It is possible for discerning observers of the Pakistani political scene to take the view that Mr. Bhutto is the principal, if not the sole, architect of his misfortune. An article to that effect by Mr. Dilip Mukherjee, biographer of Mr. Bhutto, is published in the accompanying columns. But it is equally plausible to argue that Mr Bhutto’s tragedy sums up the tragedy of his country. For he can be said to have embodied the contradictions of his people as no other Pakistani ever has, and to have become a victim of those contradictions.
The problem is complex and cannot be discussed in detail in the course of one article. As such I propose to deal with only three phases in Mr. Bhutto’s career – his emergence as a popular figure in 1966, his role in the Bangladesh crisis in 1971 and his performance as Prime Minister of Pakistan – and that, too, in broad terms.
It is hardly necessary to recall that Mr Bhutto has often been described as the symbol of radical nationalism in Pakistan. I myself described him in those terms first in these columns over 10 years ago – on November 14, 1968. But not many commentators have ever cared to define the concept of radical nationalism in Pakistan’s context and draw attention to the fact that it contains two major contradictory pulls which no one can possibly reconcile.
Mr. Bhutto became a highly popular figure in Pakistan in 1966 when as foreign minister he opposed the Tashkent agreement which President Ayub Khan and Mr. Lal Bahadur Shastri had negotiated under Mr. Kosygin’s auspices. But his opposition to the deal with New Delhi and his hostility towards this country could have made him a Pakistani nationalist, not a radical nationalist.
Dominated
Mr. Bhutto attracted the epithet of being a radical nationalist because as minister of oil and natural resources in President Ayub Khan’s government in 1961 he had, in the teeth of US opposition, negotiated an agreement with the Soviet Union for oil exploration. Today this might appear to be a simple affair unworthy of being taken note of. But in 1961 the Americans dominated almost every aspect of Pakistan’s life and administration, including the intelligence set-up. And the Pakistan government prided itself on being America’s most loyal ally in Asia. As such it required considerable daring on Mr. Bhutto’s part to think of an agreement with the Soviet Union in so sensitive afield as oil exploration and push it through.
I happened to be posted in Pakistan as a correspondent for this newspaper at that important stage in Mr Bhutto’s political career and I can testify that the agreement with the Soviet Union was not an aberration, as far as he was concerned. He was critical of his country’s military alliance with the United States; he believed that Pakistan had thereby compromised its sovereignty and gained little in return; he admired Mr Nehru and Mr Krishna Menon and wanted to shape Pakistan’s foreign policy on similar lines and he genuinely believed that it was in Pakistan’s interest to align itself with what was then called Asian nationalism. At the same time he was bitterly anti-India.
No well-known figure in Pakistan was then either so critical of the United States and Pakistan’s American connection or so bitterly anti-India. This gave Mr. Bhutto an advantage in that it enabled him to occupy both these platforms. But it was not possible for him to reconcile anti-US radicalism and anti-India nationalism and produce a viable policy on that basis. For he could not possibly reduce Pakistan’s dependence on the United States without being willing to reduce his hostility towards India.
He had confronted this problem long before the 1965 war with India when he fell out with President Ayub Khan. He had then sought a way out of the dilemma in friendship with China. But while China could not help tilt the power balance in the sub-continent, his policy of friendship with it perhaps encouraged him to press for war with India with consequences which were truly disastrous for Pakistan. For the 1971 war leading to the break-up of his country and the emergence of Bangladesh as an independent state was an offshoot of the 1965 conflict.
Valiant
As Pakistan’s chief executive after 1971 he negotiated a number of agreements with India which helped him get back the prisoners of war and the territory Pakistan had lost in the 1971 conflict. He also tried to pave the way for a de facto permanent settlement of the Kashmir problem more or less on the basis of the status quo. He made some valiant gestures to establish his independence of the West – he quit the British commonwealth and SEATO – and he talked a great deal of the grievances of developing countries. But all this did not add up to a coherent policy.
The Pakistani elite was not prepared to give up hostility towards India without which Islamabad just cannot produce a coherent foreign policy. But was Mr. Bhutto himself prepared to go ahead without reservation? It is doubtful.
A great deal has been said and written about Mr. Bhutto’s role in the constitutional crisis that hit Pakistan in the wake of the first general election in December 1970 and it has been made out that but for him Pakistan might have survived as one political entity. I for one regard this as so much nonsense. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman could not have ruled the whole of Pakistan from Islamabad even if Mr. Bhutto had not existed. For one thing, he could not have modified his six-point programme of utmost autonomy for the provinces without undermining his political base in East Bengal, and, for another, the predominantly Punjabi administrative and armed services would never have acquiesced in the proposed curtailment of the Centre’s authority. As it happened, the Sheikh was not even interested in making an attempt to keep the country together.
Mr Bhutto doubtless acted impetuously and to that extent complicated the situation. But it should be remembered that as the first truly all-West Pakistani leader since the assassination of Mr. Liaquat Ali Khan in 1950 and that, too, from the relatively small province of Sind, he had little choice but to oppose dispersal of political authority. His constituents, especially in West Punjab, would not have permitted him to act differently.
Finally, when we come to assess Mr. Bhutto’s performance as the President and Prime Minister of Pakistan, we should pay attention to the political culture of Pakistan, especially West Punjab, the social background of not only Mr. Bhutto but of the Pakistani ruling elite as a whole and, indeed of the Indian-Muslim elite, and his ambivalent attitude towards India which led him, on the one hand, to keep the conflict over Kashmir in a low key and on the other, to do all in his power to produce nuclear weapons so that Pakistan could achieve its goal of parity with India.
No serious student of Pakistan can have the slightest doubt that its political culture is essentially administrative. For no major political movement or party has ever struck deep roots there before independence or after, as far as the Muslims are concerned. Mr. Bhutto put together in the Pakistan People’s Party the first political organisation which commanded a measure of support in all provinces of what remained of Pakistan after 1971. But it was more of Mr. Bhutto’s praetorian guard than a political party. It centred round him and it was critically dependent on him.
This, of course, need not have proved a fatal weakness if, like Mr. Nehru in India, Mr. Bhutto was a genuine democrat. But he was not. He was not inclined to rule Pakistan with the help of the army, though he pandered to it and stepped up the military expenditure greatly. He sincerely believed that the ordinary people loved him and he wanted to retain their affection. But his was a paternalistic and arbitrary approach as much to his supporters as to his opponents – that of a landlord to his ryot (peasants and farm hands).
Criticised
It is easy to blame Mr. Bhutto for this failing. And he deserves to be criticised on this count. But what Pakistani politician has been wholly free from this feudal approach? Indeed, was even Mr. Jinnah, a British-trained barrister with no connection with land, free from it? In predominantly Hindu India, too, we see remnants of feudal political culture in the behaviour of our ministers. But our rulers live modestly compared with Pakistan’s, as do our rich businessmen and industrialists. And they do not expect from their subordinates the kind of servility their Pakistani counterparts do.
It may not be much of an exaggeration to say that the Muslim elite in the subcontinent has absorbed much less of what may be called bourgeois culture with its emphasis on thrift, hard work and equality, than its Hindu counterpart and that this partly explains the difference in their performance as rulers of the two countries. The observation perhaps does not apply to Bangladesh because there the landlords were mostly Hindus and the feudal culture is not so well established.
It was a fatal mix – administrative political culture, a praetorian guard passing for a party, a feudal landlord willing to nationalise industry but unable to change the social structure in the countryside, perhaps not even interested in it, sub-nations struggling to increase their autonomy inevitably at the cost of the Centre, armed forces devouring more and more funds in search for unattainable parity with India and so on. Add to it the feeling of insecurity which seized Mr. Bhutto on the eve of the election in March 1977 and we have the constituents of the tragedy that has overwhelmed Pakistan and Mr. Bhutto.
The Times of India, 14 February 1979