Remembering ZAB

ZAB was a people’s man and thrived amongst the milling crowds. He was everywhere when the chips were down.

It was a laidback April morning with a distinct eeriness pervading the air. Huddled with a few colleagues, I was sitting in a compound close to the civil courts at Chunian in the district of Kasur. Someone, completely befuddled barged in, looked around breathlessly, and broke the shocking news, “Bhutto sahab ko phansi hogayee.” The news chilled us to our spines and we were rendered speechless, staring at each other with stony eyes. This had been expected and yet, there was a sense of disbelief.

The murder trial of Muhammad Ahmed Khan had come to an end. The case was exceptional in many ways: it was not tried at the court of original jurisdiction, with the appellate forum, the Lahore High Court arrogating this jurisdiction. The bench trying the case was headed by the chief justice, who was accused by the defence of having possessed malice against the person standing trial, but he disregarded the objection. The split verdict drew a wedge between the judges belonging to Punjab and the rest of the country. An interesting point to note is that this case has never been cited in the history of criminal proceedings: no criminal lawyer or judge would feel comfortable to fall back on this case to support his brief or reasoning.

As we heard the sad news, we got hold of a transistor. There was a brief and terse account of Bhutto's execution and his burial at Garhi Khuda Bakhsh. Begum Nusrat Bhutto and her children were denied their right to be present at the funeral. An eventful era of Pakistan's history had reached its finale. A trail of events started eddying in my  mind — ZAB's meteoric rise, his controversial role in the East Pakistan debacle and assumption of power after the country’s break-up, all fell in place to complete the picture. From here onwards, he picked up the pieces, made strenuous efforts to retrieve the areas occupied by India during the 1971 war as well as brought back prisoners of war, rallied the Muslim world around and set a domestic agenda of reforms, which though, highly controversial, could not be ignored. The common man developed confidence and a sense of empowerment. The tiller of the soil could drag a landowner to a court of law. Ejectment of a tenant was no more an easy affair. While framing the 1973 Constitution, he emerged as a man of consensus: he gave the country a document, which is still the rallying point for this highly polarised and fractured nation. However, there were question marks on his style of governance, which squeezed the political space for his detractors. His conduct often smacked of high-handedness.

ZAB was, however, a people's man and thrived amongst the milling crowds. He was everywhere when the chips were down: in the earthquake-hit areas of Bisham in the Northern Areas to the collapse of a high-rise building in Karachi, from the flood-ravaged areas of Shujabad to the famine-stricken expanses of Thar, he was omnipresent.

On the international front, he did not fall prey to the temptation of piling up heaps of MoUs like our successive rulers. His real focus was on the Gulf and the Middle East, which opened vast avenues of employment opportunities for the Pakistani workforce. Within no time, our remittances were touching the $3 billion mark, far exceeding those of India.

ZAB possessed an empathetic chord and a hands-on approach to problems, unlike most of our rulers. As an under-training officer, I recall a petition of an old man that was marked for the deputy commissioner with a hand-written note in the margin by the prime minister. He had penned, “Retrieve his agony, he is running around from pillar to post.” The old man did get what he wanted, while many of us in our early years of service enjoyed the idiomatic directives of ZAB.

Ziaul Haq's government had been keen on getting as much evidence as possible to indict ZAB. A white paper was brought out to catalogue malpractices of Bhutto's rule. When it came to his financial probity or otherwise, there was mention of an installation of an air conditioning plant at state expense at 70 Clifton, Karachi. The residence had been declared the prime minister's camp office. The same document, however, added that at a subsequent stage, ZAB paid for the amount at depreciated cost as worked out by the cabinet division. Compare this act with the brazen conduct of many of his successors. It seemed that there was no other plausible case to tighten the noose around him than to try him in the murder case.

Two days after ZAB’s execution, General Zia was interviewed by the Urdu service of the BBC. To a question about Bhutto's execution, he tersely retorted, “The higher you go, the harder you fall.” A proverbial truth indeed, it sadly enough, became the literal truth when the general lost his life in an air crash.

There was a downside to ZAB's eventful era. While he exuded a lot of positive energy on major issues, on transactional matters, he lost his patience and poise. Dissension and differences were an anathema to his working style. The treatment meted out to nationalists in erstwhile NWFP and in Balochistan left deep scars. His governance smacked of authoritarian rule. The Defence of Pakistan Rule (DPR) was invoked on flimsy pretexts. Petty hoarders were often booked under its section 144 and imposition of the Maintenance of Public Order seemed to be the rule of the day. Dissent within the party was also an anathema to him. The shoddy manner in which senior leaders like JA Rahim, Meraj Muhammad Khan, Mir Rasul Bakhsh Talpur, Mukhtar Rana and Malik Suleman were treated is the sad story of our politics. The riddle of the Dalai camp could be resolved only after ZAB faded from the scene.

Despite these grey areas, ZAB was indeed a larger than life figure: a towering personality, but like a hero from a Greek tragedy, one who possessed fatal flaws.

A shorter version of this opinion piece was published in The Express Tribune on April 4^th, 2014.

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