The 88th birthday of the founder of the Pakistan Peoples Party is being celebrated today when I write these words. By the time my today’s echoes reach my newspaper readers the celebrations would have come to a close.
For me Bhutto word has a very special meaning. This meaning is spread over black as well as white areas. There are grey areas too. He was neither a saint or a martyr in a sacred cause, nor a devil or a traitor as some of his most avowed critics and haters like to believe and propagate.
He was a human with human weaknesses and follies— also with some attributes that go into the making of great men.
He was my second modern-day hero in the mid and late 1960s; the first had been Egypt’s Gamal Abdul Nasser. Both to me had come to symbolise a desire, a yearning and a dream burning in their souls for lifting their people from the state of slavish despondency and of humble submission to the will of their former masters in the West, to the state of awareness of being holders of great legacies and of their faith in their own entitlement to greatness.
My departure away from Bhutto occurred in the aftermath of the tragedy of Pakistan’s breakup. My disenchantment with him was expressed openly and vehemently on the pages of Weekly Ishtreak which was closed down in 1974 leading to my farewell to journalism. This disenchantment took the form of violent anger in my book Jhoot Ka Peghambar which was a bestseller in 1977. I killed the book when Bhutto was charged with the murder of Ahmad Raza Qasoori’s father and his trial began. My more balanced view of Bhutto’s role in Pakistan’s history was shaped in the late 1980s.
Today he is regarded by me to be worthy of greatness and remembrance for three reasons alone.
1) He was father of Pakistan’s Nuclear Programme.
2) He also engineered a foreign policy in which Pakistan was made a front line state in the struggle for formation of Islamic Bloc (Lahore Islamic Summit was his crowning achievement).
3) He founded a political party that was to have a major role to play in the awakening of the country’s masses.
It is sad that the 88th birthday of Bhutto has been celebrated at a time when his all-conquering party has been confined to Sindh only and Punjab the original power-base of the PPP has abandoned it nearly completely.
The man to thank for the tragic fall of the PPP is the son-in-law of Bhutto. He has done what General Zia ul Haque and General Pervez Musharraf had failed to do.
In a crazy ironical way Mr Zardari is the B-Team of Mian Nawaz Sharif.
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