The man who knew too much

Lawyer, former left wing Political Activist and founder of the Sanjan Nagar Institute of Philosophy and Arts, Raza Kazim talks to Shahid Saeed about his involvement in the 1984 coup attempt and his subsequent disillusionment with the country's state of affairs

The 1984 coup was an attempt by a group of lower level army officers, supported by Mustafa Khar and Ali Mahmood, to overthrow the government of General Zia ul Haq. The plotters were trapped by the intelligence agencies, arrested in January 1984, tried and finally sentenced to long prison terms. Like the previous coup-attempt in 1980 (by war hero Maj Gen Tajammul Hussain Malik and some serving officers), the plot was nipped in the bud. Raza Kazim was framed as a main plotter by the powers that be, even though he had had no contact with the plotters for more than a year.

I meet Raza Kazim at his spacious Lahore residence. He’s almost 80, but he’s still practicing law and is due to appear before the Supreme Court the next day. He asks me to shoot questions, as he has to leave for Islamabad shortly.

The Friday Times (TFT): What was your involvement in the 1984 coup attempt?

Raza Kazim (RK): I had merely given one lakh rupees to some of the accused a year or so before they were caught. I had no role in planning the coup, nor did I know of it. Mustafa Khar asked me to financially help them [the accused] for political awareness when we met in London at the residence of Ali Mahmood, whom I met through Faiz sahib and who was the nephew of Yusuf Haroon.

TFT: You gave Rs. 100,000 to people you did not know for reasons of political awareness. Isn’t that too large a sum to give to strangers and didn’t you think they were up to something nasty?

RK: I was bitterly against Zia ul Haq and I had served jail time in 1981 in Kot Lakhpat because I had written and published a pamphlet called “ Munafiqat ka iqtidar khatam karo ” (End the reign of hypocrisy). I had been against every government since 1948 after joining the Communist Party in that February. I had been a dissident against the colonials and the feudals even before Partition and I had organized strikes against the British. Though I left the party in 1951 and continued to work with trade unions, I had served time in Sialkot Jail during Liaquat Ali Khan’s government in 1950. I served time in Ayub’s and Bhutto’s governments as well. So, I was naturally willing to support anybody who would help build political awareness in the society, especially amongst groups that are kept isolated from political maturity and vision.

TFT: How did you give them the money?

RK: They [the army officers] just walked into my house like you did and I provided the money in installments. They introduced themselves, not with real names of course. They were not in uniform. I did not ask their rank or postings and as I had earlier worked in the [Communist] Party underground myself, I had enough discretion that if somebody is working underground, you don’t want to know real details. By December 1982 I had already stopped giving them money and met them last in January 1983 after which I was ‘disconnected’, as they put it.

TFT: How was the money spent by the group?

RK: I did not ask at that time and came to know about how they wasted the money only later. They bought an old Volkswagen, cutlery, crockery, scotch, whiskey and what not. They did not use it for political pamphleteering.

TFT: What were the motivations of [Major] Aftab and the others? Did they have a sound political ideology?

RK: [Major] Aftab first tried to woo the Jama’at e Islami through his brother who used to work in Amsterdam. When he failed, through the same brother he tried contacting dissidents from the People’s Party and Khar happened to be living abroad at that time. Aftab was shopping for some people who would lend support to his own vision. I never shared Aftab’s vision or mental formation.

He was a very troubled soul and he was power crazy to the level of insanity. He thought of himself as a savior, and the coup was the road to power for the messiah. I saw him with his wife and kids when they used to visit him in Attock and he was quite insensitive and cold and I could see no humanity in him.

The others were merely hanging around for power, mere deviants. Even those who were acquitted were people mostly unfit for promotion. Ali Mahmood was obsessed with becoming the Prime Minister of the country. All of them were power hungry whether it was Mustafa Khar or Ali Mahmood. Both had plans to liquidate each other if they succeeded. They were that kind of a bunch. [They were] power crazy like most people in the post-Pakistan culture where personal ambition overrules everything else.

TFT: In your earlier interview-based book, you explain your reasons for not escaping the country after having been notified about your impeding arrest. Don’t you think that letting down your children and abandoning them is a fairly unconvincing argument?

RK: They wanted me to run and were merely observing for nine days before they arrested me. The best thing for them was if I ran, since they would have liked to kill me and throw my dead body near the Indian border and claim I was killed while trying to cross the border. If I had succeeded in running away to anywhere, then they would have said that I had proved my guilt. In either case, they would have proved their [fabricated] case. They were not interested in me and I was the ‘mastermind’ for the purpose of their case. They wanted to write down that Army officers are very loyal and here is a leftist lawyer who has corrupted the minds of innocent officers. The ‘poison’, and the ‘biggest threat’ as Akhtar Abdur Rehman put it to the Zia regime, now removed, it would have ‘purified’ the Army.

K M Arif called me a ‘pseudo-intellectual from Lahore’ in his book. On one hand, I am a pseudo-intellectual and on the other hand I am the ‘mastermind’ of the conspiracy.

TFT: When were you transferred to Attock Fort?

RK: I was incarcerated with the SIB of the ISI for nine months and kept in a 4 feet by 6 feet cell with a high ceiling. Attock was like heaven compared to the earlier cell. There we got to meet each other compared to the SIB cells where we were supposed to go insane.

TFT: Did they torture you during the investigation?

RK: They did not beat me up at any time. They sent me twice to the psychiatric ward, for five weeks and three weeks respectively, and there I really felt that I would go permanently insane. They used to give me a dozen and a half tablets daily.

The first person interrogating me was a Colonel who got me pulled out of my cell at 3 in the morning and ordered me to sit on a tall stool. His opening gambit was, “I’m going to smash you to pieces”. Seeing me bored, besides being tired, he faltered and got visibly confused. Then he shot back by removing the full stop, inserting a comma and the word ‘intellectually’ (“I’m going to smash you to pieces, intellectually”). Seeing a slight smile on my face, he got even more confused. He then asked me: “Do you know, I am an MA in Political Science?” and on that note I just gave up and laughed ( to hun mein ki karan? ). We ended up playing chess and later I used to plead that I be called for interrogation since my cell was freezing cold and the interrogation room was heated.

TFT: How are you sure that the Indian intelligence agency, RAW, funded the plotters in the later stages of planning?

RK: Mark Tully, the BBC star correspondent in the subcontinent has spent many years in the region. When I was in Attock, he came from India and met my wife. He was the source of this information as he told my wife that RAW had been involved in the later stages of funding. This information is also corroborated by Ali Mahmood’s wife Billo who herself told me that they had gone to Delhi for a wedding of a Sikh friend’s son and some of them had met Indira Gandhi, including Khar.

TFT: Was the trial fair and were you given a defense counsel of your choice?`

RK: Yes, we were free to have a counsel of our own choice. I was admitted to Mayo Hospital Lahore during the case because I fainted many times during the proceedings after having lost 55 pounds during incarceration. I was there for at least 3-4 months and did not choose a counsel myself but my wife asked Aitzaz [Ahsan] and he went there twice. Two of the plotters became approvers, five were convicted and the rest, including myself, were acquitted. The President of the court-martial was a fine chap and I am beholden to him.

TFT: How do you remember the time spent in Attock Fort?

RK: As I said, Attock was like a heaven compared to the SIB holding cells. There was nothing to read or write during the SIB incarceration. To get a cigarette, one had to please the guard and I found out that if one called them “Sir ji ”, they would give you a cigarette immediately. Being a chain smoker, I was doing “Sir ji sir ji ” all day round. I think this was Bhutto’s “ bad-dua ” [curse] that struck me. He was very fond of being called “sir” and I never called him that, being a free man.

By the time I was moved to Attock, I had become so sick that the doctors moved me from the cell to a squash court. First I was kept inside the squash court but then the doctors advised moving from the large space if they wanted me to stand trial. I was moved just outside the squash courts and I remember when it used to rain, I did not used to go inside and stared at the sky lying down in the rain.

I was the oldest by far in the group of the accused. When we got out, we have met many times, and those who were in their twenties and thirties at that time had undergone so much strain that their chest hair had turned white. None of them was really normal after that. All of them were visibly damaged.

TFT: You talked of your struggle against every successive government. Do you see a bright future for Pakistan?

RK: I arrived in Pakistan from Lucknow in September 1947 and what I practically saw in the months to come was that the train had already derailed, contrary to the visions and dreams I had when I moved here. I expected that we’d start from a clean slate, collectively and consciously build a society qualitatively superior to the colonial society to which I was born into. Pakistan, in my vision, was supposed to be the turning of a page. I soon realized that it is completely the other way around. The freedom we had gained was only from British constraints on the pursuit of personal interest leading to a society led by dedication to personal interest in complete disregard of social interest. Earlier we had handed over our society to the British by leaving societal interest to the British government. You were not allowed to be corrupt or incompetent under the British. Partition meant you could now be a corrupt and incompetent clerk.

I have not to this day accepted that disillusionment and am still at war with it, though I have found willingness to live at peace with it. The reason is not just that I’m angry about it but because I do not possibly see a future on this basis. This is just a transitional phase in which a few of our generations will go down the drain. I have seen four generations, including my father’s, go down the drain and I have no expectations at all from the generation of today either and I have every reason to believe that the next generation will be the same as well. We’ve tried many things, most recently the ‘civil society’ but nothing really has worked.

This cannot continue forever since this is not a civilization and there is nothing stable about this [state of affairs]. It’s a kind of plague, of the mind, of the spirit, it’s an intellectual plague. It’s a kind of insanity but it has become so common that it is now a paradigm.

Shahid Saeed, a student, is interested in Pakistani history and politics. He can be reached at shahid@live.com.pk

February 25 - March 03, 2011 - Vol. XXIII, No. 02