Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir (41 page)

That summer, I remember my father saying something to me about returning to Pakistan. He always spoke of home, always spoke of the return, but this time he added, almost as an afterthought, ‘Don’t tell Wadi, OK?’ I promised Papa I wouldn’t say a word. The chasm had already opened.

When the news came that Zia had died in a plane crash, Papa and I were at a family friend’s house. My grandmother, Joonam, called our apartment and Aunty Ghinwa picked up the phone. Joonam was hysterical and had barely asked for her son before blurting out, ‘He’s dead, my God, Zia’s dead.’ Ghinwa frantically dialled Murtaza’s friend’s number and shrieked into the receiver that she had to speak to Mir. When his friends passed him the phone he listened quietly. His friends watched him, saw his neck turn red and worried that something awful had happened, that some other misfortune had befallen the family. Then Murtaza screamed. Ghinwa heard him drop the phone.

He rushed back home, me rushing along with him, all of us ecstatic that it was over. Eleven years of fear and violence were over. Zia was dead.

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15
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T
he run-up to the 1988 elections started on the wrong foot. Benazir chose not to enter into electoral alliances with the other parties that made up the MRD – a mistake that resulted in her having to cope with a hostile coalition once in government – because she wanted to be free of the MRD’s 1986 Declaration of Provincial Autonomy. The declaration called for limits to be placed on the centre’s power in four areas: currency, communications, defence and foreign policy.
¹
The declaration went a step further towards democratizing politics by placing ‘strict limits on the dissolution of provincial governments by the centre’.
²

Benazir might have been furthering her political career by championing a personal image of democratic leadership, but according to the historian Ian Talbot she ‘displayed little interest in strengthening and democratizing her own party, while simultaneously leading the national crusade for the democratization of Pakistan’s politics’.
³

As a result, she alienated many of the Pakistan People’s Party’s inner circle. Founding members and old guard, including her uncle, Mumtaz Bhutto, and Hafeez Pirzada, the author of the 1973 constitution, were among many who left the party under Benazir’s leadership. A core of personal business contacts and establishment politicians who trimmed their sails to the prevailing political wind and who would soon become the new party’s power brokers swiftly replaced them. Benazir’s new husband, Asif Zardari, was key in the shaping of this new coterie through his role in giving out election tickets for the 1988 elections. He allocated these tickets to his school friends and loyal
sidekicks or as Talbot puts it ‘opportunist entrants to the party’, effectively sidelining old party loyalists.
⁴

Dr Ghulam Hussain, a founding member, and one of the prisoners released in the aftermath of the PIA hijacking, found no place for himself under the new Benazir/Zardari reshaping of the PPP. Hussain had served as the party’s Secretary-General under Zulfikar, a role that cost him five years in jail during martial law. ‘Zia sent three generals to me in jail,’ Dr Hussain tells me at his house in Islamabad, ‘and they asked me to resign from my Secretary-General position in writing, offering me a ministership in the new regime. Otherwise, should I refuse, they warned, they would prosecute me for treason. They accused me of leading a shooting at Liaqat Bagh in Rawalpindi. Imagine! There was no trial, no conviction, I was simply arrested and put in jail. I told them, I’ll stay with Bhutto come what may. They made good their threats once we were brought before a judge, to scare us into understanding our position as prisoners without rights and I caused a scene. I said to the judge, “You are scared of Zia. I am scared of God, not this small man.” I was led out of the courtroom shouting
Zia hatao!
’ – Remove Zia!’

‘Benazir, who couldn’t read Urdu – she had to write her speeches in English – bypassed me and gave the PPP ticket in Jhelum to Chaudry Aftaf, who was from the Pakistan Muslim League – Zia’s party! – because he was a
jagirdar
, a man so powerful as a feudal master that he owned serfs. This same man, who violated all the party’s principles ideologically, had also sat in Zia’s
Majlis e Shoora
! I didn’t even learn about my demotion from Benazir. I read about it in the press the next day.’
⁵
The PPP’s current Prime Minister, Yousef Raza Gilani, was also a trusted member of Zia’s religious council, which rivalled parliament in its power, during the days of the Junta, Dr Hussain reminds me.

While veteran party members were swept aside, it was the workers who felt the most betrayed. Maulabux is a stout
Sheedi
man, of African, Sindhi and Baloch ethnic heritage. He and his wife live in Lyari, the beating heart of the PPP in Karachi and a Bhutto stronghold for decades. ‘
Dil se
, from our hearts, we were with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’,
⁶
begins Maulabux, whose friends and comrades call him Mauli, meaning ‘white radish’ in Urdu, a nickname so widespread that even he uses it now.

‘Our work, our sacrifices, were because of the love we had for him. Our thought, after his execution, was that no compromise with the killers of Bhutto was acceptable. The road was very difficult, of course, but we weren’t afraid of paying with arrest and with our lives.’ It’s an emotional subject for Maulabux, who reminds me as we’re speaking that we met once long ago – in Kabul when I was a baby. ‘Those of us who worked for the party during the dictatorship, we were political workers. It was a big struggle, but we were a family. If one of us was stopped, was harmed, we all rallied round. We learned politics from the senior founding members of the party. We were young then, we considered ourselves their students and we fell in love with the socialism, the egalitarianism, the principles of the PPP.’

And they suffered. They risked arrest and flogging to pass out pamphlets for the MRD and to stage women’s meetings and protest rallies in public roundabouts and parks. When things became too difficult, they would take the bus from Karachi to Gwadar in Balochistan then sneak across the border to Iran. The Iranians, ethnically Baloch on the border, would let them through without visas and they would lie low with friends and family in Irani Balochistan. The process of going underground was expensive, and they paid out of their own pockets. ‘Mir
baba
thanked so many of our families and relatives across the border, personally reaching out to them by letters and phone calls, he thanked them for protecting us workers during a time of need. All of us joined Mir
baba
when he returned to Pakistan, there was no doubt that we would.’ Why? I asked. ‘Because,’ Mauli said, uncharacteristically growing quiet, ‘because we were still struggling.’

Shahnawaz Baloch, a thinner, taller replica of Maulabux, steps in to speak. The mood of our conversation has changed. There is a reckoning that someone has to make. ‘By 1985 we had grown disillusioned with Benazir’, he starts, speaking to me in a mixture of Urdu and English. ‘The party had been taken over. A part of it by
capitalist rich industrialists with zero political understanding, another part of it by friends of the Chairperson and her husband, another by
jagirdar
, another by feudals or
zamindar,
and those workers who had merited leadership positions because of their understanding of the party’s ideology, because of their sacrifices, their loyalty, their immersion in the communities they represented – we were pushed out. Benazir was catering to those other factions for power. We lost our right to speak.’
⁷

Aftab Sherpao, who was elected a vice-president of the PPP in 1976, was yet another of the party elite who lost his voice as the party regrouped in preparation for the 1988 elections. ‘There was a vast difference between those two PPPs,’ he says. Sherpao is the consummate statesman. When we met, he had just left General Musharraf’s cabinet – he had been Pakistan’s Interior Minister during the country’s fight alongside the United States in the War on Terror, a role that placed Sherpao in danger as suicide bombers attacked him and his family, narrowly missing him several times. Some years earlier, Sherpao had founded a splinter group of the PPP, one that was openly critical of the PPP under Benazir and her husband. ‘Mr Zulfikar Bhutto was a good listener. I was a provincial minister in the NWFP at the time and used to watch him as he sat for hours and hours listening to everyone around the table before taking a final decision on any matter, regardless how large or small. She, his daughter, if she didn’t like something you said, she would cut you off. As far as political brilliance is concerned, there was no match. Yes, she had acumen, but not to the extent her father had. She got her momentum from
him
.’
⁸

The party’s decision to negotiate with the army and to work with Zia’s protégés in the lead-up to the elections carried with it the end of the PPP as its workers knew it. ‘The differences between Mr Bhutto’s party and Benazir’s only grew,’ Shahnawaz continued. ‘It became like a war – us old workers against these businessmen who had erased the party’s founding ideology. It was a war about
soch,
about thought.’ Mauli agrees. ‘She was the opposite of what Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had been. He made the party what it was by giving tickets to the small, the poor. But working with Benazir, we were thrown aside and watched
waderas
’ – a mixture of the land-cultivating
zamindar
and peasantexploiting
jagirdar
– ‘receive ticket after ticket. It was no longer about merit, it had become about power and favours.’

Why didn’t they see it coming? Why had they been taken in by Benazir’s politics, opportunistic at best? Mauli thinks for a moment. He nods, he knows what I’m asking. ‘When Benazir came back from self-imposed exile in 1986 after her brother’s murder we joined her because she promised to take Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s programmes forward. We stayed with her because she promised us no more Bhuttos would be killed, that they would be protected by the strength of the party. Even then, however, people asked us, “Why are you struggling for her?” and our answer was always the same. Our struggle didn’t begin with her, it started a long time ago.’

The deal Benazir brokered with the military elite sealed her fate, even after Zia was removed from the equation. The army ensured that the PPP would not sweep the 1988 polls, keeping Benazir on a tight leash. The party took ninety-two out of 207 national assembly seats – numbers which meant Benazir would have no power in parliament to roll back or reverse any of Zia’s laws, leaving the dictator’s legacy firmly in place.
⁹

Benazir accepted the army’s conditions. The defence budget was to remain ‘sacrosanct’, the army was to hold the ultimate veto in security and foreign policy matters, and IMF loan conditions and stipulations were to be reaffirmed and left untouched.
¹⁰
Zia’s Foreign Minister, Yakub Ali Khan, remained in place to deal with the army’s special spots like Afghanistan and Kashmir, and Zia’s one-time favourite and Chairman of the Senate, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, was promoted to serve as Benazir’s President.
¹¹

On 2 December 1988, Benazir Bhutto took her oath and at thirty-five years old became the youngest Prime Minister in Pakistan’s history. In Damascus, Murtaza was anxiously watching the votes come in. The Pakistani embassy was calling our house with up-to-the-minute results.

When the polls had closed, Murtaza was furious. ‘These elections are rigged,’ Ghinwa remembers him saying to her. ‘These aren’t the numbers the PPP should be getting after eleven years of martial law.’

The PPP had won with only a slight majority. Murtaza called his sister and pleaded with her, ‘Pinky, don’t accept these results.’ She ignored him, overjoyed that she was so close to power, close enough to touch it. Nusrat also advised her daughter to reject the results. It will make you stronger, she told her. Benazir made a public show of her irritation at the suggestion by leaving her mother in Islamabad and travelling to Larkana by herself, remaining there until her decision had been announced. She said yes to all the army’s conditions.