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Literary Review
IN CONVERSATION
Anecdotes from high places
SANGEETA BAROOAH PISHAROTY
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Arshad Sami Khan, ADC to three Pakistani Presidents, is the typical raconteur who has enough and more stories to share. A free-wheeling chat…
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Photo: V. Sudershan
Witness to history: Arshad Sami Khan.
It is interesting how, at times, a string of anecdotes alone can craft a tome. And if it includes some funny incidents, whispers in the power corridors and lays bare a lesser known side of a set of important people with a sprinkling of pertinent obse
rvations which could have given the past a twist, the yarn can be all the more punchy. Former Pakistani bureaucrat and ambassador Arshad Sami Khan’s recently published Three Presidents and an Aide (Pentagon Press) fits impeccably into this niche. And well, it can get juicier if someday you come across the diligent raconteur and listen to his tales, first hand. His is the style of the quintessential conversationist who never runs out of stories while on a meandering stroll with you.
Sami Khan, now a Canadian citizen, was ADC to three Presidents of Pakistan — Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. He also worked in the Government of Benazir Bhutto. An award-winning air force pilot (Sami clocked the longest hours on air during the 1965 Indo-Pak war), this Peshawar native has woven slivers from his long professional life into almost every page.
Full of stories of shikar, Khan, sitting in the lobby of a New Delhi hotel, recounts a particularly hilarious incident about one such venture of Joseph Tito along with his Pakistani host, Ayub Khan. It was an early morning duck shoot in the lake of Mirpur Sakro. It so happened that along with the dead duck, Tito too had to be helped out of the waters! Not just that, “Three of the police toughies who struggled to get him on board, fell too as their boat tilted and flipped over.” Khan, full of giggles, talks about “a burly Tito walking with water sloshing out of his boots and jacket pockets!”
Lucky find
He says one such venture of Ayub Khan led to the discovery of Pakistan’s legendary singer Reshma. “Ayub Khan used to be hosted by the vaderas (the landlords) during shikars. Day time would pass in the shoots and the evenings had music sessions by local artistes. The President would be present in those soirees only for a while. The evening that Reshma sang, he sat through it. He also asked me to note her details. On reaching Islamabad, he called his broadcasting minister to give Reshma a chance on Radio Pakistan,” relates Khan. “Also, he told him to give a copy of her recording. Later, he would do his work listening to her songs. Every time the tape would end he would call me to rewind.”
The day Ayub Khan was removed from the President’s post, Sami Khan recalls, “he was listening to Reshma and watching TV while a big team of bearers packed his personal belongings.”
Sami Khan, now better known as singer Adnan Sami’s father, also recounts another incident with humorous overtones. It was the 1971 war. Yahya Khan was the President. “He told me we would leave for an undisclosed destination the next day. I kept speculating and recalled that during the 1965 war, Ayub Khan had taken a similar trip to China. Convinced that we too were going there, I picked my overcoat before starting for office. So when I saw the President getting into a military jeep without any woollens, I pointed it out to him. ‘But why Sami?’ I said, ‘Sir, aren’t we going to China?’ He laughed out loud, saying, ‘We have moved miles away from 1965’.” It was a trip to “a warehouse type” secret army camp.
But Khan points out that “Ayub Khan, being a military man, handled the East Pakistan rising as a discipline issue and not as a political one. Our Constitution talks of States, a politically inclined man would have divided the two regions into different States. Who knows, that would have changed history.”
That fateful war had a personal connection. Khan had to break his engagement as the bride-to-be was from East Pakistan. “We decided to part ways as it became imminent that the country was being divided. I never met her again.”
Talking about Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Khan recounts interesting incidents related to his insomnia, his ability to remember names, his steps to teach table manners to his officers, his fetish for designer wear.
“While working for him, I sincerely prayed to get insomnia too,” he says, laughing. “What I forgot to write about was Bhutto’s finest collection of ties and guns,” he adds. An observation he remembered to pen down was Bhutto’s “landlord mentality”.
“Though he was for democracy, he was not open to listening to others. I saw that streak in Benazir too.” Offering an instance, he talks of “how Bhutto could have declared a fresh election and not given Zia-ul-Haq a chance to take over the reins on the plea of rigged polls.” Khan recounts a similar incident about Benazir. “General Gaddafi had warned Bibi against ‘some dark forces’ in her Government trying to topple her. She didn’t take him seriously and I still wonder how Gaddafi could have such an eye from the wilderness.”
“Even when her subordinates were telling her about the President’s plan to dissolve her Cabinet, she didn’t listen. A day before it happened, when my wife called to say that someone had come home asking for my sherwani to be worn by the PM Designate in the swearing-in ceremony, Bibi was planning her impending Stockholm trip.”
Parallels with the past
Having seen the power game so closely, he rues, “It is sad that no Chief Executive of Pakistan has ever left the office with dignity.” Khan too had to leave Pakistan during Zia’s dictatorship. “Because I refused to give a false report against Bhutto.”
“Ironic,” he says, “now there is a mausoleum of Zia in Islamabad but nothing for Ayub Khan who made the city. Even his family sold his house there and it has been razed down.” Having seen history unfold before him too often, Khan would rather take a leaf out of the past to look at the present move for democracy in Pakistan. “I can’t help but see a similar thing happening in 1970. On the surface that was also free and fair elections. When no party gets a majority, it becomes easy to divide and rule.”
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