Volume 7, No. 1, January 2025
Editor: Rashed Rahman
In the previous three chapters (see Pakistan Monthly Review October, December 2023 and February 2024 respectively – Ed.) I have endeavoured to explain the conceptual position of the three distinctive classes of Muslim Identity in the Indian Subcontinent and their relative behaviour in the context of pertinent events in history. My narrative of personal experiences and observations in the next chapters have a direct relevance to the historical conceptual position explained in the previous chapters.
I now revert to the narrative initiated in the first chapter (see Pakistan Monthly Review October 2023 – Ed.). This chapter is a continuance of the story.
On December 7, 1970, I had returned to my home town Sargodha, as Government College (GC) Lahore, my alma mater, observed holidays on the occasion of election of the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan. I was four months short of the voting age of 21 years, but out of sheer inquisitiveness, I accompanied my father, mother, three elder brothers, two clerks in my father’s law office and three domestic servants to the polling station situated in the nearby Government Girls High School. My father was a professional attorney with a booming private practice in civil litigation. He was a veteran of the Pakistan Movement and a sympathiser of the Muslim League (ML) since his university days. My father and mother along with the chauffeur went in his car, while the rest of us rented horse-driven carriages called tongas.
I was not allowed to enter the area earmarked for polling booths, hence stood outside to observe the activity in the polling camps established by the ML-Council faction of Mumtaz Daultana and the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI). No Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) camp was visible, but there were about a dozen young men standing shyly in a corner, carrying small PPP flags. The camp of ML-Council was full of people and its organisers invited me inside to offer me some refreshments. About 65-70 persons were provided chairs to sit on and exchange gossip in the busy camp. It appeared to me that the ML-Council’s candidate Mehr Khudadad Khan Lak, a feudal aristocrat, would easily win the election against the PPP’s nominee Chaudhry Jehangir, a junior lawyer of the Sargodha Bar Association. Jehangir was a debutant in politics, hardly known to the people, and had not even launched any election campaign.
My father impliedly expected that all those accompanying him to the polling station would be voting for the ML-Council candidate because they never disagreed with his views due to respect, as is common in Pakistani society. In the evening, while all the others dispersed to their homes, my family, a domestic servant Ashiq and a nanny Naziran sat before the television in our lounge after dinner to watch the election results. At around midnight, when about 70 percent partial results of different constituencies had been compiled and announced on Pakistan Television, surprisingly, the PPP dark horse seemed to be leading at the polls. When the news of Mehr Khudadad Lak, a close friend of my father, was announced as lagging behind by a huge margin against the PPP candidate, my eldest brother clapped in excitement. My father looked at him in disbelief and asked: “Did you vote for Bhutto?” He impishly nodded in the affirmative. Then my mother and two other brothers also confessed. The last straw on the camel’s back was the servant Ashiq who broke the silence in a timid voice: “Main wi” (I too). My father burst into a hearty laugh and said in Punjabi: “Oye choro, aj te 1946 di yaad aa gayi ae” (You rogues, you have reminded me of the polling in 1946). The defeated candidate Mehr Khudadad Lak was very dear to my father. They were so close that he had stayed for a year as a guest of my father in the outhouse of our home a few years ago when it became unsafe for him to live in his village due to some property disputes with his rivals.
The 1970 elections were the most important event in the history of Muslim Identity in India after the 1946 elections. There were queer similarities and dissimilarities between the elections held in 1946 and 1970. While the 1946 elections established Jinnah as the leader of the Indian Muslims, the 1970 elections established Bhutto as his ideological successor. Both elections were similar because both Jinnah and Bhutto faced the same rival, i.e. the orthodox, rigid, formal class of Muslims. The dissimilarities were evident in the nature of the campaigns launched by Jinnah and Bhutto. Jinnah had promoted the ‘Two Nation Theory’ by persuading the feudal leaders of Sindh, Punjab and Balochistan like Ayub Khuhro, Sir Feroze Khan Noon, Mumtaz Daultana, Nawab Mamdot and Akbar Bugti, etc., to support the Pakistan Movement. In the 1970 elections, Bhutto was campaigning to demolish the hold of the same feudal aristocracy with his slogan Musawat-e-Mohammadi (Islamic Socialism). In 1946 the Muslim community had to make a sharp choice between Pakistan and united India but in 1970 the streets of the urban areas had to choose between two competing ideologies – orthodox, rigid, formal Islam and a modern, secular, liberal system – as the way forward. During the Pakistan Movement, Jinnah was contesting against the All India Congress while orthodox mullahs and unorthodox pirs/mashaikh affiliated with Majlis-e-Ahrar were supporting his rival party. They were attacking his credibility as a representative of political Islam. In the 1970 elections the orthodox group was directly contesting against Bhutto, who represented the combined strength of the secular, nationalist, educated, modern class and the unorthodox, liberal, syncretic, mystic Islam. The orthodox group had emerged as a serious contender for political power through the electoral process instead of being in a support role for another rival. The orthodox group spearheaded by Maulana Maududi’s JI saw the elections as an opportunity to present Islam as a political ideology to take control of political power.
In rural Pakistan, it was a triangular contest between three political forces, i.e. Bhutto, Maududi and the traditional feudal aristocracy. In the perception of political analysts the most favourite of the three was the old feudal class because of its historical hold on the rural population. The feudal lords did not consider Bhutto or Maududi as serious challengers and were sure of their victory against the candidates from the middle class fielded by both Bhutto and Maududi in the elections. The feudal lords had held sway over politics in Punjab, Sindh and to some extent the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) from the early 20th century to 1947 and till 1968, forming the Unionist Party before 1947, ML from 1946 till 1955, and the Republican Party (RP) from 1955 till 1958. Finally Ayub Khan had assembled the feudal lords in the ML-Convention from 1960 onwards and converted it into an Army-controlled King’s Party. Ayub Khan’s ouster from power saw the washed up ML split into three separate political parties, the ML-Convention, ML-Council and ML-Qayyum. Among the three ML factions, only Khan Abdul Qayyum Khan’s party called the ML-Qayyum had an ideological background and was reckoned in public perception as the successor of Jinnah’s ML. Since 1956, Khan Abdul Qayyum Khan had gained immense popularity among ML workers when he partnered with I I Chundrigar to block Chaudhry Mohammad Ali, Ayub Khan and Iskander Mirza’s conspiracy to merge the ML with the RP. Ayub Khan and Mirza had helplessly seen Khan Abdul Qayyum Khan and I I Chundrigar bring a motion of no-confidence in the National Assembly (NA) on September 12, 1956 against Chaudhry Muhammad Ali the Prime Minister (PM), accusing him of secretly managing defections from the ML in favour of the RP. ML-Qayyum was the strongest contender, followed by ML-Council led by old feudal aristocrats like Mian Mumtaz Daultana, Sardar Shaukat Hayat Khan, Chaudhry Muhammad Husain Chattha, etc. ML-Convention, the King’s Party of the deposed dictator Ayub Khan too was there in a leaderless and depleted state. Both the two stronger MLs were not depending upon any ideology, rather the feudal hold of their candidates on the rural population. That was the reason for my father to consider Chaudhry Jehangir, contesting against his personal friend Mehr Khudadad Lak, a lame duck.
What was new in the 1970 elections? The Bhutto factor. Who was he? He was a product of discontinuity in the political process during the dictatorial rule of General Ayub Khan and was thrown up as a popular leader by Ayub Khan’s Martial Law. Nine years before founding his own political party named as the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) in 1967, he had emerged on the political scene as a lieutenant of Ayub Khan and Iskander Mirza in 1958. He, a timid, elegantly dressed, foreign educated young attorney, was named in the cabinet of three Lieutenant-Generals and eight civilians by President Iskander Mirza’s first martial law on October 8, 1958. After directly seizing power, Ayub Khan retained him in his cabinet. Gradually he became immensely influential in Ayub Khan’s cabinet due to his intellectual brilliance, and rose to become the Foreign Minister of Pakistan.
Bhutto’s popular approval in politics coincided with Ayub Khan’s misadventure to capture Indian-Occupied Kashmir with military force in an operation named ‘Gibraltar’. Ayub Khan had started the operation as a ploy to regain his popularity as a nationalist, lost during his contest against Fatima Jinnah, the sister of Jinnah, in January 1965. But the results of the operation did not emerge as expected and even more unexpectedly resulted in the September 1965 war with India. Ayub Khan was forced by the dismal performance in the battlefield to agree to a ceasefire. In public perception, created through propaganda, Pakistan had won the war but actually on the ground the war had ended in a stalemate. If the hostilities had continued Pakistan would have lost it due to its economic cost. When Ayub agreed to the truce terms in the Tashkent Summit with his Indian counterpart Lal Bahadur Shastri, Bhutto disagreed with him. He resigned from the cabinet and in his speeches portrayed Ayub Khan as a coward and a traitor. Bhutto emerged as the icon of Pakistani nationalism within a fortnight of quitting the cabinet.
Four years before the 1970 elections, when I was only 17 years old and studying in GC Lahore as an undergraduate, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto disembarked from a train at Lahore Railway Station to trigger a campaign to dislodge the dictator General Ayub Khan from power. My roommate in the dormitory, Chaudhry Lateef, went to greet him at the Railway Station. Latif later became a Professor of Chemistry in Zamindara College Gujrat. The students of GC, my alma mater, because of the elitist character of the institution, considered it a taboo to join political rallies held outside the college gates. GC’s main gate opened at the mouth of Gol Bagh (Round Park), which was the hub of political gatherings and could be likened to Hyde Park in London. But the protests of Ravians were unique according to the traditions of the college. The students assembled at around 11:30 a.m. in the Open Air Theatre situated behind the college’s gothic central building, built in 1864, every day during the midday break. During this period sometimes protest speeches, invariably in English, were made and then the students dispersed peacefully to resume classes thereafter. GC students never crossed the college gates (There were exceptions such as the 1964 protest campaign against Ayub’s University Ordinance, of which I had the honour of being a participant while a student at GC Lahore – Ed.). But Bhutto’s campaign against Ayub Khan was continuously gaining momentum outside the college walls. Clashes between students and police caused more segments of society such as the Bar Associations and Press federations to join the movement. The students of the nearby Islamia College, the Hailey College of Commerce, the Punjab University (PU) Law College and the PU Old Campus used to throw bangles at the Ravians to taunt them for being timid like women. I remember that on one occasion a firebrand student activist led some students towards the gate but the Principal, Dr Nazir Ahmed, intercepted them (Dr Nazir also protected students during 1964 by disallowing the police from entering GC to arrest the protestors – Ed.). He threw his cap on the ground and dared the agitators to cross it. All students turned back as a mark of respect for the Principal, who was a much loved head of GC. Hence during my years in GC, I did not have an urge to attend Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s public meetings, though my dormitory mate Chaudhry Latif never missed one.
Bhutto had formally launched his political party the PPP on November 30, 1967 quietly at the residence of an Engineering University Professor Dr Mubashir Hassan. From the day he took a train journey through Lahore to Karachi after leaving General Ayub Khan’s cabinet, the liberal, secular, educated, urban, modern Muslims saw in him a reincarnation of Jinnah. Bhutto also viewed himself as fulfilling the unfinished agenda of Mohammad Ali Jinnah.
Sarwar Sukhera, the editor of weekly Dhanak magazine, recalls that as a young worker of the PPP, he was tasked by Bhutto to prepare a few eye-catching banners for the party. Bhutto walked through the set of banners prepared by him at Lahore, but stopped at one bearing pictures of Allama Sir Mohammad Iqbal, Jinnah and Bhutto. Sukhera said, “I had put the captions below each picture as ‘Khwab’ (Dreaming Pakistan), ‘Tabeer’ (interpretation of dream) and ‘Takmeel’ ( implementation of the dream).” Tears ran from Bhutto’s eyes as he pondered over the message in the banner. He invited me to follow him inside the house. He sipped cognac and offered some to me also. Since I do not drink, I took two or three sips and put the tumbler on the side table, without Bhutto noticing it. After a while he asked me whether I genuinely viewed him as the man completing Iqbal’s dream. I said to him that people saw him as a reincarnation of Jinnah. He said, Inshallah (God willing, yes).” In later years Sarwar Sukhera had to secretly flee from Pakistan with the help of the Indian Consulate in Karachi after his magazine published a cartoon of Ziaul Haq, the dictator who toppled Bhutto’s government. The cartoon became a popular joke against Zia. In the cartoon Zia was shown as asking a lady: “Do my eyes compare with actress Hema Malini?” and she was shown as replying, “Your eyes don’t compare with each other even.” Zia had a slight squint.
Bhutto might have been a newborn baby crying in his cradle when Jinnah stayed as a house guest at his father Sir Shah Nawaz Bhutto’s house Al-Murtaza in Larkana in 1928. Jinnah, the Bombay Barrister, had been invited by Sindh’s Mohammedan Association, over which Sir Shah Nawaz Bhutto presided, for arbitration in a legal dispute among several Muslim feudal lords of Sindh. Both Sir Shah Nawaz and Jinnah remained good friends thereafter. In November 1930 they met again as delegates of the First Round Table Conference in London, called to give a political package to colonial India. Sir Shah Nawaz was knighted that year and was one of only 16 Muslim delegates chosen from all of British India. Barrister Jinnah, who had taken up residence in London’s Hampstead and opened his own law chambers in the City for Privy Council appeals, joined Sir Shah Nawaz and Agha Khan and other Muslim leaders in London. Jinnah delivered his historic words, “India wants to be mistress in her own house” in the Conference and was the first member of the Viceroy’s Imperial Council to resign in protest against the passage of the Rowlatt Act, which had extended martial law after the war. The crowning political achievement of Sir Shah Nawaz at the Round Table Conference was getting Sindh declared a separate province. Previously it was part of Bombay Province. For India’s Muslim bloc, Sir Shah Nawaz’s victory was very important because Sindh became British India’s only Muslim-majority province. This achievement was eclipsed only by Jinnah’s creation of Pakistan in later years. Due to this connection Sir Shah Nawaz became Jinnah’s emissary to the Nawab of Junagadh State, whom he served as Diwan (PM) in 1946, convincing his royal ruler to opt for Pakistan in August 1947. After India invaded Junagadh, Sir Shah Nawaz fled by sea from the port of Veraval to Karachi. Thus Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto had an ancestral connection with the creation of Pakistan and the Quaid-e-Azam.
Bhutto was received by the masses during his train journey as a nationalist, but as he started addressing larger public meetings, his profile transformed into a saviour, a saint. The reason was that his personality was like that of a Sufi. Bhutto countered the orthodox arguments of Maududi with Sufi hymns to bring mystic content into his campaign. Bhutto’s personal devotion to Sufis, especially to Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, the saint of beggars, converted the devotional hymn of dhamal (Sufi dance) “Lal meri pat rakhio” (Lal, be my protector) into an informal national song. He frequently recited the verses of the other great Sufi Shah Abdul Latif, making a point to the dispossessed in society. He frequently visited the shrine of Data Ganj Bux in Lahore, revered by the people of Punjab. The dispossessed in society were impressed by his socialist manifesto. Women of all shades, including old rural women in rags as also nubile beauties in silken saris, supported him for his liberal humane mystic image.
In the polarised lanes of downtown Lahore where various colleges were clustered and in which I daily walked, it was no accident that the two differentiated and mutually opposed choices in the character and political approaches of Emperor Shah Jahan’s two sons Aurangzeb and Dara Shikoh, re-emerged after three centuries and presented themselves in the 1970 general elections. This clash of ideologies was to influence the course of future history and cast indelible marks on contemporary history in present day Pakistan. Despite an Oxford and Berkeley education, Bhutto, in a significant and historical manner, reflected the conceptual position of Dara Shikoh. Although the orthodox formal Islam in the main remained unchanged over time, the unorthodox, informal Islam, inclusive of Hinduism before Aurangzeb’s rule, reappeared with a new slogan, i.e. Socialism. While Dara Shikoh wished to harmonise Hinduism with Islam, Bhutto attempted a similar exercise with the dominant rival ideology of his time, Socialism, evolving the concept of ‘Islamic Socialism’ and Mussawat-e-Mohammadi (The social equality of Mohammad). Secularism, Socialism and Sufism merged when the three were presented with a veneer of Islam. His famous socialist slogan Roti Kapra Aur Makaan (Food, Clothing and Shelter for all) attracted poor communities, students and the working class to him. Under Bhutto’s leadership, large parts of the democratic left gathered and united on one party platform for the first time in Pakistan’s history.
The reason for the phenomenon of Bhutto’s popular acceptance by the masses was that he personified an ideology, not a temporary political slogan or phase. Thus the period was to experience a decisive contest between the orthodox, rigid, fundamentalist class on the one hand, and the unorthodox, liberal, mystic class merged with the secular, educated, liberal, nationalist class on the other. The old unresolved question of whether Pakistan should be a secular modern country or an orthodox Islamic country had resurfaced in West Pakistan.
By the mid-1950s, the pendulum of dominance had started moving away from the secular, educated, westernised, nationalist Muslims, which was temporarily held in place by Ayub Khan’s dictatorship. But before it could swing towards the other pole of the resurgent orthodox, fundamentalist Islamists, Bhutto had intervened. He combined under his banner of Islamic Socialism Pakistan’s most sophisticated, educated, cultured modern minds with society’s poorest and hardest working folk in city and countryside alike, including simple peasants, factory workers, small shopkeepers, all people inclined towards secularism and liberalism. He thus combined the modern, educated, liberal, secular class with the mystic, secular, liberal class against the orthodox, rigid, formal Islam. Bhutto’s PPP was an unresolved mix of nationalist, secular, populist, unorthodox Islam and socialist ideologies. The ambiguity explained in part its phenomenal popularity with the masses. It was all things to all men. Both the secular nationalists and the informal Sufic, liberal classes had merged and rallied under Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto for their survival. However, unlike the 1946 campaign of Jinnah, the contest for dominance in Bhutto’s 1970 challenge was not spearheaded by the secular, educated, westernised, nationalist class but the informal, syncretic, mystic Sufic Muslims.
Bhutto’s young party, the PPP, founded only three years earlier in 1967, did not even have enough candidates to be fielded in all 138 constituencies in West Pakistan and ran only 120 candidates, of which 103 were from constituencies in Punjab and Sindh. He did not have enough candidates in NWFP and Balochistan provinces. In contrast the ML-Convention fielded 124 candidates, the ML-Council 119 and the ML-Qayyum 133 candidates. History was taking another turn. Bhutto won the contest. Bhutto completed the unfinished agenda of Jinnah’s campaign of decisively defeating the orthodox, rigid, fundamentalist Islam. Jinnah could not decisively defeat them due to his failing health, but Bhutto, a young man, completely ousted the JI and other religious forces in the 1970 elections. It was a surprise win in which young voters defied the old guard, the small peasants defied the big landlords, labourers defied the factory owners. The poor downtrodden farmers, haris (land tenants) in the villages and factory workers voted for Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s socialist manifesto of Roti Kapra aur Makaan (Food, Clothing and Shelter for all).
The polarised elections resulted in a high level of public participation and the voter turnout was 63 percent, unprecedented in Pakistan. On December 7, 1970, Bhutto’s just three years old PPP won 81 out of the 138 seats of the Constituent Assembly in West Pakistan, rooting out both the orthodox JI and the feudal aristocracy in Sindh and Punjab. Bhutto had won 62 NA seats in Punjab compared to 10 combined seats of ML factions and only one of JI. In Sindh, he won 18 seats compared to one of ML-Council and two of JI. In the provincial Assembly elections held 10 days later on December 17, 1970, Bhutto’s PPP won in the two biggest provinces of West Pakistan, i.e. Punjab and Sindh. He did not contest in the other provinces due to a dearth of candidates. PPP bagged 113 out of the 180 seats in the Punjab provincial Assembly. The JI was comprehensively beaten as it could get only one seat. The other orthodox parties, contesting separately from JI, namely the Deobandi Jamiat-e-Ulema-i-Islam (JUI) got two seats and the Salafi ultra-orthodox Jamiat Ahle Hadith could get only one seat. The comparatively liberal Barelvi political party Jamiat-e-Ulema-i-Pakistan (JUP) won four seats, equalling the total tally of the orthodox political religious parties. As had happened in the Pakistan Movement in the 1940s when the Barelvi clerics did not oppose a liberal and modern man Jinnah, they did not criticise Bhutto in the 1970 elections either. The comprehensive defeat of JI was reflected in the votes polled by it. While Bhutto’s PPP secured 41.66 percent of total votes cast in Punjab, 44.95 percent in Sindh and 14.28 percent in NWFP, the JI at its peak of political canvassing could get only 4.7 percent popular votes in Punjab, 10.3 percent in Sindh, and 7.2 percent in NWFP.
The elections also resulted in the wiping out of the feudal aristocracy from the political canvas of Punjab and to a large extent in Sindh. The feudal aristocracy of Punjab in particular received a lethal and irreversible blow to its hold on the rural population. The ML factions representing the feudal aristocracy could hardly bag 21 seats in a house of 180. The King’s Party of Ayub Khan, i.e. ML-Convention, could win only six seats, while ML-Council fielded by Mumtaz Daultana managed only 15 seats. ML-Qayyum, though it had fielded ideological urban ML workers, could win only six seats. Jinnah had depended on the feudal aristocracy for creating Pakistan in Punjab. Bhutto had destroyed it assertively.
In Sindh, PPP could not decisively dent the hold of the feudal aristocracy. It won 28 out of 60 seats, nearly touching the majority mark of 31. Later 14 independents, as is usual, joined the winning PPP. JI won only one seat, while the JUI could bag just seven seats. As for the ML factions, the ML-Qayyum and ML-Convention could win only five and four seats respectively, while ML-Council was totally wiped out.
The only province where the MLs made some showing was NWFP, where Khan Abdul Qayyum Khan demonstrated his persisting popularity by winning 10 seats. ML-Council won two seats and ML-Convention only one seat. But the National Awami Party (NAP), another secular, socialist, liberal party of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan led by his son Abdul Wali Khan, won 13 seats from the urban areas of the province. PPP did not seriously contest the elections in NWFP, yet won three seats. Thus collectively the NAP, PPP and ML-Qayyum won 26 seats in the 40-seat house. The feudal aristocracy represented by the Council and Convention MLs could win only three seats while JI was routed even in the most conservative and tribal province of Pakistan with only one seat. The other orthodox Deobandi party, JUI, contesting separately from JI’s platform, won four seats from the tribal districts.
The 1970 elections rendered the feudal aristocracy irrelevant to politics. In 1962, out of 78 members of the NA from West Pakistan, 37 were feudal aristocrats and their percentage was 47.44 percent. In 1966, out of 78 Members of the NA from West Pakistan, 46 were landed aristocrats and their percentage had risen to 58.98 due to the patronage of Ayub Khan. According to the election results of 1970, out of 144 seats in West Pakistan, only 51 were feudal aristocrats, and their percentage had reduced to 35.41 percent. Out of 85 members of the NA from Punjab, 28 were feudal aristocrats and their percentage in parliament was 32.94. In the case of Sindh, Bhutto enlisted important feudal families into PPP and out of 28 members, 18 were landed aristocrats and their percentage in the NA was 67.86.
Bhutto had won in West Pakistan and Sheikh Mujibur Rehman in East Pakistan in the elections in 1970 and in the meantime I had moved to the Law College. It was the period during which the PU campus was witnessing the clash between the slogans of ‘Asia is Red’ and ‘Asia is Green’, but I was too young to appreciate the historical transitional phase Pakistan was passing through. I was romanticising the university atmosphere with a slogan of ‘Asia is Khaki’, coined by me out of my sense of humour. But today when I have turned 74, I can safely reckon that it was the most significant period of the history of Indian Islam since two earlier events in the history of Muslim Identity in the Indian Subcontinent, i.e. the seizure of the Mughal throne by Aurangzeb in the 17th century and the creation of Pakistan between 1940 and 1947. The three reasons that single out the 1970 elections were:
First: Death of the Pakistan Ideology in East Pakistan
Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, was the birthplace of the Pakistan ideology. The Army Establishment buried it right there. East Pakistan and West Pakistan had agreed to a consensual Constitution in 1954 and again in 1956, after nine years of dialogue between the two wings of the country. Sheikh Mujibur Rehman was a member of the Constituent Assembly that had framed the 1956 Constitution after painstaking compromises. But the dictator General Ayub Khan arbitrarily replaced it with the 1962 Constitution and imposed his document with Martial Law powers. His successor General Yahya Khan, instead of restoring the 1956 Constitution, abrogated the 1962 Constitution and implemented a Legal Framework Order as the interim Constitution.
Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, the mentor of Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, had challenged the ‘Islamic State’ concept of Pakistan way back in the early years when the ‘Objectives Resolution’ was passed. Emphasis on Islamic ideology, he argued, “would keep alive within Pakistan the divisive communal emotions by which the subcontinent was riven before the achievement of independence.” He argued in favour of seeing “Pakistan in terms of a nation state” wherein a “durable identity between government and people derived from the operation of consent” (Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy:“Political Stability and Democracy in Pakistan”, Foreign Affairs, vol. 35, no. 3, April 1957, p. 425).
The allegations of the exploitation of East Pakistan’s resources for the development of West Pakistan became indefensible. General Ayub placed three of the largest legacy projects, i.e. the construction of the new capital Islamabad and the two large hydel projects, Mangla and Tarbela, in West Pakistan. Furthermore, General Ayub totally alienated East Pakistan by raising his King’s Party in West Pakistan.The misdiagnosis of East Pakistan’s ideology- and economy-driven grievances played a major role in driving tensions to the breaking point in 1971.
Pakistan elected a Constituent Assembly in 1970 to make a new Constitution, taking it back to zero point. East Pakistan wanted a loose federation bordering on confederation, as the secular nationalist Awami League (AL) was fed up with the domination of the West Pakistan-based Army Establishment, especially during Ayub Khan’s rule. While presenting his Six Point Formula for a united Pakistan with a weak Centre, Sheikh Mujib argued, “…We can even now sacrifice something for you (West Pakistan) from out of our share. We did so in the past. Do you not remember? Please recall…In the first Constituent Assembly we had 44 and you had 28 representatives. If we wanted we could have democratically brought the Capital and Headquarters of the three Armed Forces to East Pakistan. We did not…Out of sheer brotherly feeling and sense of equality we elected six West Pakistanis to the Constituent Assembly from East Pakistan…By majority of votes we could have framed a Constitution favourable to East Pakistan” (Sheikh Mujibur Rehman: “Six-Point Formula – Our Right to Live”, The Bangladesh Papers, Vanguard Books, Lahore, p31).
The 1970 elections changed the geography as also the politics of Pakistan. In East Pakistan, secular, educated, nationalist Muslims trampled the joint opposition of the King’s Party of the Establishment, Orthodox Religionists and the remnants of the old ML. Mujibur Rehman said, “President Ayub, Chaudhry Mohammad Ali and Maulana Maududi, outwardly three avowed mutual enemies, wielding their respective weapons from three antipodal horizons, are aiming poisoned arrows on the same target of the six points” (The Bangladesh Papers, Vanguard Books, Lahore, p31). Sheikh Mujibur Rehman’s AL won 160 out of the 162 seats of the National Assembly/Constituent Assembly in East Pakistan. This electoral result was inevitable. With 160 seats in a 300 member Constituent Assembly, it was for Mujibur Rehman to dictate to the dictator General Yahya Khan. Bhutto said six years later while addressing the Supreme Court of Pakistan: “Yahya Khan suffered from the misnomer that he had a Legal Framework Order, which controlled everything. I told him that once the (Constituent) Assembly comes, he will be out of the picture because the Assembly will be sovereign and the Legal Framework Order will then become a vestigial organ and will have no relevance. The moment the coming Assembly passes the first Resolution or the first Act, declaring its sovereignty, everyone else will be out of the picture.”
When East Pakistan separated from West Pakistan in 1971, the new country was named the People’s Republic of Bangladesh with secularism as its basic principle. Bangladesh was created not by the Bengalis, but the Army Establishment.
Second: Decisive defeat of the Orthodox, Rigid, Fundamentalist class
After the 1970 elections this class lost the potential and the ambition to capture power through the electoral process. This class’s only hope became to enter the power corridors through the backdoor, by joining a religious-minded dictator Ziaul Haq as the B Team of the Martial Law government.
Third: Demolition of Feudal Aristocracy
The role of the feudal aristocracy as kingmakers irrevocably ended in West Pakistan. After winning the elections Bhutto went ahead to decisively finish the institution of the feudal aristocracy. He introduced land reforms in March 1972 reducing individual land holdings to 150 acres. In the earlier reforms made by Ayub Khan, the ceiling had been fixed at 500 acres but exemptions were given to orchards, hunting areas and stud farms, etc. Ayub Khan had used the land reforms to compel the feudal aristocracy to join his King’s Party, i.e. the ML-Convention. Ayub Khan exempted those joining him but in Bhutto’s reforms all exemptions were withdrawn. Land recovered from the feudal lords totalling 1.3 million acres was distributed among 76,000 landless farmers. In 1977 Bhutto further reduced the land ceiling to 100 acres and an additional 1.8 million acres were resumed (It remains to be revealed how much of this distributed land was ‘recovered’ by the feudals with the surreptitious help of the corrupt patwari and police, a process that began in 1975 – Ed.). Simultaneously Bhutto provided security of tenancy to tenant farmers with new legislation, which virtually broke the backbone of the feudal lords. He generally protected the farm labour and tenants from the excesses of even ordinary non-feudal landlords.
I remember as Assistant Superintendent of Police in Muzaffargarh that the police and civil administration were instructed to arrest any landlord forcibly evicting a tenant and no Station House Officer dared to accept a bribe from a landlord. The ‘Hari’ and ‘Mozara’ (tenant) had become the most protected and privileged man in the village. I vividly remember an episode in which an influential zamindar (landlord) Rasul Bux Qureshi forcibly ejected his tenant from the farm and in his rage dragged his family out of their mud house and made them leave the village at midnight. The next morning the tenant appeared at the police station for registration of the case. The zamindar was connected by old family relations with Nawab Sadiq Hussein Qureshi the Chief Minister (CM), but even he refused to help him, due to fear of Bhutto. Before the enforcement of tenants’ and Haris’ rights, they were for all purposes treated as bonded labour. After being saved from the stranglehold of feudalism, they were free to find employment in other farms on better terms or move to urban areas as construction workers. Their economic conditions improved and they started buying land for their dwellings from the landlords. I remember how my father’s friend Nawabzada Zakir Qureshi lamented a few years later: “I committed the biggest mistake of my life by selling land for construction of dwelling huts to my Mozaras (tenants) at the entrance of my estate. Now they refuse to remove their donkey carts to clear the path for my Cadillac and look the other way when I blow the horn repeatedly.”
Bhutto’s anti-feudalism policy forced all prominent feudal lords to surrender their political ambitions to him. In Sindh all prominent feudal lords except Pir Pagara joined PPP after the elections. Anyone showing any sign of defiance was dealt with through highhanded means. For example when Jam Sadiq Ali, a very powerful and influential feudal lord, was sent a message of warning, the next morning saw him on a flight to London. In Punjab the three most influential feudal political figures, Mumtaz Mohammad Khan Daultana, Sardar Shaukat Hayat and Noor Hayat Noon, joined his government as subordinates. Mian Mumtaz Daultana (February 20, 1916-January 30, 1995), a veteran of the Pakistan Movement, an Oxford graduate, a non-practicing Barrister of Middle Temple, a former CM of Punjab and Defence Minister of Pakistan in ML governments was sent as High Commissioner to London in 1972, just a year after Bhutto’s coming into power. He was requested to groom Bhutto’s daughter Benazir in politics during her student days at Oxford. Sardar Shaukat Hayat (September 24, 1915-September 25, 1998) was the son of Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan, a former CM of Punjab. He was an Aligarh University graduate, a veteran of the Pakistan Movement, three times a provincial minister and the second most important leader of the ML-Council in the 1970 elections. After winning the elections he associated himself with Bhutto and helped him frame the 1973 Constitution. His son Sikander Hayat Jr. has twice fought provincial elections as a PPP candidate. Malik Noor Hayat Noon was the son of Sir Firoz Khan Noon, the last PM of Pakistan before Ayub Khan’s Martial Law in 1958.
The impact of Bhutto on Pakistan is perpetual. Even after his death, millions of Pakistanis still hail him as their Quaid-i-Awam (Leader of the People), even as they call Mohammad Ali Jinnah Quaid-e-Azam. Bhutto lost power in 1977 and was later hanged by the next dictator General Ziaul Haq. But he retained his mystic appeal till the end. He penned the last letter to Zia from his cell just weeks before his death and wrote: “I cannot take accounts from a mighty General like you, but before the final accountability on the Day of Judgment, I have no doubt that you…will be taken to the door of Shahbaz Qalandar for the blood you spilt.” On one occasion during the last days of his hopelessness in Rawalpindi District Jail, he asked his daughter Benazir Bhutto to pray for him at the grave of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar. “Go to pray at Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, my father urges me” (Benazir Bhutto’s Memoirs). An emotional Bhutto sought justice in Lal Shahbaz’s court when his wife Nusrat Bhutto was injured in a police lathi charge in Lahore during his captivity. He said in the Supreme Court: “When my wife’s blood was spilled in Gaddafi Stadium, people from my district, Dadu and other places took her blood from the hospital and put it in on the “chadar” (sheet) of Qalandar (the saint’s grave) and vowed that they would not allow this kind of thing to continue.”
The shrine of Sakhi Shahbaz Qalandar, also called Lal Shahbaz, is one of the most revered holy places in Pakistan, visited by millions every year. People dance into a trance on the rhyme “Lal Meri Pat Rakhio” (Oh Lal protect me) at the shrine. Lal Shahbaz Qalandar’s mystic mentor Sarmad danced on the gallows before being hanged in Emperor Aurangzeb’s court. Bhutto also walked up to the gallows in grace, but never surrendered to the dictator till his last moments. There remains a powerful, persistent, possibly growing, but certainly undying, mystic belief held by millions of Pakistanis, not only Sindhis but Punjabis, Baloch and Pathans as well that Shaheed (Muslim martyr) Zulfikar Ali Bhutto never died. “Kal Bhi Bhutto Zinda Tha, Aaj Bhi Bhutto Zinda Hai” (Bhutto was alive yesterday, Bhutto is still alive today).