The fez that wasn’t red

The death anniversary of Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan at the end of September provides an opportunity to reflect on his political career that spanned over five decades, probably the longest ever of a politician, in the history of Pakistan. He started politics as an Ahrari but once the Ahrars shunned politics after the formation of Pakistan, he joined the Awami League led by Hussain Shaheed Suhrawardy. His first big test came when General Ayub imposed the martial law in 1958.
Several myths are attributed to his struggle against the military dictatorship. The first one was created by Ayub himself when Suhrawardy formed a broad opposition alliance, National Democratic Front (NDF) against the dictator in October 1962 with Nawabzada as its Convener in West Pakistan. Just as Islamic extremism and Al-Qaeda are the biggest threat these days; ‘the Red Scare’ was trumpeted as the most daunting challenge at the height of the Cold War in the 1960s. Often, the regimes crushed their opponents by branding them communists or their sympathisers. When Nasrullah tried to heat up the opposition by mobilising the masses against the regime, Ayub branded him and his Front as ‘the communist dominated and communist sponsored’ – a reference to Soviet Russia and communist China.
The situation demanded Nasrullah to prove his ideological credentials to be bona fide. Instead of aligning with the progressives, he committed himself to the ‘rightist’ cause by criticising communist China with whom Ayub was warming up at that time: “Do not raise high hope … about friendship with China… how can China which is ideologically so different from you be friends with you for long.” To further prove his anti-communist credentials, he stated, “China believes in a more aggressive type of communism and wants to… extend her sphere of influence in this part of the world.” A little later, when the regime banned the rightist Jamaat-e-Islami and imprisoned its head Maulana Maudoodi, Nasrullah protested, “If this state of affairs continues, it will ultimately lead to the extinction of the right-wing political parties… and believe me, your government sponsored parties will not be able to fill this vacuum.” At the climax of the anti-Ayub movement, he comforted the American diplomats visiting his Nicholson Road residence in Lahore: “The left prospers in violent situations… Its program is a mirage… and totally alien to the philosophy behind the creation of Pakistan… Eventually, the ‘rightists’ would win.”
The second myth generally touted is that it was the Nawabzada, who was the guiding spirit behind all anti-government alliances including the Combined Opposition Parties (COP) that was formed to defeat Ayub in the 1965 presidential election. On the contrary, it was Khawaja Nazimuddin, who came up with the idea of a grand opposition alliance that eventually culminated in the making of COP.
The third myth is that it was Nasrullah Khan, who first proposed the name and later on prevailed upon Mohtarma Fatima Jinnah to contest against the Field Marshal in the presidential election of 1965 as the unanimously approved candidate of the COP; however, the reality is quite different. In fact, heads of some of the parties within the COP had personal ambitions to contest the election to become the president of Pakistan. For example, the Jamaat-e-Islami lobbied for the candidature of Maulana Maudoodi while Maulana Abdul Hameed Bhashani of the National Awami Party (NAP) was himself interested but both were unacceptable to the other parties in the COP. Outside the alliance, the candidate, who was likely to pose a serious challenge to the incumbent was General(R) Azam Khan but this proposition was cunningly subverted on the objections of Bhashani due to Azam’s association with the martial law regime through the courtesy of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who, as the foreign minister of Ayub, paid rupees five lac to Bhashani through his friend Masih-ur-Rehman to eliminate the candidature of Azam Khan.
While the COP was clueless as to who could be their next most suitable choice, it was the ‘Frontier Gandhi’ Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the President of (NAP) in the West Pakistan, who suggested that if anybody in the country could really take on the dictator, it was Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s sister. After much procrastination, Fatima Jinnah agreed but only if Bhashani guaranteed to extend electoral support to her in the then East Pakistan, which the wily ‘Red Mullah of Bengal’ promised by touching his flowing beard but betrayed the ‘Madar-e-Millat’ in the presidential election by directing his party’s Punjab president, C R Aslam to instruct the Basic Democrat members of (NAP) to vote for Ayub Khan.
The fourth myth is that it was the opposition alliance Democratic Action Committee (DAC) formed under the Nawabzada in January 1969 that brought down Ayub’s government whereas the reality is that it was the agitation launched by the PPP under Bhutto in West Pakistan and the radical Student Action Committee (SAC) as well as Sheikh Mujib in the East Pakistan that orchestrated the overthrow of the Ayub regime. Nasrullah’s opposition was pliant believing in non-violent and disciplined measures. That is why the dictator was able to rule for over a decade.
Bhutto was more clearheaded than Nasrullah and his cohorts as how to dislodge a dictator. Bhutto believed that ‘a peaceful and constitutional struggle can never dislodge a dictator…. If the objective of the movement is to remove the dictator than the edifice of law and order has to be shaken… A government can be changed through the vote only in a democracy but it means nothing in dictatorship… A dictatorship can be eliminated through revolution, violent movement… because a dictator neither gives real democratic concessions nor voluntarily gives up power.”
The fifth myth is that the Nawabzada was the greatest of all leaders. To hone the point, his admirers argue that had he been not the most towering of all the politicians, he would not have been accepted as the head of DAC by such political stalwarts as Maulana Maudoodi, Maulana Mufti Mahmood, Wali Khan, Mumtaz Daultana and Nurul Amin but the fact of the matter is that all these bigwigs had competing egos, so, they agreed to Nawabzada’s chairmanship of the DAC because he was “a weak person, amenable to influence.” Even his nemesis Ayub Khan, after some parleys with Nasrullah concluded, “This man has no authority. He is a weak man and they have put him there because he has no opinion of his own.”

The writer is an academic and a journalist. He can be reached at [email protected]