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WHEN DREAMS LEAD TO DISILLUSIONMENT
From the failed revolution of Field Marshal Ayub Khan
To the promise today of the emergence of New Pakistan
From the dashed expectations of over five decades.
To the surge of new hopes taking birth today.
This is my story.
My journey through the era of Ayub Khan to the times of Imran Khan.
The year of the great war
I was born in the year of Adolf Hitler—the year the deadliest war in the history of mankind began.
It is my subconscious mind that has thrown up this name —Adolf Hitler—in the context of these memoirs. Such has been the intensity of repulsion revulsion and hatred against the imperial colonialists who defeated our resistance first at Plasi and then at Sarangapatum, that in vein with the famous dictum that your enemy’s enemy is your friend, I have been fascinated to the name Hitler from my very early boyhood.
It used to give me a strange kind of mental satisfaction to think that I had been born in 1939—to be exact, on July the 27th, 1939, barely some weeks before the first shots in the World War II were fired. Two months and five days earlier, the famous “Pact Of Steel” had been signed between Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. This bluntly-worded military pact was underlined by a sentence in the preamble which Hitler had put in, declaring that “the two nations, united by the inner affinity of their ideologies, are resolved to act side by side, and with united force, to secure their living space”.
I was one month and four days old when on September 1, 1939, the German armies shortly before the daybreak poured into Poland from all directions.
The World War II had begun, which was not to end till I was six years old, and in which hundreds of millions were to perish all over the globe.
Churchill in the culminating Chapter of the History of the Second Great War writes:
“Notwithstanding the harsh way I have judged Hitler and his Reich, I can’t but acknowledge with great deal of pain and envy that for each German that the Allies killed, Germans killed five allied soldiers.”
As I have said I was six when the World War II ended with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Even though at that point of time I had been studying in a primary school of Batala,
I have vague memories of my early childhood life in various districts of Sindh.
I belong to a landowning family of the suburbs of Batala city of District Gurdaspur. The urbanised village bordering Batala where my ancestors should have owned all of the agricultural land was known as Sagarpura. My father Ghulam Mohammad was the eldest son of Faiz Mohammad who had been the first in the family to go into the service of the government.
My father had done his diploma in Engineering from Lucknow, and served all of his life in Sindh. It was a small town in Nawabshah district Khipro where I was born.
Continued……
