45 years to Zia’s coup & how his is the most lasting impact on India, Pakistan & the world

[Music] so here is a trick question i am asking you who do you think has been the most important person personality in the subcontinent in our lifetimes important in this important obviously at any point of time will be the leader of india not like that but important in the sense of the person's impact on the present when the person was there the past that is after the person goes away and the future of this subcontinent now many names will come some of you will say jawaharlal nehru i'll just say that that was too early in our lifetimes and again jawaharlal nehru will probably fail in this competition then you might say indra gandhi yes she did create bangladesh she changed the subcontinent and that's an enduring legacy bangladesh now is doing very well etc etc okay so let's leave her there who else is there when you look at all the rest i will mention a name name to you and that name is general zia lock now general ziawalhak and you might ask me why the hell are you mentioning general ziya today just because you like to talk about pakistan offer no this is the 45th anniversary of the military coup he staged on 5th of july 1977 throwing out throwing out kareli bhutto's government refugee bhutto it was who actually chose zia superseding at least half a dozen other generals to become chief because he used to find zia the most obsequious in his presence all the time he used to talk to zia in a very ridiculing manner muto wasn't a nice guy with people he could be very rude he could be very dismissive he could also be quite uncivil with people who he thought he was more powerful or people who he thought he had power over so he did treat zia like that zia took it and looked like quite anxious so he made zia the chief zia had a distinguished background in the army he was from one of the pakistani army's more fancied regiments the guides cavalry part of frontier force guides cavalry as you can figure out was a tank regiment zia was also born in india indian part of the subcontinent in jarandar he went to delhi's since stephen's college and he was a punjabi he was a punjabi from what's called as the arai community so bhutto thought that this man because he's been so anxious he will remain anxious like this and what happened immediately as he took over power you know in pakistan it doesn't matter who becomes army chief lots of pakistani leaders have actually dipped deep down to think of the mildest sounding person from their point of view to be the army chief they've superseded many they've given extensions to many but in the process they've all turned out to be the army chief because the power lies in the chair in the kursi in the chair of the army chief whoever you put they put there get set power so 45 years back took over power in pakistan you know broadly what happened after that that he that that he hanged bhutto soon enough soon enough he arrested bhutto in a what is widely believed to be a fake murder charge and finally despite a split verdict in his supreme court hanged him quickly with great alacrity etc jailed his wife nusrat bhutto and his daughter benazir exiled his sons so basically finished all competition now all of that doesn't make him such a you push why do you think that he made the most lasting difference to the subcontinent it to our past not to his past to our past to his present and the history not just of his country but also of his nation because what he did was not only he imposed pakistan's third martial law and the longest martial law so he ruled between 1977 and late 1988 that's almost 11 years not all of that was under martial law because for some time he brought in that joke of a democracy if he held kind of a party-less political arrangement where muhammad khan junior was made the prime minister and if he kept went around saying that that i'm not a titular president like the queen uh queen of england but but actually he controlled all the power at some point he got impatient and he threw junajo out because as he gave himself power as he brought in the so-called party-less democracy now particles democracy is a bit like non-alcoholic beer isn't it so he brought in party-less democracy because he used to say elections are great democracy is great every country needs democracy and election but you know what running jogging exercising going to the gym is great but for that somebody has to be healthy if a person is sick you don't tell that person to start running and exercising my country is sick when i nurse my country to health it will have democracy so he brought in this democracy but soon enough he figured out that he was missing all the power he had so he got rid of him also so 11 years he ruled and had the longest spell under martial law had his country under the longest spell with martial law now before that two more martial laws had taken place and i can i can just tell you the basic dates 7th february 1958 major general iskandar midza he was not a serving general then major general iskandar mirza we've told him about you earlier he was the great grandson of meer jaffer who in the subcontinent's history is remembered as among its most infamous traitors the man who betrayed or allegedly betrayed or is said to have betrayed sarajevo in the battle of plassey so he was a great great grandson he by this time was like the president of pakistan so the first martial law in pakistan was not imposed by a general it was imposed by a civilian leader former major general who immediately then who did he appoint as chief martial law administrator he appointed mohammed yup khan who was the army chief and soon enough what happened what happened is what always happens in these cases ayub khan got rid of iskandar mirza and himself became the boss this martial law lasted four years ayub khan lifted the martial law in 1962 and he brought in also some facade of some democracy of some kind he became president first and he held some kind of a presidential election in 1965. that's a complex story his rival then was fatima janna sister of kyriazam mohammed ali jinnah and then there were allegations of rigging of election etc etc by that time pakistan had become very unhappy especially because of the costs it paid for the 65 for launching the 65 war in india and not winning it which amounted to losing it because it lost the objective so that was again again a period of martial law the third period the second period of martial law was yaya khan who sort of moved in seamlessly from mayub onwards so 1969 25th of march yaya khan imposed his martial law it just so happened that exactly two years after that 25th march 1971 he launched his crackdown over east pakistan and that led to his end the day the war ended the day his army surrendered he tried to bring in some kind of a constitution etc because he was trying to buy some kind of way out of that of that shame but nobody bought into that and he was out and then came to vicari bhutto now zio luck took over from bhutto in 1977 until bhutto pakistan got a new constitution in 1973 zia took over in 1977. and you know what when he appointed junaijo as the prime minister before he did that as he did that he brought in the 1973 constitution but with some key amendments and with those amendments he gave himself as president the power to hire and fire chief ministers prime minister all governments federal government central government and the state governments in pakistan provincial governments as they are called he also gave himself that is the president the powers to dismiss any elected parliament or assembly so effectively this became a presidential dictatorship with some kind of an elected government that damage that he did to pakistan's polity one bringing in a long-lasting martial law militarizing the pakistani mind because the other two before him had not been able to militarize pakistan's mind the other thing he did was he islamized pakistan's mind it's a very complex history but i will try and explain it to you and that's the reason i thought he is he is the one who's made the most impact on the subcontinent at least in our lifetime so maybe i would say even since 1947 since the since the partition of the subcontinent now what kind of a character was it and am i exaggerating in saying that he is probably the most significant personality to have lived through our times in the subcontinent i can do no better than quote until bihari vajpayee when ziyablak died in that air crash c113 i was sent immediately for covering that story and i had i had written a cover story for india today magazine i'm sharing a link to that article with you i'm also sharing a screenshot of that article and also the page where i quote in that article until bihari vajpayee and we'll circle the quote from matalbiari bajpe and listen total bihari vajpayee this is what is set in 1988 this is august of 1988. he said he said which means he was a real real master real guru who who made who let the americans on a married dance who befuddled the russians actually defeated them in the end who def who befuddled the russians and who gave us so much trouble so vajpayee said so that was the kind of character he was because he built a legacy that now cast the shadow not just on the subcontinent definitely not just in pakistan and not not just on the subcontinent but on the entire islamic world and i would go beyond that on the entire world because look at his luck he takes over and soon enough just when he's getting into trouble he's becoming unpopular some people including the clergy are beginning to complain about him that he's come and taken over power see it was still still time when pakistan army had not become that popular with the people of pakistan because in 1971 they had lost a war they had lost more than half their country but just then the soviets walked into afghanistan as that happened he pushed his country into the jihad he became a frontline state he he tied up with the americans that's why i told you rika ko nachaya because americans realized that if they had to defeat russia in the cold war by using afghans as their proxy then they need needed pakistan to be in front but you know what it was one thing to be just cynical but zia was more than cynical zia was genuinely a genuine islamist he was a genuine islamist and he saw this as a real jihad and i know it from people who worked closely with him because for many years i was part of the track 2 circuit where many retired indian and pakistani generals air marshals top civil servants also used to participate so i have i heard from people who work closely with him that when he first became the chief he wasn't that religious he was religious but not not that religious but when he killed bhutto and got away with it people around him said dekha god's on your side god has chosen to send you now and god it is who protected you everybody said if you hang bhuto there will be trouble nothing happened then the russians came into afghanistan afghanistan the soviets came to afghanistan so again people around him convinced him or the or the conservatives around him convinced him that see this is what allah said this is why allah specially sent you you were a junior guy bhutto superseded half a dozen others to make you chief then you killed bhutto got him out of the way nothing happened now soviets have come in so jihad is needed and because somebody was needed to lead this jihad allah positioned you here and he became more and more and more fundamentalist going ahead after that now the forces he created the jihadi groups he created mustafa he said he'd brought into pakistan he declared pakistani parliament to be muslim he put put all kinds of further bans on ahmadiyya's now i will give you a little bit of history there because it's not as if he started that bhutto it is who had started this islamization unfortunately it wasn't a general but he took it to another level and what happened as the mujahideen won that victory zia immersed as a great hero as a great hero and inspirational figure among the jihadi lord and then the mindset of jihad that if you can defeat a big superpower with jihad you can defeat anybody because you know why you've got you've got divine help you've got divine intervention on your side so he's the one who left behind this jihadi culture not just in pakistan but even the pan islamic terror machine came out of this emerged from this al-qaeda ultimately al-qaeda moved into isis etc etc and don't tell me that i am exaggerating because remember where al-qaeda came up it came up in the same as park region and then later this morph into isis because this victory led by the owl hack of the mujahideen of the islamic fighters of the islamic jihad against the big superpower spread the world everywhere first of all that your religion is so supreme that you can defeat a superpower also the big superpower but the second thing was afghan war drew fighters or jihadis from the entire islamic world not only were they giving money but many fighters were coming in after all who was osama bin laden he was a saudi and there were others who came from distant islamic countries even those not from islamic countries but of the islamic faith so this became a kind of university of jihad and he's the one he's the founding chancellor of that university of jihad and inspirationally and in soul and spirit he still remains that again in pakistan he founded what i might call ziaism so ziya's zia-ism was a new definition of pakistani nationalism which is built around military power which is built around conservative puritanical sunni islam and which is also built around military superiority and and it's a mindset of permanent enmity with india in fact in that cover story i wrote on him when he died mushai to sen who was then the editor of the muslim and later became a politician there is a quote from him and he says that he is the first leader who had a subcontinent policy first leader in pakistan and also on india he was trapping india in a pincer so he had the sharpest india policy so almost everything he did has endured has endured philosophically and every leader after him has tried to put the clock back on zia but they have failed to do so so zia may have gone but zia is the mites which now rules pakistan whether you like it or not that's a reality now what kind of a leader was here so once again if i go back to all india today's stories so there were many jokes about him the good thing about the great thing about the pakistanis is they have the best jokes about their dictators they have the best jokes they also tell them with abandon i suppose if you when you have restrictions on free speech as they had in the year's times in fact in diaz times journalists were treated very rudely he had come he had come in saying that in 90 days i'll hold an election and restore the constitution etc he did no such thing under him 11 journalists were convicted by military courts and four of them were flogged in public and yet people told us great jokes about him so one of his those jokes used to be that junejo who he became prime minister like his bonsai prime minister he was having tea with him in his garden uh at the army house in rahul pindi and there was plate of biscuits on their table so a crow came picked one biscuit and ran away so zia frowned at the crow zia against resumed talking with junajo or listening to janaejo the crow came and picked up another biscuit and zia said to the crow listen don't do it again because i'm going inside the house to get my shotgun if you do it again i'll come and shoot you with a shortcut so zia turned around to go inside the house the crow dived in again maybe to pick up one more zia turned around pulled out a pistol from his from his pocket and shot the crow so what was the lesson of the story the story was he says one thing but does something else so that's the kind of image they had built this is this is part of a published story now why do we say that zia was the father of the jihadist culture not just in pakistan of the subcontinent but in the entire world one because he made a jihad win against a superpower number two because he got the other super power that's america with its western allies got so deeply invested in jihadist powers not until osama bin laden's people hit the world trade towers in 2001 towards the end of 2001 september 2001 not until then did the americans in the west western powers pull away from their investments they did not disinvest until then from the jihadist groups it's only after they got hit that they began worrying about it until then india had been hit several times by the same forces the bombings of bombay in 1993 were definitely linked to the same forces after that davout ibrahim landed up in karachi eventually also just before that in the same year india had had the bombing of the jnk assembly by a human bomb driving a car laden with explosives that was very much a part of the same jihad etc in fact when that happened americans were so insensitive that the secretary of state then that is general powell colin powell he said an attack has been carried out in a government of india facility that's the expression used for the assembly so until september of 2001 americans and the western powers were deeply invested in this jihadi culture that was zia's doing that is the seed that zias planted and that's the reason we say zealitis who built modern jihad and zealitis who left behind him the kalashnikov culture in pakistan the drug addiction drug smuggling and drug addiction in pakistan and third islamization and i will in two minutes three minutes i will tell you about what happened with islamization in pakistan when pakistan was founded by muhammad ali jinnah he had not imagined pakistan to be an islamic republic this was a country where the large muslim majority of the subcontinent will have a country of their own so there was some privileging of the religion but this was not to be the islamic republic now he found some pushback from the clergy etc the clergy said at that point that this can't be discarded pakistan has no justification if it is not islamic republic etc but if you see jinnah speech on august 11 1947 in pakistan's constituent assembly from that speech he indicates this was a political struggle this was not about religion march 1949 however when the pakistanis passed what was called as the objectives resolution they were their constitution was still in the works constituent assembly was still working that's when they said our sovereignty belongs to allah which means for the first time they admitted that there will be a strong islamic element to their government or to their state when this happened one member of the constituent assembly who was actually a congressman he said and that's his exact quote he said you are now leaving the door open for an adventurer court an adventurer who could claim to be god's appointee now cut to 1977 in 1977 came in as that apparent appointee of god to make it a truly islamic country otherwise even under ayub and yaya it was not an islamic republic that's a more complex history and i will tell you about that after the defeat in 1971 sultry karli bhutto inherited a broken a dismembered and very dispirited and very angry and very demoralized country so what did he do like all smart cynical leaders he found refuge in religion now bhutto like his two dictatorial predecessors that is yaya nayoob was not a tea totaler he was hardly islamic in his practice right these were all whiskey drinkers who drank actually the best brands of whiskey at that point good scotch wasn't so easily available in the subcontinent you had to be very elite and very well connected to get there these were these were really not islamists in their personal lives but in 1973 he declared pakistan an islamic state he declared pakistan islamic state he set up a council of islamic ideology 1974 he got together with king faisal and he helped king faisal of saudi arabia to set up a counter islamic nationalism counter islamic nationalist counter to arab nationalism arab nationalism at that point was represented by the birth party which was leftist uranus later saddam hussein etc assad rulers of syria they were from the bath party now they were arab nationalists so he helped king faisal the saudi group to build an islamic nationalism to counter arab nationalism very successfully six months later bhutto declared ahmadiyya's to be non-muslim 1977 he rigged his election and because of that a lot of trouble erupted so he declared nizami mustafa he declared nizami mustafa he banned liquor can you imagine bhutto banning liquor he banned liquor and he also declared friday to be the weekly holiday instead of sunday so all this was done by a democratic civilian leader not by an army dictator it just so happens that 1978 by the time zia took over fully and got entranced he then picked up the baton from here and converted pakistan into a medieval theocracy so what do we mean when we say that he converted pakistan now he took it forward to becoming a medieval theocracy so bhutto had declared ahmadiyya's to be non-muslim he now forbid ahmadiyya's to even go into a mosque also from even greeting fellow muslims or other muslims in the muslim way i suppose by way of assalamu alaykum etc he also forbade them from naming their daughters after women linked to the holy prophet's household he took it further again he declared his parliament to be muslim he then experiment with party party-less democracy and the fact is that he came to believe over time that every change every change that he was bringing about was ordained divinely and most of those changes have endured i will tell you his name featured in the article 270 a of pakistan's constitution you know when was it removed from there it was removed in april 2010 that is 22 years and five elections after he had died until then nobody had the courage even to remove that that's the kind of impact he had in pakistan so he changed pakistan fully he changed the subcontinent fully fully all of the subcontinent even now is held to ransom by the forces he unleashed so just about six days before he died on august 17 he gave his last interview in august 11. not to me to another publication in which he said i want history to judge me objectively so how do you judge him objectively now you might say that under him pakistan was booming so as i mentioned this earlier when i first went to pakistan in 1985 pakistan he seemed to be doing much better than india so at that point i mentioned in that story of mine the cover story that pakistan's per capita income was 6 000 rupees all values indian rupees which was fifty percent higher than india's india was four thousand and three times higher than bangladesh's today pakistan's per capita income is 30 40 percent lower than india's and even lower than bangladesh so bangladesh from being one third of pakistan has now become about 50 percent more than pakistan that is the price the pakistanis that played for theism which because what did he do he brought in jihadism he brought in islamism he converted his state which was a modern state in the 60s he converted that state into an islamic medieval style theocracy after him many leaders including a dictator that is musharraf many leaders have tried to change it they've all struggled so his is the most enduring influence which neither democrats nor military dictators have been able to change in his country which is neighbors namely us and afghanistan have never been able to shake off both india and afghanistan still suffer from the forces or still has is are still damaged by forces unleashed by zia and then global islamic jihadism is also a kind of permanent legacy that he left behind that's why i would say that in our lifetimes the subcontinent's personality one personality who made the most impact and the most lasting impact was ziya it's unfortunate for pakistan its neighbors and the rest of the world but that's a reality [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: ThePrint

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Keywords: ThePrint, shekhar gupta, theprint india, theprint hindi, cut the clutter, zia ul haq, pakistan politics, pakistan dictators, zia ul haq coup, zulfikar ali bhutto, yahya khan, ayub khan, pakistan military coups, 45 years of zia ul haq

Id: sm8nt6zU54A

Length: 28min 21sec (1701 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 11 2022