The life and death of Asghar Khan

The death of Air Marshal (retired) Asghar Khan a few days ago in Pakistan brings to an end the life not merely of an individual but perhaps also that of a generation which made a political difference in the country Mohammad Ali Jinnah cobbled into shape in 1947.

Asghar Khan was of course the first Pakistani and therefore the first Muslim to head an air force in a partitioned Indian subcontinent. He was part of the Royal Indian Air Force and like so many others --- Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs --- was compelled by history to choose his future in light of the politics of the times. As a Muslim, as one in sympathy with the cause of the Muslim League, Asghar Khan opted for Pakistan in much the same way that another Muslim, a young officer in the Royal Indian Army named Sahibzada Yaqub Ali Khan, chose to go over to Pakistan when Partition came in 1947.

Asghar Khan served the Pakistan air force with distinction and saw to it that it approximated the modern world in terms of the aircraft and the fighter pilots it accumulated and provided training to. He retired from the air force shortly before India and Pakistan went to war in September 1965. It remained for his successor, Air Marshal Nur Khan, to preside over the air force during the war.

Even so, President Ayub Khan saw to it that Asghar Khan was kept in the loop over the details of the war and images of the former air chief appeared in the newspapers as the conflict ground to an inconclusive result. Asghar Khan then went off to a new field and that was Pakistan International Airlines, which he served with distinction as its chief. After that came his decision to move out of government service.

Perhaps the air marshal would have been content, after the air force and PIA, to live out the remaining years of his life in quiet retirement. But he was too young to go into that mode. Perhaps he would be an advisor somewhere or the other. Perhaps at some point he would join Ayub's government as a member of the cabinet. Perhaps, given the vastness of time he had in his hands, he would write his memoirs. In the end, none of these conjectures, or thoughts if you will, came to pass. What did come to pass was a growing sense of popular resentment against the Ayub regime in both East and West Pakistan. The old field marshal, it was becoming clear, was losing his way and needed to be gently put out to pasture.

It is part of Pakistan's fractured history that Air Marshal Asghar Khan and Justice Syed Mahbub Murshed, former chief justice of the East Pakistan High Court, made their way into politics --- separately of course --- at a time when an increasingly beleaguered Ayub Khan was beginning to demonstrate signs of desperation. In 1968, even as the regime celebrated what it called a decade of progress, really a paean to Ayub's decade-long dictatorial rule, political discontent gathered pace across the country.

Ayub Khan had opened too many fronts to wage his battle to remain in power. In East Pakistan --- and we speak of the year 1968 --- Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the future Bangabandhu, along with thirty four other Bengalis, was being tried on charges of involvement in the Agartala Conspiracy Case. In the West, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Khan Abdul Wali Khan had begun to excite the masses with new ideas of popular rule. Ayub's reaction was swift: he had the security forces promptly arrest Bhutto and Wali.

Within days of the these arrests in West Pakistan, Justice SM Murshed and Air Marshal Asghar Khan publicly made it known that they were making an entry into politics. The arrival of these two men in the political arena was to be an enormous boost to the campaign to force the regime from power. In the twilight of the Ayub regime, Asghar Khan and SM Murshed made a difference. Both took part in the Round Table Conference called by a tottering regime and made it clear that the Ayub dictatorship had to make way for democracy.

It is a sad story that Asghar Khan's politics was never to rise to the heights that Mujib's and Bhutto's did. He first formed a political party he called the Justice Party. Sometime later, he discarded it and went for a new political organization he named the Tehrik-e-Istiqlal (decades later, in Khan's advanced years, it merged with Imran Khan's outfit, which came to be known as the Tehrik-e-Insaf). Asghar Khan's party took part in the December 1970 election but did not win a single seat, though respect for him as an individual was not affected by the results of the vote.

Asghar Khan assumed a statesman-like role in Pakistan during the crisis which erupted when the Yahya Khan regime postponed a scheduled convening of the newly elected national assembly in Dhaka in March 1971. He was one of those rare Pakistani political figures who publicly made it known that power should be handed over to Awami League chief Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in the interest of a preservation of Pakistan's unity as a single state.

Indeed, as Pakistan hurtled toward a conflagration toward the end of March 1971, Asghar Khan sought to have the regime change course, the destructive course it had taken, and hand over power to the Bengali leader. "Sheikh Mujibur Rahman is the last link between East and West Pakistan," he said. "After him, no one knows what will happen." He was to be proved right.

In post-1971 Pakistan, Asghar Khan was to feel the wrath of an arrogant Bhutto, whose excesses in power were endlessly condemned by the former air marshal. When the elections of March 1977 were rigged by the Bhutto government, Asghar Khan joined forces with other opposition politicians, who had already come together under the umbrella of the Pakistan National Alliance, and launched a sustained agitation against the government.

Asghar Khan, uncharacteristically, at one point vowed to have Bhutto hanged if the latter did not concede fresh elections. In all the agitation against the Bhutto government, Asghar Khan's was the strongest, indeed most intransigent voice. Bhutto was compelled to reach a deal on new elections with the PNA late in the evening of 4 July 1977. The deal and the future of democratic politics in Pakistan were, however, set at naught by the coup d'etat imposed on Pakistan by Bhutto's putatively loyal army chief, General Ziaul Haq, in the early hours of 5 July.

It is a sad commentary on Asghar Khan's politics that his differences with Bhutto came in the way of his moral judgment at a time when the fallen prime minister was fighting for his life before Pakistan's pliant judiciary. General Zia was determined to hang Bhutto and Asghar Khan or for that matter other leading figures of the PNA said not a word in his defence or in protest against the questionable manner of his trial. With Bhutto dispatched to his grave, Zia turned his guns on other political leaders, especially Asghar Khan. The Tehrik-e-Istiqlal chief's denunciations of Zia's hold on power did not, naturally, endear him to the regime. And so his sufferings went on.

Ironically, through the 1980s, despite the repression let loose by the Zia dictatorship, Asghar Khan and all the other politicians who had campaigned vigorously in 1977 to push Z.A. Bhutto from power united around the executed leader's daughter Benazir Bhutto in the struggle for a restoration of democracy in Pakistan.

Air Marshal Asghar Khan fell silent, by slow degrees, in the times of General Pervez Musharraf. There were reasons behind his fading away. He was getting on in years. And his politics --- and he --- were becoming irrelevant. At a personal level, it was the father in him that was unable to emerge from the shock of the suicide of a son whose future in politics had appeared to be assured.

Four years short of a century, Asghar Khan died in his native city of Abbotabad on a day that followers of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto observe the birth anniversary of their executed leader.


The writer is Associate Editor, The Asian Age