Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain’s political life has three themes running right through it. These themes then overlap, weaving intriguing patterns on the political landscape of the country which will take some effort before they make their secrets known.

First and perhaps foremost is his association with the military establishment or the man heading the army at a particular time. The book starts with an episode from Gen Ayub Khan’s era. The boundary wall of the house of Chaudhry Zahoor Elahi, Hussain’s father, is pulled down under martial law order for being an encroachment. But before long, the officers ask the owners to reconstruct it at its original place. This is very symbolic of the politics the Chaudhry family is going to excel at — so long as they know how far they can go with their expansion plan and how much liberty they can take with the permanent establishment.

Second, the relationship with the Sharifs of Lahore, with whom they were bonded by the common benefactor Gen Ziaul Haq, has figured prominently in the life and career of the Chaudhrys and, consequently, in Hussain’s biography. The third factor that has defined the politics of the Chaudhrys of Gujrat is the, by and large, negative engagement between them and the PPP.

One person’s truth about 40 years of politics

This is a big pool of occurrences and anecdotes spread over the 300-odd pages of Sach Tau Yeh Hai! but this truth may leave you craving for more. It is one person’s truth, not necessarily the truth of his accomplices and fellow actors. It is most certainly not the whole truth, yet it does provide more than useful — on rare occasions, even revealing — insight into events and issues the veteran politician has gone through and has had to deal with over a 40-year career.

Elahi, the founder of this particular family brand, did not quite like Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. This much we have known all along and it is a bit disappointing that as Elahi’s son, Hussain does not help us a lot in understanding as to what caused an apparently unbridgeable breach between these two popular, or awami, personalities.

The finale to this engagement between the two politicians who had prospered in their relative areas during the Ayub Khan era was deadly. It came in the shape of two violent incidents: the 1979 hanging of Bhutto by Gen Zia who turned out to be a keen patron of the Chaudhrys of Gujrat, and two, the killing of Elahi in 1981 by a young man who confessed he was working for Al Zulfiqar. With these two pioneers departing, their children were left to fight it out with each other. However, the most remarkable aspect of this intra-family saga was the number of times the PPP approached the Chaudhrys of Gujrat for an alliance.

Bhutto had asked Elahi to join him in the PPP at the time of the party’s inception in the late 1960s. According to this book, the two men then came face-to-face with each other over the issue that eventually led to the secession of East Pakistan. Later, Elahi had to spend a lot of time behind bars during the PPP’s first term in power. These were all trumped-up charges, the proud son and modest joint-heir to the legacy tells us in this memoir as he makes abundantly and affectionately clear that his cousin and comrade Chaudhry Parvez Elahi has been an equal partner in whatever initiative he has taken in his life and career.

Years after Bhutto’s offer, the Chaudhrys turned down a handshake with Benazir Bhutto after the 1988 general elections, the book says. The story goes that Benazir was ready to let Parvez Elahi lead a government in Punjab so long as it kept Nawaz Sharif out of power. Messrs Hussain and Parvez Elahi refused. Instead, they chose to stay in the camp known by the label of ‘Gen Zia’s remnants’, continuing with a love-hate relationship with the Sharifs, about which later.

Though the story in this book doesn’t cover the period (it ends at the 2008 elections) it was left to the rather worn out and considerably weakened PPP to finally find favour with the Chaudhrys as leaders of the PML-Q. By that time circumstances had taken Hussain and Parvez Elahi far adrift of the Sharifs who had in the past been the Chaudhrys’ first choice as allies. The PML-Q’s joining of forces with the much-maligned PPP proved disastrous during the 2013 polls and detracted a lot from the reputation of both Asif Ali Zardari and Hussain who were both considered past masters at cobbling together alliances out of whatever material they had available to them.

As per a reading of the book, Hussain was quite upset at Gen Pervez Musharraf’s decision to come up with a relief package for the PPP under the title of the National Reconciliation Ordinance (the very infamous NRO). He blamed it, for once without mincing words, on those who had lobbied for Benzair in the United States. This is where the story in the book takes on the bitterest tone, rivalling the moment of disgust where Hussain rather uncharacteristically quotes Richard Armitage, saying that it was ‘good friends’ Gen Musharraf and his right-hand man, bureaucrat Tariq Aziz, who had cost the PML-Q the 2008 election.

Before we touch upon the subject of Hussain’s association directly with Gen Musharraf and other military rulers of Pakistan, let us first get out of the way his family’s ties with the Sharifs, a topic which is also replete with references to the Army’s interaction with politicians. Given Hussain’s emphasis, he was never too fond of Shahbaz Sharif — right from the day Shahbaz proposed that those who had agreed to back Nawaz Sharif in his first attempt to be Punjab chief minister after the 1985 election may be asked to take oath on the Holy Quran. On the other hand, the narrator of the book is very reluctant to give too many details about what really propelled Nawaz Sharif to the top in a hurry. All that this account offers is army officers, serving or retired, yet powerful, such as the then governor Ghulam Jilani Khan asking the politicians to follow his guidelines and the politicians, including Hussain, obeying without much fuss.

Coming through the same Zia regime, Hussain lists many instances where his family was rubbed the wrong way by the Sharifs even though on the surface they looked so close for so long. Seemingly among the most painful memories in the book pertain to the instance after the 1997 election when Parvez Elahi had to settle for the post of speaker of the Punjab Assembly. He was originally promised the office of chief minister, as a reward for the Chaudhrys’ long-time support for the Sharifs. The offer came from a person none other than Mian Muhammad Sharif, the head and founder of the Sharif house of power. The chief minister’s seat this time was occupied by Shahbaz. Hussain was once again drafted in the federal cabinet under Nawaz Sharif, as the interior minister.

That might have been an important position indicating a certain kind of proximity between the Sharifs and the Chaudhrys, notwith­standing the uneasiness underneath. Yet Hussain reiterates here that he had no inkling about what was cooking inside then prime minister Nawaz Sharif’s head that fateful day in October 1999. According to him, it came all too suddenly. There was an attempt by Nawaz Sharif to replace Gen Musharraf with Gen Ziauddin Butt. There was an order that delayed the landing of Gen Musharraf’s plane as he was en route to Karachi from Sri Lanka and by evening the military had taken over and Hussain and Parvez Elahi were under house arrest in Islamabad and Lahore respectively. It can be argued that Hussain must have seen it coming, especially when at one place in his book he reports that Muhammad Sharif, or Abba Ji, had advised prime minister Nawaz Sharif to get rid of Gen Musharraf not too long after he had hailed and honoured the general, calling him his ‘fourth son’. If Hussain knew, he doesn’t say so.

The Musharraf coup signalled another phase in the history of this Gujrat family. It was during this period that the dream of getting the coveted chief minister’s chair was finally realised. Parvez Elahi did not just get the reward for his perseverance and his prolonged background presence; according to many sources he did quite well as the Punjab chief minister. This book reasserts the old Hussain justification that it was the Sharifs who ended the old association with his clan rather than it being the other way round. The Sharifs, the version insists, struck a deal with Gen Musharraf and fled the country, leaving their PML-N colleagues to fend for themselves. Again, not too many details are provided about how it all came about. It is as if everything happened as it was ordained without any one — at least not Hussain — asking too many questions or losing his matter-of-fact, single-register rhythm.

Which doesn’t mean that Sach Tau Yeh Hai! — which has apparently been ghostwritten — is devoid of sentiment. If not too frequently, a sense of loss, even betrayal, does take the narrator in its grip. This is pretty much a story of betrayal at the hands of politicians and non-politician power masters in the country. If on the one hand there is the Shahbaz-Nawaz duo repeatedly denying the Chaudhrys their due, on the other is Gen Musharraf who exploited Hussain’s clout at crucial moments, such as the siege of Laal Masjid in Islamabad and the revolt by Akbar Bugti, only to go against Hussain’s direction at the ultimate moment.

There is emotion and there is quite a lot of compassion in the book. Some of it might have crept in unnecessarily, and modesty somewhat compromised, because of the presence of the ghostwriter who has given in some detail what Hussain would be a little embarrassed to pen on his own. The facts about the philanthropic work by the family are all too well-known to the world and could perhaps have been left out to create space for insights into a lot of other events in a very happening career.

The reviewer is Dawn’s resident editor in Lahore

Sach Tau Yeh Hai!
By Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain
Ferozsons, Karachi
ISBN: 978-9690025326
328pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, June 24th, 2018