Yahya Khan—Zulfikar Ali Bhutto

Yahya Khan and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto form a political alliance whose significance lies in the crisis it helps bring into focus: the West Wing leadership’s response to an election in which Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman’s party won an overwhelming majority in the East Wing. The novel links the two men through their negotiations, their joint withdrawal from those talks, and the military operation that followed. Their alliance appears less as a portrait of personal intimacy than as a consequential alignment of power, narrated through Saleem Sinai’s retrospective, openly interpretive account.

Political Context

At the turn of 1971, Sheikh Mujib’s Awami League had won 160 of 162 East Wing seats, while Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party had taken 81 constituencies in the West. Saleem presents the results as an irritation to Yahya and Bhutto, both West Wingers, and connects that irritation to the political impasse over Mujib’s right to form a government. This framing makes the alliance legible through what the leaders confront: an election whose results threaten to shift authority toward the East Wing.

Saleem places the dispute within Pakistan’s deeper division. East and West were separated by the landmass of India, while religion served as the bond holding the two wings together. He also compares the division between a country’s past and present to a split in individual consciousness. This is the narrator’s interpretive analogy, not a claim that the political crisis is reducible to psychology; it shows how the novel makes national fragmentation echo through its account of personal memory and identity.

Talks and Breakdown

Yahya offered immediate talks with Mujib and Bhutto to resolve the political tensions. On March 25, Yahya and Bhutto abruptly ended those talks and returned to the West Wing. Their shared departure is the clearest narrated action that binds them as political partners in the crisis. The same date marks Mujib’s proclamation of Bangladesh, placing the breakdown of negotiations alongside the formal declaration of secession.

The account distinguishes the observable sequence from what cannot be known. Yahya’s portrait watches over the CUTIA men assembled before their deployment, but its expression gives no clue to his intentions. Later, when soldiers are told that the purpose of their journey is to act against Mujib, their orders are presented as the explanation offered to them, not as access to either leader’s private thinking. The novel therefore establishes the alliance through decisions and consequences while withholding a definitive account of motive.

From Political Alliance to Military Action

The military operation that followed the talks’ collapse makes the political stakes concrete. On March 15, before the negotiations ended, twenty CUTIA units had assembled in a hut and were ordered to remove their uniforms; the men and dogs were then flown to Dacca by way of Ceylon. They arrived alongside a much larger West Wing force. This earlier deployment establishes that military preparations were already under way before the March 25 breakdown, complicating any simple reading of the talks as the sole turning point.

After Yahya and Bhutto returned west on March 25, Brigadier Iskandar and other officers entered the CUTIA barracks with the uniforms and collars. The men were ordered to dress and take up arms, and Iskandar announced that the mission concerned Mujib. This scene does not show Yahya or Bhutto directly issuing the order to the unit; it connects their political break with the military action through chronology and the stated objective of the deployment. Keeping that distinction clear is essential to the novel’s account of the alliance.

Narrative Significance and Limits

Saleem’s telling mixes reported events with conjecture. He imagines how irritated the two West Wing leaders must have been by the election results, then marks that interpretation as an inference. His narration also associates the political crisis with a fear of splitting, using the country’s divided wings as a figure for the difficulty of holding a coherent identity across past and present. The relationship is thus part of a broader pattern in which national history is recalled through the narrator’s personal and sometimes openly speculative framework.

The alliance’s narrative weight comes from what follows its decisive rupture with Mujib: the deployment to Dacca and the violence Saleem later describes there. The novel places Yahya and Bhutto at the threshold between negotiation and force, but the available account does not establish the full terms of their partnership or resolve their individual intentions. It presents their political alignment through a sequence of shared stakes, joint withdrawal, and consequences that exceed the negotiations themselves.