Bhutto couldn’t get along with Baloch leaders: Najam Sethi

Karachi
Saturday, the second day of the Karachi Literature Festival, was devoted to panel discussions and interactive sessions participated in by Pakistani litterateurs, academics and media persons as well as those from overseas.
One of the first sessions to be held in the morning was ‘Politics and Personalities of Pakistan: In Conversation with Najam Sethi’.
It was moderated by former principal of Lahore’s Aitchison College and former Civil Service of Pakistan official Agha Ghazanfar.
The speaker was noted print and television journalist Najam Sethi, who reminisced about his interaction with various political personalities of the country of an era gone by.
He narrated how during the troubles in the former East Pakistan, while he was a student at Cambridge in England, Pakistani students, including himself, used to demonstrate outside the Pakistan High Commission in London to persuade the then Pakistani government to refrain from punitive action against the Bengalis and instead reach a political settlement with them.
He said they constantly protested against Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s stance on the issue. “However, Bhutto was totally authoritarian,” he said, adding that the late Pakistan People’s Party founder would not listen to anybody.
Sethi said they had predicted that after East Pakistan, the next trouble spot would be Balochistan, a prediction that, he said, turned out to be absolutely accurate.
He described his period of incarceration in Hyderabad during the later years of the Bhutto tenure as well as his evaluation and interaction with all the other political leaders who had been condemned to the same fate.
He also talked about how in 1974 while in Quetta, he was approached by the police chief of the province as well as a former senior police official who was a top boss in the federal government, MAK Chaudhry, who told him that he had been charged with conspiracy to break up Pakistan.
Chaudhry had asked Sethi to accompany them to Islamabad by helicopter. He refused and then through protracted negotiations the matter was resolved.
As Sethi put it, Asif Ali Zardari was dead opposed to Benazir returning to Pakistan because he was sure that her life would be in danger.
Sethi described how he was told to stop writing about the corruption and improprieties of Shahbaz Sharif and about his clash in 1999 with Nawaz Sharif, who, he said, had him handed over to the agencies for settling scores.
As for Pervez Musharraf, Sethi said the former president had said in an interview that the Kargil operation was just the right thing to do.
He said that after 9/11, he had called a meeting of media persons and explained to them as to why he had decided to fully side with the US in the War on Terror.
Talking about Khair Bakhsh Marri, Sethi said he was a very private person and a recluse. As for Ghous Bakhsh Bizenjo, he said he was a diplomat par excellence.
Bhutto, Sethi said, could not get along with Baloch leaders. “Nowadays the media are relatively free and there’s a semblance of democracy. Therefore, rulers just can’t afford to be as authoritarian as they were 40 years ago.”