The Army’s Mosaic of Ideas-II

Columnist Col (Retd) ABDUL QAYYUM talks about the ideas that have shaped the growth of the Pakistan Army.

I joined the Army when I was 17 and now I am 67. Over these decades, half a century sounds so ancient, I have known many memorable people but in that mosaic of memories there are only a few who remain as luminous as General SHAUKAT RIZA. It is men who make for memories and the ideas they represent within the context of events which shape our lives - as individuals, as an organisation, as a community. A few words about SHAUKAT RIZA.

One of the micro-chips in my mind relate to Shaukat Riza when he was my Company Commander (Khalid Company) at the Military Academy in Kakul (1950-52). After a day’s gruelling business on the parade ground and in the classrooms, I enjoyed his friendship in the Dramatic Club (in that happy auditorium next to Ingall Hall) for a few hours of exhilarating relaxation. On one occasion I was to play Hamlet on the stage and during the full dress rehearsal I wore Shaukat Riza’s blue patrols (Wellington’s, trousers, a white shirt with willowy sleeves, maroon QAMARBAND, no tunic). Shaukat Riza’s eyes burrowed into me as I came to the lines: “O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew...” After the rehearsal Shaukat Riza called me aside: “Well done, boy! Hope those lines won’t haunt you during your military career. I think you are made of sterner stuff...” I think Shaukat Riza was thinking as much of himself as of me.

Of stern stuff the soldier is made but that is not all that there is to him. Shaukat Riza was a good example of it. It shone through during that difficult year of his command as GOC 19 Division (Comilla, East Pakistan, 1971). Behind that rough and gruff exterior was a thoughtful man, sensitive and compassionate, as clean as stainless steel. The East Pakistan experience came close to wrecking him and he asked me repeatedly to keep away from it all. His letters of the time said it all. As a soldier he did his duty, lacking in neither resolve nor resolution, but he was man enough to carry a scar that he never sought to conceal. The civil war in East Pakistan remains the darkest stain on the fabric of our minds and we did little then and have done little since to come out clean. Even Lady Macbeth did better as she roamed the ramparts of the castle, crying “all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand”. Had there been a few more men around of the likes of Shaukat Riza, we would have had less to cry about. “Tigers” alone do not make for a good army, and the kind we had disturbed the ecological balance of even the Sunderbans.

Shaukat Riza was one of our good generals, lean of body and lofty of spirit. The sun, not just in Gujranwala, had tanned his skin but like Zarathushtra he strode out to meet it. He was lean, frugal, austere, almost ascetic, a far cry from those who munched sandwiches from Shezan even on the Artillery ranges in Nowshera. You may, in this context, want to hear a story from Brigadier (Retd) Mukhtar Karim about General Douglas D. Gracey whose shadow was so much shorter than Ayub Khan’s, or Yahya Khan for that matter. I’ll leave you to hear it from Brigadier Karim himself. “RIMC boys” are not bad at telling stories, of the kind that matter.

Shaukat Riza, I was telling you, was frugal and austere. He ate little, liked his SAAG-ROTI, jogged much, come hell or high water, read and reflected even more. While at the MO (Military Operations) Directorate in GHQ, he fell out with his boss. To keep the fellow off the screen of his mind, Shaukat Riza took to some voracious reading: Arnold Toynbee, Oswald Spengler, Ibn Khaldun and Will Durant. This helped him not only to forget the DMO but also to cultivate a passion for history, in his later years focussed on the Pakistan Artillery and the Pakistan Army. Shaukat Riza was also the author of our first FSR (Field Service Regulations).

First and foremost a soldier, Shaukat Riza took to most of his writing after retirement. Not a born-writer, he learned to write the hard way, over many years carrying a copy of Roget’s Thesaurus whenever he sat down to write. It was not just vocabulary that bothered him but also a temperamental hankering after precision and accuracy, an over-riding desire to be brief and to the point. He spoke in clipped sentences, phrases really which off and on acquired the status of a sentence. His writings carry the flavour of his speech: terse, epigrammatic, like the man, lean and shorn of all that is ornate. Shaukat Riza wrote long-hand, several sharpened pencils and an eraser in a tray to a side. Even in our day, he would be in need of no word-processor. Ibn Khaldun had none, I think he would have said, and he too was happy without one. His first draft (seldom revised) was a joy to look at, as clear as the handiwork of a laser printer, better because it smelled of Shaukat Riza!

Good gunner that he was, Shaukat Riza, spoke with a voice loud and clear. Hard of hearing he was, but never hard of heart, or dull of mind, or flippant of spirit. His laughter was louder than his speech, as if to conceal a larger loneliness within him. That loneliness he handled well, without gloom within or around him, without having to read “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” (as my friend MUSHTAQ MADNI once naughtily suggested to him), without any decrease in the joy that he shared with his many friends. As DR&D (Director Research and Development, GHQ, 1963-64), he was a competent and compassionate boss, clear-headed, bold, innovative, a nourisher of open and fearless minds. I like to think I enjoyed a special relationship with him, linked to our days at the Military Academy. On one occasion, after many hours of a long and tiring discourse on professional matters, he called me aside to stand out with him in the sun. It was a glorious winter afternoon and his words were memorable: “That meeting is over now, Qayyum. Put it aside, for a while at least. Read Muhammad Asad’s “Road to Mecca”. We are travellers all and I’ll walk by your side...” When you read that book, you will know what he meant and what I now understand at 67. God bless Shaukat Riza!

A man is a man, before he becomes a soldier, sailor or airman, cobbler or carpenter. Shaukat Riza was a meticulous man, striving for perfection in whatever he engaged in or undertook to be. He was a good gunner and many gunners rush to claim him as their own. As a general, he was more than another senior officer from the artillery. He took pains to understand and polish his role as a leader of men in war and peace, although much of it came to him naturally. I saw little of him in the field but, knowing the man, I reckon he was in the image of Robert E. Lee, a general who aroused the devotion of his men even in the most trying of circumstances. He kept me away from the civil war in East Pakistan (1971) and it would be instructive to know more about how he fared there surrounded by so many hawks. A soldier may fight, but all combat is useless if the goal is not peace. Shaukat Riza understood this well and like the Ancient Mariner came out of his experience “a sadder and wiser man”. That wisdom had little impact on the subsequent evolution of the Army’s mind-set and we learnt little from the tragedy of East Pakistan. An old Japanese proverb says: “On the sign it is written ‘Do not pluck these blossoms!’ yet it is useless against the wind which cannot read.” Like the wind, the Pakistan Army as an institution has not learned to read.

In the selection of the pieces and their weaving into a happy and harmonious mosaic of ideas, training institutions play a very important role. Without in any way devaluing the vital contribution of those schools which impart instruction in technical and tactical matters, three institutions call for special care and nourishment: the Military Academy, because it lays the foundations for the officer corps, its basic orientation and work ethic; the Command and Staff College, because of its blend of character and competence in the pursuit of professional excellence as the officer approaches the threshold of command; the National Defence College, because it is the last call for formal instruction in higher command. Shaukat Riza did not enter the portals of the NDC but he left his mark on all of us who came in touch with him at the Military Academy (where he was a Company Commander, 1950-52) and the Staff College (where he was the Chief Instructor in the late sixties). Shaukat Riza’s impact was holistic, although I remember him more for the man that he was beyond the confines of the soldier that he also was.

After retirement, Shaukat Riza declined to take over as our Defence Secretary. Instead, he took to writing about the Army he had known and the vicissitudes it had been through over the years. His passion for history remained as he gradually faded away as all good soldiers do. Towards the end, without a house or home of his own, he went over to his brother’s place in Gujranwala to die there in peace away from the anti-septic anonymity of the CMH. How very like Shaukat Riza, the ocean-going salmon returning to the stream of its origin for the final farewell!

After Shaukat Riza’s death, I wrote an obituary in “The Nation” (Lahore, 01 May 1990). I can hardly believe that ten years have already gone by. Reading that piece over again, I note that very little of the essentials has been erased from my memories of the man. Now as then, my mind repeatedly reverts to “the agony of a good man caught in a bad situation” (East Pakistan, 1971). The closing lines in that distant write-up will bear reputation” “Lean, austere, frugal in his habits, always ready to race up the nearest hill, he is the last man who should have died of a heart attack. Maybe, we forget that the heart is not just a physical phenomenon. Shaukat Riza, I know, had grown a little weary of late, weary of spirit, slowly surrounded by that loneliness which descends on every man who, having lived a full life, fails in the end to comprehend what the fullness was all about. That, I fear, is the way it will be for most of us, full or empty. As Shaukat Riza sailed away, I recited the YA SIN. I hope someone will do the same for me when my time comes to go....”

In the context of the Army’s mosaic of memories and ideas, altogether too few of us have wept over East Pakistan as Shaukat Riza did, may be because of the mistaken notion that “tigers” do not weep. Even without tears, there has been no institutional stock-taking for a cleansing of our ideas on war and peace, and our conduct in both. That challenge remains for those still in uniform and the future historian who may yet put things in their right perspective. Since I left the Army long ago and am no historian, I can only do what comes within the radius of my competence: to recall the men I came to know intimately and to record a little of their legacy to the Army that marches on. My focus on the individual carries a personal bias, as explained in what I wrote on Shaukat Riza long ago (01 May, 1990): “When the lives of an entire people are turned upside down (in any war, not just 1971), what remains of abiding interest is the triumph and the tragedy within the individual soul: of good men, like Shaukat Riza, trying to cope with chaos.” Coping with chaos, in war or peace, is the very essence of the soldier’s profession and the mettle of an army is defined by its understanding of and its approach to the many nuances of chaos. That calls for a complete philosophy, a mosaic of ideas relevant to the role and conduct of the Army in our specific milieu. Hopefully, our examination of the part and the past will lead to a firmer grasp of the whole as it should be, for a future as we want it.