakistanis regarded the declaration at Tashkent as confirmation that Kashmir had been lost, that something had been wrongfully taken away from them once again. It was Bhutto who spoke out against Tashkent; other politicians and pundits allied with the government were characteristically silent. As Zulfikar continued to speak out against his former boss, he was harrassed more and more.

  In those days, the Sindh government had ruled that rice sellers could only deal with the state. Some ten wagonloads of rice were automatically handed to the state, who offered typically inadequate compensation, and permitted the sellers to sell only one wagonload freely to the buyer of their choice. Taking advantage of the fact that Zulfikar belonged to a feudal family, the government launched a case against several workers at the Bhutto rice mill on the grounds that they were caught trying to sell three wagonloads of rice in Peshawar.

  Abdul Waheed Katpar, the young lawyer from Larkana, was in Quetta with his family on vacation when he heard the news of the smuggling charges brought against Zulfikar. His family advised him to go to Larkana and assist in the defence. He had never met Zulfikar Ali Bhutto at that time, he knew him only by name. ‘Why should I go?’ he asked his family. ‘Doesn’t Bhutto have many young lawyers around him, friends of his, that should be handling the case?’ In Katpar’s eyes, the case was obviously political; it could be thrown out of court easily. No, he was told, none of those men were around Bhutto any more. Since he left government and had fallen out of official favour, they had all abandoned him.

  ‘So I got into my small Russian car and drove through the night to reach Larkana’, Katpar remembers. ‘I filed bail applications for the arrested workers, some of them women, and got interim bail handed down from the local sessions court. It turned out the workers had a permit to sell the rice they had been caught with. A legal permit. It was a case built on misconceptions and on deceiving the public. I confronted the Peshawar police who had made the arrest and produced two witnesses who could back up the facts, and that was it. The case was dropped.’

  Zulfikar was away in Paris during the whole rice debacle and returned to Larkana to find that a stranger from his city had fought the case and had it dismissed, freeing the workers from the family mill. He rang Katpar up and invited him to Al Murtaza House, Zulfikar’s home in Larkana. ‘That’s where we started,’ says Katpar. ‘He thanked me for my help, and asked how much he owed me for my services. I told him to forget about the fees, I was just doing my job. Mr Bhutto then took out a notice from his pocket – it was a letter from the District Commissioner of Larkana telling him to surrender all the arms in the house.’ (I interrupt Katpar with my laughter and he smiles at me wondering what’s so funny about this very unfunny story. I tell him that that was how the police continually harassed my father, Murtaza – arms. The family owns several antique weapons and had been shikar hunters all their lives. They all had legal permits, but it was the easiest way for the authorities to create some bother for us. Katpar leans forward and tells me it’s always been their favourite trick against their enemies, his eyes twinkling at our common story.) ‘I took his note,’ Katpar continues, ‘and went to file a petition in the courts. That’s how I became close to Mr Bhutto.’

  While the government continued with its petty persecution, Zulfikar was at work drafting a political manifesto. He had spent time travelling the country and speaking with young activists and local leaders within the four provinces and East Pakistan. He had decided to found his own party. At that point, Katpar was spending a lot of time at Al Murtaza with Zulfikar. They ate many meals together and sat late in the evening listening to Sindhi folk music. ‘He never listened to Urdu songs, only Sindhi ones. It was Sufi music,’ Katpar tells me proudly. At that time a young engineer from Lahore, Dr Mubashir Hasan, and J. A. Rahim, also from Lahore, were in Larkana with Zulfikar. Together they were the authors of the manifesto that would launch the Pakistan People’s Party. They were from middle-class not feudal backgrounds, degree-educated and intellectual. As the autumn changed into winter and the launch date of the party neared, Zulfikar approached his friend and lawyer Katpar. ‘Would you like to come to Lahore with us?’ he asked. Katpar shyly refused. ‘I’m not a politician,’ he protested. He was in fact president of the Larkana Bar Association, which was, and remains, a highly political post. ‘You’ll come with us,’ Zulfikar insisted and together he and Katpar travelled to Lahore.

  The city of Lahore is unlike other cities in Pakistan. It is large and winding with canals to guide one through the urban sprawl that has grown all around this historic fort city. In the summer the roads are full of people riding their bicycles and tongas to work across large avenues lined with shady trees. The canals are dotted with young children and men splashing about in the water to escape the sweltering heat. In the autumn, however, the climate is cool – unlike in the rest of the country – and slowly, as the winter months draw near, a mist descends over Lahore.

  In contrast to the craziness that one finds in other metropolitan areas in Pakistan, Lahore always has a sense of calm about it. The neighbourhoods are spacious, the restaurants teeming with lazy eaters out to sample some of Punjab’s finest dishes, and the schools and universities carry on educating their students in some of the finest institutions the country has to offer. Lahore lacks that sense of urgency, of needing to prove itself, as if it has already arrived. Lahore is quietly aware of its envied place in Pakistani history.

  It is the city that the Mughals built as their capital this side of the border and
holds not only the tomb of Jahangir, the Shish Mahal or palace of mirrors, but also the Shalimar Gardens, designed by the architect of the Taj Mahal for the emperor Shahjahan. Lahore is also the home of the sandstone Badshai Mosque and Kim’s gun, made famous by Rudyard Kipling, and is heralded as the birthplace of Pakistan – it was in Lahore that the original Muslim League, led by Jinnah, passed the Pakistan Resolution at its annual session on 23 March 1940. Lahore is where the dream of Pakistan was born. Lahore added another notch to its historic record, as the birthplace of the Pakistan People’s Party, when in 1967 Sindh’s famous son came to the Punjab to make his own history.

  When news had spread that Zulfikar, free of General Ayub’s regime, was about to launch his own political platform, the General’s government took steps to ensure that this would not go smoothly. Assembly in public spaces in Lahore city and its neighbouring districts was banned under Section 144 of the criminal code to prevent Zulfikar from holding a massive public gathering that would potentially embarrass the government. Section 144 is an establishment favourite. It has been put into effect on numerous occasions – it was used during the 1971 civil war, employed to halt union and trade demonstrations, and more recently put forward by General Pervez Musharaff to thwart people from rallying around radical Islamic parties in the aftermath of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan.

  Regardless of the fact that Section 144 was reserved for situations of grave national emergency, the law was pushed through, forcing the nascent PPP to meet privately. The party had been originally scheduled to announce its creation and present its manifesto to the people in one of the city’s large parks, but because of the looming threat of violence from the state, the announcement of the party’s establishment was shifted to the home of one of its founding members, Dr Mubashir Hasan, in 4-K Gulberg. Dr Mubashir offered his home because no assembly hall was willing to take the risk of upsetting the General by welcoming Zulfikar Bhutto. Section 144 had effectively scared the owners of any private spaces from opening their doors.

  On 30 November 1967, delegates from all across the country, the rich and the poor, the secular and the religious, both men and women, met under a large shamiana, or tent, in Dr Mubashir’s small garden to usher in the birth of the Pakistan People’s Party. Though delegates from East Pakistan were stopped from entering Lahore and those travelling from Sindh and Balochistan were continually harassed by their local authorities because of their association with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, hundreds of people came. Abdul Waheed Katpar stood outside Dr Mubashir’s residence and issued permits to the five hundred or so delegates streaming into the house. The permits were issued by the party to ensure that there was a modicum of safety and order.

  Over the next two days the Pakistan People’s Party was founded by unanimous decision of all delegates present. On the morning of

  30 November, once all the delegates had registered their names, the first session began with a recitation from the Koran. Next, two poets, Aslam Gurdaspuri and Dr Halim Raza, recited poems in Urdu that they had penned especially for the occasion. Following the poetry, the principal delegates were introduced to the convention by name, and included the likes of Dr Mubashir, Katpar, Miraj Mohammad Khan, and Begum Abad Ahmad Khan.

  After being introduced by Malik Aslam Hayat, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto rose to address the convention and was greeted by a standing ovation that ended only as he began to speak. He spoke eloquently and emotionally, calling the occasion ‘the hardest of all and the most challenging I have had to meet as our country, Asia, nay the whole world, all are passing through a dangerous period of transition’.51 Zulfikar condemned Pakistan’s ‘monstrous economic system of loot and plunder’52 that guaranteed that the rich few (twenty-one families at the time of Partition, twenty-seven families by the millennium) got richer while the poor of Pakistan sunk into desperate poverty.

  He explained that, in contrast, the new party’s economic programme would be aimed towards social justice and led by the principle that the means of production should never be allowed to become the means of exploitation. He outlined the need for the nationalization of certain industries such as banking, transport and fuel resources and their inclusion in the public sector. Zulfikar maintained that the root cause of Pakistan’s economic and political problems lay in the fact that ‘fundamental national problems had not been referred to the people at any time. The people alone could finally settle the issues and the final nature of their state and government.’53

  As well as economics, Zulfikar also spoke about the importance of Kashmir, without which, Pakistan was as ‘incomplete as a body without a head.’54 He also called for an end to the bombing of North Vietnam, adding that as Pakistanis ‘we pay homage to the indomitable people of Vietnam’55 and warned that the present atmosphere in Pakistan of police violence, cultural degradation and lawlessness would eventually lead the country into destruction.

  Zulfikar concluded his introductory remarks by reaffirming the fact that it was these very economic and political conditions that brought the need for a new party to a head. He ended his speech with a promise. ‘We respect tradition, but will oppose the bad in the old. We respect only those traditions that are beneficial to the people of Pakistan, not those that are dragging the country backwards . . . We will give our country a new outlook, we will give Pakistan a new revolutionary form.’56

  Dr Mubashir described it to me later as ‘the day of your life’ and gave an example of the excitement and energy that was felt that day. ‘Take the case of Khursheed Hasan Meer, a very politically active lawyer from Rawalpindi, a former president of their District Bar Association. Z.A.B had invited him. He came and told me in private that he had not come to join the new party, but only to observe. As the convention proceeded, he asked for the floor, made a very fiery speech and announced his decision – from the podium! – to join the party.’ Even Katpar, another lawyer who had always been suspicious of politics, gave a speech, speaking publicly for the first time in his young life.

  The second session began later that afternoon at 3.30 and lasted about three hours, during which four committees were formed: the steering committee, the constitutional committee, the resolution committee, and the draft declaration committee. Zulfikar was elected chairman of each of these committees. The inclusion of elections was one of the greatest precedents set by the party, but it was a system that was to be swiftly abandoned after Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s death.Following a general discussion about the responsibilities of the various committees, the day’s activities came to end.

  The third session met the following day, 1 December, and after the initial poetry readings and recitations, the party passed twenty-five resolutions and the draft declaration committee put forward a working paper outlining the manifesto of the party.

  Kashmir was the subject of the third resolution passed by the convention, and it declared that ‘no solution to the question of Jammu and Kashmir is possible except on the basis of self-determination as accepted by Pakistan and India as well as the United Nations’.57 No compromise, such as the one at Tashkent, would be accepted on the matter. Zulfikar felt there was no duty more incumbent on Pakistan than ‘redeeming the pledge given to the people of Kashmir’58 and later spoke of the political mess that General Ayub had created when he suggested that if nations could not resolve their disputes, they should put them aside and move on with life. The consequence of such inane statements, commented Zulfikar, was that when Britain’s Foreign Secretary last visited Pakistan, he brusquely repudiated the UN’s commitment to hold a plebiscite in Kashmir.

  The issue of military alliances, the fifth resolution, held an important place within the party’s framework and for Zulfikar personally. It was SEATO and CENTO that had mired Pakistan in a network of subservience and slavish allegiance to the world’s superpowers. The convention called upon the government to leave the two alliances since they had ‘in no way contributed to the security of Pakistan when their assistance was needed’.59 The resolution also called for the Mutua
l Defence agreements between Pakistan and the United States to be declared null and void since the US had failed to come to Pakistan’s assistance during the 1965 war with India. It was a spectacularly onesided deal, Zulfikar explained. There was nothing mutual about it when, during the war, Pakistan, ‘the country of three military alliances had to run from pillar to post in search of armaments and spare parts’60 rather than receive them from the United States. The resolution ended by calling for Pakistan to ask the Americans to return all its military bases in Pakistan.

  Two resolutions were passed respectively about Vietnam and the Middle East. Zulfikar wrote that ‘As Muslims, we entertain no hostility against any human community; when we say this, we do not exclude the Jewish people.’61 However, the occupation of Palestine was seen as an illegal and systematic victimization of a people, and that, like the carpet bombing of the Vietnamese, was an injustice that the party recognized. In calling for the unity of the oppressed, Zulfikar was very clear about the impetus for doing so. ‘Our unity is not directed against any creed, religious or secular. It is not nourished by hate or rancour. Its drive and force is a passion for justice.’62

  It is this sentiment that leads to one of the most important resolutions, the eighteenth, which calls for the solidarity of the Third World. This was an issue integral to Zulfikar’s political philosophy. He saw the world as broken down into ‘the hewers of wood and drawers of water on one side, and those who wield mastery over the planets’ resources on the other’.63 There was no economic justice in the Third World, where the large industrialized states still enforced their dominance over a colonial economy. This was possible, in Zulfikar’s eyes, because ‘our terms of trade, our markets, and our resource flows are overwhelmingly dependent upon the economic and political policies in the richer countries’.64 Since the peoples of the Third World had always been united by their common suffering and struggles against exploitation, it was they who had the mandate to rid themselves of such unfavourable conditions.