Broadly speaking, two possible explanations have come to be widely accepted on the timing of the quasi-coup in Pakistan. First, having concluded in the wake of the Iraqi occupation and annexation of Kuwait that it would need Pakistan’s support for the confrontation with Saddam Hussein, Washington finally gave a go-ahead signal to President Ishaq Khan and General Beg who had, in any case, been keen to topple Benazir Bhutto for their own reasons. Secondly, since the United States had got entangled in the Gulf crisis, Khan and Beg decided to strike, assuming that the American administration would, on the one hand, be too preoccupied with the Gulf, and on the other, too anxious for their goodwill to worry about preserving the democratic façade in Islamabad.
The first explanation is rather weak. Implicit in it is the assumption that the Americans feared that Benazir would resist a request for a Pakistani military presence in Saudi Arabia and use of other facilities. This, on the face of it, is an untenable proposition. Benazir has been beholden to Washington. The military-bureaucratic power elite would never have let her move into the office of Prime Minister in the first instance in 1988 if she did not enjoy the kind of goodwill she did in Washington. And, but for continuing US support for her, they would probably have removed her from the office of Prime Minister long ago.
Two additional points may be made in this regard. Benazir is, for all we know, genuinely for the US; she was partly educated there and she has a number of friends in that country. And Islamabad has received such generous assistance from the Saudis that no Pakistan ruler can find it easy to turn them down in the hour of their distress. It is, for example, common knowledge that Riyadh provided the cash for the purchase of the first squadron of F-16s by Pakistan before the US decided to rearm it in a big way in the context of Soviet military presence in Afghanistan. On top of it all, military ties between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia date back many years. Even when 10,000 Pakistani soldiers sent to Saudi Arabia for the protection of the ruling family were withdrawn in 1988, 5,000 Pakistani military personnel stayed on there.
The second explanation is more persuasive. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait on August 2. President Khan dismissed Benazir on August 6. In between President Bush had reacted strongly to the Iraqi aggression and let it be known that he shall not let the occupation of Kuwait pass. This explanation, however, leaves open the question regarding President Khan’s and General Beg’s calculations and/or compulsions. This question is not as easy to answer as has generally been assumed.
The Benazir government is said to have been extraordinarily corrupt. Her husband, Asif Zardari, had come to be regarded as an embodiment of this corruption; Pakistanis called him ‘Mr. 10 per cent’. Even so I for one find it rather difficult to believe that Khan and Beg were so appalled by rampant corruption and so keen to improve matters as to be anxious to overthrow a duly elected government. Their choice of men such as Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi, Ghulam Mustafa Khar and others should suffice to settle this issue. These men have not been known for rectitude, to put it rather mildly.
Politics in Pakistan, as in India, has become a highly costly as well as a highly lucrative business. Indeed, Pakistani politicians would put ours to ‘shame’; they deal in crores if ours are content with lakhs for similar favours. That may bring them into disrepute across the border as it does on our side of the border. But precisely for that reason, corruption and arbitrariness cannot be cited as good enough reasons for the dismissal of the Benazir government, especially since martial law regimes in Pakistan too have been notoriously arbitrary and corrupt.
Most commentators in India and abroad have taken the view that Benazir had lost much of her popular appeal and had, therefore, become vulnerable on account of the doings of her aides, her husband and his father Hakim Zardari; the two together apparently exercised enormous extra-constitutional authority and control over banks and other financial institutions. Even so I take the view, perhaps wrongly, that Khan and Beg decided to strike not so much because they believed Benazir had compromised herself and therefore become vulnerable as because they feared that she might, if allowed to continue in office, be able to consolidate her position and possibly undermine theirs.
The combined opposition headed by Jatoi had given notice of a no-confidence motion against her government. The general assessment in Islamabad was that she would defeat it with a comfortable majority in the National Assembly. That by itself would have strengthened her position.
Benazir has claimed that she was about to disclose the names of men in influential positions who, according to her, have been involved in drug trafficking. It is not easy to accept this claim on its face value; Benazir had generally followed a conciliatory approach towards the military top brass; she had allowed two of her promotions to be disregarded; on her own admission, she had acquiesced in an Afghan policy she did not approve of; as such she could not possibly have suddenly decided on a course of action which would surely provoke a direct confrontation with them.
But such a possibility cannot, and should not, be dismissed altogether. Benazir, as a perusal of her autobiography Daughter of the East would show, can be very daring if she is driven into a comer. And it is possible that she felt she was being cornered. Such a disclosure, if she had indeed decided to make it, would, without doubt, have greatly embarrassed the military-bureaucratic elite, both within Pakistan and without.
We cannot, however, take Benazir at her word. So we shall let her claim in regard to drug trafficking pass. But it is self-evident that the ruling establishment is so scared of her that it is sparing no effort to see to it that her principal lieutenants and, if possible she herself, are debarred from contesting the promised elections. The caretaker government has been in a desperate hurry to publicise charges against PPP leaders, including the charge of murder against Benazir herself, set up special tribunals for their trials and arm these tribunals with extraordinary powers.
Benazir will be seven-month pregnant at the time of the poll, if it is in fact held on October 24, as promised. All opposition parties have come together in order to ensure a one-to-one contest with Benazir’s PPP. They shall not be short of funds and support from the official machinery. But all that does not give Khan and Beg the confidence that the ‘discredited’ woman can be kept out through the electoral process. They want to frighten her into leaving the country, and failing that, to make sure that as many PPP leaders as possible are debarred. Surely this speaks of panic on their part and should call for a reassessment of the Pakistani scene.
But before I outline my assessment, it would be in order to refer to the Pakistani campaign, readily swallowed by a number of Indian ‘intellectuals’, that Benazir had adopted a wholly partisan attitude in the Mohajir-Sindhi confrontation and that this was a source of direct conflict between her on the one hand and President Khan and General Beg on the other. I have all along felt that as a duly elected Prime Minister, Benazir could have called in the army in Sind only to assist the civilian authorities, that she could not possibly have agreed to transfer overriding powers to it and thereby in effect supersede the state government.
More important, I have been doubtful that General Beg in fact wanted the army to assume special powers as provided for under Article 245 of Pakistan’s Constitution; that would have involved the army deeply in the Mohajir-Sindhi armed conflict; constituted as the Pakistani army is, it would in all probability have sided with the Mohajirs; that in turn would have exposed General Beg, himself a Mohajir, to the charge of partisanship, further inflamed Sindhi passions and aggravated tensions.
Ishaq Khan and Mirza Beg, I have been convinced, were insisting on extraordinary powers for the army precisely because they knew that Benazir would not, and could not, agree and they felt that they could thereby embarrass her. General Beg has more or less admitted that much. He has said that the intention behind the demand was to promote a dialogue between the Mohajirs and the Sindhi leaders. But such dialogue has not taken place. Instead Sindhi armed men struck again at the Mohajirs in Karachi on August 22, killing 27 persons and injuring 83. At the time of writing (August 23) the army has not been given powers under Article 245, though it is now fully within President Ishaq Khan’s competence to do so.
On balance, I would, therefore, take the view that Khan, Beg and their ilk found Benazir inconvenient not so much because she was guilty of corruption or whatever, as because she constituted a threat to them, despite the compromises she had made, just by virtue of her being a duly elected Prime Minister and of being in full command of her party. Comparisons are never exact. Yet I would say that Benazir has come to occupy the same position in Pakistan that Indira Gandhi did in India from 1969 onwards with, of course, the obvious difference that the army is not a political actor in our country. Pakistan’s politics, with all its distortions produced by frequent military interventions and takeovers, revolves around her. All politically conscious Pakistanis must either be for her or against her; her failures notwithstanding, she remains the most formidable political figure in the neighbouring country.
Khan and Beg have obviously seized the opportunity the upheaval in the Gulf has presented them. But I am not quite sure that they have worked out a reasonably well-defined game plan. They certainly want a faction-ridden and weak coalition to present the facade of civilian rule from behind which they can rule. But they cannot be totally insensitive to the risks of their heavy-handed moves to keep Benazir out of the arena. Benazir is no mere Sindhi leader. But she is the Sindhi people’s principal hope and her maltreatment can only aggravate their grievances and strengthen them in their resolve to fight for their rights.
Khan and Beg would probably try to blur domestic issues by projecting Pakistan in a major policing role in the Gulf. It is obviously premature to discuss this issue. The overall situation in the Gulf is too confused and confusing to enable us to engage in this exercise. Even so it does seem to me that Khan, Beg and their aides face a situation, both internationally and in the region, which calls for greater skills than they are known to have possessed, and they may well find themselves in deep trouble this time. If they were wise men, they should have refrained from toppling Benazir at this point precisely because the scene in the adjoining Gulf is so complicated and explosive. Her presence would have provided them an invaluable cushion and it would have bought them time so that they could wait for events to unfold before taking firm policy decisions.
I have often said, half in joke, that Jinnah must have been in league with the Hindus to have forced partition of the country and with it of the Muslim community which in united India would have had only to make a deal with Harijans in order to dominate the country’s political life. I have the same feeling about Khan and Beg. Though I must hasten to add that this is not yet a firm assessment, it cannot be seriously denied that by plunging Pakistan into an unnecessary and possibly prolonged confusion, they have given us some respite, and that too at a time when not only Kashmir and Punjab continue to defy solution, but also when Raja VP Singh has wilfully precipitated an intense intra-Hindu conflict and forfeited whatever claim he might have had to legitimacy and support.
Far from being a friend of India who would send distress signals to New Delhi in anticipation of her dismissal, Benazir in office would have been a formidable adversary, especially in the new context of the caste war the Raja has imposed on us in ‘fulfilment’ of his commitment to protect India’s ‘unity and integrity’. Khan struck in Islamabad on August 6; the Raja struck in New Delhi on August 7. Perhaps the word ‘in’ should be taken out of both sentences.
Sunday Mail, 26 August 1990