Dr Abdul Wahid Soomro (MNA Pakistan Peoples Party)

When the country’s first military dictator, Field Martial Ayub Khan (1958-69), resigned following a concentrated protest campaign and agitation by left-wing student organizations, and parties like the PPP, he decided to become a recluse and just fade away (he died in 1974).
The country’s second military dictator, General Yahya Khan (who replaced Ayub and functioned as the head of state between 1969 and 1971), was first put under house arrest by the Z.A. Bhutto regime and then allowed to live a life in obscurity until his quiet death in 1980.
Yahya was remembered as the man who led Pakistan into a disastrous civil war in former East Pakistan and the consequent defeat of the country’s armed forces at the hands of the Indians. A defeat that eventually facilitated the ‘liberation’ of East Pakistan that (in 1972) became the sovereign nation of Bangladesh.
Pakistan’s next military strong man, General Zia-ul-Haq (1977-88), never got the chance to live out his end days in quiet retirement. While facing his toughest test against his nemesis, Benazir Bhutto (in 1986-87), Zia seemed to have prevailed over Benazir’s remarkable street power, when his plane blew up in mid-air over Bahawalpur in August 1988.
A victim of a perfectly clandestine assassination plan (there was a bomb placed inside the plane), he was celebrated as a ‘martyred mujahid’ by some sections of the Afghan/Pakistani jihad groups operating in the country, as well as among some conservative segments of the society (especially in the Punjab).
And even though Mian Nawaz Sharif did take thousands of their supporters to Zia’s grave site in Islamabad, claiming that he would ‘complete Zia’s mission’ (oh, my), he soon realised that his survival depended more on the votes of the living than on the ghostly blessings of a dead dictator.
By the mid-1990s Zia seemed to have lost whatever little fan following his memories had managed to collect after his assassination. Today, some twenty-two years after his explosive demise, his name rings the loudest whenever there is a discussion anywhere in the country about the proliferation of extremist thought and jihadi groups in the country. He is seen as the main culprit in this respect and this has been his most enduring legacy.