by Ali, Tariq
The “Lal salaams” (red salutes) were still ringing in my ears when I was taken that same day to meet Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the leader of the nationalist, but still staunchly parliamentarian, Awami League. In March 1965, the Awami League, in the person of the sheikh, had dropped a bombshell with what became the famous Six Point plan for regional autonomy (discussed in the following chapter). The opposition West Pakistani leaders were so shocked that they accused the Ayub regime’s most Machiavellian civil servant, Altaf Gauhar, of having drafted the plan to split the anti-Ayub opposition.
This marked the beginning of the gulf between Bengali nationalism and the West Pakistani opposition parties. The abyss widened over the years, and the united struggle against the dictatorship was just a passing phase. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman knew my own sympathies were on the left and that I was closer to the Bengali peasant leader Maulana Bhashani, who had taken me on a tour of the villages and small towns of the Eastern province a few weeks previously. Bhashani had told me then of his meetings in China with Chou En-lai, who had pleaded with him not to weaken Ayub Khan since he was a friend of China’s. The majority of Pakistani Maoists had loyally followed this advice, but Bhashani had realized that to support Ayub meant political suicide. He had joined the movement, but it was already too late.
Sheikh Mujib now reminded me that I had recently referred to him as “Chiang Kai-Sheikh” and muttered something about Mao backing Ayub Khan. Nonetheless he greeted me warmly and came straight to the point.
“Is it true that you said what they told me you said today?”
I nodded.
“You are sure they will use force. How sure?”
I explained that my certainty did not come from any hard information from those in power or even through understanding their psychology, but from one hard fact. The primary export commodities of East Bengal were vital to the economy of West Pakistan. Autonomy would mean the loss of financial control for the West. Sheikh Mujib listened attentively, but did not seem fully convinced. Perhaps he thought he could maneuver his way to power via a deal with the military chiefs. His party was pro-West and had, only recently, stressed its closeness to Washington and security pacts. He may have believed that Washington would compel the Pakistani military to play ball. Later when Nixon and Kissinger “tilted toward” Islamabad, it was a bitter cup for him to swallow. Mujib felt he had been badly betrayed.
The movement in 1968 was overwhelmingly secular, nationalist, and anti-imperialist. The student wing of the Jamaat-e-Islami would sometimes try to disrupt meetings, including two of mine in Rawalpindi and Multan, occasionally by force, but were swept aside by waves of students chanting various versions of “Socialism is on its way” and “Death to Maududi,” the latter a reference to the leader and principal theologian of the Islamists, patronized by the Saudi royal family and a committed supporter of the United States.
The war in Vietnam had struck a deep chord among Pakistanis of virtually all social classes, and the poet Habib Jalib was wildly cheered on platforms we shared that year when he recited:
Global defenders of human rights,
Why the silence?
Where are you?
Speak!
Humanity is on the rack
Vietnam is on fire,
Vietnam is on fire
Jalib would then turn on the rulers of Pakistan and warn them that if they carried on as before, the Vietnamese fire might spread to “where you are” and “clouds filled with dynamite will pour down on you.”
A detailed survey of the casualties revealed the scale of the mobilizations. November 1968: 4 deaths and over 1,000 arrests; December 1968: 11 deaths, 1,530 arrests; January 1969: 57 deaths, 4,710 arrests, and 1,424 injured; February 1969: 47 deaths, 100 arrests, and 12 injured; March 1969: 90 deaths, 356 arrests, and 40 injured. These figures were based on press releases from the government and were generally regarded as a considerable underestimation. It had by now become obvious to the military high command that blanket repression was not deterring the crowds. They had lost their fear of death. When this happens, revolution becomes a possibility.
Railway workers in the Punjab had begun to sabotage rail tracks to prevent troop movements, and in East Bengal police stations were attacked and armories raided. A week later, the generals in GHQ called on their field marshal with sad faces but firm instructions. Ayub did not hesitate. He surrendered. His resignation was announced that same day. His successor, General Yahya (a particular pronunciation means “fuck-fuck” in Punjabi) Khan, took over and immediately announced that the country’s first-ever general election would be held in December 1970. A euphoric fever gripped the country. Clashing cymbals, cheering crowds, and loud drumbeats marked the fall of Ayub Khan, who had, as Bhutto later recalled, been considering elevating himself to an even higher position than field marshal:
During the “golden era” of Ayub Khan an earnest proposal was made to him by an eminent personality to declare a hereditary monarchy in Pakistan and to make himself the first monarch. Ayub Khan took the proposal seriously. He formed a two-man Supreme Council of Nawab of Kalabagh and myself to examine it. We returned the proposal together with its blue-print to Ayub Khan within a week with the recommendations that he should forget it altogether. Ayub Khan’s observations were “bhehtar sallah” (good advice). He added however, “It is not all that senseless.”*
This jovial Sandhurst-trained officer, secular in outlook, fond of the odd drink, and used to obeying orders, had, alas, been overpromoted. Now he was gone. His overdependence on Washington and his own Svengalis had brought him down.
What lay ahead? Just three years previously, Karl von Vorys, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, had concluded a 341-page book on Pakistan with these words:
“Just six years ago Mohammad Ayub Khan took the helm of the State of Pakistan. Since then he has many accomplishments to his credit. The disintegration of the country, an acute threat in 1958, seems rather remote now.”† At least one sentence was accurate.
4
THE WASHINGTON QUARTET
The General Who Lost a Country
THE PAKISTAN ARMY PRIDES ITSELF ON BEING A UNIFYING FORCE, without which Pakistan would disappear. The history about to be recounted suggests that the opposite is the truth. In March 1969, Ayub passed control of the country to General Yahya Khan, who promised a free election within a year and, fearing the revival of the mass movement, kept his word. Before returning to the twisted narrative of Pakistani history, a pen portrait summarizing the place and function of the army might be helpful to the reader.
The army’s oft-repeated claim that it is independent of “vested interests” had finally been exposed. Ayub Khan had played politics and enrolled the landed gentry in his Muslim League. His son had utilized the military umbrella to become a businessman and had amassed a small fortune. Indeed, the whole historical role of the military and bureaucratic state apparatus that Pakistan “inherited” from British rule in India had now emerged into the light of day for many Pakistanis of the ’68 generation. This role was in many ways a peculiarly central and concentrated one in Pakistan, setting it off from the military regimes that exist in various Asian and African countries today.
The Japanese invasion and occupation of Southeast Asia during the Second World War temporarily smashed the old colonial apparatuses of government—which had anyway never had a large indigenous quotient—in Burma, Indonesia, and elsewhere. After the war, there was little chance for the imperial powers to reconstitute these, and considerable sections of the armed forces and civil services that emerged in the postindependence period had participated in a national liberation struggle against either Japanese or European oppressors.
In Africa, on the other hand, the colonial administrations were usually staffed so thoroughly by the colonizing power itself that the civilian bureaucracy and—above all—the army had to build up virtually from scratch after independence was granted. On the Indian subcontinent, however, neither of t
hese patterns prevailed. Here, a large and locally recruited civil service was an absolute necessity, since the British could not hope to staff themselves the bulk of the administrative system necessary to control such an immense population. The same situation obliged them simultaneously to create an extremely large Indian army, whose junior and some senior officers were recruited from the feudal aristocracy of the subcontinent. Lord Curzon’s Memorandum on Army Commissions for Indians stated in 1900 that indigenous officers “should be confined to the small class of nobility or gentry . . . [and] should rest upon aristocracy of birth.” Such an officer corps would serve “to gratify legitimate ambitions, and to attach the higher ranks of Indian society, and more especially the old aristocratic families, to the British Government by closer and more cordial ties.”*
On the whole the scheme worked pretty well until the end of the Second World War. Indian troops performed sterling service for their imperialist masters in both world wars, and in relentless domestic repression at home. No other colonial power could boast of such a capacious sepoy force. A precondition of its success was, of course, the ethnic heterogeneity of India, which allowed the British to recruit their mercenary army from selected “martial races”—mainly Punjabis, Sikhs, Pathans, Rajputs, Jats, and Dogras—who could be relied on to keep down the other subject nationalities of the empire.
However, in India the Congress Party had led a strong independence movement from the 1920s onward that built a mass organization in the countryside and succeeded in levering Britain out of its imperial suzerainty after it had been fatally weakened by the Second World War. The Congress was then able itself to knit the state together and dominate a parliamentary system that has survived ever since.
The scenario in Pakistan was very different. The Muslim League was always an extremely weak organization by comparison. Originally created by Islamic princes and nobles in 1906 “to foster a sense of loyalty to the British government among the Muslims of India” (to cite from its statement of aims), it was captured by the educated Muslim middle class led by Jinnah in the 1930s and for a brief period was in alliance with the Congress Party. However, its main thrust was always anti-Hindu rather than anti-British. It collaborated with the raj during the Second World War and received a separate state from it in 1947, without having seriously struggled for independence. This change was itself stage-managed by the bureaucracy, which initially wielded most of the real power. However, once in the saddle, Ayub surrounded himself with a clique of cronies and increasingly made his regime into a personal dictatorship, rather than institutionalizing corporate military rule. A decade later Ayub’s regime had become so immensely unpopular that it provoked the largest social upheaval in the history of the country. It was henceforward useless to the ruling class. Thus, in the emergency of early 1969, with masses on the streets in Rawalpindi, Lahore, Karachi, Dhaka, and Chittagong, and continuous strikes and riots in both East and West, the army dislodged Ayub and finally assumed direct political command.
The Yahya interregnum represented the end of a slow shift in the intrastate complex of power from the civilian to the military apparatus. Naturally, the civil service remained influential within the government: key civilian bureaucrats still concerned themselves with those manifold problems of running the state machine and the economy that were beyond the competence of the army officers. But the military were now the senior partner.
Already in 1971, the Pakistan army constituted a force of three hundred thousand troops, mostly recruited from those sections of the Punjabi and Pathan peasantry who traditionally provided infantry for the British. Seventy thousand of them were deployed in Bengal. The officer corps, from the critical rank of lieutenant colonel upward, was a select elite screened with the utmost care for its class background and political outlook. The generals, brigadiers, and colonels of the Pakistan army are scions (usually younger sons) of the feudal aristocracy and gentry of Punjab and the North-West Frontier, with a sprinkling of wealthy immigrants from Gujarat and Hyderabad. The impeccable social credentials and accents of this group, which so entrance Western journalists, reveal their past. They were trained as imperial recruits in Sandhurst or Dehra Dun. The Punjabi regiments engaged in repression in Bengal thus included units who once practiced their trade under General Gracey in Vietnam. General Tikka Khan, who later became known as the butcher of Dhaka, was a veteran of Montgomery’s army in the North African campaign. General “Tiger” Niazi, who signed the act of surrender to India in December 1971, later wrote with pride in his memoirs that the nickname Tiger “was given to me by Brigadier Warren, Commander, 161 Infantry Brigade, for my exploits in Burma during World War Two.”* This was the situation at the time of the military offensive against the Eastern portion of Pakistan by its own army.
MEANWHILE, THE ignominious departure of Ayub Khan had shifted the struggle from the streets to electoral campaigning. Two political parties dominated the scene. In the West, the Peoples Party, led by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, had absorbed some of the most courageous and intelligent leaders and activists of the 1968–69 movement. They were aware that the country’s mood of unfocused euphoria could not go on. It required a political outcome. For this a party was essential, and all the other parties were either discredited or irrelevant in the larger scheme of things. Bhutto had sown the seeds and he would reap the rewards. In the East, the bulk of the Maoist left that had supported Ayub Khan because of his links with China collapsed. The weaknesses of the traditional pro-Moscow left, strong in the media, weak on the streets, left the field wide-open to the Awami League. This party had defended Bengali autonomy and won over the movement to this cause. It became the voice of Bengali nationalism and was politically prepared for the onslaught that was being planned in Islamabad.
In 1947, the predominantly Hindu trader and landlord class of East Bengal migrated to West Bengal, which was and is a part of India, leaving their businesses and lands behind them. From the start this vacuum was filled by Bihari Muslim refugees from the United Provinces of India and non-Bengali businessmen from the Western portion of Pakistan. The economic exploitation of East Bengal, which began immediately after partition, led to an annual extraction of some 3 billion rupees (approximately $300 million) from the East by West Pakistani capital. The most important foreign-exchange earner was jute, a crop produced in East Pakistan that accounted for over 50 percent of exports. This money was spent on private consumption and capital investment in West Pakistan. The sums granted for development projects by the central government offer an interesting case study of discrimination. Between 1948 and 1951, $130 million were sanctioned for development. Of this, only 22 percent went to East Pakistan. From 1948 to 1969 the value of the resources transferred from the East amounted to $2.6 billion. The West Pakistan economy was heavily dependent on East Bengal, partly as a field for investment, but above all as a mine of subsidies and as a captive market. The Six Points demanded by the Awami League included both political and economic autonomy and directly threatened the immediate business interests of West Pakistani capitalists and their supporters embedded in the military and the civil service. The Six Points were:
1. A federal system of government, parliamentary in nature and based on adult franchise.
2. Federal government to deal only with defense and foreign affairs. All other subjects to be dealt with by the federating states.
3. Either two separate, but freely convertible, currencies for the two parts of the country or one currency for the whole country. In this case effective constitutional measures to be taken to prevent flight of capital from East to West Pakistan.
4. Power of taxation and revenue collection to be vested in the federating units and not at the center.
5. Separate accounts for foreign-exchange earnings of the two parts of the country under control of the respective governments.
6. The setting up of a militia or paramilitary force for East Pakistan.
These demands were both a response to the exploitation cited above and a serious at
tempt to maintain the unity of Pakistan via a new constitutional arrangement. When reproached by foreign correspondents for being “unreasonable,” Sheikh Mujibur Rahman would become extremely irritated: “Is the West Pakistan government not aware that I am the only one able to save East Pakistan from communism? If they make the decision to fight, I shall be pushed out of power and the Naxalite types [Maoists] will intervene in my name. If I make too many concessions, I shall lose my authority. I am in a very difficult situation.”*
The Six Points represented the charter of the aspirant Bengali bourgeoisie; it articulated their desire to create their own regional state apparatus and to have an equal share of the capitalist cake. But this was precisely the reason why the dominant bloc in West Pakistan was opposed to them. The Pakistan army was organically hostile to the prospect of a Bengali civilian government because of the danger that it would reduce the lavish military apparatus that had been a built-in feature of the Islamabad regime since Ayub seized power in October 1958. Some idea of the enormous stake the Pakistani officer corps had in retaining the status quo is reflected in that military expenditures over the preceding decade (1958–68) had absorbed no less than 60 percent of the total state budget. In the fiscal year of 1970 alone, some $625 million were allocated for the armed forces. The shortsighted West Pakistani political leaders who failed to appreciate this would soon become the victims of the same machine, for the army was not seriously in favor of any government that might challenge the imbalance between social and military expenditure.
