Aboard the Democracy Train (8 page)

The powerful feudal and chief of PML (F), Pir Pagara of Khairpur – who had suffered an ignominious defeat at the hands of the masses in 1988 – had led the move to stamp out the PPP. Big landowners of Matiari and Khairpur – who were dead set against Benazir and her populist PPP – had begun to sponsor the dacoits against the small landowners that formed the grass roots of her party.

As buses headed toward Hala, north of Matiari, passengers were held up at gunpoint, robbed and kidnapped. In dramatic scenes enacted all over interior Sindh, the dacoits forced male passengers to disembark and walk hands up in the air at gun-point
toward the marshy jungles along the Indus Highway. They were kept as hostage in the jungles until their families paid ransom.

I took the Indus Highway to the town of Saidabad (near Hala) to meet the small landowners victimized by the dacoits. It was a scary time to be traveling by road. Mohib Shidi and his gang would emerge with sudden ferocity from the jungles to ambush vehicles with Kalashnikov fire. Even my driver appeared anxious as our car sped along the Indus Highway – the only vehicle on the road in broad daylight.

But I was in the grip of a familiar sensation that came from chasing a big story. In Saidabad, I found a small landlord, Haji Waris Rahu and his men in gloomy spirits in the courtyard. The electricity had gone off – a frequent occurrence – and it was too hot to sit indoors. The verandah was bathed in milky moonlight, made even more eerie by the peasants holding Kalashnikovs.

The men were Rahu’s relatives, ready to ward off an imminent attack by the bandits. They could have been characters in a novel set in Tsarist Russia. The servant dutifully brought mugs of tea for all of us, while the villagers spoke one by one. I took notes in the moonlight.

Rahu’s men blamed the attacks on Mohib Shidi’s gang. They dully reeled the names of the dacoits and the big feudals who protected them. The aggrieved landowner told me in a distinctly downcast tone that although he had passed on the names of the dacoits to the administrative head of police – Deputy Inspector General (DIG) of Sindh, Saleem Akhtar Siddiqi – the authorities had failed to respond.

The situation reached epidemic proportions in the small towns along the 70-mile National Highway between Hyderabad and Mirpurkhas, where, according to my sources, the police chief of Sindh had been told by the Chief Minister Jam Sadiq Ali to look the other way while “pet dacoits” acted with impunity.

Small landlords in the farming community of Sultanabad – who had spent years growing mango and banana plantations – found their trees shaved off if they ignored the extortion notes by the dacoits. With no faith left in the government, they had changed their farming practices to growing less lucrative vegetables.

Despite my investigative reports published in
Dawn
about the dacoit menace, I came back to Karachi to find that it was business as usual. Indeed, while Islamabad looked on indifferently, dacoits zeroed in on more wealthy targets in Sindh: Chinese engineers who worked on an electrification project in Dadu were kidnapped, while Japanese tourists who toured Kandhkot in the north of Sindh were taken hostage. Rural Sindh drifted toward anarchy.

By mid 1991, Benazir came up with a concrete plan to fight the Sindh chief minister. As leader of the PPP opposition, Benazir proposed to pitch a candidate for a parliamentary seat that fell vacant from the town of Jacobabad in interior Sindh.

In normal times, a by-election caused by death or resignation of a parliamentary member is a routine event. But these were not normal times. Benazir planned to throw her weight behind her nominee and get him elected as the chief minister of Sindh.

Benazir’s nominee was the seasoned Western-educated lawyer and politician, Abdul Hafeez Pirzada – possessed of a fair complexion with fine, chiseled features and a stubborn jaw. A former federal law minister under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, he was one of the authors of the 1973 constitution that was suspended by Gen. Zia ul Haq.

But Pirzada was also controversial in that he disappeared from the scene when Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was hanged. Moreover, the ISI listed him as the beneficiary of over PKR 3 million (USD 35,000) in 1991 – money to be used to defeat Benazir’s reelection. Despite this, his prestigious background endeared him to Benazir and she decided to bet on him, both as a candidate and a future chief minister for Sindh.

It was an early demonstration of Benazir’s tendency to do whatever was needed to attain power. The practice would later be fine-tuned into an art by her life partner, Asif Zardari.

Chip was back in Karachi from his travels. He was joined by an American journalist, Steven Barmazel from the
Far Eastern
Economic Review.
For many in the West, Benazir still represented the best hope for Pakistani democracy. Like me, both Americans sought to see up-close whether the young woman would overcome the obstacles laid out by the military. We left together to get a first hand view of the election in Jacobabad.

Located at the border of Balochistan province, north of Sindh, Jacobabad is named after a British commissioner, Gen. John Jacob. He is remembered in Sindh for his engineering skills – having designed a modern irrigation system – and for his administrative abilities. Indeed, years later, I met villagers in remote areas of Larkana who praised the British administrator’s success in maintaining strict law and order in the area. Candles are still lit at Jacob’s gravesite by peasants who call him “
Jacum saheb
” (Sir Jacob), giving a native touch to his name.

In June 1991, as I stepped out of a bus in the sizzling 120°F heat of Ghari Khairo, Jacobabad – the hottest town in the sub-continent – I was greeted by a surprised shout from an elderly, white-haired man with furrowed eyebrows. Startled, I looked up at the leading landlord of Sindh, Illahi Baksh Soomro as he called out, “So now journalists are coming from outside to cover the election.”

Little did I know that my first encounter in Jacobabad would be with I. B. Soomro. Soomro’s relatives are known to be near fixtures in army-backed governments: his nephew, Mian Mohammed Soomro served in the Musharraf government while his brother, Iftikhar Soomro was elevated to the level of minister during various interim administrations. In 1991, the silver-haired federal minister, I. B. Soomro had come back to his hometown to back Jam Sadiq Ali’s nominee – Ghulam Ali Buledi.

As Chip, Steve and I went around Jacobabad, some of the local tribal leaders representatives told us that I. B. had forewarned them against letting their people vote for the PPP. Indeed, Jam’s administration had ensured that women – who tended to be more pro-Benazir – did not vote at all. In Jacobabad, Jam had slyly connived with Benazir’s relative and leading feudal from Larkana, Mumtaz Bhutto. Apparently, Mumtaz had thrown his weight behind tribal leaders to stop their women from coming out to vote.

Benazir and Pirzada held a press conference, widely attended by Sindhi journalists, in which they spoke in English for the benefit of my American companions. Benazir told us that Jam Sadiq Ali brought “some 200 dacoits” to Jacobabad on the eve of the by-election. She spoke of the “long-haired men,” armed with machine guns, that had arrested Pirzada’s supporters when they arrived from Balochistan border only a few miles away.

At one polling station, I overheard the government’s polling agents say that we must be stopped from entering the voting area. We later learnt that the government had provided presiding officers with ballot boxes, which were already “stuffed and sealed.”

Every now and then we bumped into Pirzada’s vehicle en route to the polling stations. He stood disheveled in the middle of the road, with his angry face red and perspiring, as he talked about the blatant rigging he had witnessed. Pirzada had taken to calling me the “veteran of Jacobabad.”

After days of witnessing the electoral charade, my American colleagues and I were not surprised when the Election Commission announced that the government’s nominee had won three times the number of votes secured by Pirzada.

An accomplished lawyer, Pirzada refused to give up and instead argued his case vociferously in front of the government’s Election Commission in Karachi. The judge nominated by the government, late Justice Naeemuddin, admonished him for his outbursts and threw out his case.

But by then Benazir had already moved on to seek new ways of returning to power. Even while she was in Jacobabad, she had fretted that her stay in the small town might reduce her image to that of a provincial, rather than national, leader. Once again, her eyes were set to rise to the highest office, no matter what it took.

The tyrannical Chief Minister of Sindh, Jam Sadiq Ali died of natural causes in March 1992. The army lost their strongman and
the pressure on Benazir and her PPP eased. By then, however, the free hand given by the establishment to dacoits had cost the nation dearly. The ransoms fetched by the kidnappings of Chinese engineers and Japanese tourists made the dacoits more restive. Like wolves baying for more blood, they advanced to the wealthy industrial city of Karachi.

One morning in June 1992, I woke up to learn that our next-door neighbor – industrialist, Ashiq Ali Hussain – had been ambushed and kidnapped a short distance from his home. Hussain’s kidnapping from his chauffer-driven car – which occurred in the presence of his armed guards – sent shockwaves through the top industrialists in Karachi. Even the military establishment realized the dacoits had gone too far.

A few days later, with a heroic flourish, the army launched “Operation Clean-up” in Sindh and began to exterminate dacoits like flies. Although for months, they had ignored our investigative reports on dacoits, the kidnapping of a key industrialist appeared to have been a wake up call. All of a sudden, the forests were cut down across Sindh to prevent dacoits from taking hostages. District administrations, until now allowed to look the other way, were warned against sheltering the bandits. Ranger patrols were stepped up and dacoits were shot on sight.

As the army branched across Sindh for “Operation Clean-up,” the poor villagers heaved a sigh of relief. It was also a signal to ordinary Sindhis and the PPP that the time was ripe to reorganize for a return to power.

By 1992, Benazir had learnt that the road to Islamabad did not lie with the electorate but through currying favor with the military rulers. She began hobnobbing with the president who had once dismissed her, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, to convince him to sack Nawaz Sharif’s government.

Four years in the knitty gritty world of politics had taught Benazir that securing the support of millions may be good for her populist image, but it would not make her the next prime minister of Pakistan. Eventually, it would be the PPP’s recourse to “palace intrigues” – a well-traveled road for politicians seeking power in Pakistan – that did the trick.

Knowing me as the reporter who covered the PPP for the nation’s most influential newspaper, the party’s top brass began to contact me directly. Each evening, a key aide to Benazir – Nabil Gabol – cleverly timed his phone calls to give me information about Benazir’s meetings with the establishment, aimed at securing the dissolution of the assemblies.

The PPP’s purpose was served, as I wrote lead stories in
Dawn
about indications that fresh elections were in the offing. It was also a genuine demand by the masses, who argued that Benazir’s last tenure had been too short to do any good.

In the meantime, Benazir kept her “train marches” handy in her bid to return to power. One of her party loyalists, remembering the glowing image of Benazir I had presented in my newspaper, playfully asked me if I would be ready to join them again on the “Democracy Train.”

By then, however, I had seen far too much anarchy and opportunism in the PPP’s policies to make me feel optimistic about their efforts to bring democracy.

I retorted with a metaphor taken from the famous train accident at Sangi railway station in rural Sindh in 1990, when a train careened out of control at the station and killed hundreds of people: “Ah, but remember there’s Sangi ahead.”

Over two decades later, my mind’s eye flashes back to the peasants of Sindh, whose half-shirts flapped in the wind as they ran barefoot along the railroad tracks to hear the PPP – then led by the charismatic Benazir Bhutto – promise them a better future.

It is a promise that still waits to be fulfilled.

On September 30, 1988, it was late evening at my newspaper,
Dawn
, in Karachi, when news came that terrorists had started a shooting spree in Hyderabad, a city north of Karachi. Dozens of those killed were Mohajirs – Muslim refugees from India.

Although incidents of ethnic violence had for the last three years escalated across Sindh, the nature of the attacks struck me as extraordinary. It was the first time that the Mohajirs – also called Urdu speakers – were targeted in such large numbers. Even the residents of Karachi, inured by acts of daily violence, had grown anxious and the telephones rang off the hook.

No one had claimed responsibility for the incident but ripples of fear ran through the community that it was an ethnic killing that would become the precursor to unspeakable bloody retaliation.

It was an audacious attack that reeked of conspiracy. Hyderabad had more Sindhis than Mohajirs and the attackers could easily blend into the population. On the other hand, the planners had apparently calculated that there would be a backlash in Karachi where the MQM had, for the last three years, flexed muscles mainly against the ethnic groups – Pashtuns and Punjabis – for control of the city.

The timing of the incident gave us pause. Gen. Zia ul Haq’s plane had crashed six weeks before and the military had announced a timeline for elections. Benazir Bhutto – whose father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had been executed nine years earlier by Gen. Zia – had received a rapturous welcome home as she prepared to take her “Democracy Train” across Sindh to mobilize supporters for the forthcoming elections.