The Longest August (34 page)

Under Bhutto, the Pakistani military's traditional doctrine that India was enemy number one remained intact. It was politically expedient for him to promote the idea of Pakistan facing a foe. This provided a strong incentive for the populations of the four Pakistani provinces to subordinate their linguistic, subnational loyalty to the overarching patriotism of Pakistan sharing borders with a powerful adversary.

Released of its linkage with the subcontinent's eastern zone, post-1971 Pakistan started looking westward to the Persian Gulf region, including Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam. The dramatic prosperity of the Gulf monarchies stemming from the quadrupling of oil prices in 1973–1974 created an unprecedented demand for the Muslim workers of Pakistan. That in turn strengthened religious sentiment in their native land and pushed Indian and Pakistani societies further apart.

Pakistan's new constitution, finished in March 1973, described Islam as the country's official religion, thus highlighting Bhutto's commitment to the doctrine of Islamic socialism. (As it was, with the loss of a substantial Hindu population in East Pakistan, the proportion of Hindus in the rest of Pakistan had declined sharply to a tiny 2 percent.) It stipulated parliamentary government. A provision barred any change in the constitution, which was unveiled on August 14, 1973. With that Bhutto became the prime minister of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

By then Bangladesh had its first general election under its own constitution and returned Shaikh Mujibur Rahman as prime minister.

In February 1974 the Islamic Conference Organization in Lahore provided an opportunity to reconcile two leading Muslim nations, Pakistan and Bangladesh. A special delegation flew to Dhaka (the renamed Dacca) and returned to Lahore, along with Shaikh Rahman. The Pakistani parliament then authorized Bhutto to recognize Bangladesh. After doing so, he traveled to Bangladesh and laid a wreath at its war memorial at Savar Upazila, fifteen miles northwest of Dhaka—a gesture warmly appreciated by Bangladeshis but controversial in Pakistan.

Once India had signed a supplementary agreement with Pakistan, the repatriation of the Pakistani POWs followed. With this event, Bhutto could rightly claim that he had wiped off the last vestige of humiliation suffered by the pre-1971 Pakistan.

Bhutto quietly moved toward converting the LoC in Kashmir into an international border in 1974. He incorporated the Northern Areas into Pakistan. And his government assumed direct authority to administer Azad Kashmir, which was tantamount to Pakistan incorporating the territory—something Delhi had done earlier in the case of India-held Kashmir.

Meanwhile, in India, Shaikh Muhammad Abdullah, then under house arrest in Delhi, was ruminating on the 1971 Bangladesh War. He concluded that it was better to end the politics of confrontation, which had the potential of causing further breakups in Pakistan and India. “Our
quarrel with the Government of India is not about accession but about the quantum of autonomy,” he said in February 1972. He was released later in the year. Protracted talks between the appointed personal representatives of Abdullah and Gandhi led to the signing of the Kashmir Accord in November 1974. “The State of Jammu and Kashmir which is a constituent unit of the Union of India, shall, in its relation with the Union, continue to be governed by Article 370 of the Constitution of India, ” read the accord.
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In the end, Abdullah settled for genuine self-rule in the state by a government elected in free and fair elections. He became the chief minister of Kashmir in February 1975 after disbanding the Plebiscite Front and reviving the moribund National Conference.

These developments signaled a lowering of Indo-Pakistan tensions on the Kashmir problem. But there was no progress on any of the subjects listed in Article III of the Shimla Agreement on normalization of relations: establishing greater communications through all available means, promoting travel facilities, resuming trade and economic cooperation, and making exchanges in science and culture.

India's Peaceful “Smiling Buddha”

In any case, Bhutto and Gandhi got distracted by turmoil on the domestic political scene. Bhutto faced insurgency in Baluchistan. And the quadrupling of oil prices in late 1973 and early 1974 spiked inflation in India, whose foreign reserves fell dangerously low because of the hard currency payments it had to make for oil imports. Nonviolent mass protest gathered momentum, and Gandhi's Congress Party was blamed for corruption and misrule.

To divert popular attention, Gandhi authorized an underground explosion of “a peaceful nuclear device”—code-named Smiling Buddha—at the Pokhran military firing range, located between the Rajasthani cities of Jodhpur and Jaisalmer, on May 18, 1974. Its yield was put at twelve kilotons. The official statement said that further experiments would be conducted to perfect “nuclear devices,” adding that it was all “for peaceful purposes.”
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This detonation was the climax of a process initiated by the research of Homi J. Bhabha, an Indian nuclear physicist, in 1944 at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay. He lobbied officials and leading politicians in Delhi to sponsor nuclear research. Among those
who agreed with him was Jawaharlal Nehru. “I have no doubt India will develop its scientific researches and I hope Indian scientists will use the atomic force for constructive purposes,” Nehru said in June 1946. “But if India is threatened, she will inevitably try to defend herself by all means at her disposal.”
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As the prime minister, Nehru set up the Indian Atomic Energy Commission in 1948 under Bhabha. Six years later the Bhabha Atomic Research Center in Trombay, a suburb of Bombay, purchased a research reactor code-named CIRUS (Canadian-Indian Reactor, US) using heavy water (deuterium oxide) supplied by the United States.
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It went critical only in July 1960. After China's defeat of India in the October 1962 war, Bhabha publicly called for developing nuclear weapons as a means of deterring potential Chinese aggression. His proposal got the official green light after Beijing tested its atomic bomb two years later, when Lal Bahadur Shastri was prime minister.
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The nuclear test at Pokhran used plutonium derived from the reprocessed spent fuel from the CIRUS reactor. The nuclear program had so far cost India $1 billion, with its current annual budget running at $140 million.
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However, it would be only in 1980 that India would be able to put its nuclear weapon into service.

Unsurprisingly, the government in Islamabad did not accept Delhi's pronouncement of peaceful intentions. At a press conference, Bhutto declared that Pakistan would not be threatened by India's “nuclear blackmail.” Returning to the same subject three weeks later, he claimed that India's nuclear program was designed to intimidate Pakistan and establish “hegemony in the subcontinent” and that Pakistan would develop a nuclear program in response to India's nuclear test.
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The Pokhran explosion marked the start of a nuclear arms race between the two traditional rivals, with Bhutto—having secured financial assistance for his nuclear enterprise from a few oil-rich Arab states, including Libya under Colonel Muammar Gaddafi—coining the catchy term “Islamic atom bomb.” He argued that the possession of a nuclear weapon by Christian, Jewish, and Hindu countries had highlighted the deficiency of a Muslim nation in this regard. In his argument there was apparently no place for China, ruled by the atheistic Communist Party of China, but that mortal flaw in his argument did not bother him.

To burnish his Islamic credentials at home, Bhutto rejected the Ahmadi minority's pleas in 1974 that they were Muslim, and declared them non-Muslim.
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He did so to placate the ulema (religious scholars). He had often felt susceptible to the Islamist groups' attacks on him for being a son of a Hindu mother, Lakhi Bai. They willfully overlooked her conversion
to Islam and name change to Khurshid before marrying Sir Shah Nawaz Bhutto. Nor did they take note of the fact the founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, had married a Zoroastrian who converted to Islam.

As a symbol of socialism, Bhutto started wearing a cap worn by Mao Zedong as well as an open-collar Mao jacket. Crucially, he nationalized all banks and insurance companies and seventy other industrial enterprises, including some medium-sized factories, thus breaking the power of the top twenty-two families who dominated Pakistan's nonfarm economy.

Simultaneously, his program to expand the military continued. Despite the loss of more than half of its citizens following East Pakistan's secession, Pakistan expanded its armed forces from 370,000 in 1971 to 502,000 in 1975.
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As a result of a series of Sino-Pakistan agreements signed by the Bhutto government, China became the main supplier of military hardware to Pakistan. Ties between the two became stronger and extended to the nuclear industry following Bhutto's visit to Beijing as leader of the high-level Pakistani military and scientific delegation in June 1976. China agreed to revive the nuclear reactor in Karachi originally sold by Canada in 1965. More importantly, it contracted to supply Pakistan uranium hexafluoride, UF6—commonly called “yellow cake”—a compound used as feedstock in the uranium enrichment process that produces fuel for nuclear reactors and weapons.
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In July 1976 work started on the Engineering Research Laboratory (renamed Kahuta Research Laboratory in 1983), code-named Project 706, in Kahuta, a village twenty-five miles southeast of Rawalpindi, the twin city of Islamabad. Bhutto placed it under the joint authority of Lieutenant General Zahid Ali Akbar of the Army Corps of Engineers and Abdul Qadeer Khan, a nuclear scientist, who had convinced Bhutto to pursue a uranium enrichment path, instead of plutonium (which India had done), to build an atom bomb. Bhutto gave Qadeer Khan the deadline of seven years to assemble one. The scientist would meet that challenge, thanks to the active assistance of China.

Born in the central Indian city of Bhopal, Qadeer Khan was sixteen when his parents migrated to Pakistan. After graduating in physical metallurgy from Karachi University, this oval-faced Pakistani with an intense gaze, a clipped mustache, and raven black hair pursued further studies in West Berlin; Delft, Holland; and Leuven, Belgium, between 1962 and 1971. He obtained undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in metallurgy and engineering. In between, he married Hendrina Donkers, a Dutch woman, and they had two daughters. This pointed to his acquiring Dutch
citizenship. In March 1972 he got a job with an engineering company, Physical Dynamics Research Laboratory (acronym in Dutch: FDO), in Amsterdam as a metallurgist.

Qadeer Khan's fluency in English, Dutch, and German proved a great asset to FDO when it got a subcontract to develop a better version of centrifuges for enriching uranium from URENCO,
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a consortium of Britain, Holland, and West Germany formed in 1970 to manufacture centrifuges to produce enriched uranium for use in power plants and nuclear weapons. He thus got free access to the design and manufacturing of centrifuges and the suppliers of various parts and materials. His declaration to his employers that he intended to take up Dutch citizenship eased his way to getting security clearance.

Enraged by the explosion of the “Smiling Buddha” by India, he addressed a letter to Bhutto in which he explained that he had gained expertise in centrifuge-based uranium enrichment technologies at URENCO's laboratory in Almelo, Holland. On his arrival in Karachi with his family in December 1974, he was whisked off to Islamabad. He explained to Bhutto that producing fuel for one atom bomb through uranium enrichment would cost a paltry $60,000. Bhutto was convinced. Once Pakistan's uranium enrichment program got going in early 1975, Qadeer Khan started channeling secret technical information from URENCO to Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, head of Project 706. With the 1976 Chinese agreement to supply yellow cake to Pakistan, Bhutto's dream started to turn into reality.

“We were on the threshold of full nuclear capability when I left the government to come to this death cell,” wrote Bhutto in his memoirs,
If I Am Assassinated
, published posthumously in late 1979. “We know that Israel and South Africa have full nuclear capability. The Christian, Jewish and Hindu civilizations have this capability. The Communist powers also possess it. Only the Islamic civilization was without it, but that situation is about to change.”
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Domestic Setbacks for Bhutto-Gandhi Duo

In India, any feel-good sentiment among its nationals, sparked by the nuclear device explosion in May 1974, soon vanished as continued high inflation and scarcity of essential goods showed no sign of abating. In Gujarat the protest movement initiated by university students spread so
quickly that it caused the downfall of Gandhi's Congress Party ministry there. By the end of the year, all opposition parties except the CPI rallied around Jaya Prakash Narayan, a nonparty personality of high, unblemished caliber. Its demands now included eradication of corruption in politics and government bureaucracy and an overhaul of the inequitable electoral system corrupted by the Congress Party. In the midst of this turbulence, in June 1975, a court invalidated Gandhi's parliamentary seat won on the corrupt practice of using government facilities and resources during her 1971 election campaign. Instead of stepping down, she had the president, Fakhuruddin Ali Ahmad, declare an emergency. She started ruling by decree.

In Pakistan, Bhutto turned nationalization into a political tool and extended it to all wheat-milling, rice-husking, and cotton-ginning units in 1976 to enfeeble his opponents. His autocratic manner alienated many left-wingers and others who had joined the PPP in droves at its birth.

On the eve of the general elections in March 1977, all opposition factions and disempowered interest groups coalesced to form the nine-party Pakistan National Alliance (PNA), covering both religious and secular elements, to challenge the PPP.