• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

Pakistan Today Copyright © www.bhutto.org 1 COTETS Preface 3 Introduction 4 Chapter I 10 Chapter II 24 Chapter III 33 Chapter IV 35 Chapter V 41 Chapter VI 50 Chapter VII 52 Chapter VIII 61 Chapter IX 69 Chapter X 74 Chapter XI 79 Chapter XII 82 Chapter XIII 84 Chapter XIV 86 Chapter XV 88 Chapter XVI 94 Chapter XVII 97 Chapter XVIII 101 Chapter XIX 106 Chapter XX 109 Chapter XXI 111 Chapter XXII 118 Chapter XXIII 120 Chapter XXIV 125 Other Books by Author 128 Pakistan Today Copyright © www.bhutto.org 2 PREFACE This book is based on travels of Mr. Khalid Latif Gauba, who visited Pakistan on the invitation of Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in November 1975. This book not only gives account of his stay and meetings with different dignitaries during his brief visit to Pakistan. It also includes his observations about the reforms and changes brought by the great leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. The book was first published in Bombay in 1977. I am reproducing this book with the hope that the new generation of Pakistan will read it to lean about the great services of Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to the country. Bhutto’s government was over thrown by General Zia in July 1977, the year this book was originally published. He was eventually hanged in April 1979 after the Military Junta with the conspiracy of Judges got him convicted first through Lahore High Court and afterwards from Supreme Court. It was a judicial murder of a great leader of a developing nation. Had he been alive things would have looked different. After his conviction Bhutto wrote the following words from jail to his attorney Yahya Bakhtiar; “I did not kill that man. My God is aware of it. I am big enough to admit if I had done it, that admission would have been less of an ordeal and humiliation than this barbarous trial which no self respecting man can endure. I am a Muslim. A Muslim’s fate is in the hands of God Almighty I can face Him with a clear conscience and tell Him that I rebuilt His Islamic State of Pakistan from ashes into a respectable ation. I am entirely at peace with my conscience in this black whole of Kot Lakhpat. I am not afraid of death. You have seen what fires I have passed through.” Bhutto family have paid a big price for Pakistan first Z. A. Bhutto gave his life by judicial murder, soon after his murder his young son Shahnawaz Bhutto was killed mysteriously in France. His eldest son and a member of parliament was shot down near his home in Karachi and lastly the only hope for the poor masses of Pakistan Ms. Benazir Bhutto was assassinated by a suicide bomber and target killer last year. I hope and pray that the Bhutto family does not pay any more prices to serve this Nation. Sani Panhwar Member Sindh Council PPP Los Angeles, California, October 2008 Pakistan Today Copyright © www.bhutto.org 3 ITRODUCTIO I was born in a tiny hamlet which is note in the heart of Pakistan. I lived most of the first 30 years of my life in that part of the Punjab which went to Pakistan. On partition I lost my home, my friends and my livelihood: came out as a refugee to India. I have little reason to love Pakistan. Yet I have been as emotionally involved in Pakistan as I have been in India. Every time the two have gone to war against each other, my heart has bled within me. I was convinced that there was never any justification for either India or Pakistan to fight over any-thing. I am more than ever convinced today that we have much to gain from fraternal friendship and much to lose from fratricidal wars. Let the facts speak for themselves. In the last 30 years that we have been independent, we have fought three wars and innumerable skirmishes against each other. In these armed confrontations over 50,000 young men were killed; ten times as many were maimed for life and In incalculable amount of military hardware bought at exhorbitant prices in foreign exchange was destroyed; over the years 45 million men, women and children were forced to cross and re-cross frontiers as refugees. Our meagre resources which could have gone into building more schools, hospitals, dams and factories were wasted in buying tanks, fighter aircraft, submarines and other instruments of destruction. It is our mutual distrust of each other which more than anything else has hampered our march to words prosperity. We remain ill-nourished, ill-clad, ill-housed, semi-literate and backward. Can we afford to go on treading this suicidal path? Obviously not. Many years ago our then prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru wrote: "It is inevitable for India and Pakistan to have close relation -very close relations..... We can be either hostile or very friendly with each other. Ultimately we can only be really very friendly whatever period of hostility may intervene, because our interests are closely interlinked." Every patriotic India and Pakistan should by now have realised that friendship between us is more important for us than friendship with other nations and must be given top priority. We must first look each other for succour and afterwards to Soviet Russia, China, the United States, the Arabs or Iranians and other which or Powerful nations. To cultivate friendship we must shed our past inhibitions, fears and prejudices. And in order to do that we must get to now each other better, respect each others sentiments and, when occasion demands, come to each others help. Thirty years ago we were one people, belonging to the same race, speaking the same languages, eating the same kind of food, observing the same traditions-our way of life was the same. Today we have become strangers. We know more of what is going Europe and America that we know of what is going next door to us. But we still have Pakistan Today Copyright © www.bhutto.org 4 enough in common to re-verse that process. What we Indians have to do is to learn more about Pakistan, its leaders, politicians, its artists and literatures, its younger generation, and the progress it has achieved in agriculture and industry. I have been fortunate in been able to keep up contacts with my Pakistani friends and visiting the country as a journalist. Even so my in counters and visits were always on eye-opener, dispelling many misgivings and misconceptions. I first went to Pakistan when field Marshal Ayub Khan was President and stayed in what had been my own home, then allotted to my friend Manzur Qadir who was foreign Minister. I had instinct live revulusion against military dictators and was convinced that Pakistan must be groaning under the heel of the Marshal's military boots. And I could not visualise the liberal-agnostic Manzur whose integrity I respected immensely being a pillar of Ayub's establishment. Despite the much publicised to the propaganda that all Pakistanis hated Indians. I was in for many surprises. Lahore looked cleaner and neater then when I had left it. All its open sewers were sealed; the stench that pervaded the city in my days was gone. I saw no one urinate or defecate in the streets. People looked happy and relieved after the years of chaos that had preceded Ayub Khan's take-over. Manzur Qadir took me to breakfast with the president. He was an enormous man, a kindly man who more fitted my nation of a father-figure than a tyrant. His wife was a homely looking pathan lady who could have been any my numerous aunts. The President spoke with conviction of the need to develop the closest ties with India-even common defence. Later that morning I was with on their Independence Day celebrations. While the President was speaking on Pakistan's achievements, a man leapt up and began to shout: "Sub jhoot hai - he is a lair". The man was promptly removed by the police. I was not convinced. There was Mian Anwar Ali, Commissioner of Police who happened to be sitting next to me. I was not convinced. There was more going on under the surface than the peace and prosperity the President was lauding. I realised my error in making quick and facile judgments. Another jolt awaited me in the evening. The Manzur Qadir's had invited some of my friends for dinner. The party included the two brothers Nawabzada Mahmood Ali Khan and his brother Mazhar (once editor of "Pakistan Times" and today editor of "Viewpoint") and his perennially lovely wife, Tahira, daughter of the late Sir Sikander Hayat Khan. Mahmood had obviously come prepared to nettle Manzur Qadir. He manoeuvred the convensation accordingly. "I believe you have written quite a few books", he said, turning to me. I nodded. “So has our friend Manzur. He has produced one great masterpiece which you must read”, he said, slapping a copy of Pakistan’s Marshal Law regulations in my hand. Than it was a free for all. Manzur Qadir’s projected “basic democracies”, came in for as much lambasting as Ayub Khan’s regime. I had believed that under Ayub’s dictatorship no one dared to speak his mind. That was not so. Amongst the other people I met on this visit was young Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the President’s blue-eyed boy and Minister of Cabinet in his early thirties. I mistook him to be a college student.

Load more

  128

Copy Link