Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s birthday falls on 5 January and has been celebrated, since his death, at the family’s ancestral graveyard at Garhi Khuda Bux, near Larkana. In 1994, 5 January coincided with Murtaza’s second month in jail. He had last seen Zulfikar in 1977 when he and Shahnawaz were sent into exile by their father. Murtaza had never been to his father’s grave to offer the customary prayers of Muslim mourning. He wrote a letter to the Sindh Home Ministry asking to be paroled for three days so that he could travel to Larkana to mark his father’s birthday and pray at his grave. His request was swiftly turned down. The Eid parole was one thing, everyone in the country celebrated Eid. But there were only two Bhutto heirs in Pakistan for 5 January.
Mummy and Joonam and many of Murtaza’s supporters travelled to Larkana to stand in his place and it soon became apparent that Benazir’s government was going to make use of Murtaza’s absence by putting on a large show of their government’s strength. Some 10,000 plainclothes policemen had been deployed to Larkana for the occasion.
Murtaza reacted with unmeasured anger. ‘We will not allow the killers of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to come to mazaar,’ he said. That ruled out virtually the entire top echelon of Benazir’s PPP, all but five of her Central Committee members, and most of her closest advisors. ‘Do not enter Larkana,’ Murtaza warned, further adding that any attempts by the government to threaten or impede his workers’ movements on the day would be noted and not forgotten. Already, Larkana was being swept by the police and many of Murtaza’s most vocal workers, old Bhutto activists among them, were being detained on flimsy pretexts to keep them off the streets on the big day.
‘There were so many of us in Al Murtaza, the family home. Ten people were staying in one of the guest rooms, many of the workers from across Sindh and Punjab were with us, staying in the house wherever we could find room, and Joonam was quite ill, she had a fever and a bad flu,’ Mummy remembers of the lead-up to the 5th. ‘Everyone was agitated about the hostile reaction from the government and was pushing for us to go to the mazaar early the next morning. “We have to go,” they kept saying and I thought we shouldn’t. Look, I said, we’ve come. We’re here. We made our point. But no one registered me.’5 No one could have expected what happened next.
On the morning of 5 January 1994, the police, led by a Karachibased officer named Wajid Durrani, and acting under the orders of the Prime Minister, cordoned off our Al Murtaza house. The Bhutto house was locked down. The state was determined that no one should leave the house, not even Zulfikar’s widow, the Prime Minister’s own mother, who had never been stopped from travelling to her husband’s grave, not even under General Zia’s junta. The police were also charged with ensuring that no one should enter the house. Mummy exhales deeply before continuing. ‘There was a big crowd of workers coming towards the house to join the convoy that was supposed to take us to the mazaar. They were stopped by the police. Inside the gates of the house, the workers who had been barricaded in began to shout slogans. The police were in the middle of these two crowds. At around eleven in the morning, the police fired into both groups.’
Mummy was inside the house when she heard the gunfire. One of Murtaza’s paternal cousins, who goes by the nickname Poncho, was with the family at Al Murtaza. Joonam, who was in her bedroom resting, ran out of the room in a hurry and went through the gates to try and stop the police. The police were unprovoked. They had barricaded and isolated the house. The crowds of workers trying to reach Al Murtaza were stuck in limbo on the streets. No one in the crowds had any weapons – they were armed only with banners and posters, slogans and pictures. No reason for the police siege was ever given.
Joonam was outside the house, screaming, trying to stop the police from firing into the crowds, but the officers didn’t put down their guns. They kept shooting, and then turned their guns towards Joonam and the open gates of the house and fired. ‘They barely missed her,’ Mummy says to me, shaken still by the memory of it all, ‘two young boys, workers, were shot and killed that morning. One of them because he had stood in front of Joonam to protect her and he was hit by gunfire . . . It was meant for her . . .’ Mummy’s voice trails off.
Several young men were wounded. The police, led by Wajid Durrani, refused to open the cordon for the wounded to be taken to hospital. An Edhi Trust helicopter, privately owned by one of Pakistan’s largest charitable foundations, came to airlift the wounded to safety – Larkana’s local hospital is only a five-minute drive from our house – but was denied permission to land. The man who protected Joonam died on the road in front of Al Murtaza. He could have been saved had he been treated in time.
Joonam was distraught. No one had ever fired upon Bhutto’s house. Not under Ayub Khan’s dictatorship, not under Yahya Khan’s martial law, not under Zia ul Haq’s repression. She had been imprisoned, denied the right to trial and had even been beaten, but Nusrat Bhutto had never been shot at before. She spoke to the media, to the BBC, to Indian and Pakistani journalists who were at the scene. She said to the New York Times that only two days earlier Benazir had offered to drive her mother to the mazaar on the 5th, so desperate was she that Nusrat be seen with her and not with Murtaza’s workers. ‘Instead, she sent people to tear-gas and to shoot.’6 Joonam continued angrily, ‘She talks a lot about democracy, but she’s become a little dictator. I can’t forgive her.’7
‘Night came and the house was still surrounded,’ Mummy remembers, coming back to me. ‘Our electricity was cut off. We knew that they were listening to everything we were saying so we spoke to each other in whispers the whole night. They had heard us talking about going to the mazaar early in the morning the night before the 5th, and when we woke up we had been encircled by the police. There were no phones, no lights, we didn’t have enough food to feed everyone who was trapped inside and outside the gates and it was a cold night in the middle of Larkana’s winter.’
Across the road at Larkana’s sports stadium, the PPP celebrated the birth of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Music blared, people danced, and dinner was freely served. Benazir was there celebrating the show of strength she’d arranged, even after two men – two more men died of their injuries later – had lost their lives across the street. Many more were wounded. ‘There was a total lack of decency,’ Mummy says sadly when I ask her about Benazir’s celebrations. ‘She displayed a total lack of sympathy, of political maturity, of compassion. They were celebrating when just a few hours earlier a massacre had taken place.’
Zulfi and I were in Karachi. We couldn’t reach either of our parents or our grandmother. We had stayed back to attend a cousin’s birthday party. We refused to go. Our cousins were annoyed with me that day; I was spoiling the party, I was self-righteous, I was no fun. Go without us, I said, still not knowing the full extent of what had happened. People were being killed and my father was in jail. I refused to go to whatever hotel they were having the festivities at and didn’t send Zulfi. We wore black armbands that day. Zulfi was still little and I carried him most of the day as we sat in the office waiting for news.
Mummy woke up in Larkana the next morning to find that the cordons hadn’t been lifted. ‘Joonam called Benazir, who was in Naudero,’ she recalls, ‘and she asked her daughter, “When are you going to stop killing people?” She was so angry. And Benazir told her mother that the ‘crowds were shooting at us’, meaning at the police. It was simply untrue. “They’re RAW agents,” she hissed at her mother before slamming the phone down.’ The notion that RAW agents – or members of India’s Research and Analysis Wing Intelligence agency – had infiltrated Al Murtaza sounded delusional to everyone but the Prime Minister, who made sure that the press picked up her conspiracy theory. Police were forced to fire at Murtaza Bhutto’s house, mother, and supporters because they were all protecting/aiding/working as secret RAW agents. ‘Mir found his sister’s allegations, which were divorced from any logic or rationality, totally incredible,’ Mummy remembers. ‘He responded by saying, “Really? RAW agents? How did they get past the Prime Minister’s stella
r security and into the country? How did Indian spies manage to bypass her obscene security in Larkana?” It was too absurd.’
Speaking to the New York Times after the attacks, Joonam raged further, ‘She tells a lot of lies, this daughter of mine . . . She has become paranoid about her brother.’8
{ 19 }
The spring of 1994 passed slowly. We continued to visit Papa once a week in Landhi Jail and carried on building a life for ourselves in our new home. 70 Clifton felt like a house that hadn’t been lived in for years; the rooms were musty and used more for storage than for living: albums and political gifts from random governmental functions spanning generations of political Bhuttos cluttered most cupboards and drawers, the furniture was frayed from lack of care, and it felt as if we were guests in our own house.
Mummy and I, both summer-born Geminis, spent our birthdays in courtrooms hearing Papa’s bail hearings being postponed or put off because the prosecution had failed to show up. My school term had ended for the summer and we were alone at home, all of us moping around with nothing to do and nowhere to go. So when Mummy burst into my room one June morning, I assumed that she must be upset about something. Or that the house was on fire.
She turned on all the lights – there were no windows in my aunt’s old room, they had all been boarded up. ‘Get up! Getupgetup!’ Mummy screamed. I sat upright in bed, unsure of how scared I should be and sleepily confused over what was happening. ‘He’s being released!’ Mummy yelled. Only then did I realize that her voice was happy and excited. ‘Papa’s got bail – he’s coming home!’
Papa was being tried in six major cases – all charges involving treason and sedition and all carrying the death penalty. There was confusion, even in Karachi, over just how many cases Zia’s regime had brought against the Bhutto brothers. It was even said in the press that the total number of charges against Murtaza and Shahnawaz was higher than the ninety-odd that we knew of, that the junta had placed a total of 178 charges against the two men.
Although Murtaza had been awarded bail in many of the cases against him, there was one last case that was keeping him in jail. An application for bail had recently been put forward by his lawyers and the presiding judge, Ali Ahmed Junejo, had been overtly pressured by the Sindh government to deny the application and keep Murtaza in jail. ‘I’m going to make history with this case,’ Junejo declared. The proclamation sounded ominous to me. I remember Papa recounting to me what the judge had said and thinking that he was threatening to convict Papa, to send him to the gallows. It sounded to my twelve-year-old ears like a warning.
Rumour has it that on the day that he was preparing to read the bail decision to the court, 5 June, Junejo was interrupted several times by a court clerk who kept handing him slips of paper informing him that an urgent phone call was waiting for him in his chambers. He ignored the messages and continued with his proceedings, reading the order pronouncing Murtaza’s bail.
What is certainly not rumour, however, is that the very next day Justice Ali Ahmed Junejo was sacked from his job by the government. Later, Junejo spoke openly of his belief that it was his decision to grant Murtaza Bhutto bail that cost him his job but that he felt he had done his legal duty and that justice had been served.
But Papa didn’t come home that day. We waited all day, but there was no sign of him being released from Landhi Jail. Something was wrong; his release papers should have been processed in an hour – two at the most – but we had no information over what was causing the delay. Eventually, Joonam picked up the phone and called Benazir. Mummy and I sat in Joonam’s bedroom as she made the call. ‘Why aren’t you releasing Mir?’ Joonam asked, her voice tight and strained with nerves. ‘We have more cases against him, Mummy,’ the Prime Minister replied. She was not feeling chatty. She didn’t elaborate on where these cases came from, how the ‘missing’ ISI file against Murtaza had suddenly reappeared, and didn’t sound terribly aggrieved at the prospect of keeping her only brother in jail.
It was petty, it was so petty what Wadi was doing. My stomach hurt. I couldn’t believe – even after the 5 January shooting – that she could be so cruel, so consumed by the myopic maintence of her power.
When Papa’s release orders were finally signed the next day, close to twenty-fours hours after his bail had been granted, we heard that Benazir had been rung up by the army, by someone with enough epaulettes to order the Prime Minister around. ‘Stop making a hero out of him,’ the army man reprimanded Benazir. ‘Let him go, quickly.’ Whatever else he said, it shook the Prime Minister. Papa received his release papers on 6 June.
We busied ourselves getting dressed and tidying up the house. Papa hadn’t been home to 70 Clifton in seventeen years. It was the home he was born into; they were the same age. I remember coming back from winter breaks in Karachi and Papa would pick us up at the airport and interrogate me about the house all the way back to Mezzeh. ‘Was this painting still looking scary?’ (The modern art piece of a crucified Jesus in Zulfikar’s library and yes, it was.) Was that Chinese carpet still in the sitting room? How did the garden look? What shade of purple were the bougainvilleas? Everything had to look perfect for their reunion.
We watched the news of Papa’s release on the BBC. The broadcast showed women in Lyari dancing and celebrating the court’s verdict. It was confirmed. He was free. No calls of congratulation, however, came from the Prime Minister’s house. Some time after lunch we received news that Papa had left Landhi. Joonam had already gone to bring him home. Throngs of supporters joined Murtaza on the journey out of jail and to his father’s home. It should have taken Papa around two hours to reach us. But he didn’t get home till after midnight.
Mummy, Zulfi and I stood at the doors of 70 Clifton when we heard the chanting, joyous crowds approaching. Mummy and I were holding on to each other, Zulfi in Mummy’s arms. It was the homecoming we had been dreaming of since arriving in Karachi.
Papa was carried through the gates by the crowds who raised slogans and wept with the significance of what they were witnessing
– Zulfikar’s surviving son, finally free and making his emotional journey to his father’s home. Papa was wearing a white shalwar kameez that was wrinkled and blotted with stains of Karachi’s summer heat. His hair was flecked with deep pink rose petals. He was tired, but radiant. We hugged him at the door and I stood on my tiptoes to kiss his face. He smelt beautiful, as always, Gray Flannel cologne lingering on his brown skin.
Papa walked into the home he’d left as a young man of twenty-three. He was almost forty when he finally returned. Mummy, Joonam and I let Papa walk through the corridor of the house alone – we imagined that his heart must have been so heavy with nostalgia and all sorts of emotions, he would need his space. He was returning to a life that had been so violently changed, but whose scenery looked the same. Well, sort of. Papa walked as far as the ugly glass sliding doors that Joonam and Benazir had erected between the corridor and the downstairs lobby during their time under house arrest in the 1980s.
‘What’s this doing here?’ Papa said, turning around, his face contorted with horror. The glass doors were removed the very next morning.
The first trip Papa took, several days after being released, was to Larkana so that he could pray at his father and brother’s graves. He planned to drive the 300 kilometres, stopping at some forty towns and villages on the way to meet and speak to people. It was a long and arduous journey, but an emotional one, marred only by the government’s constant attempts to delay and harass him and his workers as they travelled across the interior of Sindh.
‘All along the Super Highway from Karachi to Jamshoro people waited in the scorching heat of June to catch a glimpse of Mir Murtaza Bhutto,’ a local magazine reported. ‘From the Jamshoro toll plaza to the city’s railway crossing, the road was so jam-packed that it took his motorcade a couple of hours to cross that distance of five minutes.’1
In Jamshoro, Murtaza was audacious, upping the ante in his criticisms of the government. �
��My sister Benazir and the party of Shaheed (martyr) Bhutto are besieged by a mafia of thugs, thieves, and Zia’s agents. We’ll boot them out of the party,’ he promised. ‘We are the real party of the shaheed.’2 Papa’s convoy drove through cities large and small, pulling crowds along the way. ‘I was surprised when in a small village like Kakar, in district Dadu, which has a total population of 2,000, he was received by a crowd of at least 10,000,’ a Sindhi journalist covering the journey was quoted as saying.3
But Larkana’s homecoming, that was something special. ‘It was a prince’s welcome,’ reported the press. Murtaza’s constituency was alive with the news of his imminent arrival. ‘Normally the people of the town go to sleep by 9 or 10, especially in this sweltering heat,’ a journalist commented. ‘It has been like this only twice before – once when Bhutto’s body came to Garhi Khuda Bux after his execution and the second time when Benazir returned from London in 1986.’4
As Murtaza’s convoy reached the city limits, crossing the dusty roads of interior Sindh into Larkana’s lush agricultural land, chants of ‘Chamki haider ji talwar, aayo Bhutto jo pagdar.’ ‘The sword of Hazrat (saint) Ali shines, the successor of Bhutto has arrived’5 and men and women cried, ‘Aya, Aya Murtaza Aya’ (‘he’s come, Murtaza has come’), while throwing flower petals on the passing cars.
Suhail, finally back in Pakistan and fighting the cases that Zia’s dictatorship had made sure to lodge against him too for his loyalty to the Bhutto brothers, accompanied Murtaza on the trip to the family graveyard at Garhi Khuda Bux. ‘Mir went first to Grandpapa’s grave and did the fateha prayer there. He laid rose petals on the tomb and spent some time standing over his father’s grave. It was very emotional for him. Then he went to pray at Shah’s grave and was visibly shocked and hurt to see how his brother had been buried. The grave, unlike their father’s, which had been encased in marble, was flat on the ground. It was untidy, there was dust and dirt around it, and it was circled by bricks that hadn’t been properly fitted. The stage outside the mazaar that Benazir built for her rallies and public speeches was properly constructed, it was quite sophisticated. Papa was horrified.
Songs of Blood and Sword Page 35