Zulfikar Ali
Bhutto Revisited Part I (1956-1966)
By Siyasi Mubassir
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto
was hanged on April 4, 1979. "Upon hearing of
his execution," writes Professor Anwar Syed, "many
Pakistanis wept; some rejoiced. Never before had
a politician or ruler in the country been loved
and hated as much as he." (Anwar H. Syed, The
Discourse and Politics of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto,
New York, St. Martin's Press, 1992, P. xi) As
stated by Professor Syed, there was probably no
other Pakistani ruler who had aroused such intense
and deeply polarized emotions in so many people
as Bhutto. A man with an extremely complex personality,
he made a deep impact, both good and bad, on the
country's history, politics, and economy; although,
probably the most well-read among all Pakistani
politicians, he failed to understand the limits
of power and, as a result, met a most tragic death.
The purpose of this
article is to give an objective analysis of Zulfikar
Ali Bhutto's political career, personality, leadership,
and rule. Bhutto's Ascent to Power Zulfikar Ali's
father, Sir Shah Nawaz Bhutto, one of the wealthiest
and most influential waderas (landowners) of Sindh,
was a good friend of Governor General (later President)
Iskandar Mirza. Describing the friendship, Professor
Stanley Wolpert writes, "Mirza had been a regular
guest for the annual hunt in Larkana, staying
at Al-Murtaza (the Bhutto family home)… . (In
the) winter of 1955-56, he brought (General) Ayub
along to Larkana for the hunt ... Both generals
enjoyed the generous hospitality of the Bhutto
family ... whose grand feasts and lavish parties
were appreciated by all lovers of good food and
fine wines and whiskies. Zulfi and Nusrat were
charming, delightful hosts. His quick wit and
endless anecdotes of Oxford, London, Los Angeles,
and Berkeley, and his sharp grasp of politics
and diplomacy impressed the generals... Governor
General Mirza and General Ayub were captivated;
the latter would long remain so." (Stanley Wolpert,
Zulfi Bhutto of Pakistan: His Life and Times,
New York, Oxford University Press, 1993, P. 49)
Soon thereafter, Mirza invited Bhutto to join
his own political creation, the ruling Republican
Party, presumably, to be able to offer him a ministership.
Bhutto wisely declined to accept this offer arguing
prophetically that the party would not last long.
The party did die within a couple of years after
its birth.
Then, Mirza offered
Bhutto the mayoralty of Karachi, which he declined
again, regarding the job as too dull for his taste
and temperament. Later, he accepted Mirza's offer
of membership of the Pakistan delegation to the
UN, where he gave an impressive speech. In March1958,
Mirza nominated him as the chairman of the Pakistan
delegation to the UN Conference on the Law of
the Sea at Geneva. After receiving this appointment,
Bhutto wrote a flattering letter to Mirza, assuring
him of his "imperishable and devoted loyalty to
you." He added, "(w)hen the history of our Country
is written by objective Historians, your name
will be placed even before that of Mr. Jinnah.
Sir, I say this because I mean it, and not because
you are the President of my Country..." (Z.A.
Bhutto to Major General Iskander Mirza, April
1958, held in Bhutto Family Library and Archives,
cited in Wolpert, P.55) Bhutto's eloquence at
the UN conference was highly applauded by other
delegates, including John Foster Dulles, the US
Secretary of State. Bhutto "reveled in his own
wit and charm, his clever turn of phrase, declamatory
skill, the ring of rhetoric that came so naturally
to him" (Wolpert, P.56). Now, Bhutto had become
Pakistan's rising star: his charm, brilliance,
oratory skills, wide learning, and his ability
to flatter his boss (as in the example above)
were his great assets. Bhutto was also an extremely
hard-working man.
During Bhutto's
official visit to the US as Prime Minister, President
Nixon remarked to the former's personal physician,
"I believe His Excellency (Bhutto) works for 16
to 18 hours a day" and jokingly asked the doctor,
"What do you give him?" (This story was narrated
to this writer by the physician himself.) Within
six months after declaring his "imperishable and
devoted loyalty" to Iskandar Mirza, Bhutto had
no difficulty in abandoning his benefactor and
joining Ayub Khan's cabinet as the Minister of
Commerce. He continued to rise in Ayub Khan's
eyes, who found in the young brilliant Sindhi
a good spokesman for his military regime. To identify
himself with the Ayub Regime, there was a complete
volte face in Bhutto's thinking: for instance,
he now argued that the unitary system of government
was "best for Pakistan", although just a couple
of years ago, in a newspaper article, he had strongly
condemned the idea of a unitary state and had
argued forcefully that only a federal system of
government could keep Pakistan united. Bhutto
helped Ayub in several ways. On his advice, Ayub
conferred on himself the rank of Field Marshal
in order to establish his superiority over the
hierarchy-conscious Pakistan army's generals.
Bhutto also helped
Ayub in drafting a new constitution and creating
the system of "Basic Democracies," which also
served as an electoral college and made it much
easier for Ayub to get elected as the President
in 1964. Besides being helpful to Ayub in several
ways, Bhutto had no dearth of praise for his boss.
"He referred to Ayub Khan as Pakistan's Lincoln,
Lenin, Ataturk (the founder of modern Turkey)
and, above all, as Saladin ...." (Bhutto's Statement
in Pakistan Annual, 1961, cited in Dilip Mukerjee,
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto: Quest for Power, New Delhi,
Vikas, 1972, Pp. 36-37, cited in Syed, P. 28)
Pleased with Bhutto's flattery and impressed with
his brilliance, Ayub made him his close confidante,
nominated him Secretary General of the reconstituted
Pakistan Muslim League and made him his Minister
of Foreign Affairs.
Bhutto and
the War of 1965
"(W)hen Bhutto was prime minister, he told Salman
Taseer that he had indeed initiated the idea of
sending guerilla fighters into Indian Kashmir
(in 1965), and that he had convinced Ayub Khan
that the time to engage India in a confrontation
had come. But he added that instead of sending
Kashmiri guerillas, as he had advised, 'they'
sent in regular Pakistani troops in plain clothes
and mismanaged the whole enterprise." (Salman
Taseer, Bhutto: A Political Biography, New Delhi,
Vikas, 1980, Pp. 46-47, cited in Syed, P. 49)
The Pakistani infiltration in Indian Kashmir in
1965 led to a full-scale war between India and
Pakistan, which was a nasty surprise and a great
shock for Ayub Khan as Foreign Minister Bhutto,
who regarded himself as a great expert in international
relations - a view shared by Ayub and many others
as well - had assured the President that India
would not cross recognized international borders
and would not, therefore, invade Pakistan. Besides
being wrong in his prediction, Bhutto, during
the war, was sending strange messages to Ayub
Khan. While the Indian forces were moving into
Sindh and Bahawalpur in West Pakistan, where most
of the Pakistani troops were concentrated, Bhutto
was advocating some wild ideas.
In a "Top Secret"
memo to Ayub, he predicted that India might attack
East Pakistan, in this eventuality he suggested
the need for a "link up" of Pakistani and Chinese
troops in eastern India, targeted at liberating
Nepal and Sikkim from Indian domination and providing
Pakistan "a stranglehold over Assam, whose disposition
we could then determine." (Z.A.Bhutto, memo in
"India" volume held in Bhutto Family Library and
Archives, cited in Wolpert, P. 93) By this time,
Ayub had more or less lost confidence in his foreign
minister's sagacity and "knew how perilously low
his army's supply of bombs and bullets was by
the third week of September..." (Wolpert, P.93)
He, therefore, made the wise decision to end the
war. It is important to analyze the consequences
of the tragic war of 1965 as, in view of this
writer, it impacted Pakistan in several negative
ways.
1) Before the war,
Pakistan was receiving large scale economic and
military assistance from the United States, according
to some estimates about $500 million every year,
which in terms of today's currency value would
be a sum running into a few billion dollars. Because
of the war, the US ended the military aid completely
and reduced economic assistance considerably.
2) The Pakistan
government propaganda machinery heralded this
war as ending in Pakistan's victory, which created
a false euphoria, particularly in West Pakistan.
The war was at best a draw, albeit a great compliment
to Pakistan, in view of its military's smaller
size and its far fewer resources as compared to
those of India.
3) During the years
following the war, India started a huge military
buildup, acquiring weapons from different sources.
With the US military assistance ended, and with
Pakistan's far fewer economic resources, the gap
between Pakistan's military strength and that
of India continued to widen significantly in India's
favor during the ensuing years. 4) After the war,
in a National Assembly speech in Dacca, Foreign
Minister Bhutto declared that during the war,
it was confidently assumed that, in the event
of an attack on East Pakistan, China would come
to its defense. This was an alarming policy shift
since, before the war, the general assumption
was that "the defense of East Pakistan lay in
the West." Now the Bengalis were being told that
their defense lay in the hands of China. Obviously
this came as a rude shock to many Bengalis who
contended that if China was responsible for their
defense then what was the advantage in their being
a part of Pakistan? As an independent country,
they argued, they would be able to take care of
their defense more effectively. Already, most
Bengalis were totally frustrated with the Ayub
Regime as they felt that they were denied an equitable
share in power.
In Ayub's Pakistan,
power was vested in the military, bureaucratic,
and business-industrial elites, among whom Bengalis'
representation was minimal, although they constituted
a majority of the country's population. To bring
matters to a head, a war was thrust on them, a
war they did not want, which was waged without
their consultation or agreement, and during which
they remained helpless observers. The reduced
US economic assistance following the war also
started hurting economic development in East Pakistan.
All these factors led to the promulgation of the
Six-Point Formula by Shaikh Mujib-ur-Rahman, which
envisaged an emaciated central government of Pakistan,
having no taxation powers and with jurisdiction
in only two subjects: foreign affairs and defense.
5) In a talk given at Oxford University, the British
High Commissioner in India, Freeman, stated that
before the 1965 war, there was a subconscious
but deeply-ingrained concern in the minds of many
Indians that since for almost 600 years of the
sub-continent's history, the Muslim armies had
often defeated the Hindu armies, the Pakistani
military, in a future war, would be likely to
do better than its Indian counterpart.
What the 1965 war
did, according to Freeman, was that, to their
delight, the Indians learned that there was nothing
superior about the Pakistan army and that India
could defeat Pakistan. This was a great psychological
breakthrough for India. (Freeman's comments were
narrated to this writer by Khurshid Haider, who
was inducted as a Director General, Pakistan's
Ministry of Foreign Affairs under Prime Minister
Bhutto's lateral entry program. She was a scholar
in residence at Oxford when Freeman gave this
talk.) With regard to the 1965 war, "... Ayub
Khan told G. W. Choudhury (a Bengali minister
in Yahya Khan's cabinet) more than once that the
decision to start the conflict with India in 1965
had been the fatal mistake of his career, and
he blamed Bhutto and Aziz Amad (Foreign Secretary
and Bhutto's close friend) for having misled him."
(G.W. Choudhury, The Last Days of United Pakistan,
Bloomington, IN, Indiana University press, 1974,
P.20, cited in Syed, P. 49) How hurt and angered
Ayub Khan felt about the war was also commented
on by Mian Arshad Husain, a former Foreign Minister
of Pakistan in an article published in the Pakistan
Times, several years ago. According to Arshad
Husain, Ayub never forgave himself for the war
of 1965.
Tashkent
In January 1966, the Soviet leaders invited Ayub
Khan and Prime Minister Shastri for talks in the
Soviet Central Asian city of Tashkent. Bhutto
was a member of the Pakistan delegation but Ayub
excluded him from the main negotiations he had
with Shastri and Prime Minister Kosygin. At Shastri's
insistence, the Indo-Pakistan agreement to be
signed by Ayub and Shastri was to include a "no-war"
clause. "Bhutto hit the ceiling when he read (this
clause), threatening to fly home to 'expose' Ayub's
treacherous 'surrender' to all of Pakistan." (Wolpert,
P.101) Ayub succumbed to Bhutto's pressure and
the "no war" clause was omitted from the final
agreement. With hindsight, one could argue that
Ayub Khan had shown statesmanship by agreeing
to include the no-war clause in the joint declaration
and that Bhutto acted unwisely by opposing it
so fiercely. The 1965 war had failed to deliver
Kashmir to Pakistan. Now that the US military
assistance to Pakistan had ended and Pakistan's
own resources were far fewer than India's, how
did Bhutto expect that another military showdown
with India would result in Kashmir's accession
to Pakistan? Also, with a no war pact in place,
India might have been under moral and international
pressure not to wage a war in East Pakistan in
1971.
Ayub Khan
and Kashmir
With regard to the Kashmir dispute, Arnold Smith,
a Canadian national and a former Secretary General
of the Commonwealth of Nations, has described
the following interesting discussion he had with
Ayub Khan. "Although Pakistan and India had forgiven
the sins of the colonial power, they had not healed
the wounds left between them in Kashmir after
Partition. Twenty years later, in 1967, I visited
Ayub Khan and posed a parallel to him from Canadian
history. Canada could, I suggested, have spent
decades feeling aggrieved about the land-grab
by which the United States possessed itself of
the tip of the 'Alaskan panhandle' when Teddy
Roosevelt sent troops north in 1902, or about
the much earlier boundary dispute between New
Brunswick and Maine. We could have spent our energy
in trying to right these ancient wrongs. Instead,
we had grumbled for a time at the unfavorable
decision of an international tribunal, and then
settled down to cementing good neighborly relations
and to developing the vast natural resources and
spaces we had left. The Pakistan president seemed
fascinated by this New World pragmatism, but maintained
that, while that might seem a logical way to end
the Kashmir dispute, it was not practical politics
among Punjabis." (Arnold Smith with Clyde Sanger,
Stitches in Time: The Commonwealth in World Politics,
Don Mills, Ontario, General Publishing CO., 1981,
P.131) It seems that Ayub was trying to pass the
buck - shifting the responsibility to the Punjabis
with regard to the Kashmir dispute. The fact of
the matter was that it was not the Punjabis but
a Pathan (Ayub Khan) and a Sindhi (Bhutto) who,
for the sake of Kashmir, had put Pakistan's territorial
integrity at stake in 1965.
Bhutto
Ousted
As stated above, Ayub had lost confidence in Bhutto
after the 1965 war; the latter's opposition to
the Tashkent Agreement and his plans to start
his own political party to oust Ayub further antagonized
the President. In June 1966, "Ayub informed Zulfi
(Bhutto) that it was best for both of them, and
for Pakistan's international credibility, that
he take 'sick leave' abroad." (Wolpert, P.108)
That was the end of Bhutto's association with
the Ayub government.
Summing
Up
Bhutto was a beneficiary of his aristocratic lineage,
which propelled him to a central ministership
at a young age. However, one should not ignore
his other assets: brilliance, hard work, vast
knowledge, charm, and wit. Also as noted above,
his outright flattery of Mirza and Ayub must have
been pleasing to the ears of these two powerful
men and helped him in his political career. As
discussed above, the most important and at the
same time the most unfortunate event of the period
under discussion (1956-1966) was the 1965 War.
Here, as the chief diplomat of Pakistan, Bhutto
should have been a restraining influence on Ayub,
the Field Marshal. Instead, he turned out to be
the main instigator of this war - a war that,
in the long run, proved to be too costly for Pakistan.
