Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Quotes

It would be bad politics to try and summarize a situation which is dynamic. Have faith in mankind and its mission. God the Creator is the God of all mankind. God is omnipotent yet. The Creator of this World and the World after this one has imposed on Himself the obligation to be kind and forgiving. No tin-pot dictator of a palm-tree society is capable of imposing any such obligations on himself. On the contrary, he vainly boasts that he is answerable and accountable to nobody.

Mrs. Gandhi has only one dream: to take over the whole sub­continent, to subjugate us. She’d like a confederation so as to make Pakistan disappear from the face of the earth, and that’s why she says we’re brothers, and so forth. We’re not brothers. We never have been. Our religions go too deep into our souls, into our ways of life. Our cultures are different, our attitudes are different. From the day they’re born, to the day they die, a Hindu and a Muslim are subject to laws and customs that have no points of contact. Even their ways of eating and drinking are different. They’re two strong and irrecon­cilable faiths. It’s shown by the fact that neither of the two has ever succeeded in reaching a compromise with the other, a modus vivendi. Only dictatorial monarchies, foreign invasions, from the Mongols to the British, have succeeded in holding us together by a kind of Pax Romana. We’ve never arrived at a harmonious relationship.

As for my two wives, what can I do about it? They married me off at thirteen, to my cousin. I was thirteen and she was twenty-three. I didn’t even know what it meant to have a wife, and when they tried to explain it to me, I went out of my mind with rage. With fury. I didn’t want a wife, I wanted to play cricket. I was very fond of cricket. To calm me down, they had to give me two new cricket bags. When the ceremony was over, I ran off to play cricket. There are so many things I must change in my country! And I was fortunate. They married my playmate off at the age of eleven to a woman of thirty-two. He always said to me, »Lucky you!«

They are going to kill me. It doesn't matter what evidence you or anyone comes up with. They are going to murder me for murder I didn't commit.

And I say something else. If I were to ascertain that our soldiers really used violence on the women of Bangladesh, I’d insist on being the one to try them and punish them.

Politically the Mukti Bahini count for nothing, lacking as they do any ideological preparation, any indoctrination, any discipline. Then socially speaking, they’re a disturbance—they only know how to fire in the air, frighten people, steal, yell Joi Bangla. And you can’t run a country by yelling Joi Bangla. The Bengali Maoists, on the other hand ... well, they certainly don’t represent a very refined productat most they’ve read half of Mao’s little red book. But they’re an articulate force and don’t let themselves be used by the Indians, and I don’t even think they’re against the unity of Pakistan. They’ll end up having the upper hand.

Pakistan was once called the most allied ally of the United States. We are now the most non-allied.

"A regime that can suspend or abrogate the constitution and run the country on its whims and caprice should be ashamed of bringing on its lips the word "law". It is like prescribing a punishment for adultery after raping the country. It is like saying that Holy Quran is suspended nobody can escape from the Hadees."

When I fell in love with my second wife, I was twenty-three. She was also studying in England, and though she was an Iranian, that is, from a country where polygamy is the custom, it was hard for me to persuade her to marry me. I didn’t have many arguments except for the two words, »So what, dammit!« No, the idea of divorcing my first wife never went through my head. Not only because she’s my cousin, but because I have a responsibility toward her. Her whole life has been ruined by this absurd marriage to a boy, by the absurd custom in which we’ve been raised. She lives in my house in Larkana; we see each other every so often. She’s almost always alone. She hasn’t even had children—my four children are born of my second mar­riage. I’ve spent little time with her—as soon as I was an adolescent I went to the West to study. A story of injustice. I’ll do everything I can to discourage polygamy—besides it causes no small economic problem. Often the wives are separated in different houses or cities, as in my case. And not everyone can afford it, as I can.

If things do not change, there will be nothing left to change. Either power must pass to the people or everything will perish.

Tikka Khan was a soldier doing a soldier’s job. He went to East Pakistan with precise orders and came back by precise orders. He did what he was ordered to do, though he wasn’t always in agree­ment, and I picked him because I know he’ll follow my orders with the same discipline. And he won’t try to stick his nose in politics. I can’t destroy the whole army, and anyway his bad reputation for the events in Dacca is exaggerated. There’s only one man really respon­sible for those events—Yahya Khan. Both he and his advisers were so drunk with power and corruption they’d even forgotten the honor of the army. They thought of nothing but acquiring beautiful cars, building beautiful homes, making friends with bankers, and sending money abroad. Yahya Khan wasn’t interested in the government of the country, he was interested in power for its own sake and nothing else. What can you say of a leader who starts drinking as soon as he wakes up and doesn’t stop until he goes to bed? You’ve no idea how painful it was to deal with him. He was really Jack the Ripper.

What gift can I give you from this cell out of which my hand cannot pass? I give you the hand of the people. What celebration can I hold for you? I give you the celebration of a celebrated memory and a celebrated name. You are the heir to and inheritor of the most ancient civilization. Please make your full contribution to making this ancient civilization the most progressive and the most powerful. By progressive and powerful I do not mean the most dreaded. A dreaded society is not a civilized society. The most progressive and powerful society in the civilized sense, is a society which has recognized its ethos, and come to terms with the past and the present, with religion and science, with modernism and mysticism, with materialism and spirituality; a society free of tension, a society rich in culture. Such a society cannot come with hocus-pocus formulas and with fraud. It has to flow from the depth of a divine search. In other words, a classless society has to emerge but not necessarily a Marxist society. The Marxist society has created its own class structure.

Politicians are always trying to make you believe that they’re good, moral, consistent. Don’t ever fall in their trap. There’s no such thing as a good, moral, consistent politi­cian. Politics is give-and-take, as my father taught me when he said, »Never hit a man unless you’re ready to be hit twice by him.«

When I went to America, her message had so sunk into my ears that I became a radical. I went to America to study at the University of California, where a jurist of international law was teaching. I wanted to take my degree in international law. And that was the period of McCarthyism, of the communist witch hunts—my choices were laid out. To get away from Sunset Boulevard, from the girls with red nail polish, I ran off to Maxwell Street and lived among the Negroes. A week, a month. I felt good with them—they were real, they knew how to laugh. And the day in San Diego when I wasn’t able to get a hotel room because I have olive skin and looked like a Mexican ... well, that helped.

So I must proceed with patience, by reforms, measures that will gradually lead to socialism—nationalizing when possible, refraining from it when necessary, respecting the foreign capital of which we have need. I must take my time, be a surgeon who doesn’t plunge his knife too deeply into the fabric of society. This is a very sick society, and if it’s not to die under the knife, you have to oper­ate with caution, waiting slowly for a wound to heal, for a reform to be consolidated. We’ve been asleep for so many centuries, we can’t violently wake ourselves up with an earthquake. Besides, even Lenin, in the beginning, stooped to compromises.