by Dilip Hiro
These developments signaled a lowering of Indo-Pakistan tensions on the Kashmir problem. But there was no progress on any of the subjects listed in Article III of the Shimla Agreement on normalization of relations: establishing greater communications through all available means, promoting travel facilities, resuming trade and economic cooperation, and making exchanges in science and culture.
India’s Peaceful “Smiling Buddha”
In any case, Bhutto and Gandhi got distracted by turmoil on the domestic political scene. Bhutto faced insurgency in Baluchistan. And the quadrupling of oil prices in late 1973 and early 1974 spiked inflation in India, whose foreign reserves fell dangerously low because of the hard currency payments it had to make for oil imports. Nonviolent mass protest gathered momentum, and Gandhi’s Congress Party was blamed for corruption and misrule.
To divert popular attention, Gandhi authorized an underground explosion of “a peaceful nuclear device”—code-named Smiling Buddha—at the Pokhran military firing range, located between the Rajasthani cities of Jodhpur and Jaisalmer, on May 18, 1974. Its yield was put at twelve kilotons. The official statement said that further experiments would be conducted to perfect “nuclear devices,” adding that it was all “for peaceful purposes.”9
This detonation was the climax of a process initiated by the research of Homi J. Bhabha, an Indian nuclear physicist, in 1944 at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay. He lobbied officials and leading politicians in Delhi to sponsor nuclear research. Among those who agreed with him was Jawaharlal Nehru. “I have no doubt India will develop its scientific researches and I hope Indian scientists will use the atomic force for constructive purposes,” Nehru said in June 1946. “But if India is threatened, she will inevitably try to defend herself by all means at her disposal.”10 As the prime minister, Nehru set up the Indian Atomic Energy Commission in 1948 under Bhabha. Six years later the Bhabha Atomic Research Center in Trombay, a suburb of Bombay, purchased a research reactor code-named CIRUS (Canadian-Indian Reactor, US) using heavy water (deuterium oxide) supplied by the United States.11 It went critical only in July 1960. After China’s defeat of India in the October 1962 war, Bhabha publicly called for developing nuclear weapons as a means of deterring potential Chinese aggression. His proposal got the official green light after Beijing tested its atomic bomb two years later, when Lal Bahadur Shastri was prime minister.12 The nuclear test at Pokhran used plutonium derived from the reprocessed spent fuel from the CIRUS reactor. The nuclear program had so far cost India $1 billion, with its current annual budget running at $140 million.13 However, it would be only in 1980 that India would be able to put its nuclear weapon into service.
Unsurprisingly, the government in Islamabad did not accept Delhi’s pronouncement of peaceful intentions. At a press conference, Bhutto declared that Pakistan would not be threatened by India’s “nuclear blackmail.” Returning to the same subject three weeks later, he claimed that India’s nuclear program was designed to intimidate Pakistan and establish “hegemony in the subcontinent” and that Pakistan would develop a nuclear program in response to India’s nuclear test.14
The Pokhran explosion marked the start of a nuclear arms race between the two traditional rivals, with Bhutto—having secured financial assistance for his nuclear enterprise from a few oil-rich Arab states, including Libya under Colonel Muammar Gaddafi—coining the catchy term “Islamic atom bomb.” He argued that the possession of a nuclear weapon by Christian, Jewish, and Hindu countries had highlighted the deficiency of a Muslim nation in this regard. In his argument there was apparently no place for China, ruled by the atheistic Communist Party of China, but that mortal flaw in his argument did not bother him.
To burnish his Islamic credentials at home, Bhutto rejected the Ahmadi minority’s pleas in 1974 that they were Muslim, and declared them non-Muslim.15 He did so to placate the ulema (religious scholars). He had often felt susceptible to the Islamist groups’ attacks on him for being a son of a Hindu mother, Lakhi Bai. They willfully overlooked her conversion to Islam and name change to Khurshid before marrying Sir Shah Nawaz Bhutto. Nor did they take note of the fact the founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, had married a Zoroastrian who converted to Islam.
As a symbol of socialism, Bhutto started wearing a cap worn by Mao Zedong as well as an open-collar Mao jacket. Crucially, he nationalized all banks and insurance companies and seventy other industrial enterprises, including some medium-sized factories, thus breaking the power of the top twenty-two families who dominated Pakistan’s nonfarm economy.
Simultaneously, his program to expand the military continued. Despite the loss of more than half of its citizens following East Pakistan’s secession, Pakistan expanded its armed forces from 370,000 in 1971 to 502,000 in 1975.16 As a result of a series of Sino-Pakistan agreements signed by the Bhutto government, China became the main supplier of military hardware to Pakistan. Ties between the two became stronger and extended to the nuclear industry following Bhutto’s visit to Beijing as leader of the high-level Pakistani military and scientific delegation in June 1976. China agreed to revive the nuclear reactor in Karachi originally sold by Canada in 1965. More importantly, it contracted to supply Pakistan uranium hexafluoride, UF6—commonly called “yellow cake”—a compound used as feedstock in the uranium enrichment process that produces fuel for nuclear reactors and weapons.17
In July 1976 work started on the Engineering Research Laboratory (renamed Kahuta Research Laboratory in 1983), code-named Project 706, in Kahuta, a village twenty-five miles southeast of Rawalpindi, the twin city of Islamabad. Bhutto placed it under the joint authority of Lieutenant General Zahid Ali Akbar of the Army Corps of Engineers and Abdul Qadeer Khan, a nuclear scientist, who had convinced Bhutto to pursue a uranium enrichment path, instead of plutonium (which India had done), to build an atom bomb. Bhutto gave Qadeer Khan the deadline of seven years to assemble one. The scientist would meet that challenge, thanks to the active assistance of China.
Born in the central Indian city of Bhopal, Qadeer Khan was sixteen when his parents migrated to Pakistan. After graduating in physical metallurgy from Karachi University, this oval-faced Pakistani with an intense gaze, a clipped mustache, and raven black hair pursued further studies in West Berlin; Delft, Holland; and Leuven, Belgium, between 1962 and 1971. He obtained undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in metallurgy and engineering. In between, he married Hendrina Donkers, a Dutch woman, and they had two daughters. This pointed to his acquiring Dutch citizenship. In March 1972 he got a job with an engineering company, Physical Dynamics Research Laboratory (acronym in Dutch: FDO), in Amsterdam as a metallurgist.
Qadeer Khan’s fluency in English, Dutch, and German proved a great asset to FDO when it got a subcontract to develop a better version of centrifuges for enriching uranium from URENCO,18 a consortium of Britain, Holland, and West Germany formed in 1970 to manufacture centrifuges to produce enriched uranium for use in power plants and nuclear weapons. He thus got free access to the design and manufacturing of centrifuges and the suppliers of various parts and materials. His declaration to his employers that he intended to take up Dutch citizenship eased his way to getting security clearance.
Enraged by the explosion of the “Smiling Buddha” by India, he addressed a letter to Bhutto in which he explained that he had gained expertise in centrifuge-based uranium enrichment technologies at URENCO’s laboratory in Almelo, Holland. On his arrival in Karachi with his family in December 1974, he was whisked off to Islamabad. He explained to Bhutto that producing fuel for one atom bomb through uranium enrichment would cost a paltry $60,000. Bhutto was convinced. Once Pakistan’s uranium enrichment program got going in early 1975, Qadeer Khan started channeling secret technical information from URENCO to Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, head of Project 706. With the 1976 Chinese agreement to supply yellow cake to Pakistan, Bhutto’s dream started to turn into reality.
“We were on the threshold of full nuclear
capability when I left the government to come to this death cell,” wrote Bhutto in his memoirs, If I Am Assassinated, published posthumously in late 1979. “We know that Israel and South Africa have full nuclear capability. The Christian, Jewish and Hindu civilizations have this capability. The Communist powers also possess it. Only the Islamic civilization was without it, but that situation is about to change.”19
Domestic Setbacks for Bhutto-Gandhi Duo
In India, any feel-good sentiment among its nationals, sparked by the nuclear device explosion in May 1974, soon vanished as continued high inflation and scarcity of essential goods showed no sign of abating. In Gujarat the protest movement initiated by university students spread so quickly that it caused the downfall of Gandhi’s Congress Party ministry there. By the end of the year, all opposition parties except the CPI rallied around Jaya Prakash Narayan, a nonparty personality of high, unblemished caliber. Its demands now included eradication of corruption in politics and government bureaucracy and an overhaul of the inequitable electoral system corrupted by the Congress Party. In the midst of this turbulence, in June 1975, a court invalidated Gandhi’s parliamentary seat won on the corrupt practice of using government facilities and resources during her 1971 election campaign. Instead of stepping down, she had the president, Fakhuruddin Ali Ahmad, declare an emergency. She started ruling by decree.
In Pakistan, Bhutto turned nationalization into a political tool and extended it to all wheat-milling, rice-husking, and cotton-ginning units in 1976 to enfeeble his opponents. His autocratic manner alienated many left-wingers and others who had joined the PPP in droves at its birth.
On the eve of the general elections in March 1977, all opposition factions and disempowered interest groups coalesced to form the nine-party Pakistan National Alliance (PNA), covering both religious and secular elements, to challenge the PPP.
This caused consternation in PPP circles. It led to vote rigging, carried out by the all-powerful district commissioners in rural areas, to an undetermined extent. The electoral officials declared the PPP had won 155 of 200 seats—76 percent of the total, up from 58 percent in the previous general election in 1970—with the PNA getting only 36. Bhutto’s opponents cried foul. Massive protest demonstrations led by the Islamic parties within the PNA followed. Bhutto responded with martial law and gunfire by army troops.
When these methods proved ineffective, he made concessions to the religious camp. He announced that Islamic Sharia law would be enforced within six months. He banned alcohol and gambling and closed night clubs. He declared Friday, the holy day in Islam, as the weekly off-day instead of the traditional Sunday.
Bhutto’s compromises failed to satisfy the opposition. That provided General Muhammad Zia ul Haq with a rationale to stage his Operation Fair Play at four am on July 5, 1977. He overthrew the civilian government and imposed martial law. He placed Bhutto under house arrest in the hill station of Murree. Zia’s operation code-name implied that he wanted to disengage the hostile camps and conduct a fresh election, but that never happened.
In Delhi, on the other hand, Gandhi, assured of the electoral success of her Congress Party by the Intelligence Bureau (IB), ordered a general election in January 1977. The IB proved disastrously wrong. The Janata Alliance, a coalition of the main opposition parties, trounced the Congress Alliance, led by Gandhi, by 345 to 189 seats. Morarji Desai, a former conservative Congress leader, became the prime minister. A long-time adversary of Gandhi, he attempted to move as far away from his predecessor’s foreign policy as he could. To balance Gandhi’s strong pro-Soviet tilt, he tried to improve ties with China, with his foreign minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee visiting Beijing in February 1979. Desai went on to formalize the decade-long covert cooperation between RAW and Israel’s Mossad. At the same time he reiterated India’s peaceful intentions toward Pakistan.
Zia ul Haq reneged on his promise to hold a National Assembly election because the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) chief told him that based on the information collected by his agents, the PPP would win a free and fair contest. Ironically, it was on the recommendation of General Ghulam Jilani Khan, the ISI head, that Bhutto had promoted Lieutenant General Zia ul Haq to chief of army staff in March 1976 above the heads of four more senior generals. Also, given Zia ul Haq’s well-known piousness and lack of interest in politics, Bhutto had concluded that he could count on the unfailing loyalty of a general whose religiosity would add a pro-Islamic hue to his political persona.
When General Ayub Khan had seized power in 1958, the standing of politicians had collapsed, and the once-powerful Muslim League had splintered into squabbling factions. By contrast Zia ul Haq had overthrown Bhutto, who for all his faults had mesmerized a very substantial part of the public and whose PPP, built from scratch, had acquired fairly deep roots in society. He therefore faced a daunting challenge: to dispel the Bhutto magic and smash the PPP.
12: Islamist Zia ul Haq,
Builder of the A-Bomb
As personalities, Muhammad Zia ul Haq and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto stood poles apart. Zia ul Haq came from a modest home in the East Punjab city of Jalandhar, his very religious father, Muhammad Akbar Ali, being a junior clerk in the British Indian Army in Delhi. Born in 1924, he graduated from the city’s prestigious St. Stephen’s College1 and then joined a cavalry regiment of the army. In 1947 he opted for the Pakistani military. He rose through the ranks but did not cease to be reverential to those who were socially superior to him. He remained strictly religious. “Drinking, gambling, dancing and music were the way the officers spent their free time,” he recollected. “I said prayers, instead. Initially, I was treated with some amusement—sometimes with contempt—but my seniors and my peers decided to leave me alone after some time.”2 As a colonel in 1962, he underwent two years’ training at the US Army Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Here too he stayed away from drinking and dancing. During the 1965 Indo-Pakistan War he was a tank commander. And as Brigadier Zia ul Haq, he trained soldiers in Jordan from 1967 to 1970. He was promoted to major general in 1973 and put in charge of the First Armored Division in Multan.
Two years later he rose to lieutenant general and took command of the Second Strike Corps, also based in Multan. He invited Premier Bhutto to his base and asked him to hit a target. The egotistical Bhutto scored with the first shot, much to his surprise and satisfaction. Turning on his obsequiousness to the fullest, Zia ul Haq exuded his loyalty to Bhutto, who noticed how meticulous the general was in offering his daily Islamic prayers.
Now, in July 1977, having toppled his benefactor and assumed supreme power as the chief martial law administrator, Zia ul Haq called himself “a soldier of Allah.” He projected himself as a moderator, promising a free and fair election in ninety days, with both the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and the Pakistan National Alliance (PNA) contesting. He released Bhutto on July 28.
Among those who accepted his word at face value was India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA). “He [General Zia] has categorically stated on several occasions that takeover was necessary to prevent civil war, his prime objective being to supervise political solution,” said Foreign Secretary J. S. Mehta, the highest bureaucrat in the ministry, in his cable to all of India’s foreign missions, according to declassified documents. “His 90-day plan makes it incumbent on him to arrange polls in October. All public indications so far suggest that he means what he says.”3
This was not to be. Bhutto’s rallies proved hugely popular, and he capped his domestic activities with a tour of friendly Arab countries. Knowing Bhutto’s record of punishing his enemies, Zia ul Haq calculated that after his expected electoral victory, Bhutto would wreak vengeance. Therefore he rearrested him on September 3 because of his alleged involvement in the murder of Muhammad Khan Kasuri, a Punjabi politician who, because of his differences with Bhutto, had quit the PPP in 1974. Bhutto would be found guilty and hanged in April 1979.
Zia’s Artful Dece
ption
India’s ambassador in Islamabad,4 however, continued to present Zia ul Haq in a favorable light. “Gen Zia ul Haq is said to be devout but not a fanatic and is professional in outlook,” wrote Mehta, the former foreign secretary of the MEA in Delhi. The Pakistan-Afghanistan division of the MEA agreed. “The concessions to Islamic Sharia Law and Nizam-i-Mustafa [Urdu: Rule of Prophet Muhammad] are doubtless meant to neutralize any serious opposition to the unconstitutional takeover of government by the armed forces, but not necessarily an indication of ambition to continue in power. It also incidentally gains for the regime the support of orthodox political elements.”5
In reality, Zia ul Haq started monopolizing power once the Supreme Court had invoked the “doctrine of necessity” in October to legitimize the coup. It also allowed him to suspend the 1973 constitution. As the chief martial law administrator, he presented a provisional constitution that authorized him to amend the 1973 document at will. But he pursued Bhutto’s project of building an atom bomb with much greater vigor while keeping Project 706 under wraps, with the innocuous sounding Engineering Research Laboratory (ERL) stealthily enriching uranium.
To get an inkling of what transpired inside the ERL, India’s Research and Analysis (RAW) agents collected discarded hair from nearby barber shops and sent them to the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Trombay, for analysis. It found traces of uranium in the hair, indicating uranium enriching activity at the ERL.6
A past master in speaking with a forked tongue, Zia ul Haq responded warmly to friendly overtures by Indian premier Moraji Desai. They maintained direct contact through periodic telephone conversations until mid-1979, when, following a split in the ruling Janata Alliance, Desai had to step down. In early 1978, according to Bahukutumbi Raman, former head of RAW’s Counter-Terrorism Division, in an unguarded moment Desai told Zia ul Haq that he was well aware of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program.7 Predictably, Zia ul Haq denied any contraband activity. Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) went into overdrive to winkle out all foreign spies and their agents from the ERL area.