by John Keay
As in East Bengal when Yahya Khan had postponed the 1971 National Assembly, protesters took to the streets while a succession of general strikes paralysed the economy. In Lahore and Karachi martial law was imposed. In Sind, muhajir students, among them Altaf Hussein, the future leader of the formidable MQM party, were still agitating against the reservation of educational places and jobs to Sindi-speakers. At least in Sind, Bhutto was on home territory. In the NWFP he barely dared show his face. There Khan Abdul Wali Khan, the six-foot-something Pathan patriarch who led the main opposition party and should have been heading the Pakistan National Alliance, had been arrested on a trumped-up charge and consigned to gaol. Nationwide, in a matter of weeks in the early summer of 1977, more than two hundred protesters died in armed clashes involving either the FSF, the police or the army. Students and small traders, once the backbone of the PPP’s support but now alienated by rising prices, rampant corruption and lack of jobs, rallied to the opposition’s Pakistan National Alliance and backed its demand for a rerun of the elections.
Bhutto, with his mandate sullied and the army increasingly reluctant to gun down his opponents, had no choice but to backtrack. ‘Too clever by half’ (and more questionably the man who ‘gave political opportunism a bad name in Pakistan’), he indicated that there might indeed have been improprieties in the recent election, and offered the National Alliance a dubious compromise.15 Simultaneously, he tried to detach the Islamic parties from the Alliance by volunteering to ban gambling, close nightclubs and restrict the sale of alcohol. Coming from the clean-shaven and cigar-smoking Bhutto, it was a blatantly cynical attempt to cling to power. By pandering to the intolerant sentiments of religious radicals, it also set a dangerous precedent.
But none of these concessions brought an agreement on rerunning the elections. Nor did they reassure those several brigadiers whose troops were trying to reimpose order in the streets. It was seemingly on the insistence of the latter that General Ziaul Haq, fearful of the army itself being divided by the ferment, staged his coup of 5 July 1977.
At the time the coup seemed even more benign than Ayub Khan’s in 1956. There was no bloodshed, no overt protest. The 1973 Constitution was not abrogated, merely suspended pending arrangements for new elections; Zia promised they would be held within ninety days, after which he would stand down. Meanwhile martial law was reimposed, political life ceased, and the nation went back to work – all, that is, except the FSF, which was disbanded and its leaders arrested. Under interrogation they confessed to numerous crimes and evinced a willingness, as suspicious as it was plausible, to implicate Bhutto. But Bhutto himself was treated with caution. Whisked off to the cool comforts of a hill-station, he and his party henchmen enjoyed a spell under holiday-cottage arrest; the arrangement was temporary and supposedly for their own safety.
A month later they were duly released; elections held while the principal contender was still under restraint would have been a farce. But if Zia was counting on Bhutto’s followers having by now despaired of him, he was mistaken. Massive crowds welcomed back the self-proclaimed ‘Leader of the People’ in Karachi, Lahore and his native Sind. As so often, disgrace and detention had done his reputation no harm whatsoever. Though unforgiven by many, he was unforgotten by none.
It was this outpouring of support that seems to have decided his fate. In early September, little more than a month after his release, he was re-arrested, charged with murder, bailed, and then re-re-arrested, this time for good. It is not clear whether Zia had been nudged into action by the officers who had urged the July coup or whether he was now more mindful of his own vulnerability; for if the PPP were to win the promised election, it would be the General who would have to stand trial. To scotch any such possibility, on 1 October Zia announced that the elections would have to be postponed for ninety days. More postponements would follow as the ninety days stretched to ninety months and beyond.
Bhutto lived to witness only eighteen of them. For high-profile prisoners in South Asia, detention was not necessarily a hardship. Often it was served under house arrest; even in gaol the prisoner might enjoy access to creature comforts plus the services of a retainer or two. Sentences might be commuted for those willing to embrace exile; judicial executions were comparatively rare (and still are), even in the case of convicted terrorists. Mustafa Khar, Governor of Punjab province as Bhutto’s strongman and then Punjabi gaolbird as his deadly rival, would set up his own poultry farm while in prison and, having taken his gaolers onto his payroll, would want for nothing. ‘He had been allocated seven rooms … his cell was air-conditioned. He had a fridge and a deep freezer …’ noted Tehmina, the latest of his glamorous wives.16 On prison visits, she was hard pressed to think of any little luxury to take him.
But Bhutto’s incarceration was different. During more than a year, while his case was decided and an appeal rejected, he languished in the solitary confinement of a cramped death cell, ‘hemmed in by its sordidness and stink throughout the heat and rain of the long hot summer’.17 Few visitors were allowed; his eyesight deteriorated and his gums rotted. For although the most political of political prisoners, he was not being treated as a political prisoner.
Accused, tried and convicted of instigating the FSF’s elimination of an opponent, he was sentenced to death as a common criminal. The appeal against the sentence was rejected by a four-to-three majority of the doubtfully constituted Supreme Court. International pleas for clemency from the Western powers and the Arab world also fell on deaf ears. After a farewell visit from his wife Nusrat and his daughter Benazir, both of whom would succeed him as leader of the PPP, he was led from his cell in the early hours of 4 April 1979 and hanged until dead.
Mujib had been assassinated, and Indira too would die in a hail of bullets; only Bhutto was judicially executed. Throughout his prison ordeal he had remained defiant. He allegedly refused the options of exile or retiring from politics (‘It was like asking a human being to live, but without oxygen’18). He refused even to lodge his own appeal lest it lend legitimacy to the proceedings. The Bhutto legend would owe much to the manner of his death and the courage with which he met it, more perhaps than to his rhetoric or his tarnished record in government.
Zia’s refusal to commute the death sentence was nevertheless curious. There were ample grounds for clemency: the conviction was shaky, the appeal had been rejected by just a single vote, and world opinion was unanimously in favour of a reprieve. Bhutto himself, and later Benazir, sensed a conspiracy. Zia, they argued, stood firm on the instructions of Washington. Often the target of Bhutto’s jibes, the US had come to regard him as a dangerous demagogue and the last person to be trusted with a nuclear capability. In other words, Bhutto died because of the bomb; cherishing martyrdom, he had sacrificed his own future for that of his country. But although Zia would indeed enjoy close relations with Washington, they dated from later in 1979, by when the Shah of Iran had been overthrown and Russian troops had begun rolling into Afghanistan. At the time, Zia was more concerned with strengthening his hold on power and ridding himself of the turbulent premier who was sworn to contest it.
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In line with titles like Bhutto’s Quaid-i-Awa (‘Leader of the People’) and Mujib’s Banglabandhu (‘Bengal’s Big Brother’), the London Economist had capped its coverage of the Bangladesh war by declaring Indira Gandhi ‘Empress of India’. No longer just any old avatar, villagers joined the national press in hailing her as a reincarnation of the goddess Durga, the all-conquering manifestation of the wife of Lord Shiva. The victory in Bangladesh had been her apotheosis.
Apart from Pakistan’s poorly executed bombing of some small airports in Punjab and J and K, Indian territory had scarcely been affected by the war. The population, though, had been affected. In anticipation of further air raids, security had everywhere been tightened and the major cities put on high alert. Civil-defence drills disrupted the working day; sirens were tested at night. Even distant Bombay was subject to a city-wide blackout. This made
after-dark excursions along pavements that habitually doubled as dormitories so perilous that Christmas shopping had to be curtailed. Out at the airport, fighter pilots had rigged canvas awnings from the wings of their jets beneath which they ate and dozed while waiting for the order to scramble.
It was, of course, a false alarm, and lasted less than a fortnight. But such precautions ensured maximum awareness of the war and then universal delight at its outcome. The delirious crowds could hardly believe it: Pakistan had finally got its come-uppance. After centuries of humiliation at the hands of Muslim and British invaders, India had a battlefield triumph to celebrate. The nationalist greeting of Jai Hind – as much ‘Victory to India’ as ‘Hail India’ – was no longer a pious hope; it was a joyous statement of fact. The army had redeemed its failures of 1962 and 1965; and the Prime Minister, who had assumed personal responsibility for the conduct of the war, had emerged as a master strategist. Outwitting Pakistan’s moustachioed generals while deftly deflecting Washington’s disapproval, the leader once dismissed by Morarji Desai as a ‘dumb slip of a girl’ now deserved every encomium that was going. She could do no wrong, and had she chosen the moment to call another snap election, she might well have whitewashed the opposition as comprehensively as Mujib in 1970. As it was, in March 1972 Congress won 70 per cent of the seats contested in the state elections.
But the trouble with such a soaring approval rating lay in the near impossibility of sustaining it. Though gratified by all the plaudits, Indira urged the nation to put the Bangladesh war behind it and concentrate on the war against poverty. It was a timely reminder. With over 40 per cent of the rapidly growing population still below the poverty line, there were far more poor Indians than in 1960. As in Pakistan, the ‘Green Revolution’ (affording higher crop yields through the use of hybrid seed, better irrigation and more fertiliser) had substantially increased wheat production in the northern states. Self-sufficiency in cereals was at last within reach. But when the monsoons of 1972 and 1973 both failed in large parts of the country, grain prices shot up and food riots followed.
In the economy as a whole the growth rate remained stuck at 3–4 per cent per annum. The earlier investment in infrastructure and heavy industries had stalled. Inflation was in double figures even before the 1973 oil-price hike sent it up to over 20 per cent. Like her father, Indira Gandhi claimed to be running an economy that combined socialist upliftment with capitalist incentive. But according to one economist, it had failed on both counts. ‘It had grown too slowly to qualify as a capitalist economy, and by its failure to eradicate illiteracy or reduce inequalities had forfeited any claims to be “socialist”.’19
Throughout South Asia, nationalisation was seen as the touchstone of a socialist economy. Taking ever more industries into the state sector (Mrs Gandhi now added coal, then oil and gas to her government’s portfolio) was supposed to ensure that they were run for the national benefit, that prices were not inflated by profit-taking and that workers enjoyed some security of employment. But in practice what endeared nationalisation to the populist governments of the day was the inviting reservoir of desirable posts and perquisites that it made available. In return for awarding to an applicant a directorship in a state-owned bank, for instance, the government could expect cheaper loans for its favoured projects, plus a substantial donation to party funds. The operation of the permit raj in the private sector had much the same effect. Well-meant policies aimed at social betterment were being commandeered by the ‘politics of patronage’.
Cronyism and nepotism thrived as a result. The most high-profile case was provided by Sanjay Gandhi, the younger of the Prime Minister’s two sons. Despite a doltish reputation and a dismal school record, on the strength of an apprenticeship with Rolls-Royce in England the twenty-five-year-old Sanjay tendered for a coveted licence to set up India’s first indigenous automotive plant. Government-backed, it was to mass-produce an affordable ‘People’s Car’ at the rate of 50,000 vehicles per year to challenge the Fiats, Morrises and Triumphs built to outdated designs from Europe. The newspapers were full of it, dealerships were sought, orders pledged. With little discussion and despite a total lack of managerial experience, Sanjay was awarded the contract ahead of eighteen other applicants. He was then practically gifted the site for his ‘Maruti’ factory by a Chief Minister keen to ingratiate himself. Eyebrows were raised, and the misgivings of Mrs Gandhi’s principal adviser were noted. But such was her national stature and her command of both party and Parliament that few dared openly object.
Maruti’s promise of ‘horsepower to the people’ became a bad joke. During its ten years under Sanjay’s stewardship the company produced not a single production-line vehicle and only a handful of barely driveable prototypes. It did, though, alert Sanjay to the ways of patronage and the political possibilities afforded by his birth and his mother’s confidence in him. Though without either a seat in Parliament or an office within the party, he increasingly acted as a political troubleshooter and a gateway to the Prime Minister’s office.
Egged on by Sanjay and her all-powerful secretariat, in 1973 Indira resumed her vendetta against the Supreme Court and its reluctance to sanction constitutional amendments. She did so by setting aside both seniority and tradition to appoint a little-known but pliable Chief Justice to head the Court. ‘The choice was politically motivated, a manifestation of the government’s increasing desire to control the judiciary.’20 Many senior figures remonstrated, though to little immediate effect, prominent among them being the revered Gandhian and socialist Jayaprakash (or J.P.) Narayan. In the same year a petition citing serious irregularities in the 1971 Rae Bareilly election was lodged with the UP High Court in Allahabad. The stick-waving Raj Narain was still on the warpath. With the parliamentary opposition ineffective, resentment over corruption and the high-handedness of the Prime Minister’s secretariat was finding extra-parliamentary expression. In a two-pronged assault, Narayan publicly championed growing disgust over the venality and exploitation at every level of government while Narain doggedly pursued the Prime Minister herself through the courts.
Early in 1974 remonstrations gave way to demonstrations. In the state of Gujarat students took to the streets to protest against rising commodity prices and the blatant corruption of the Congress-run state government. Bihar, J.P. Narayan’s home ground, followed suit; similar demonstrations involving organised labour as well as students brought the entire state to a standstill. And to cap it all, in May the socialist-led railway workers’ union called a national rail strike.
The government responded with force rather than concessions. In Gujarat over a hundred protesters died in confrontations with the police before Mrs Gandhi suspended the state government. The train strike was also ruthlessly suppressed, some 20,000 rail workers being imprisoned without trial under a draconian new Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA – otherwise the ‘Maintenance of Indira and Sanjay Act’). Only in Bihar were the protests left to run their course. This was largely due to the unassailable reputation of J.P. Narayan. The seventy-two-year-old ‘conscience of the nation’, who rather than seeking office had devoted his life to a variety of noble causes, now lent his name and his leadership to the whole protest movement (henceforth the ‘JP Movement’). Calling for a non-violent ‘total revolution’ (‘political, economic, social, educational, moral and cultural’), he toured Bihar addressing massive crowds and promising ‘a real people’s government’ within one year.
Suddenly Mrs Gandhi seemed to have lost her touch. The Bangladesh ‘bounce’ had subsided. A new distraction was needed, and like a conjuror pulling rabbits from under her sari, she came up with two, one explosive, the other acquisitive. In May, in the midst of the rail strike, she gave the go-ahead for that test-firing of India’s first nuclear device. Though the test had been on the cards for months, the timing was entirely of her own choosing. Euphemistically billed as a ‘Peaceful Nuclear Experiment’ (and known accordingly as PNE), it was hailed as an important step in �
�building up a better future for the people’. It was also hailed as a triumph for the nation’s scientists, and was accompanied by fulsome disclaimers of any weaponising intent. Nevertheless, a national outburst of unseemly chauvinism followed, then an international outburst of hypocritical condemnation. The existing nuclear powers deplored proliferation, as did India’s South Asian neighbours, none more so than the incensed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan.
Four months later, with the JP Movement spreading beyond Bihar and a mass march on Delhi in the offing, the second rabbit was revealed. It took the form of a carefully engineered and decidedly brazen assault on Sikkim, the smallest of the sovereign states along the Himalayan glacis. Nehru would have been appalled. While keen to claim Kashmir and gobble up the colonial enclaves of Pondicherry and Goa, he had always acknowledged Sikkim as a sovereign kingdom, just like Nepal and Bhutan. Its historical and religious ties were with Tibet. It had long commanded the main trade route with Tibet and had once been on a territorial par with Bhutan. It was not, and never had been, part of political India.
True, like Bhutan, it was otherwise wholly dependent on India and had long since assigned to Delhi its defence and the conduct of its external affairs. Yet the sovereignty of the kingdom, as enshrined in its Chogyal (‘righteous king’), was uncontested. It flew its own flag, minted its own currency, communicated direct with its Himalayan neighbours and maintained its own small corps of national guards. Though for convenience the British had sometimes grouped it with the princely states of India proper, it had not been considered one of them. Hence in 1947 the Chogyal had not been among those princes from whom Mountbatten extracted Instruments of Accession. Instead, in 1950 there was a new ‘treaty’ – the term itself being indicative of the equal status of the signatories – whereby Sikkim now accorded to India as the new protecting power responsibility for its defence, foreign affairs and communications.