‘Let it be’

This government, which is with us in the name of the people, has done little from its inception, other than employ tactics to further its two-point agenda — the completion of its constitutional term and the preservation of presidential immunity. It has survived on the coat-tails of Benazir Bhutto, courtesy of whose assassination and of a deal struck with the US and its allies, Asif Zardari is where he is. It has also used to the full, the ghost of the PPP’s founder, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (ZAB).

Governance is absent, the government is seen as rapacious, yet it survives. It has tied up the higher judiciary in constitutional matters — the judiciary seemingly the sole functioning branch of government — to the extent that justice for the common man has suffered. We have had a series of stand-offs between the judiciary and the executive, which has done neither any good, and which, certainly, has not benefited the nation in any manner.

The presidential team has, for its own reasons, failed in three years to ‘solve’ the murder of the party leader, Benazir Bhutto, and now, as yet another distraction, we read that her widower is to file a reference in the Supreme Court seeking its opinion on a review of the 1979 trial for the murder of ZAB. For heaven’s sake, why reopen a most unsavoury and, in some ways, sordid matter? This is the worst distraction possible.

We all know the circumstances under which ZAB was hanged. We all know that the trial is considered by the world and the nation as a judicial murder. One of the Supreme Court judges who upheld the death sentence, Justice Nasim Hasan Shah, has publicly admitted this to be so. We all know that for Ziaul Haq it was do or die — that he could not let ZAB live and hope to live himself.

ZAB was no angel — another fact known by all. That the botched murder of Raza Kasuri resulting in his father’s death could have been a Henry II-Thomas á Beckett situation is not impossible. “Who will rid me of this meddlesome fellow” may well have been an exclamation expressed and then acted upon by men with criminal minds.

ZAB was tried and sentenced with four other men — Mian Muhammad Abbas, Ghulam Mustafa, Arshad Iqbal and Rana Iftikhar Ahmed, all functionaries of ZAB’s strong-arm goon gang, the Federal Security Force (FSF), who were hanged after ZAB went to his gallows. Two others accused, Masood Mahmood and Ghulam Husain, also of the FSF, were pardoned as they turned approvers. ZAB was convicted on evidence given by discredited men, the scum of the then Pakistani earth, who he had befriended and employed to undertake tasks that should not have been even thought of. Masood Mahmood, Ghulam Husain and their fellow FSF man Saeed Ahmed Khan were wicked, amoral individuals with whom a prime minister should never have been associated. Why drag up all this dirt again?

The appeal in the Supreme Court which climaxed in December 1978, though a solid indictment of Ziaul Haq and his doings, ended as badly as it had begun. ZAB addressed the court over a period of four days, in masterly and typical fashion. After he had finished, his co-accused asked to be heard. Director Operation Intelligence of the FSF Mian Muhammad Abbas did not plead innocence. He begged forgiveness for the murder and made no bones about the fact that he had acted on instructions. FSF Inspector Ghulam Mustafa went to the stand armed with a copy of the Holy Quran, upon which he swore his guilt and, whilst pointing at ZAB, testified also to his guilt.

It was all horrible — a most distressing time for those who lived through the trial and the hanging — not only of ZAB, but of four others who, quite naturally, have been largely forgotten.

In the immortal words of the Beatles, “Let it be”. Enough harm has been done.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 2^nd,  2011.