On July 5, 1977, the elected government of Pakistan’s Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was overthrown in a coup d’etat launched by army chief General Mohammad Ziaul Huq.
Less than two years later, on April 4, 1979, the junta sent Bhutto to the gallows. It was an eerie tale of the Pakistan army raising Bhutto to the heights of politics and then, once he had outlived his usefulness, destroying him ruthlessly.
Ironically, Zia had been handpicked by Bhutto, over six other generals senior to him, to succeed General Tikka Khan, as army chief of staff because of what the prime minister considered his absolute loyalty to him.
The July 1977 coup was effectively the end of a tempestuous career. Back in the later part of the 1960s, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was Pakistan’s man of the future. In the 1970s, when he was Pakistan’s prime minister, an American journal placed him on a pedestal with others who it thought would make a difference in the times ahead. He was, in the view of the journal, among the few men who would be inspirational leadership figures around the world.
By April 1979, he was dead, executed by the brutal military regime of Ziaul Haq. It has been close to four decades since Bhutto was hanged and then buried hurriedly and surreptitiously, on April 4, in his village Garhi Khuda Bakhsh outside Larkana. Since that dark, dismal day, he has remained a man who arouses strong passions among Pakistanis and among people elsewhere around the world.
People of my generation were in school when Bhutto swiftly rose to prominence in Pakistan through his perch in the regime of Field Marshal Ayub Khan. He was minister for commerce before he became minister for industries and natural resources.
In January 1963, when Mohammad Ali Bogra died of a heart attack, Bhutto took charge as minister for external affairs (the term “foreign minister” came to be used later).
At one point, he also took over as general secretary of the ruling Convention Muslim League, with Ayub occupying the presidency of the party. A fanatical admirer of the military ruler at that point of time, Bhutto publicly suggested that Ayub Khan be made Pakistan’s president for life. In 1965, we were too naïve to understand the opportunism that underscored the Bhutto character.
We loved it when he excoriated the Indians at the United Nations Security Council in September 1965. We thought he was defending Pakistan’s interests. In January 1966, it was a glum-looking Bhutto in the company of Lal Bahadur Shastri, Ayub Khan, and their delegations in Tashkent moments after the signing of the Tashkent Declaration. Everyone looked happy. Bhutto did not. We loved him, in naïve fashion, for we had by then begun to dislike Ayub Khan.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto could have been a pivotal figure in history. But by 1977 he had squandered his chances
Bhutto was forced out of the government by Ayub Khan in July 1966. His replacement as foreign minister, Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada, did not impress us. And so when Bhutto formed the Pakistan People’s Party in November 1967, we talked about it in school.
There was no question that he was our hero, that we looked to the day when he would be Pakistan’s president. The moment came, sometime in 1968, when he did inform Pakistanis that he would challenge Ayub Khan at the presidential election scheduled for 1970. Time Magazine carried the report in one of its issues.
By the end of 1968, as political unrest spread across Pakistan and as the name of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman began to be heard increasingly loudly, my father took it upon himself to educate me on the background of the man who would someday be the founder of an independent Bangladesh.
I read through newspaper reports on the proceedings of the Agartala conspiracy case. As Mujib’s persona took an increasingly potent shape in Pakistan, my infatuation for Bhutto went into a state of decline.
When Bhutto went to jail in November 1968, I was not worried. Indeed, I was a trifle amused when, at a judicial hearing challenging his detention, he produced a piece of meat, one of two served to him the previous night at dinner, to demonstrate before the court the degree to which he was being humiliated in prison.
And then he went dramatic. “The wheel of time will turn,” he declaimed, “and in the revolution of that turn a better tomorrow will dawn.” I noted it down in one of my school notebooks.
During the election campaign of 1970, Bhutto demonstrated the purely unconventional and the shockingly dramatic. In Sanghar, as bullets whizzed past his jeep, he jumped off the vehicle and bared his chest to his assailants, daring them to kill him.
It was a brave thing to do, or so I thought. Today, with good reason, I believe it was all stage managed, just as the act of tearing up the UN Security Council resolution in December 1971 was a put-on.
We now know it was a simple piece of paper he was shredding as he stormed out of the chamber. Be that as it may, when Bhutto went to Quetta in June 1970, my classmates and I decided to see him and get his autograph. Somehow it was I who did the talking. He gave us his autograph even as he harangued a delegation of Baloch students unable to decide whether they should align themselves with the PPP or with Bangabandhu’s Awami League.
The Machiavellian aspects of the ZA Bhutto character began to manifest themselves soon after the 1970 elections. We thought he would make a good leader of the opposition once Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman took over as Pakistan’s first elected prime minister.
In the event, Bhutto went on to undermine the results of the election and aided the Pakistan army in brutally trying to suppress the Bengali nationalist movement in March 1971. On December 20, 1971, as he addressed Pakistan’s people hours after being sworn in as Pakistan’s president, he spoke eloquently of building a new Pakistan out of the debris of war.
I heard him, on the radio, ramble on for long minutes on end. The enthusiasm I had once felt, in 1965, for him when he spoke at the UN, was not there anymore.
He had destroyed the lives of Bengalis, had condoned genocide, had been party to the task of depriving Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman of power legitimately derived from an exercise of the ballot.
It was a rain-swept April evening at the Dhaka YMCA in 1979 when my young teacher Syed Khwaja Moinul Hasan and I remembered Bhutto. He had been hanged at dawn and was already in his grave.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto could have been a pivotal figure in history. But by 1977, he had squandered his chances. The very army that had raised him to prominence in the late 1950s was finally to push him to an ignominious death in the late 1970s.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist.
