My parting of the ways with Z.A. Bhutto had occurred soon after he chose to get into the garbs of Pakistan’s Chief Martial Law Administrator, and set out to turn the country’s institutions upside down inorder to implement his political agenda, as well as to establish his party’s domination in practically every sphere of life in the country.
It is far easier to bring down and destroy a structure than to build one Bhutto had acquired all the authority he needed to destroy the order that existed when he took over as the builders of a New Pakistan on the ashes of the Pakistan that had existed till December the 16th 1971 when Pakistan Army was made to lay down its arms before the victorious Indian General Jagject Singh Arora.
This authority Bhutto used with ruthless abandon. There was a wave of ‘fix-ups’ and nationalizations that brought totally incompetent party loyalists and sycophantic new -bureaucrats into the control of the nation’s assets and institutions.
The ironical misfortune of ZAB himself and the nation he was leading was that he didn’t have any blueprint of the New structure he wanted to build on the foundations of the destroyed one. Nor did he have at his disposal and under his command the kind of ‘meritorious team’ that is required for epoch-making reconstruction.
The bitter fruits of this misfortune were to be reaped by ZAB and his country on the 5th of July 1977 when a power-hungry General decided to capitalize upon an opportunity that his boss and benefactor had created for him.
Let us however not forget that ZAB was a man of vision too. His vision took the shape of Pakistan’s ambitious Nuclear Programme, as well as the historic Islamic Summit at Lahore that was designed to shape the world of the Crescent into a key balancing factor in the global realities of power politics —–
I was a Bhuttoist till about the middle of 1972. then I drifted away. Drifted away so much that my magazines were banned by Bhutto’s regime in 1974. in 1977 I wrote a book that was the cry of my soul at having witnessed the running away of my ‘beloved’ with a vagabond.
Still on the morning of the July 199 I had tears in my eyes. On the 4th of April 1979, I really cried.
General Zia ul Haq was not a born villain. But his good points will always remain eclipsed by the heinous crime he committed by hanging the man who had made him.
05-07-2010
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