16 For reasons of space, my publishers have not been able to include my extensive writing on several persons who made a long-lasting impression on me, including Mazari, Jabbar, Kamal Azfar, Sayyed Akhlaque Hussain, Zia Khaleeli, and Brig (retd) A.R. Siddiqi (to name but a few). The interested reader is invited to retrieve these deleted pages at this book’s website https/…

Abul Samad
And it was thus that at about 1 pm on 14 December 1978, I landed at Karachi airport. I was slightly taken aback to be introduced to a Pakistani called Mubarak Shah who was in the small welcome party. He said he had been expressly sent to invite me to the home of his chairman, Abdul Samad. I said I could not possibly go there direct from the airport but would surely make my way soon after settling in. Mubarak Shah insisted on accompanying us to Hindustan Court where I would be staying until they got ready India Lodge, the official palatial residence.

It took a while to shake off the insistent Mubarak Shah but eventually I did and went straight to my new office at India House. The office was housed in a soaring four-storey building with numerous rooms but totally dilapidated as it had been utterly neglected, as indeed had been all our vast properties in Karachi, for the past 13 years since 1965 when the capital was moved to Islamabad and war had broken out between the two countries. So, I found my whole team – comprising two clerks temporarily deputed from our Embassy in Islamabad and me – huddled into one small room with one telephone between us, while workers in their scores swarmed over the vast premises trying to make the office building ship-shape.
The phone rang. The clerk who picked up the phone passed it on to me saying it was from the office of the Deputy Commissioner, Sukkur. At the other end was the unfortunate liaison officer escorting a Hindu sadhu who, at LK Advani’s pleading, had been permitted by the Pakistan authorities to return to Sadh Bela, near Sukkur, to provide spiritual succour to the relatively large community of Hindus who had remained in Upper Sind despite Partition. The poor man seemed to be at his wits’ end as he stammered that he had a terrible problem on his hands that only I could solve. I hesitantly asked what the trouble was. The liaison officer cried out that the Muslim “mureeds” (followers/devotees) of the Hindu saint were insisting that they meet the visiting Hindu priest to secure his blessings. Would I please give him permission to let them do so? Somewhat grandiloquently, because I could barely believe that this was going to be my first task as Consul-General, I granted the permission asked for.
It was my first and lasting lesson in discovering how gaping was (and is) the gap between the stereotype of Pakistan and Pakistanis that most Indians carry in their heads and the ground reality. It was also the first lesson I learned in how much the ordinary Pakistani (particularly the India immigrant, the ‘muhajir’) identifies his origins with us. That alone could explain the liaison officer bypassing proper diplomatic channels and directly communicating with the representative of a ‘foreign power’. This would never have happened with the Brits or the Americans, not even with the Iranians or even the Chinese. I was seen as indistinguishable from the local bureaucracy, largely because I looked like them and was fairly fluent in their everyday language – which was Hindusthani, not formal Persianized Urdu. This lesson was to be bored into my mind several times over the next three years.
Meanwhile, I gave in to Mubarak Shah’s increasingly desperate pleas for me to accompany him to Abdus Samad’s home. I had learned betimes that Samad was one of Pakistan’s more prominent industrialists, running his Premier Tobacco Co. in competition with Pakistan Tobacco (the front for the former Imperial Tobacco Company that in India had changed its name, first to India Tobacco Company and then to ITC). So, I was not surprised by the immensely long circular drive up to his magnificent mansion. Samad was at the door to receive me and escorted me down a longish corridor with a number of young men lined up to my left and an equal number of young women lined up to my right. As he went through the introductions, I found that they were all his sons and daughters-in-law or his daughters and sons-in-law. What struck me was that all the Karachi siblings, boys or girls, were married to spouses from Madras (Chennai). So, the first thing I said to Samad as we seated ourselves on his comfortable sofas was, “But why have you married all your children to Indians?” His astounding response was, “Because I am an Indian!”
Before I could quite digest his reply, he went on to explain that he was 17-18 years old at Partition and their Hindu agent in Sukkur running the marketing of their highly successful beedi and chewing tobacco manufacturing units in Tamil Nadu had “fled to Indore” (he still seemed to nurse an active grudge against the man). His father, therefore, had asked Samad to proceed immediately to take over the retailing at the Sukkur end. He had done so and was quite happy as he frequently visited his family in Madras, but, in September 1949, India, in retaliation for Pakistan not having devalued its rupee along with India after the pound sterling was devalued vis-à-vis the US dollar, had banned most trade with Pakistan. He was thus left with no work to do and decided, with his family’s consent, to pack up and go home.
He applied to the Indian High Commission for the issue of an Indian passport and then got extremely worried when the High Commission informed him that as, in the meantime, he had become a Pakistani citizen and acquired a Pakistan passport, the Government of India would refuse to let him change sides. He informed his family who were among the strongest financial supporters of the Congress in Madras province. This led to Kamaraj and several other Madras Congress leaders calling on Nehru in Delhi and “saying that if Samad was not an Indian, neither were we.” Nehru apparently calmed down the irate Madras Congress leaders with the assurance that he would find a way around this problem. And sure enough, a little while later, Samad heard from the High Commission that his case had been cleared and he could visit the consular officer to collect his Indian passport. But when the Pakistan government came to hear of this, their Finance ministry drew up an indictment of the company’s tax returns and imposed such heavy penalties on Samad that he would have driven his family firm bankrupt if he had paid all that was demanded. The authorities had quietly let him know that if he declined the Indian offer of a passport, an accommodation with him on tax matters would be reached.
At this point, Samad went on, he could think of only one man who could save him – “an Aiyar,’ he said, “like you”. Partition had yet not affected the professional classes. And so, this Indian income tax adviser flew into Karachi fairly frequently to handle Samad’s case. But, complained Samad, as soon as news of the man’s arrival reached the ears of the tax department, the IT officers would descend on the Indian expert with their files to get his opinion on the cases they were finding difficult to handle and Samad would find his problem being by-passed.
Nevertheless, he persisted. Then, he said, he opened the papers one morning to find that this Aiyar had been killed in an air accident. “You’re talking of my father,” I interjected. Samad shook his head sadly and said, “I should have guessed. He was V. Sankar Aiyar and you are Mani Shankar Aiyar. On that day,” he went on, “I knew I would have to remain a Pakistani because no one else could have saved me”. And wiped a tear from his eye. And in this way I discovered that through his untimely death, my father had contributed a millionaire to Pakistan.
Other Sindhi friends, including Elahi Bux Soomro, too did not sound unduly alarmed. Elahi Bux, a wadehra from Shikarpur abutting Larkana, had been so close to ‘Zulfie’ Bhutto that he was the one who had found the one qazi willing to conduct the unorthodox marriage ceremony of the Sunni Bhutto to the Shia Nusrat. Yet, the story Elahi Bux shared with me of his treatment at the hands of his friend, who had become Chief Martial Law Administrator after Pakistan lost the Bangladesh war, made my blood run cold. As he was driving around his lands one day, the Superintendent of Police in Shikarpur district drove up to his jeep and, saluting smartly, said he was under orders to arrest Elahi Bux. An astonished Elahi Bux asked why. The SP replied that he did not know, but his orders were to take him straight to Sukkur Central Jail, without even letting him go home to put together a few things. The SP soothingly added that Soomro would doubtless be informed of the reasons for his detention by the warder on arrival in Sukkur. Of course, the first thing that the bewildered Elahi Bux did on meeting the warder was to ask why he was under arrest. The warder shook his head and said he had been told to keep all three registers open – dacoity, murder and rape – and would be informed in due course of which register to fill! Elahi Bux remained in confinement till one day he was suddenly informed that Bhutto had appointed him deputy High Commissioner to London and he would have to leave the country directly. Such were the whims on which the government was being run. I asked myself, why would anyone rise in defence of such an arbitrary ruler?
Then there was a charming lady, Nishad Feldman, widow of the late Herb Feldman, author of a brilliant little book, “The End and the Beginning?” (OUP, London, 1978) on the last days of erstwhile united Pakistan. The only other guest was an old veteran of Sindhi politics who introduced himself as Mungo, MNA of Sukkur. He had given Zulfie Bhutto his opening into politics. Yet, he was morbidly enthusiastic about the sentence being carried out and gave me his reason why. Apparently, he had publicly disagreed with Bhutto about some matter of policy and had promptly been bunged into the Malir Jail on the outskirts of Karachi. At 10pm at night, the warder came to his cell and said he was wanted on the ‘phone by the Prime Minister. Mungo went to the warder‘s office and heard on the other end a familiar voice saying, “Mungo, listen,” followed by the tinkling of a spoon against crystal. “Do you want to spend the rest of the night in jail or would you rather have a nightcap with me? All you have to do is apologize.” Mungo unleashed a string of expletives and banged the ‘phone down. “Such a b*****d deserves to die,” he muttered to me through clenched teeth. 
However, I found myself a true Bhutto loyalist in another Sindhi politician, Pyar Ali Allana, son of G.A. Allana, among the most faithful followers of Jinnah in the province of Sind. Pyar Ali had served as minister of culture in the PPP’s Sind provincial government. He was almost maddened at the prospect of his godfather’s hanging. When I asked him what he proposed to do about it, he replied, “What can we do when you do not promise us sanctuaries in India?” I replied that before asking for sanctuaries, he had to start a revolution. To which his answer was, “First sanctuaries; then revolution,” adding, “You are a Morarji man; just wait and our Indira Ma will return and then we’ll have our Sindhudesh!”
In January 1980, about a year after this bizarre conversation, during which I often ran into him, I saw him seated on the sheet stretched across the floor, a little distance from me, at Rock House, the home of a wealthy Hindu businessman who prudently kept himself out of Pakistan as much as he could. The occasion was a private concert by Abida Parveen, then an upcoming singer who belted out classical Hindusthani music in a deep bass. She was renowned for her revolutionary fervour and I had read glowing reports about the massive crowds who turned up to listen to her in the mofussil towns of rural Sind. Indeed, I had sought permission to attend one of her rural performances but been denied it, doubtless because they did not want me to see the bubbling anger in the countryside over the assassination, as they saw it, of their beloved leader.  She sang only in her mother tongue, Sindhi (until fame and a growing fortune drove her to Urdu and even Punjabi). When one song in particular had the select gathering ecstatic. I slid across the floor to Pyar Ali to ask him to translate its meaning to me. He waited for a pause in the proceedings to share with me the import of the song. Abida had sung of a Nawab hearing in the distance a golden voice come floating over the air waves into his palace.  He sent someone to fetch the minstrel. The minstrel arrived with the “saaz” (a stringed musical instrument) in his hands. The Nawab expressed his high appreciation of the music and asked what he could give the minstrel by way of reward.
“Your head,” replies the minstrel, and then, showing the ‘saaz’, says it was carved out of the trunk of the tree from which the Nawab had had his father hung. The allusion to Bhutto and Zia had missed no one – hence the wild appreciation being showered on Abida. Pyar Ali then grabbed me by the arm and said he must talk to me. We went out and he said, “Indira Ma has been back in power for ten days and yet nothing has happened.”
I said, “I told you, nothing would happen.”
With infinite sadness, Pyar Ali shook his head and muttered, “Every night for the past ten nights I have the same dream over and over again. I hear a car driving into the porch. I rush out and see that it is Indira Ma driving herself to my house. She sees me and, stepping out of the car. pulls out of the pallu of her sari a bunch of keys and says, “Here, Pyar Ali, here is your Sindhudesh.”
What could I do but stagger in disbelief? Unfortunately, Pyar Ali is no more. He deteriorated mentally and mercifully died, his dream of an independent Sindhudesh unrealized. But that is the mysticism in which the response to Zia’s dictatorship was being formulated in the Sindhi mind. Completely unreal.
Other friends of Bhutto, notably the Parsi, Ardeshir Cowasjee, who had grown up with Zulfie, and whom Bhutto made chairman of the Karachi Port Authority but dismissed when things started going wrong, startled me with the choice abuse he reserved for his former friend and patron. Yet another was G.D. Advani, a Hindu who had stayed back in Pakistan and was running a hotel that was notorious for its time, the Palace Hotel, much patronized by Zulfie when he was a young man about town. Advani, as a non-Muslim, had been given the license to build a casino on Clifton Beach that would attract much-needed petrodollars from the newly rich Sheikhs of the Gulf. Then, just as Advani was readying to rake in his winnings, Bhutto, confident by then of trumping the disapproving mullahs, simply robbed Advani of his property and entrusted it to his ‘talented cousin’, Mumtaz Bhutto. Little wonder that Advani seemed to view Bhutto’s hanging as well-deserved personal revenge.
I could not see from where the momentum could come to fuel a major uprising against the General if push came to shove.  Meanwhile, February passed into March and March into April 1979. I received a telegram from Delhi informing me that the Indian Chief of Army Staff, General O.P. Malhotra, would be transiting through Karachi airport on his way back to Delhi from an official visit to Kenya. I informed my keepers, the Karachi Protocol Office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and arrived at the airport well on time, all brushed up and dressed to the teeth. I was distressed to find only a junior Brigadier in attendance and comforted myself with the thought that perhaps a senior General would put in his appearance only after our Chief of Army Staff had arrived. That never happened. Our COAS, however, was the soul of courtesy, munching his biscuits and sipping his tea and making polite conversation with the Brigadier while I seethed at the discourtesy being shown to our senior-most army officer and kept composing in my mind the Note of protest I would send next day to the Foreign Office.
That Note Verbale never got sent. For the next morning I learned the reason why. Overnight, Bhutto had been hanged and all the senior army personnel had been busy arranging his burial before daybreak at his village of Garhi Khuda Baksh near Larkana!
While the papers were emblazoned with screaming headlines, the streets were surprisingly subdued. There were no rivers of blood flowing in the streets of Karachi. I went around the city to check. All was calm and quiet. I returned to Hindusthan Court and ran into my old friend, the darzi.
“What happened?” I enquired. “You said the streets would run with rivers of blood!”
“No, Sir, our leaders let us down. They did not give the call for us to rise. Cowards,” he spat out.
“But,” I persisted, “do the masses make the leader or do the leaders make the masses?”
“I don’t know,” he replied dolefully.
“So,” I asked, “why have you still got on your PPP cap?”
With infinite sadness, he responded, “No one has asked me to take it off. If they do,” he added, taking off his cap, “I’ll do so”.
The revolution had choked. Zia had got away with murder.  
Encouraged by the absence of any public reaction to the hanging of ‘Shaheed’ Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, Zia started slowly releasing Bhutto’s closest political associates. With the National Assembly (Parliament) shut down, many started flocking to Karachi. This was my golden opportunity. The first of the PPP leaders I cultivated was Hafeez Pirzada, Bhutto’s minister of law (and several other portfolios). I met him at the exquisitely appointed home of my dearest friends then and now, Bina Muneer and her husband, Zaki. He had little to add to the muted reaction to Bhutto’s hanging that I had noted among even the most ardent champions and beneficiaries of the PPP. But he had a great deal to say about the domination of the Punjabis in Pakistan and the need, therefore, to ensure equitable power-sharing among the four provinces by constituting a Council of State above Parliament, composed of equal representation of each of the provinces so as to reduce Punjabi “dominance” and accord an equal voice to each province irrespective of the wholly disproportionate population differentials among them. It was an interesting constitutional arrangement but wholly removed from the ground reality and, of course, came to nothing.
After I got to know him better, and I did because we would meet at someone or the other’s house most evenings and frequently at his place or mine, I tried to probe his immediate plans to restore civilian authority in Zia’s Pakistan. He despaired to the point of hinting at secessionist solutions. As the Bangladesh experience was then very much a “lived” experience for every Pakistani, especially senior ministerial colleagues of Bhutto’s like Pirzada, I was slightly but not entirely taken aback when one day, after we had become good friends, he sighed and said nothing could be done about military dictatorship in Pakistan without India. What, I asked, could India do? “Sanctuaries,” he suggested, echoing his junior, Pyar Ali Allana. Because by then we had become fairly close, I replied, “But where is your revolution?” “Oh, we need to be first assured of sanctuaries”, he remarked. I replied, “Hafeez, the only revolution you are capable of making is to stir the sugar in your coffee”. I feared I might have crossed an unmarked line, but he laughed off the remark good-naturedly.
Through Hafeez and others, I started widening my circle of political acquaintances, mostly from the PPP but spreading in concentric circles to embrace virtually every political persuasion. Strangely, for a group of politicians under siege in a military dictatorship, they were all to a man most forthcoming and uninhibited about expressing, even to an Indian (much more, I discovered, than to my fellow members of the consular corps), their frequently frank and ‘subversive’ views. Among them was Makhdoom Amin Faheem, the eldest son of the Pir of Hala, one of Sind’s most respected religious leaders. As the Pir held a hereditary office, over the centuries the family had built themselves an impressive palace at Hala and accumulated vast wealth which they used to reinforce their huge political influence deriving from the Pir’s spiritual standing among the pious inhabitants of rural Sind. Amin was a modern-minded young man, very much a Bhutto man but, like so many of them, wholly resigned to the hanging of their leader (an event Bhutto had foreseen when he remarked that no male member of his family appeared able to cross the age of fifty – Bhutto himself was 53 when he was caught by the hangman’s noose). I spent hours at Amin’s hospitable home, acquiring what knowledge I could from him of Sind’s manners and customs, traditions and folklore and, of course, politics and sociology.
One memory that stands out is my asking him whether his father had Hindu ‘mureeds’ (in a throwback to my having discovered on my first day in Karachi that our Hindu sant had Muslim ‘mureeds’). He replied, “But, of course, hundreds of them.”
I went on, “Do they still keep in touch with him?’
He said, yes, they did. So, I enquired, “How?”
“Oh,” he said, “every time there is a birth or a wedding or any other happy occasion like a son getting a job, their families, write to my father and seek his blessings.”
“What,” I exclaimed, “even from India? After all these years?”
He seemed surprised at my surprise. “Yes, from India too.”
Then, with some embarrassment, I went on, “But I understand your father gives his blessings only after receiving his nazrana (votive offering).”
“Of course, every blessing requires a nazrana”.
But how do they get it across?
“By the same route,” came the prompt reply, “as they send their request. On camel-back through the smugglers”!
Thus, does spiritual need outwit the machinations of border control. To Makhdoom Amin Faheem, it was perfectly in the nature of things for his father’s Hindu ‘mureeds’ to seek the good offices of smugglers to send their ‘darkhwast’ (petitions) for blessings to the Pir on camel-back, along with a token nazrana (of five or ten Indian rupees) and receive in return, through the same smugglers’ route, the Pir’s written blessings. It was quite a revelation. I saw no reason to share it with my authorities.
Amin went on later to become the Commerce Minister of Pakistan and almost made it to PM. He was pipped at the post by the manoeuvrings of Bhutto’s son-in-law, Asif Zardari. He has now passed away, as have so many others, but remained a life-long friend.
Another young Sindhi PPP politician I recall with the greatest affection was Mir Hazar Khan Bijarani of Jacobabad. He was among my later acquaintances. I was pleased but surprised when he invited me to visit his village of Karimpur in Upper Sind. “It has a temple but no mosque,” he explained with some pride. I wondered if the authorities would permit me to go, especially as the anti-Zia Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD) was gathering momentum. He waved away the problem, saying “leave that to me”. And, sure enough, the permission came through and I flew to Sukkur where Bijarani picked me up to drive me straight to his village. As we sped by the sparse landscape, I asked him whether he could tell me how much land his family held. “Nothing much,” came his reply, “just 6000 acres”! We went on for a while in silence and then he felt, in all politeness, he should ask me the same question.
“How much land do you own?” he asked.
I replied that my father had relinquished his share in return for the family house in the village but the family as a whole held perhaps 25. “Aap tho bahut bade rais honge,” he remarked. (“So, you must be a very big landlord”).
I shook my head and explained, “Not with just 25 acres”.
“Oh, I thought 25,000,” he replied.
That, I noted silently, was the difference between India and Pakistan: we had had land reforms and they hadn’t and perhaps that was the root cause for democracy in India as against dictatorship as the norm in Pakistan.
The rest of the trip was an eye-opener. We stopped off at the Jacobabad district headquarters where a Hindu had just been elected as President of the municipality. I spoke and urged the Hindus to conduct themselves as good Pakistanis, just as Muslims in my country were all patriotic, nationalist Indians. I do not think I could have escaped censure from Delhi if I had made that speech in this day and age, but it did make the headlines and came in for commendation from Benazir who, the following morning, had invited Suneet and other ladies of the consular corps to her home in Karachi for morning coffee.  
After spending the night in Karimpur where I woke to the sound of temple bells, he took me on a tour of several neighbouring villages. The villages were all deckedout as for a political rally and people in their hundreds poured out of their huts to greet me as if I were a political leader. Cries of “Jiye, Bhutto” rent the air and I rather suspect some of them thought I might be Bhutto himself. It was in many ways my political blooding and I have never forgotten the thrill of being mobbed, evenif it was under false pretences! I wonder what the authorities in Islamabad would have made of these shenanigans, but, as a far as I could make out, they just took it in their stride.
Of course, that drew me very close to Bijarani and we remained good friends as he rose up the political ladder, making it to Minister of Inter-state affairs in the Zardari-Geelani government. Learning that I was visiting Karachi for the Literary Festival in early February 2018, he called me in Delhi to invite me to stay with him at his beautifully appointed Defence Housing Authority residence, thanks to his recently acquired second wife, an utterly charming and very cultivated young woman. I do not know – no one seems to know – what exactly happened later the same evening, but next morning their bodies were found in the bedroom, with both of them shot dead. A very sad, indeed tragic end, to what by all appearances had been a very happy marriage. 
Early in my tenure, I met Kamal Azfar, another life-long friend, happily still with us, who had served as minister of planning in the PPP government in Sind. His father had been in the ICS, Orissa cadre, and his never-fulfilled desire was to visit his birthplace, Sambalpur. He was a devoted follower of Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi and was waiting for Jatoi to be released to know what political path to take. Later, much later, in the ‘90s, Kamal was named Governor of Sind but was removed too soon to be able to fulfill his dearest wish – which was to have me as his guest in Governor’s House. One day, after a tete-a tete dinner at his lovely Spanish villa, he presented me with a little book he had written on the need for Pakistan. It contained the sentence: “Pakistan was necessary because an inferior number with a superior culture would otherwise have had to live with a superior number of inferior culture”I read the sentence that night and hit the ceiling. I tried to educate him in the years that followed on the “Wonder that was India” and when we returned to India he accepted my invitation to travel all over India seeing not only the Muslim legacy they had so foolishly left behind in India but also the Hindu, Buddhist, Jain and Sikh monuments that proclaimed our nation’s glorious, composite heritage. To Kamal’s eternal credit, he has ever since regretted the line he composed because it sounded ‘clever’. The lesson I learned, and would love to have our Foreign Office learn, is that it is only if we expose Pakistanis in their millions to our shared heritage that we can rid them of the ridiculous prejudices and misinformation they carry in their heads, just as we do about “The People Next Door”, if I may steal the title of TCA Raghavan’s highly readable account of the true history of the last seven decades that we have wasted in quarreling instead of coming together.
In the autumn-winter of 1979, Jatoi was released. I was delighted to receive from him an invitation to a dinner reception. The house was glittering with lights and buntings as we arrived. The entire consular corps was there. So was the Indus-like flow of alcohol being openly served to the multitudes by a host who had barely escaped the gallows himself and had just been released from months in jail. The police could have swooped down on him and taken him (and several of his guests) into custody for breaking the strict laws of the Nizam-e-Mustafa proclaimed just months earlier. I guessed the police were nowhere to be seen because they were under orders to make themselves scarce. Indeed, Zia himself had intervened when the police had raided Amy Haque, the wife of one of Pakistan’s star cricketers and leaked to the press their find of a huge cache of liquor with all the lip-smacking details. Zia then added a coda to the shariat – that a Pakistani’s home is his castle, and the police must not chase alcohol into people’s homes! The man was a religious fanatic – but a highly pragmatic one.
I wended my way towards our host, having heard that he was at the bar (where else?). Jatoi greeted me effusively and, like every Pakistani I had met in Karachi, was more than willing to talk – and talk uninhibitedly – to an Indian diplomat, of all people, at his first meeting. I asked him what it was he was demanding of the government.
“Democracy,” was his unhesitating answer.
Abandoning all caution, I went on, “Within Pakistan or without?” “Within Pakistan, if possible; without, if necessary!”
I then asked, “What is it that you particularly have against Zia?”
“Mr. Consul-General,” he said, “before this b****d came to power, I used to have 24 brands of whisky in my bar.”
“Now,” he added, “I have only six”!
That seemed to be as good a definition of dictatorship as any I could find in Pakistan.
The next incident that comes to mind, is finding myself squeezed between Jatoi and Maulana Jan Muhammad Abbasi, a cleric from the Jama’at-e-Islami, at the ‘rasam’ ceremony (traditional tying of the turban ceremony to install the heir) of Ayub Khuhro’s eldest son, a year or so later. The Maulana got up to greet someone and Jatoi winked and whispered to me that he had had the man kidnapped on the eve of the filing of nominations in the 1977 elections – for his temerity in even trying to stand against Bhutto! (It was charges like this that led to the general public belief, at least in Karachi which gave the PPP only two out of nine seats, that the whole election had been rigged, and thus opened the way to Zia’s military coup)  Jatoi deeply disapproved Benazir’s aspiration to dynastic succession, as did her uncle at one remove, Mumtaz Bhutto, and several of Bhutto’s senior-most colleagues. It was an empty disapproval because Sind, in particular, and Pakistan on the whole, regarded Benazir as the only legitimate successor to her father. Her senior colleagues might have the talent and experience of governance but only she had the charisma. The vote would be for her, not them. Yet, just as many were sensing the Zia dictatorship tottering, it was fascinating to be personal witness to the total lack of unity in even the country’s principal Opposition party, let alone the Opposition as a whole.
Once launched, I found my circle of political acquaintances rapidly extending beyond the PPP. There was, for example, the suave and always elegantly dressed lawyer, Mushir Ahmed Pash Imam, one of the very few to have been elected as an Independent to the National Assembly from the Clifton area where we lived. He was opposed to Bhutto, which is why he had stood against the PPP candidate but did not have very much to add about the state of things in Pakistan. I would describe him as a genial dilettante who was neither too vocal about Bhutto’s destiny nor too concerned about its fallout on the city, but definitely against the military dictatorship.
I particularly appreciated the company of Zahur Hasan Bhopali, whose calling card described him as the Information Secretary of the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-i-Pakistan (JUP). His perspective comprised in equal parts vitriol directed at Bhutto and vitriol directed at Zia. He was pious but equable, with a ready laugh and a willingness to agree to disagree. He often called on me just to pass the time of day and I introduced him to my colleagues in the office. Some three years later, soon after I had left Karachi, one of these colleagues called on Bhopali. The conversation ended with Bhopali asking my colleague to convey his “salaams to Mani Shankarji”. Seconds later, he was shot to death by his next visitor, his last words having been to remember me.
The only place from which the Jama’at-e-Islami, the bugbear of Indian public opinion, were able to return their only two MNAs (Members of Parliament), Khurshid Ahmed and Ghafoor Ahmed, was Karachi city. Whatever reservations India might have had about their public postures against India and their fanatical advocacy of militant Islamic tenets, the fact is that it was they who had pressurized Zia to open the Indian Consulate in Karachi even without waiting to reciprocally open the Pakistani consulate in Bombay. It was their constituents who were our principal visa seekers, the ‘muhajir’. The evening papers had taken it upon themselves to competitively keep count of the number of visas we were issuing (combined with some discreet leaks from our end). “Fifty thousand” screamed the headlines about two months into the exercise; “seventy-five thousand” proclaimed the headlines two further months later. By September, within six months of our opening, we were edging towards one hundred thousand, a full lakh. I called in ten Pakistani journalists, particularly from the Urdu medium press, and asked them to man the windows of our visa office to have them distribute the last ten passports that would take us to the 100,000 mark. When it was reached, there was a loud roar of applause as the lucky recipient’s passport was handed over to him (by Pakistani hands!) and I presented him with a tin of Darjeeling tea. At this, the waiting audience burst into slogans, “Hindusthan ke Consul General, zindabad, zindabad” (Long live Hindusthan’s Consul-General). Then, heartwarmingly, “Yahan koi paabandi nahi, koi rishwat nahi” (No hurdles here; no bribes!). I was overwhelmed. So were the journalists. I had a field day in the papers that evening and the next. Little wonder that the two Jama’at-e-Islami MNAs were effusive in their thanks for our having contributed in no small measure to the fulfillment of one of their constituents’ most keenly felt requirements, the open opportunity to visit India. I felt vindicated at having told my visa clerks not to regard their tasks as akin to issuing railway tickets; with every visa they issued, they were buying the goodwill of the other side.
So much for the ‘Islampasand’, (Islam-lovers) as they liked to be called. There weremiscellaneous others who I assiduously cultivated. Foremost among them was Sherbaz Mazari, President of the National Democratic Party, a fiercelyindependent and remarkably well-read tribal ‘sirdar’ from Dera Ghazi Khan, at the tri-junction of Balochistan, Sind and Punjab, who would never compromise on his principles and, therefore, did not make it to the top despite hovering near the summit for most of his active political life, which he admirably summarized in his autobiography, in my view the best by any sub-continental politician, “A Journey to Disillusionment” (Oxford University Press, 1999). To enter his home was to enter a book-lined world of refined taste and elegance, filled with framed photographs of his full life among the builders of Pakistan and presided over by his wife, Souraiya, a model hostess. He kept an excellent table overlooked by hunting trophies. His friends and memories were a lived history of Pakistan. He was 17 at the birth of the nation, an enthusiastic celebrant of the new nation but as the years rolled by was reduced to the utter “disillusionment” of his youthful dreams. Honest, upright, a stalwart of unflinching integrity and, therefore, very lonely and often politically isolated, while yet wielding an enormous moral influence on the political life of the country, the man reveals his enduring values in this extract from his memoirs. The setting is early March 1971, when Mazari has been elected as an Independent from his home district of Dera Ghazi Khan in the elections of December 1970. Even as Bhutto’s machinations, along with “the ‘hawk’ generals”, are hurtling Pakistan to the edge of self-destruction, Bhutto, whom Mazari has known since they were young men about town decades earlier, is trying repeatedly to get Mazari to join the PPP and boycott the National Assembly called in Dhaka to swear in Mujib as the new duly elected Prime Minister of Pakistan:
“I could not accept the stand that Bhutto had taken against the elected majority leader of Pakistan. Whether we liked Mujib or not, if we believed in democratic parliamentary principles, we had to accept this man as prime minster of the country. Any other course of action, in my opinion, would not only be unprincipled and undemocratic, but would also lead to national catastrophe.”
He goes on:
“My sympathies lay with the ideals of democracy. In my view the Awami League had won a clear majority to govern the country and no one had the right to dictate terms to them. Even if, as opponents of Mujib insisted, the Bengalis wished to form a separate country, then as a democratic majority they were well within their rights to do so.”
He then starts skating on very thin ice:
“Secession by its very definition means a break-away from the majority wishes of a nation. The Bengalis were in a clear majority and their claim that they had been badly neglected was valid in my view.”
And his conclusion:
“Failure to come to terms with the Awami League boded calamity for the country…The reality of actual governance would have forced the Awami League to change its Six Points by tempering some of its more extreme concepts. On the other hand, if the Awami League government showed no interest in managing the affairs of the west wing, then West Pakistanis would have peacefully broken away from the majority. The likelihood of the Awami League forcing unity on West Pakistan was non-existent.” (pp.198-200)—\
Ataullah Mengal and Khair Baksh Marri had escaped abroad to run their revolutions from exile by the time I reached Karachi, which is why, to my great regret, I never met them. (So it was with Murtaza Bhutto, the eldest son of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who, not without reason, was dubbed the “Prince of Terror”).   However, I did get very friendly with Akbar Bugti’s younger brother, Ahmed Nawaz Bugti, and picked up something from him about the flavor of Balochistan’s doomed past, present and future. With his elder brother, Akbar, who I never personally met, I had a strange Tryst with Destiny. Akbar filched my “Confessions of a Secular Fundamentalist” (Penguin/Viking, New Delhi, 2004) from Hamida Khuhro’s drawing room, brushing aside Hamida’s protest that hers was a signed copy, saying she could always get another copy from me, then went off to the cave in his homeland where he was gunned down by Musharraf’s troops with my book pinned to his chest.
So, I was more than happy to welcome a Pakistani Malayalee visitor I had not met before, B.M.Kutty, personal political aide to the legendary Ghaus Baksh Bizenjo. (It seemed not even revolution in Balochistan could be plotted without a Malayalee to hammer out the plans at 130 words a minute!) Although there was no one around to listen, Kutty whispered confidentially that Bizenjo wished to see me, He added he had arranged an unmarked vehicle to take me to the rendezvous at Akbar Mustikhan’s home. I told him I would gladly come, not clandestinely but only in my own official car with India’s flag proudly flying. Kutty wondered whether local security would prevent me from reaching Mustikhan House, where Bizenjo was staying, but I remained adamant saying I would either come openly or not at all. In the event, no restriction was placed on my movements within the city (although, as ever, I must have been followed). And I learned to never set aside less than four hours for a meeting with Bizenjo.
Bizenjo had a great deal to say and he said it well. He began by presenting me with an English version of his speech in the lower house of Kalat’s bicameral legislature in December 1947 in which he regretted Partition but said that now that it had happened, he preferred Kalat to be independent rather than accede to Pakistan. He then took me through the various phases of his eventful life. Rather than join Jinnah’s exclusivist Muslim League, he opted for the Indian National Congress in the late ‘30s after graduating from Aligarh Muslim University, principally because, as an ardent footballer, he had learned that it was possible for Indians of all races and religions to pull together as a team. In Pakistan, he had spent several extended periods in jail, under both military and civilian governments, for the sin of consistently demanding democratic and civil rights for all. The partition of Pakistan in 1971 happened despite his heroic attempts to reconcile Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and the Pakistani generals egging Bhutto on. Indeed, it was Mujib who advised him to leave Dacca (Dhaka) on 21 March 1971 saying he anticipated a major military crackdown in the next few days. He also spoke at length of the so-called “Hyderabad conspiracy case” that had been conjured out of thin air by the Bhutto regime to incarcerate him, Wali Khan, Khair Baksh Marri, Ataullah Mengal and some fifty other Pathan and Baloch leaders in Hyderabad Central Jail from May 1976 till a few months before he met me in 1979. He had dedicated his life to securing the rights of the “nationalities”, as he dubbed the linguistic/ethnic groupings of Pakistan. He then moved on to the contemporary scene. Although, or perhaps because, he was the only non-Sirdar to be prominent in Baloch politics and had spent decades trying to unite the tribal leaders to present a common front, he despaired of ever getting them to set aside their internecine quarrels to snatch their rights from Pakistan’s leaders of whatever hue. However, he was not giving up.
I came away feeling ennobled by his palpable concern for all oppressed people world-wide, his profound belief in human rights, and his readiness to undergo whatever dangers, suffering, prison and torture this might involve. It was the first of several meetings to follow. I think I should emphasize that he never sought, or even hinted at, any help from India. This was his unrelenting battle with the Pakistani establishment, and he intended to fight it with self-reliance and self-confidence.
As I was leaving, Bizenjo’s host, the genial and generous Akbar Mustikhan, presented me with a type-written manuscript of his book on Balochistan for which he had not, as of then, sought a publisher. It provided much of the raw material for my dispatch to the ministry of external affairs that gathered dust in musty cupboards in South Block until Foreign Secretary ‘Mani’ Dikshit declassified it for publication as an Annexe to my book, “Mani Shankar Aiyar’s Pakistan Papers” (UBSPD, New Delhi, 1994).
I also felt I should round out my impressions of Balochistan by meeting the “other side”. Any interaction with army officers was, of course, impossible but I spent time with other Baloch, notably Mir Nabi Baksh Zehri, an onyx multi-millionaire, who having survived a murderous attack on his life by, he believed, Bhutto’s henchmen, held that Zia had done the right thing by hanging Bhutto. Moreover, he too was convinced of the futility of the insurrection being incited by Baloch tribal heavyweights owing to their ancient quarrels with each other. I was subsequently able to repay him for his confidences by arranging for him to meet and present to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi an onyx tablet that had been found in his mines depicting (approximately) the outlines of a united India.
I also met A. K. Brohi, the renowned lawyer and former High Commissioner to India, who, although he was from Sind rather than Balochistan (but tracing his ancestry to the Baloch Brohi tribe), was a close associate of Balochistan’s most prominent lawyer, Yahya Bakhtiar, and was a hard-line Pakistani patriot to boot. He too had narry a good word for the Baloch sirdars in revolt. Yet, however hard I searched it was evident that almost every Baloch had his grievances but did not regard India as party to their quarrels.—/
In sharp and striking contrast to the “discontents”, whom I was largely encountering, was Javed Jabbar, intellectual, columnist, writer, cineaste, social activist and media entrepreneur, who I met soon after reaching Karachi and with whom, over the last four decades, I have cultivated a warm friendship spiced with enduring differences, tolerated in good humour. I never met another Pakistani as deeply committed to the Ideology of Pakistan and as passionate a defender of the Pakistan nation. In his review of an anthology of Javed Jabbar’s prolific writings, Dr. S. Jaffar Ahmed, Director of the Pakistan Study Centre, University of Karachi, hit, I thought, the nail on the head when, in two sentences, he summed up Javed’s contribution to an understanding of Pakistan:
“Objective and innovative about what constitutes nationhood in Pakistan. Moves ahead of others in the search for the uniqueness of Pakistan.”
“Objective”, “innovative”, “what constitutes nationhood”, “uniqueness”: that about sums up the grounds on which Javed is convinced of the historical imperative for creating Pakistan; the rationale for persisting with Quaid-e-Azam Jinnah’s vision despite setbacks; the importance of highlighting the many achievements of Pakistan and Pakistanis; and with unshakeable belief in Pakistan’s manifest destiny. Like Jinnah himself, Javed is a modern-minded man, dressed usually in Western clothes, a practicing but clean-shaven Muslim not over-concerned with theology or ritual but rooted in identifying himself as a Muslim, liberal in outlook, humanist in his values, and a secular activist in regard to Pakistan’s minorities, in short, an embodiment of the Pakistan Jinnah had envisioned in his inaugural address to the Pakistan constituent assembly (which, Javed corrected me, was delivered on 11 and not 14 August, as I had somewhere written). Widely read and the author of a stream of books, articles and columns, and keen on engaging in debate and discussion, his was the about the most stimulating intellectual company I found in Karachi and I enjoyed crossing swords with him. It was always most enlightening and quite a relief from the carping criticism and general despair over the future of Pakistan that filled the air.
At the time, he was unattached to any party but so involved through his writings and social work with nation-building that by 1985 – that is, a few years after I had left Karachi – he was “elected” to the Pakistan Senate as an “independent technocrat”. I put inverted commas around the word “elected” because Zia was still firmly in the saddle and anything smacking of genuine parliamentary democracy was conspicuously absent. Yet, Javed was very much in Opposition till Zia was killed in August 1988 by the notorious “case of exploding mangoes”. He then joined Benazir’s PPP and became, between December 1988 and August 1990 (when Benazir was summarily ousted), successively Minister for Information & Broadcasting and Minister for Science & Technology. He once again entered the caretaker government, set up after Benazir’s second dismissal, as Minister of Petroleum & Natural Resources from November 1996 to February 1997. His final stint in office as Minister of Information & Broadcasting was under Pervez Musharraf, after the coup that ousted Nawaz Shariff, but retrieved his good name when he resigned within months over policy differences with the military government. (His days with Benazir are selling well under the title, But, Prime Minister, Paramount Books, Karachi, 2021)
Another young Pakistani with a lively mind who I would have liked to get to know better if he had not been jailed as frequently as he was during my days in Karachi, was the socialist firebrand, Iqbal Haider. At the time, he was a devoted follower of Meraj Muhammad Khan, who was an early associate of Zufiqar Ali Bhutto but broke with him when he found that Bhutto was a “cruel” man. By the time I reached Karachi, Meraj had founded the far-left Qaumi Mahaz-i-Azadi (National Freedom Front). Iqbal was principally occupied, as a highly capable lawyer and avid trade-unionist, with defending the rights of labour. This, in itself would have got him into trouble but his being, in addition, the secretary-general of Meraj’s outfit in Karachi district brought him into frequent conflict with the authorities, leading to his being locked up again and again, much to my frustration as I found him an engaging companion. It was really much later, when he shed something of his Che Guevara persona, joined the PPP and became Pakistan’s first-ever (and last?) Minister of Human Rights, besides his Law portfolio, in Benazir’s second government, that we started meeting frequently and without interruption in Delhi, Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi. He got passionately interested in fishermen and others being held prisoner, both in Pakistan and in India, long after their sentences had been served and played a most constructive role in getting them released and repatriated. He also founded “The Forum for a Secular Pakistan”. In good times, he would have made a superb High Commissioner to India, but that remained, and will remain, my private dream, as Iqbal passed away tragically on 11 November 2012 of coronary respiratory failure at the age of 67. His daughter, Alizeh, has happily picked up the baton.
When I first knew Iqbal Haider in Karachi, he was, of course, dead against Zia and military rule. One day, I had gone to see the Editor of Dawn, Pakistan’s leading English-language newspaper, to deny the rumour that was rocking Karachi, as it often did, of an imminent Indian attack. As I came down the staircase after the briefing, a door near the exit opened and Iqbal stepped out. He had come out of his chambers on the ground floor. He earnestly took me by the shoulders and said, “You know how I hate this bastard (the standard euphemism for Zia) but if you chaps attack us, I want you to remember that I am a patriotic Pakistani and will fight you to my death”. It was one of the most important lessons I learnt in Pakistan: that Indian hostility, or even the apprehension of such hostility, is what unites Pakistanis behind their government, military or civilian. So, any belief on our part in India that the frequently expressed disillusionment of Pakistanis with their leaders and their future reflects an underlying instability that will bring the country down like a house of cards, is woefully mistaken. Pakistan is an ineradicable reality and Pakistanis of every hue will fight to retain their “New Medina” to the last breath. Equally, as I wrote in my farewell dispatch from Karachi, the general populace will respond with the greatest outpouring of generosity to a “blitzkrieg of good will” from our side. Pakistan is not going away; we can huff and we can puff but that’s not going to blow the house down. The more intelligent course would be to bring them over to our side. But, as I have discovered over four decades of plugging this line, there are no takers for this view in India, dismissed by one of our best Foreign Secretaries, ‘Mani’ Dikshit, as a “Pollyana” view of Pakistan. I have had to reluctantly conclude that the lobby for peace is far larger in Pakistan than in India.—/
I have already mentioned the inimitable M.B. Naqvi, political commentator, in the context of the Pak-Hind Prem Sabha. In the same class, I would place Sultan Ahmed, Bhutto’s favourite. The fall of Bhutto had, of course, cut down his access to the inside story but he continued to be a lively retailer of political gossip, more authentic in his assessments than much that passed for “news” and “comment”, an excellent source to go to for confirmation and a wise head to consult for prediction and prognostication.
I have also mentioned, Brig. (retd) Abdul Rahman Siddiqi in the context of the Pak-Hind Prem Sabha. He was editor of the Defence Journal. He was very proud of being a fellow-Stephanian and would regale me with tales of pre-Partition Delhi when he would walk over the Ridge every evening from College to the Dawn office in Daryaganj to do his bit for Pakistan, fully realizing that, as a Dilliwallah, Pakistan was not for him but some kind of insurance for having to live out his life in Hindu-majority India. It was only in due course that I learned he had been Head of Defence Public Relations and thus witness at first-hand to the horrendous political and military mistakes, and the inhuman racial viciousness and vacuous religious prejudices of the Martial Law administrators, particularly Gen A. A. K. Niazi, that had led inexorably to East Pakistan being transmogrified into independent Bangladesh. He subsequently wrote up his journal, “East Pakistan: The Endgame – An Onlooker’s Journal 1969-71” (OUP, 2004), but I did not realize he was an eyewitness to the unfolding of the disaster until after I had left Karachi when his book came out some two decades later. When he presented me a copy on a visit to Delhi in 2005, he told me he was writing his autobiography in Urdu tentatively titled “To Catch a Butterfly”. When he saw the look of non-comprehension on my face, he explained it was a well-known Persian expression. The butterfly was the most beautiful creature in God’s creation, and anyone would wish to catch it. But if you caught it, it would immediately die, leaving on your fingers the stain of the colour on its wings. That, he added wistfully, was the outcome of his youthful enthusiasm for Pakistan. They had caught the butterfly.
Under the title, “PARTITION and the Making of the Mohajir Mindset: A  Narrative”(OUP, 2008), Brig Siddiqi, now getting to 96, has poignantly set out the story of his life as virtually an exile, and,  more  broadly, the fate of the ‘Muhajir’, that is, those who deliberately set out from the India of their birth at the clarion call of Jinnah to find their Valhalla in Pakistan:
“While Muslim India might have appeared as a nation without a state, it eventually became a state without a nation” (p.xxi)
“The Sindhis viewed the Urdu-speaking refugees as interlopers and collaborators” (p.xxiii)

“the muhajir dilemma in Pakistan remains as complex as before. To their inherent sense of ‘otherness’ has been added what Ayesha Jalal calls ‘else(ness)’, a state of mind in the context of their changed relationships with Indian Muslims and Bangladeshis” (p. xxvii)

“More than half a century after the founding of Pakistan, I still wonder if it is a nation-state or just a grouping of four provinces…leav(ing) the Urdu-speaking mohajir the odd man out” (pp.148-149)

“What is a world without familiar faces and landmarks around? A howling wilderness!” (p.151)

“The mirror cracked and with that The reflection and the vision of the butterfly!” (p.151)

Hence, the nostalgia and longing on which the Pak Hind Prem Sabha was emotionally constructed.—/-
Another author-writer who, like Siddiqi, straddled the social divide between the Sind Club and the Pak Hind Prem Sabha, was Iqbal Hasan Burney, founder of the Karachi Press Club, and long serving editor of “Outlook”, the renowned Pakistani weekly newsmagazine, the title of whose collection of editorials penned over the first quarter century of Pakistan tells it all: “No Illusions, Some Hopes, and No Fears” (OUP, 1996). The book is in two Parts: “Gathering Darkness: 1962-64”, covering the Ayub Khan years, and “Elective Despotism: 1972-74”, covering the initial Bhutto years – and it is difficult to think of a more searing pen or deeper perception of all that is wrong with Pakistan – and what redeems it.

I spent hours listening to his reminiscences and find considerable resonance in the editorials republished nearly a decade later spanning two years of military dictatorship, on the one hand, and two years of civil tyranny, on the other.  So, instead of trying to recall long-ago conversations, let me quote a few lines from his writings:

“1947 is only a dim memory. The ideological coating, thin as it was, washed down the Ganges and the Brahmaputra in 1971 (but not the Indus! – MSA)…The two-nation theory too has gone by the board. There are now an equal number of Muslims in India, and more in Bangladesh…It is no more relevant to talk about who made Pakistan because the Pakistan they made is no more. It is dead. A new Pakistan now exists…(Yet) despite the cruel limitations of the present system and the political imbalances not yet remedied, the people in general have benefited as a result of partition…The inherent geopolitical tension which marked the erstwhile state of Pakistan has now been resolved. That is, if we can save the rest.” (pp. 252, 314, 383)
Then came the lines that doomed the revived Outlook:

“It is a grave mistake to identify the country with one person, one party. This is precisely what has led to the failure of the political process…It is obvious that the regime has failed. It is time for a change” (p.513, editorial of 8 June 1974)

The newsmagazine was shut down by Bhutto a few weeks later. That just about sums it up.—/’

The other leading business family, besides Abdus Samad of Premier Tobacco whom I have already mentioned, were the Adamjees. I did not get to know the principal Adamjee as well as I should have, but did make good friends with his cousin, G.M. Adamjee. He had fled Dacca so precipitately that he had left virtually everything behind in his home. That rather grand home had been converted into a VIP guesthouse by the Bangladesh government. I was put up there when I visited Dhaka with Foreign Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao in 1982. Looking through the bookshelves, I came upon a volume that carried G.M. Adamjee’s name on the fly leaf. I pinched it and returned it to the true owner when he visited Delhi a while later!

An early acquaintance had been struck with the one branch of the Lahore-based Saigol family, possibly the wealthiest of the famous 22 families of the Ayub era. Chand and Chunni Saigol had little to do with their families’ textile empire and were primarily aesthetes of exquisite taste and artists of exceptional talent. She ran a small side-business in designing and printing stationary and sent along a young woman, Betty Rahman, to see if she could drum up some orders from the newly established Consulate-General of India. There were some visiting cards and other small items that we could usefully secure from them and, to the increasing distress of her father, Betty was obliged to make several visits to our office. Her father warned her that this would get her into difficulties with the police. Sure enough, the doorbell rang one Friday morning (Pakistan’s official day off work) and a police officer demanded to know if Betty Rahman were in the house. A thoroughly alarmed father went to fetch her. In stentorian tones, the policemen ordered her to confirm that she knew the newly arrived Consul-General of India. When she admitted this, and was stuttering to explain how, he asked how well she knew me. Protesting “not very well”, the policeman drew out of his pocket a set of passports and enquired whether she could kindly get him visas for him and his family! In due course, Chand and Chunni became close friends of ours but hardly a source for inside information on the Pakistan economy! They knew far more about the arts and crafts of India and Pakistan than about the wheelings and dealings of commercial transactions.

My more entrpreneurial businessman friend was Sadruddin Hashwani, whose business interests ranged over cotton, rice and, above all, the hotel industry. For a businessman, he was astonishingly open in his harsh condemnation of Zia. I was under the impression that this was because, as a fellow-Sindhi, it was only to be expected that Sadru would be outraged by Bhutto’s maltreatment at Zia’s hands. I could not have been more wrong. His autobiography (Truth Always Prevails: A Memoir, Jamhoori Publications, Lahore, 2017) makes clear:

“He (Bhutto) was the first national leader I studiously avoided meeting…My reason was simple enough: to Bhutto, his opinion was the last opinion. He didn’t relish debate or discussion and was intolerant of dissent. I was used to speaking my mind and realized that if Bhutto felt I had crossed the line, he would put me on some negative list or blacklist” (p.71)
Sadru goes on to relate a story about Bhutto running into his old friend, Ramchandani Dingomal, in whose famed law firm, Bhutto had begun his career in law:

“I say, Zulfi, you have gone and nationalized education. Why?’ 

Bhutto laughed, ‘Relax, your children and mine are not going to be studying here in Pakistan, are they?” (p.73)
As for Zia:
“I went up and greeted him, hoping to end our conversation there. However, he stopped me and asked a question: ‘So, what news?’

 ‘News?’ I began…’No news…Mr. Bhutto ruined the economy and you are rewarding the same set of bureaucrats’. Zia froze, but I was just starting. ‘Switch on the TV and all you see are mullahs. Please focus on the economy – we are sunk otherwise” (p.93)

Next day, Sadru got a call from the chief of the Intelligence Bureau:

“ ‘Sadru Bhai, there is a message from General Zia. Please don’t speak to him or even bother wishing him socially. You are forbidden from doing so’.

“I exploded: ‘Bhaad mein jao (Go to Hell). And please convey this to General Zia’.

“Within a week, not just me but the entire family had been put on the Exit Control List’.” (p.94)

Bhutto or Zia, nothing had changed!

Perhaps I should end this pen-portrait with Sadru’s denunciation of “Zia and Zia-ism”:

“Along with his series of religious laws, he created a society that was concerned with the symbols and outer layers of Islam and not with its essence and its profound philosophy. Somewhere and somehow, we need to roll back that period…Somewhere and somehow, we need to undiscover Zia and Zia-ism – and rediscover Islam in its breathless, boundless beauty” (p. 235)

Another Sadru, also an Ismaili, who I got to know rather well was Sadruddin Gangji, a rival hotelier who was putting up the Sheraton in competition with Hashwani’s Holiday Inn and the Intercontinental. I had taken a shine to him because, in contrast to all the others who were fulsomely praising my work to Ambassador Bajpai, Sadru Gangji quietly told him, “Oh! Mani is really enjoying himself!” This was the real truth. If I was doing a good job, it was because I was so thoroughly enjoying myself.

Gangji had entered my life within days of my arrival in Karachi when

he called on me in my home in something of a tizzy to ask whether I could assure him of a ticket that night by Indian Airlines/Air India from Dubai to Bombay as the Karachi-Bombay flight was full. I walked him across to the apartment of the Indian Airlines manager, Desai, and a confirmed ticket was quickly given. Bursting with gratitude, Sadru asked me what he could do for me. I said, “Nothing”, and had to repeat it several times when he persisted. After enduring many rebuffs, he scribbled a number on a stray sheet of paper and said I could call “Akbar at the Telephone Exchange any time I wanted, and Akbar would put me through to wherever I wanted to call”. I gave the chit to my staff and forgot all about it. It was perhaps two years later that I was desperately trying to get through to Delhi when my secretary reminded me of Gangji and the Telephone Exchange Akbar. He still had the chit with him. I asked him to get Akbar on the line and when I gave my name, Akbar welcomed me with a warm, “Aapka bade din se intezar tha!” (“I have been waiting to hear from since very long”) andwithin seconds put me through to Delhi. Saved! I had hardly put the phone down when Akbar called back, “Ab bathaiye, kahan milaoon? London? San Francisco? Tokyo?” I laughingly put him off but confessed to myself there were uses to the Sadru Gangjis of this world.

Sadru loved throwing his money around but I was intrigued at his repeated invitation to Suneet and me to go on holiday with him to Switzerland, all expenses paid. I also could not quite make out why he made such a song and dance about picking up our luggage in advance so that we could arrive at the last moment and board in comfort and style. Of course, there was no question of our accepting. So, Gangji settled for getting Mehdi Hasan, a great friend of his, to give a farewell concert for just us and our staff in the Consulate-General’s auditorium one morning hours before our final departure from Karachi. It was a generous and gracious gesture on the part of both the great ghazal artiste and the businessman. 

However, a few months later, we read a small news item in one our New Delhi papers that Sadru Gangji had been arrested at Frankfurt airport for attempting to smuggle a consignment of high-value drugs found in the baggage of his travelling companions who had been let off after the judge accepted their plea that they had been duped into sending their baggage in advance. Now, Sadru’s game became clear. There is no such thing as a free lunch! He had to spend seven years in a German jail but tried to bounce back when he was allowed to return to Pakistan. He found himself socially boycotted and lost any claim on the Sheraton.

At the other end of the respectability spectrum were the Habibs of Habib Bank, one of Pakistan’s major private banks. Begum Habib – Mehru – a lively presence, became a very close friend; her husband was more reserved. They made for great social company, but I cannot say I managed to screw any significant information out of her husband.

Towards the end of my tenure, I also got to know Mir Nabi Baksh Zehri, the onyx lord of Balochistan. He always claimed that Bhutto had tried to kill him and that it was a miracle he escaped. There was no way I could ascertain the truth or otherwise of the story, but it was in line with Bhutto’s reputation in those days. He had a soft spot for India. When his workers found a rough onyx stone that showed what he saw as a pre-Partition outline map of India, he begged me to get him an appointment with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi as he wanted to present it to her. When I got back to Delhi, somewhat to my surprise, she agreed to receive him, and I found him bursting with pardonable ride at a photograph taken of his presenting the onyx tablet to her.     

There were so many other businessmen, big and small, I knew that I can only mention in passing. There was Basheer, President of the Karachi Stock Exchange, ever ready to explain to me the ups and downs of the market, and Irshad, who loved poetry more than business, and Tahir who ran a carpet shop and spent his day walking long miles with ungainly gait to his clients’ homes, and Jaffer Ali of Princely Travels who offered me a complimentary ticket to fly from Bombay to Calcutta to see my sister when on home leave. There was Anwar Oosman, the furniture king, who gave his daughter’s hand in marriage to a Bombay businessman and whose many visa and passport problems I have been keeping a benevolent eye on all these years, and Braganza, the tailor to Karachi’s young men about town. A young probationer who arrived in my last month told me with deep concern that I was being insulted in Sadar bazaar. How? I enquired. Well, he replied, there is a rehriwallah (a street vendor) who told me he was your “friend”. The rehriwallah outside Braganza’s? I asked. Yes, he replied. To which, I said with pride, I am, indeed, his friend! And so many others…

I also particularly remember the chair of the Manghopir small industries association, interrupting me in the middle of a lecture I was giving when I remarked that if I compared the houses of Karachi’s Defence Housing Authority with those in Defence Colony of Delhi, it was clear that the Pakistan economy was not doing as badly as many seemed to think. He said, “Sir, just let the army run your country for a few years and your Defence Colony houses will shine brighter than ours!”

I should also mention a Parsi school friend, Farooq Captain, who ran one of Pakistan’s leading conglomerates, Captain Industries. His house was literally next door to our Chancery, on Fatima Jinnah Road.  He had suffered a terrible road accident and was wheelchair-and-walking stick-bound and lived most of the time in Boston. It was his charming mother, Freny, who welcomed me to their home and introduced me to Farooq’s sister, Spenta and her husband, Darius, who ran a most successful automobile business. They, in turn, increased our circle of Zoroastrian friends, including B.B. Dubash and Justice Dorab Patel, the dissenting judge in the Supreme Court in the Bhutto hanging case – a remarkably brave and principled man.

My closest friends were a bunch of young men and women built around Bina Muneer. She had married Zaki, the son of one of Pakistan’s tycoons from the Ayub era, the Hyeson Group, who had held a stranglehold over the sugar business but were now in slow decline. Bina and Zaki made a lovely couple, she lively and full of zest and spirit; he somewhat more reserved but with an enquiring mind, kind and generous to a fault. I was still grieving over my younger brother, Mukund, whom I had lost to suicide in March of the year I reached Karachi and as they were both of the same age, I made Zaki in my mind the younger brother who had been so cruelly snatched away for me. Bina kept a really lovely house and it was at the centre of some of the pleasantest evenings we spent in Karachi.

Also, since Karachi society was deeply interconnected, we also met lots of top politicians, journalists, artistes and other celebrities at their home. It was there that I met Guljee, Pakistan’s great painter, and his bubbly wife, Zarro, who gave me a Guljee painting as a farewell gift on the day of our departure. They had met me in Delhi only a week or two before they were brutally strangled by an intruder or an insider, no one knows who.

The other close friends they introduced to us included Sadia Pirzada, Hafeez’s wife, and the Tapal couple, Iqbal and Sabra, big in the tea-and-coffee import business who have now branched out into several different lines, and whom we have continued to meet over the last forty years. It is also through the Muneers that I finally met Akbar Liaquat Ali Khan, the son of the first Prime Minister of Pakistan.

That is a story worth recounting in a separate paragraph. On the day after my arrival in Karachi, a fat envelope had been hand-delivered at my office, containing a booklet about one of Karachi’s most formidable personalities, Begum Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan. Idly flipping through its pages, I sat up on finding that her second son, Akbar, had been born on the same day of the same month of the same year as I had been, 10 April 1941. So, I immediately called her and asked to pay a courtesy call. She was graciousness incarnate. And when I told her that I had found from her booklet that I had been born on the same day as Akbar, she almost enfolded me in her arms. Akbar, at that moment, was somewhere out of the country, but we quickly became friends on his return. He has since married Durre, whose family origins lie in Bangladesh. Oddly enough, he is completely at ease with India and Indians while she remains skeptical and suspicious – not of me, but of my country. Akbar earned the collective kudos of all of us when he arranged for an Indian actress, Katy Mirza, renowned for her exceptional physical assets, to visit Karachi to the delectation of all!

There were also the boxwallahs. Karachi had a rash of British business houses that had not moved out with the Empire. I loved recalling to them Zaka Rahmatullah’s dismissive remark about their line of work – “buying cheap, dear boy, and selling dear”! It was also Zaka who put down one of them when they opposed an amendment to the Sind Club regulations that Zaka had proposed. The man began ponderously, “Our Founding Fathers in their wisdom…” and Zaka finished the sentence for him “decided that people of your colour should not even be members of this Club”! It brought the House down. I used to tease Habib-ur-Rahman, who was promoted to head Lever Brothers in my time that the sun would set on the Empire only when he retired from the chairmanship of Unilver! Others I particularly remember included Jami Rahim, Masud Karim, Sleem Majidullah and so many others who taught me so much. Several have passed away and several have grown very old. I miss them all. 

Another business executive we got to know well was our neighbour, Ather Ansari, who traced his origins to Saharanpur where he had a number of politician relatives. He and his wife did us the singular honour of parking their children in our care when their youngest child suddenly died, and they wanted to shield their children from the tragedy. His daughter, Tina, and our Suranya became life-long friends and are planning a reunion in Karachi with all their classmates whenever the Corona pandemic gives over.

Finally, I think I should mention Zia Khaleeli who ran a small import-export agency that had secured a contract to import iron ore through India’s public sector Minerals and Metals Trading Corporation (MMTC) for the Karachi Steel Mill. He became a very close companion, less because of his commercial relations with MMTC than because he was the scion of the famous Khaleeli family of Madras and Bangalore, and his cousin was our colleague, Ambassador Akbar Khaleeli of the Indian Foreign Service. Zia was the son of the ICS officer, Abbas Khaleeli, a must-go-to person for anything on Pakistan’s history or politics and closely related to both the Foreign Minister of Pakistan, Aga Shahi and the Foreign Secretary, Aga Hilaly, and several other legends of Pakistan history including Admiral S.M. Ahsan, the Governor of East Pakistan who quit when he discovered what his army colleagues were up to. It was also at Abbas Khaleeli’s home that I met H.I. Rahimtoola, Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s close companion, who was Pakistan’s first envoy to London and later rose to be a minister and Governor of both Sind and Punjab before Ayub’s coup and knew everything you wanted to know about the birth of Pakistan. Zia Khaleeli too has stayed a valued friend these last forty years.

It was about the same time that I chanced upon the poet, Adrian Husain, who wrote in English but surrounded himself with poets in every Pakistani language: Urdu, Sindhi, Punjabi, Pushto and the dialects of Balochistan.—/

In a different branch of art and culture altogether was the very talented architect, Yasmin Lari, who received from Prince Karim the Aga Khan prize for her remarkable achievement in designing a hotel in Agra which combined in striking measure traditional Mughal architecture with modern features for the delectation of discerning visitors to the city of the Taj Mahal.

Her husband, Sohail Lari, kept himself generally in the background to let Yasmin have the spotlight, but I could see that he was taking it all in with a mischievous twinkle in his eye. He gave me perhaps the most penetrating insight into why I was encountering so much hatred of Gen. Zia ul-Haq in the circles in which I was spending many a pleasant evening. “These people,” said Sohail, “earlier got what they wanted whoever was in power. It made no material difference. Now, for the first time ever, Pakistan is being ruled by a truly believing, practicing Muslim who was not born to privilege and wealth and who has always been far removed from their social milieu. So, they don’t know whom to turn to get the favours they need done.”–/-

As the federal government had been relocated in 1965 from Karachi to distant Islamabad by President Field Marshal Ayub Khan, there were only three senior civil servants I got to know in Karachi: M.M. Usmani, Commissioner of Karachi; Salim Abbas Jilani, CMD, Karachi Gas Authority; and Sayyed Akhlaque Husain, CMD, Sind Sugar Corporation. Usmani was correct, reserved and always helpful. Among his duties, I suspect, was to keep an eye on me and report on what I was up to. His wife had Kanpur connections and once she got to know me had no hesitation in seeking my assistance for visas in both directions, forher and her family to visit India and for her Indian relatives to visit Karachi. 
Salim Jilani was marking time in Karachi waiting to take up his posting as Chief Secretary, Balochistan, perhaps the most challenging assignment of any in the Pakistan Civil Service. He went on to become Defence Secretary and even Defence Minister in an interim government of Pakistan. Highly intelligent and well-read, he and his wife, Aziza, bubbled with goodwill towards me and my country despite the sensitivity of the posts he held. We continue to be close friends over the forty years that have lapsed since I first went to meet him to complain about the inflated bills that I thought I was paying for gas. He gently explained that was the price to be paid for living in a huge mansion before I was quite forty!

Sayyed Akhlaque Husain was the most fascinating of the three.  He was in a punishment posting for having objected to continue serving as Chief Secretary, East Pakistan when the army cracked down on the Bengalis. Hence his dead-end posting. He was very keen on taking me to his public sector sugar mill in Thatta, principally to introduce me to his favourite sugarcane farmer, a Hindu called Patel. Over-ruling my protestation that I was not particularly keen on meeting Patel, Akhlaque asked me to take the man to one side and we held our conversation by a haystack. I asked Patel why he had stayed back in Pakistan when so many others had fled, he replied, “Mere chand ekad hain” (I hold a few acres).
“How many?” I enquired.
“Oh, nothing much,” he replied. I persisted.
“About 600”, he said.
I congratulated him on having stayed behind!
It was also Akhlaque who paid me a compliment I especially treasure. Karachi was agog with news of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. At a largish dinner in his home, he told me a bunch of society ladies were having hysterics over this in the adjacent room. Would I calm them down? 
I looked at him astonished, “You’re asking an Indian to explain to a group of Pakistanis that the Soviet aim is not to move on from Kabul to Karachi to reach the warm waters of the Indian Ocean?”
“Yes, indeed,” he suavely replied, “you’re the only one I know who can do it!”  
Why do I mention in such minute detail all these Pakistanis I met and cherished? Only to show that across a wide spectrum of Karachi opinion I found a clear willingness, amounting to an ardent desire, to see differences with India settled so as to promote peace and harmony between the two nations. I searched for telltale signs from business barons to barbers and bootblacks; from society ladies in expensive chiffon and ‘suited-booted’ boxwallahs to butlers and domestic servants; from politicians who had held high office to purveyors of news and comment; from intellectuals to poets and writers; from artistes of different genres; from street vendors to shopkeepers; from English-speaking pucca sahibs to diehard Islamic nationalists; from the religious minorities, ranging through rich ones like the Parsis and some Hindu millionaires such as Prem Shahani (Bhutto’s agricultural adviser who had sat across India’s Fakhruddin Ali Ahmad at an FAO meeting) and the Mehtanis of Rock House, as well as the SC leader, Dalpat, whose son, Anil Dalpat became Pakistan’s test team wicket keeper even as India’s Syed Kirmani was keeping wicket for the Indian side, as well as, of course, the poor Hindu haaris (share-croppers) of Sindhi wadehras and the Hindu Dalits whom Jinnah had kept back to keep Karachi clean;or the Irish nuns at the Convent of Jesus and Mary, where my kids studied, to a number of teachers in Karachi’s reputed private schools and government schools; ordinary folk from rural Sind to Abida, the daughter of the Labour Minister in Bhutto’s provincial Sind government and PPP leader of the slum dwellers of Lyari; and from the sophisticates of Karachi to those who thronged my visa area sloganeering, “Hindustan ke Consul-General, zindabad, zindabad” and “Yahan koi rishwat nahi , koi paabandi nahi”! All wanted peace; none was a warmonger. Bhutto’s 1965 call for “a thousand years’ war” with India had no takers. No one wanted 1971 repeated in rump Pakistan. —/-