A chance meeting catapulted General Rani into the highest echelons of power as she emerged as the real power behind the throne when Ayub Khan quit in the face of a Leftist movement and handed over power to Yahya Khan in 1969
In the 1960s, Aqleem Akhtar, better known as General Rani (queen), had had enough of her abusive husband. She walked out of the marriage with her children much to her conservative and middle-class family’s shock only to realize how difficult it was to make ends meet. General Rani found a way out when she began visiting the favourite haunts of the Pakistani political, military, and business elite: nightclubs in Karachi, Lahore, and Rawalpindi.
She would, wrote Nadeem F Paracha in The Friday Times, arrange ‘dance parties’ for men bored with their wives.’ General Rani exploited the weaknesses of men in positions of power for a reliable female company. She knew, Ayesha Nasir quoted General Rani saying in Newsline magazine, ‘that dumb, pretty girls who come with no strings attached are a universal failing of men in power’. She became the provider of such women.
General Rani would frequent the parties of the high and mighty to make her way into the corridors of power. She would not drink or dance. General Rani normally sat near toilets to start conversations with influential men, who would drink a lot and frequent toilets to relieve themselves. The trick worked at a Rawalpindi party. A sloshed future military ruler, Yahya Khan, not only noticed her during a toilet visit but would also fall for her.
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The chance meeting blossomed into a deeper relationship. It catapulted her into the highest echelons of power, earning her the moniker General Rani. She emerged as the real power behind the throne when Ayub Khan quit in the face of a Leftist movement and handed over power to Yahya Khan in 1969, continuing the military’s domination.
General Rani could, wrote Nasir, ‘guarantee employment, ensure promotions and bring about unwelcome transfers’ with the ‘slightest gesture of her bejeweled hand.’ She had Yahya Khan’s ear when he ruled from 1969 to 1971. Akhtar exploited Yahya Khan’s weaknesses: booze and womanizing. She would even advise him on policy and political matters.
Paracha described General Rani as Ayub Khan’s ‘muse and mistress’, and often the ‘brain behind the swinging general’s regime.’ As arguably Pakistan’s most powerful woman, she was Yahya Khan’s gatekeeper. Influential people would visit her to curry favours with the military ruler.
General Rani, whose grandson Fakhar-e-Alam hosts the popular cricket show The Pavilion, took care of Yahya Khan’s weaknesses and idiosyncrasies and became indispensable to him. She never shied away from speaking about her relationship with him. In an interview, General Rani narrated how Yahya Khan once visited her in a ‘somewhat agitated state’ in the middle of the night. He wanted to know whether Akhtar had heard a song the legendary Noor Jahan had sung.
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Yahya Khan summoned his secretary at 2 am to have a shop opened to organize a recording of the song when General Rani told him he did not have the time to listen to music. General Rani sensed the fascination he had for Noor Jahan. She flew to Lahore the next day, where a hotel suite was permanently reserved for her, to arrange Noor Jahan’s private performance for Yahya Khan in Islamabad.
General Rani’s journey to dizzying heights of power is among Pakistan’s most fascinating stories. Akhtar’s fall, however, was faster than her rise. The aftermath of the 1971 war, which ended up slicing Pakistan into two parts, hit close home when General Rani became a symbol of Yahya Khan’s depravity, one of the reasons that was blamed for the ignominy.
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The humiliating defeat in the war with India cut short Yahya Khan’s military rule. He was forced to step down. With him came the fall of his cronies. General Rani, whose daughter Aroosa Alam came under the spotlight in India as former Punjab chief minister Amarinder Singh’s friend, soon found herself back to square one and under house arrest for the next five years. There appeared to be no end to her woes. She was jailed again in the 1980s for drug trafficking under Zia ul-Haq’s military rule, which completely changed how Pakistan was governed until then.
In Zia’s Pakistan, there was no place for a woman like General Rani and the indulgence she enjoyed during Yahya Khan’s rule. Zia was cut from an altogether different cloth. He was unlike the men who had so far helmed the Pakistan Army and the state.
Zia came from a conservative, religious family from Jalandhar that was forced to move to Pakistan at the time of partition. His father, Akbar Ali, though a civilian official at the British Indian Army’s headquarters in Delhi, was known as maulvi (cleric) for his religiosity. Ali would raise Zia in a conservative Islamic way of life. As a student at Delhi’s elite St Stephen’s College, Zia offered his prayers regularly, observed fasts, and mobilized the Muslim students to serve the cause of faith.
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Zia, who joined the British Indian Army before the Partition, swam against the tide there too. He was an exception to the Westernized ways of his fellow Indian officers. Zia refused to give up his religious and cultural traditions and offended his British superiors with his lifestyle.
The Pakistani Army officer corps inherited the pre-partition lifestyle. They, according to Zia, spent their free time drinking, gambling, dancing, and listening to music. Zia, instead, said his prayers. He was, writes Husain Haqqani in Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military, initially treated with ‘some amusement—sometimes with contempt.’ Zia never drank; smoking was his sole indulgence.
