Welcome back to the deep dive. You know, usually
when we crack open a new topic, we're looking
at a specific event or maybe a scientific breakthrough
or a business trend. Right. Something we can
kind of put in a box. Exactly. But today, today
we are unpacking a story that honestly feels
less like a history lesson and more like a. like
a high stakes political thriller. Written by
someone who specializes in Greek tragedies. That
is the perfect way to frame it. It really does
have everything. Oh, absolutely. You have immense
intellect. You have soaring rhetoric, a meteoric
rise to absolute power, and then a fall. A fall
that is so steep, so controversial, and so tragic
that it still defines the politics of the region
today. We are talking about Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto,
Pakistan's ninth prime minister, its fourth president.
And a man who quite literally rebuilt a nation
from what he called very small pieces. Only to
end up being executed by the very state machinery
he helped to shape. It's a massive topic. I mean,
Butoh is a figure of such extreme contradiction.
He really is. Just look at the visuals of his
life. Here is this, you know, Western educated
barrister who wore bespoke Savile Rose suits
and drank scotch. Right. Yet he became the messiah
for the rural poor. He was the Democrat who gave
the country its constitution. Yet he had this
undeniable, almost feudal authoritarian streak.
And perhaps most famously, and we will definitely
get into this, he is the man who said his people
would eat grass if that's what it took to get
a nuclear bomb. That quote is legendary for a
reason. And we are going to get into all of it.
The Islamic bomb, the tragedy of 1971 and the
breaking of Pakistan, the secret police and the.
well, what many call the judicial murder that
ended his life. We're working off a huge stack
of historical records, biographies, and even
some recent legal updates to really get under
the skin of this man. The mission today isn't
just to recount dates and times. It's to figure
out how. How does a man this brilliant end up
in a death cell? What is the psychology behind
the father of the nuclear bomb, who was also
the father of this massive populist movement?
To understand the end, you really have to look
at the beginning. You have to look at the paradox
of his birth, because Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto wasn't
born into the struggle. He was born into immense
privilege. Right. The source material mentions
he was from a wealthy Sindhi family with Rajput
roots. His father, Sir Shahnawaz Bhutto, wasn't
just a landowner. No, not at all. He was a major
player during the British Raj. A huge figure.
Exactly. His father was the Diwan, which is essentially
the prime minister of the princely state of Junagadh.
So Zulfikar grows up in this feudal aristocratic
environment near Larkana. He's a wadara, a feudal
lord by birth. So servants, hunting cartridges,
that kind of life. A life of total comfort. But
then, and this is the key, look at his education.
He doesn't just stay on the family estate to
manage the lands. No, he goes global. He heads
to the University of Southern California and
then transfers to UC Berkeley in 1949. And this
is where the story gets really interesting. I
mean, think about Berkeley in the late 1940s.
It must have been a vibe. It was. It was a hotbed
of political thought. And this is a truthful
nugget that explains so much of his later politics.
While at Berkeley, completing a degree in political
science, he became deeply interested in socialism.
So he's not just, you know, reading Marx in a
dorm room. No, he was actively engaging with
it. He was delivering lectures on the feasibility
of socialism in Islamic countries. Wait, hold
on. So the seeds of his Islamic socialism platform,
which becomes his massive calling card later,
were actually planted way back in his college
days in California. Precisely. It wasn't just
some campaign slogan he cooked up to get votes.
It was an intellectual framework. Yes, one he
had been building for years. He truly believed
you could marry the egalitarian principles of
Islam with the economic redistribution models
of socialism. And then he tops that off with
Oxford Christ Church College, where he studies
jurisprudence. He gets called to the bar at Lincoln's
Inn. So by the time he returns to Pakistan in
the 1950s, just look at the package. He has the
feudal authority of his father, the socialist
fire of Berkeley, and the legal polish of Oxford.
He is incredibly articulate, highly educated
in Western political thought, and... You have
to assume deeply ambitious. Oh, massively. And
he wastes no time. He becomes the youngest member
of the cabinet under President Iskandar Mursa
and then the military dictator Ayub Khan. Holding
portfolios like commerce, information. And eventually
foreign affairs. He was essentially the wonder
kind of Pakistani politics at that point. OK,
so as foreign minister starting in 1963, this
is where we see the first major shift in Pakistan's
trajectory. Right. A huge shift. Up until then.
Pakistan was very much in the American camp,
a loyal anti -Soviet ally. Budo, however, pushed
for a pivot. He'd look at the map and realize
that relying solely on the U .S. was, well, it
was risky. He wanted strategic depth. The sources
mentioned the Sino -Pakistan agreement. That
was him. That was Budo. He engineered closer
ties with China. He realized China was the natural
counterweight to India. That relationship, which
is still the cornerstone of Pakistan foreign
policy today, started with Budo's vision in the
60s. But this is also where we see the hawk emerge.
He wasn't just a diplomat shaking hands. He was
aggressive. Extremely. He was a key architect
of Operation Gibraltar in 1965. Okay, remind
us what that was. This was a plan to infiltrate
covert troops into Indian -administered Kashmir
to try and incite an uprising. Bhutto convinced
President Ayub Khan that India wouldn't respond
with a full -scale war. Which turned out to be
a massive miscalculation. Huge. India absolutely
responded. It sparked the 1965 war. And when
that war ended in a stalemate, though the public
was told it was a great victory, Ayub Khan went
to Tashkent to sign a peace treaty with India.
And this is the moment Bhutto flicks the script.
Right. The Tashkent Declaration. For Budo, this
was a betrayal. He felt they had given away at
the negotiating table what the soldiers had fought
for on the battlefield. So he resigns. He resigns,
or was dismissed, depending on who you ask, in
1966. And this is the turning point. If he stays
in government, he's just another minister associated
with a failed war. But by leaving, he becomes
a martyr. He taps into that anti -Iyub sentiment.
He goes from being the establishment's golden
boy to the establishment's biggest nightmare.
And he launches his own movement. Exactly. The
Pakistan People's Party, the PPP, is born in
November 1967. And the slogan he comes up with,
I mean, it's brilliant in its simplicity and
power. Islam is our faith. Democracy is our policy.
Socialism is our economy. All power to the people.
It resonated because nobody had ever spoken to
the common man like that before. Pakistani politics
had always been a... a drawing room affair for
the elite. Right. Bhutto took it to the streets.
He unbuttoned his collar, rolled up his sleeves
and channeled that Berkeley socialism. He united
leftists, Marxists, students and the rural poor
under one banner against Ayub Khan. And it worked.
I mean, it really worked. In the 1970 elections,
the PPP won a landslide in West Pakistan. But,
and this is a massive, but they didn't win the
whole country. No. And this brings us to the
darkest chapter in this story. The 1970 election
was the first truly democratic election in Pakistan's
history. And while Bhutto swept West Pakistan,
what is Pakistan today? Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's
Awami League swept East Pakistan. Which is now
Bangladesh. And because East Pakistan had a larger
population, Mujib had the absolute majority.
So by all democratic rules, Sheikh Mujib should
have been the prime minister of the entire country.
Yes. But Bhutto... He didn't want to sit on the
opposition benches. He wouldn't accept it. He
refused to accept an Awami League government.
The sources mention some infamous rhetoric here.
Budo threatened to break the legs of any PPP
member who dared to go to DACA for the assembly
session. That is intense. It sounds more like
a mob boss than a barrister from Oxford. It creates
a deadlock. Yeah. And there's a famous phrase
mentioned in the sources. Idhar hum udhartum.
Meaning, we rule here, you rule there. Essentially
proposing to partition the government. Before
the country was even physically partitioned.
So this deadlock gave the military dictator at
the time, Yahi Khan, the pretext he needed to
delay the power transfer. That led to massive
civil unrest in the east, which led to Operation
Searchlight. The brutal military crackdown on
Bengalis. A truly horrific chapter. And the source
says Budo supported this crackdown initially.
He was in Dhaka on the night of March 25th when
the operation started. Reportedly, when he flew
back to Karachi, he said, Pakistan has been saved.
Pakistan has been saved. He thought the military
action would suppress the Bengali nationalist
movement and preserve the union. Talk about a
tragic miscalculation. It was catastrophic. Instead
of saving the union, it led to a full -blown
civil war, Indian intervention, and a crushing,
humiliating defeat for Pakistan. The war ends
with the surrender of the Pakistani army in Dhaka
in December 1971. The country is split in half.
It's hard to overstate the trauma of that moment.
The entire national identity was shattered. And
Yahi Khan resigns in disgrace. And who is left
to pick up the pieces? Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. He
flies back from New York, where he was pleading
Pakistan's case at the UN, in that very dramatic
speech where he tears up the papers and storms
out and lands in Rawalpindi. And on December
20, 1971, he takes over. He becomes president
and the first ever civilian chief martial law
administrator. It's a contradiction in terms,
but that was the situation. I want to read a
quote from his address to the nation right after
he took over. He said, That's a heavy burden.
The country was demoralized, isolated, and as
he said, It was his moment of supreme test. And
honestly, if 1971 was his lowest moral point,
the diplomatic maneuvering in the years immediately
following is considered by many to be his masterpiece.
He had to negotiate with India, the victor. A
victor who held 93 ,000 Pakistani prisoners of
war in 5 ,000 square miles of territory. That's
the Simla Agreement of 1972, right? Yes. And
just think about the leverage here. India or
Gandhi holds all the cards. She could have dictated
any terms. But Bhutto goes to Simla. And he manages
to negotiate the return of that territory and
the release of all 93 ,000 POWs without giving
up much in return. How on earth did he pull that
off? He played on the psychology of the situation.
He was brilliant at this. He argued that if India
humiliated Pakistan too much, his new democratic
government would fall and the military hawks
would return. Which wouldn't be good for India
either. Exactly. He turned his weakness into
a bargaining chip. He essentially told Gandhi,
help me stay in power or you'll have to deal
with someone much worse. It was a psychological
victory that restored some dignity to a shattered
nation. OK, so he stabilizes the ship diplomatically,
but he's also looking at the security situation
and thinking, never again. This brings us to
the nuclear program. The Islamic bomb. You have
to remember the context. Pakistan had just been
sliced in half by conventional military force.
Then, in 1974, India tests its first nuclear
device, codenamed Smiling Buddha. So the threat
becomes existential for him. Completely. Buddha
realizes Pakistan cannot compete conventionally
against India's size. He sees nuclear deterrence
as the only survival strategy, the only guarantee
against future dismemberment. This is where that
famous quote comes in. If India builds the bomb,
Pakistan will eat grass or leaves, even go hungry,
but we will get one of our own. And that wasn't
just rhetoric. He meant every word of it. In
January 1972, just a month after taking power,
he convened a secret meeting of scientists in
Multan. Multan Conference. It sounds like a scene
from a movie. A secret gathering of the country's
best scientific minds in a tent. And what does
he say to them? He looks at them and asks, very
directly, can you give it to me? When they hesitated,
talking about costs and technology and timeframes,
he basically demanded it. He said, I'll find
the money. You just build it. He mobilized the
entire state machinery behind this one goal.
And it's important to clarify something here.
Popular culture often calls Dr. A .Q. Khan the
father of the bomb. Right. But the source material
is very clear. Budo is the true father of the
program. Why is that distinction made? What's
the difference? Because A .Q. Khan was a brilliant
metallurgist who brought the enrichment technology
from Europe much later. But Budo created the
political will, the funding, and the administrative
structure years before Khan was even in the picture.
He set up the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission.
He brought in the Nobel laureate Abdus Salam
to lead the theoretical physics group. He literally
built the entire infrastructure from scratch.
So Khan was the engineer, but Budo was the architect.
A perfect way to put it. Khan provided the key,
but Budo built the house and the door it unlocked.
And he paid a heavy price for it diplomatically,
didn't he? A huge price. Yeah. The U .S. was
not happy about nuclear proliferation, especially
in such a volatile region. There's that famous
account of a meeting with Henry Kissinger in
1976. Yes. Kissinger reportedly told Butoh that
if he didn't dismantle the nuclear program, the
U .S. would make a horrible example of him. Make
a horrible example of you? That is chilling,
considering what happens just a year later. It
is. But Butoh refused to back down. He saw the
nuclear capability as non -negotiable for Pakistan's
sovereignty. He even called it the Islamic bomb.
Was that just branding? It was very clever branding.
It was a way to garner support and, crucially,
funding from wealthy Arab nations like Libya
and Saudi Arabia. He framed it as a deterrent
not just for Pakistan, but for the entire Muslim
world. Let's shift gears to what he was doing
inside the country. He promised, socialism is
our economy. What did that look like in practice?
It looked like massive nationalization. In 1972,
he started taking over key industries, steel,
chemicals, cement. Then in 1974, he nationalized
all the private banks. The idea was to break
the monopoly of the rich, right? The source mentions
the 22 families who controlled almost all the
country's wealth. Exactly. He wanted to redistribute
that wealth. And in some ways, he did empower
the labor unions. He introduced land reforms,
setting ceilings on how much land a single person
could own. Which must have upset his own feudal
class. Oh, it did. He was a feudal lord taking
on the feudal... It's another one of his contradictions.
He also gave workers new rights to pensions and
Social Security. But there was a downside to
all this nationalization. A big one. The implementation
was chaotic. It scared away private investors,
both domestic and foreign. And then he made a
critical error. He went after the small flour
mills, rice husking units, and cotton ginning
factories. Why was that such a big error? Because
now he wasn't just hurting the big tycoons. He
was hurting the middle class and the small business
owners who formed the backbone of the rural economy.
And the bureaucracy wasn't ready to run all these
businesses. Not at all. Production stalled and
corruption increased. It damaged the economy
significantly in the long run. But amidst this
economic turmoil, he managed to pull off something
no one else had. The 1973 Constitution. This
is arguably his most enduring positive legacy.
Before 1973, Pakistan was running on interim
arrangements or martial law orders. There was
no consensus. And he got everyone to agree. He
managed to get all political parties, the religious
ones, the secular ones, the regional ones, to
agree on a single document. It established Pakistan
as a parliamentary democracy. It's the Constitution
that, despite all the amendments and suspensions
over the years, is still in force today. And
as part of that, he shifts from president to
prime minister. Yes, he pivots to the parliamentary
system that he himself created. And he also opened
up the world to the common man, quite literally,
with passports. Yes, the passport reform. This
is one of those things that doesn't get enough
credit, but it was revolutionary. Before Budo,
getting a passport was a privilege reserved for
the elite. You had to be someone important. Right.
He made it a right for every citizen. This triggered
a massive wave of labor migration to the Gulf
states. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, all those places
were booming. Which created the remittance economy
that Pakistan relies on even now. Exactly. All
those workers sending money back home to their
families, that huge flow to foreign exchange,
it all started with Budo's simple policy of giving
everyone a passport. So we have a man who gives
the country a constitution, a nuclear deterrent,
and empowers the working class. But then there's
the Greek tragedy flaw, the authoritarian streak,
the hubris. It's the classic tragedy of a populist
leader. He loved the people in the abstract,
but he didn't tolerate dissent from individuals.
And to enforce his will, he created the Federal
Security Force, the FSF. What was the FSF? Ostensibly,
it was to help the police with law and order.
In reality, it became a paramilitary force under
his direct control, completely loyal to him.
So his personal muscle. His personal muscle.
They were used to harass political opponents,
break up protests, and intimidate journalists.
And then there's Balochistan. Yes. In 1973, he
dismissed the elected provincial government in
Balochistan, which was run by an opposition party.
This triggered a massive insurgency. And how
did he respond? He responded with the full force
of the military. It was a brutal, bloody conflict
that lasted from 1973 to 1977 and created deep
scars that still haven't healed. The source mentions
a really specific incident involving the Iraqi
embassy that just sounds wild. Tell us about
that. This is that spy thriller element of his
story again. In 1973, Budo's intelligence discovered
that Iraq which was then under Saddam Hussein,
was secretly smuggling weapons to the Baloch
separatists to destabilize Pakistan. So what
did he do? Send a diplomatic note? No, no. He
didn't just send an angry letter. He ordered
an armed raid on the Iraqi embassy in Islamabad.
A raid on a foreign embassy? That's a huge diplomatic
breach. It is, but it paid off. They broke in
and found crates and crates of Soviet submachine
guns and ammunition destined for the rebels.
And he didn't keep it quiet. Of course not. This
is Budo. He paraded the weapons on national television.
It humiliated Iraq, and more importantly, it
cemented Budo's alliance with the Shah of Iran,
who was also terrified of Balak separatism on
his border. So the Shah then helped him crush
the insurgency. Exactly. The Shah provided financial
aid and even Cobra helicopters. Budo was playing
4D chess on the international stage. Speaking
of the international stage, he also hosted that
massive Islamic summit in Lahore in 1974. The
OIC summit. That was Budo at his absolute peak.
He gathered heads of state from 37 Muslim countries.
Gaddafi, King Faisal, Yasser Arafat, they were
all there in Lahore. It was a huge moment. It
was. He was positioning Pakistan not just as
a South Asian country, but as the leader of the
entire Islamic world. It was a moment of immense
national pride and put him on the global map
as a major statesman. So he's on top of the world
in 1974. But by 1977, things start to crumble.
What happened? The 1977 elections. Budo called
for elections, confident he would win. And honestly,
he probably would have won a fair fight anyway.
He was still very popular. But he got paranoid.
His party operatives did. The opposition, a nine
-party coalition called the PNA, Pakistan National
Alliance, was gaining ground. They were a mix
of religious and secular parties united only
by their hatred of Budo. And the results come
in? And they show a massive, unbelievable landslide
for the PPP. The PNA alleged massive systematic
rigging. They pointed to constituencies where
Budo's people won with impossible margins, where
the number of votes cast was more than the number
of registered voters. So the opposition cried
foul. They did more than that. They launched
a nationwide agitation. Street protests, violence,
burning cars. They called for Budo's resignation.
The country was paralyzed for months. And when
there's chaos in Pakistan, usually the military.
The military steps in. And this is where we meet
General Zia -ul -Haq. Now, this is a crucial
detail. Budo had appointed Zia as army chief
over several more senior generals. Why? He picked
him because he thought Zia was apolitical, pious,
and most importantly, completely loyal. He saw
him as a sycophant. Budo reportedly even referred
to him as his monkey. Big mistake. Never underestimate
the quiet ones. A fatal mistake. On July 5, 1977,
Zia launched Operation Fair Play. Fair Play.
The irony is rich. He declared martial law, arrested
Budo and the opposition leaders, and promised
to hold elections in 90 days. A promise he didn't
keep. Zia never held those elections in 90 days.
He quickly realized something very simple. If
he released Budo, Budo would likely win the election.
And if Bhutto won, he would almost certainly
try Zia for treason for launching the coup. So
it became a zero -sum game. One of them had to
go. Exactly. The mission changed from holding
elections to eliminating Bhutto. But they couldn't
just shoot him. That would make him a martyr
instantly. They needed to do it through the courts
to give it a veneer of legitimacy. This leads
us to the trial. The charge wasn't corruption
or treason. It was murder. Yes. The murder of
Nawab Mohammed Ahmed Khan Kasuri. He was the
father of a dissident PPP politician, Ahmed Raza
Kasuri. The car they were in was ambushed in
1974. The target was supposedly the son, who
was a vocal critic of Bhutto, but the father
was killed in the attack. And they pinned this
on Bhutto. They charged him with authorizing
the hit, based on the testimony of the former
head of his FSF, who had turned state's witness.
And the trial itself. It's widely regarded as
a sham. The source calls it a judicial murder.
The witnesses were pressured. The judges were
handpicked by Zia. The chief judge even had a
known personal vendetta against Butoh. Ramsey
Clark, the former U .S. Attorney General, observed
the proceedings and called it unjust. And the
verdict? Guilty. But it was incredibly close.
The Lahore High Court sentenced him to death,
and the Supreme Court upheld the sentence by
a narrow split decision of four to three. Four
to three. One vote decided the fate of a prime
minister. One vote. It's staggering. The descriptions
of his time in the death cell are heartbreaking.
The source mentions torture, poor conditions,
him wasting away. It was designed to break him.
He was made of immense vanity and dignity, always
well -dressed, always in control, and they stripped
all of that away. He was kept in a stinking damp
cell, yet he refused to beg for mercy. He wouldn't
appeal for clemency? He refused to do it personally.
World leaders pleaded for his life. Brezhnev
from the Soviet Union, the Pope, President Jimmy
Carter, but Zia was unmoved. Zia famously said,
there is one grave for two bodies. He knew it
was him or Butoh. And on April 4th, 1979, he
was hanged in Rolpindi District Jail. His final
words were reportedly, oh Lord, help me for I
am innocent. It's such a heavy ending. But the
story didn't end there, did it? Decades later,
the legal system actually admitted they got it
wrong. That's the incredible postscript. In March
2024, just recently, the Supreme Court of Pakistan
finally issued an opinion on a presidential reference
filed years earlier. They officially acknowledged
that Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto did not get a fair trial.
It was an institutional mea culpa. A mea culpa.
45 years too late. But it was a formal recognition
that the state had committed a historic injustice.
So what does this all mean when you put it all
together? We have a man who gave the country
the constitution it still uses, who built the
nuclear program that defines its security policy,
who awakened the political consciousness of the
poor. But he also played a key role in the breaking
of the country in 1971, ruled like a feudal lord
with a private army, and left a legacy of deep,
bitter polarization that his own daughter Benazir
inherited. That is the Buddha paradox. You can't
separate the builder from the destroyer. He was
a Shakespearean figure in the truest sense, immensely
talented, but deeply flawed by his own hubris.
He empowered the masses with his voice, with
that slogan, Roti Capra Makan, but he crushed
individuals with his power. And there's that
lingering, what if? That's the question historians
still debate. If Buddha hadn't been executed,
if he'd been allowed to live, even in exile.
Would Pakistan have avoided the long, dark years
of Zia's dictatorship that followed? The Islamization,
the involvement in the Afghan jihad. All of that
happened because Boud was removed from the picture.
Or was Boud's own authoritarianism the very thing
that weakened the civilian institutions enough
for the military to walk right back in? Exactly.
Did he plant the seeds of his own destruction?
It's a question without an easy answer. The question
will leave you to mull over. It's been a heavy,
deep dive, but a necessary one to understand
the region today. Thanks for listening. Thank
you