Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir (12 page)

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 Mutual 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.

The solution Zulfikar envisioned was not a class war or some sort of global battle for power, but simply the redistribution of economic wealth and the creation of a Third World summit that would open up the space for those underdeveloped nations to speak. This was progressive Zulfikar at his best. Those critics that expend all their energy attempting to denigrate the man’s politics (by either their antipathy or their supposed allegience to the PPP and Zulfikar’s legacy) wilfully ignore the visionary quality of Zulfikar’s political philosophy. The Third World, Zulfikar maintained, did not want charity; it only wanted its fair share. ‘We are trying to create an environment of opportunity, an ethos of dignity and hope for the underprivileged majority
of our peoples. We cheerfully undertake the toil and sweat for a better life for our masses; we accept the denial of immediate comforts.’
⁶⁵
If the Third World did not act immediately and purposefully there was the inevitable danger that ‘our collective capacities will then remain immobilized and we will have failed to translate the abstract into the concrete, poetry into politics and romance into reality’.
⁶⁶

The fourth and last session of the founding convention of the party opened at three in the afternoon on 1 December and dealt with the basics of the party. The convention adopted a document on the necessity for such a new political forum and then moved to decide upon a name for the as yet untitled party. Names such as the Socialist Party of Pakistan and the People’s Progressive Party were bandied about and sampled until rejected as the convention collectively voted to call itself the Pakistan People’s Party.

The convention unanimously passed the interim constitution of the party and moved to elect a chairman. The delegates all shouted out Zulfikar’s name and refused to propose any other candidates. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was unanimously elected, after which he addressed the delegates in Urdu and promised to serve the party, the peasants, the working class and the nation of Pakistan with all of his being.

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3
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M
ir Murtaza Ghulam Bhutto was born on 18 September 1954. The first son welcomed by Zulfikar and Nusrat, he was born a year after his sister Benazir and arrived just as 70 Clifton, the family’s house, had been completed. The family, four in all now, moved into an upstairs section of the house that they shared with Sir Shahnawaz and his wife, Begum Khurshid. Murtaza, named after his great-grandfather, was a sunny child with a warm disposition. Photographs show him playing in the garden as a young child, dragging a bicycle by its handlebars and sticking his small feet into the garden pond.

As a boy, Murtaza, who was soon joined by a younger sister, Sanam, and a baby brother, Shahnawaz, four years his junior, enjoyed all that his world offered him. He would yearn to go hunting with his father and his uncles in Larkana, shooting wild boar and deer. His foray into the world of
shikars
was brief, however, as Zulfikar, then a young minister in Ayub’s cabinet, was shifted to Rawalpindi, where the children were raised outside the parameters of a laissez-faire landed elite. A Swiss governess, Noreen, was hired to look after Zulfikar and Nusrat’s boisterous children as they began to travel, both inside Pakistan and abroad, more often. The children delighted in torturing their prim nanny and years later Papa still chuckled, his
khe khe khe
laugh spreading light across his face, when he recounted poor Noreen’s attempts at discipline. For one, she would insist the young Bhutto children finish their spinach, their daily hated vegetable, before they were excused from the dining table. Soon the children found an ingenious way of disposing of four large servings of the leafy vegetable – they would
take turns chucking their spinach to the pet dog, who obediently waited for each dish under the table (he eventually got sick). Murtaza, Sanam and Shah – nicknamed Gugail, or Gogi for short, by the family – mischieviously tormented Noreen on as regular a basis as they could muster. Benazir was less naughty, often siding with the nanny and abiding by her strict codes, soon becoming her favourite in the house. Her siblings, meanwhile, were less inclined to ‘apple polish’ as the boys would say, and invented new ways to circumvent Noreen at every turn – spitting out their daily vitamins as soon as she’d turned her back was one such small act of resistance – in the hope that she would volunteer her resignation.

‘We were in Pindi by force of circumstance because my father was a minister,’ explained Murtaza in an interview with a Karachi magazine a few months before he was killed, ‘so our exposure to the feudal set-up was kind of limited. And even when we did visit the village, there were strict checks on us to see that we didn’t get up to any mischief. And because we were expected to concentrate on studying, we didn’t have time to run off for
shikar
and things like that – which is generally what kids in feudal families grow up with.’
¹

‘We were never brought up as the children of a typical feudal family,’ continued Murtaza.

My father always said to us that everything can be taken from you, but your mind and thoughts cannot . . . He placed a lot of emphasis on education as did his father before him. I remember that as kids when we used to go to the village, we already knew that when somebody bows down to touch your feet, you should stop him before he gets there. So, no, we were not raised as the kids of a feudal family.
²

Murtaza began riding classes. His mother Nusrat framed a photograph of him standing perfectly upright in riding jodhpurs and a grey leather jacket. Murtaza’s hair is gelled impeccably, parted on the right, and he is smiling broadly, holding a riding crop in his gloved hands.

Later on he remarked that while he enjoyed hunting and riding, ‘these were not the things I did night and day. It wasn’t a lifestyle.’
³

When it came time for Murtaza to begin his schooling, he went first to Aitchison College in Lahore, a colonial institution built to educate the country’s young sons in a conservative and archaic environment and atmosphere. Murtaza lasted only a few months at Aitchison – which has since become internationally infamous for educating Omar Sheikh, the alleged murderer of the American journalist Daniel Pearl – before begging his parents to free him and bring him back home to Karachi. The college, a boys’ school, ‘encouraged what I would for lack of a better term describe as feudal traits’, remembered Murtaza. ‘The
pagris
(turbans), the riding, the personal servants – all these things are the surface indications of a feudal lifestyle.’
⁴
Students at Aitchison were required to attend Friday prayers at the school’s mosque every week. Cricket was the school’s crowning glory, cricket, cricket and more cricket. ‘They promote this image of a rigorous public school kind of atmosphere,’ continued Murtaza in the interview, ‘you know, the cold showers and all that, and yet there is this odd paradox because you are made to feel like you’re some sort of
chota sahib
(little master).’
⁵

After leaving Aitchison, Murtaza attended Karachi Grammar School, the city’s elite Jesuit school set up by monks and Freemasons during the colonial days of the Raj. ‘It was a more liberal kind of place,’ he recalled. ‘There was a much better mix of people there. True, everyone was largely well-to-do, but their backgrounds were varied: there were kids of land-owning families but there were also children of writers and professionals.’
⁶
He made friends with many such children but it was Gudu, who hailed from an intellectual and media-oriented Lahori family and was several years older than Mir, who was his best friend. Murtaza excelled in school, but managed to fail spectacularly in mathematics, something of a family trait. When my turn came to bomb at maths, no matter what grade I was in or how adept my teachers were, Papa was both reassuring – ‘Don’t worry, it’s genetic’ (it is) – and supportive – ‘You’ll never have to use it later on in life’ (I did). His blue Grammar School maths notebooks are
covered with his doodles and practised signatures. ‘Maths is a boaring subject,’ Murtaza scribbled confidently on his geometry notebook.

Murtaza’s Grammar School report cards were bound together in a black leather book, a sign of the school’s status. Murtaza’s report for his eighth year is written in carefully marked spaces in blue fountain pen. Under the subject religious knowledge his teacher has written, ‘Must show more interest’. That remark is echoed in the report book every term, until somewhere around tenth grade, where the remarks change, begrudgingly almost, to ‘has improved’. The general remarks, which noted that Murtaza was absent only once that term, sound especially Victorian. ‘Young Bhutto has taken to his studies very seriously and I do hope he perseveres during the next scholastic year . . . Mir is a well-behaved lad, obedient and exemplary.’ The report is signed by Nusrat, though previous terms show the name P. Bhutto under the signature of a parent or guardian. Pinky, his sister Benazir.

While Benazir tended to treat Murtaza with the distance elder children precociously reserve for their subordinates, Murtaza adored his oldest sister. He teased her for her aloofness while protectively fussing over her and making sure she was treated as seriously as she wished to be – when they were young children, at least. An old family friend of Zulfikar’s, who often spent time at 70 Clifton with the Bhuttos and later with Mir and his siblings when they were adults, spoke to me about his obversations of the rivalry among the children. ‘Benazir always kept a keen eye on Mir. If he had a new tricycle, she wanted one too. It didn’t matter that her parents told her that boys had separate toys from girls or that her own play area was well stocked with dolls and the like. It must have been hard on her, because her brothers were so instantly likeable and charming and she was shy and introverted, so that she felt like an outsider when forced to compete with her male siblings.’ After double-checking that I would shield his identity the family friend said that he had been an official guest of Benazir’s prisons during her second term and did not fancy his chances of remaining a free man in the current environment. ‘Whenever Zulfi and Nusrat came home from state trips or official visits, there would often be a separate suitcase with gifts for the children, books that
Zulfi – an avid reader – had bought on his travels and various mementoes given by their hosts. One time, I had been to the airport to welcome Zulfi and Nusrat and was at the house in 70 Clifton when their luggage arrived. All the children were giddy with excitement, they were all looking forward to seeing what treats their parents had brought for them, but Benazir parked herself on top of the suitcase in question and demanded that she receive her presents first, since she was the eldest child and in her eyes the most important one.’ I laughed at the story. People would tell me the strangest things when I told them I was writing a book, bizarre anecdotes and tales that I had never heard before. I thought it appropriate to break the ice with a joke. How old was Wadi, I asked, fifteen? The family friend thought quietly for a minute, ignoring my attempt at humour, and then turned his head to the side, as if mystified by the answer. ‘Yes,’ he replied with no sign that he was joking.