The Longest August

by Dilip Hiro

  Astonishingly, the Censor Board concluded that the story was likely to “instigate communal dissension” and denied the producer a license to exhibit it. When Sathyu showed the film to many officials and journalists, they disagreed with the board. Their pressure led the censors to lift the ban. The movie was a critical and commercial success on its release in 1973. It won a prestigious award for its contribution to “national integration” and later found its place in the top twenty-five Bollywood movies of all time according to film critics.47 Yet it had no chance of being shown in Pakistan because, after the 1965 war, the Indo-Pakistan trade had virtually ceased.

  Whereas their triumph in the Bangladesh War boosted the confidence of the people of India, the Pakistani Army’s disgraceful surrender left the nation shell-shocked. The Herculean task of restoring its collapsed morale fell on Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

  11: Zulfikar Ali Bhutto

  The Savior of West Pakistan

  Zulfikar Ali Bhutto achieved supreme power in a country with a disgraced military, shattered government, and bewildered and demoralized public. Born into the household of a feudal lord, Sir Shah Nawaz Bhutto, in Larkana, Sindh, he went along at the age of fourteen with an arranged marriage to his cousin Amira, but only after receiving a cricket bat as a gift. Five years later he enrolled at the University of California and graduated with a degree in political science in 1950. He then studied law at Oxford University. During the next summer break, while in Karachi, he met and married twenty-two-year-old Nusrat Ispahani, a tall, slender, high-cheek-boned daughter of Iranian parents who had moved to Karachi from Bombay, where Nusrat had received higher education. The young couple then departed for Oxford. After acquiring a law degree from Oxford University, Bhutto was called to Lincoln’s Inn, London. He was twenty-five and the father of a daughter named Benazir (Urdu/Sindhi: Peerless).

  On his return to Karachi he practiced as a barrister and taught law at Sindh Muslim Law College. Three years later he was appointed a member of Pakistan’s delegation to the United Nations. In that capacity he addressed the Conference on the Freedom of the Seas.

  After his military coup in 1958, General Muhammad Ayub Khan appointed Bhutto minister of water and power. He advised Ayub Khan on the Indus Waters Treaty with India, which was signed in September 1960. The military ruler then promoted him to minister of commerce. His real opportunity came when, at age thirty-five, he took charge of the foreign ministry after the death of Muhammad Ali Bogra in January 1963. By the time he quit Ayub Khan’s government in mid-1966, he had been a cabinet minister for eight years. That had enabled him to acquire a base in the political-bureaucratic landscape of Pakistan. His founding of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and its rapid rise have been narrated earlier (see Chapter 9).1

  Intent on becoming the prime minister, even though the PPP was way behind the Awami League led by Shaikh Mujibur Rahman, Bhutto played the spoiler. Knowingly or inadvertently, he was instrumental in the breakup of Pakistan. Yet neither he nor the people and political and military leaders, traumatized by a military defeat and the loss of the eastern wing, were in a frame of mind to rake up the recent past.

  On December 22, 1971, he transferred Shaikh Rahman from solitary confinement to house arrest at a government guest house near Rawalpindi, where he was still deprived of news. A few days later, Bhutto visited the Bengali leader to inform him of his supreme office. He tried to extract a promise from Rahman that Bangladesh and Pakistan would maintain some links. Shaikh Rahman refused.2

  Pressure from assorted foreign leaders, including President Richard Nixon, mounted for the release of Shaikh Rahman. To divert popular attention away from the fate of the much-loathed Bengali icon, Bhutto issued a series of ordinances, including one on January 1, 1972, to nationalize ten basic industries. Five days later he coupled his decision to place Yahya Khan under house arrest with the release of Shaikh Rahman, who was put on a plane to London. He appointed an inquiry commission under Justice Hamoodur Rahman into Pakistan’s military defeat in East Pakistan. These actions of Bhutto resulted in Washington resuming its aid to Pakistan in February.

  Bhutto rushed to pursue his pet project of arming Pakistan with an atom bomb. On January 20, 1972, he convened a secret meeting of the officials of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) and other scientists under a canvas awning in the spacious garden of a feudal lord friend in Multan, Punjab. He delivered an inspiring speech in which he referred to fate placing him in a position from which he could lead Pakistani into a nuclear arms race. “Can you give it [the bomb] to me?” he asked. When the senior scientists hemmed and hawed, Bhutto turned to the younger ones, who included Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and Munir Ahmad Khan. Mahmood rose to his feet. “Yes, it would be possible,” he said. “But how long would it take?” inquired an insistent Bhutto. “Maybe, five years.” Bhutto held up three fingers. “I want it in three.”3 Ironically, it would be Bhutto’s bête noire, India, that would detonate a nuclear device before his deadline.

  In February he traveled to London.

  Back Channels to a Tortuous Summit

  During that visit Bhutto told former British prime minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home, a fellow alumnus of Christ Church (College), Oxford, that he wanted to start a new page in the prickly Indo-Pakistani relations. This would require a summit with Indira Gandhi. As victor of the recent war, she could afford to be magnanimous and invite him for talks.

  When Gandhi was told that Bhutto was in a chastened and realistic mode, back channels were set up. Bhutto used Mazhar Ali Khan, then editor of the prestigious daily Dawn and a former member of the (banned) Pakistan Communist Party, to contact one of his prepartition fellow travelers from the Communist Party of India (CPI). He chose Sajjad Zaheer, based in Delhi. They met in London in the third week of March to settle the agenda. Khan confirmed to Zaheer that Bhutto wanted to forget the past, and added that it was in India’s interest to help him consolidate power—otherwise the generals and religious right would coalesce and overthrow him. (Indeed, this would happen five years later.) Zaheer passed on the gist of his talk to a fellow traveler of the past, Parmeshwar Narayan Haksar, now a close aide to Gandhi.

  They agreed to hold a summit in Shimla (previously, Simla), capital of Himachal Pradesh, in late June 1972. The overarching purpose was to forge a set of principles to guide relations between India and post-1971 Pakistan.

  President Bhutto, dressed in a well-cut white, double-breasted cotton suit was greeted by Prime Minister Gandhi, wearing a bright-colored sari with a very broad border in the salubrious weather of Shimla. Bhutto had arrived with a large delegation, which included the bedazzled nineteen-year-old Benazir, then a student of Radcliffe College. She and her father stayed at the state governor’s guest house. Gandhi had gone out of her way to visit the house and, after ordering fresh furniture, had supervised its arrangement before the summit on June 28.

  M. K. Kaw, a senior civil servant, was charged with looking after Benazir Bhutto. He was assisted by Veena Datta, an officer of the Indian Foreign Service. He and his colleague had to improvise to keep Benazir occupied while her father conducted high diplomacy. “Veena helped me keep Benazir in a good mood,” wrote Kaw in his memoir, An Outsider Everywhere: Revelations by an Insider, after his retirement.

  Benazir’s first priority turned out to be to watch the recently released Bollywood movie Pakeezah (Urdu: Pure), which, given the virtual absence of Indo-Pakistan trade, could not be exhibited in Pakistan. There were no DVDs or VHS tapes in those days. Benazir’s choice underscored the addiction to movies among Pakistanis and Indians irrespective of gender, class, or religion. Pakeezah is the story of a Mughal court courtesan, well versed in dance, music, and social etiquette, played by Meena Kumari, a Muslim film star whose life would end in tragedy. A special showing was arranged for Benazir at the local Ritz Cinema. “There were only three of us in the cinema hall: Benazir, Veena and myself,” wrote Kaw. “Benazir enjoyed the film immensely.”4 It wa
s Benazir’s love for movies that fifteen years later would lead to her marriage to Asif Ali Zardari, whose father, Hakim Ali, owned Bambino Cinema in Karachi—one of the few that showed foreign films and was therefore frequented by her.

  However, in Shimla now, the real-life drama was between Benazir’s father, Zulfikar Ali, leader of a vanquished nation, and Indira Gandhi, the victor. She had risen to supreme power at home by exploiting the weaknesses of her detractors in the ruling Congress Party who had initially nicknamed her goongi guddia (dumb doll) because of her lack of articulation. In marked contrast, Bhutto was a soaring orator in public and an entertaining raconteur in private. A lawyerly approach to negotiations had become second nature to him. Gandhi, on the other hand, never finished her study of modern history at Somerville College in Oxford. Both of them were strong-headed, though, and monopolized power once they reached the apex. They felt offended at the merest slight. They nursed grudges and delighted in trouncing their adversaries. In order to beat her political enemies and counter their evil intentions, Gandhi was known to sponsor outlandish religious rites conducted by self-styled Hindu gurus. She regularly consulted astrologers and holy men.

  On the positive side, while conducting day-to-day administration, both maintained a long-term strategic vision beneficial to their nations. Bhutto’s self-regard was unbounded. “My name and my reputation are safe in the custody of the people and in the heart of history,” he wrote at the end of a chapter in one of his books.5 Statements such as these led Gandhi to describe him as “unbalanced.” Intensely emotional, he was given to theatrical gestures, such as tearing up his speech at the UN Security Council on hearing of the Pakistani Army’s surrender to India on December 16, 1971. In stark contrast, Gandhi was remarkably serene in crisis; she displayed this serenity to much acclaim during the run-up to the Bangladesh War.

  At the Shimla summit her primary aim was to bring the Kashmir dispute to an official closure. Given Bhutto’s weak bargaining position, her chances of success were high. Intense and tortuous negotiations between the two delegations reached a dead end when Gandhi insisted on including “the final solution of the Kashmir problem” in the joint communiqué. Bhutto disagreed. He wanted the Kashmir issue listed as an ongoing dispute that remained to be settled. Earlier, the two sides had agreed on converting the 1949 UN cease-fire line into the Line of Control (LoC). To save the summit from failure, Bhutto and Gandhi held a one-on-one meeting on the evening of July 2.

  There are conflicting reports of what transpired during that session. One version has it that Bhutto, using all his lawyerly logic and immense charm, convinced Gandhi that after the disastrous loss of East Pakistan in the recent war, if he were to abandon Pakistan’s claims to Kashmir in peace, he would be booted out by the military. According to another account, the Bhutto-Gandhi bargaining boiled down to converting the present LoC into an international border. Bhutto reportedly agreed verbally. “Is this the understanding on which to proceed?” Gandhi asked. “Absolutely,” Bhutto is said to have replied. “Aap mujh par bharosa kee jiye [You should trust me].”6

  In the end a compromise on Kashmir ensued. The agreed-on document said that “in Jammu and Kashmir, the Line of Control resulting from the ceasefire of December 17, 1971, shall be respected by both sides without prejudice to the recognized position of either side. Neither side shall seek to alter it unilaterally, irrespective of mutual differences and legal interpretations.” Also, both sides undertook “to refrain from threat or the use of force in violation of this Line.” The final draft included India’s wording that the two countries would settle all their differences “by peaceful means through bilateral negotiations or by other peaceful means mutually agreed upon.” This ruled out third-party mediation. Article VI of the agreement listed a final settlement of Jammu and Kashmir “as one of the outstanding questions awaiting settlement.”7

  The Shimla Agreement laid down the principles to govern future relations between India and Pakistan as well as steps to normalize them. Though it is dated July 2, 1972, the accord was signed at 12:40 am on July 3, 1972. Since then the cease-fire has largely held, except during the 1999 Kargil armed confrontation. And bilateralism has become the defining feature of Indo-Pakistan relations, with no quarter given to third-party mediation or arbitration. Overall, the 1972 Shimla Accord has been the basis of all subsequent Indo-Pakistan talks.

  Post-Shimla Agreement

  Following detailed negotiations to determine the line of demarcation in Kashmir, India and Pakistan completed the mutual withdrawal of their troops on December 20, 1972. They exchanged POWs resulting from their hostilities along India’s western frontier. And Delhi returned over five thousand square miles of West Pakistani territory to Islamabad.

  The Shimla Agreement did not refer to the 90,370 Pakistani POWs. They were under the jurisdiction of Bangladesh but held inside India because of the insufficient financial and administrative resources of the newly established sovereign state, which was not recognized by Pakistan.

  Repatriation of these POWs was a high priority for Bhutto. But he could recognize Bangladesh only after the introduction of a new Pakistani constitution, which took into account the reduced area of the country. It was the National Assembly that had the authority to prepare a fresh constitution. The PPP enjoyed a comfortable majority there. Guided by Bhutto, the committee charged with drafting the constitution got to work.

  In return for cooperating with the PPP on this task, the ruling National Awami Party (NAP) in Baluchistan demanded greater autonomy. Bhutto refused to envisage any reduction in his powers. The simmering civil unrest intensified. In February 1973 he dismissed the NAP government and dissolved the provincial assembly. The protests in Baluchistan turned violent. Bhutto dispatched the army to crush the insurgency and maintain order. This assignment restored the morale of the military, badly shaken by its debacle in East Pakistan. Its emboldened generals called for an expansion of the ranks, which Bhutto granted enthusiastically, hoping thus to reinforce his popularity among the twelve corps commanders. On the other hand, Bhutto unwittingly eased the army’s path toward resuming its earlier centrality in running the country.

  Under Bhutto, the Pakistani military’s traditional doctrine that India was enemy number one remained intact. It was politically expedient for him to promote the idea of Pakistan facing a foe. This provided a strong incentive for the populations of the four Pakistani provinces to subordinate their linguistic, subnational loyalty to the overarching patriotism of Pakistan sharing borders with a powerful adversary.

  Released of its linkage with the subcontinent’s eastern zone, post-1971 Pakistan started looking westward to the Persian Gulf region, including Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam. The dramatic prosperity of the Gulf monarchies stemming from the quadrupling of oil prices in 1973–1974 created an unprecedented demand for the Muslim workers of Pakistan. That in turn strengthened religious sentiment in their native land and pushed Indian and Pakistani societies further apart.

  Pakistan’s new constitution, finished in March 1973, described Islam as the country’s official religion, thus highlighting Bhutto’s commitment to the doctrine of Islamic socialism. (As it was, with the loss of a substantial Hindu population in East Pakistan, the proportion of Hindus in the rest of Pakistan had declined sharply to a tiny 2 percent.) It stipulated parliamentary government. A provision barred any change in the constitution, which was unveiled on August 14, 1973. With that Bhutto became the prime minister of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

  By then Bangladesh had its first general election under its own constitution and returned Shaikh Mujibur Rahman as prime minister.

  In February 1974 the Islamic Conference Organization in Lahore provided an opportunity to reconcile two leading Muslim nations, Pakistan and Bangladesh. A special delegation flew to Dhaka (the renamed Dacca) and returned to Lahore, along with Shaikh Rahman. The Pakistani parliament then authorized Bhutto to recognize Bangladesh. After doing so, h
e traveled to Bangladesh and laid a wreath at its war memorial at Savar Upazila, fifteen miles northwest of Dhaka—a gesture warmly appreciated by Bangladeshis but controversial in Pakistan.

  Once India had signed a supplementary agreement with Pakistan, the repatriation of the Pakistani POWs followed. With this event, Bhutto could rightly claim that he had wiped off the last vestige of humiliation suffered by the pre-1971 Pakistan.

  Bhutto quietly moved toward converting the LoC in Kashmir into an international border in 1974. He incorporated the Northern Areas into Pakistan. And his government assumed direct authority to administer Azad Kashmir, which was tantamount to Pakistan incorporating the territory—something Delhi had done earlier in the case of India-held Kashmir.

  Meanwhile, in India, Shaikh Muhammad Abdullah, then under house arrest in Delhi, was ruminating on the 1971 Bangladesh War. He concluded that it was better to end the politics of confrontation, which had the potential of causing further breakups in Pakistan and India. “Our quarrel with the Government of India is not about accession but about the quantum of autonomy,” he said in February 1972. He was released later in the year. Protracted talks between the appointed personal representatives of Abdullah and Gandhi led to the signing of the Kashmir Accord in November 1974. “The State of Jammu and Kashmir which is a constituent unit of the Union of India, shall, in its relation with the Union, continue to be governed by Article 370 of the Constitution of India, ” read the accord.8 In the end, Abdullah settled for genuine self-rule in the state by a government elected in free and fair elections. He became the chief minister of Kashmir in February 1975 after disbanding the Plebiscite Front and reviving the moribund National Conference.