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06 November 2012 By Saeed
Qureshi Air Marshal Asghar Khan kicked
off his political career in 1970 with an intense
obsession to destroy
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. To achieve
this end he urged the then army chief Ziaul Haq to
overthrow Bhutto's government. Later he called upon
Zia to "hang Bhutto by Kohala Bridge." Asghar Khan has earned for
himself the dubious distinction as being one of the
bitterest adversaries of late Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. The
charge would not be in vain that he is partly
responsible for the demise of ZABhutto both from the
corridors of power and also from this world. By temperament Mr. Khan is
incorrigibly whimsical and cannot stay on one track
for a longer period of time. It is incomprehensible as
to why he developed so much of deep-seated hatred for
Mr. Bhutto who took the reins of a sinking Pakistan,
with a defeated army, a demoralized nation and
navigated the country to safe shores. Notwithstanding Mr. Bhutto's
later postures, he proved himself to be a sagacious
leader with immense talent and acumen to save the left
over Pakistan that was on the precipice of further
falling further into the deep ditches of humiliation
and disintegration. Asghar Khan's role all along his
political career has been that of a stubborn spoiler.
He has a trenchant tendency to get indignant and
unpredictably part company with the most loyal and
trusted companions. By his wavering political conduct
he has proven that he is far from a stable person in
decision making or to stand firm on his commitment,
alliances and manifesto. He lacks sobriety, a modicum
of tolerance and maturity and therefore has been
hopping in the political arena without landing the
ball into the goal post. The prominent columnist and
Television anchor Hamid Meer has written a very
compelling article in daily Jang that portrays Asghar
Khan as the one who invited the then COAS General
Ziaul Haq to get rid of Bhutto by imposing martial law
which the latter did. Asghar was not even content
with dismissal of Mr. Bhutto's democratic government
but wanted him to be sent to gallows. He had been maintaining a noxious
nexus with military regime not only to scuttle
democracy in Pakistan but avenge his personal
anti-Bhutto vendetta by getting him sentenced to
death. Asghar Khan's notorious call urging Ziaul haq
to "hang him at the Kohala Bridge to save Pakistan"
testifies to the poisonous mindset of a person and to
the limits of vindictiveness he could go. In the
hindsight one can explore the acute caprice of Mr.
Khan demonstrated in making and breaking alliances for
mysterious reasons or because of the psychological
compulsion not to stay on one course. Asghar Khan's political journey
started with the formation of his political party
Tehrik-e-Istiqlal Pakistan
(TIP) in
1970.On the platform of this party he launched his
anti-Bhutto campaign that continued till 1979 when
Bhutto was hanged. Interestingly, following the
imprisonment of Mr. Bhutto by Ayub Khan, it was Asghar
Khan who continued the anti-Ayub movement launched
from the platform of both PTI and the PPP as a
successor to Mr. Bhutto. During the incarceration of
Mr. Bhutto, Asghar shot into prominence like a
meteorite. He was adored and looked upon as a hero and
a revolutionary by the PPP cadres. He led the mammoth
processions and kept the momentum of movement in high
gear When Mr. Bhutto was released, the astronomical
ovation and sudden prominence given to him was no more
there.
He suffered from an inborn personality setback and
started nursing the grudge that he was a better a
leader than Bhutto. From that moment he started
opposing and debunking Bhutto openly. His aversion and
feeling of deprivation started turning into a syndrome
of extreme hate for Mr. Bhutto. It was under that
acute feeling of fall from an extolled position that
during the 1977 elections, Asghar Khan allied his
party with the Pakistan
National Alliance (PNA)
against the People's Party. For his spiteful and slanderous
attacks against Mr. Bhutto and the PPP leaders, he was
sent to jail for a few months in 1977. It was during
that brief imprisonment that he wrote to the defense
forces urging them to withdraw their support for the
"Illegal regime of Bhutto", and "differentiate between
a "lawful and an unlawful" command to save Pakistan.
That was a clear-cut call for creation of a military
regime in Pakistan which the military Junta later did
establish under General Ziaul Haq's command. This
demand was tantamount to decimating democracy and its
replacement with the authoritarian army rule. In the aftermath of 1977 general
elections, the PNA launched a countrywide movement
accusing PPP and Bhutto for rigging elections and
calling for new elections. The PPP government was
completely paralyzed. Along with other allies of the
PNA, including the religious parties and army in the
back, Asghar Khan jumped into the fray in whipping a
storm against Bhutto regime. His merger of PTI with
PNA was precisely for that objective. In order to find a solution for
the stupendous political imbroglio that had gripped
the country, Mr. Bhutto initiated a dialogue with the
PNA leadership. An
Agreement was reached on June 8, 1977 to hold fresh
Elections on October 8, 1977. Asghar Khan opposed the
agreement and came up with a long litany of other
demands that were most unreasonable and could not be
accepted by even an insane person. Thus the last
chance to save democracy was lost due to Asghar Khan's
intransigence. Asghar
Khan was poised to see the downfall of Bhutto in order
to satiate his personal grudge against him and with
that the demise of a democratic order for over a
decade. True to his slippery and flippant temperament,
he later dissociated himself from PNA as his sinister
objective of overthrowing Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto's
government by General Ziaul Haq in July 4, 1977,
had materialized. The "judicial murder" of Mr.,
Bhutto was extremely joyful and a big fillip to the
bloated ego of Asghar Khan as he was the one who had
called upon the Gen Zia to hang him. Yet in a bid to
take the center stage in the political vacuum created
by the incarceration and later by the death of ZA
Bhutto, he unscrupulously decided to take on General
Zia-ul-Haq who had announced to hold the general
elections in 1979. However General Zia-ul-Haq
indefinitely postponed the elections, and put Asghar
Khan under house arrest from October 1979 to October
1984.
That
development catapulted
Tehrik-e-Istiqlal to
become
the most favorite party and large number of high
profile distinguished political figures joined the
Tehrik e- Istiqlal. Once against true to his mercurial
habit, he left the MRD in 1986 as a result of which
many of the Tehrik's members resigned in protest and
later joined the Pakistan
Muslim League (N) founded by Nawaz Sharif in
1988.That is how the MRD was internally fragmented by
Asghar Khan due to his impatience and propensity to
betray the causes and missions no matter how vital for
the country.
The Movement
for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD)
was a formidable alliance formed in February 1981 by
politically and ideologically divergent parties with a
one point agenda of ending General Zia-ul-Haq's
martial law and the military rule. It was led by
Benazir Bhutto the daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto for
whose ouster from power and his ultimate hanging, Air
marshal was significantly responsible. Yet Asghar
disregarding any qualms of conscience of working with
the daughter of his victim, decided to join this left
wing alliance in 1983.
The MRD movement mostly launched in Sindh was brutally
crushed by Gen Zia. Thousands of its supporters and
protestors were killed by the army and countless were
put in jails and subjected to torture and lashing.
Asghar Khan practically had no role to play since he
was confined to his house in Abbottabad.
During Musharraf era, Asghar Khan handed over the
reins of PTI to his son Omar Asghar Khan who merged it
with an NGO and at the same time formed another
political party under the name of National Democratic
Party.
After joining so many parties and alliances and then
leaving them abruptly during his almost 40 years
dabbling in politics, his latest switch over was to
support Imran Khan in December last year. That was
again a kind of merger with Imran's PTI as thereafter
he resigned as the president of his own party Tehrik
Istiqlal.
While glancing over Asghar Khan's queer and zigzagging
political style, it is not difficult to discern that
he started his political career solely as an adversary
of late Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. In his pent-up hatred for
Bhutto he even preferred establishment of martial and
the death of an outstanding political leader. In
politics there is a political brinkmanship or tussle
based on programs and manifestoes but not aimed at the
physical removal of the political rivals.
But Air Marshal Asghar Khan was always driven more to
destroy Bhutto and the PPP and less to serve the
nation or for the uplift and glory of the country. He
became as the main hurdle in the implementation of the
accord between the PNA and the Bhutto on holding of
fresh elections. Had he consented on that and not
thrown a spanner at the behest of the army, Pakistan
would have been saved from a draconian martial law
whose deep scars are still writ large on the face of
Pakistan.
At the crossroad of history he cannot claim any
political accomplishment for democracy or advancement
of the county because his politicking was based on
rancor and vendettas. He lacked vision and lost his
time in simply keeping PTI as a petty adjunct of other
political outfits for narrow objectives. He has ever
remained as a vacillating, unstable and unpredictable
political minion who had the audacity to join or walk
out of an alliance depending upon the level of his ire
and disenchantment with a party or person.
He has been an aimless trotter in Pakistan's political
wilderness all along these four decades. He is a Don
Quixote of Pakistan who had been tilting his lance at
every windmill but would get bruised himself in
return. The fundamental flaw in his character was his
unbridled intolerance and intense haughtiness that
always kept him as an unreliable and unsuccessful
pariah in politics. |
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