Bhutto’s rule erodes democracy in Pakistan

Press, 19 October 1976, Page 20

Bhutto’s rule erodes democracy in Pakistan

By

GAVIN YOUNG

in Rawalpindi

The Prime Minister of Pakistan, Mr Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, is spending millions of rupees and considerable political energy in a successful effort to put Pakistan, for so long overshadowed by giant, bombastic India, into the world limelight.

Mr Bhutto, after the death of Mao Tse-tung, is one of the “heavyweight” Asian leaders, one who the international commt nity listens to with genuine attention and respect. He is breaking Pakistan’s era ped obsession with the Indian threat. Pakistanis are streaming to Iran and the Gulf States. Mr Bhutto’s ally, the Shah of Iran, wants to build a road and a railway through Afghanistan to Pakistan. New air and train links join Lahore with Amritsar, Karachi and Bombay. “I have been on the international scene for 20 years,” Mr Bhutto says. He is on excellent terms with China; he has a rich protector and patron in the Shah; with Iranian help he is edging towards rapproachement with Afghanistan; the Russians

are erecting a steel mill at Karachi; America has a good aid programme; Britain takes in emigrants; France provides Mirage jets and, possibly, a nuclear plant. But Mr Eh -tto’s activities on the foreign scene are accompanied by worries at home. As Thailand’s democratic experiment is snuffed out and a year after Mrs Gandhi put the lid on the Indian press and opposition, a number of Pakistanis see signs here as well of the further erosion of the democratic spirit in Asia. In Pakistan, that spirit rose again from the ruins of military dictatorship and defeat by India in 1972. Mr Bhutto, in fact, nursed it back to life. No-.,-, it is maintained in tones of rising urgency and anguish by his opponents that this brilliant, Rajput aristocrat, with his Oxford and California degrees in political science and' lav.-, is heading for unquestioned one-men rule, based on blandishments, threats, arrests and violence. In a sense, he has already achieved it. Under the

Defence of Pakistan emergency regulations that Mr Bhutto has retained since the Indo-Pakistan war over Bangladesh nearly five years ago, it is punishable by prison without bail to “stir up hatred against the Government,” a risk which effectively intimidates the press.

Mr Bhutto has a flamboyant way with an arrest warrant: his most outspoken opponent, Mr Wali Khan, a wild, if brave, public speaker from the NorthWest Frontier Province, has been in gaol and his National Awami Party banned since early 1973. His trial drags on with no end in sight. There is Governor’s rule in the province of Baluchistan and two divisions of the largely Punjabi Army, whose declared aim is to "pacify” it. A Bhutto-nominated administration sits in Peshawar, the capital of the N.W.F.P. — although in the last elections Mr Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (P.P.P.) had no following ineither Baluchistan or Peshawar.

I drove up from Rawalpindi to visit the wife of Mr Wali Khan, the imprisoned Pathan politician. The landscape is luminous and green, with many fluffy trees and cultivation in patches like mats thrown down haphazardly. From the crossing of the Indus the land becomes lumpy and then intensely fertile and you can see why every ancient invader descending from the arid Khyber Pass gasped with astonishment. Begum Wali Khan is a handsome woman. She is now the vice-president of a newly formed opposition party. One of her two sons, Asfandyar, is in gaol, allegedly concerned with the bomb murder of one of Mr Bhutto’s appointees in the provincial government in Peshawar. We sat in a large, simple house in the middle of sugar fields, streams and lanes full of ox-carts. There was a trestle bed, a chair or two, a large deep-freeze. Four men in turbans crouched outside clutching guns.

“You have to have, guards in a country like Pakistan,” Mrs Wali Khan said. Mr Bhutto has complained that rural Pakistani children are stiH brought up on weapons as Western children are on candy. “My husband only wants basic human rights for the Pathans. We are not secessionists.” Secessionism is the underlying charge aganist Mr Wali Khan. “But now under these Defence Regulations we can’t have public meetings. The newspapers won’t use anything we say. I can get about, but I am followed.” There is no doubt that Mr Wali Khan is a remarkable man. But it is also true that in free elections his party only won 13 out of 42 seats in the provincial assembly. His violent tone in public meetings — almost as per-

sonal and viperish as Mr Bhutto’s own — scared even Pathans off, other Pakistani opponents of Mr Bhutto say. And he has certainly taken a distinctly equivocal way for a man who has no thought of an independent Pathan State — Pakhtoonistan — in union with Afghanistan — or so he claims.

But his fate casts a pall over the political face of Mr Bhutto’s Pakistan.

So does the police harassment of former Air Marshal Asghar Khan, a man universally respected for his utter probity, who often finds his way blocked or his house surrounded if he tries to go about his political business. “Any criticism I make they say is spreading hatred of Government or alarm and despondency,” he says in the gentlest of voices and mildest of tones. With a quiet smile he adds his conviction that it is his moral duty to keep trying to make himself heard. Others are less calm. I have seldom seen such political passion so nakedly expressed as I have from other Bhutto opponents. Politics here are not gentle, it is true. There have been bombs galore in recent years, and attempted political murders, and actual murders (Mr Wali Khan himself has survived four attempts), and abductions.. Perhaps the outside world , has never grasped just what a brutal, no-holds-barred business hte Pakistani political hurlyburly can be.

There are four temperamental provinces to hold together since the fifth, Bangladesh, was cut adrift. In 1947, Dr Jinnah’s Pakistan was, as it were, slapped together with a constitution, a prayer and the Islamic faith as mortar. Since then there have been 17 years of futile military rule. So army coups are not something that many Pakistanis contemplate with enthusiasm. (“Those ignorant generals,” says Mr Bhutto, bitterly, of Ayub Khan and Yahya Khan.) But the newness of Pakistan and even a feeling of the artificiality of it are of grave concern to Mr Bhutto. The break-up of the State haunts him as it haunts Mrs Gandhi next door. He claims that the Baluchis, or some of them, are intent on independence. “They actually had a draft declaration of independence drawn up,” he told me. “I said ‘they will not succeed in dismembering the State’.” Even Bhutto-haters believe that important Baluchi leaders have that in mind. So the incipient guerrilla movement is being forcefully snuffed out: the Sabre - jets of Pakistan’s Air Force spream about the skies round Quetta, soldiers ride shot-gun on armoured trains to the coal area in the Baluchi tribal lands, and the Shah of Iran provides big Chinook helicopters from his stock-pile of American weapons. It i> probable that Pakis-

tan, emerging very slowly from feudalism, religious obscurantism, an atmosphere of amazing parochialism in the modern age, needs a strong central authority: in fact, needs Mr Bhutto. He has the intellectual brilliance that others lack and the international experience. True, he is aloof, brutally -rude to colleagues in public, cold as ice, full of contempt; “oppressively mediocre,” he drawled about the late Mujibur Rahman of Bangladesh. In private he is highly entertaining. But to his opponents, who range from businessmen to Left-wing students, he is either a socialist who

cripples the economy with nationalisation or a man who talks socialism, but hob-nobs with rich landlords.

For all his guile and arrogance, even his enemies can see him — and sneakingly admire him — in his ruthless brilliance as a kind of dark angel in South Asian politics. A new Sukarno perhaps? A new Nasser? Anyway, a major star of the Third World may soon rise again from the banks of the Indus. Yet to be safe at home Bhutto desperately needs economic success and reform at home to justify his harshness —O.F.N.S. Copyright.