9/1/2021 General Ziaul Haq: The man to answer for a lot that went wrong with Pakistan - Herald

I t is now generally agreed upon by most people that Ziaul Haq’s martial law changed
Pakistan’s destiny for the worst. Most, but not all. A friend’s mother cried when Zia
died because he prayed five times a day and was from the Arain clan, like her.

In Saba Imtiaz’s 2014 novel, Karachi, You’re Killing Me!, her protagonist quips: “If there
is ever anything you can count on at Pakistani cultural events, it’s that Zia – dead for
longer than most people can remember – can still be blamed for everything.” I share
her scepticism.

I don’t believe in the Great Man Theory of history. I don’t believe individuals can
single-handedly reshape the fate of millions. I believe great upheavals are caused by
institutional and structural pressures and individuals only respond within a limited
number of rationalised choices.

Whether Zia was there or not, there was going to be a conflict in Afghanistan
between two opposing superpowers with assorted Saudi interests thrown in; the
Iranian Revolution was going to happen anyway and bring sectarian violence in its
wake; Pakistan’s third martial law was well in the making before he imposed it.
Military dictatorships in Pakistan have a certain sense of fatalism about them. Habib
Jalib, the people’s poet jailed multiple times by Zia for penning verses against his rule,
once wrote: “Virsay mein humay yeh gham hai mila, iss gham ko naya kya likhna?
(We’ve inherited this sad state of affairs, why write this sadness as something new?).”

Zia’s greatest legacy is said to be Islamisation but it had already taken root with the
passage of the Objectives Resolution in 1949. The Council of Islamic Ideology, too, had
been set up in 1962 by Ayub Khan. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s economic socialism had very
clear Islamic overtones.

His efforts to unite Muslim countries were his major foreign policy initiatives. It was
his 1973 Constitution that made Islamic Studies compulsory in schools. In 1974,
Ahmadis were declared non-Muslims. In 1977, a federal law prohibited the sale of
alcohol to Muslims. Even our nuclear programme was deemed to be making an
Islamic bomb. The anti-Bhutto movement of 1977, too, used the demand for Nizam-e-
Mustafa (the system of the Prophet of Islam) to replace Bhutto’s social democracy. All
that was before Zia came along.

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This historical determinism, however, does not absolve him of his tyranny and the
havoc he wreaked on the Constitution, democracy and political parties. Things could
have been different with another tyrant. To start with, there was nothing certain
about Zia’s rise to the top. Bhutto bypassed seven senior lieutenant generals to make
him army chief because he was deemed to be the most disinterested in politics. But
as we now know, the army acts as an institution regardless of the individual heading
it.

Consider the circumstances: the United States was not happy with Bhutto over the
nuclear programme; the landed and industrial elite were not happy with Bhutto over
land reforms and nationalisation; the army was not happy with Bhutto as per
declassified American documents. All this encouraged Zia to carry out his
premeditated coup d’état that turned into a coup de grâce for democracy in Pakistan.

It is no secret that Zia lent heavily on Islam and ulema due to lack of popular support.
Some of his concessions to ulema still haunt us to this day. The penal code was
amended to add the death penalty as a punishment for blasphemy and increase the
scope of what constitutes blasphemy. In 1979, he promulgated the Hudood
Ordinances with punishments such as lashes for adultery. In 1980, he set up the
Federal Shariat Court to hear appeals in cases under the Hudood Ordinances. In 1981,
he set up a hand-picked consultative body, Majlis-e-Shoora, to act as the federal
parliament. It was packed with ulema nominated by him. He also introduced
mandatory zakat deduction from bank accounts, leading Shias to rise in violent
protests.

By 1984, he was feeling so confident about the strength of his constituents –

comprising ulema, spiritual leaders, business community and the military – that he
decided to hold a referendum that asked if people wanted Islamic laws in the country
and if their answer was to be yes then that automatically meant that they wanted Zia
as the president of Pakistan for the next five years. Nobody came out to vote.
“Marhoomeen shareek huay, sachchai ka chehlum tha (The dead participated, it was
the 40th day of mourning for the death of truth),” Jalib said of the level of public
participation in it.

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9/1/2021 General Ziaul Haq: The man to answer for a lot that went wrong with Pakistan - Herald

The President General Mohammed Ziaul Haq administering the oath of office of the Chairman of Federal
Shariat Court to Mr. Justice (Retd) Sallahuddin Ahmed on May 20, 1980 | White Star

In 1985, Zia brought in an elected Majlis-e-Shoora instead. The elections were held
on non-party basis after a government-appointed commission declared that political
parties were un-Islamic. The members of Majlis-e-Shoora were chosen presumably
on the grounds of an election candidate being sadiq (truthful) and ameen (honest).
These requirements were brought in as additions to articles 62 and 63 in the
Constitution. The most well-known politician to come out of that exercise, Nawaz
Sharif, was disqualified more than three decades later due to his failure to fulfil them.

Another gift of Zia’s era was the radicalisation of Islamabad’s Lal Masjid. Its prayer
leader, Muhammad Abdullah, was close to the general before he became close to the
Afghan Taliban’s chief Mullah Omar and senior al-Qaeda leaders. It took another
military dictator two decades later to uproot the extremist influence from Lal Masjid
in a bloody operation in 2007.

In hindsight, though, Islamisation seems more like political expediency than a well-
thought-out system. His personal beliefs did not stop him from taking part in the
Black September killings of Palestinians in Jordan where he was posted as a brigadier
from 1967 to 1970. When he wanted Bhutto framed for murder he asked Mian Tufail
Mohammad, then head of Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), to provide him with four people willing
to testify that Bhutto paid them to kill a dissident politician. He promised Tufail, by
one account swearing on the Quran, that these witnesses would be pardoned after

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Bhutto was hanged. They were hanged immediately after Zia had gotten rid of
Bhutto. That is when JI distanced itself from him.

He once had his picture taken as he bicycled to his office from his home,
demonstrating an austere and protocol-free way of life. What the press did not show
the public (and it could not because of the draconian censorship rules it was
subjected to) was that hundreds of security personnel had secured the route before
Zia started pedalling his bicycle.

He introduced laws to socially and politically ostracise Ahmadis but then went on to
give an official award to Professor Abdus Salam, an Ahmadi of Pakistani origin who
had won the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Beyond his religious hypocrisy, his actual enduring legacy is his systematic
decimation of parliamentary democracy. He introduced the Eighth Amendment to
the Constitution of Pakistan in 1985 to protect his martial law from judicial review
and acquire the power to sack an elected government and legislature on a whim — a
power he exercised to dismiss the government of prime minister Muhammed Khan
Junejo in 1988. The same amendment was subsequently used three times in the 1990s
to remove democratic governments midway through their tenures.

Zia’s crackdown on political dissidents and journalists resulted in the arrest of

thousands of people. Many of them were incarcerated and tortured in the basements
of Lahore Fort because the jails were all spilling over. Public floggings of criminals
and political opponents were a routine affair and hangings were often projected
widely in the media to scare people into submission.

Zia also banned student unions in 1984, much to the impoverishment of youth
engagement with politics in general and political challenge against fascist forms of
conservatism in particular. The effects of this repression were felt throughout the
next two decades as political engagement among the urban, educated middle and
upper-middle classes started going down and violent groups organised on non-
political grounds of religion, sect and linguistic prejudice assumed massive firepower
to deadly consequences.

Guns and drugs proliferated in his era. It was the age of Kalashnikovs and heroin.
Automatic weapons, originally meant for Afghan mujahideen, were either smuggled
into Pakistan or their replicas were produced in factories in tribal areas. Drugs
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produced in the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan were a major source of
funding for the anti-Soviet warriors in Afghanistan. Illegal manufacturing and
smuggling of both guns and drugs continue to this day in Pakistan. Then there were
around five million Afghan refugees, many of whom came to settle here permanently.
But, then again, the British-era Durand Line that separates the two countries can be
blamed for all these problems as much as Zia.

Is he responsible for every ill that plagues Pakistan today? I remain sceptical though I
must admit that I did not have to live through his dictatorship.

The writer and journalist graduated from the Lahore University of Management
Sciences with a degree in economics.

This article was published in the Herald's August 2017 issue. To read more subscribe to
the Herald in print.

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