India

by John Keay

  Theoretically the generals and the bureaucrats ought to have been at one with the Constituent Assembly in upholding the national interest against provincial lobbying. But because officers in both these services were drawn overwhelmingly from the provinces of West Pakistan – and predominantly from Panjab – this was not the case. Rather did they see the national interest as being synonymous with that of West Pakistan’s Panjabi heartland, which province could therefore count on the lion’s share of any investment incentives. On the other hand an East Bengal woefully under-represented among the mustachioed mandarins and generals could expect economic discrimination, social neglect and long periods of direct rule. According to politicians in Dhaka, Pakistan as a whole was being steadily ‘panjabised’ while East Bengal was being demoted to the status of a ‘colony’. The British high commissioner had expressed similar sentiments, reporting in 1950 that ‘West Pakistan is prepared to fight the “cold war” with India to the last Bengali.’2

  Although the priorities of the military and the bureaucracy did not always coincide, they had done so in the matter of foreign aid. Without it, Pakistan could barely have survived, let alone have accommodated the influx of refugees and confronted India over Kashmir. The bureaucrats needed funds to disburse, the generals needed munitions to rearm, and initially Britain had looked the best bet for both. Some British officers and administrators were still serving in the country; the British considered Pakistan strategically crucial to what remained of their empire; Pakistan’s share of the sterling balances (monies accrued by undivided India during the Second World War) was held in London; and General Ayub Khan, the first non-British commander-in-chief of Pakistan’s armed forces, smoked a pipe, was comfortable in tweeds, played golf and had been a Sandhurst cadet. General Ayub was appointed, on British advice, in 1951. But in that same year Washington comprehensively trumped London’s dilatory drip-feed of military aid and development funds. Having identified Pakistan as a vital link in its geopolitical containment of communism, and having decided that the army was the country’s most stable and amenable institution, Washington was already in direct negotiations with the generals when, in October 1951, prime minister Liaquat Ali Khan was gunned down at a public meeting in Rawalpindi.

  As is often the way, a hail of police bullets had instantly eliminated the assassin. An Afghan who had once been a British agent and latterly a Pakistani agent, this shadowy operative could have been hired by any number of interested parties, domestic or foreign. But it was no secret that prime minister Liaquat was ambivalent about alignment with Washington. He is thought to have sympathised with the resentment felt by Pakistani Muslims over the role of the West in Egypt and Iran, and he may have been contemplating a mobilisation of this resentment to challenge his rivals, both civil and military. His removal had, to say the least, been convenient for many.

  Whoever was responsible, the losers had been open debate and political accountability. For, as of Liaquat’s death in late 1951, the institutional balance of power in Pakistan shifted decisively north, away from the political mudslinging in Karachi to the shady swards of the military cantonments in Rawalpindi. The first in a procession of crusty bureaucrats with military connections took over as governor-general; with military approval, another civil servant, the ex-ambassador to the US, soon moved into the prime minister’s office.

  The long road from Karachi’s debating chamber to Rawalpindi’s parade ground led through a veritable thicket of bureaucratic authoritarianism. But just as ‘the politicians were less than gifted democrats and the bureaucrats more than traditional autocrats’ so the military dictators were far from outright despots.3 The length of the transition from parliamentary practice to military diktat alone argues against the army’s appetite for government and in favour of its avowed preference for civilian rule, albeit as exercised by unelected and dependable bureaucrats. It would take three years (1951–4) of stop-start bargaining for the desperately needed US arms shipments to materialise under a Mutual Defence and Assistance Pact, and somewhat longer for Pakistan to fulfil its part of the bargain by joining the Baghdad Pact as well as SEATO. Another four years elapsed before the emasculation of Pakistan’s political process was formalised with the dissolution of a second Constituent Assembly and the declaration of martial law. By then (1958) the situation seemed to admit of no other solution.

  Provincial elections in East Bengal in 1954 had started the ball rolling. Postponed since the anti-Urdu riots of 1952, East Bengal’s first elections duly confirmed the province’s rejection of the Muslim League and all it stood for in terms of a pro-West foreign policy as well as on constitutional and language issues. The Muslim League lost all but ten of the 300-plus seats it had contested, among them all those held by the Bengali contingent in the central Constituent Assembly in Karachi. The victors, a variety of left-leaning parties dominated by the Awami League and designated a United Front, demanded replacement of these Constituent Assembly members, a move which would probably have terminated the Muslim League’s tenure of power at the centre. But before any action could be taken, the Bengal election was effectively negated. Serious conflict in the jute mills had just left several hundred dead in what was more an ethnic bloodbath than an industrial dispute; then Fazl-ul-Haq, the United Front’s octogenarian leader, had indiscreetly told an Indian audience of his regrets over Partition and his hopes for East Bengal’s ‘independence’. This provided not just a pretext for intervention but an imperative. The governor-general despatched a new hardline governor to Dhaka who promptly declared Governor’s Rule, so suspending all political activity in the province.

  The implications of the Bengali vote were serious. Approximately half of Pakistan’s citizens, all resident in its most productive and inaccessible province, were opposed to the priorities, policies and constitutional proposals being pursued by the central government. There was no longer a national consensus; Dhaka and Karachi were on a collision course. But just as serious were the implications of the dismissal of the offending United Front government. For if the governor’s action in Dhaka went unchallenged, so might similar action by the governor-general in Karachi. In other words, the Constituent Assembly, its unrepresentative character now exposed, could itself be next in the firing line.

  With unaccustomed despatch the Constituent Assembly immediately began asserting its authority. But, in trying to declaw the governor-generalship, instead of pre-empting a mauling it provoked it. Hatched in a London hotel room, the decisive coup of 1954 got the go-ahead in the gubernatorial bedroom in Karachi. Apparently the ailing governor-general, who at the time was ‘wrapped in a white sheet and gesticulating wildly as he lay rolling on the floor’, whooped with approval. A state of emergency was duly declared on 24 October 1954. The Constituent Assembly was dissolved and its cabinet of ministers dismissed.4

  With the prime minister hopelessly discredited in this affair and the governor-general clearly ‘not in control of his full senses’, the bureaucrats sallied out for another round of musical chairs. In 1955 Iskander Mirza, the no-nonsense governor of East Bengal, principal mover in the recent coup and another Sandhurst man, was installed as governor-general; meanwhile prime ministers came and went at the rate of one a year. Only the commander-in-chief stayed put. General Ayub Khan’s support had been essential to the coup, yet he hesitated to stand forth as its principal. Civilian government was to be given one more chance.

  It nearly worked. Governor’s Rule was revoked in East Bengal, which now became East Pakistan; to negate that province’s demographic preponderance in national elections, all the other provinces were amalgamated into a ‘one-unit’ West Pakistan; and in 1956 a second Constituent Assembly, newly elected by the provincial legislatures, made quick work of at last providing the now bipartite and renamed Islamic Republic of Pakistan with its long-awaited constitution.

  Not surprisingly, this document reserved extensive discretionary powers to the head of state. In effect the contested interventions of ‘Governor-General’ Iskander M
irza now became the constitutional prerogatives of ‘President’ Iskander Mirza. The first-ever elections to a Pakistan National Assembly were scheduled, the franchise being universal and the seats allocated so as to ensure parity between the new units of East and West. But whether members were to be elected by separate Muslim and non-Muslim electorates or by joint ones was left for further discussion. East Pakistan, with a substantial Hindu population, insisted on joint electorates, West Pakistan on the retention of separate electorates. Not without a sigh of relief from many quarters, this issue led to the elections being postponed.

  For East and West were at loggerheads over much else. The appointment as prime minister of the veteran Bengali H. S. Suhrawardy (he who as undivided Bengal’s prime minister had presided over the Calcutta massacres exactly a decade earlier and who had since founded the Awami League) was meant to assuage Bengali opinion. It succeeded only in discrediting Suhrawardy. In bitter rows over the allocation of development funds and over Bengali enthusiasm for Egypt’s nationalisation of the Suez canal, ‘Mirza thwacked Suhrawardy back into line.’5 Another prime minister took his place in October 1957, then another in December. Their unwieldy coalitions meant that within a year ‘approximately one-third of [Constituent] Assembly members held cabinet positions’.6

  This Karachi charade was overshadowed only by the pandemonium in Dhaka. There, exacerbated as much by the provincial assembly’s less than neutral speaker as by the official opposition, the reinstated United Front government took on both, literally. Fists flew, microphones served as truncheons, members wrestled in the aisles, and a pole flying the national flag did duty as a battering ram. In a repeat performance on 23 September 1958 the deputy speaker was felled when struck on the nose by a missile, reputedly a desk-top. He died two days later. Arrests followed, as did a report from military headquarters in East Pakistan to the effect that only armed intervention could restore order and prevent a breakaway.

  It coincided with a similar report from the opposite extremity of the country. The Khan of Kelat in Baluchistan, giving vent to a disgust shared by many, had seized a fort and replaced the Pakistani flag with his ancestral standard. Against what looked to be a bid for autonomy the army finally rolled into action. On 6 October 1958 troops were deployed in Baluchistan. Next day they were everywhere. Throughout Pakistan, ports, airports and rail terminals were occupied, radio and telecom stations seized, the press muzzled, political parties banned, the constitution abrogated and martial law declared.

  As military coups go, that of 1958 was a well-planned, smoothly executed and, despite the indefinite postponement of elections, not unpopular exercise. Evidently Mirza and Ayub, the latter now prominent as chief martial law administrator, had been considering the move for months. They had not, though, reached agreement on its aftermath. Mirza announced an early return to civilian rule while Ayub made it clear that martial law must remain in force for as long as it took to restore stability, devise a new political system and push through a programme of major reforms. One man was thinking days, the other years. The years won. After an abortive counter-coup, Mirza was persuaded to resign in favour of early retirement on a handsome pension in London. Ayub gathered round him a coterie of associates that included the young Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and assumed the presidency. Before boarding his plane Mirza reportedly wished the general ‘the best of luck’; it could have been a sporting gesture or just a sarcastic good-riddance.

  Opinions of Ayub Khan’s personal rule over the next decade differ greatly. To all who cherish democratic freedoms, it remains the bleakest of interludes during which an authoritarian inheritance was so fostered and formalised as to provide both precedent and blueprint for all the military takeovers that followed. Zia-ur-Rahman and Mohamed Ershad in what became Bangladesh, no less than Zia-ul-Haq and Pervez Musharraf in what remained of Pakistan, would brazenly draw on this legacy. Intellectual life was stunted and the hopes of a young nation squandered. Political sycophancy became the norm. The prospects of responsible parliamentary rule ever thriving appeared to have been irretrievably blighted.

  On the other hand, those who accord a high priority to economic development and national cohesion tend to be more indulgent. For all his sins, Ayub proved a surprisingly benign, even likeable, dictator. The purges conducted by his counterparts in China, Indonesia and Iraq were notably absent, as were the ideological and sectarian bigotries that informed them. His notions of stability and justice owed more to the rough-and-ready brand of paternalism associated with the Panjab’s British rulers. Thousands of venal politicians, corrupt bureaucrats and black-marketeers were immediately hauled before special tribunals where most were censured, some penalised, but few imprisoned. The object seems to have been to deter rather than to punish. Profiteering was outlawed, prices for essential foodstuffs fixed, probity and administrative efficiency applauded. An attempt to limit large landholdings and redistribute the surplus probably fared no better than in India; and like every government that Pakistan has ever known, the Ayub regime lavished funds on defence to the neglect of education, public health and other forms of social provision. But in Karachi, housing schemes were built for the refugees, while in rural parts of West Pakistan irrigation was extended and land reclaimed. Thanks to the availability of American technical support and investment, Pakistan was an early beneficiary of the ‘Green Revolution’ in the mid- to late 1960s. On both sides of the border agriculture also benefited from a solution to the vexed issue of water-sharing in the Panjab. An Indus Waters Agreement, unattainable so long as Karachi’s warring politicians had a say in the matter, was signed by Nehru and Ayub in 1960 and owed as much to Ayub’s pragmatism as to the World Bank’s intercession. It removed a source of conflict second only to Kashmir and set a rare example of Indo-Pakistani co-operation. Through two more wars and countless crises the signatories would honour its terms and respect the Commission that still oversees them.

  On a political stage hitherto monopolised by the subtle wits and rhetorical skills of the legal fraternity – Jinnah, Liaquat and Bhutto, like Gandhi, Nehru and Patel, were all barristers – the bluff statements and simplistic remedies offered by Ayub carried conviction. Not since Wavell had a military mind grappled with the problems of South Asian governance. But, as then, good intentions proved no guarantee of acceptable solutions. Islamabad, Ayub’s designated new capital, was meant to signify a brave new start, like Kemal Atatürk’s Ankara. Yet it was also a monumental extravagance wildly at variance with his own injunctions about simple living and personal economy. The lavish lifestyle of those families, supposedly twenty-two in number, who benefited most from the regime’s free-market economic policies rankled still more. Yet without channelling funds, credit facilities and licences to the entrepreneurial interests best able to exploit them, the long-sought lift-off would hardly have been possible. In 1960–5 manufacturing output grew by over 11 per cent annually and the economy by over 5 per cent annually. They were major achievements. But per-capita incomes increased by only around 3 per cent a year, and this mostly because the rich got richer. The poor just got more. Pakistan’s ‘golden decade’ showered its favours on a few entrepreneurial and landowning interests from the country’s west wing, but almost none from the east wing, while the rest of society benefited scarcely at all.

  It was much the same with Ayub’s painfully elaborate system of ‘basic democracy’. His big idea was to enlist support for the regime and encourage a more inclusive esprit by giving the people, 80 per cent of whom were illiterate, a crash course in responsible decision-making prior to the reintroduction of some more conventional form of democracy. To this end there was ordained a five-tier pyramid of ‘basic democracy’ councils, each level of which had its administrative responsibilities. The pyramid reached from the grass-roots ‘union councils’, with half their members being locally elected on a universal franchise, to the topmost provincial-level councils, a few of whose members were indirectly elected from the tiers below. The elective element thus tailed off up th
e tiers, or ranks, of what was more like a chain of command. Conversely, the unelected element of official nominees and office-bearers became progressively more dominant towards the top – like officers in the army. A product of the parade ground, the system was less ‘basic democracy’ than ‘basic training’ and, though heavily promoted, would be just as easily consigned to oblivion.

  The promise of a more conventional exercise in democracy remained, as did the newly self-promoted Field Marshal Ayub’s appetite for national endorsement. Either way, a new constitution was required. With ample experience to draw on, a consultative body quickly cobbled together the necessary document, Ayub then blue-pencilled anything remotely offensive to his chances of controlling subsequent governments, and the constitution was duly promulgated in 1962. Martial law was lifted. National elections, of a sort, followed in 1964. Only the 120,000 ‘basic democrats’ (those who had secured election or appointment to one of the five tiers) could vote; but political parties now re-emerged and old faces – Nazimuddin’s and Suhrawardy’s among them – entered the fray. Joining the ranks of those he most despised, Ayub himself briefly relinquished the presidency to contest as the leader of a splinter group of the resuscitated Muslim League. He won comfortably, though not with the expected landslide and not without accusations of ballot-rigging. The election of a president followed in 1965. Again Ayub won, but this time only marginally. Clearly, to galvanise the nation in support of his reforms some new ingredient was needed.

  In point of fact it had already been anticipated by his fiery young foreign minister, Z. A. Bhutto. The meteoric rise of Bhutto had owed much to Ayub’s infatuation with his acolyte’s personal brilliance but more to the latter’s uncompromising championship of the Kashmir issue. Bhutto’s coruscating attacks on the Indian government had won electoral support for the regime, especially among the young, while Ayub himself warmed to the old idea that Pakistan’s problems (and his own) stemmed from the fundamental betrayal of the two-nation theory that India’s retention of Kashmir constituted. There was also fury over Washington’s providing military aid to India in the wake of the Chinese incursion (it might be used to suppress Kashmiri dissent) and over Indian moves to reduce the special status of Kashmir to that of a constituent state within the Indian republic (so in effect annexing it).