The Enigmatic
Z. A. Bhutto
By Dr Ahmad Faruqui
Dansville, CA
January 5th was the 77th birthday
of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the most controversial
figure in Pakistani history. It is time to reminisce
and grieve.
Bhutto burst on the center-stage of Pakistani
politics as Ayub Khan’s foreign minister
when he laid the cornerstone for Pakistan’s
enduring ties with China in 1963.
The 1965 war with India propelled him onto the
world stage, as he mesmerized the UN Security
Council with oratory. Then came his celebrated
break with Ayub over the Tashkent Declaration
in 1966, the formation of the Pakistan People’s
Party in 1967 and his arrest and release as the
streets from Peshawar to Karachi echoed with cheers
of “Jiyae Bhutto, Sada Jiyae.”
The 1970 elections were a major turning point
for him, as his party’s strong showing in
West Pakistan led to his being appointed the president
after the military debacle of 1971. He proceeded
to retire 29 senior “fat and flabby”
military officers and to restructure the defense
organization. In 1972, he met with Indian Prime
Minister Indira Gandhi in Simla and negotiated
the release of 93,000 Pakistani prisoners of war
and 6,000 square miles of Pakistani territory
without yielding over Kashmir.
To counter India’s military predominance,
he initiated Pakistan’s nuclear bomb program
stating that Pakistanis would make a bomb even
if they had to eat grass. To placate the army,
he made a commitment to making it the “finest
fighting force in Asia,” and doubled defense
expenditures. Striving to develop an independent
foreign policy, the author of “The Myth
of Independence” pulled Pakistan out of
Cold War military alliances. In 1974, he held
a very successful Islamic Summit in Lahore. But
his crowning achievement had come in the prior
year, when the National Assembly passed a new
Constitution.
Tragically, Bhutto proved to be a demagogue like
Argentina’s Juan Peron. He had come to power
on a platform of Islamic socialism, designed to
provide food, clothing and housing to every Pakistani.
This platform created unrealistic expectations
and led to economic anarchy. Tenants stopped paying
rent and workers seized factories through “gherao”
tactics. Bhutto, who had chided Ayub for “using
the language of weapons rather than the weapon
of language” to resolve conflicts now did
the same to re-institute property rights, alienating
his former constituents.
In May 1971, Bhutto had written, “When the
history of this country is written it will be
admitted by our people and by the world outside
that no individual has rendered so much service
to the cause of socialism in Pakistan as I have
done.” However, within a few years of coming
to power, he marginalized the leftist ideologues
within his party. The college students who had
been in the vanguard of his movement to oust Ayub
now joined the growing ranks of those disillusioned
with Bhutto.
His large-scale nationalization program was designed
to “eliminate, once and for all, poverty
and discrimination.” Instead, it resulted
in making access to the state a primary means
of accumulating a private fortune. Corruption
was endemic as resources were transferred from
nationalized enterprises to private individuals.
Unfettered by socialist concerns, the state intervened
to redistribute resources arbitrarily in favor
of those who had access to its patronage. By 1976,
it was clear that Bhutto had merely replaced market
capitalism with state capitalism.
On the economic front, per capita income stagnated,
income distribution worsened, the foreign debt
rose and capital fled from the country. Most of
the problems were caused by economic mismanagement,
but he blamed them on external events.
Things fared poorly on the political front. Disaffection
with his policies caused language riots and labor
strikes. The religious parties united against
him and his concessions to them only made them
more determined to unseat him. He responded by
curtailing press freedoms and creating a security
force to harass, arrest and torture political
opponents.
Citing a terrorist threat, he dismissed the Balochistan
government. This led to a large-scale insurrection
involving 20,000 insurgents and 80,000 army troops,
of whom 5,000 became casualties. Bhutto made no
political moves toward reconciliation and the
fighting petered out.
In the judgment of Stanley Wolpert, just about
all these problems were caused by Bhutto’s
inability to attract to his service men of greater
integrity or probity. After seeing what he did
to J. A. Rahim and Kaneez Fatima, very few such
individuals wanted to jump on the Bhutto bandwagon.
Nervous about his political standing, he encouraged
subordinates to rig the national elections in
1977. They went overboard, giving him 155 of the
200 seats rather than the simple majority that
was expected by most political observers. The
subsequent street violence and 350 deaths marked
a turning point in his political fortunes.
The army, which always regarded itself as the
guardian of national interest, took over power.
Two years later, Bhutto was hanged on a murder
charge. His prophecy that his “assassination
on the gallows” would result in rivers of
blood flowing from Peshawar to Karachi remained
unfulfilled. He was yesterday’s icon, having
succumbed to what Max Weber called the “routinization
of charisma.”
At the beginning of his presidency, Bhutto had
quoted Machiavelli to Oriana Fallachi while analyzing
Ayub’s downfall: “Wrong political
decisions are like tuberculosis, difficult to
detect in the beginning but easy to cure, and,
with the passage of time, easy to detect but difficult
to cure.” Unknowingly, he had written his
own obituary.
Driven by a sense of destiny, Bhutto considered
himself a poet and a revolutionary. But his prized
collection of books was filled with volumes about
Hitler, Mussolini and Napoleon. When he was detained
at the Sihala Rest House by the army in 1977,
he asked for some of his books on Hitler to be
brought to him so that he could figure out “how
Hitler was able to control his generals and I
was not.”
Bhutto was felled by his towering hubris, which
caused him to overreach himself. Years of learning
in the west failed to subdue the eastern feudal
lord inside of him. Underneath the polished Saville
Row exterior there remained the mailed fist of
a Mughal emperor.
His biggest mistake was the failure to institutionalize
democracy and actualize the promises contained
in the 1973 Constitution. But how could hse have
done it, since he could not countenance opposition
within his own party, let alone in parliament?
Alas, his brilliance had a Shakespearean quality
and carried within itself the seeds of its own
destruction.
The day has come for Pakistan’s leaders
to learn from Bhutto’s tragedy and shun
authoritarianism. They should listen to the people
before claiming to speak for them.
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