Midnight's Descendants

by John Keay

  Worse followed. As of the 1973 Arab–Israeli war, world oil prices began rising, and with them the cost of manufactured goods and most other commodities. Bangladesh’s under-mechanised economy was less affected than some, but the price of imported goods shot up, and the cross-border smuggling of everything from pharmaceuticals to rice, cattle and consumer durables became a national pastime. Elsewhere floods, poor harvests and the misappropriation and erratic distribution of aid led to scarcity, then famine. Most acute in the still lawless northern provinces of Rangpur and Mymensingh, the effects spread to Dhaka, where by mid-1974 thousands of famine victims were invading the city. Others drifted over the border in another wave of migration into India.

  Mujib would concede a death toll of 30,000 from the famine; international agencies put it at fifty times that. With India and the Soviet Union unable to help, Mujib suddenly reversed his previous insistence on accepting only bilateral aid from friendly nations and went cap-in-hand to the UN and Washington. A World Bank-led consortium duly came to the country’s rescue, though not before Mujib had been persuaded to ditch his command economy. Tajuddin Ahmed, his socialist Finance Minister and previously Prime-Minister-in-exile of the Mujibnagar government, was sacked, the currency devalued, state industries denationalised, and reforms favourable to the private sector and foreign investment introduced. ‘Critics of the new aid consortium argue that Bangladesh has had to barter away the last vestiges of its original commitment to the ideals of “socialist planning” in return for short-term relief,’ noted the Far Eastern Economic Review.5

  Other critics vented their disillusionment in less measured terms. Never an organised force, the Mukti Bahini had been only partially absorbed into the army. Bands of still armed fighters infested the countryside and, losing all confidence in Mujib, increasingly turned on members of his government and party. Mujib responded by raising his own vigilantes, the Lal Bahini and then the Rakhi Bahini. But these, too, rapidly got out of hand and began selecting their own targets. A reign of ill-directed terror began. ‘By the end of 1974 four thousand Awami Leaguers were reported murdered, including five members of parliament.’

  Distancing himself from all these paramilitaries, Mujib now performed another about-turn. He called in the army, ostensibly to suppress the smuggling that financed the insurgents; then in December 1974 he effectively abrogated his own two-year-old Constitution by declaring a state of emergency. His well-drilled National Assembly endorsed it, so ending all further pretence of parliamentary government. Mujib declared himself President indefinitely, the press was muzzled, political parties banned and the rights of protest and assembly suspended. After just three years, Bangladesh was not only in deep trouble but back under one-man rule.

  Bhutto, when he took up the reins of power from Yahya Khan in January 1972, was described as the first-ever civilian to be a Chief Martial Law Administrator; Mujib now had a good claim to being the second. In imposing a state of emergency he had also reversed his pupil–mentor relationship with Mrs Gandhi in that his own ‘Emergency’ anticipated by six months Indira’s identical response to ‘disruption and collapse’ in India.

  But it was in Bangladesh itself that the betrayal was most sorely felt. For a politician whose entire career had been built on electoral arithmetic, and for a nation that owed its statehood to democratic consensus, the lurch towards authoritarian rule was unforgivable. In a vain attempt to revive his moribund reputation, Mujib formed a new national party which rejoiced in the acronym of BAKSAL. It stood for the ‘Bangladesh Peasants and Workers Awami League’ and heralded another about-turn, this time back to the left in an attempt to enlist the support of those worst affected by the failure of his earlier economic policies. But by now Mujib had taken a turning too many. He had lost touch with reality. ‘In a country overrun by self-styled enforcers, gouged by profiteers, and raped by government officials … [he] presided over a court corrupted by power.’6 Once the symbol of the nation’s hopes, Mujib was now the horn-rimmed butt of its own failure, a Groucho Marx lookalike floundering amid his own delusions.

  With all other opposition stifled or divided, only the army saw itself as capable of challenging his all-powerful BAKSAL. By mid-1975 it was not so much a case of whether it would intervene but of how, when and in whose name. The last question has yet to be conclusively answered; but of the ‘how’ and ‘when’ there is a grim certainty. On the night of 15 August tanks rolled up before the Rahman residence in Dhaka. Troops then stormed the building. Mujib was gunned down on the stairs; his family – some twenty persons, mostly women and children – died along with him. Only two daughters, both of whom were in Europe at the time, survived, one being Hasina, a future Awami League Prime Minister and redoubtable champion of her father’s reputation.

  That the bloodbath had the backing of senior military figures was self-evident. The trigger-happy majors responsible for it were promoted, granted immunity from prosecution and given a safe passage into exile. But so convoluted was the 1975 power struggle, and so partisan the testimony of the participants, that the spate of attempted coups and counter-coups that followed has yet to be satisfactorily unravelled. Suffice it to say that by the end of 1975 the now army Chief of Staff General Ziaur Rahman – he who had first broadcast the news of Bangladesh’s independence in 1971 – had commandeered a rank-and-file army mutiny and, tearing a leaf out of Ayub Khan’s book, declared himself Bangladesh’s first official Chief Martial Law Administrator.

  *

  Thus, within four years, Bangladesh had succumbed to military rule under a General called Zia. If the Awami League could so traduce its mandate as to endorse autocratic government and invite military intervention, then so could the PPP in what remained of Pakistan. Bhutto should have been warned. Yet eighteen months later, he too stood accused of so prostituting the apparatus of power as to trigger a coup which was conducted under the glassy-eyed stare of another General Zia.

  As with Mujib in Bangladesh, much had been expected of Bhutto in his truncated Pakistan. ‘If ever a Pakistani ruler wielded absolute power, it was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto following the 1971 war with India,’ writes Lawrence Ziring.7 Unlike Pakistan’s later prime ministers he was unbeholden to the army, which was anyway discredited and maimed by the defeat in Bangladesh. More experienced and more intellectually formidable than Mujib, the urbane Bhutto looked equal to any occasion. He delighted the international community with his literary quips, commanded the adulation of his followers with earthy jibes, and silenced rivals with biting sarcasm. Appreciating the need for a reappraisal of Pakistan’s purpose and convinced that he personally embodied that purpose, he articulated it much more confidently than Mujib.

  In a Pakistan minus its eastern wing, the doubtful parity implicit in the original idea of the subcontinent’s ‘two nations’ was no longer sustainable. There were as many Muslims in India as in what now constituted Pakistan (or indeed Bangladesh). While mindful of its origins as a homeland and haven for the subcontinent’s Muslims, post-1971 Pakistan must face about. Its destiny now lay as a compact nation state astride the crossroads between an Islamic West Asia, a still Soviet Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent.

  Such repositioning called for some historical revisionism. Aitzaz Ahsan, a stylish lawyer and leading light in the PPP, would argue that contrary to received opinion the new Pakistan, however fortuitous, was anything but artificial. As a distinct socio-political entity cradled by the Indus river rather than the Ganges, ‘Pakistan had existed for five and a half of the last six thousand years’.8 According to Ahsan, only in the last half-millennium had its identity been obscured by a succession of outside rulers and the constant passage of arms. Islam had provided solace and a wider sense of community, but it was not the Indus peoples’ only distinguishing trait. A predilection for clannish fraternities based on kinship and convenience, a preference for ostentatious consumption over thrift and capital accumulation, a high tolerance of exploitative rulers, a readiness to switch allegiances, and a tendency to b
lame any but themselves represented the characteristic response of the Indus peoples to constant pillaging and subjection. Fashioned by adversity, ‘Indus man’ was a tough nut, parochial, resilient, intemperate and largely impervious.

  Ahsan would write his The Indus Saga and the Making of Pakistan during several long spells of post-Bhutto detention. He lacked the resources of the historian, but as a persuasive advocate he made a noteworthy case for not judging Pakistan by the standards applicable to less troubled regions. An elite long inured to authority, indeed ‘conditioned to brutality’, could take in its stride the brickbats of repressive fortune and the comings and goings of regimes. ‘The Bengalis did not have the same tolerance threshold as [the] Indus [peoples]. And so they separated.’9 Without them, Pakistan could again become its robust old self.

  Whether Bhutto was aware of Ahsan’s thinking is uncertain. But he acted as if he was, pushing the Indus persona to its limits. While protesting his democratic credentials and endearing himself to the masses with a flurry of nationalisations (heavy industries, insurance, cooking oil, rice husking, banking, etc.) he tightened his iron grip on party, patronage and power. Martial law was terminated, and in 1973 Pakistan’s third and most enduring Constitution ushered in a genuinely parliamentary form of government. This transferred all executive authority from the President to the Prime Minister, in which office Bhutto, as Chairman of the PPP, was duly confirmed by a National Assembly composed of the victors of the 1970 poll.

  On paper the new Constitution was unexceptionable. Orthodox opinion was assuaged by the designation of Pakistan as an Islamic state, by the promotion of Quranic teaching and by the creation of an advisory council to ensure legislation conformed with Islamic precept. Yet initially Bhutto, a Shi’i by birth and a libertine by inclination, shunned the Sunni Islamic parties and made no adjustments to his decidedly secular lifestyle. In similar vein, the Constitution awarded more autonomy to the provinces by specifying the responsibilities reserved to their governments. But as in India, the list of ‘concurrent subjects’ (i.e. those for which the federal centre and the provinces shared responsibility) was long and contentious. In effect ‘Bhutto, despite his often expressed sentiments in favour of federalism, was no more willing to shift power from the centre to the provinces than any of his predecessors.’10 Constitutional concessions extracted by the opposition parties were swiftly negated by prime ministerial ordinances which, though couched in terms of the national interest, were deployed in the interests of the PPP.

  The party itself was regularly purged and just as often diluted by the induction of sycophantic allies. Instead of shoring up its grassroots support by establishing a structure of representative local committees, Bhutto took it upon himself to select the party’s functionaries and dictate its policies. Intolerant of even the mildest criticism, he relied on his own undoubted charisma, plus the services of the newly raised FSF. The initials stood for the ‘Federal Security Force’ – or to those singled out for its thuggish attention, the ‘Fascist Security Force’. Recruited from unsavoury elements, the FSF was outside the purview of the armed forces, more amenable than Mujib’s Rakhi Bahini and answerable only to Chairman Bhutto.

  History might have forgiven Bhutto his authoritarianism had he lived up to his egalitarian principles. In a society with more bastions of privilege than even caste-ridden India, targets were plentiful. The twenty-two familial conglomerates that supposedly controlled most of the economy were scattered by his nationalisation programme, many preferring to take themselves and their capital overseas. As in Bangladesh, the economy then contracted and the growth rate slowed. Private investors took fright while the public sector was hamstrung by the ‘politics of patronage’. It was the same with the bureaucracy. The elite Civil Service of Pakistan was dissolved in favour of a graded and more accessible administrative structure. But in practice many former bureaucrats simply resurfaced as born-again ‘Bhuttocrats’; and it was not talent that enjoyed easier access but influence. Likewise the great landowning baronies of Punjab, though subject to two attempts at radical land redistribution, remained substantially intact thanks to favours rendered to the PPP and the usual cut-and-paste ploy of dividing holdings among relatives and dependants.

  Most important of all, the army’s presumed role as the saviour of the nation cried out for curtailment. As well as awarding some peacekeeping responsibilities to the FSF, Bhutto worked to dilute the armed forces’ monopoly of national defence and to influence the selection of their most senior personnel. But again all three moves backfired. The FSF became more detested than the miscreants it was supposed to control. Moreover it proved no match for the army when it came to containing mass insurgency. From 1973 to 1976 some 80,000 regular troops were engaged in ruthlessly suppressing a secessionist movement in Balochistan; it was nearly as many as had been deployed in Bangladesh in 1971. And as early as 1972 the military had been called to Sind province when the Urdu-speaking muhajir community rioted against Bhutto’s privileging of the native Sindi-speakers. Both interventions ‘carried echoes of Yahya’s ill-conceived actions in East Pakistan and depressingly repeated the pattern of the state hampering national integration by provoking regional opposition through its violent suppression of legitimate demands’.11

  Another way to reduce the army’s influence was to upstage its monopoly of firepower. At the time of the 1965 Indo–Pak war, Bhutto had famously vowed that, were India ever to develop a nuclear bomb, ‘then we should have to eat grass and get one, or buy one of our own’.12 Buying in the technology and eating grass to pay for it came a lot nearer when in May 1974 Indira Gandhi opted to test-fire India’s first ‘nuclear device’. Allegedly developed to deter further aggression from China, and then fired for domestic reasons, it lacked the warhead of a nuclear bomb and there was as yet no means of delivering it. But the explosion beneath the Rajasthan desert clearly advertised both intent and capability.

  Pakistan, too, had a small nuclear programme. A plutonium power station had been supplied by Canada, and France had signed an agreement for a reprocessing plant. Reprocessed plutonium could be used for weapons. But under pressure from the anti-proliferation lobby and the US, in the mid-1970s Canada halted fuel supplies and the French contract was put on hold. Bhutto, who had already urged the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission to achieve ‘fission in three years’, would persevere with plutonium; but he also let it be known he was open to alternatives.

  This news reached the ears of Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, a senior nuclear physicist then working at a uranium-processing facility in the Netherlands. Born in Bhopal in India, from where his family had removed to Pakistan at the time of Partition, A.Q. Khan was a leading expert in the design and engineering of centrifuges suitable for uranium enrichment. He had a wide understanding of the whole process, and access to international suppliers and scientists. With Bhutto’s backing, in 1976 Khan and his assets were transferred to a new research centre at Kahuta near Rawalpindi. He would remain there for a quarter of a century, being credited with Pakistan’s first nuclear tests in 1998 and becoming a national hero, the country’s most decorated scientist and the world’s most notorious purveyor of nuclear knowhow and materials.

  Bhutto would rate his own role in the development of what he called ‘the Islamic bomb’ a greater achievement than his masterminding of the strategic alliance with Communist China. ‘I put my entire vitality behind the task,’ he would write, ‘… [and] due to my singular efforts Pakistan acquired the intra-structure [sic] and the potential of nuclear capability.’13 Thanks to Bhutto, the nation would finally possess a credible deterrent against Indian aggression. It would also have a useful bargaining counter in negotiations with Washington; for discontinuing nuclear development – or pretending to – could be traded for aid packages and conventional weapons. Better still, with the programme and its control under civilian direction, the government could boast a defence capability that upstaged the heavy armour on offer from the armed forces.

  Having rescued th
e nation after the Bangladesh débâcle, Bhutto would now claim to have underwritten its security for generations to come. But the bomb would take time to develop, and there was no guarantee that the nuclear programme would remain under civilian control. Fatally, in May 1976 he took another swipe at the military by picking as the army Chief of Staff an unknown, unregarded and supposedly amenable General called Ziaul Haq. Then eight months later he called for elections. Although due within five years of the new Constitution having been approved, Bhutto gave minimal notice of the poll, and was confident of sweeping the board.

  ‘Perhaps I have embedded myself too deep in the poor of this land,’ he wrote. ‘I am a household word in every home and under every roof that leaks in rain … I have an eternal bond with the people which armies cannot break.’14 Anything other than a vote for Bhutto would therefore be treachery, and anything less than a clean sweep unthinkable. The opposition parties nevertheless cobbled together a grand Pakistan National Alliance and went down fighting. The PPP won the 1977 election handsomely; but it was amid such widespread accusations of having disqualified potential opponents, rigged the vote and tampered with the ballot boxes that the real cut-and-thrust only got under way after the results were declared.