THIS IS MY STORY—86
MY JOURNEY THROUGH THE ERA OF AYUB KHAN TO THE TIMES OF IMRAN KHAN.
GHULAM AKBAR………
The Bhutto Phenomenon
I am today at 79 quite different from the man I was when I fervently invested my hopes and dreams in ZAB in 1965 or when I became a kind of ‘Crusader’ against him for committing a “grand betrayal” by embarking upon the path of Power Politics (in 1972).
Today I can judge him more objectively on the basis of the knowledge I have acquired about him. Without a shadow of any doubt he was a great man, with inborn political acumen and inbuilt brilliance. He had knowledge. He had analytical power. And he had a goal. He wanted to rise to a position which would entitle him to command every institution of the country-including the Army.
Sherbaz Mazari, in his auto biography A JOURNEY TO DISILLUSIONMENT wrote:
“In 1954 I had gone to the Karachi Airport to receive my friend Akbar Bugti. It was there that I first made my acquaintance with Zulfiqar Ali Bhuto. At the airport terminal while waiting for Bugti, I noticed an elderly man being pushed on a wheelchair by a younger man, who walked up to me and asked if I was Sherbaz Mazari. When I answered in the affirmative, he told me that his father wanted to have a word with me. When I walked over to the elderly man, he addressed me as BETA and introduced himself as Shah Nawaz Bhutto “This is my son Zulfi”, he said “We are going abroad for my treatment. I have known sir Bahram Khan Mazari. When we are back, I want you to have dinner with us. “Which I did on their return. This was the first of many dinners that I was to have with Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto at his residence in the years to follow. In time I got to know him quite well. Indeed, for a number of years we were even very good friends. Zulfi would drop in at my hone at regular intervals in the mornings. We were both avid book collectors, and had a youthful weakness for fine clothes. His great ambition in those days was to become a member of the Sindh Provincial Assembly in the 1958 elections. His home town of Larkana was then in the strong hands of the Sindhi politician Ayub Khuhro, a man Zulfi hated. He used to become abusive at the very mention of Khuhro’s name. Bhutto’s obsessive hatred of Khuhro was linked to an incident that he soon narrated to me. Upon his return from completing his education abroad, his father Sir Shah Nawaz, took him to call on Khuhro who was Surdh’s chief minister. The purpose of the visit was to seek a position in the foreign service for his son. Khuhro made them wait outside on the verandah for a lengthy half an hour. Later when the two were seated with Khuhro, the chief minister slighted them by drinking tea himself without offering them any. Swallowing his pride Sir Shah Nawaz introduced his son to Khuhro, and emphasizing on his degrees from Berkeley and Oxford, requested for a job for him in the foreign service. Khuhro asked the elder Bhutto to submit an application in writing to him and dismissed them cursorily with a wave of his hand. While recounting the story, Bhutoo could not help but sprinkle the entire tale with expletives directed at Khuhro. That was the nature of the man I was getting to know. Later in 1972 as soon as he achieved power as the Chief Martial Law Administrator, one of his first acts was to humiliate Khuhro by having the walls to his house at Larkana razed to the ground. Forced into submission, Ayub Khuhro and his family members soon joined Bhutto’s PPP. At the time I recall Bhutto gleefully commenting; ‘The so-called iron man of Sindh turned out to be no more than a man of straw.”
At times Bhutto’s sensitivity reached absurd levels. He often took umbrage at the merest perception of a slight, and never forgave or forget them. He was a complex man. Despite his extremely sensitive nature, he also practiced, when he had to, the sycophancy which has become the hallmark of any successful Pakistani politician. The level of flattery Bhutto would descend to, is explicit from the letter he wrote to President Iskankar from Geneva on April 30 1958. In this letter he expressed to his mentor his imperishable loyalty and devotion. Then went into a state of extreme fawning by adding. “When the history of our Country is written by objective Historians your name will be placed even before that of Mr Jinnah. Sir, I say this because I mean to and not because you are the President of the Country.”
Not surprisingly, in October 1958, Iskandar Mriza made the young thirty-year-old Bhutto his minister for commerce. Our friendly relations continued for many years that followed. There were to last until a few months into his fateful climb to the very pinnacle of power in Pakistan. By then his ego could brook no equals. In Islamabad, during his days as president, he once invited me for dinner. When we met, he addressed me as Mr Mazari, and I, in turn addressed him formally as Mr President. It seemed that the only use the past had for Bhutto was as a means to getting where he had got to. It appeared that now that he had got there, apart from the slights he now wished to avenge, the past had become largely irrelevant.”
