n April 4th, 1979, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was led to the gallows in Rawalpindi jail in the depths of the night. Within minutes he was dead. Before the break of dawn, his remains were flown to his village Garhi Khuda Bakhsh near Larkana and buried hastily before the people of Pakistan could wake up to news about his liquidation by the Zia-ul-Haq regime.
It was thus that a brilliant life overshadowed by unbridled ambition and limitless arrogance came to a sorry end.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto fell from power on July 5th, 1977. When he lived, he was a complex figure for those who observed his rise and fall. Decades after his execution, he remains that way. There are his fans, largely within Pakistan, who have consistently believed that he is a shaheed, a martyr, in the defence of democracy. And then there are those who remain convinced that having ridden to power on the slogan of democracy, he did everything he could to bury it under his civilian dictatorship.
A fairly large number of books on Bhutto’s life and career have appeared across the years, with the promise of more to appear in the times ahead. And especially since the assassination of his daughter Benazir in December 2007, the Bhutto myth has taken on a new and expanded dimension. And do remember that we are speaking of the man who almost behaved like a maniac when he spoke to the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci in the early 1970s. Megalomaniac he surely was before her, but the extent to which certain streaks of ‘madness’ manifested themselves in him left even the shock-proof journalist surprised. Bhutto’s aspersions on Indira Gandhi, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and nearly everyone else were too outrageous for polite ears. And even he realised that, subsequently, which is when he sent Pakistan’s diplomats in Italy scouring for Fallaci, to ask her to withdraw the interview or to ‘admit’ that she had made it all up!
What appears in the Fallaci interview is what the essential Bhutto was. And that is the point which comes through in Stanley Wolpert’s Zulfi Bhutto of Pakistan. Wolpert, the American academic celebrated for such seminal works as Gandhi’s Passion and Jinnah of Pakistan, was provided with all manner of facilities, including access to Bhutto’s library and papers, by the Bhutto family. That being the basis of the study, it follows that Wolpert’s analysis of the Bhutto character is by and large a sympathetic study of a man who could have done much better as a politician than what he actually did. The author traces the rise of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, essentially after his return to Pakistan following higher studies abroad, and the many factors that went into facilitating it.
He was a bright young law professor in the early 1950s. By 1958, he was a cabinet minister, happy to be under the tutelage of General Iskandar Mirza, a man not too well-disposed toward democracy. And yet, when only days later, Mirza was sent packing by General Ayub Khan, Bhutto swiftly transferred his loyalties to the new honcho in town. It is a picture that you come by in the excellent biography of Mirza by his son Humayun Mirza quite some years ago. Bhutto, recalls the young Mirza, earned General Mirza’s admiration at the very first meeting he had with the president, so much so that Mirza found a spot for the young lawyer in Pakistan’s central cabinet.
And Bhutto was keen to demonstrate his gratitude to Mirza in return. He fired off a fawning missive to the president, informing him in unabashed fashion that history would record that Iskandar Mirza was the greatest man Pakistan had produced, greater than the founder of the state, Mohammad Ali Jinnah. By late October 1958, with Mirza and his wife Naheed on their way to unending exile in Britain, Bhutto made sure that Ayub Khan kept him on. For the subsequent eight years, he was never to look back. He was minister for commerce, for industries and natural resources.
In 1960, he worked out a deal on energy with the Soviet Union, impressing almost everyone in Pakistan and outside. By early 1963, upon the death of Mohammad Ali Bogra, he was foreign minister in the Ayub regime. Added to that position was the job of general secretary of the Convention Muslim League, the clutch of pro-Ayub politicians propping up the dictatorship. It was Bhutto’s finest hour, from the point of view of genuflection. He proposed that Ayub Khan, already in occupancy of the presidency, remain in power for the rest of his life. It was thus also a moment that made others mock him.
