India: A History. Revised and Updated (99 page)

Luckily, after two years of this tit-for-tat, sounder counsels had prevailed. India had changed its tune, removing the most offensive duties and so making it easier for Pakistan to stage a climbdown; in 1955 it belatedly embraced devaluation. Besides such high-risk expedients, five-year plans for industrial development had been trotted out, investment incentives devised and a major role reserved for the state. But in Pakistan, unlike in India, these initiatives had at first fallen on stony ground. Private investors proved reluctant to forsake the easier returns to be made from investing in trade, while state investment had proved no less problematic, principally because the state itself remained a highly contested arena.

Instead of a sovereign parliament, for nine years Pakistan’s only central legislature had been a Constituent Assembly. Pending adoption of the
constitution which it laboured to produce, this body exercised interim powers under the 1935 Government of India Act and so was liable to that Act’s ample provision for intervention by the head of state (once the viceroy, then the governor-general, and by the 1960s the president). In effect the Constituent Assembly’s powers reflected those of a bygone colonial era in which representative bodies conferred a veneer of respectability on an essentially authoritarian regime. The composition of the Constituent Assembly was equally out of date. Members had been directly chosen not by the electorate but by the provincial assemblies, themselves elected on a very limited franchise back in 1946 when India was still undivided and ‘Pakistan’ no more than an exciting slogan. The Constituent Assembly could hardly be said, therefore, to enjoy either a popular mandate or a current one. It was no more representative than it was sovereign and was thus doubly vulnerable.

It might still have given a better account of itself had its majority party acted as a responsible unit. Pakistan’s Muslim League, like India’s Congress, had always comprised a spectrum of interests – provincial, linguistic, religious, ideological and economic. But lacking either a strong central organisation, a predetermined programme or, after the death of Liaquat Ali Khan, a respected leadership, it was much more at the mercy of these interests than in control of them. Itself faction-ridden and fragmented, the League in Karachi was in fact less troubled by rival parties than by its supposed associates in the provincial capitals. These provincial Muslim Leagues, though themselves at odds with one another and individually far from united, tended to exploit the central Muslim League’s divisions to promote their own provincial interests, often at the expense of national policies. Nor was this the worst of it; for they were also happy to oblige unelected interests, notably the military and the administrative bureaucracy, by representing their views and acting on their behalf. Parliamentary politics as conducted in the Constituent Assembly by its Muslim League ministry were thus as vulnerable to executive subversion from within (thanks to the League’s warring factions) as from above (through the head of state’s exercise of viceregal powers).

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.’
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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 mud-slinging 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.
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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.
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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 Mirza 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.’
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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’.
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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.