How the 1977 Zia takeover sealed fate of Pakistan

It would probably be fair to say that the military takeover in the early hours of July 5, 1977, sealed Pakistan’s fate in ways that were far from obvious at the time, or even during the dark decade that followed. A fireball in the sky brought Gen Ziaul Haq’s dictatorship to an explosive end 11 years later, but the pall it cast over Pakistan’s polity has never entirely lifted. It took another 11 years for the next military chief to carry out a coup, and Pervez Musharraf’s tenure was a different beast, but in the interim the Army was never completely out of power. And, 40 years on from Zia’s treachery, it is seen as the primary arbiter in respect of determining the national direction.

Military supremacy had been demonstrated earlier, when the first Pakistani to be inducted as military chief, 11 years into the nation’s inception, decided that he was better equipped to guide the young country’s fortunes than politicians. The move was wrong-headed but not entirely arbitrary. Follow-ing the transfer of power in 1947, power had changed far too frequently in the decade that followed, without setting the confessional state on a trajectory that held much promise.

At the same time, Ayub Khan’s coup pre-empted an election that may indeed have ushered in reasonably representative rule. It wasn’t until the self-ordained field marshal was obliged to make way for a successor — again, 11 years after assuming power — that the democratic exercise was rescheduled. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s biggest mistake was to induct Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq as Army chief.

The 1970 elections, the first to be held on the basis of universal adult franchise, were indeed free and fair but the military-civilian resolve in what was then the western wing of the country to disrespect their outcome led to a civil war in the eastern wing that proved unforgivably costly in terms of human lives. What followed in what remained of Pakistan tends sometimes to be envisaged as some kind of a golden period. Yes, it did in some ways represent the dawn of democracy, and it was an era of promise. But  Bhutto’s tenure as first President and then Prime Minister was perhaps above all a period of missed opportunities. Furthermore, by caving in to some fundamentalist demands, Bhutto effectively paved the way for the depredations that followed.

He was responsible for any number of errors as Prime Minster, but by far his biggest mistake was to induct Zia as Army chief, on the assumption that this pathetic creature would serve as a loyal poodle. It is possible that Zia’s ritual humiliation in that slot guided his instincts to strangle all forms of democracy and execute the nation’s first popularly elected Prime Minister. But the crisis of legitimacy he faced both domestically and on the international stage was ultimately resolved only by a neighbour’s woes. Zia was all too eager to be enrolled as mujahid number one in the deeply deplorable endeavour, which not only crippled Afghanistan and sowed the seeds of seemingly ineradicable Islamist violence across much of the West Asia, but also blighted Pakistan. For the moment, at least, it seems an indelible stain.

Despite the early experiments with public hangings and flogging, the Zia regime wasn’t outwardly brutal on the Pinochet level or scale. Its barbarity was more insidious. And the cover of religiosity in which it garbed its barbarity lives on in the Taliban mentality that essentially sprang from Zia’s entanglement with the previously marginal Jamaat-i-Islami and its ilk. Many of us back then saw Zia’s  unrepresentative incumbency as a temporary phenomenon that would wear off once he departed. Pakistan’s experience since the fortuitous mid-air comeuppance has, however, defied that assumption. His noxious ideological spirit freely walks abroad and recreates itself. Pakistan’s salvation lies in a thorough exorcism that does not, for the time being, appear to be anywhere on the horizon.

By arrangement with Dawn