Thanks, third eye.
I don't know about that. I'm sure there would be many. But was sending the Bhutto a right choice? Wasn't it Pakistan People's Party which won the highest number of seats in general elections of 1970 (which was first general elections in the history of Pakistan)? So, don't you think sending the Bhutto wasn't a 'neutral' choice?
It sounds a scripted speech in my humble opinion (at least it seems so) and Mr. Bhutto had rehearsed it much. Please no offence be taken if you are a 'Bhutto' lover. Just take it as a comment of an ignorant person!
I don't know if Bhutto should have walked out of the SC and if he should have said whatever he was saying.
Regards
Haroon
This is a really complicated answer. Today there are many shades of political opinion in Pakistan, and it is almost certain that whatever one says will irk one or the other group, or even a combination of them. This answer is based on what I saw happening, what I read afterwards, and the way I interpreted it all - very much from a personal, idiosyncratic point of view. It doesn't have to meet anybody's expectations, so jiyalas, please go easy on me.
Bhutto had a role in the 'deep establishment' from very early days. It was his point of view that Ayub bought in deciding to give Operation Gibraltar the go-ahead, a disastrous decision if there was one. Bhutto explained at length to the generals, Ayub included, that the people in Kashmir would rise in support of the infiltrating special forces commandos, that there would be no escalation by the Indians beyond the LOC, on the international border, and that in any case, China would support Pakistan in case such a thing happened. As it was, in 65, the Kashmiri people were emphatically not ready for an uprising, and pointed out the special forces men to Indian troops; the results of the hot pursuit of the commandos at one stage raised fears about the safety of Muzaffarabad; the second point, no escalation, was also proved wrong when the second phase, Operation Grand Slam, was launched, across the J&K border, and the Indian Army counter-attacked across the international border; the third point, Chinese intervention, was proved dead wrong when China sat peacefully through all the song and dance.
Nevertheless, Bhutto proved to be Teflon-coated. Ayub was roundly abused by everybody for being such a dud leader, but the real author of the mistaken thinking, Bhutto, got away with not a single tarnish on his reputation as a far-seeing and very well-connected statesman of international stature. It was time for round II.
Please remember that there was only six years between 65 and 71. India was disturbed in 48, but went on to do things with Hyderabad, in 49, and with Goa, in 61, which gave her leaders a bad enough conscience to keep quiet about. Over the fullness of time, the scars of 48 would have died out. Relations with Pakistan and with individual Pakistanis was still warm in those days; my parents went to Europe on holiday, my father wanted to see the battlefield of Waterloo, but the then Indian Ambassador to Brussels was unable to put them up. On their meagre allowance, only a friend putting them up would have made the trip possible. So they stayed with the Pakistani Ambassador, Iqbal Athar Ali, an ex-ICS man and old friend of my father's, instead. When they made their duty call on HE the Indian Ambassador, the reception was understandably a little thin-lipped.
Unfortunately, Pakistani politics was on the boil. I dare not go into detail or both the jiyalas and the razakar supporters from the east will come jump on me. At every stage, Bhutto, through his old connections, was in intimate contact with the deep establishment. There are those who wink and look knowing about the origins of his party itself, and the ready support it got, but in all honesty, Bhutto was a demagogic leader with his finger on the public pulse, and had no difficulty in gripping the imagination of the west Pakistani voter.
Perhaps you good people will not understand, but east Pakistan was then in those years in a very bad temper. They were convinced that they were being kept out of government jobs and positions, that they were not given a look into the military and were relegated to subordinate technical positions in each service, and that they were not allowed to expand their numbers in the military to anywhere near their majority of the population in the country. Urdu always seemed to be waiting in the wings to move in and suppress Bengali as a language, Urdu speaking Biharis were not slow to condemn Bengali-speakers for their fealty to Bengali, and the economy was not moving fast enough to provide jobs, which just aggravated matters. On top of all that, if Pakistanis think, from YouTube and stuff like that, that Bhutto was a spell-binding orator, you haven't heard anything. When Mujib stood in front of that crowd in Ramna Maidan and spoke, he was heard across the border in west Bengal, and at that moment, if he had wanted west Bengal to secede and join east Pakistan, nobody knows what might have happened. That was after the election; it was the first, proper, fair election, and the Awami League swept east Pakistan, while the PPP swept west Pakistan.
Bhutto was still cuddled up in the lap of the establishment. He advised the generals, he spoke to the diplomats, he was consulted by the civil servants, he was in the middle of everything, just as much as Mujib was out of everything. And when Yahya took his disastrous decisions to play around with the election results and try to reduce the magnitude of Mujib's victory and the implications, the whole thing exploded.
It was in this context that the generals decided that Bhutto should go to the UN. His brief was clear; he had to drag out whatever he could from the debacle. He did a magnificent job of forensic eloquence; he said all those things you've heard, once alive, now on tape.
It wasn't a neutral choice; it was the generals' choice, but in that day, that year, there was simply nobody who might have been a tenth as good as Bhutto. You called the speech scripted, and it sounded as if Bhutto had researched it much. Believe me, that is precisely what was called for. Pakistan had been in an extremely difficult situation, only the advent of war had averted the constitutional disaster, and now there was a price to pay in the UN. It was Pakistan's duty to concede nothing, to admit nothing, and Bhutto conceded nothing, admitted nothing. In that way of looking at it, it was a master class, by a master.
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