Your portrait of Zia-ul Haq in your novel is very different from the conventional wisdom. Zia was seen as a wily, old fox who kept both friends and adversaries constantly guessing about his real intentions. Your Zia, on the other hand, is a paranoid, almost pathetic figure, obsessed about staying alive.
How accurate is your image of the general? Does it have any basis in fact? Or is your portrait of the man drawn more by fictional license than reality?
It has no basis in reality. I just took his name and the circumstances of his death and made up everything else. You would think that somebody should write a proper biography of the guy but nobody has attempted. I did read some hagiographies which were basically telling me what a simple, god fearing decent man he was. I just decided to sex up his life a bit.
But really who knows what he was like a few weeks before he died? Or what did he say during the four minutes while the plane was airborne and then started to go down. I had to make it all up and I had fun doing it
When the general's plane crashed 20 years ago this August, the KGB, R&AW, Murtaza Bhutto's Al-Zulfiqar were among the suspects accused of involvement in the incident. Your novel points a finger - in fact, several fingers -- elsewhere. Writing in Vanity Fair magazine in September 1989, Edward Jay Epstein hinted that some powerful people wanted Zia out of the way, a conclusion somewhat similar to yours. Are your conclusions derived from reality, something you pieced together from what you have heard in your dual careers, first in the Pakistan Air Force and again as one of the sub-continent's finest reporters? Or is this again a fictional excursion into what you believe are the most likely reasons for what the joint US-Pakistani committee investigating the crash called 'a criminal act of sabotage perpetrated in the aircraft'?
I think Mr Epstein's article did inspire me. He is probably the only one who attempted a serious investigation. He is probably one of the brightest investigative journalists of our time but even his article also concludes with time-tested journalistic cliche that truth was the first causality in this crash or some such thing. And if truth has been declared dead in this case by someone as august as Mr Epstein, one can only resort to fiction.
Exclusive on rediff.com: The day Zia died
Why was no real attempt made to locate the individuals/agencies responsible for killing Pakistan's president? It was as if the man died and the truth was hastily buried with him. Why did that happen in your opinion? Was it because those who succeeded him had no real desire to discover the truth? Was the Pakistani establishment, then reverting to civilian rule, eager to put the repressive Zia years and memories of the general behind it and therefore disinclined to identify the real assassin(s)? Or do you believe the truth lies deep within the ISI vaults?
I have no idea. My guess would be that everyone was sick and tired of him and soon after nobody cared. Even his own son who has been an almost permanent minister in Pakistan government has hardly every brought up the subject years.
For all I know it could have been a mechanical failure but that would be of no use to a fiction writer. Do you really think intelligence agencies have vaults where truth lies? Paper shredders, more likely.
General Zia-ul Haq, the Pakistan president whose mysterious death in an aircrash, August 17, 1988, is the backdrop for Mohammed Hanif's amazing novel. Photograph: India Abroad archives
Also read: Mohammed Hanif on rediff.com: The case of Musharraf and the drunk uncle
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