The Fall From The Heights

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, President and then Prime Minister of what remained of Pakistan after the liberation of Bangladesh in December 1971, was overthrown by his handpicked army chief General Mohammad Ziaul Haq on 5 July 1977. Less than two years later, on 4 April 1979, he was hanged on disputed murder charges. All these years later, Bhutto remains a complex figure for those who observed his rise and fall. Since his execution at age fifty-one, a tragedy that has been characterised as judicial murder committed by a medieval military regime, there are his fans, largely within Pakistan, who have consistently believed that he is a shaheed, a martyr, in the defence of democracy. And then there are those who remain convinced that having ascended to power on the slogan of democracy, he did everything he could to bury democracy under his civilian dictatorship.

A fairly large number of books on Bhutto’s life and career have appeared over the years. And especially since the assassination of his daughter Benazir in December 2007, the Bhutto myth has taken on a new and expanded dimension. And do remember that we are speaking of a man who behaved in near disoriented manner when he spoke to the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci months after he succeeded the disgraced General Yahya Khan in the presidency. Megalomaniac he surely was before her, but the extent to which certain streaks of hauteur manifested themselves in him left even the shock-proof journalist surprised. Bhutto’s aspersions on Indira Gandhi, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and nearly everyone else were too outrageous for polite ears. And even he realised that, subsequently, which is when he sent Pakistan’s diplomats in Italy rushing into relocating Fallaci, once she had left Pakistan, to ask her to withdraw the interview or to ‘admit’ that she had made it all up! She gave the diplomats short shrift.
What appears in the Fallaci interview is what the essential Bhutto was. And that is the point which comes through in Stanley Wolpert’s ‘Zulfi Bhutto of Pakistan.’ Wolpert, the American academic celebrated for seminal works on Mahatma Gandhi and Mohammad Ali Jinnah, was provided with all manner of facilities, including access to Bhutto’s library and papers, by the Bhutto family. That being the basis of the study, it follows that Wolpert’s analysis of the Bhutto character is by and large a sympathetic study of a man who could have done much better as a politician than what he actually did. The author traces the rise of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, essentially after his return to Pakistan following higher studies abroad, and the many factors that went into facilitating it. He was a bright young law professor in the early 1950s. 

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto

By 1958, he was a cabinet minister, happy to be under the tutelage of Pakistan’s first President, General Iskandar Mirza, a man not too well-disposed towards democracy. And yet, when only days later Mirza was sent packing by General Ayub Khan, Bhutto swiftly transferred his loyalties to the new chieftain in town. It is a picture that you come by in the excellent biography of Mirza by his son Humayun Mirza quite some years ago. Bhutto, recalls the younger Mirza, earned General Mirza’s admiration at the very first meeting he had with the President, so much so that Mirza found a spot for the young lawyer in Pakistan’s central cabinet.
And Bhutto was keen to demonstrate his gratitude to Mirza in return. He fired off a fawning missive to the President, informing him in unabashed fashion that history would record that Iskandar Mirza was the greatest man Pakistan had produced, greater than the founder of the state, Mohammad Ali Jinnah. By late October 1958, with Mirza and his wife Naheed on their way to what would be unending exile in Britain, Bhutto made sure that Ayub Khan kept him on in the cabinet. For the subsequent eight years, he was never to look back. He was minister for commerce, for industries and natural resources. 
In 1960, he worked out a deal on energy with the Soviet Union, impressing almost everyone in Pakistan and outside. By early 1963, upon the death of Mohammad Ali Bogra, he was foreign minister in the Ayub regime. Added to that position was the job of general secretary of the Convention Muslim League, the clutch of pro-Ayub politicians propping up the dictatorship. It was Bhutto’s finest hour, from the point of view of genuflection. He proposed that Ayub Khan, already in occupancy of the presidency, remain in power for the rest of his life. It was thus also a moment that made others suspect his motives.
And yet a moment would come when Bhutto, grown inordinately ambitious and decidedly hubristic, would begin to mock Ayub himself. Informed by foreign secretary Aziz Ahmed late on a cold January 1966 night in Tashkent following the signing of a deal by Ayub Khan and Indian Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shahstri, that ‘the bastard is dead’, Bhutto asked, ‘Which one?’ That was one of the many indications of the disdain, even hate, in which he viewed not just his mentor but Indian politicians as well. But as Wolpert would report, there was the confidence Bhutto brought back to a post-1971 devastated Pakistan, a time when the emergence of Bangladesh and the surrender of 93,000 Pakistani soldiers had left his people traumatised. He understood the grave nature of the situation, of the realities that stared him in the face. 
One needed little persuasion to understand that he had been one of the principal elements responsible for the disaster that had befallen Pakistan, but it was one truth Bhutto was unwilling to accept. He blamed everyone else, including Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, for the country’s break-up, but he would not bring himself to acknowledge his own guilt in the genocide that led to the Bengali armed struggle for freedom. But he did eat humble pie in the end. He freed the incarcerated Bangabandhu in January 1972 and saw him off at Chaklala airport. As the Bengali leader flew off into the night sky, Bhutto told waiting journalists as he waited at the airport to welcome the Shah of Iran to Pakistan a few hours later, ‘The nightingale has flown.’
In the final phase of his life on death row, Bhutto penned his final work, ‘If I Am Assassinated’, the introduction to which came from the Indian journalist Pran Chopra. Acknowledging the work as being from the pen of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Chopra writes: ‘He is speaking to history from the platform of his own brilliant mind and his unique experience of one of the most interesting countries of the developing world.’
In a sense, ‘If I Am Assassinated’ is a mea culpa, an enumeration of his thoughts over his role in Pakistan’s modern history. Bubbling with ideas, it is vintage Bhutto at his best. He examines the role of the army in Pakistan’s politics, including the break-up of the country in 1971 (though he says nothing about his own contribution to the disaster). He dwells on the Hamoodur Rehman Commission Report. And he provides readers with his assessment of his own administration and the pressures, local as well as foreign, it worked under. He praises what he calls the noise and din of Indian democracy, after all those years spent in political combat with India.
‘If I Am Assassinated’ will make one, all these decades after Bhutto penned it, appreciate the huge possibilities he symbolised for his country, it also gives one reason to understand why he fell so hard and so fast. His library at his residence in Karachi was a veritable treasure, with visitors surprised by the many works on Napoleon and Hitler adorning the shelves. His treatment of his political rivals remains a dark stain on his legacy. In the period preceding the genocide launched against the Bengalis in March 1971, he made it painfully obvious that he was not willing to be in opposition with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman wielding power in Islamabad. Bhutto’s hubris prevented his rise to statesmanship.  
Bhutto’s tragedy was and remains unique: it was the army that raised him to prominence and power -- and it was the army that destroyed him. Along the way, he showed promise but then slid into the Machiavellian. His shrewdness gave him glory. His cunning caused the death of millions in what would one day be Bangladesh.
(Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, President of Pakistan December 1971-- August 1973, Prime Minister of Pakistan August 1973 -- July 1977, was overthrown by the Pakistan army and subsequently hanged) 
____________________________________
Syed Badrul Ahsan writes on politics, 
diplomacy and history