Sharifuddin Pirzada’s revelations

EDITORIAL: Sharifuddin Pirzada’s revelations
Daily Times, May 8, 2007

The “great” Pakistani lawyer who helped Pakistan’s military dictators change our constitutions to suit their autocratic rule — and who is today Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz’s adviser and who lost his case when President General Pervez Musharraf sent him to the International Court of Justice — has threatened to reveal the war going on between the founder of the country, Mr Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the Quaid-e-Azam, and his lieutenant in politics, Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan, who was Pakistan’s first prime minister.

Mr Pirzada says, “I will try to tell the people in detail about the differences between the two in my book which will come to the market next year”. Mr Pirzada was for some time secretary to Mr Jinnah and says he was witness to the fight, and is now determined to write a tell-all book. No one asked him why he has kept mum for such a long time. He has been talking about the Jinnah-Liaquat quarrel off and on but has preferred to show coyness about writing it all down.

Pakistan has many unsavoury “secrets” simply because they were not revealed when they should have been. Later, when the facts were revealed they were condemned as “mischief” against Pakistan. Most of the events, like the Liaquat-Jinnah quarrel, the “murder” of Ms Fatima Jinnah, and the killing of Liaquat Ali Khan himself, all became conspiracies and today stare an increasingly violent Pakistan in the face.

There was a quarrel between the two great men who worked for Pakistan and if it had been made public at the time when it happened it would have been digested by the people as normal politics. But the effort to hide facts has complicated matters, falsified textbook history and given opportunity to people like Mr Pirzada to pose as great authors. Had he written the book in the early years, the embarrassment that will now ensue could have been avoided.

Actually, the Jinnah-Liaquat quarrel has already been recorded in a scholarly volume. Roger D Long, Professor of History East Michigan University, has contributed an article in the book MA Jinnah: Views & Reviews edited by M R Kazimi (OUP 2005) in which he has offered a balanced view of the incident that compelled Liaquat Ali Khan to offer to resign from his post in a letter dated 27 December 1947. Mr Jinnah, of course, did not accept his proposal to resign, but the letter that Liaquat Ali Khan wrote was preserved in the family archives.

The letter of resignation is written within months of the creation of Pakistan and tells us about some estrangement between Begum Rana Liaquat Ali Khan and Mr Jinnah. It says: “My wife has related to me what you told her last night at your dinner. I am sorry to learn that she has incurred your displeasure for some unknown reason. She could not have possibly done anything to merit such strong criticism and condemnation as for you to say that she was impossible and that she was digging her own grave”.

His offer of resignation was couched in three words — “slipping out quietly” — so that Mr Jinnah, as the architect of Pakistan, could have around him the people he felt good about. He pleaded for his wife: “A prime minister’s wife cannot live in a vacuum. She has to take her due place in the life of the nation, and on account of the opinion you seem to have of her it becomes very embarrassing and difficult for both of us to do our duty in the position which as the prime minister’s wife and I as prime minister occupy”.

Mr Pirzada says he will reveal more than just the Jinnah-Liaquat quarrel. One wonders if he will also narrate his activities during the time when he was appointed attorney general of Pakistan by General Zia-ul Haq during his dictatorship and allowed to carry on his private practice too. There were times when he appeared as a lawyer before judges whose promotions he was in the process of deciding. He can say that his function was not against the law and he would be right. Even his services to all the military dictators were within the law because all dictatorships were tragically indemnified by law in Pakistan. And he was the architect of it all! *