" We would have had the likes of Birlas and Tatas but for nationalization."
Nasim Saigol, Interview with Business Today, India. March 22-April 6,1992
" Had we gone at the rate of growth during the decade of 1960's, I reckon we would have definitely been an Asian tiger by now"
Abdul Hameed. M. Dadabhoy, Interview with Daily Dawn September 9, 1995.
Bhutto's nationalization broke some of the 22 families financially but several of them were also broken in body and spirit, with the result that they disposed off industaries that escaped nationalization or self-imposed a moratorium on new projects. Farooq A Shaikh of Colony group, one of the major affectees of nationalization remarked in an interview with author that top Pakistani industrialists not just lost industrial units to Bhutto's nationalization policy, they lost the urge to invest in Pakistan.
" We concluded regretfully that it was a bad judgement on the part of our group to have remained exclusively confined to Pakistan. It was like putting all the eggs in one basket", he said while noting that several industrialists particularly those from Karachi had resorted to flight of capital, ahead of Bhutto's nationalization and were able to comfortably live out the Bhutto era in Europe or United States on business ventures set up there.
Karachi based business communities of Memons, Khojas and Bhoras had led the first wave of industrial development in Pakistan but it were they who suffered most in the seperation of East Pakistan and Bhutto's nationalization. These business communities had been seasoned by persecutions of different types in their abodes in India and elsewhere, particularly, Burma, and therefore, they responded in the only way that was expected in such a situation , i.e switch over investment and move abroad. It is not surprising that several leading industrial families of the 1970 era have not set up a single big industrial project