Ziaul Haq and the damage he caused Pakistan

General Ziaul Haq, Pakistan’s army chief of staff, seized power in July 1977 and became president in 1978. Photograph: Reuters

In the early hours of Jul 5, 1977, General Ziaul Haq, Pakistan's chief of army staff, overthrew the elected government of Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and imposed martial law in the country. It was a happening rich in irony, for Zia had been chosen by the deposed Bhutto only a year earlier to head the army because of what appeared to be his genuflecting loyalty to the prime minister. Bhutto, always insecure in politics, had promoted him over six other generals in the mistaken belief, as it turned out, that Zia would never mount a revolt or a coup against his government.

The Zia coup was significant from another aspect, which was that after its defeat and surrender in Bangladesh in 1971, the army was thought to have become chastened in behaviour and would not in future commandeer Pakistan again. Ziaul Haq's coup put paid to that notion. In the more than eleven years in which Zia and his fellow generals ruled Pakistan, the army was systematically institutionalised in the country's politics, with ramifications that are yet being felt today.

The coup of July 1977 was, tellingly, a refusal by the army high command to have Pakistan find a way out of the political crisis engendered by the flawed elections of March of the year and the series of protests mounted by the opposition Pakistan National Alliance against the Bhutto government. There is little question that the ruling Pakistan People's Party indulged in rigging at the elections, to a point where even Bhutto expressed surprise at the enormity of it. Eventually, a deal was arrived at by the government and the PNA on fresh general elections late in the evening of 4 July. It was a deal unpalatable to General Zia. The army struck within hours.

And thus was Pakistan's first elected government — by default since the majority Awami League, owing to machinations by the army and the PPP and the genocide of Bengalis, had led the province of East Pakistan to independence as the sovereign republic of Bangladesh in 1971 — overthrown in the third coup d'etat by the military, the two others being Ayub Khan's takeover in 1958 and Yahya Khan's in 1969. The 1977 coup was to be a long tale of eleven years of duplicity by General Zia, beginning with his repeated promises of new general elections within ninety days of his taking over but never living up to them. The smooth-talking general met Bhutto, then under house arrest, speaking of new elections in which the latter could take part. At one point, Bhutto reminded Zia of the constitutional provision of an armed or illegal takeover of the government being treated as treason. The wily Zia got the message. It would be either his head or Bhutto's. In the event, it was Bhutto who walked the gallows on disputed murder conspiracy charges in April 1979.

The damage General Zia caused Pakistan is today a dark phase in its history. His Islamisation, through his Wahhabi leanings, led to the persecution of liberals in the country. Martial law regulations led to the public humiliation of eminent citizens, among whom were the reputed journalist Salamat Ali and the iconoclastic poet Habib Jalib. Zia, with little faith in politics but an abundance of belief in the ability of unfettered religious fervour to ensure social order, presided over a country where women's rights were ignored and curtailed, where the press was muzzled, where martial law overshadowed all other laws. In the Bhutto case, he would not let a judge return to the bench because the judge could cast a decisive vote in acquitting the ousted prime minister. He made sure that the court was led by a judge known for his deep antipathy to Bhutto.

The biggest damage that General Ziaul Haq caused Pakistan and by extension, the South Asian region was to align himself with the United States in operations against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. A pariah in the West after his armed takeover of Pakistan, he nevertheless saw his fortunes rise with the decision by Leonid Brezhnev to send Soviet troops to bolster the communist regime in Kabul. Zia was suddenly an ally for Washington. It was especially when Ronald Reagan took over as US president in 1981 that Zia's stock rose not just in Washington but in other western capitals as well. The Mujahideen were the recipients of support, morally and materially, from Reagan and Zia. With the battle for Afghanistan widening and becoming bloodier, tens of thousands of Afghan refugees made their way to such Pakistani cities as Peshawar and Quetta. To this day, three million Afghans are in Pakistan, victims of the legacy set in the Zia years.

General Ziaul Haq was blown up, along with senior military officers and US ambassador to Pakistan Arnold Raphael in a yet unexplained C-130 air crash over Bahawalpur on 17 August 1988. It was the end of a brutal regime whose policies would in the times ahead spawn new dangers for the region, with the rise of the Taliban and the infiltration of Afghanistan by Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda. Zia's political manoeuvres threw up such neophytes as Nawaz Sharif in the country and would ensure that in future not only another army chief, in this case Pervez Musharraf, would seize power but also that despite elections it would be the army that would call the shots.

Zia left Pakistan radicalised beyond measure, with such outfits as Lashkar-e-Toiba and myriad other groups terrorising the country. In his time, the army's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) assumed authority that would be a menace not only for Pakistan but for South Asia as well.

Ziaul Haq, or whatever could be recovered of his body in Bahawalpur, remains buried in Islamabad. Pakistanis do not remember him. If they do, it is generally with disdain.