Question

Analyse the impact of Gen Zia regime on Pakistan just in 10 lines.

Answer 1

Over the course of the next decade, after having Bhutto executed, Zia fundamentally transformed Pakistan's polity, creating an almost entirely theocratic form of government, empowering society's most violent and intolerant impulses and undermining the basis of a plural and democratic political structure in Pakistan for decades to come.

Zia suspended political parties in that year, banned labour strikes, imposed strict censorship on the press, and declared martial law in the country (nominally lifted 1985). He responded to the Soviet Union’s invasion of neighbouring Afghanistan in 1979 by embarking on a U.S.-financed military buildup. He also tried to broaden his base of support and worked for the Islamization of Pakistan’s political and cultural life.

Zia today occupies a uniquely contradictory position in Pakistan. Despite the endurance of his imprint on the country, he is more reviled than at any point since his assassination in 1988. Once feted as a global anti-communist and Islamic stalwart by the United States and Saudi Arabia, his birth and death anniversaries now pass without official commemoration, while the anniversary of his coup is observed as a ‘Black Day' by Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party (PPP) and other opposition groups.

He developed Pakistan's nuclear capability against the strong complaints of Washington, but overall was a cooperative ally of the Reagan Administration in its successful efforts to force the Soviet Union to withdraw its 115,000 troops from neighboring Afghanistan, where Moscow was helping the Kabul Government fight a civil war against American-backed rebels.

President Zia, 64 years old, was a devout Moslem who tried to unify his nation of 102 million people under the banner of Islamization and played the precarious balances of international power politics with a certain finesse. But he never kept many of his promises, perhaps because he placed his own political survival above democratization.

For those who opposed him, the image was quite different. After the 1977 coup, thousands of Bhutto supporters were imprisoned and hundred were publicly flogged.

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