MANI-FESTO

Bhutto vs Bilawal

Quite fortuitously, Syeda Hameed’s Born To Be Hanged: Political Biography of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and the interview given to a TV channel by ZAB’s grandson, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, have come before us at virtually the same time. The contrast could hardly be greater. And, therein lies the significance of the coincidence.

Bilawal argues that “the solution is peace, we just have to figure out a way to get there”. The way to get there, he argues, lies in “a progressive alternative to populist, hate-driven politics”, adding, “if we actually want to find a solution, we need to sit together and find a solution” through “concrete steps taken towards an actual dialogue”. This, he says, is what “ultimately the youth on both sides understand”. Not that there are no “hostilities” and “genuine complaints on both sides”, but that the answer does not lie in wars and sterile confrontation. Dialogue “behind closed doors” is, he stresses, the only way to overcome “reservations Pakistan may have about India” and India’s “reservations about what is going on in Pakistan”.

The irony is that the greatest practitioner of “hate-driven politics” that the subcontinent has seen since independence and partition was none other than his grandfather who thundered at the United Nations, “We will wage a war for a thousand years”—a phrase that gained him immense popularity in the Pakistan of his day and led eventually, and inevitably, to the military disaster of 1971 and the partition of Pakistan. Carried away by the power of his own empty rhetoric, India, ZAB proclaimed, is a “great monster”, always “given to aggression” and “determined to annihilate Pakistan”. An India of 450 million, he went on, has unleashed on a mere 100 million “a war of chauvinism and aggrandisement”. In India, he saw nothing but “a war machine”; its ultimate objective being “the establishment of Indian hegemony in South Asia”.

Illustration: Bhaskaran Illustration: Bhaskaran

The significance of Bilawal’s remarks lie, I think, not so much in his eschewing his grandfather’s nonsensical rodomontade, but in his attributing to “ultimately the youth on both sides” the alternative path of dialogue. For there has been a huge generational change in Pakistan on perceptions of India from those that prevailed when the struggle for a separate Muslim state gained momentum in the 1940s. In the immediate aftermath of the establishment of Pakistan as a sovereign state, being Pakistani was defined as not being Indian. That has changed. The youth Bilawal talks about believe they are Pakistanis not because they have shed their Indian identity, but because they are self-evidently Pakistanis by birth.

Moreover, almost all Pakistanis of the post-partition generation have never met a Hindu in Pakistan in all their lives. It is difficult to hate a ghost. In contrast, even at the tender age of 15, ZAB, in a letter to Jinnah, raged, “Musalmans should realise that Hindus can never and will never unite with us, they are the deadliest enemies of our Quran and our Prophet”. Even after Pakistan transmogrified from a wild fantasy into a hard reality, he was still writing in 1968, “The Muslims of India are being subjected to greater waves of terror and intimidation, their lives and properties have become more insecure while a systemic campaign of extermination is being waged by India”. Another letter of the same period “draws”, says biographer Hameed, “an analogy with struggle of the Nagas for a ‘third nation’ with the struggle of Muslims to carve a second state. Both struggles, he wrote, were against Hindus”.

Bilawal believes India has indeed been “secular”, but cautions that the “perception that India is moving away from that secular image also makes the Muslims of Pakistan insecure”.

It is now, alas, we, not the Pakistanis, who are refusing to engage in meaningful dialogue.