LARKANA: Former Sindh chief minister Mumtaz Ali Bhutto passed away at a local hospital in Karachi on Sunday. He was 88. He will be buried in his ancestral graveyard of Mirpur Bhutto on Monday (today).

Born on Nov 28, 1933 in the village of Mirpur Bhutto in Larkana district, late Bhutto’s father, Nawab Nabi Bakhsh Khan Bhutto, was a member of the legislative assembly and had a strong political background before partition.

He attended St George’s College in Mussoori and then Lawrence College, Murree. He got his law degree from Lincoln’s Inn, and masters degree from Oxford University in 1959.

He will be laid to rest in his hometown in Larkana district today

He became an MNA at the young age of 32 in 1965. He was the founding member of the Pakistan Peoples Party when his cousin and late former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto formed it on March 30, 1967.

He along with Zulfikar Bhutto contested the 1970 general election and emerged victorious. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto became the first democratically elected prime minister of Pakistan and he made Mumtaz Bhutto as the governor of Sindh on Dec 24, 1971 and then chief minister of Sindh on May 1, 1972. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto used to call him his “talented cousin”.

Mumtaz Bhutto as the chief minister had made the Sindhi language as the official language of the province by introducing the Sindhi Language Bill, 1972 in the Sindh Assembly. The passage of the Sind Teaching, Promotion and Use of Sindhi Language Bill, 1972 by the provincial assembly that established Sindhi language as the sole official language of the province resulting in language violence in Sindh. Due to the strong protests, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto made Urdu and Sindhi as official languages of Sindh.

He was arrested during the struggle against the arrest of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and then exiled by Gen Zia’s government. He founded the Sindhi Balouch Pashtoon Front while living in exile in the United Kingdom in March 1985 with Attaullah Mengal, Abdul Hafeez Pirzado and others.

He also announced support for a new constitutional framework for Pakistan as a weak federation that was commonly known and discussed in political circles as the concept of confederation. He returned to Pakistan and was arrested by the military government. On March 31, 1989, he called a workers’ convention at Hyderabad and announced his political party and named it as the Sindh National Front (SNF).

In the 1993 general election, he was elected on a provincial assembly saet from Larkana and on Nov 6, 1996 became the caretaker chief minister of Sindh.

In 2013, he merged the SNF into Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, but quit the party in 2017 after developing differences with the leadership. He later joined the Imran Khan-led Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf.

He left behind two sons — Ameer Bakhsh Bhutto and Ali Haidar — and as many daughters and a widow to mourn.

Published in Dawn, July 19th, 2021