Zulfi Bhutto of Pakistan His Life and Time STANLEY WOLPERT ZulfiBhuttoofPakistan Copyright©www.bhutto.org 2 CONTENTS Chapter 1 SindhiRoots(pre-1928) 7 Chapter 2 FromLarkanato Bombay (1928-1947) 27 Chapter 3 BriefCaliforniaInterlude (1947-1950) 37 Chapter 4 FromOxfordto Karachi(1950-1957) 50 Chapter 5 Apprenticeshipto Power (1958-1963) 75 Chapter 6 ForeignMinister to theFieldMarshal(1963-1965) 96 Chapter 7 WintersofHisDiscontent (1965-1969) 130 Chapter 8 Free ElectionsandtheBirthofBangladesh(1970-1971) 172 Chapter 9 President Bhutto “PicksUpthe Pieces” (December 1971-July 1972) 210 Chapter 10 ProvincialProblemsProliferate (mid-1972-early 1973) 253 Chapter 11 ForeignTriumphs,DomesticTragedies(April1973-1974) 274 Chapter 12 Prime Minister Bhuttoat the Peak ofHisPower (1974) 294 Chapter 13 From“LeaderofPakistan’sPeople to “Leader ofthe ThirdWorld”?(1975) 314 Chapter 14 Preludeto NewNationalElections(1976) 332 Chapter 15 NewElectionsandTheir TragicAftermath(early 1977) 353 Chapter 16 Zulfi’sFall—FromMartialCoupto Martyrdom (5July 1977-4April1979) 384 ZulfiBhuttoofPakistan Copyright©www.bhutto.org 3 Preface Since 1980, when I visited Pakistan to do research on my Jinnah of Pakistan, I have been fascinated by the mercurial and seemingly self-conflicting life of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Most Pakistanis I met either loved or hated Zulfi Bhutto, the People’s Party prime minister, who was arrested by his own commander-in-chief General Zia ul-Haq, and hanged after two years in prison. Millions of Pakistanis still hail Zulfi Bhutto as their Quaid-i-Awam (“Leader of the People”), even as they do Mohammad Ali Jinnah asPakistan’sQuaid-i-Azam(“Great Leader”). For most of its brief history since its birth in mid-August 1947, Pakistan was ruled by unpopular generals who seized and held power using martial force. Bhutto seemed different, the almost uniquely popular founder-leader of Pakistan’s People’s Party, who had just swept the polls throughout Punjab and Sindh only months before his arrest. How then could he be hanged without inciting mass riots throughout Pakistan,ifnot arevolution,I wondered? This book is the product of a decade-and-a-half of my reflection onthat question, the last five years of which have been devoted to research into the life of Zulfi Bhutto as amicrocosmicmirror ofPakistanisociety anditstroubledhistory inhistimes. I am indebted to many people for kind assistance in completing this book. First of all, it was thanks to Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and her mother, Begum Sahiba Nusrat Bhutto, that I was given full and free access to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s Library at his 70, Clifton home in Karachi. Prime Minister Benazir, now Leader of the Opposition in Pakistan’s National Assembly, graciously granted me free access to all of her father’s books and papers preserved in that Bhutto Family Library and Archive, providing that her mother, who uses 70, Clifton as her Karachi residence, had no objection. Begum Sahiba Nusrat kindly welcomed me to carry out my research in that Library whenever I came to Karachi over the next three years. Prime Minister Benazir and Begum Sahiba also tooktime fromtheir busy schedulesto permit me to interviewthemat length. I interviewed more than 100 of Zulfi Bhutto’s colleagues and family, and am grateful to all of them for their patient cooperation and frankness in answering my questions. Most helpful were Zulfi’s closest collateral relative, Mr. Mumtaz Ali Bhutto, and his only living sibling, Begum Manna (Bhutto) Islam, both of who shared their intimate recollectionswithme. ZulfiBhuttoofPakistan Copyright©www.bhutto.org 4 Foreign Minister Sahabzada Yaqub Khan was most encouraging when I informed himofmy intentionto embark uponthisstudy,andAmbassador JamsheedK. Marker was singularly instrumental in launching my research. I am deeply grateful to both of those gentlemen-diplomats for their more than “diplomatic” kindness and consideration. Special thanks to Mrs. Marker for her gracious hospitality and help. I thank Ambassador Abida Hussain and Minister Fakhar Imam for their illuminating insights. Thanks to Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith, Ambassador Henry Byroad, Ambassador Robert Oakley, and Ambassador William Clark, for sharing so many recollections and so much South Asian wisdom with me. I am also most indebted to Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Teresita Schaffer and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Nancy Ely-Raphelfor their frank responsesto my many questions. Thanks to Fellowship support from our excellent American Institute of Pakistan Studies (AIPS), I was able to start my research in Pakistan early in 1989.I am grateful to all members of the AIPS Board for their scholarly confidence, but must specially thank my good friends, Professor Hafeez Malik and Professor Ralph Braibanti, without whom AIPS would never have been born. Hafeez helped convince Prime Minister Bhutto of the importance of starting this premier Institute for U.S.-Pakistan scholarly exchange in 1973, and Ralph presided over the first Board meeting in Washington that year. Thanks to Dr. Peter Dodd and Dr. William Lenderking for their warm hospitality in Pakistan, and to Mr. Ali Imran Afaqi for his kind and efficient help, and to Consuls Kent Obee andHelenaFinn,and Consul-GeneralJoe Melrose. UCLA’s Gustave E. Von Grunebaum Center for Near Eastern Studies also supported my research, and I thank my good colleagues, Director/Professor Georges Sabagh and Professor Richard Hovannisian, for their kind assistance. I also thank Dean John N. Hawkins, who heads our Institute for International Studies and Overseas Programs at UCLA, for his unfailing help and encouragement, and my old friend and colleague, Vice-Chancellor RichardSisson,for hiswarmsupport. Piloo Mody first “introduced” me to Zulfi Bhutto with his memoir, Zulfi, My Friend (1973). Piloo hoped someday to “complete” that inchoate biography of Zulfi, but he too died young. I remain, however, singularly indebted to Piloo for his insightful work, and to his wife Vina, who generously granted me full access to her and Piloo’s fine collection of Bhutto photographs. Thanks to dear Joyce Hundal for introducing me to Piloo and Vina. I also thank Mr. J. J. Mugaseth, Zulfi’s oldest school-buddy, for so kindly assisting me, and also sharing his early photos of Zulfi. Thanks to Omar Qureshi and Al Cechvala for their time and hospitality and to Husna Sheikh for kindly agreeing to allow me to interview her and to Begum Mehru Rahim Khan for her gracious ZulfiBhuttoofPakistan Copyright©www.bhutto.org 5 assistance. Special thanks to General Gul Hasan and to Minister Roedad Khan for their interviews. Many friends in Pakistan opened their homes as well as their hearts and minds to me, too many to list all of them, but I must particularly thank Brigadier Noor Hussain and his good Begum Hushmat; Rizvan Kehar and his good wife; Suhail and Yasmeen Lari; Dr. Haye Saeed and his daughter Salima; Yahya Bakhtiar and his daughter Zeba; Begum Shaista Suhrawardy Ikramullah; Khalid Shamsul Hasan and his family;andArdeshir andNancy Cowasjee. Khalid-Sahib knows I can never adequately thank him, and Ardeshir, like Khalid, is a true gentleman-scholar and a friend, with whom I join in mourning the deathofhiswife and father. My warmest thanks to my splendid editor Nancy Lane, who had now been midwife for many ofmy books.I thank JaneBitar fortyping the finalmanuscript. To my darling wife, Dorothy, I can but inadequately express my growing admiration anddevotionthat hashadonly 40briefyearsinwhichto blossom, withmuchlove. ZulfiBhuttoofPakistan Copyright©www.bhutto.org 6 1 Sindhi Roots (pre-1928) No individual in the history of Pakistan achieved greater popular power or suffered so ignominious a death as Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (1928-79). Zulfi Bhutto’s political rise and fall were, indeed, so meteoric as to make his name a legend in the land over which he presided for little more than half a decade prior to his hanging. A full decade after his death, Bhutto remained popular enough to ensure the election of his daughter, Benazir, to the premier position he once held. Wherever she campaigned in Sindh and much of Punjab, the popular roar that greeted her was “Jiye Bhutto!”—”Bhutto Lives!” by which millionsofPakistanismeant andstillmean,ZulfiBhutto. Zulfi Bhutto roused such diametrically opposed passions and has left such divergent images among his disciples and adversaries that it remains virtually impossible to reconcile them as reflections of any single personality. Much like the nation he led, and in many ways came to epitomize, born irreconcilably divided, partitioned into East and West, torn from the subcontinental fabric of Mother India by the Islamic faith of his fathers, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, microcosmic reflection of Pakistan, was never a simple personality. His unique charisma and the deep-rooted failings that brought him to an early and violent death emanated from his schizoid personality, the strengths of one part of which were matched by weaknesses of the other, the depths of its dreadful darkness mirroring the brilliant heights of its most powerful peaks. Torn apart by his inner conflicts, never able to reconcile his romantic dreams of glory with the mundane realities and misery so prevalent all around him, Zulfi hoped to the bitter end of his brief but flamboyant sojourn at the top of Pakistan’s slippery pole to save himself and his land from a destiny of diminution, death, and fragmentation, vaingloriously viewing himselfasanIslamic Napoleon,the “Shah-in-Shah”of Pakistan. “For over a year and a half I have been kept in solitary confinement,” Zulfi wrote from his acrid death cell in Rawalpindi’s now-demolished prison, that bitterly cold January of 1979. “My family has owned not thousands of acres of land but hundreds of thousands, for generations…..My genesis to political fame is written in the stars….If I am not a part of Pakistan……Sindh is not a part of Pakistan ... my roots in the soil of ZulfiBhuttoofPakistan Copyright©www.bhutto.org 7 this land are very deep.”1 So it is in the subsoil of Sindh we must search for Zulfi’s roots, in the shifting treacherous sands of that ancient southernmost province of Pakistan. Sindh means “river,” named for its Indus lifeline. The Bhuttos migrated to Sindh in search of water, leaving their parched Rajputana desert homes farther east, in what is now India’s Rajasthan, near the dawn of the eighteenth century. Zulfi’s paternal ancestors had before his clan’s long trek been Hindu Rajputs, but during the seventeenth century Central Asia’s great Mughals conquered virtually all of India, and many Rajput warriors, like Zulfi’s progenitor, Sheto,2 converted to Islam, reaping a harvest of tax exemptions and other benefits from the devout Mughal Padishah (Emperor) Aurangzeb (r. 1658-1707) and his Muslim amirs, and claiming for himself, as clan leader, the regal title of khan. Thus, as far back as history traces them, Bhuttos have been adroit at seizing whatever opportunities life offered, equally ready to move on or to change their faith if they deemed it expedient for survival’s sake, determined to overcome drought, famine, or the fiercest of adversaries in struggling to advance themselves and the fortunes of their clever family. Sheto Khan found the fertile land he sought in Sindh’s Ratodero, just a few miles north of Larkana, and the rural town in which Zulfi would be born two centuries later. In the fecund watershed of the Indus River, the silt around Ratodero and Larkana proved rich enough to raise as much rice and sugar cane as all the Bhuttos could eat, and cotton enough to clothe that fast- growing clan as well. Though unknown to Sheto Khan, less than ten miles south of Larkana was the still-undiscovered site of one of the world’s greatest ancient cities, Mohen-jo-Daro.3 The untilled growthand woods aroundRatodero andLarkanawere full of game, especially wild boar, which Bhutto men always enjoyed hunting. Hunting would, in fact, become Zulfi’s favorite sport, and though he was considered only a fair shot, for almost two decades, whenever he was in Sindh, he annually hosted a regal hunt at Larkana to celebrate his birthday. Zulfi probably had the best and largest private collection of hunting rifles and ammunition in Pakistan, and his guests would include the sheikh of Abu Dhabi and the shah of Iran, as well as Pakistan’s presidents Ayub KhanandYahyaKhan. 1 Z.A.Bhutto'sPrisonCellHolograph(hereaftercitedasBhuttoPCH)inBhuttoFamilyLibraryandArchives (hereaftercitedasBFLA),70,Clifton,Karachi. 2 ForearlyBhuttofamilyhistoryIhaveprimarilyrelieduponSirShahNawazBhutto'sunpublishedmemoir (hereaftercitedasSirShahNawaz'sMemoir),whichbegins,“ThisisnotanAutobiography....”Itisheldinthe BFLA. 3ForbackgroundinformationaboutMohenjoDaroandtheearlyIndusValleycivilization,seeStanleyWolpert,A NewHistoryofIndia,4thed.(NewYork:OxfordUniversityPress,1993),chap.2,andappendedbibliography. ZulfiBhuttoofPakistan Copyright©www.bhutto.org 8 Mughal governors ruled Sindh from its bustling port city of Thatta (some fifty miles east of Karachi), which had attracted English merchants early in the seventeenth century by reports that it was “as big as London” (with then close to a quarter million population) and that “its port filled with ships laden with every kind of merchandise, which arrive by passing down the navigable Indo river, on whose bank it stands ... a most wealthy and most vicious spot.”4 The breakdown of Mughal power soon after the death of Aurangzeb in the early eighteenth century left Thatta and Sindh in the hands of the martial Kalhoras, under whose rule British East India merchants established their first factory in 1758. Sheto’s great-grandson, Pir Bakhsh Khan Bhutto, fought and defeated the Arbos, a tribe related to the Kalhoras by marriage, in “many battles in Larkana,” where he established Bhutto power. Before the end of that century of violent conflicts and rapid change, however, the Kalhoras themselves were defeated by fiercer Baluchi invaders, the amirs of Talpur, who took control of Sindh, moving their capital almost a hundred miles north along the Indus to Hyderabad. Wadero Pir Bakhsh Khan swore allegiance to the new Talpur rulers of Sindh, and was confirmed in return over his vast tracts of Bhutto land around Larkana, Sukkur, and Khairpur. In 1821, however, Wadero Pir Bakhsh was “invited” by His Highness Mir Ali Murad Talpur to send his eldest son, Allah Bakhsh Khan Bhutto, to Khairpur, where he was kept “as an honourable hostage” at the Talpur court for five years, “to ensure that my family did not revolt.”5 The British had been forced to abandon their first factory in Thatta less than two decadesafter opening it,andtriedwithout initialsuccess to negotiate anew commercial treaty with the Talpurs. East India Company servants continued, nevertheless, to seek fresh footholds in the region that had once proved profitable, and soon after 1830 British ships sailed up the Indus to Hyderabad, eliciting the prescient prophecy from observant Sindhis that “our land is lost now that the British have navigated our river.” With the more powerful and ever-threatening Punjab kingdom of Sikh Maharaja Ranjit Singh to its north, Sindh’s amirs first hoped to ally themselves withthe British company in order to keep the one-eyed “Lion of Punjab”6 at bay. In April 1838, Colonel Henry Pottinger concluded a treaty with the Talpur amirs, which permitted a British minister and his “escort” of troops to reside in Hyderabad. Two months later the British concluded their infamousTripartite TreatywithRanjit Singhandthe exiledformer amir of Afghanistan, Shah Shuja, who had lived as a pensioner of the British in Ludhiana, 4 ThequotationisfromFraySebastianManrique,aPortuguesewhovisitedSindin1640-41,andisnotedin YasmeenLari,TraditionalArchitectureofThatta(Karachi:HeritageFoundation,1989),p.8. 5 SirShahNawaz'sMemoir. 6 KhushwantSingh,RanjitSingh,LionofPunjab(London,1962). ZulfiBhuttoofPakistan Copyright©www.bhutto.org 9 and was to serve as the company’s puppet-prince on the throne of Kabul after he was returned to it by a mighty British army that invaded Afghanistan in 1839. That doomed army of the Indus would, moreover, invade through Sindh, and Sindh’s amirs were expected to pay all military bills as part of the “debt” Shah Shuja claimed from them, which the British company was pleased to support, despite repeated Talpur disclaimers. Sindhwas thususedas the launching padfor the tragicFirst Anglo-Afghan War.7 Sir Charles Napier led the brutal conquest of Sindh in September of 1842. Three Talpur amirs had divided their kingdom, the major portion ruled from Hyderabad, the others farther north from Khairpur and Miani. Those armies joined forces in a last desperate stand against the British invasion at Miani, the Talpurs’ Waterloo, in March 1843, when ten thousand Sindhis were slaughtered. Napier established his court in Karachi, then just a tiny port on the Arabian Sea, where he remained as the company’s first governor. He was honest enough to confess to his own diary: “We have no right to seize Sindh, yet we shall do so, and a very advantageous . . . piece of rascality it will be.”8 Napier personally reaped some £70,000 in Sindhi plunder. His most famous subordinate was a brilliant young Canal Department servant named Richard Burton, who wrote two cogent volumes on Scinde, The Unhappy Valley, which would be publishedsoonafter he returnedto Londonin1851.9 Pir Bakhsh’s son, Dodo Khan Bhutto, ruled the clan during Napier’s over- lordship of Sindh, and he was, indeed, appointed by Napier’s lieutenant as “the sole arbitrator” to give an award on the boundaries of the Chandio Jagir; his liberality to the Chandios would long win their support for all Bhuttos. His hot-blooded grandson, Mir Ghulam Murtaza Bhutto (c. 1869-99), Zulfi’s grandfather, fell in love with the beautiful Sindhi “mistress”10 of Larkana’s British collector-magistrate, Colonel Mayhew. Mayhew was then “an old man . . . over sixty.” Handsome Mir Murtaza, of course, was much closer in age to the young Sher beauty, which soon reciprocated his love. The wily old colonel suspected the affair and “laid a trap to catch the sinners,” Zulfi’s father recalled. The colonel pretended to leave on tour, letting word of his departure reach Larkana from his Sukkur residence, luring Mir Murtaza as fast as his horse could gallop to the Sher mistress’s bed. The colonel returned that same night to catch the naked lovers, 7 SeePatrickMacrory,SignalCatastrophe:StoryoftheDisastrousRetreatfromKabul,1842(London:Hodder& Stoughton,1966). 8 TheLifeandOpinionsofGeneralSirC.J.Napier,ed.SirW.Napier,2:218(London,M.) 9 SeeFawnBrodie,TheDevilDrives:ALifeofSirRichardBurton(NewYork:Norton,1967). 10 SirShahNawaz'sMemoir. ZulfiBhuttoofPakistan Copyright©www.bhutto.org 10