Malicious Gossip

by Khushwant Singh

  It takes an age before a lover of beauty in the garden is born.)

  —the Speaker tells the members to omit the quotation from their speeches as it would be taken as read.

  The Prime Minister, as is his wont, makes a dramatic entry as the session is about to conclude. His tributes to the Quaid are well prepared in the style of Nehru’s famous “tryst-with-destiny” speech. But despite his superior oratory he does not have the same felicitous choice of words. Although he had the same kind of education in a prestigious university (Oxford), he did not spend as long a time in gaol as did Nehru (nine years) to turn that education into a creative faculty.

  However, when it comes to the dramatic, Bhutto can teach the world’s most seasoned statesmen a few tricks. He knew about the oil strike in Dhodak (District Dehra Ghazi Khan), but kept it a secret till he could explode it in Parliament. The announcement is acclaimed by a long, standing ovation. He then pulls out a bottle from his briefcase, strides across the hall towards the Opposition benches, embraces the bearded beturbaned leader, uncorks the bottle and makes him sniff it to assure him that it is oil.

  One afternoon I go to the bazaar and check the prices of food. Flour, rice, sugar, meat, eggs, cooking oil: each one of them costs between twenty-fifty per cent more than in India. Not only is Pakistan’s progress in industry lamentably slow, even in agriculture, India has gone well ahead of Pakistan; an acre in our Punjab or Haryana produces almost twice as much as in Pakistani Punjab.

  They have got their priorities very wonky. They have introduced colour television (Rs 10,500 per set) while literacy, health services, family planning cry for attention. And their newspapers are duller than ours.

  Another afternoon I spend with students of Islamabad (now renamed Quaid-e-Azam) University and am profoundly impressed by their erudition, objectivity, and knowledge of Indian affairs.

  Then there are long sessions of drinking with Faiz Ahmed Faiz. He has put on weight and is much slower in his movements. But his capacity to imbibe Scotch remains as unimpaired as his affection for old friends.

  There is also an all-too-brief encounter with the actor Zia Mohyeddin and his lovely teenaged second wife, Naheed Siddiqui—Pakistan’s leading Kathak dancer. She has plans for coming to India this spring.

  A telling comment on the two-nation theory is made by the comely Aliya Imam who is quite the lioness of Karachi’s Urdu literary circles. She produces a handful of silver rings she had got from Iran for her friends and relatives. One is to be given to her brother in India. Another to the poet Ali Sardar Jafri and a third to the novelist Krishan Chander. She then slips one on my finger and says, “You too are my brother.”

  My only encounter with a member of Pakistan’s minority community is with the Managing Director of Murree Breweries, Mr Bhandara. I am not sure of his identity and ask him, “Are you a bawaji?” He looks somewhat nonplussed and asks me in perfect Punjabi “Bawaji kee honda?” There are upwards of 5000 Parsis in Pakistan—and predictably, all very prosperous.

  I leave Islamabad in the mid-morning. Ambassador Bajpai deposits me in the safe custody of an airport official with the request that I be locked up in the VIP lounge till my flight is called. I prefer to mingle with the crowd and am rewarded with free cups of tea and 7-Ups by strangers who want nothing of me except to take their good wishes to their friends in India.

  Islamabad to Lahore is a one-hour flight by a twin-engined Fokker Friendship. We fly over towns I had known well in the days of my youth—and over Nankana Sahib and the Ravi to Lahore. And once more into the embraces of my friends Mohammed Anwar, Rahman and Manzur Qadir’s family which is as close to me as my own. The Qadirs live in the house that once was mine.

  The chief object of my coming to Lahore is to catch up with the last days of Manzur Qadir’s illness and death. He was my closest and dearest friend and the most dominant influence in my life. I felt my knowledge of him was incomplete unless I had read the last chapter of his biography.

  We spend the afternoon buying all kinds of bric-a-brac (incidentally Pakistan produces the most exquisite onyx ware you can see anywhere in the world). Also the latest Mehdi Hassans and Sabris and tapes of a new singer called Habib Wali Mohammed and one of Nayyara singing Faiz. I see more tapes of Lata, Asha and Kishore Kumar in Pakistan record shops than of Pakistani singers. After dinner, Asghari Qadir, her son Basharat and I sit by the fire. I ask them to give me a detailed account of Manzur’s last days.

  Manzur, like me, was an agnostic, but when it came to facing death, he turned back to his religion, Islam. Continuous emissions of blood and transfusions had made him very weak and he could not even pick up a book. When his friends came to visit him in hospital, he would ask them to read to him. Sometimes it was Hali’s Mussadas or Iqbal’s Shikwa. Then it was the Ayat-ul-Kursi from the Quran:

  No slumber can seize Him

  Nor sleep. His are all things

  In the heavens and on earth.

  Who is there that can intercede

  In His presence except

  As He permitteth? He knoweth

  What (appeareth to His creatures as)

  Before or After

  or Behind them.

  It is not the peal of church bells but the call of the muezzin which rouses me from slumber—for the rest it could be Christmas morning in London. Lahore is a lot like it—cold, frosty and misty. A Sui gas fire which has burnt all night (this natural gas is cheap and plentiful) in the main rooms fills them with a bright orange glow. I join Begum Qadir by the fire for a cup of “bed-tea”. Pakistani tea is an insipid affair tasting like sugared hot water with a dash of milk. (When visiting Pakistan take along tea, cardamoms, betel leaves and jharoos.)

  Mohammed Anwar arrives in his cream-coloured Mercedez Benz. We drive out into the grey dawn towards Bahawalpur Road. I recognize a few old landmarks and then am lost in a maze of graveyards and mosques. We finally locate the object of my pilgrimage to Lahore. A small, dusty enclosure contains the graves of people I had known, revered and loved: Sir Abdul and Lady Qadir, Mohammed Sleem (the great tennis player and criminal lawyer) and beside him the latest inmate, my friend Manzur Qadir. I scatter rose-petals on his grave and garland his tombstone. The epitaph is taken from Iqbal’s dialogue between the poet and the taper:

  Main to jalti hoon key muzmir meri fitrat mein soz Too ferozaan hai keh parvanon ko ho sauda tera (I burn because it is in my nature to burn and give light; You burn and give light to enter into a contract with the moth)

  Basharat Qadir has transposed the lines to form a more fitting tribute to his great sire:

  Too ferozaan hai keh muzmir ten fitrat mein soz (You are alight because it is in your nature to be bright)

  I read and reread the epitaph till the tears in my eyes blur my vision. I drop a few on my friend’s grave and bid him and Pakistan farewell.

  From the Death Sentence to the Gallows

  For the last two days that I have been in Islamabad and Rawalpindi, an unseasonal rain has been lashing the cities and a chill wind has been blowing from cloud-covered Marghala hills. Nevertheless, people were out in the cold rain to cluster round news stalls to scan the latest supplements of Urdu papers. When the first intimation that Bhutto would be hanged on the morning of 4 April appeared I was in the Sadar Bazar. Copies of Sadaqat were quickly sold out and read in silence by groups. Some shed tears, some sighed, but no voices were raised. There were armed policemen and units of the army all over the bazar breathing down the necks of citizens everywhere. Although a pall of gloom spread over the city, there was no fear of violence from the soldiers or the policemen. They seemed to share the apprehensions of the people over the uncertain future of their country.

  The people had reconciled themselves to the idea of Bhutto being hanged. Whatever support there was for him and resentment against the present regime was muted. Most of Bhutto’s supporters are in detention. No reliable figures are available, but upwards of 25,000 are known to be held all over the country. The figure may well be f
our times that. Mr Abdul Hafeez Pirzada, who was Law Minister in Bhutto’s Cabinet, put the figure as high as 200,000. It is evident that though the administration is loath to take action immediately, it is determined to crush the slightest manifestation of protest if that protest threatens to assume the proportions of a mass movement. Protests there certainly will be, but they will be delayed and probably surface nearer the time of the general election promised next November.

  There is a curious paradox in the Pakistani political scene. Most people concede that if Bhutto had been let out of gaol and there were to be a free and fair election today, his party would sweep the polls. At the same time, political analysts concede that there is little likelihood of a spontaneous rising in favour of Bhutto. The paradox is explained thus: Bhutto was undoubtedly very popular amongst the masses because of the populist slogans he had coined and the promises he had made to them: freedom from hunger (roti), a change of clothes (kapda) and a roof over their heads (makan). They knew that he had neither the intention nor the means to fulfil these promises, but to the hungry, hate-fed, homeless millions, the mirage was better than nothing. “What did Bhutto give you?” asked an irate anti-Bhutto politician of a rabble of landless peasantry (Kammis). Prompt came the reply: “Even if he did not give us what he promised, he gave us zaban (tongue) to ask for our rights.” It was Bhutto who coined the word istisal (from the Arabic for exploitation) and told workers in factories that they were being exploited by landlords and common soldiers, that their officers were misusing them. “Do not suffer istisal any more; I will put an end to it,” he had promised. Most people did not understand what the word istisal meant except that it connoted something that they could do without. Bhutto also enjoyed the reputation of being a clever man, smarter than any other politician in the land and perhaps the only one who could talk on the level with the wiliest of the world’s statesmen. It did not bother the people very much that Bhutto was himself a ‘wadhera’ (landlord) given to rich living. What if he had several wives and a mistress or two! What if he was occasionally drunk, used bawdy language and filthy abuses! Or had a few people bumped off, beaten or put behind bars? Most heads of state are known to do that and get away with it. To them the only mistake Bhutto committed was to leave a trail of clues of a crime and allow himself to get caught.

  This view of Bhutto was not shared by the educated, urban elite of Pakistan who recall his years of misrule during which many Opposition politicians were murdered, their families, including their womenfolk, insulted, and thousands of innocent men and women put behind bars. The people of Pakistan came to be sharply divided in their attitude towards Bhutto. Some continued to worship him, others to loathe him. A lady whose husband had been beaten up and imprisoned by Bhutto exploded in anger and said to me, “I could hang him with my own hands; I would hang him ten times over.” What was needed was the healing touch. The only person who could have given this was President Zia-ul-Haq. But ever since the last day for filing petitions for mercy passed without any of Bhutto’s wives or children begging for his life, the feeling grew that President Zia had been deprived of the option of granting clemency and had lost the chance of giving the healing touch.

  Mr Abdul Hafeez Pirzada (Bhutto’s Law Minister) and Mr Aziz Ahmed (Bhutto’s Foreign Minister) did plead for Mr Bhutto’s life. Also, the four other men convicted with him begged for mercy on the grounds that they had no personal animus against Ahmed Raza Kasuri or his father and were only carrying out the orders of Bhutto. Rabia Khanam, mother of Arshad Iqbal, one of the condemned men, denounced Bhutto as a “cruel dictator whom no one could dare to disobey”. What probably persuaded President Zia-ul-Haq to go ahead with the execution was the sort of reasoning put forward by Mr Ahmed Raza Kasuri, the “marked man”, whom the assassins failed to kill and slew his father instead. In a press interview, Mr Ahmed Raza Kasuri stated that Bhutto alive will “be a constant danger” to Pakistan and if he is not hanged his (Kasuri’s) mother will demonstrate before the President’s house. Mr Kasuri said that if Bhutto’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment or remitted, he would pose a constant danger to the country; if released under political pressure, he would play the Mujibur Rehman role in Sindh; if exiled, he would play a devilish role from outside. Bhutto himself knew no mercy, the word was not found in his dictionary, so he deserved none himself. The same sentiment was expressed by some theologians, notably Maulana Mohammed Hussaini Hazari, senior Vice-President of the Ulema Council of the Pakistan National Alliance. The Maulana described Bhutto as “a black spot on the face of humanity” and holds him responsible for the disintegration of the country

  “The affair has dragged on too long,” said a senior official of the Ministry of External Affairs to me. “It should have been decided one way or the other as soon as the death sentence was confirmed.” The anti-Bhutto elements fully agreed with this and went further to say that if General Zia had shot Bhutto on the night of 5 July 1977 instead of arresting him, he would have spared himself and his country of these months of agony: garba kushtan roz-e-awal, it is best to kill the cat on the first day. The curtain rose for the final act in the drama of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s life at 8.30 a.m. on 18 March 1978. The scene was the main courtroom of the High Court of Lahore. It is a large hall divided into three by two sets of wooden railings. On the northern end sitting at a higher level were five judges in their wigs and black gowns. Facing them in the main body of the hall were members of the High Court bar including counsels for the prosecution and the defence, likewise attired in black. Behind them separated by another railing were members of the public. And on the western wing, alongside the judges and the lawyers, stood the five accused with armed police escort behind them. Chief amongst them was Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, impeccably dressed in a light spring suit and sporting a tie.

  No prior notice had been given of this day of judgement. The lawyers engaged in the case had been rung up by the Registrar in the early hours and asked to be present in the main room. The accused were brought in from the Kot Lakhpat gaol in the Black Maria under heavy escort. Word had however got round and the courtroom was packed.

  All eyes were turned on the acting Chief Justice, Mushtaq Hussain. He read a summary of the unanimous verdict of the five judges in the case of the murder of Nawab Mohammed Raza Kasuri on the night of 10-11 November 1974 at Lahore. All the accused had pleaded not guilty. Four had presented their defence. Only one, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, had refused to take part in the proceedings.

  Justice Mushtaq Hussain finished reading the findings of the panel of judges and proceeded to pass the sentence: “To be hanged by the neck till you are dead.”

  All eyes turned from the judges to the accused, mainly to Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. He heard the sentence without flinching and simply turned his face away from the judges. He was lost in his own thoughts. “You could see that he was stunned,” said one of the lawyers. “But he showed no sign of fear or anger, it seemed as if he had not heard the judge. Or believed it was some kind of grim charade he was witnessing.”

  There were no slogans of any kind, no expression of approval or disgust. Neither Bhutto’s wife Nusrat nor his daughter Benazir was in court. And armed police were all over the place.

  Lawyers representing the four other accused went over to them for consulation; Mr Bhutto having boycotted the Hight Court proceedings had no one to talk to him and remained lost in himself for some time.

  Back in the Kot Lakhpat gaol, six rooms had been reserved for Bhutto. He went straight to his bedroom and flopped on it fully dressed. He had his eyes fixed on the ceiling. “He lay there for an hour or more without moving,” says a warder. “Only when I approached him and asked him if he would like to eat something, I noticed he had been crying. He did not answer me.”

  At 11 a.m. the lawyer, Mr Yahya Bakhtiar, came to visit him. The two men embraced each other and broke down: “Is this the end?” asked Bhutto. “No,” replied Bakhtiar emphatically, “We shall appeal against the sentence.” They talked for quite some time.
Bhutto’s spirits were revived and he was more himself.

  According to gaol rules, prisoners condemned to death have to be lodged in specially designed cells, on which constant watch can be maintained to prevent inmates from taking their own lives. Only in the morning and evening are they let out for half an hour to take exercise or tehlaee.

  At 5 p.m. Mr Bhutto was removed to a condemned cell—but at his insistence he was allowed to wear his own clothes, keep his own bed, chair and eat his own food. He was given writing material and got all the magazines and newspapers he desired. The mood of depression descended on him again and according to a jail warder, “he lay on his bed like a dead rat”. This lasted for a couple of days.

  It seems that the appeals of clemency from different heads of state published in the papers revived his sagging spirits. He began to believe that the chorus of protests from all parts of the world would deter the courts and rulers of Pakistan from doing him harm and all the exercise was to break his morale. He resolved to show no sign of cracking under the strain.

  Yahya Bakhtiar filed the appeal in the Supreme Court. Since the court was located in Rawalpindi, in mid-May Mr Bhutto and his co-accused were transferred to the gaol in Rawalpindi—ironically alongside the very mansion from which only a few months earlier he had ruled Pakistan. A set of four rooms, normally reserved for women convicted of murder, were prepared for him. He had a bedroom, a study, a bathroom and a kitchen all to himself. Once again gaol regulations were overlooked in order to make the distinguished prisoner comfortable. He was given a niwar bed instead of a hospital-type steel bed, a rubber-foam mattress, his own blankets, fan and light with the switchboard within his reach. He was also furnished with a table, chair, table lamp, books and magazines. His food and his Havana cigars came from his home. He wore his own clothes (he had two suitcases full of them) and used his own shaving kit. He was allowed an hour everyday with his counsel and could take his half hour of tehlaee at times of his own choosing. Since winters in Rawalpindi are sharp, he was provided with electric heaters. His wife and daughter joined him for tea in the afternoon. Very often, Benazir lay on the same bed with her father and the two talked in whispers to avoid being overheard by the ever-present warders and to ensure their dialogue was not recorded by bugging devices.