by Ali, Tariq
Pakistan’s servile leaders were supportive of the Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt in 1956. This was totally unnecessary, and one can only assume that they thought the United States would, however reluctantly, fall in line behind the adventure, which it did not. Their support for the war on Nasser’s Egypt inflamed public opinion and created a wave of anger that led to mass demonstrations throughout the country. Interestingly, the Jamaat-e-Islami played no part in these mobilizations. Political parties now began to demand an exit from the security pacts and a neutral foreign policy. These demands were popular. Mirza and Ayub were apprehensive that the country’s first general election, scheduled for April 1959, might produce a coalition that would take Pakistan out of the security pacts and toward a nonaligned foreign policy, like neighboring India. The United States was even more nervous over such a prospect and encouraged a military takeover.
Mirza, ever arrogant, thought he could run the show with Ayub as his loyal sidekick. He underestimated the autonomy of the army. Simply because General Ayub had, until then, supported every measure he had proposed, the president assumed he would be able to maintain complete control. On Mirza’s initiative, the Pakistan army seized power on October 7, 1958. A cabinet dominated by generals was appointed together with a few nonparty civilians. These included Mohammed Shoaib, a veteran U.S. agent, as finance minister; a brilliant lawyer, Manzur Qadir, as foreign minister; and an unknown young Sindhi, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, as minister for commerce. The response of the West was supportive, and the New York Times, while deploring the suspension of the constitution, was nonetheless hopeful:
“In Pakistan both President Mirza and the army’s head General Ayub Khan have stated clearly that what they propose and wish to do is to establish in due course a fine, honest, and democratic government. There is no reason to doubt their sincerity.”*
A few weeks later three generals called on the president and read out to him his political obituary. A shaken Iskander Mirza left the country forever and became an exile in London, where he later died.
General Ayub Khan became Pakistan’s first military dictator. Within six months all political parties and trade unions had been banned, and the largest chain of opposition newspapers, Progressive Papers Limited, was taken over by the government without a whimper of opposition from the tame Pakistani press or its Western counterparts. A secret Ministry of Education directive was issued in August 1959. Its aim was to “stop the infiltration of communist literature into the country and to prohibit its publication and circulation within the country.” All educational institutions were instructed to “undertake a survey of books in university and college/school libraries to ensure that all objectionable materials are withdrawn.” The delighted Islamists cheered the announcement. As a dictatorship, Pakistan became an even stauncher member of the free world. General Ayub told the first meeting of his cabinet, “As far as you are concerned, there is only one embassy that matters in this country: the American embassy.” The United States reciprocated with a statement endorsed unanimously by the National Security Council (NSC) that noted “the presence of important U.S. security facilities in Pakistan” and gave full backing to the military takeover of the country:
The political instability which was characteristic of previous governments and seriously impeded the effectiveness of U.S. efforts in Pakistan has been replaced by a relatively stable martial law regime. . . . The present political situation should be conducive to the furtherance of U.S. objectives. . . . In view of the present stability, even though achieved by fiat, the problem has changed from one of short-term urgency, requiring us to reckon with individual politicians in one crisis after another, to one which allows us to take a longer-range view of Pakistan’s potential. . . . We give special emphasis to assuring the Pakistan government of our sympathetic interest in and support for its proposed economic and social reforms.
This was simply a case of putting immediate U.S. interests above all else—an imperial failing since ancient times. The NSC statement supporting the military dictatorship ran counter to an extremely astute analysis that was also on the table. A top-secret report from the Office of Intelligence and Research Analysis of the State Department written in December 1958 bluntly stated the consequences of backing the military dictatorship:
. . . a prolonged period of military rule, which Ayub apparently contemplates, could intensify provincial and class tensions. It would probably disillusion the intellectuals, teachers, journalists, lawyers and the broad run of the middle class whose deepest political desire has been to see Pakistan match India’s record of democracy and avoid degenerating to the level of a Middle Eastern or Latin American dictatorship.
. . . only under a democratic system would East Pakistan, with its greater population, appear to be able to match the greater military and bureaucratic weight of West Pakistan.... The prospect of prolonged suppression of political freedom under military domination would intensify the risk of such an increase in tension and discontent in East Pakistan as perhaps to jeopardize the unity of the two wings of the country.
Those who made similar arguments inside Pakistan were denounced as “pro-Indian traitors” or “Communist agents.” Ayub Khan, who soon promoted himself to field marshal, differed on this assessment of democracy and came up with a novel explanation. In an early radio broadcast to the nation, the military dictator informed his bewildered “fellow countrymen” that “we must understand that democracy cannot work in a hot climate. To have democracy we must have a cold climate like Britain.” Few doubted his sincerity on this matter.
Remarks of this sort did little to diminish Ayub’s popularity in the West. He became a great favorite of the press in Britain and the United States. His bluff exterior charmed the notorious showgirl Christine Keeler (they splashed together in the pool at Cliveden during a Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference in 1961), and the saintly Kingsley Martin of the New Statesman published a groveling interview. Meanwhile opposition voices were silenced and political prisoners were tortured.
In 1962, Ayub decided that the time had come to widen his appeal. He took off his uniform, dressed in native gear, and, addressing a forced gathering of peasants assembled by their landlords, announced that there would soon be presidential elections and he hoped people would support him. The bureaucracy organized a political party, the Convention Muslim League, and careerists flocked to join it. The election took place in 1965, and the polls had to be rigged to ensure the field marshal’s triumph. His opponent, Fatima Jinnah (the aged sister of the Great Leader), fought a spirited campaign but to no avail; family links did not count for as much in those days. The handful of bureaucrats who refused to help “adjust” the election results were offered early retirement.
Meanwhile, Western backing for the regime continued apace. The arguments used in its support related principally to the “economic development” taking place, which was supposedly transforming Pakistan from a rural to an urban economy and paving the way for the modernization of the country. This was certainly the view of Finance Minister Mohammed Shoaib, who was so close to Washington that it sometimes received the minutes of cabinet meetings, together with Shoaib’s assessments, before they were even seen by its own members. Shoaib was given strong backing by many visiting stars from the U.S. academe. Gustav Papanek from Harvard fully approved the state establishment of enterprises that could then be turned over to private entrepreneurs and wrote in praise of the “free market economy” that “through a combination of incentives and obstacles produced an environment in which success was likely only for the ruthless individual . . . whose economic behaviour was not too different from their robber baron counterparts of 19th century Western industrialisation.”* Robber barons they certainly were, but unlike their European counterparts they enjoyed the support of a fiscal and economic system that diverted the productive wealth produced by agriculture via a network of subsidies into manufacturing.
The resulting redistribution was at the expense of the peasant
ry, but few cared. The U.S. economic advisers echoed Papanek’s view that “great inequalities were necessary in order to create industry and industrialists,” and that the growth generated in this fashion would lead to a “real improvement for the lower income groups.” This is what later, in the era of globalization, became known as the trickle-down effect. It did not work then as it does not work now. The upper-income groups in the towns paid no taxes and illegally moved their money abroad. Little was invested in the productive nonagricultural sector. Even the official planning commission set up by the government bewailed the bad habits of the city elite in West Pakistan. Keith B. Griffin, an Oxford economist well versed in the economic problems confronting the country, produced a report showing that between 63 percent and 83 percent of savings transferred from agriculture were wasted in nonproductive extravagances, i.e., the sumptuous style cultivated by the nouveaux riches. Griffin went on to point out that in West Pakistan “the potential surplus of these savings units was used to consume more, to buy more ornaments, jewellery and consumer durables and to bid up the prices of real estate and farm lands, helping their owners to disinvest. Often such surplus was devoted to luxury house construction or to open up one more retail store in the already crowded streets and bazaars.”†
The greater inequalities accepted by the Neanderthal Harvard Group were creating new divisions in the country as a whole. In the West wing of the country the elite flaunted its new wealth without shame. There was no shortage of critical comment, but few of the critics took the imbalance this was creating with the East wing very seriously. The Bengalis, naturally, were not pleased with this state of affairs. In addition to being punished politically simply because they were a majority, they now saw moneys accrued by jute production in their region, the export of which had provided a balance of payments surplus during the boom created by the Korean War, disappearing into the coffers of West Pakistan. The stark contrast between the West and East wings of the country created the basis of the national movement in Bengal. The demands of the nationalist Awami League were a local version of “no taxation without representation.”
As the tenth anniversary of the field marshal’s reign approached, a sycophantic intelligentsia and a myopic bureaucracy began to prepare the celebrations, known as the Decade of Development. The Ministry of Information decided on a trumpet call in the shape of a book. It was thought that Pakistan’s soldier-statesman would be further legitimized on the world stage by the publication of his memoirs. Ayub Khan’s Friends Not Masters: A Political Autobiography was published by Oxford University Press in 1967 to great acclaim in the Western press and nothing short of sycophantic hysteria in the government-controlled media at home.*
The biography’s publication was linked to the dictator’s growing unpopularity. A military adventure against India in 1965 had ended in disaster. Ayub, always cautious in these matters, was reluctant to authorize a strike against India. Bhutto and a number of senior generals convinced him that a preemptive strike would take the Indians by surprise and that Operation Grand Slam would liberate Kashmir, the disputed and divided province claimed by both sides after 1947. Ayub finally agreed. India was taken by surprise and Pakistani forces came close to achieving their strategic objectives, but serious operational and organizational failures halted the advance, giving India time to move its troops forward and push Pakistan back, but only after the largest tank battle since the Second World War. Sixty Pakistani tanks were captured intact after the Indian victory.
Ayub was forced to travel to Tashkent, where the Soviet prime minister, Aleksey Kosygin, brokered a cease-fire deal between the two countries. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, by this time a mercurial foreign minister, resigned soon afterward, alleging that secret protocols attached to the Tashkent Treaty amounted to a betrayal of the Kashmiri people’s right to self-determination. This turned out not to have been the case, but it had become a useful weapon at mass meetings. When, a year later, I asked Bhutto why he had pushed Ayub to wage an unwinnable war, his reply took me aback: “It was the only way to weaken the bloody dictatorship. The regime will crack wide open fairly soon.” Bhutto had by this time decided to organize his own political grouping, and the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) was founded in 1966.* From the beginning the party line was to destroy the Ayub regime. In 1967, Bhutto began to address a series of large meetings throughout the country and was arrested. His confidence was high. Knowing full well that his cell was bugged, he would, during meetings with his lawyer, Mahmud Ali Kasuri, provoke the military. “General Musa’s days as governor of West Pakistan are numbered. We’ll dress him in a skirt and make him dance on the streets like a monkey,” was one of the few insults that were printable.
In response to the growing opposition in the country the regime decided that a distraction was needed. In October 1968 lavish celebrations to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the dictatorship were in progress. The Karachi daily Dawn competed with the government press by publishing sixty-nine photographs of the field marshal in a single issue. The citizens were triumphantly informed that in Karachi, a city with only three bottled-milk outlets, the consumer could choose among Bubble Up, Canada Dry, Citra Cola, Coca-Cola, Double Cola, Kola Kola, Pepsi-Cola, Perri Cola, Fanta, Hoffman’s Mission, and 7UP. In Lahore a reporter from the government newspaper Pakistan Times slobbered over a fashion show:
The mannequins received a big hand from the elegant crowd as they moved up and down the brightly lit catwalk modelling the dresses. Some of the creations which the audience warmly applauded were “Romantica,” “Raja’s Ransom,” “Sea Nymph” and “Hello Officer.” . . . The Eleganza ’69 look was defined as a blend of the soft and the severe.
But the bread and circuses became a public relations disaster. On November 7, 1968, students in Rawalpindi and Dhaka surprised the government and themselves by marching out onto the streets. They demanded freedom and the restoration of democracy, recalling the words of the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire:
It was an evening in November . . .
And suddenly shouts lit up the silence;
We had attacked, we the slaves; we, the
Dung-underfoot, we the animals with patient hooves...
Soon student action committees were springing up across both parts of the country. This was the “unfashionable” 1968, far removed from the glamour of Europe and the United States. It was also different in character. The gap between the actions of the Pakistani students and workers and the actual conquest of state power was much narrower than in France or Italy, let alone the United States or Britain. No democratic institutions existed in Pakistan. Political parties were relatively weak. The movement was stronger than them.
The scale of the uprising was breathtaking: during five months of continuous struggles that began on November 7, 1968, and ended on March 26, 1969, some 10–15 million people had participated in the struggle across East and West Pakistan. The state responded with its customary brutality. There were mass arrests and the dictatorship ordered the police to “kill rioters” on sight. Several students died during the first few weeks. In the two months that followed, workers, lawyers, small shopkeepers, prostitutes, and government clerks joined the protests. Stray dogs with Ayub painted on their back became a special target for armed police.
But here too the two halves of the country saw a marked disparity in the degree of repression. A few hundred died in West Pakistan. Nearly two thousand perished in Bengal. More than in the Punjab, Sind, North-West Frontier, and Baluchistan put together. One of the most moving aspects of this insurrection was the unity it imposed from below. When students died in the West, barefoot women students of Dhaka in the East marched in silence in a show of respect and solidarity. These six months were the only period in the history of united Pakistan where ordinary people on both sides of the country genuinely felt close to each other. I know this from personal experience. For three months, from March to May 1969, I traveled extensively in both parts of Pakistan, addressing meetings large and small and talk
ing to student leaders and antidictatorship politicians, poets, and trade union leaders. The mood was joyous. The country had never been so full of hope before or since.
In those few months, the Pakistani people spoke freely. All that they had kept repressed since 1947 poured out. And the movement was not without humor. For hundreds of years the Punjabi word chamcha (spoon) has been used to denote a stooge. The origins of this are obscure. Some argue that it goes back to the arrival of the British. Local potentates who had hitherto subscribed to the art of eating delicately with their fingers had abandoned tradition and begun to use spoons and forks. Whatever the truth, the demonstrators started greeting pro-regime civil servants and politicians with spoons, the size depending on the self-importance that the dignitary attached to himself and popular estimates (usually accurate) of the degree of his sucking up to power at home or in Washington. When Ayub or his ministers arrived, they were greeted by gigantic homemade spoons as well as hundreds of the normal variety bought in the bazaar and used as cymbals to enliven proceedings.
The meetings I attended in East Bengal were particularly heated. I could see before my eyes the large gulf that separated the two wings of Pakistan. I argued that a voluntary socialist and democratic federation was the only thing that could save the country. This view sounds utopian today, but in those heady days everything seemed possible.
On a hot and humid afternoon in April 1969 I was taken to address the students of Dhaka University under the amtala tree on the campus. Many a political movement had been born in this symbolic space. Here, the students had, after a spate of fiery speeches, decided to fight the dictatorship. They would not let me speak in Urdu and voted, by an overwhelming majority (which included Nicholas Tomalin of the Sunday Times), that I speak in English, suggesting wryly that I learn Bengali for the next time. It is a beautiful language and I promised I would, even though I half knew that there never would be a next time. Every political instinct told me that Bengali national aspirations were about to be crushed by the army, that it would rather destroy Pakistan than permit any meaningful autonomy, let alone accept a confederation. I made this point forcefully to the students that day. This being the case, I told them, why not go for complete independence? Take over your country. Done quickly, it might avoid the bloodshed to come. There was a hush. The audience looked at me in amazement. Someone from the other side, a Punjabi to boot, had mentioned the word independence. Then they cheered and chanted slogans, before carrying me on their shoulders back to my car.
