A Friend of Feudalism

masadi #78: "I challenge you to show me one inconsistency unlike you who was rallying behind Musharraf and the Afghan invasion and now does a turnaround..."

you need to calm down a bit, and look at what you are stating......i have already showed on so many items on which you are inconsistent......for starters, i never supported the afghan invasion.....in fact, i wrote an article against it on this site......this is the first point on which you are inconsistent.....like this, you are inconsistent on many points......

- you are pushing the rights of the common man, yet you associate yourself with an individual, who discarded the wishes of the common man of more than 50% of the country......this is an inconsistency...

- the most elitist figures in the world, historically, are landowners.....it is only when the power of the landowner was broken, all over the world, that the common man gained some ground....bhutto was an out and out feudal, who represented the feudal class, through and through, and his family still represents them......it doesn't matter what he said......you need to look at who he was and what he represented......this is an inconsistency......

- another form of elitism, is family dominance of institutions, politics, etc........surely, you cannot deny that bhutto's politics are dominated by his family......can you name any other political party in pakistan, which has only had one family running it......i challenge you to name one that has had a change of leadership and it never moved outside one family.....and that too a feudal family...all other parties have had, at least, some movement outside families........this is the height of elitism.......and another inconsistency

- bhutto did not introduce socialism.....he introduced crony socialism......which destroyed the common man as it made him poorer......did the banks become more accessible to the common man because they were nationalised.....did the education system become better for the common man, because it went through crony nationalism........so on and so forth......the common man was lucky that the middle east opened up during that time, other wise he would have starved.....

did bhutto get rid of the feudalistic structure of his party.....how many common men, have reached the top of his party......bhuttos (zulfiqar, nusrat, mumtaz, benazir, murtaza), khar, jatoi, gilani, makhdoom fahim, faisal hayat, abida hussain, etc. look like common men/women to you....even the urban class includes people like aitezaz ashan etc..certainly not common men.......most of all, did bhutto even get rid of the feudalistic structure of his own family.....

so you support a feudal man, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, who studied in a country you despise, who ran a family-owned party, with its own security force, whose party's top hierarchy were (and still are) all elitists, who sidelined the views of over 50% of the common men of a country, resulting in a break-up of a country, and who ran a govt. which reduced opportunities for common man.......apparently, you support him because he made exciting speeches about roti, kapra aur makaan......

.....your criteria is rhetoric and not facts......

amazing!! there is nothing wrong with supporting bhutto......but, then you lose the right to the sociological views, you keep presenting.......in fact, the views you are presenting are the ones bhutto presented.....unfortunately, it was only a presentation......his actions were contradictory to his views.......

Masadi sahib,

May I know what exactly ZA Bhoot acheived in his tenure in power apart from declaring Ahmedis as non-Muslims? He sc***** up the economy thru his nationalisation programme and all that while his so-called land reforms remained on paper. His slogan of Roti Kapda and Makaan was just like him, plain sham.

Regards

Regards

I know that many of you here like Manto are reading challenged, they think reading is about copy pasting and personal attacks of the Ad Hominem kind, so for their benefit let me help you with the quote from ZAB that I reproduced below.

The guy is staring death in the face in his miserable cell and he writes the part reproduced below about the common man, the proletariat, the worker. Now what kind of trickery is he after invoking the common man when the class he derails in the same quote, the one that will not accept any equitable solution till it is overthorwn completely, has just put him in the gallows to get rid of him? Please explain this to me Bulleya and Manto. You cannot because you know the man tried, tried and failed while becomming the most popular leader in Pakistan's history among the common man not because of the family he belonged to or the brand of clothing he wore, but because he invoked principles of socialism, something that the people of Pakistan and all poor and toiling masses of the third world demand and desire. That is what true democracy is about not the BS of the MAJ. End of story. Not interested in any more discussions about ZAB, the guy is dead, and gone, he left a great mark on Pakistan and great hope for the world's poor in their struggle against the elite, for which Allah will surely reward him regardless of what the sobs say.

ZAB in If I am Assassinated

"If I were assassinated" in which he drew the lessons from the experiencie. He said: "I am suffering this ordeal partly because I sought an honourable and equitable middle way between conflicting interests, in order to harmonise the disjointed structure of our society. It seems that the lesson of this coup d'Etat is that a middle way, a modus vivendi, a compromise is a utopian dream. The coup demonstrates that the class struggle is irreconcilable and that it must result in the victory of one class over the other. Obviously, whatever the temporary set backs, the struggle can lead only to the victory of one class, the proletariat."

Manto writes "Just then, the driver stopped the car as one of the traffic lights on Murree Road turned red. Having heard me seconds before, he (Bhutto) told the driver, ‘Drive on, no one can stop me!’ This was the difference"

Pakistani scholarship at its best, Ad Hominem and he said she said and "look at his morals" while claiming to be "better than thou". Is that all you can muster fool?
One causes the death of over a million and relegates hundreds of millions to reactionary discrimination and misery, the other goes directly to the people, listens to them and tries to consolidate the resources of this nation for its people. The difference is crystal clear, ZAB anyday!

bulleya writes "masadi #: i am afraid you are changing the rules as your arguments change......you need to make up your mind on what you stand for:"

Nonsense, not changed or being inconsistent in one thing. I challenge you to show me one inconsistency unlike you who was rallying behind Musharraf and the Afghan invasion and now does a turnaround...

Then he writes "how did bhutto make the plight of the common man his issue, other than simply making speeches about it.....he certainly wasn't too concerned about the plight of the common man in east pakistan...i hope you agree with this....."

You make the plight of the common man an issue when you visit every single village in Punjab and listen to the people, you make it a plight when you not only talk the socialism talk but implement it. You make the plight of the common man an issue when you try to get rid of the foreign BS that is keeping your people down. You take care of the people when you try to fix foreign issues that are bleeding the nation, you make the poor a priority when you raise the independance issue on the international forum and represent the poor....not to mention the land reform that was extremely hard to pass in a feudal country, going against the elite that hated the man....catch my drift? Only a fool would stretch himself to the East and fail miserably, but that is no reason to assert that he wasnt concerned with the plight of the common man in the East, if he wasnt he wouldn't have set Mujib free, if he wasn't he wouldn't have jumped the ocean to represent the poor in Africa....you don't have a foot to stand upon Army supporter...

Then he writes "why is this not your concern?...."

It is not my concern because I am not a PPP supporter, I support the efforts of the ZAB alone in trying to mainstream democracy and people power in this country.That he was setting up a monarchial system is your whim. He failed to implement the socialism that he wanted and the democracy that he wanted, after achieving much, the military coopted what little achievement were made. The BB was part of that cooptation, why should I support her? I do not. Bhutto was not an angel or a magician, I am not presenting him as such. He talked the talk of the global poor and he walked the walk in that direction as well. In the Pakistan political scence he was a maverick who went against the structures of Power, in whatever ineffective way but go against them he did, go agaisnt the imperialists he did, and he was punished for that. It would be injustice to take that away from him. In fact his case is the only case that gives me some hope for this nation. MAJ and his church are part of the same game the colonials have been playing with us for centuries, do not think of someone who has managed to push through the corridors of power with direct appeals to the people who loved him, in an environment like Pakistan, to race through reforms, it is a small incremental process unless there is a revolution, and there was no revolution though the catastrophie of 1971 offered him an open window in which to achieve much and he did...

The High Priest of the Church of MAJ responds with the same old bs, he throws a name out but does not show how that "name" disputes even a single one of the indusputed facts that I presented. Those facts aren't in the ancient history, they are well known from PRIMARY documents, from newspapers and papers that are widely available. They are no secret and he repeats his bs about Fatima Jinnah. She LOST, people wanted to capitalize on the entire industry of legitimization of the Jinnah that the creation of Pakistan produced, as monarchial succession, they failed, that is all and that was it...

masadi #: i am afraid you are changing the rules as your arguments change......you need to make up your mind on what you stand for:

"...The fact that ZAB made the plight of the common man and the integrity of this nation state his main campaign issue in the elections, and mainstreamed the people as powerful says a lot about his great leadership...."

how did bhutto make the plight of the common man his issue, other than simply making speeches about it.....he certainly wasn't too concerned about the plight of the common man in east pakistan...i hope you agree with this.....

now, in west pakistan, what was his concern?......did he do anything to remove the plight of the common name.....did he remove feudalism; what to talk of the whole country, did he even remove it in his own family?......

".....That is not my concern, my concern was with the people's agenda of the ZAB, not the cooptation of his party by the elites thereafter....."

why is this not your concern?....it is your concern when it comes to usa and to fatima jinnah and to your general concepts of sociology.....but when it comes to bhutto, it is not your concern!!.......

i am not talking of the, "cooptation" of bhutto's party by elites....i am talking about him and his family......his personal views.....the whole party is a single family elitist party...that family is the bhutto family.......how much more elitist can anyone be, then to put one's own personal relatives as the heads of one's own party, which by the way is based totally on feudalism......

.....a feudal family, heading a political party in a third world country is the ultimate peak of elitism.....bhutto founded all of this.....on top of this, bhutto took out the one major awami movement that was about to occur in east pakistan........he did so with the assistance of the military......

there is absolutely nothing more elitist, personally, or publicly than what bhutto did and represented.......this elitism is what you are always arguing against......yet when it comes to bhutto, your argument and principle makes a 180 degree turn.......

you need to look at the actions of people and not the words they speak.......bhutto, in his words, represented what you say......in his actions, and personal life, he represented exactly what u oppose.......

Majumdar,

In my view most heterodox communities of a mainstream orthodoxy tend to be far ahead of the mainstream.

I wish that close to the the end of his life... MAJ would have chosen his clients wisely... because a man is known by the company he keeps.

Manto mian,

It was quite unfortunate for us Hanuds/Injuns that MAJ (pbuh) was born in a Gujarati Muslim baniya household and MKG in a Gujarati Hindu baniya one. It wud have been much better if the roles had been reversed. In any case, MAJ was far ahead of his times for the IM community of that era.

Regards

Also:

"In the subcontinent, very few leaders emerged from the underprivileged background. The rare ones, who emerge from the poverty, ended up becoming avatars. Both Jinnah and Gandhi were of a lower middleclass background. Similarly Mujib, too was from a similar lower middleclass background."

Mahomed Ali Jinnah was son of a khoja merchant- who was not very wealthy but not very poor either. By definition he was certainly middle class.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was the son of a Diwan (a minister of sorts) of a Princely state and was born in wealth... though he was by caste the same as Mahomed Ali Jinnah ... and was certainly not a feudal.

I don't know about Mujeeb's early origisn except the oft repeated claim that he used to cycle from town to town following Mahomed Ali Jinnah during the Pakistan movement.

I think Sardar Patel was the politician who emerged from truly humble background but I might be wrong.

Re: # 66

HP writes:

Bhutto did support the army and I think it was Bhutto who actually planned how the whole thing would work. Gen. yahya spend days in Larkana in early 1971 consulting with Bhutto over these issues and when they came out of those meetings, east Pakistan's fate was sealed.

So in other words Bhutto was the military establishment's B-Team.

Rafi Raza - Bhutto's confidant- claims in his book on Bhutto that Bhutto confessed to Rafi Raza that the military regime under Yahya had rigged the elections in West Pakistan to get Bhutto a mandate to offset the Awami League-National Awami Party alliance.

Pakistan would have been better off with six points. And remember this whole idea of Bangladesh as part of Pakistan resulted from Congress' refusal in 1947 to entertain a United Bengal with Sarat Bose, Suhrawardy and Jinnah had agreed to.

Masadi mian,

"Not disputed by a single historian"

Read "Zulfi Bhutto of Pakistan" by Stanley Wolpert. Let us just say your "facts" are not even considered facts. Since you've not quoted any historian per se... I think your claim- as with most of your "scholarship" is sham.

You still haven't explained why was it that people like Wali Khan - son of Ghaffar Khan- put their faith in Fatima Jinnah despite being Jinnah's doughtiest opponents? So much for your monarchial succession theory. It was because they realised that only Fatima Jinnah had the popular appeal (because she was the sister of Quaid-e-Azam) and integrity required for the job...

Ironic that of all the politicians you blame the one man - Jinnah- who did not create a political dynasty for "monarchial succession" ... just because a wide range of political leaders chose his sister.

Meanwhile Raja Dahir of Larkana... the avid law breaker Mr. Bhutto... self styled Napoleon Bonaparte of Pakistan is some sort of a "democrat" and a "populist". The only thing Zulfikar Ali Bhutto tried to be was Machiavelli's prince... and failed miserably at that because Zia-ul-Haq proved to be even more unscrupulous and dishonest than ZAB.



The slippery pole of Pakistan's decline in the calibre of leadership is perhaps most aptly captured in Gul Hassan's memoirs:

Whenever he could, the Quaid-e-Azam, accompanied by Miss Jinnah, would drive out to Malir in the evening. This was his only relaxation. I always took a spare car, in which Inspector (later SP) FD Hansotia of the police rode behind us. He was permanently assigned to protect the Quaid-e-Azam. There was no other escort. It seems strange when I compare those days with what happens now, when the escort of any dignitary is as menacing as the advance guard of an armoured division, if not more dangerous. On one of these drives, the rail crossing at Malir was shut and our car stopped. I looked around and saw that the train was some distance away, so I went to the gatekeeper and asked him to let us go through, of course telling him who was in the car. He obliged, I returned to my seat next to the driver, Aziz, and told him to move on. He answered that the Quaid-e-Azam had told him to stay put. Just then the Governor-General told me to go and tell the gatekeeper to close the gate. I did as I was bid and resumed my seat. He then said, ‘Gul, do you know why I told the driver not to move the car?’ I replied, ‘No sir’. He said the reason was simple: ‘If I do not obey the law, how should I expect others to do so?’ This brief statement affected me greately. Though the Head of State, he considered himself as bound by law as any other citizen. Such a demonstration is only possible by men who are truly great.

Years later, I was driving with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to the Chinese Ambassador’s residence for dinner, a day prior to our trip to Beijing in 1971. Bhutto had won the elections in West Pakistan and Yahya Khan deputed him to go to China as the head of a delegation of which I was a member. He asked me to tell him what had impressed me most during my stay with the Quaid-e-Azam. I told him this story. Just then, the driver stopped the car as one of the traffic lights on Murree Road turned red. Having heard me seconds before, he (Bhutto) told the driver, ‘Drive on, no one can stop me!’ This was the difference. The one who had given us Pakistan was law-abiding; the other, who held no office then, was above the law! And he would, when he assumed office, be more disdainful of any such curbs." (Memoirs, by Lt. General Gul Hasan, Oxford, Karachi, 1993, pp. 75-76).

HP Sain,

Were the 6 Points incompatible with the Lahore Resolution? In my (based on limited knowledge) opinion, not? Would like to have your opinion on this.

Regards

HP writes "However, The Six points program of Mujib was not to keep Pakistan united. It was a program which would have eventually led to the separation of east Pakistan in a few years down the line."

And the eventual seperation of NWFP, Baluchistan and maybe even Sind, facilitated by India; or at the very least a military coup in short succession that would have undone the whole process. Am I wrong?

To be very factual the mizaj of whatever we call Pakistan..& we always consider Pakistan which is a couple of big cities where such fancy subjects as "democracy" are an issue.

The NWFP , when not interfered by western brainwashing aka "education", is the true democractic traditions of Jirgas & solving their problems in their own cultural & traditional ways.

The "feudals" so much maligned have their own system & are no more uglier than the Commissioned officers & Civil Servants, in fact worse because they are not on "welfare"..meaning barking at taxpayers expense. Somehow we equate theater performance and role-playing as a westerner as "progress" ( ritual) ..just as we count savaab as so many times for this or that ritual (like roza ). We are shameless & unabashed "deal-makers". The nanga-pUn going ons in Islamabad, Dubai , Ryadh and London at present is a mirror-image of us....the laughing stock of the world....the self-delusioned "urban" "middle-class" [code words for english speaking, suit wearing, amreeka-palats]

Once when Sardar Ataullah Mengal, NawaB amir Muohammed Khan ( then Gov. west Pak) & Ayub ( Pres. ) were together discussing some matter. When Mengal raised his voice high & chided Ayub, Kalabagh requested him to exercise restraint to which Mengal, aghast said to Kalabagh iright in front of Ayub: " Nawab sahib, this guy is a naukar, he is on wages, how can you ever compare him to you & I"

The worst thing that has happened to both India & Pakistan is this transplanted system of "democracy" & the dissolution of States. Hyderbad Bhopal Rampur have yet been not replaced even to their 10% level in all spheres of activities. The Great Mughals did not interfere in the Panchayat system & never ever disturbed the ground-roots of all culture & tradition