Two books chronicle Pakistan’s descent into chaos, one set in the 1970s, the other after Benazir Bhutto’s death. Bhupesh Bhandari surveys the history
Pakistan is the kind of place to which, as cricketer Ian Botham famously said, you’d like to send your mother-in-law. That was in the 1980s. Zia-ul-Haq had Islamised Pakistan. History books had been rewritten to wipe out any Indian connection, and ballroom dances and drinks banned in army messes. Capital punishment was introduced for petty crimes. And theologians debated how to handle the issue of interest on loans — after all, according to Shariat it was usury.
But nobody would have dreamt that the country would one day very nearly be consumed by Islamic terrorism. Religion hasn’t quite turned out to be the binding force that Zia thought it would be. Visits to Pakistani news website can be depressing, so full are they of destruction and death. Terrorists seem to be able to strike wherever they want. More recently, former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright outdid even Botham’s observation when she called Pakistan an international migraine.
Out of Pakistan’s descent into chaos have emerged writers who tell stories of pain and grief. Shehryar Fazli’s Invitation is a novel set in Karachi in 1970 — before the country broke in two and the loss of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) plunged the whole country into shame. Amir Mir’s The Bhutto Murder Trail throws up once again all the unanswered questions on Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. Personal loss and angst flow through the pages. Mir, the book leaves you in no doubt, was close to Bhutto. Too close, in fact, to make unbiased observations. In all probability, Bhutto was killed by the monster she had reared. The Taliban, she had said in the not-too-distant past, were like her own children.
The Bhutto family is no stranger to assassination and mysterious death. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was executed in 1979 two years after he was deposed by Zia. His younger son, Shahnawaz, died under mysterious circumstances in France in 1985. He was probably poisoned. His second son, Mir Murtaza, was killed in 1996 in Karachi. Fatima, Mir Murtaza’s daughter, wrote a book on her father and his differences with Benazir (Songs of Blood and Sword, Penguin 2010) in which she stops short of accusing Benazir of her father’s murder. Benazir’s turn was next. Now, Asif Ali Zardari, Benazir’s husband, holds Pervez Musharraf responsible for her death. (The Bhutto name carries a lot of weight in Pakistan, like “Gandhi” in India. Soon after her murder, Benazir’s son changed his name to Bilawal Bhutto from Bilawal Zardari.)
For sheer reading pleasure, Invitation scores over the other. Its chief character Shahbaaz returns from Paris to Karachi to scuttle his aunt’s plan to sell the family orchard. It is the family’s last, tenuous connection with the country. His father was part of a communist conspiracy to seize power, and fled to Paris after the lid was blown off the plot. The Karachi that young Shahbaaz sees is full of drinking revelries (legal), cabarets (legal), pornography (illegal), political intrigue and discrimination against people from East Pakistan. That Karachi could well have been Bombay. The book captures, in a subtle way, how fundamentalists and zealots had slowly begun to replace moderates and assume power by the early 1970s. Two such zealots help Shahbaaz evict the squatters from the family orchard, something even the police failed to accomplish.
The formation of Bangladesh and the defeat of the country’s “invincible” army helped the fundamentalists rise. Defeat was just reward for an army, they argued, that had forsaken the holy word by taking to the ways of the infidels. The Pakistani army, which had traditions not too dissimilar from those of the Indian army, had paid the price for its debauchery. Allah hadn’t failed the army; the army had failed Allah.
The two books offer important perspectives on Pakistan’s painful history. A third book, however, ought to be read with these two. That is M J Akbar’s recent Tinderbox: The Past and Present of Pakistan. He describes the country’s tumultuous journey in the 63 years since its independence. M A Jinnah, the father of Pakistan, though he fought for a separate nation for Muslims on the grounds that they were a different nation from the Hindus, wanted Pakistan to be a secular country. Bury the past, become secular and move on — this was his message to the people of his country. His harangues against the cunning and devious Hindus stopped with Partition.
It is instructive to go through what Jinnah told the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on August 11, 1947: “Make no mistake, Pakistan is not a theocracy or anything like it… You are free to go to your temples. You are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this state of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed — that has nothing to do with the business of the state.”
He didn’t stop at rhetoric. Joginder Nath Mandal, an untouchable Bengali Hindu, was nominated and appointed interim president for a day before Jinnah could be sworn in. Mandal was also a part of Pakistan’s first cabinet of seven — he held the law and labour portfolio. Jinnah then asked Jagannath Azad, a Hindu poet from Lahore, to compose the infant country’s first national anthem. But this proved too much for his successors to digest. This fact has been conveniently erased from public memory. Subsequently Hafiz Julludhuri, a Muslim, was asked to compose a new national anthem. Jinnah was not a devout Muslim. He was irregular with his prayers and is said to have been fond of ham sandwiches and whisky.
But hardcore Islamists were not prepared to give up without a fight. For almost two decades after independence there was incessant shadow boxing between them and the secularists. Though there were undercurrents, the situation was nothing compared to what it is today. Fazli writes without inhibition about those days in Invitation. Slowly, but steadily, the Pakistan of Invitation morphed into a hardline, intolerant state. In 1973, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto gave Pakistan a new constitution that declared Islam the state religion. The posts of president and prime minister were reserved for Muslims. That ended forever the secular state Jinnah had in mind. The fate of non-Muslims in Pakistan was sealed.
Appointing Zia the army chief over others proved Bhutto’s undoing. He was supposed to be a safe bet because he was quiet, unassuming and, everybody thought, without any lofty ambition. Moreover, he was a Punjabi Muslim, not a member of the martial races from the country’s wild north-west frontier. What Bhutto perhaps didn’t know, and his advisors didn’t tell him, was that Zia was deeply religious. While his brother officers chose to drink and dance in the mess, Zia prayed. In 1977 Zia replaced his mentor and become the supreme leader of the country.
This is when the radicalisation of Pakistan began. All government correspondence started with “Bismillah” (“In the name of God”), eating places shut down during the month of Ramadan and tea was prohibited in offices. Islamic laws and punishment were introduced for theft, adultery and drinking. Shariat benches were added to the High Courts, and an appellate Shariat tribunal was added to the Supreme Court. The law of evidence was amended to deny women equality. The hardliners knew that there were people right at the top sympathetic to their cause. Zia would often say that he was on God’s mission and would stay in power for so long as God wished. His death in a plane crash was attributed, by his detractors, to divine retribution.
From that point to Benazir’s murder, the details of which have been captured well by Mir, was, in hindsight, a logical journey.
THE BHUTTO MURDER TRAIL
From Waziristan to GHQ
Author: Amir Mir
Publisher: Tranquebar
Pages: 284
Price: Rs 495
INVITATION
Author: Shehryar Fazli
Publisher: Tranquebar
Pages: 387
Price: Rs 495
