Son of the Desert
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Dedicated to Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto Shaheed without words to express anything. The Author SONiDESERT A biography of Quaid·a·Awam SHAHEED ZULFIKAR ALI H By DR. HABIBULLAH SIDDIQUI Copyright (C) 2010 by nAfllST Printed and bound in Pakistan by publication unit of nAfllST Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto/Shaheed Benazir Bhutto Archives. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First Edition: April 2010 Title Design: Khuda Bux Abro Price Rs. 650/· Published by: Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto/ Shaheed Benazir Bhutto Archives 4.i. Aoor, Sheikh Sultan Trust, Building No.2, Beaumont Road, Karachi. Phone: 021-35218095-96 Fax: 021-99206251 Printed at: The Time Press {Pvt.) Ltd. Karachi-Pakistan. CQNTENTS Foreword 1 Chapter: 01. On the Sands of Time 4 02. The Root.s 13 03. The Political Heritage-I: General Perspective 27 04. The Political Heritage-II: Sindh-Bhutto legacy 34 05. A revolutionary in the making 47 06. The Life of Politics: Insight and Vision· 65 07. Fall out with the Field Marshal and founding of Pakistan People's Party 108 08. The state dismembered: Who is to blame 118 09. The Revolutionary in the saddle: New Pakistan and the People's Government 148 10. Flash point.s and the fallout 180 11. Coup d'etat: tribulation and steadfasmess 197 12. Inside Death Cell and out to gallows 220 13. Home they brought the warrior dead 229 14. Legacy 244 Notes & References 250 Bibliography 260 FOREWORD In writing a balanced biography of this great man of history, I have followed a root-to-stem approach; so that the flower can be seen in stark reality. Events of his life-time are correlated with their historical perspective. When a social reformer, a visionary politician, or revolutionary, rises in a nation, he has to swim against the stream. As such he has to exert all his physical, mental and emotional force to break the current of the historical flow in order to divert it to the desired goal. In that, he invites opposition, incurs ill-will and animosity of the vested interests, and puts his own Life and reputation at stake. A biographer seeks for a closer approximation to an understanding of his activities, in a particular discipline which envisages the search for historical truth as its essential basis. Truth and justice are two cardinal principles, which properly comprehend history and its makers. Neither genius nor eloquence or erudition can make up a historical truth: One must tell what one sees; above all, which is more difficult, one must always see what one sees. A Chinese proverb says, "Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow." Writing history is like performing a pyrrhic war-dance of the ancient Greeks. Facts and fiction, real story and concoction, folk rumors and planted versions, the relevant and trivial, all fall on one or the other short syllable, but they have to meet the-metrical foot, failing which they will slip into the backwoods of history. 1 Son of the desert In 1903, Prof. J.B. Bury during his inaugural lecture as Regius Chair of History at the Cambridge University said, "History is not a branch of literature. History is a science, no less and no more. "1 Twenty one years afterward, he modified his statement and said, "No history can be instructive if the personality of the writer is entirely suppressed, it will be dead and colorless and inhuman, however faultless it may be in detail, however carefully the rules of historical method may be applied.'" The writer's personality can choose the words or influence the choice of points to be raised; but a historiographer is an investigative agent. His investigation report can not conceal the facts. Then what constitutes the conclusive proof, when many versions of the process of the same story are afoot? The conclusive proof comes out of history itself. History, like the Universe, has a black hole. Inside the black hole, live the mute men and women who make no noise of themselves until they burst forth, sack certain luminous stars and create new ones, more luminous and more agile. Of the genuineness of any star of the illuminated world of history, the conclusive proof is that the mute and the inglorious men and women burst forth from the black hole of history and made him their leader, the Quaid-e-Awam, the leader of the people. What men have said and done, above all what they have thought: that is history, says one historian and another adds, History has for its subject, human nature. It is the record of what man has thought, said, and done. It is the lamp by whose light we see human nature in action, and we can understand the causes, the significance, the results of events in proportion to our own comprehension of the character and nature of the men or the nation concerned. Biographies of the great men of history constitute the core study of history. Histories make men wise.112 But it is also true that History teaches us that man learns nothing from history.3 That is why history repeats itself. True biographies are rare on account of their backlash. Great personalities live even after their death. Their devotees and 2 Son of the desert depreciators both live on. They may hit back if offended, or treat the biographer as a camp follower if pleased. The writer never wants to do either, but he tries to maintain creditability of his pen. That is what the present biographer has strived for in these pages. Son of the Desertis a real story of a great man of history. He spent his short life running through the shifting sands of his time and made his mark on the socio-political and economic history of his people, which endures even after his death. He is referred to as "Shaheed" i.e. a martyr. Li terally it means one who, by his death, bears witness to his belief or, suffers greatly from a cause, and is tortured and tormented. Ever since his death, his followers call him "Shaheed Baba". They are considerable in number, belong to the rising young generations and carry strong conviction, though the party founded by him, the Pakistan Peoples Party, now stands split into four/five factions, all claiming him as their ideal. I have written this account also as a witness to the times, and have related my personal experience and perception at places. I have further eschewed the style of Strachey School of Biographers.4 Lytton Strachey had established his reputation as a biographer through his witty and irreverent treatment of established reputations. His movementsoon spent itsforce in theWest, and on the whole, the writing of biography came to be characterized by care, sympathy and tolerance, rather than by wit, mockery or moral condemnation. In the world of knowledge nothing is final; and there is no final word in the field of research either. Dr. Habibullah Siddiqui Baitul lzzat SUECHS, April 4, 2006. 3 CHAPTER ·Ol ON THE SANDS OF TIME "I am son of the desert. If you like to take on me, come on, I am here!" Thus spoke "son of the desert" to history. The desert is a bridge connecting history with antiquity; but it has its own atmosphere of romance, which does not easily surrender to realism. The desert is unyielding, resilient and seductive. The Thar, in Sindh (Pakistan) and Rajputana (Rajasthan), in India, constitute such a desert, where the ancestors of "Son of the Desert" once lived and sprawled up to central India. The existing Aravalli hills are much worn-down remnant of once lofty range of mountains in Rajputana tending roughly NE.·SW. for some 350400 miles from the Delhi Doab towards the Rann of Cutch, adjoining the Thar desert. They reach 5,650 feet at Mount Abu; but, between Jodhpur and Jaipur, they sink to less than 1500 feet in a saddle like formation, which the Rajputs martially guarded and appropriated to their exclusive use. The Hindu Rajput ancestors of "son of the desert" had an exclusive territory carved out for themselves in a triangular shape between the old Sutlej, the Jumna and the Narbada rivers. It encompassed some area of central India and the whole of the so called Indian Desert (The Thar and the Rajasthan). This exclusive Rajput territory was impregnable for foreign invaders. Hence the inhabitants were left to their own way of life, culture and civilization. They had their own river, the Sarsvati flowing in the old bed of the Sutlej and then separately in the Hakro channel system, irrigating Thar and Rajputana. The Rajputs were basically agriculturists and were mainly settled Son of the desert on the Sarsvati Alias Hakro river, which is now lost in the desert. The "lost river", Hakro, had two more broad channels; "Nara" and the "Dhoro Puran". Nara was formed by Raini and Wa hinda spill channels. Just after Khairpur, in Sindh, it passed along the plains, and skirted the eastern desert (still called Nara) meeting the edge of the desert to the south. The Nara-Hakra course resumed its dose parallel inclining south-west until it fell into the Rann of Cutch. The Dhoro Puran joined this course before its fall in the Rann. A few miles upstream from this conf luence traces, there are Buddhist ruins and on the right bank of the Dhoro Puran, and just 8 miles upstream from the modern Naokot, there stand the ruins of an lndus settlement called "Nohto".