A Journalist Looks Back
Murder in the Park
By Aslam Sheikh
It was my sixteenth day in the Rawalpindi office of the Associated Press of Pakistan (PPP) as a trainee-journalist. But what a day! I shook hands with the first prime minister of the country Liaquat Ali Khan in the forenoon at the then modest Chaklala airport for the first time. By the evening the prime minister was dead, a victim of an hired assasin's bullet in the city's largest park --- comparable in a way to London's Hyde Park as far as political congregations are concerned. To this day the murder remains a mystery. Incidentally since then the prime-ministerial seat has not been a bed of roses.
Karachi was in those days the federal capital. But Rawalpindi had its own importance. Partly it was its proximity to Kashmir. But more importantly it was the headquarters of the armed forces. Even before 1947 Pindi was the headquarter of British India's Northern Command and its cantonment was described as the largest in the sub-continent.
Some months before the assassination of Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, Rawalpindi was catapulted into world headlines for what came to be known as the Pindi Conspiracy Case involving some senior army officers including General Akbar Khan known to be nursing grouse against the move for a ceasefire in Kashmir.
Among the four civilians, the arrest of poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz, then the editor of a prestigious English daily with a leftwing tilt gave the alleged conspiracy a special dimension. Equally stunning was the detention of Sajjad Zaheer, another literary figure of repute and more importantly the Secretary General of the Communist party of Pakistan. It is now well known that the central committee of the communist party had opposed any backing for an army coup and censured Sajjad Zaheer for participating in a meeting of angry army officers on his own initiative. Faiz of course was there as a personal friend of General Akbar and some other army officers having known him since the Second World War when the poet served as a public relations Colonel in the British army as the Soviet Union joined the Allies against Hitler.
The plan for any coup against Liaquat’s government was indeed dropped as is now well known. But this provided a God-sent opportunity to pro-West prime minister and newly elevated General Ayub Khan for ordering a crackdown on not only a small group of known communists but even other liberal elements in the media and trade union movement to appease Americans who at that time were as afraid of "Godless Soviets" as they are today of the Islamic civilization and God-fearing Muslims. The current witch-hunt of Muslims in the US under new home security laws is an amusing reminder of McCarthyism of 1950’s when the US executed its two best scientists Rosenbergs about whom Faiz wrote a moving poem. Similarly some professors and scholars were hounded out of prestigious universities on baseless charge of having links with the American communist party or sympathy for Soviet Union.
The APP office in Pindi was located in a largely military area and housed in a building known as the Soldiers home and was to serve in a more modified form as the Press Information Department of the federal government in the early sixties after Pindi was elevated to the status of an interim capital. In the earlier decade the building housed the Public Relations outfit of the Kashmir Affairs Ministry. Apart from the defense ministry, Rawalpindi also had a federal ministry by the name of Kashmir Affairs Ministry headed then by a federal minister -- the well-known and ambitious political figure Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani. The APP office was also in the vicinity of the Inter-Services Press Relations (ISPR) Directorate which was assigned the task of projecting the armed forces. ISPR then was headed by Commander Maqbul Hussain who often boasted of his Second World War coverage as a correspondent of Reuters. His aides included such well-known figures as Col. Masud, Major Khalid Ali who later served at many foreign capitals as press officers, Major Ibnul Hasan later editor of Pakistan Economist and Major Taffazal Siddiqi who earlier served as a reporter for four years.
Those were bad days for the print media as far as financial remuneration was concerned for the hard work done in the newspapers and news agencies. In the still relatively under-developed profession of print media the national news agency (carved out of Reuter's subsidiary in undivided British India) alone had some regular salary structure and some measure of security of service. It attracted a large number of new aspiring journalists who later distinguished themselves in many national newspapers.
Before I joined the Pindi office of the APP, for a month or two I got the benefit of a soft induction in Karachi, then the capital of the country. The APP head office there was located in the old dilapidated Badri building on the McLeod Road (renamed later as Chundrigar Road) not far from the Kemari harbour. There I familiarized not only with the working of the agency but also for the first time met the old guard of English-language journalists like Jamil Ansari, Zamirudin Ahmad, I.H.Burney of weekly Outlook fame. Presiding over the agency was Malik Tajudding who was manager of Lahore office of the Associated Press of India, a subsidiary of Reuters during the British rule.
The fledging APP worked under private management though the news agency was subsidized by the government in a concealed manner and skillfully used for projecting the government’s point of view. But the good thing then was that it was done without suppressing opposition's stories. A total government takeover of the news agency in which the ministry of information (then only a component of the larger home ministry) called the shots was still some years away.
The assassination of Pakistan’s first prime minister in Rawalpindi's "Company Bagh," later renamed as Liaquat Gardens, was incidentally the first news story of national importance that I helped to cover with my senior colleague at the Associated Press of Pakistan. A senior journalist Hasan Akhter, later a veteran of Dawn, was then in charge of APP's Pindi office. But it so happened that a few days before Liaquat’s visit to Pindi, Akhter had to be hospitalized for his appendicitis. As he was recovering, Mr. Chishti of Bahawalpur office was redeployed to the Pindi office to officiate for Mr. Akhter for some weeks. I was then too junior and still a mere trainee to be given that responsibility. But Chishti relied a good deal on me and encouraged me to do important assignments.
When Liaquat's visit to Pindi was announced the then editor of APP at Karachi headquarters Jameel Ansari (who later joined Dawn) rang up to emphasize that the prime minister’s speech needed to be covered carefully as it is expected to be very important both from national and international angle. Chishti asked me to accompany him to the venue of the meeting for preparing comprehensive notes. (Tape-recorders were a distant invention yet. Stenography was the great asset in those days for the news agency reporters. But I relied on my own comprehensive note taking.
As we prepared to cycle to the venue of the proposed meeting , the prime minister's PRO staying at the Pindi’s circuit house rang up to say that we should join him at the circuit house Rawalpindi where he was staying to go to the meeting place in his official car so that he could brief us about the importance of Liaquat's speech. This corroborates the widely held view after his assassination that he was to make some important announcement possibly about foreign policy in his Pindi speech. We were helped to be seated by his PRO quite close to the dias where curiously profusely garlanded Liaquat sat alone in a solitary chair put on the dias. Unlike the tight security of today, the dias was unprotected by any special improvisation. Curiously the most important individual in the land sat exposed to an unexpected attempt at assassination. Undoubtedly Liaquat was at that point at the height of his political popularity though within the political and bureaucratic establishment he had his critics too. He had apparently consolidated his personal power after Quaid’s death three years ago by playing one provincial leader against another. Nonetheless his image in the public was fairly high.
The venue of the meeting was jam-packed where a large crowd had turned up to hear him. Liaquat had hardly risen to address the crowd when somebody fired from a close range right in the region of his heart. He lay bleeding on the dias with a thick garland of flowers around his neck. There was a total confusion in the garden with many VIP guests including the then commissioner of Pindi division hiding behind sofas and chairs in a desperate attempt for safe cover. My senior colleague Chishti decided to rush to the office to "flash some takes" on the tele-printer to the Karachi office which was the headquarters of the agency. There was no direct dialing in those days nor today’s quick means of news transmission. Chishti asked me to go to the CMH to follow the story at that end. There was a big crowd there too. Though Liaquat was probably already dead the then Kashmir Affairs Minister Mushtaq Gurmani came out of the hospital premises and told the crowd that Liaquat was still alive and was undergoing a blood transfusion. On this the crowd shouted "Liaquat Ali zindabad”. In the meanwhile our Karachi office instructed the Pindi bureau not to release the story directly from the Pindi office to the subscribers and pass on the eyewitness account to the headquarters which would release it directly to all subscribers.
While the world had known about Liaquat’s murder from international broadcasts the people of Pakistan did not know that their prime minister was dead till late in the evening. Moscow radio while announcing the story commented that the murder was possibly the consequence of Anglo-American rivalry in the region. The killer was an Afghan national Said Akbar. From all accounts it seemed that he was a hired assassin.
Over the years many inquiries ordered under public pressure failed to unveil the real motivation. But soon it was widely alleged that Liaquat's murder was the result of power struggle within the top layers of Pakistan. Apparently the conspiracy was conducted in collution with some foreign elements. But it remains a mystery to this day like the many other assassinations. It is a tragic landmark in the country's gradual drift towards weakening of the political authority and the supremacy of civil-military bureaucratic establishment. It also was followed by the Army's repeated intervention in civilian affairs. No wonder in the years to come prime ministers were either disgraced and dismissed or met more tragic ends like that of Z.A. Bhutto.
Following Liaquat's murder an important reshuffle took place in the top hierarchy with Khawaja Nazimuddin stepping down from Governor-General's position to the office of prime minister and Finance Minister Ghulam Mohammad elevated to the position of the Governor-General. A nomenclature stemming from the interim Independence Act because l956 constitution was some years away. Apart from this key change a significant development was that Kashmir Affairs Minister Gurmani who accompanied the body of Liaquat Ali to Karachi from Pindi was named the Interior Minister in the federal cabinet.
In the new power equation the politicians came to acquire a relatively weaker position. The civil-military establishment was gradually moving towards a more dominant position in the power equation with tragic and far-reaching consequences for the country.
This tragic incident also marked the crucial stage in the protracted battle of the elites for the usurpation of the main benefits of the new independent State where power had been transferred from the colonial masters to local elites without any change in the socio-economic order.
(Aslam Sheikh’s youngest daughter, Feriyal Aslam, currently a PhD student at the Department of World Arts and Cultures, University of California at Los Angeles, had emailed this article of her late father to Pakistan Link. The late Mr Sheikh wasDirector General of the Associated Press of Pakistan (APP), and a leading columnist. He died in December 2004. According to Feriyal ’Murder in the Park’ is the first of a series of five articles that the late Mr Aslam Sheikh wrote in his last years. For Aslam Sheikh the articles were not “a personal memoir but episodes of the story of Pakistan’s perpetual multi-dimensional crisis that has lingered on since its birth in 1947 and the eventful half-century that followed before the new Millennium. These episodes are unique as witnessed from the close vicinity of the ‘ringside seat of a journalist’ as he describes later in his memoir,” says Feriyal Aslam)
