Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Quotes

"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."

This is not a letter on Pakistan. If it were, I could have written a small book entitled "Glimpses of Pakistan's history". Time does not permit it. The nation is gripped in her worst crisis, standing in the middle of the road between survival and disintegration. Since the birth of Pakistan, crisis has followed crisis in rapid escalation. Millions of lives were sacrificed to create this country. Pakistan is said to be the dream of Mohammad Iqbal and the creation of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the Quaid-e-Azam. Was anything wrong with the dream or with the one who made the dream come true? Opinions have differed and continue to differ. The next few years will most probably decide the issue, perhaps once and for all, and not without bloodshed. This process is not inevitable but the present policies of the ruling junta are driving this country towards a sad inevitability

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!«

Earlier, I have cautioned you against an outright pragmatist approach. Now I am cautioning you against an outright populist approach. Sometimes a populist decision is, in the long run, not beneficial to the masses. Neither pragmatism nor populism are fundamental political and socio-economic doctrines. Nor do I say that you should play it by ear. I have made this melancholy analysis in anguish. My jail surroundings have not influenced my objectivity. I do not want to see the whole world in a death-cell merely because I am in a death cell. I do not say that the High Court has pronounced a death sentence on the world because a law court has pronounced a perverse death sentence on me. I would be the happiest man if the gloomy winter of mankind were to give way to a shaft of sunlight and to coloured flowers. The world is very beautiful. "A thing of beauty is a joy forever". There is the beauty of the landscape, of the tall mountain, the green plains, the humped deserts. There is the beauty of the flowers and the forests, of the azure oceans and the meandering rivers. There is the splendour of architecture, the magnificence of music, and the sparkle of the dance. Above all, there is the beauty of man and woman, the most perfect creations of God.

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.

The favourite slogan, the one that caught on during the May 1968 fête in France was "it is forbidden to forbid". There is nothing to forbid the youth of Europe to reject both communism and capitalism. What will they build in the absence of both systems? Will their concept of building a new structure with a new philosophy mean willful self-destruction? This sounds insane but the youth of Europe is not insane.

Your grand-father taught me the politics of pride, your grandmother taught me the politics of poverty. I am beholden to both for the fine synthesis. To you, my darling daughter, I give only one message. It is the message of the morrow, the message of history. Believe only in the people, work only for their emancipation and equality. The paradise of God lies under the feet of your mother. The paradise of politics lies under the feet of the people.

Africa will rid herself of the maniacs. Africa will live to show that "Black is beautiful". Africa is ancient but Asia is ageless. Her nimble and graceful beauty has adorned civilization from the birth of mankind. Latin America has become the castanet of an international culture that links Andalusia to Arabia and the Caribbean. What beauty there is in the tap of her flamenco! Europe is glamorous and adorable, so seductive that she is still beautiful after a number of face lifts. America has been watergated. In that flow of stagnant waters you can behold beauty in its reflection. In etherial terms the whole world is beautiful. In physical terms I have rarely seen more scenic beauty than in California or in Texas. What pains me is to see how the blind power of that most powerful society is turning that beauty into something as sinister as the portrait of Dorian Grey.

The people have realized that Martial Law is not law. A regime not established by law is devoid of the attribute to dispense law. A regime which puts in a bunker the highest law in the land does not have the moral authority to say that nobody is above the law.

We badly need to gather our thoughts and clear our minds. We need a political ceasefire without conceding ideological territory. We need a ceasefire to bury dead thoughts and to overcome fatigue. The modus vivendi has to be honourable and above board. Both sides have lost or, should I say, neither side can win. During the ceasefire a combination of existing forces might create a new order or a new equation between existing forces. Whatever the formula, it cannot be evolved on the battlefield of the old or new cold wars. The new international order has to emerge through the demands of a Third World summit conference. The answer to the North-South conflict, which is more serious than the East-West conflict, has to be found honestly and with unimpeachable integrity. Genuine disarmament will not come on its own or by platitudes at special sessions of the United Nations on disarmament, although, I was among the first to propose such a conference eighteen years ago.

Oh, Mrs. Gandhi is wrong about her father! Nehru instead was a great politician—she should have half her father’s talent! Look, even though he was against the principle of Pakistan, I’ve always admired that man. When I was young I was actually enthralled by him. Only later did I understand that he was a spellbinder with many faults, vain, ruthless, and that he didn’t have the class of a Stalin or a Churchill or a Mao Tse-tung.

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.

Every government, every country, has the right to exercise force when necessary. For instance, in the name of unity. You can’t build without destroying. To build a country, Stalin was obliged to use force and kill. Mao Tse-tung was obliged to use force and kill. To mention only two recent cases, without raking over the whole history of the world. Yes, there are circumstances where a bloody suppres­sion is justifiable and justified.

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.

If the people wanted my head I would bow without demur. If I had lost the confidence or respect of the people I would not want to live. The tragedy of the drama is that the very opposite is true.