Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s Shahadat

By- Ghinwa  Bhutto

 Several hours earlier than the usual morning twilight hours of April 4, 1979,  Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto  was taken to the gallows where he bore his last witness, shahadah, to democracy and to the power of the people in his final act of defiance to the arbitrary rule of  the military dictator, Zia. As his body was being hurriedly laid to rest in his winding sheet by a scared to death coterie, the country hummed with silent admonitions of this national outrage, with horrified hopelessness, with goose-flesh foreboding  and premonitions as to the future course of political events in the country. The diabolical act which people had hoped against hope would not happen had finally taken place leaving a permanent sore that shall aggravate again and again.

 The liquidators of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, one may only surmise, who, in a sense,  had had their wish,  could not have purred with content that fateful day either as their tormented consciences must have dug into them. Or, am I being naïve? If there were any gloating that day in any quarter,  I would rather jettison the thought.

 Hundreds of thousands of political workers and millions of Pakistani masses enamoured to Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto were already agonising over the few weeks preceding the fatal day. They  shuffled and scrambled to give some kind of a response that may withhold the hand of the dictator but they stood comprehensively derailed in the absence of the leader who had centralised the reservoirs of their political energy over the last decade. Their skimble-skamble agitations proved impotent as hell broke loose for them on the day. For a long time they had extolled their leader as Quaid-e-Awam and Quaid-e-Jamhooriyet. Now they had a Shaheed-e- Jamhooriyet on their hands.

 For a long time too they had, in their moments of glory, chanted the slogan Jeay Bhutto,

( Long live Bhutto), today in their moment of mortification they again yelled, with a slightly different shade of meaning added to it,  Jeay Bhutto (Bhutto lives on). And verily too as Shaheeds never die. In time to come as millions of people raised the slogan during the innumerable twists and turns of the long ensuing struggle for democracy, they brought their genius at work to add ever new meanings to the chant. Jeay Bhutto  became a rallying call, requiring  people to gather up as Zia’s dictatorship put draconian restriction on peoples right to assembly. Jeay Bhutto became the battle cry, to urge people to move forward in moments of adversity, to break a cordon, to defy illegitimate, overbearing authority. Jeay Bhutto acquired the significance of a taunt, an affront to the rulers in uniforms and in the mufti. And it moved from the political arena into the ordinary parlance. You could end a good joke with Jeay Bhutto. You could celebrate the birth of a much wanted child with the chant Jeay Bhutto.  You heard it in the cricket matches and the Hockey stadiums. By a strange twist, one may think, Bhutto’s Shahadat (death)  had  occasioned a new meaning into the slogan Jeay Bhutto  (Bhutto lives on), while the tormented chant itself  had, by an apparently stranger twist,  become synonymous with glory, exhilaration and exultation. The expression smarted for an eternal entry into the dictionaries. The spirited and spiriting chant itself appeared to emanate from the depths of peoples hearts, from every air sac in their lungs as it animated entire circumjacences. Unfortunately, the two-time Prime Ministership of Benazir seems to have wrenched the soul out of the slogan.

Bhutto’s Shahadat had also left in its trail a Bhutto factor in our country’s politics. It was a factor that either multiplied you by several hundred thousand or sundered you by an approximate numeral depending upon whether you placed yourself on the right or the wrong side of it. It is to be regretted that the two-timer Benazir, in both her stints as the prime minister, urged on by Zardari and their mutual insecurity in the face of other claimants to the political legacy, sprained to replace the Bhutto factor by the cock-a-hoop Benazir factor. The frolic faltered as it was fated to. Add to it the contraposition between the high-minded martyrdom of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and autistic fortune-hunting of  the Zadaris, and you would wish to withdraw from the odour. I may be excused here a little variation upon a penetrating insight into human history to reaffirm from our own experience that all great events and characters in history do indeed appear twice over; first as a grand tragedy, secondly as a mock caricature feebly jostling for the role model.

Today, however, as we slowly pace towards the resting place of the Shaheed Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, allow me to shrug off the distasteful thoughts, events and all the motley personages, to close my eyes to contemplate over, and take my counsel from, the Shahadat of  Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. Shahadah! What a beautiful word humanity has chiselled to encompass an ever present kernel of its million year experience of  collective struggle against the forces of nature and its own errants, during which time it has made votive-offerings of its best men and women for the collective good. It means ‘to bear witness’; it also signifies death; and, quite paradoxically, it also means ‘life’, even ‘eternal life’.

During each of our five daily prayers Muslims raise their index finger, their Angusht-e-Shahadat, as they second and reiterate their familiar formula of words, the second Kalemah, the Kalemah-e- Shahadat, to bear their witness to the truth of Oneness of  God and Prophethood of Muhammad (PBUH). The formula of words uttered may strike one as ritualistic incantations and the act of lifting a finger as a customary, routine form, facile enough so as not to require labours of Hercules from its practitioners. Yet, over the last fourteen centuries, millions of Muslims have laid their lives, have willingly walked into the throes of death, to bear witness to the truth of this very Kalemah. For the entire spectrum of trillion hues and colours of burdens, trials and ordeals, starting from the trivial lifting of a finger to the final parting of the soul from the body is already included in the meaning of  expression ‘bearing witness’. And the Shaheed never dies, he lives on, for the witness he bore cannot now be withdrawn; it is providential, absolute, and final; with his death he has  anointed his witness forever.

Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto Shaheed entire life explicates to us the exacting demands and burdens in their plenitude that are involved in the satisfaction of the onerous task of bearing shahadah (witness). Since his break with Ayub he was hounded by the dictator’s police and other secret agencies. Yet he strained to convey to the people the meaning and significance of Ayub’s betrayal. He set upon the uphill work of forming a political party which shall ensure mass participation in political decision making, and for several years he went to every nook and corner of the country, to the remotest villages, contacted every section of the population students, workers, intelligentsia, peasants, farm labourers, and a myriad of dispersed and discontented organisations of the downtrodden, and invited them to centralise themselves at a single political platform. He was derided and scoffed at. But he sweated on with his massive, back-breaking effort at mass communication, and finally the formation of the Pakistan Peoples Party was achieved. The entire state machinery moved to lampoon him as all the Ulemas united to declare him an infidel. The Omniscient, however, vindicated him as Pakistan Peoples Party was returned by a massive mandate. In the intervening period he suffered detention and imprisonment, attempts were made at his life, both the carrot and the stick were employed, but he was not to be distracted. During power too he continued to work painstakingly at the pledges he had made to the people. Whatever his detractors may say, when all the pros and cons are accounted for, the single overbearing truth remains undeniable: more and more people of Pakistan fell in his fold. And when he was finally overthrown and imprisoned by Zia he refused to compromise in spite of the innumerable threats and pressures. When he was let out for a short time he didn’t spare a single moment in going back to the  people who alone are the custodians of Gods omnipotence on earth. He was re-arrested  and finally taken to the gallows where he bore his final testimony to his lofty ideals.

Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s life and death of great burdens takes my mind back to perhaps a grander event in terms of its consequences for human history, the crucifixion of  Hazrat Essa Aleh-is- Salaam. I request your pardon for drawing the parallel, but just as Christ’s walk to the cross had left the writing on the wall that the day is not far when the Roman Empire will succumb to Christianity, so too Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s final Shahadah  had served the notice that this shall last be the last brazen, undisguised military dictatorship of Pakistan.

It is also time to reflect upon the trials that thousands of  Pakistan Peoples Party’s workers went through during their arduous fight against the dictatorship of Zia, to remember the arrests, tortures, long imprisonments, lashes and hangings that they were subjected to, and to pay my salutations to them, their families, and all those peoples who even so much as lifted a finger to help them. I also send my salaam to all those progressive and liberal intellectuals, lawyers, teachers, journalists, poets and writers who bore their witness to the ideals of democracy, liberty and equality, and lent a helping hand in that dark era to the workers of  the Party.  

Allah has warned us that in this life of struggle we shall be subjected to many trials. We may be brought face to face with fear. We may be enticed. We may be divested of our belongings. Our near and dear ones may be subjected to untold sufferings. But he has also promised us that there is reward for the patient and the persevering.

We persevere on our journey to the last resting place of  Shaheed-e-Jamhooriyet, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto to bear our witness to the ideals of  Peace, Progress, Prosperity and Power to the People. There we shall draw new vigour from the unflinching struggle he conducted to espouse causes of the poor and the downtrodden. We shall come back from there with a new resolve to carry on the struggle in the new circumstances we find ourselves in.

Here lies Shaheed-e-Jamhooriyet. I am certain that even as they were putting you in the grave, the grave for the military dictatorship was also being prepared by the Providence.

Your final witness for democracy has settled that our country shall never again have to bear with a brazen, naked military dictatorship. I enter into a promise with you that we shall put the spirit back into the slogan Jeay Bhutto and shall fail the puny mortals dream of entering into eternity.

Here also lies your son Shahnawaz Bhutto Shaheed who kept on focusing on what you would be thinking, saying or doing were you alive until his tragic untimely death. Here also lies your son and my husband Mir Murtaza Bhutto Shaheed  who came back to the country determined to continue your struggle and to defeat the betrayal from within but was treacherously murdered. I am certain that just as your shahadat  has proved to be the death knell of  shameless military dictatorships, so too your son Mir Murtaza’s shahadat  shall smoke out the fortune hunters from the ranks of your Party and the country, shall sequester all those who glibly borrowed your idiom to dupe the masses for the sole purpose of  loot and plunder, and shall lay to rest all pretenders to your political legacy. I hope also that Mir Murtaza’s shahadat, at the hands of the police, brings relief to the much oppressed people of this country from the excesses of the law enforcing agencies and proves to be the end of extra-judicial killings at the instigation of political or administrative superiors. If even a part of all this happens I would be satisfied that Mir succeeded in bearing his witness to the lofty ideals inculcated in him by you.

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