The Life and Struggle of Mir Murtaza
(By Ghinwa Bhutto)
Born to Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, Mir Murtaza, my husband, must have been programmed to the politics of the poor in Pakistan. From the reminiscences of his childhood that he shared with me, I gather that he was soaked into the ferment of politics from childhood years as his great father brought home the tensions of his fiery political career. He had internalised the spirit of democratic political struggle at an early impressionable age.
He certainly trained for the vocation in some of the prime institutions of the world as he chose to specialize in Government and Politics for his graduation at Harvard. His vantagepoint already determined in the infancy years, he now underwent the rigors of the discipline that is political science, and was exposed to the full brunt of war of political ideas and ideologies, and history of political movements. During this phase of life, as his ideas were polished, as he was subjected to the pros and cons of the many political ideologies, from what I recollect of his narration of these polemics of ideas, he throughout remained an unwavering partisan of the poor. He was doing his masters' thesis in a key area of international political conflict when he was forced to discontinue and enter active politics.
The coming twenty odd years of his life that he devoted, thinking and living politics, had wised him up to the many facets of the spectacle that is practical politics, to politics as an art and craft. His was a life of struggle. He spent a part of this committed, active political life fighting against Zia’s dictatorship that sought to obliterate all opposition to itself, especially the PPP. When this phase was over, he found himself up against a betrayal from within that marooned him, tricked the Party and used it as a platform for country’s plunder.
During the entire course of his life Murtaza always led his team from the front, and that is how he chose to die as well. He pursued politics as if possessed, and always responded to the calls of democratic politics in the country as if he were obeying an impulse. A spirit pervaded in him, as if he wanted to give back to the world all the knowledge the world had given him with a view to making it a better more humane world, as if he wished to return the love that the poor and the oppressed of this country had shown for his father and for his party, a love that he thought had gone requite-less, and I and our two children as a family, could not, and would not have wished to, stand in the face of its thrust.
He was, when he was killed, a thoroughbred politician with the right pedigree, right exposures during the impressionable childhood, right education, and sufficiently mellowing experience during which he must have acquired wisdom from friends and foes alike, to contribute to the quality of life of our country and its people. I think that there is something very wrong with our ways as a people if we allow our best men to be extinguished thus, after we ourselves have invested so much in their growth and formation.
This, in principle, sums up the nature and moral, of Mir Murata's struggle, though entire books may be written on the daily twists and turns of the twenty years of his political life. I myself would have wished to stop here, but let me add a few details.
The subversion of the democratic government of PPP by Zia and the arrest of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was, of course, the cataclysmic event that catapulted Murtaza and Shah Nawaz Bhutto Shaheed into active life who were both, as male progeny, likely to be on target of the military adventurer, and were advised by their father to leave the country. All that the legalist detractors might say, notwithstanding, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Shaheed decided, in line with the correct political tradition, to conduct a political counter-assault on the military dictator. He refused to compromise, and walked undefeated to the gallows, leaving behind a proud legacy that, in time, not only saw Zia to his end, but also gave our country a permanent gift of a constitution and said adios to armchair politics for good. Now many lesser friends and foes try to ape Bhutto.
From abroad, Mir Murtaza and Shah Nawaz Bhutto went around the globe without rest, in the face of many constraints, building up international isolation for the usurper Zia, and support for the restoration of democracy and constitutional rule. At home, Zia was busy establishing an oppressive regimen smothering all opposition, and successfully building up an image of invincibility for himself. It was this image of invincibility that Mir Murtaza and Shah Nawaz Bhutto undertook to shake and give hope to the hundreds of thousands of workers who were lashed, suffered long periods of imprisonment, were tortured and stood leaderless as a great part of leadership sought sanctuaries.
They stood fired by the unwavering example of their father. They also stood fired by the beatified legend of Che Guevara who, at the time, personified the most sacrosanct paradigm of people's struggle against similar Latin American military dictatorships. The world has taken a turn, the paradigm has withered, but who would say that it has not taken the impress of this struggle.
Shah Nawaz Bhutto Shaheed bore his last testimony in 1985 during the many turns of this sustained activity, which never saw a day off. In 1988 PPP was again back into power with Benazir, at its helm. Even initially most of the workers, including Murtaza, who had kept the Party vibrant throughout Zia’s eleven years rule, thought that PPP ought to desist from forming the government on the basis of compromises, but Benazir nonetheless went ahead with her plans. The extent of her betrayals was unveiled only slowly. Murtaza, the workers of the Party who had rendered so many sacrifices, as also all that the Party stood for were left in the cold. She would not even withdraw the cases against Murtaza that were framed during the Martial Law period, though the overwhelming moral strength of the entire struggle against Zia had forced the issue of withdrawal of these cases on the forefront of the democratic government’s agenda. It was at this time that Muratza's fate was sealed; he was left in the wilderness, as Benazir and her husband Zardari saw him as a hazard to their plans of tricking the Party and plundering the country. Murtaza still languished as an expatriate, leading a life of exile even as the party he had given every moment of his life to was now in power, his own sister and her husband ruled the roast and appeared to enjoy limitless power. Every pariah of the martial law period was now allowed to come back, but the believing brother Murtaza was being told to stay moored, that he was being a bother by keeping on wanting to come back to the country, that he will be an embarrassment to the PPP government should he appear in the country. For a politically committed person, this life of political inactivity was worse than death. He nonetheless stressed and strained hard to stay in touch with political reality of the country.
Political struggle, of course, went hand in hand with considerations of personal life. Murtaza, of course, had a family and he had to ensure that the two cohered together. By now Murtaza had Fatima and Zulfikar as well, and he had taken care to imbue them with a Pakistani identity in a life of exile, tried to inculcate in them noble ideals of justice, equality, liberty and dignity of all peoples of the world, and tried to give them a sense of pride in the life and struggle of their father and forefathers. His children pined for their land even as they had seen little of it. Pakistan, the land of their forefathers, was their identity, and Murtaza could no longer bear to keep them away from their moorings.
Come 1993, and the second grander betrayal and he was again told to stay put. But he could no longer stagnate and vegetate docked away in a state of statelessness, as the sinister meaning of this sisterly advice was also beginning to dawn upon Murtaza and was by now bothering the brother. The key to plundering the country lay in tricking and hijacking the Party; and the key to hijacking the Party lay in sequestering the brother. By now Murtaza knew that he had been left high and dry, and stood alone; he decided to come back, come what may. He considered that he might die on the tarmac of the airport but he decided that life may not belong to him, but it belonged to his children and they had to start living among the people for whose freedom pride and dignity their father had died.
Murtaza was ostracized and incarcerated by the government from the moment he landed at the airport after being turned back once. The judge who eventually allowed him bail remained suspended during the entire period of Benazir’s government. All those who associated with him suffered worst forms of victimization at the hands of the oppressive regimen that had been thrust on the people of Pakistan. But Murtaza never flinched for a moment always led his followers from the front, and that is exactly how he died. He finally decided on March 15, 1995 to form Pakistan Peoples Party (Shaheed Bhutto) to fight off the betrayal of the original ideals of the Party as set out by Quaid-e-Awam, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. He is no more with us, but he has left us a platform from which we may continue the struggle for the creation of a motherland where people may entertain hopes for the future of their children.