by Ali, Tariq
An angry provincial governor called on the army to intervene. Martial law was declared in Lahore. General Azam gave orders to shoot rioters on sight. Within twenty-four hours the crisis was over. Maulana Maududi and others were tried for treason, and Maududi was sentenced to death, which was later commuted.
A court of inquiry was established to inquire into the cause of the disturbances. It was presided over by Justice Munir and Justice Kayani. The published report, I have often argued, is a classic of its type, a modern masterpiece of political literature. It should become part of the national curriculum if a serious state education system is ever established. The two judges began to question Muslim clerics from rival schools, and different factions testified as to what they thought constituted a Muslim state and their definition of a Muslim. With each new reply the judges found it difficult to conceal their incredulity, some of which was reflected in their report. All the groups concurred in the view that a secular state was impermissible and that non-Muslims could not be treated as equal citizens. This raised a new problem:
The question, therefore, whether a person is or is not a Muslim will be of fundamental importance, and it was for this reason that we asked most of the leading ulama [religious scholars] to give their definition of a Muslim, the point being that if the ulama of the various sects believed the Ahmadis to be kafirs [unbelievers], they must have been quite clear in their minds not only about the grounds of such belief but also about the definition of a Muslim because the claim that a certain person or community is not within the pale of Islam implies an exact conception of what a Muslim is. The result of this part of the inquiry, however, has been anything but satisfactory, and if considerable confusion exists in the mind of our ulama on such a simple matter, one can easily imagine what the differences on more complicated matters will be....
Keeping in view the several definitions given by the ulama, need we make any comment except that no two learned divines are agreed on this fundamental. If we attempt our own definition as each learned divine has done and that definition differs from that given by all others, we unanimously go out of the fold of Islam. And if we adopt the definition given by any one of the ulama, we remain Muslims according to the view of that alim, but kafirs according to the definition of everyone else.*
The demand to declare the Ahmediyyas infidels faded from public view. No government took it seriously, and threats to the community receded. Ironically, it was Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, under political siege by a combined opposition in 1976, who thought he would outflank the Islamist parties by implementing three of their old demands: a ban on alcohol, Friday and not Sunday as the official holiday, and, more serious, declaring the Ahmediyyas a non-Muslim sect. This craven capitulation could only strengthen those who had first proposed these measures. Ahmediyyas remain Muslims in India, Britain, France, Germany, East Africa, but not in Pakistan. The late Pakistani physicist Dr. Abdus Salam was the only Muslim scientist to win the Nobel Prize. That he was an Ahmedi would make the preceding sentence inaccurate in Pakistan.
The Pakistan envisaged by Jinnah never took off. The geographical entity died on the killing fields of East Pakistan. Over 70 percent of Pakistanis were born after the debacle of 1971. Amnesia prevails. Few have any idea what took place or even that there was once another country. The country’s name was the brainchild of Chaudhry Rahmat Ali, an Indian Muslim studying in London during the thirties and evidently with time on his hands. He played around with the initials of Muslim majority areas in India: P represented the Punjab, A was for Afghanistan, K was Kashmir, S represented Sind. Unfortunately, pak also means “pure” but, more interesting, there was no B for Bengal or Baluchistan. Could a nuclear Pakistan dominated by the military fragment still further, and if so, what might be the consequences for the region as a whole? Whose interests would another division serve? Those without knowledge or understanding of their own history are fated to repeat it. What follows is an attempt to explain the past and the present in the hope of a better future.
3
THE WASHINGTON QUARTET
The Man Who Would Be Field Marshal
IN OCTOBER 1958, A DECADE AFTER THE GREAT LEADER’S DEATH, the political system he had set in place received its first shock. The Pakistan Army, backed by Washington, decided on a preemptive strike against democracy and declared martial law. Some months later at a public poetry reading, most of the participants confined themselves to reciting love poems. When it was his turn, the Punjabi poet Ustad Daman began to recite a poem about birds twittering. Some of us shouted from the audience, “For Allah’s sake, say something!” This unseemly provocation elicited an extemporized couplet:
Now each day is sweet and balmy,
Wherever you look, the army.
Cheered by the large crowd, he was then picked up by the police a few hours later and held in custody for a week or so. Pakistan had changed.
How and why did this happen? Within a year of the country’s founding, the Great Leader was dead, leaving behind a set of notables— mainly landed gentry sometimes doubling as hereditary religious leaders (Pirs, Makhdooms, etc.)—who sometimes wondered how they were going to muddle through. The new rulers were soon confronted with two contradictions, one of them serious.
The first of these concerned the political geography of the new country. It was divided in two parts, East and West, separated from each other by a thousand miles of India and having little in common except religion, and sometimes not even that. If Islam constituted a nationality (as the Muslim League insisted but as orthodox Islamists initially resisted), this was always going to be its big test. Sixty percent of the population was in East Pakistan, with their own language, tradition, culture, diet, and time zone. The overwhelming bulk of the bureaucracy and army was from or based in West Pakistan. The reason was simple. The Punjab had been the “sword arm” of the raj especially after the conclusion of the Sikh Wars of the nineteenth century. A large share of the native soldiery came from the most economically backward parts of the subcontinent; the army was considered a step up by poor peasant families groaning under the yoke of native landlords. The British virtually restricted recruitment to the countryside. They were suspicious of the urban petit bourgeois and saw the Bengalis as the epitome of this layer, loquacious and unreliable, who had to be kept out.
In 1933, General Sir George MacMunn (1869–1952), a doughty warrior from the Scottish lowlands, wrote a quaint tract entitled The Martial Races of India, replete with imperial justifications for the pattern of recruitment to the British Indian army:
The staunch old yeoman who came into the Indian commissioned ranks via the rank and file, or the young Indian landowner made the Indian officer as we know him. . . . The clever young men of the Universities were quite unfitted for military work... the army officers had long realised that the Indian intelligentsia would never make officers.
This rule was relaxed during the Second World War when expediency dictated the entry of educated officers, and a number of undesirables (including even Communists after Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union) were hastily recruited to assist the war effort in India and Britain. Postwar pruning got rid of most of this layer. Others left voluntarily. Staunch yeomen and younger sons of the landed gentry remained.
The British Indian army was shaken during the war. The fall of Singapore to the Japanese had pierced the myth of British invulnerability. There was no fail-safe inoculation against the nationalist disease, and a number of officers and soldiers (some of them from the “martial races”) captured by the Japanese defected and set up the Indian National Army, which fought alongside their captors against the British on the basis of wrongheaded nationalist logic according to which “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” something that is almost always never the case. Empires old and new have no friends. They only have interests. The civil conflicts during partition also colored the thinking of Indian officers in the north. They had witnessed appalling massacres that they were helpless to prevent, larg
ely because the imperial power feared that divided loyalties would lead to chaos if there was a breakup of the army along communal lines. For that reason the military was not encouraged to intervene in order to stop the massacres. At best, the army offered some limited protection to refugees on both sides.
This army itself was partitioned along communal lines, creating two different command structures, each temporarily under the control of a British general. Consequently, the new Pakistan army maintained most of the old colonial traditions with continuity preserved in the first instance by the appointment of General Sir Frank Messervy and subsequently Sir Douglas Gracey, a colonial veteran, as its first two commanders in chief. In addition, over five hundred other British officers stayed behind to give the new fighting force a much-needed boost. This created some resentment. In 1950, a small group of more nationalist-minded officers (including a general, Akbar Khan), together with an even tinier collection of Communist intellectuals, discussed a possible coup d’état to topple the pro-West government. The half-baked plot was uncovered, and the participants (including the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz and the literary critics Sibte Hassan and Sajjad Zaheer) were sent to prison, and the infinitesimal Pakistan Communist Party was banned.
In contrast to Hindu and Sikh detachments, no all-Muslim units had been allowed in the colonial army, a decision dating back to the 1857 anti-British uprising for which the imperial power wrongly held the old Muslim aristocracy exclusively responsible. In fact, it was a proto-nationalist rebellion by Indians of every stripe against the new conquerors. The old recruitment policy persisted till well after partition. Few Bengalis were recruited to the Pakistan army. The policy was changed much later with the partially successful, if politically disastrous, Islamization during the late seventies and eighties that is discussed in a subsequent chapter and whose effects are still present.
The first Pakistani military chief met all MacMunn’s criteria. General Ayub Khan was tall, mustachioed, and well built. He was from tried and tested stock, the son of a risaldar major (a noncommissioned officer), and regarded by his superiors as an obedient and trustworthy soldier. He was to fully justify that trust, remaining loyal first to the British and later to the United States throughout his years in military politics. He reached the top effortlessly, helped by fate: General Iftikhar, due to succeed Gracey and generally regarded as a sharper and more independent-minded officer, perished in an air crash in 1949. It would be unfair to single out Ayub Khan as the only native conservative-minded and submissive, pro-British senior officer in the new Pakistan army. Few of his well-trained contemporaries were any different. The same could be said about their Indian counterparts. Reading through the prolix and self-serving memoirs of postindependence generals on both sides of the Indo-Pak divide is tedious and unrewarding. The books are revealing, however, in that they provide an insight to the psychology of the generals. The golden age, for most of them, lies firmly in the past, with gimlets (gin cocktails) at lunchtime or a post-sunset whiskey with their pink-skinned superiors. That they had not been allowed membership in exclusive whites-only clubs till after independence did not bother them unduly. They had got used to the social apartheid. At their happiest fighting alongside and working under British officers, they would treasure those times for the rest of their lives. Ayub Khan, for instance, had been among an early batch of young native cadets sent to Sandhurst when the “Indianization” of the army had become necessary. He would later proudly recall that he was “the first foreign cadet to be promoted Corporal and given two stripes.”
A majority of ruling Pakistani politicians too had grown up serving the British. Like their old mentors, they regarded the ordinary people with a mixture of repugnance and fear. Small wonder that senior civil servants and military officers, true heirs of the departed colonial power, treated the politicians with contempt. On this front, the difference with India could not have been more pronounced. In India the political leadership had been forged over three decades of continuous nationalist struggles and long periods of imprisonment. No general or civil servant would have had the nerve to challenge a first-generation Congress leader. Had he lived longer, Jinnah might possibly have stamped his authority on the two institutions—the army and the civil service— that dwarfed the Muslim League on every level, but his deputy, Liaquat Ali Khan, prime minister and Leader of the Nation (Quaid-i-Millat) and himself a refugee, lacked the same authority over his own party and the country. The Punjabi landlords who dominated the Muslim League and were desperate to gain total control viewed the prime minister as an unnecessary impediment to their own rise, and there is little doubt that it was they who had him assassinated while he was addressing a large crowd in the municipal park in Rawalpindi in October 1951. His assassin, Said Akbar, was immediately shot dead by the police on the orders of Najaf Khan, a senior police officer and factotum of the then inspector general of police, Khan Qurban Ali Khan, who in turn was a close friend of senior Punjabi landlord-politicians.
Liaquat’s assassination symbolized the deep-rooted antagonisms that had developed between the local gentry and the refugee “interlopers” who had crossed the river Jumna and made their way to the Muslim homeland. Some of the wealthier refugees would later regret their decision to come to Pakistan, but the less privileged had no alternative. They were driven out of their villages and towns. That the refugees tended to be more cultured and better educated than their unwilling hosts soon became another point of contention. They were strongly embedded in the civil service of Pakistan, and this created resentments. Their linguistic affectations and mannerisms were constantly caricatured, and they in turn found it difficult to conceal their contempt for the wooden-headed and uncouth Sindhi and Punjabi politicians. The cold-blooded decision to bump off Liaquat was partly intended as a shot across the bows of his fellow migrants. The message was simple: you are here on sufferance and don’t forget that this country belongs to us. So much for “the homeland of Islam in the subcontinent.” Worse was yet to come.
General Ayub Khan was in London when Liaquat was assassinated, and later described, somewhat disingenuously, his shock on meeting the new prime minister, Khwaja Nazimudin, and cabinet: “Not one of them mentioned Liaquat Ali’s name, nor did I hear a word of sympathy or regret from any one of them. Governor-General Ghulam Mohammad seemed equally unaware of the fact that the country had lost an eminent and capable Prime Minister.... I wondered how callous, cold-blooded and selfish people could be. . . . I got the distinct impression that they were all feeling relieved that the only person who might have kept them under control had disappeared from the scene.”
That the country’s senior politicians did not copiously weep was to their credit. Having approved the removal of their colleague, it would have been gross hypocrisy on their part to do so. But it seems unlikely that General Ayub’s intelligence chiefs had not informed him of who was behind the assassination. This being so, why did he not act at the time and insist that the rogues responsible organize an immediate general election? He was, of course, preoccupied elsewhere, engaged in political intrigues of his own with the defense secretary, Iskander Mirza, a former general turned senior bureaucrat. Mirza was an astute manipulator. He took advantage of the weakness of the political leadership, ousted a mentally decaying, foulmouthed fellow bureaucrat, Ghulam Mohammad, and took over as governor-general, the country’s head of state.
Mirza ruled with a heavy hand, and when the Bengalis toppled a Muslim League government after provincial polls in 1954, the governor-general removed the elected government and imposed Governor’s Rule throughout East Pakistan. It was the first step toward the disintegration of the country and the militarization of its political culture. It is a sad story that I have written about in some detail elsewhere.* Here it is sufficient to stress that the alienation of the eastern half of the country began early and got worse each consecutive year. The prejudice of Punjabi officers and civil servants against the Bengalis mirrored British prejudices during the colonial period.
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nbsp; As with others who would follow him, Mirza’s overconfidence brought about his political demise. He had presided over the introduction of a new constitution in 1956 declaring Pakistan an Islamic republic and himself as its first president. Mirza and Ayub together institutionalized Pakistan’s role as a U.S. satrapy by joining a network of Cold War security arrangements known as the Baghdad Pact and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), designed to defend U.S. interests in both regions. Ayub had negotiated directly with Washington to secure the military aid program of 1953–54 and Pakistan admittance to the “free world” together with South Korea, South Vietnam, and Thailand.
The writer Saadat Hasan Manto, bemused by what was taking place, wrote a set of nine satirical “Letters to Uncle Sam.” The fourth was written on February 21, 1954, a year before his death:
Dear Uncle:
I wrote to you only a few days ago and here I am writing again. My admiration and respect for you are going up at the same rate as your progress towards a decision to grant military aid to Pakistan. I tell you I feel like writing a letter a day to you.
Regardless of India and the fuss it is making, you must sign a military pact with Pakistan because you are seriously concerned about the stability of the world’s largest Islamic state since our mullah is the best antidote to Russian communism. Once military aid starts flowing you should arm these mullahs. They would also need American-made rosaries and prayer-mats, not to forget small stones that they use to soak up the after-drops following nature’s call.... I think the only purpose of military aid is to arm these mullahs. I am your Pakistani nephew and I know your moves. Everyone can now become a smartass thanks to your style of playing politics.
If this gang of mullahs is armed in the American style, the Soviet Union that hawks communism and socialism in our country will have to shut shop. I can visualise the mullahs, their hair trimmed with American scissors and their pyjamas stitched by American machines in strict conformity with the Sharia. The stones they use for their after-drops [of urine] will also be American, untouched by human hand, and their prayer-mats, too, will be American. Everyone will then become your camp-follower, owing allegiance to you and none else.*
