Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir (17 page)

While it is fair to say that Zulfikar’s time in office remains memorable owing to his advances in social programmes and foreign policy, it is important to recognize that it was hindered by many setbacks and mistakes made by the Prime Minister himself. He was a polarizing figure; you either loved Zulfikar or hated him. Without looking at the problems of his regime, there is no way to understand the manner in which violence and power attached themselves to the Bhutto family. And there is no larger problem than the role Zulfikar played in Balochistan.

Balochistan is a province blighted by Pakistan. The origins of the Baloch people, tribal in their formation and groupings, are said to be Semitic or Iranian, depending largely on whom you ask. Those who identify linguistically with the Aryans across the border claim a Persian heritage, those others who speak Balochi or one of the other regional languages claim that they abandoned their lives as shepherds in Syria sometime during the first millennium and travelled nomadically across the landscape of Central Asia before settling in the Baloch province.

By the time of the Raj, Balochistan had been part of the Mughal, Persian and Afghan kingdoms and had added culturally, linguistically and ethnically to its population. By the nineteenth century, the province was divided into four princely states, the majority of which were brought under the suzerainty of the British Raj. Wars and imperial struggles further unified the larger area that is now Balochistan, a province rich in mineral resources, namely gas, but whose population is poor.

As the subcontinent began to break apart, two states were asked where they wanted to go: Balochistan and Nepal. As the Baloch remember it, the people of the province voted to be independent – like Nepal, they didn’t choose to belong to either Pakistan or India. The centres of Baloch authority unanimously rejected the idea of joining Pakistan and declared their independence. However, they were ruled by princes, who were easily bribed. The Pakistani Army was sent in and forced Prince Mir Ahmed Yar Khan of Kalat to change his
tune; the Khan of Kalat signed an agreement revoking Baloch claims to independence and brought his people into Pakistan. His brother, on the other hand, refused to bow to Pakistani pressure and was later killed in his quest for Baloch national sovereignty.

The mode of operations had been set. The second conflict between the province and the state of Pakistan took place a mere ten years later in response to General Ayub’s One Unit centralization policy. Balochistan was not going to go quietly into Pakistan’s fold. The third struggle – they were averaging one per decade – happened in the early 1960s as the Pakistani Army began to build garrisons for its troops in Balochistan. Militants, insurgents belonging to various tribes, took up arms and attacked the state’s army. General Yahya quelled the violence by erasing the One Unit structure and signed a ceasefire with the various warring factions. But the Baloch, formally and forcefully brought into Pakistan, were not held peacefully for long.

‘Pakistan is a colony,’
¹⁵
Khair Bux Marri, the head of the Marri tribe, insisted to me when I went to speak with him at his Karachi home. I was met at the gate by burly men with large
shalwars
and Kalashnikovs hanging from their shoulders. The Bhuttos are not particular favourites of
Sardar
Marri, but the elder tribesman met my request for an interview graciously, received me courteously and offered me orange juice as we spoke.

‘Very few countries are independent,’ he continued, ‘but Pakistan has been an imperial colony from the British to the Americans now. How can a colony have an independent attitude? Pakistan accepts the dominant position of imperialism. They chose to call this country Pakistan, land of the pure, because they believed the Koran is here, as if all other nations are pagan. To call it Pakistan is a grave mistake. It is
na-pakistan
, land of the impure.’ I asked Marri how it was that the Baloch found themselves perpetually pitted against the state. ‘There’s a saying in Balochi,’ he explained, speaking so quietly I had to keep edging closer towards him, this tribal chieftan who famously loathed my family, so that I might hear him. ‘A man comes into a railway compartment and he sits in a corner as if he is there out of other people’s generosity. You can tell him to move back in the carriage
until he has nowhere else to go. But when pushed to the wall, he will draw his dagger. At that point, he’ll either kill you or he’ll die.’

In 1972, the Baloch found themselves pushed against the wall once more. They had voted alongside the Awami League and were further isolated when East Pakistan broke away from the union. Members from a range of political parties in the province grouped together to form the National Awami or People’s Party, NAP, and pitted themselves as a bloc against Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s government. Various Baloch leaders demanded more representation in the federal government and began to formulate a secessionist plan of their own. The following year a large consignment of arms was found at the Iraqi embassy in Islamabad. The weapons, police alleged, were en route to the Marris of Balochistan. Zulfikar reacted quickly; he called the actions of the Marri insurgents treasonous and dismissed the provincial Baloch government.

The issue behind closed doors was admittedly larger; there was pressure from the Shah of Iran, who believed that the ethnic Baloch on his side of the border were arming themselves against Pahlavi rule. Worried at the prospect of an armed revolt, the Shah asked Pakistan to intervene. The army was sent into Balochistan once more. Zulfikar was not the first premier to take excessive measures against the Baloch, but he shouldn’t have acted in conformity with his predecessors, all insecurely prone to excessive violence against the Baloch people. Khair Bux Marri, the same man who served me orange juice, put together the Baloch People’s Liberation Front, BPLF, and began a guerrilla war against Zulfikar’s government and his troops. Estimates, shrouded as they are, put Pakistani losses at around 3,000 with close to 10,000 Baloch separatists killed.

I asked
Sardar
Marri about the operation carried out in the 1970s. He demurred. ‘You are his granddaughter, it wouldn’t be proper,’ he said politely. I was surprised by Marri’s formality with me. I assured him that I was there to listen to him, to hear whatever he had to say. ‘I have within me great fire against the PPP,’ he cautioned. I insisted that I would not take anything he had to say personally. I am not my grandfather’s keeper, I said with a laugh, please speak freely. He shrugged.
I had asked for it. ‘Bhutto was no different from Hitler,’
Sardar
Marri began. ‘Before the operation he initiated, death only touched certain areas of the province. Then it affected all of Balochistan. The violence was expanded. Before our resistance had been traditional, tribal. Then it became more nationalistic.’

Marri was jailed on Zulfikar’s orders. Many tribesmen were. Their dissent was silenced forcefully and they have never forgiven him for it. Yousef Masti Khan, another Baloch politician my father’s age, also agreed to speak to me about the role Zulfikar played in Balochistan and was less old-fashioned and reticent about his views. He too had been arrested in 1974. Masti Khan was kept in barracks across from the passport offices in Saddar, Karachi, for fifteen days before he was moved by the army to a jail in Quetta. He was a young activist, a small player in provincial politics, and his father, Akbar Masti Khan, was an old friend of Zulfikar’s. They used to argue about his policies. After the younger Khan was released, his father was called by his old friend, the Prime Minister, and offered a contract to build a highway across the province.

‘I told my father, if you do it, I will leave here and take up arms in the mountains,’
¹⁶
Yousef Masti Khan told me, speaking animatedly. ‘My father said, I can’t just refuse Zulfikar, he’s very vindictive.’ Eventually, according to Yousef, his father went to see Zulfikar. He knew he couldn’t take the deal and had to find a way out. He reached the official residence of the Prime Minister in Rawalpindi and found Zulfikar sitting on the staircase in his pyjamas, smoking a cigar. They talked for a while about old times, shooting the breeze as if things were normal, until finally Zulfikar asked him how things were in the province. ‘Do you want to hear the answer for a Prime Minister or for a friend?’ Akbar Masti Khan asked him. Zulfikar told his friend to speak openly. ‘Why are you killing people in Balochistan?’ he asked him. Zulfikar spoke about the violence, about the attacks on the state by the insurgents, about the sabotage. I don’t want violence, he said, but what can I do? ‘Withdraw the army,’ insisted his friend. With that Zulfikar hung his head. ‘I can’t,’ he replied.

It was a familiar refrain. He had, like all those before him, no
power against the army when he was engaged in a war against his own people. The moment that Zulfikar began to fight Pakistanis, treasonous ones or not, he began to distance himself from his power base, from the source of his ultimate strength, and then the army, finally back in business, began to turn against him. Akbar Masti Khan was also arrested. And the army remained in Balochistan till the end of the decade.

‘The Balochistan operation gave the army a lot of strength,’
¹⁷
agreed Miraj Mohammad Khan. ‘They saw that the government needed them. Zulfikar was fighting his natural allies – the NAP were socialist, progressive, he missed these crucial alliances and that’s what broke him.’ Miraj left the PPP in 1974, in protest against the government’s violent attack on Balochistan, and because of the about-turn Zulfikar had taken against the unions.

‘The feudalists betrayed him. They infiltrated the party and then used its apparatuses against the people and because he had become insecure by that point, because these feudalists distanced him from the people, Zulfikar let them,’ Miraj explained to me in Urdu. ‘I walked out of a meeting in 1972 when we were discussing the union protest in Landhi, Karachi. The workers were striking and causing disruptions and Zulfikar said to us, “I assure you the strength of the street will be crushed by the strength of the state.” So I walked out. He called me later and said I’d broken protocol. I told him why I left, why I broke party protocol. “It’s the situation, Miraj!” Zulfikar replied, justifying what he had said. But the police, under the orders of the Chief Minister, had fired on the workers. The workers, the people, before this shooting believed that everything had changed with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, they believed they had come to power and this terrified the industrialists. So, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto placated them.’

For Miraj, a lifelong Marxist so committed to the idea of a new Pakistan he still refuses to speak in English, this U-turn was unacceptable. Though he was one of Zulfikar’s closest associates, Miraj left the party. ‘I told him, you’re being taken over by Intelligence. They’re alienating you from your strength. J. A. Rahim was pushed out, Dr Mubashir Hasan was pushed out, so was I – all the founding
members, all of us the most radical elements. Intelligence would send him reports saying we were plotting to kill him and as he got weaker, he became more paranoid.’ The year after he left, Miraj was arrested. J. A. Rahim one of the writers of the party manifesto, was brutally punished for his dissension. Dr Mubashir Hasan, the Finance Minister at whose house the PPP was founded, resigned from his ministry post, but stayed – one of the few – with Zulfikar.

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5
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A
ll of the men who gave their youth and their commitment to the party with Zulfikar that afternoon in Lahore were, one by one, sent to jail. ‘He was not a prophet,’ Miraj, now frail and ill, told me. ‘He was a great man and a great leader, but in our culture we have a tendency to make prophets out of men.’ The conclusion of Zulfikar’s power was near, and in his weakness he didn’t even see it coming.

Towards the end of his political reign, Zulfikar floundered. Despite the United States’ hostility towards Pakistan’s burgeoning nuclear programme, the building of the ‘Muslim bomb’ was pushing ahead, though it was winning the Prime Minister no friends in the process. Henry Kissinger, who publicly rated Zulfikar an able and intelligent politician, was said to have warned him that the Americans would ‘make a horrible example’ out of him if he were to proceed with Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions.

Losing his solid footing, Zulfikar became nervous and started to appease the opposition at home, hoping the turnaround would placate his traditional enemies. He amended the 1973 constitution several times, enhancing his own powers by allowing the federal government to ban political parties and curbing the power of the courts so that, under the third amendment, ‘no order could be made prohibiting detention or granting bail to a person so detained’.
¹
Imagining his position secure, Zulfikar curried favour with the religious parties, small in number but powerful in terms of their fear factor, by amending the constitution to define the parameters of who was a Muslim. The Ahmedis, a small sect of Muslims who believe a prophet after
Muhammad, called Ahmed, will one day walk the earth, were officially defined as non-Muslims. Zulfikar went further: he banned alcohol, drove the country’s gambling and entertainment industries underground and declared Friday, the day of prayers, a public holiday.

But he could not stave off the decline that had already begun. The feudalists, who had infiltrated the PPP in a bid to secure their own positions, began fighting among themselves. Abdul Waheed Katpar, one of the founding members of the PPP, remembers this period as one of intense paranoia for Zulfikar. ‘He thought the army would kill him. He called them the
Khakis
. When the big
zamindar
in the party began to destabilize the party’s image with their public feuding, Zulfikar told them, “Your fighting won’t destroy me, the army will not spare me now – don’t think they will spare you either.”’
²

In 1976, when the butcher of Bengal, General Tikka Khan, retired from the army, Zulfikar replaced him with General Zia ul Haq ‘over the heads of five senior generals’,
³
promoting him to Chief of Army Staff purely because Zulfikar believed him to be a meek, subservient man. Zia swore his undying loyalty to the Prime Minister on a Koran and bowed feverishly whenever Zulfikar walked into a room. Zia was a ‘cunning man’, remembered Katpar, ‘always acting over-courteous with Bhutto. He was very ambitious and that made him very cruel.’
⁴
A stout man, with pomaded hair parted severely in the middle, and a moustache dyed black and carefully combed, Zia came from humble origins. He was not known for his political aspirations, but for his obedience to orders and religiously inspired simple-mindedness.