For more about this colourful statesman who dominated Sind politics, in rivalry to the Bhuttos, for the best part of half a century until  he passed away at age 80 in 1980, please see below. Also see his historian daughter’s biography of him, “Mohammed Ayub Khan: a life of courage in politics Hamida Khuhro, Ferozsons, Lahore, 1998

Of course, most of Sind’s leading PPP lights – Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi, Hafeez Pirzada, et. al. – were still in detention in Islamabad. But I was not hearing any threatening voices of rebellion from either the press corps, nor even from Sindhi journalists, nor from the Sindhi friends I had started making, foremost among them being the historian, Hamida Khuhro of the famed Khuhro wadehras of Sind (feudal landlords of tens of thousands of acres). They had been political rivals of the Bhuttos ever since the 1930s when Hamida’s father, Ayub Khuhro, then about 30, had defeated Shahnawaz Bhutto, Zulfie’s father, in the election to the Bombay provincial assembly. Of course, she was no admirer of the Bhuttos, nor was her father, but they had their ears to the ground, but nothing they said or hinted at pointed to any groundswell of revolt in rural Sind.

I was very fortunate to spend hours on the lawns of the Khuhro household through 1979 in what turned out to be the last year of Ayub Khuhro’s colourful life. He loved telling spicy (or, perhaps, the more apposite expression would be “spiced-up”) tales from his life. The one that stunned me was his claim that in the 1945-46 elections (from which Khuhro emerged as the Chief Minister of Sind in the run-up to Partition), the British ICS Commissioner of Karachi Division had stuffed the ballot boxes with bogus votes for the Muslim League for fear that the city’s marginal Hindu majority might hand over Karachi to India! If Khuhro had not said it so casually, I might have thought he was improving his story.

Khuhro insisted that he had no intention of driving away the Hindus who were as Sindhi as he himself was. Indeed, for that same reason, he had gathered together the Hindu/Sikh community in the Gurudwara on Bunder Road to keep them guarded and safe. He claimed that it was none other than Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan who, on the night of 6 January 1948, had, at instance of the muhajirs flooding the city from India, unleashed the murderous gangs who had massacred to a man these internally displaced minorities that Khuhro had attempted to save. To further establish his credentials as a secular Sindhi, despite having been singularly responsible for giving the Muslim League a political profile in the province, he said that he had invited Sri Prakasa, India’s first High Commissioner, to accompany him in his car on an extended tour of the province, where, despite Partition, there were sizeable numbers of Hindus in upper Sind and a scattering elsewhere in the province. They still constitute the highest concentration of the Hindu minority in the country.

As an aside, let me quote Pallavi Raghavan in her little gem, “Animosity at Bay: An Alternative History of the India-Pakistan Relationship, 1947-50”, HarperCollins, 2020, pp. 41-42. Sri Prakasa in his despatches tried to make the authorities in India understand that “it is necessary for responsible Indian authorities in public statements to credit the (Pakistan) Government with good intentions, (since) if we attack the Government, Hindus will be encouraged to leave”. This sensible advice not only fell on deaf ears; Sri Prakasa was severely reprimanded by the West Bengal CM and, more gently, by Nehru himself. Raghavan thinks this is because Sri Prakasa (and, therefore, Khuhro) were out of sync with the prevailing ethos of defining the “finality of partition” through “a majoritarian interpretation of South Asian politics”. Unfortunately, seven decades later, the two countries are still stuck with this highly regressive “majoritarian” definition of Partition, although it is clear to all but those totally blinded by prejudice and paranoia that Pakistan is an irreversible fact of history – and so is “Bharat, that is, India”. 

Although Ayub Khuhro had been in many ways amongst the most responsible for flying out to London in 1934 to persuade Mohammad Ali Jinnah to return from self-exile to active political life India, he had a falling out with Jinnah in the immediate aftermath of independence and lost his chief ministership after just a few months in office. He remained on the roller-coaster of Pakistan politics for another decade, but that ended in 1958 when Iskander Mirza overthrew the last civilian government in which Khuhro was Federal Minster of Defence.

I was meeting him twenty years after he had ceased to be the political force he had been in Sind since the age of 21. But he had lost nothing of his verve and zest for life. With a twinkle in his eye he recounted how his rival Shahnawaz Bhutto, fascinated with a Hindu ‘dancing girl’, had sought the help of his young neighbour, Ayub Khuhro, in getting him married to the girl. Khuhro hid the girl in a hired victoria, a covered horse-drawn carriage, and rode it up to the Bhutto mansion, from where, at a pre-arranged signal, Shahnawaz emerged and, getting into the victoria, galloped off. The nikah (wedding ceremony) was eventually arranged in the Quetta home of the Khan of Kalat. It was the betrothal that led to the birth of Zufie in 1926!

I forbore from asking too many questions about the assassination of the last Congress chief minister, Allah Bux Soomro, in 1942 which led to Khuhro being jailed on charges of inciting Pir Pagaro to send his Hurs to carry out the assassination as Allah Bux travelled in a tonga from the station to his home. Khuhro emerged from jail several years later to a hero’s welcome and played a stellar role, along with G.M. Syed, in getting the provincial assembly of Sind to pass the first ever resolution of a legislature seeking the creation of Pakistan. Such were the existential contradictions that co-existed in Pakistan.

From his daughter, Hamida, who eventually became perhaps my closest friend in Pakistan, I picked up some entertaining tid-bits about the Khuhro family’s relations with the Bhuttos, father and son. Later, Hamida in May 1998 presented me in Karachi with an autographed copy of her biography of her father, “Mohammed Ayub Khuhro: A Life of Courage in Politics” (Ferozsons, Lahore, 1998) which gives the fascinating details of politics in Sind over the eight decades of her father’s life from his birth in 1900 to his passing away in 1980.

She had been a Fellow at St. Anthony’s, Oxford when the situation in East Bengal in March 1971 came to a boil. She wrote a Letter to the Editor of the London Times, published on 1 April 1971, a week into the crackdown in East Pakistan, squarely putting the blame on Bhutto and the army:

“Today, I, a Sindhi, would be ashamed to be called a West Pakistani if it were West Pakistan that was “restoring discipline” in East Pakistan.” (p.477)

This was the opening line twisted by Bhutto and others into the canard that Hamida had publicly proclaimed that she was ashamed of being a Pakistani.

She went on:

“But the people of Sind, Baluchistan, the North West Frontier and, I am sure, the people of the Punjab, abhor and disavow the coercion of Bangladesh.” (p.477)

She further argued:

“(t)he present situation is not, as I have said, a struggle for political and economic power between the people of East and West Pakistan. It is a struggle…of the Army and the Civil Service, overwhelmingly Punjabi in composition, to retain its pre-dominance, both in the West over smaller provinces and in the East over the majority province of Bengal”. (pp.477-478)

She then moved into the kill:

“In this present phase of the struggle, Mr. Bhutto of People’s Party of Pakistan, has, indeed, played the role of a ‘political bastard’.” (p.478)

Strong words for any woman, let alone a Pakistani woman! But Hamida was too much her own woman to let the caveats of tradition get in her way; strong, independent, highly educated and intellectually sophisticated, she would not let up:

“his party is increasingly revealed as Fascist in behaviour with a para-military ‘volunteer’ organization, threats against other political groups and leaders and against the press and a naked pursuit of power by any means…he is providing a convenient front as elected leader of West Pakistan to the forces that would like to crush legitimate political activity.” (p.478)

She ended with an impassioned:

“appeal to our Bengali brothers to remember that the idea of Pakistan is greater than those who now manipulate the country for their own ends.” (p. 478)

Her final words were a heart-felt call to the people of Bangladesh:

“to not abandon us in West Pakistan to our fate”. (p.478)

A furious Bhutto took time off from the crisis engulfing the country to write a long letter, hand-delivered to the Khuhro family, which began by berating “your daughter, Dr. Hameeda Khuhro, who seems to have lost all sense of propriety…characteristic of your attitude towards me and my family for the last sixty years or more.” (p.484). He went back to the elections of 1923 (when) you intrigued against my father”, denounced Khuhro for the outcome of the “fatal elections of 1937” (that Bhutto’s father, Sir Shahnawaz, lost to Ayub Khuhro) and brought up several murders from the past in which Khuhro or his family members were implicated to allege that it was only the intervention of his father that had had saved members of Khuhro’s family and then Ayub Khuhro himself in the 1942 Allah Baksh murder case in which “he had saved you from the gallows because he was a gentleman”. (pp.484-485). Of such stuff are feudal blood-feuds made!

Bhutto then recounted how Ayub Khuhro, who was Defence Minster in Pakistan’s last civil government, had been arrested for “black marketing” under the Martial Law regulations and he, Bhutto, as a lawyer, had offered to defend Khuhro in the Martial Law proceedings. He went on that, despite becoming a minister in Ayub Khan’s regime while Khuhro was “suffering imprisonment as a third-class convict”, he had refused to share with the Martial Law authorities the “convincing evidence” he had of Khuhro’s “contested possessions”. He further claimed, “I told President Ayub Khan that I was his Minister of Commerce and not his chief of Police.” (p.486)

But this nobility of character was somewhat marred when he also alleged in the same context that ”your father was a small zamindar struggling very hard to improve his status..,(a)t the time when my great ancestors were owning vast tracts of land in Larkana and Jacobabad, and we were held in high esteem, (when) you were nowhere in the picture”. (p.486) It is hard to credit such blatant social prejudices a quarter century into Independence but they did define Hamida’s description of Bhutto as “a curious mixture of pique and pettiness”. (p. 507). He concluded with the threat: “I am far too engaged in the struggle for Pakistan’s survival to attend to your pranks…Do not indulge in hallucinations built on falsification of events and resting on equally tenuous foundations.” (p.488).   

One of his ancient grievances was the high wall the Khuhros had built some forty or fifty years earlier to cut off their mansion from the neighbouring Bhutto manor in their shared town of Larkana. So, he had the wall bull-dozed when he came to power. Like the Bourbon Kings of France, the Bhuttos never forgot nor forgave. Obviously, it was not to be expected that the Khuhros would haveany sympathy for Zulfie in his hour of need.  Yet, Khuhro wrote to President Zia on 21 March 1979 saying (pp. 511-512):

“If Mr. Z.A. Bhutto pays the extreme penalty of death, the public will bestow on him the crown of martyrdom. All his sins will be wiped away when he pays for them with his life.”

The letter ended:

“I would also like to point out that the politics of our country, including the successive coups d’etat, have been free from the taint of blood and violence which characterize so many countries. Although Mr. Bhutto would be punished under ordinary criminal law of the country, it would be treated by people and the world at large as a political decision…As a sincere worker and well-wisher of the country and one who has enjoyed the confidence of the people of Sind, and of Pakistan over a long period, I would like to advise moderation and mercy.”

However, this letter was not made known to me at the time, although Khuhro had in his letter warned,  “His death will surely cause deep bitterness in the minds of the masses of Sind” and “The very existence of Pakistan could be endangered” (p.512), I went on my way believing that even if only to save their own skins, the Khuhros would have hinted at trouble brewing in rural Sind if, in fact, trouble were brewing. Sind appeared to be as tranquil as the Khuhros seemed to be unconcerned. Perhaps that was because I was meeting them after Bhutto had already been hung and there was no public stir in evidence.