Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir (14 page)

One day, Gudu and Murtaza took a tent and a flashlight and camped out in the garden of 70 Clifton. ‘I think he was rebelling or something,’ remembers Gudu. ‘We’d go inside for food but we were trying to live out in nature.’ As the night progressed and their conversation about Che Guevara and worldwide socialism heightened, ‘We realized we wanted to do something’, says Gudu. ‘It was a very political time – Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had just left Ayub’s government – and we wanted to do something. Let’s start a magazine, I said.’ And so they did.

They had come across printers as they travelled with Zulfikar on his campaigns across the country and Gudu and Murtaza managed to wangle a deal whereby the pages of the magazine were printed at nearly no cost, so long as they paid for the colour on the cover. They gathered friends and schoolmates who knew enough about the world to appreciate their obsession with progressive socialism and convinced them to write for the magazine. Together, Gudu and Murtaza selected the articles that would be printed in each issue. They had a vision and they worked hard to make sure the magazine reflected the idealism of their youth ‘We worked in the slums in Lyari during the elections,’ remembers Gudu. ‘We all felt for the poor people, they influenced us a lot, it was the late 1960s – a very radical time.’

Shah, too young at the time to write for the magazine, joined up as a supporter and hawker of the magazine. However young he was though, he never missed out on accompanying Murtaza on the campaign trail or on trips with their father across the country. Zulfikar encouraged his youngest child to accompany his older brother, pleased that the brothers displayed the stamina and interest to keep up with the gruelling day-to-day intricacies of local campaigning and political tours. One of their main jobs during the build up to the 1970 election, as they travelled around the country campaigning for local PPP candidates, was to help print pamphlets and posters. Murtaza found printers who were sympathetic towards the party and hostile enough to Ayub’s dictatorship for them to be willing to print party material for free. The PPP barely had any funds at the time; it was not the mega conglomerate it is today, but a young party with the poor running
as its candidates – with professors and trade union activists at its helm, not feudals landowners and businessmen, not yet.

Murtaza, hardly eighteen, went to Larkana, his father’s constituency, and met with villagers in
panchayats.
‘Young people wanted to follow him around,’ remembers Gudu, who accompanied him to many of these gatherings. ‘They wanted to touch him, to be around him. He listened to everyone,’ says Gudu. ‘Mir spoke to the people and discussed their problems with them. His father also spoke to him a lot, it was private, between the two of them, but they had a connection when it came to the political work and Mir always listened to him.’ In time Murtaza began to receive legal petitions from workers who had no access to the law. One heading reads: ‘Lawlessness of police in Garhi Yasin in taking of my daughter illegally.’ The petitioner is a citizen of Naudero, where the Bhutto agricultural lands are based, and he submits: ‘Seeing no other source, I request your honour to kindly help me get back my daughter, Roshan Khatoon, whose suit has not been decided by the civil court of Larkana. For this I will remain ever grateful, thank you in inticipation [sic] Ali Sher.’ Murtaza spoke to all petitioners who wrote to him and did what he could. ‘It was his purpose’, explains Gudu, unfazed that such things could be asked of a young man like him. ‘His heart was in it. Mir met the people with great dignity and they trusted him, even at that young age.’ Years later, I found those petitions, sent to Papa at college in the United States in some cases, in a small cardboard box. He never threw them away.

It was with the elections in the foreground of their minds that Murtaza and Gudu decided to call the magazine
Venceremos
, Spanish for ‘we will overcome’ and a battle cry long associated with Castro and Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution. The first issue of
Venceremos
has Alberto Korda’s iconic portrait of Che, printed in block red, on the cover. It opens with a message from the two editors:

With harmonic emotions perhaps to be shattered, we publish the first edition of VENCEREMOS. It is our hope, it is our aim and determination, that VENCEREMOS will kindle into the flame . . .
that a fire will start in the mind of men. VENCEREMOS we hope will make the people realize, especially the proletariat, because for them we have a message, the evils of this society, the absurdness of their lives, their useless sense of values . . . That they should break away, tear down this social structure, and thus cleansed build a new society, a new nation based on the fundamental laws of human nature: for the love of humanity. We want to put a stop to this exploitation of man by man.

The introduction’s rapid-fire internationale ended with a poem: ‘VENCEREMOS, Arise ye prisoners of starvation, Arise ye wretched of the earth, for justice thunders condemnation, a better world’s in birth.’ For all its excitement and lack of grammar, the introduction set the mood of the magazine, but it didn’t colour the content of the magazine, which was surprisingly serious. ‘Indonesia: The Downfall of a Nation’, ‘The Disastrous Policy of the Americans in Vietnam’ and ‘State of the Pakistani Economy’. Murtaza wrote articles for the magazine such as ‘God’s Forgotten Land’, which begins: ‘The Valleys of Kashmir, the most beautiful in the world, have for decades been stained by the blood of their own people . . . The people of Jammu and Kashmir must be aware that “a revolution is not a dinner party” nor is it a protest march, a revolution is more or less a war between the exploiters and the exploited.’

When I finally tracked Gudu down after months of searching and exhausting the kindness of strangers by leaving emotional voicemails for him on their answering machines, I found my father’s old teenage confidant, who now lives in Washington DC, working as a shortorder cook, as well as practising as a licensed naturopath, to fund his ambitious travels across the world to study with shamans and healers. He speaks in a light, almost frail voice, about the lift-off of the magazine. ‘At the time, there were student revolts going on against Ayub, so we went and distributed
Venceremos
to Karachi University students and had some copies sent to Lahore to be passed around Punjab University. Mir wanted to keep the magazine ideologically geared towards the youth.’ Gudu and I spent a spring day together, sitting on the porch of the shared house he was living in – where he still
kept decade-old copies of
Venceremos
with him – and in Meridian Hill park, also known as Malcolm X park in the racially diverse Columbia Heights neighbourhood. The park, alternatively described on DC tourism websites as a hippie, drumbeating haven or a notorious vice den of the city’s more seedy elements, was beautiful on the sunny April day we visited. Lugging my camera bag and inadvisably wearing a sweater, I was exhausted by the time Gudu and I sat down by the park’s thirteen basin cascading fountains. I showed him pictures of my brother Zulfi. He smoked and I cried. Alternatively, every twenty minutes or so I would open my notebook to jot something down and Gudu would cry. When we parted company, I promised to send him a copy of the book I was writing. ‘I don’t know where I’ll be,’ he said in his whisper. I promised to track him down again when the book was ready; I had already found him once, after all.

Future editions of
Venceremos
with Ho Chi Minh on the cover and angry articles lambasting the Shah of Iran, an ally of Zulfikar’s (whom he found obnoxious and insufferable, but an ally nonetheless) inside, were taken to Saddar and distributed on the roads to workers and passers-by. The thought of the son of such a political powerhouse standing on the road, trying to foist Lenin upon whoever went by made Gudu laugh as he remembered it. ‘It was a beautiful youth,’ he said.

In the autumn of 1972, Murtaza won an academic scholarship to Harvard University. ‘Dear Mr Bhutto,’ the letter, dated 9 June 1972 read, ‘The Committee on Admissions and Scholarships’ decision to admit you is clear evidence of its belief that you are well qualified intellectually and personally for Harvard.’ Chase N. Peterson, the chairman of the committee, signed the letter with a rounded C and an elongated P. Murtaza set off from Pakistan as an independent young man for the first time.

By the late 1960s Ayub Khan’s government was beginning to lose its hold over the country. The United States cut off military aid to Pakistan
in 1967.
¹²
Ayub’s unilateral foreign policy was entirely ineffectual; Pakistan had been cut off financially and diplomatically isolated and further had lost face as the United States became closer to India, its traditional enemy. Pakistan had lost so much standing with the Americans that they did not bother to renew their base at Badebar, near Peshawar, in 1968.
¹³

Domestically, Ayub had become the ‘symbol of inequality, of all that had gone wrong’,
¹⁴
and he had begun to lose ground politically. But Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s PPP was not the only party that threatened Ayub’s stability. In East Pakistan, it was the Awami League, founded in 1949, that had become a force to reckon with.

Since Partition the ethnic Bengalis who populated most of the new country felt alienated as East Pakistanis, and the time to act, to demand more, was finally upon them. East Pakistan made up more than 50 per cent of the nation’s entire population, yet it was physically separated from West Pakistan by more than a thousand miles of Indian territory. But it was not only the distance from the central government that so estranged East Pakistanis; economically there was a tremendous disparity in the funds allocated to the various provinces, with Bengal or East Pakistan getting the short end of the stick. Culturally, East Pakistanis felt slighted by the fact that Bengali was never adopted as an official language, as Urdu – spoken by the ethnic Muhajirs who crossed over from India during Partition – and English were.

It was under the direction of Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, a former student leader active in the cause of building Pakistan and head of the Awami League, and so committed to the new country that he reportedly bicycled across the new borders to reach the promised homeland, that East Pakistan announced its political grievances with the Six Point programme of 1966. The Six Points voiced the party’s demands for a parliamentary form of government with a central parliament directly elected by the people; for the powers of the federal government to be restricted to defence and foreign policy, leaving all other affairs to constituent units; for separate fiscal policies or currencies to be introduced to stop the flow of capital from East Pakistan;
limited powers of taxation for the federal government; provincial rights to enter into trade agreements with foreign countries and full control over its earned foreign exchange; and finally for the provinces to have their own militaries and paramilitaries if necessary.
¹⁵
Essentially, politely, the Awami League was asking for more than provincial autonomy; it was asking for its own country.

None of the six points were accepted by Ayub’s government. The dictator only felt threatened by what he saw as the Awami League’s separatist leanings. In 1968 he had Mujib arrested for the treasonous act of plotting seccession from Pakistan. Zulfikar was also arrested, his new party hadn’t been asking for much less than a complete turnaround of the political system and the end to Ayub’s disastrous reign, so he too was thrown into jail in late 1968 – and was shifted from jail to jail for the next three months until his release in January 1969. On the issue of the Awami League’s six points, the PPP, as Dr Mubashir Hasan puts it, ‘accepted five and a half’, rejecting mainly the notion of separate assemblies and a new Bengali currency.

Ayub’s weakness and political insecurity against the two rising threats paved the way for martial law. On 26 March 1969 General Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan, the army’s Commander-in-Chief, proclaimed martial law and installed himself as its chief administrator. Four days later, the 1962 constitution – a document hardly worth the paper it was printed on – was abrogated and Yahya Khan assumed the presidency of Pakistan. Ayub, beleaguered by poor health, left quietly and elections were called for the following year. Zulfikar, who had a wicked sense of humour, kept one reminder of his former boss – a large portrait of the General in uniform. He hung the portrait, painted at his commission, in his drawing room in Larkana. To this day, members of the General’s family have asked for the portrait but family rules – handed down from Zulfikar himself – forbid it. Ayub hangs in our drawing room still.

The return to constitutional government was initially set for October 1970, but was postponed until December, after which Pakistan would be presented with a brand new constitution. The election campaign was fierce. The Awami League stood resolutely by its Six
Point platform, not conceding an inch on its agenda. Zulfikar embarked on an intense campaign and toured extensively around West Pakistan at the helm of the PPP’s strong leftist and national platform. ‘He was a man of great energy,’
¹⁶
remembered Miraj Mohammad Khan, one of the party’s founding members. ‘He would stand in the rain to talk to ten people as if they were a thousand.’