Very few among the young Pakistanis are likely to have any recollection of Salamullah Tipu; Nadeem F. PARACHA. — File Photo

Last week I accidentally bumped into a mild-mannered middle-aged man who turned out to be a cousin of the notorious Salamullah Tipu. Very few among the current generation of young Pakistanis are likely to have any worthwhile recollection of this character.

Tipu for a while almost became a Che Guevara-like figure for a whole generation of left-wing student groups. From 1980 till his death in 1984, Tipu became a symbol of militant resistance against the Ziaul Haq dictatorship, after which he gradually faded away from Pakistan’s collective memory.

Nevertheless, during his dramatic 15 minutes of fame, Salamullah Tipu managed to become the dictatorship’s enemy No 1. The single most important episode Tipu is remembered for is the hijacking of a Peshawar-bound PIA plane in 1981.

In the 1960s when various countries faced a barrage of student movements, most of them were led by supporters of what was called the ‘New Left’. This was an innovative strain of Marxism that not only attacked capitalism and ‘western imperialism’, it was equally critical of orthodox Marxist tendencies, and ‘Marxist distortions’ like Stalinism. The movements reached a peak in 1968-69, but frustrated by heavy police action, many student groups eventually mutated into urban guerilla outfits.

Interestingly, even though Pakistan too became a scene of the 1960s’ worldwide phenomenon of student activism, the movement did not mutate like it did in the West. On the contrary, the movement in Pakistan returned to the campuses and continued its ideological battles through annual student union elections.

However, armed militancy among student groups finally arrived in Pakistan after the government of Z A Bhutto was toppled in a right-wing coup in 1977. The new military regime started using right-wing student parties like the Islami Jamiat Taleba (IJT) to subdue progressive student activity on campuses.

The rising militancy and the violent campaign of persecution exercised by the Zia dictatorship developed a tense pressure cooker situation out of which emerged some of Pakistan’s very first personalities amongst the progressive student parties. The leading personality in this respect was Salamullah Tipu.

Tipu belonged to an Urdu-speaking lower-middle-class family of Karachi. His grandfather, Ashfaqullah, was a noted anti-British firebrand, who was hanged by the British in 1927. After his schooling, Tipu joined a Karachi college in 1972 where he enrolled in the left-wing National Students Federation (NSF). At college, Tipu became NSF’s muscle man against the IJT, and formed ‘street-fighting units’ to tackle IJT’s ‘Thunder Squads.’ In 1975, while still at college, Tipu quit NSF and joined the PPP’s student-wing, the Peoples Students Federation (PSF).

According to his cousin, Tipu read translated works of leftist revolutionaries like Che Guevara and Carlos Marighella. Soon after the 1977 coup, Tipu went underground to evade arrest. He resurfaced in 1979, when some members of the IJT shot dead an NSF activist at the University of Karachi.

Tipu travelled to Peshawar along with some PSF militants and bought a cache of AK-47s from the same Afghan gun-runner who had first sold guns to IJT activists — even though NSF and PSF claimed the guns were provided to IJT by future Afghan warlord, Gulbaddin Hykmatyar, who was stationed in Peshawar as an anti-Soviet Islamist leader.

On his return Tipu along with four other PSF members got into a gunfight with some IJT activists at the University of Karachi. In the tussle Tipu shot dead a senior IJT member. Tipu then escaped to the then Soviet-controlled Afghanistan and joined Murtaza Bhutto’s guerilla outfit Al Zulfikar (AZO).

Tipu re-entered Pakistan in early 1981 and along with three other PSF militants hijacked a Peshawar-bound PIA plane from Karachi. The plane was first forced to land at Kabul airport, and was then flown to Damascus. Though undertaken to ‘avenge Z A Bhutto’s hanging by Zia’, the hijacking was at once condemned by the young co-chairperson of the PPP, Benazir Bhutto, who was languishing in a Karachi jail.

The hijackers demanded that 55 political prisoners be released. These included PPP, PSF, NSF and some Marxist, Baloch and Pakhtun activists. Zia hesitated and Tipu shot dead a Pakistani diplomat on the plane accusing him of being a part of Zia’s coup against Bhutto. He wasn’t.

Around 50 prisoners were eventually released by the Zia regime, most of them having been arrested on trumped-up charges, such as indulging in ‘anti-Islam activities’ and being ‘Soviet agents’.

In 1982, after a botched attempt to assassinate Zia (in India), Tipu had a falling out with Murtaza Bhutto. By then Al Zulfikar had become a chaotic ring of violent in-fighting. Declared ‘uncontrollable’ by the Afghans, Tipu was thrown in a Kabul prison and eventually executed in 1984 for murdering an Afghan national. His body was never returned, and he is said to have been buried somewhere near Kabul.

Tipu’s fall from being a romantic revolutionary brutalised by reactionary politics of a violent dictatorship that eventually turned him into a cold-blooded mercenary, is a telling tale of what happened to progressive dreamers under Zia. Most of them vanished from the scene, many were physically eliminated, and, it is also believed, others (like Tipu), were ‘allowed’ by the reactionary state to play out their deadly revolutionary fantasies just so that the state could then accuse the democratic forces of sabotage and treason.

At least this is exactly what Benazir Bhutto and Tipu’s family believed. According to them, had the Zia regime wanted to botch the hijacking, it could have. But it didn’t, and (thus) allowed the drama to take its violent and ultimately, tragic course.

Not surprisingly, both Ms Bhutto and her mother were accused of engineering the hijacking, and (in 1985) four members of the PSF who had little or nothing to do with the hijacking were hanged on the scorched grounds of Karachi Central Jail.