| No leader in the span of Pakistan’s political history has been so beloved of caricaturists as the late General Zia-ul-Haq. With the possible expectation of Khawaja Nazimuddin whose rotund figure balanced on two spindly legs resembled a ball of wool supported by two knitting needles, no leader has provided such a ready set of instantly recognizable traits. All Zia-ul-Haq’s physical features - unequivocal parting of his hair, the Machiavellian angle of his eyebrows, the doleful astigmatic eyes rimmed with darkness, the clipped moustache and the teeth with their central trapdoor - came easily to the pen of his detractors. |
| His political identity – an unusual amalgam of an essentially simple man, a soldier from the Pakistan Army who usurped power and became instead a soldier for the cause of Islam, a private family man who became a public figure and then made his personal beliefs the struts of state policy - made him a perfect target for those who can spot and depict the irony in such a situation. To the western press, in particular, he was a favourite subject and it delighted in portraying him as a uniformed zealot or as a bemedalled mullah, likening him on occasion to their own comic anti-hero Terry Thomas. Had they, or for that matter had any of his contemporaries, looked less superficially at General Zia-ul-Haq, they might have recognized a startling similarity between him and not a British comedian but another British personage – Oliver Cromwell. [EXTRACT] |
Published in THE NATION 9 July 1992, and reprinted in THE ARMLESS QUEEN (1994). |
|
