Preface
To look in isolation at the civil war in Pakistan, and at the war between Pakistan and India, is to mislead and be misled. These events are part of a continuum. The first purpose of this book is to provide the necessary social, economic and political background to the emergence of irreconcilable conflicts on the South Asian subcontinent. To this extent the book is intended for the general reader.
The specialist, on the other hand, also needs to revise his framework and ‘facts’. Almost nothing on the subcontinent is what it appears to have been. In particular, a fresh look at the rôle of the so-called modernising élite was overdue. This book does not offer a definitive new study of British India’s struggle for independence, but it does indicate the directions in which a new generation of scholars may usefully turn their attention.
Pakistan was the first post-war ‘new State’ to emerge out of European colonialism. More than fifty new States have since become independent. Together they now form the Third World. Many Social, economic and political tensions are common to them all. What is more, most of these emerging States are trying to solve their problems in ways similar to those tried in Pakistan. There are lessons here on how not to go about the business of nation-building. All those concerned with problems of political participation, mobilisation, integration, and economic development ought closely to analyse the Pakistan experience.
But it is the people of Pakistan and Bangladesh themselves to whom the tragedy of the first new State is of greatest concern. Many skeletons are hidden in the cupboards of Muslim history on the subcontinent. All historians—in particular Muslim historians—have served us badly by operating in a framework which was concerned with glorifying the past—an activity which ruled alike. If I were a historian I would take the reader on a conducted tour of this unexplored chamber of horrors. But I am not a historian. The ‘history’ in this book is strictly the backdrop against which I have tried to focus attention on behaviour.
In particular I believe that the pukka sahibs—the class that the British promoted for their own ends—have betrayed the people in a way no ruling or dominant class among the Muslims have done before. The full extent of their corruption, social alienation, class bias and economic greed has been exposed to view since independence, and in particular during the blood-curding events of 1971. The Muslims might as well have invited Lord Macaulay to lead them to Mecca! The year 1947 was a turning point where Muslim history failed to turn—the sahib class saw to it that it did not. The promised land had been reached—more by default than by design—but the people were not allowed to participate in building the egalitarian and just social order that had been promised.
It is not only the holocaust of 1971 which has disillusioned every Pakistani—my own
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disillusionment began as long ago as the afternoon of 1 July 1948. Earlier that day I had been put ashore at Karachi by a refugee ship from Bombay. At dawn, when the Karachi coastline had been sighted, the Muslim refugees on the boat had wept for joy—the Pakistan of their dreams had been reached. That afternoon I stood among the multitude and watched the Quaid-i-Azam* [Mr. Jinnah] drive in state to open the State Bank of Pakistan—his last public appearance. The pomp and ceremony was impressive, but I had seen it all before—on film of the Viceroy driving in state in Delhi! As I watched that ceremony I found it difficult to believe that the raj had in fact ended. Jinnah no doubt was sincere—perhaps even a people’s man—but those who followed him were certainly not. Liaquat Ali Khan’s brief premiership was merely an interlude before the big boys took over.
So I have been getting progressively more disillusioned since 1948. The harder I have looked at my country’s progress the greater has been my disillusionment. Had I remained in Pakistan the ‘opportunities’ of the sahib class might well have come my way, too, and perhaps I would today be living a confortable parasitical existence in Pakistan. In retrospect my luckiest break came in the early 1950s when I was thrown out of the Pakistan Army cadet school because the commandant decided I was not ‘officer material’. His decision surprised me then, but does no more! And so I found mayself in England.
This physical distance from Pakistan, however, has given me a degree of intellectual freedom denied to those who stayed in the bogland of the élite’s corruption. A few in Pakistan who tried to speak out were put into prison or otherwise silenced by a series of draconian press laws and the university ordinances. The atmosphere of Pakistan when I spent ten months there during 1969—70 was that of a vast open prison. But fortunately the guards were too few to police every drawing-room. I did not have to go out among the teeming, hungry, emaciated millions to discover discontent. The discontent had reached the carpeted drawing-rooms and the soft sofas. This was the healthiest sign I could find in an otherwise sick society. They realised that there was something very, very wrong.
Most of my evenings in Pakistan were spent in discussions in these comfortable, even luxurious, drawing-rooms—cooled by the ‘Cola’ from the fridge and, in a few cases, by the airconditioners. I came back convinced that the clique that rules Pakistan is a small frightened minority within the élite entrenched in the bureaucratic dugouts of Islamabad and Rawalpindi.
This book was conceived when I was still in Pakistan. ‘You are a free man. You live in England. You write. You can write. We live in a dungeon. Tell us, tell the world, what’s happening to us.’ These words were spoken by a student in Lahore. A few days later a student in Dacca said much the same thing. Many of their elders felt the same but were more restrained. ‘Democracy is coming’, they would say, ‘and we shall sort out our problems in peace once for all.’ I did not share their optimism, but neither did I tell them that the kind of ‘democracy’ they were trying to establish would solve few, if any, of the country’s problems. Now I wish I had. But this book remained in my subconscious for only another few months. Throughout the rest of 1970 I kept hoping that this sad story would not have to be written. We would forget the past and live in a new future. My hopes were shot to bits by the political crisis that was deliberately engineered in January and February of 1971. The synopsis had reached the publisher long before the Awami League ran amok and Yahya Khan went berserk.
In this sense this book is not a ‘quickie’. It had been in gestation for far longer than it took to write. The writing period—March 1971 to January 1972—was of course one of great emotional strain caused by the horrific events that were unfolding in Pakistan. One sat and wrote, but I make no apology if on occasions the emotions of sorrow—even anger—show through. Cool and dispassionate scholarship could hardly be achieved by one whose world was falling apart as he wrote. I often had the sensation of
* The Great Leader.
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trying to write abroad a ship on the high seas that was being scuttled by its own crew.
The truth about Pakistan is now buried under the debris of what was formerly the truth. Pakistanis and Bangladeshis have to dig themselves out of the debris, level the ground, and start building again, taking care that all the architects, engineers, and overseers, and perhaps even some building site workers, are first dismissed en masse. If this book helps them to do so even at this eleventh hour—or is it the thirteenth?—my labours will have been rewarded.
Just how Pakistan and Bangladesh can be rebuilt is a question that needs an answer. No individual can answer it. But a number of individuals working together can. This process must now begin. Whatever the answer may be, of one thing I am certain—there is a great deal to learn from some of the techniques of political mobilisation and economic development used by the Chinese—and even perhaps by the Israelis—within a framework which is peculiarly our own.
This, incidentally, does not apply to Pakistanis and Bangladeshis alone—it applies to all underdeveloped countries, including India. Let there be an ‘indigenous revolution’ in every land. The umbilical cords from our colonial past must now be finally and, if necessary, ruthlessly cut. It is time to retire all our false prophets.
My Pakistani friends are likely to complain that too little attention has been paid to Indian subversion in Pakistan. My answer is that, in the space available, I had difficulty in doing justice to the subversion of Pakistan by the rulers of Pakistan themselves. It is subversion of the State from that has to be ended—when this happens external subversion will cease. What is required now is a massive political dialogue in the country—stating perhaps with an inquest. This book is my evidence before the bar of public opinion.
If the book has any merit, much of it is due to my wife Suraiya. She is a history graduate of Aligarh whose academic career was ended by marriage. She played a considerable part in helping to form many of the opinions, and at crucial points she drew my attetion to areas I had either neglected or not sufficiently considered. Often she remained alone for long hours while I struggled with the ghosts of history in my study. Our children, Shama and Iqbal, somehow managed to understand that their Abboo was digging into the past looking for a future for them.
For early encouragement when the book was still in the planning stage I am grateful to my friends and colleagues, Tony de Reuck and Frank Edmead. Frank also read the whole of the typescript, made valuable comments, and straightened out many mixed metaphors. To both of them I owe a great debt of gratitude. My Guardian colleague Maurice Landergan also read most of the early draft. Mrs. Maureen Foster gamely struggled with my handwriting and always managed to produce the typed product on time.
Most of my Pakistani friends have helped simply by being available for consultation. My many student audiences, including those at University College and Imperial College, have listened with patience, and their questions and comments have been of immeasurable help. My colleagues in the Pakistan Solidarity Front, and those friends who are new citizens of Bangladesh, have been equally generous.
London K.S.
March 1972
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1 God’s Chosen People
The Pakistanis call their State Mumlakat-e-Khudadad—a God-given country. The delusion of being God’s chosen people is one of the oldest to have bedevilled human behaviour. Godly delusions, however, are not the exclusive endowment of the ruling élite. The entire people must accept them or else such beliefs and self-images lose their political, social and economic utility. History—or what passes for history and historical experience—is the womb in which the seeds of self-deception are sown. The realistic behaviour of one generation becomes the ‘miracle’ of another. The ‘Indian Mutiny’ of 1857 was a realistic last-ditch attempt by the Muslims of India to prevent the consolidation of British power. It was the final act of a defiant and proud people who had ruled India for 800 years. They lost the battle but secured their pride which was to be carefully nursed and handed down until a future generation could redeem the lost empire and the fortunes of the former rulers of India.
All societies glorify acts of individual heroism. After the Mutiny the British heroes, dead or alive, received the Victoria Cross and other civil and military awards. But no Muslim political authority survived the war to hand out similar laurels to the heroes of the vanguished. The Muslims called their dead shaheed (martyrs). For glorification dead heroes are better than living ones who may, as brave and honest men, prevent simple stories from becoming legends, Muslims did not lack dead heroes. Tales of Muslim bravery and stories of the betrayal by those Indians, mainly Hindus, who backed the British became commonplace among Muslims of India who did not relish the privilege of being the first generation of Queen Victoria’s subjects.
One such story that every Muslim child in northern India is still told concerns the battle that followed the siege of Lucknow (1857). In the grounds of the Residency in Lucknow where the mutineering Muslim forces had surrounded the British Resident and his senior staff is a grave-like mound. Buried there, or so the Muslims believe (the fact is impossible to check), is a headless warrior of the decisive battle for the Residency. The warrior, legend has it, refused to fall from his horse after he had been decapitated. Having lost his head, he had gone on to kill another dozen British soldiers, carefully avoiding other Muslims fighting around him. He had fallen to the ground and died only after his commanding officer had ordered him to ‘yield to the Will of God’.
To the Muslims of India defeat became the ‘Will of God’. Men having failed, Muslims must turn to God. They did. They withdrew—and those who did not were thrown out by the British regime—from the traditional Muslim occupations in the civil service, the judiciary, and the armed forces. The Hindus, the betrayers of Muslim India’s cause, had merely changed masters. During the many centuries of Muslim rule the Hindus had learnt Persian and Urdu and served the Muslims. Now the Hindus applied the considerable talents in obedience they had developed over hundreds of years to obeying the British. They learned English and joined the subordinate services in the British administration. The Muslim educated classes, on the other hand, declared that the learning of English was the ‘high road to infidelity’. Muslims had reached India as conquerors. Obedience to the infidels was no part of the Islamic faith.
In the West, Islam is often thought of as a religion like any other. What is overlooked is that the founder of Islam, the Prophet Mohammad, did not merely preach a creed and a set of gospels enshrined in a Book; he, unlike any other founder of a great religion, also established a dominion. The Prophet was…..
….The momentum that built up landed the Muslims in Spain in the west and India in the east.1 Long before the Muslim empire reached its farthest outposts, the heart of the inspiration, the dominion established by the Prophet, had crumbled and disintegrated into civil war and the Caliphate, an elective office, had been replaced by hereditary kings. The Prophet’s legacy had gone but its memory left an indelible impression on the Muslim mind. It came to be known as the Khilafat-e-Rashida or the Dominion
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of the Rightly-Guided Caliphs. To revive and reconstruct a new order on the lines of the pure Islamic society that the Prophet built is a dream that to this day haunts the conscience of orthodox Muslims.
Nowhere has the orthodoxy of Islamic ritual survived in greter depth and conviction than in the Indian subcontinent. God, thought the Indian Muslims, vanquished people who allowed their souls to be contaminated by the worldly desires of empire and luxury. This was a convenient doctrine on the morrow of defeat at the hands of the British. The respite from the onerous task of being a ruling class must be used for the cleansing of the soul that had gathered much dust—and lust—in the intervening centuries since their forebears had left Arabia. Indian Muslims found comfort in the thousands of mosques scattered all over the country. They flocked to the mosques where the mullah, who had for centuries been ignored by the kings and the proletariat alike, welcomed the hitherto misguided multitude. Once again the former kings, their kinsmen, vazirs, nawabs, and the ordinary Muslim peasants stood shoulder to shoulder in prayer. The mullah prompthly deleted the references to Muslim….
…would mean the Muslims’ return to lust for power and luxury. It would also mean the loss of the mullah’s new-found popularity and the mosques would be deserted once again. Instead the mullah turned to delivering sermons in Urdu that everyone understood before delivering the stereotype Arabic oration. The sermon now became the chief weapon of the mullah. He included in it stern warnings against moral degradation that would overtake the Muslims if they learnt English or if they tried to imitate their new rulers. By shunning imitation the mullah also meant eschewing the temptation of taking part in modern industry, trade and banking; these were based on usury—strictly forbidden in the Koran. The obedience he preached was of a special kind. It meant that the Muslims must not mount another revolt against the British, but equally that they must also refuse to accept the new educational system and, by implication, must also eschew the temptations of active participation in the new order. In short, they must stay in the mosques and pray and preserve the purity of their souls. The Prophet, the mullah reminded his audiences, first purified the souls of his followers before setting up the dominion. If Muslims had any political ambition it must be to recreate a polity in the image of the Prophet’s Arabian State. Until then the Muslims must lie low in the mosques and hope that the rule of the infidels would pass in time, leaving them uncontaminated by foreign language, culture and ideas.
The mullah did not bother to think ahead. He did not concern himself with such questions as how the rule of the infidels from Europe would end, who would replace them, and how the mosque-preserved Muslims could hope to re-emerge as rulers of India If these questions occurred to him and his followers at all….
…be destroyed and the righteous Muslims would once again take up their rightful place as rulers of the dominions of God. Had not the Holy Koran described the Muslims as the ‘best people’ and promised them the earth? The Holy Prophet’s prophecy that Muslims would rule the entire world before the Day of Judgement was repeated from the pulpits of mosques throughout India. If Allah and His Prophet had made a promise they could surely be relied upon to deliver the world to the Muslims and to restore the Caliphate. The golden era of the Caliphs would return. The Muslims must not be impatient. They must wait—and purify their souls. Such logic—and conviction in such beliefs—came easily to a defeated, broken people. It became necessary for the religion of the rulers, the dominant classes and the congquerors to be replaced with an Islam that would make Muslims good citizens and passive subjects of an empire run by the infidels.
The mosques and the madrassahs (schools specialising in religious education) busied themselves with the task of reformulating Islamic doctrines in a way that the poor and the illiterate would understand and the educated would find difficult to refute. In the new Islam of passive obedience what is was defined as the Will of Allah, and the literal meaning of the word Islam, namely, submission to the Divine Will,
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was presented as willing submission to what is. What there was was, of course, ignorance, poverty, hunger, and disease—and the British raj. The sick, the hungry, the ignorant all became holy men because they endured suffering that was preordined by Allah. To mop up any spare energy that might have escaped the net, the ritual of extra….
….trouble enough with the Ottomans. No chances were to be taken with the Muslims in India. Their power must be broken. Muslim dominance in India had been centred around Delhi, the United Provinces and Oudh. A strong, rich, highly educated and articulate Muslim aristocracy in northern India ran the Moghul empire. It was this aristocracy and its wealth that had to be dispersed. The Muslim aristocracy had been based on feudalism and a highly organised Muslim educational system. The latter derived almost all its income from the former. The British introduced a series of land reforms, the Permanent Settlement and the Resumptions, that gradually transferred landownership in India from the Muslims to the Hindus. This ended the rentfree grants that maintained the Muslim educational system. With one, or at most two, strokes the British ruined hundreds of ancient Muslim families and at the same time educational establishments closed down. Such centres of Muslim art, architecture and artisan activity as Delhi, Meerut, Agra, Lucknow, and Murshidabad were ruined.
Only in one of the provinces of British India—the Punjab—did the Muslim aristocracy not only survive but add greatly to its fortunes. In the Punjab the rôle of the Muslims was reversed. There the British had to defeat Sikh power and such Muslim families as the Mamdots, the Tiwanas, and the Qazilbashs became the natural and necessary allies of imperial raj.2 The Muslim feudal lords of the Punjab, who were to play havoc with Pakistan politics a hundred years later, were among the most loyal allies of British power in India. The sturdy Punjabi serfs, controlled by a class of ruthless landlords, became human fodder for the British Indian Army. The Punjab Regiment and its exploits in the two world wars became famous. It is important to note that British policy in the nineteenth century affected the provinces of Punjab and Bengal—the two ‘wings’ of the future Pakistan—in opposite ways. In the Punjab the Muslim feudal families were greatly strengthened whereas in Bengal, Murshidabad and Dacca were ruined and abandoned. The Permanent Settlement robbed the Muslims of Bengal and Bihar of their landed estates and Hindu landlords were foisted on a largely Muslim peasantry. In the new capital city of Calcutta the Hindus monopolised the junior ranks of the British civil service and were allowed to participate in the growing export and import trade. Some Hindu families thus because enormously rich as rural landlords and urban magnates.
The more money the Hindus made and the more English education they acquired, the more prayers the Muslims said and the more mosques they built. The Muslims of India built more mosques under the British raj than under the whole of the Moghul Empire. The Moghul had built huge cathedral-type mosques, such as the Jama Masjid at Delhi, more for prestige than for prayer. The impoverished Muslim subjects of Queen Victoria built humble mosques in large numbers in most villages and suburbs. As the ‘houses of God’ proliferated, the people of God lay prostrate, defeated, and demoralised with little or no idea of salvation—except in the Hereafter. Islam as the religion of personal piety, devotion and prayer for the sake of prayer—or merely for the sake of killing time—was greatly strengthened by the advent of the British raj. The leadership of the Indian Muslims passed from powerful emperors and statesmen to religious revivalists. In the process the leadership was also fragmented. There were almost as many ‘leaders’ as there were mosques. Every local imam was a leader. He led his flock down a blind alley in which the Muslim soul was sustained by faith in ultimate triumph without any evidence to promote hope based on reason. To sulk is a circular activity. The mass of Indian Muslims—the former rulers—sulked in piety. When they raised their hands in prayer they asked for little—the most they asked of the Almighty was for His wrath to fall on the infidels. In the meantime the British ruled and the Hindus replaced the Muslims as the dominant middle class.
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The Birth of the Ėlite
By the second half of the nineteenth century the condition of the Indian Muslims was so pitiable that even the British took pity. A strong lobby of British opinion emerged which held that the raj had been too harsh on the Muslims. Aristocracies all over the world share a common love of sport, good food, hunting, an emphasis on personal and social manners, a certain reserve even in intimate friendships and a frank but courteous outspokenness. The British aristocracy which ruled India found all these things among the Indian Muslim aristocracy. The vegetarian Hindu could hardly compete in the common love of good beef (of the Hindus’ sacred cow) that the British and the Muslim upper classes shared. While British policy actively discriminated against the Muslims, expatriate Englishmen found some of their own aristocratic values mirrored in Muslim company. The pro-Muslim lobby among the British found a spokesman in W.W. Hunter who had been director-general of the Statistical Department of India.
In 1871 Hunter published a book called The Indian Mussalman. Hunter was primarily interested in the Muslim aristocracy. He found that former Muslim princes ‘sullenly and proudly [eat their] heart out among the roofless palaces and weed-choked tanks….They drag out a listless existence in patched-up verandahs or leaky outhouses, sinking deeper and deeper into a hapless abyss of debt’.3 Human nature the world over is least suited to adjust to a falling standard of living. Former standards are maintained long after they can no longer be sustained. The most usual recourse is to borrowing. The Muslim aristocracy was no exception. The former princes and landdowners lived in their leaky palaces until, as Hunter put it, ‘the neighbouring Hindu moneylender fixes a quarrel with them, and then, in a moment a host of mortgages foreclose, and the ancient Mussalman family is suddenly swallowed up and disappears for ever’.4 Such broken families seldom stayed in the neighbourhood where once they had been the local ‘lords’. Young men from these families sought anonymity in the cities and towns of India. Hunter described the Muslim aristocracy as the ‘best men’ in India and recommended that British policy should seek to remove ‘the chronic sense fo wrong which has grown in the hearts of Mussalmans under British rule’.
The impact of Hunter’s book was profound. But before the British could trust the Muslims they had to be assured that there was no likelihood of another Mutiny. To be credible this assurance would have to come from the Muslims themselves and from a quarter that the British could trust. The Hindus had won British confidence and patronage through their uninhibited enthusiasm for the English language, western education, and total absence of a feeling of guilt for the ‘loss’ of India. The Muslims, to be trusted, must also speak to the British in English and from within the new Establishment.
One of the few Muslims who had joined British service before the Mutiny was Sayyid Ahmad Khan. He had been born in a Moghul aristocratic family. As a young man he had joined the British judicial service as a minor official and had risen to be a sub-judge in Delhi. Even during the Mutiny he had remained loyal. He earned additional gratitude and confidence of the Government for saving many British lives, including those of women and children, by hiding them in his bungalow. His credentials as a loyal British subject and a Muslim aristocrat were impeccable. On the one hand he enjoyed the confidence of the British and on the other the dispossessed sullen Muslim aristocracy looked upon him in envy. Young men from Muslim families who could no longer rely on Moghul service for a career found a new idol. If Sayyid could make the grade in British service so could they. But to do so they would have to learn English as Sayyid had done, and take the ‘high road to infidelity’.
Sayyid was bold enough to challenge the mullah logic. His boldness went further : he tried to ‘rationalise’ Islam. The mullah’s Islam, through its isolation from the world of reality, movement, change and action, had in the meantime become ritualised. Of the Koranic injunction against usury, Sayyid held that ‘interest’ in its modern form was not forbidden. He went so far as to assert that the Koran itself did
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not lend support to the generally held beliefs about the Prophet having performed ‘miracles’. Sayyid wanted a ‘Reformation’ of Islam. Is this he miserably failed, but he succeeded in creating a class of people who can only be described as protestant Muslims without a ‘Protestant Islam’. In 1875 he founded the Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh which later became famous as the Aligarh Muslim University. Young men from the former aristocratic Muslim families who had remained largely unemployed converged on Aligarh. There they were taught English, western literature, the arts and sciences, and religion. Though Sayyid had to give way on religious doctrine and students at Aligarh were nominally tought orthodox Islam, the overpowering influence of western education there could not fail to sow the same seeds of ‘reforming’ religious zeal as had infected the sage himself.
Many of the senior teachers at Aligarh had been Englishmen, who exerted enormous influence. Muslim students who graduated from Aligarh, it is fair to say, had little in common with the bulk of the Muslim population of India. Aligarh graduates soon began to take up posts in the lower ranks of the administration and others spread out into the smaller towns, serving as teachers in the Muslim schools and colleges which proliferated throughout India. A degree from Aligarh became a passport to jobs, official patronage, social status and even affluence. Western education among the Muslims became known as the ‘Aligarh Movement’. This movement in India and the rise of Protestant Christianity in Europe had one thing in common : both were started by men whose interests were better served by rebelling against existing religious doctrines. Thus Sayyid created the Muslim ‘protestant’ élite in India, the members of which also developed the complementary habits of thrift and enterprise. Sayyid opened up a vast new vista of betterment and advancement for the articulate Muslim aristocracy that had once ruled India. In case the now westernised Muslim aristocracy still retained some of the old spark and a taste for political dominance, Sayyid’s first commandment laid down that Indian Muslims’ first and foremost duty was to be loyal to the British. This the Muslims could achieve only through complete abstinence from all political activity.
The mullah who led the Muslim multitude from the ‘houses of God’ dotted all over the vast Indian countryside, and Sayyid who led the Muslim aristocracy from Aligarh, agreed in preaching abstinence from politics. The mullah held that the Muslims’ love of power and wealth was responsible for their moral degradation and the erosion of spiritual values. Sayyid held that in the new order in India the Muslim aristocracy could only regain its wealth and influence by being loyal subjects, and servants, of the British. While the mullah tried to steer the Muslim masses away from the main stream of life in the new India of the infidels, Sayyid tried to get the former Muslim aristocracy back into the main stream, side by side with the British and under their aegis. In Sayyid’s view the British had crossed the seven seas and conquered India and half of the rest of the world because of their love of learning, scientific innovation, and irreverent attitude to religious dogma. In the mullahs’ view the Almighty had punished the Muslims by depriving them of the Indian empire for precisely these deviationist tendencies. All knowledge was in the Koran, held the mullah, and therefore the Muslim had no right or indeed need to do any original thinking of his own. Islam, argued the mullah, was based on belief while reason and scientific inquiry encouraged doubts that eroded belief. Hold your beliefs, argued Sayyid, but beyond belief there lay a vast new world of discovery and advanture that the Europeans had mastered. This debate between the orthodox mullah and the followers of Sayyid persists to this day and is the cause of a fundamental social conflict in Pakistan. Indeed, the demand for Pakistan was made and led by Sayyid’s followers—the Muslim aristocracy—who then became the rulers of Pakistan. But of course Sayyid had told them not to debble in politics. How did they end up as rulers once again?
The answer is that Sayyid’s ban on political activitiy was itself a political move. It was meant more to reassure the British of his intentions than to blunt the political instincts of the Muslim aristocracy. Sayyid at once became a favourite of the British. Sayyid’s insistence on English education could hardly fail to find favour. At first the British were suspicious because Sayyid had also put part of the blame for
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the Mutiny on them. ‘It was for the Government [wrote Sayyid] to try and win the the friendship of its subjects, not for the subjects to try and win that of the Government’. Sayyid went further and invited the British to emulate the example of the Msulim conquerors of India. In his book, The Causes of the Indian Revolt, Sayyid wrote : ‘There is no real communication between the governors and the governed, no living together or near one another, as has always been the custom of the Mohammadans in countries which they have subjected to their rule.’5
English liberal opinion, in England and in India, was deeply influenced by Syyid’s strictures on the style of British rule. This was a masterly stroke by Sayyid. He had extricated the Muslims from blame for the Mutiny and by way of prescription for future policy he invited the British to strike firmer roots in India as the Muslims had done. He was not against the British, in fact he wanted British raj to stay, become stronger, and flourish. This, too, was acceptable to the British. On the one hand he told the British to emulate the Muslim example and get closer to the Indians, and on the other he told the Muslim aristocracy to get closer to the British. Indeed it would appear that Sayyid was thinking of an eventual partnership between the British and Muslim artistocracies—both eating beef, playing polo, and socialising—to rule India between them. But there was one complication—the Hindus had started learning the English language a good half-century before Sayyid’s followers. The Hindu response to British preponderance was uninhibited by religious doubts about obedience to the infidels. The Hindus had always successfully absorbed alien cultures and adjusted to alien rulers. For every school or college that Sayyid’s campaign for Muslim education produced, there were already ten in existence for the Hindus. While the younger generation of Hindu educated classes was taking B.A. and M.A. degrees in India and a few were at Oxford and Cambridge and at the Inns of Court in London, Sayyid’s followers were still struggling with the Roman alphabet. If the British took Sayyid’s advice and got closer to the Indians, the Indians that they were most likely to get closer to were Hindus, not Muslims who had shunned English education.
This is precisely what happened. Allan Octavian Hume, a retired English civil servant, read Sayyid’s book and decided to do something about integrating the British raj with Indian society. But when the British talked about ‘Indian society’ they meant those in India who had been ‘civilised’ by English education. Communication with the ruled was acceptable so long as the medium of such communication was English. Learning or speaking any of the Indian languages was no part of the British conception of ‘integration’. Sayyid had carefully omitted to draw British attention to the Muslim rulers’ record of having moulded their alien culture into an Indian language—Urdu. Instead he had advised Muslims to learn English, and so there was no need for the British to learn any of the Indian languages. In any case, the British from the beginning regarded Indian language, art, literature, and religion a ‘grand abomination’ and their own rôle as that of bringing the advantages of European civilisation to the Indians.6
In 1885 the Viceroy, Lord Dufferin, asked Hume to found an organisation which would reflect Indian ‘public’ opinion. Hume, having read Sayyid’s book, had already been thinking on similar lines. He proceeded to found the Indian National Congress in that year. ‘We desire to be governed according to ideas of government prevalent in Europe. We are thoroughly loyal. We want proper and legitimate share in the Government’. These words of the president of the first Congress could have written by Sayyid himself. In fact for 25 years after 1885 each session of the Congress began with a resolution of respectful loyalty to the Throne. Until 1904 several of the annual sessions of the Congress were presided over by eminent Englishmen. It was the practice for the provincial governor of the host city to attent the Congress session in which the same ceremonial way as the Queen might go to the Lord’s Test Match. Under the aegis of the British, the Congress was dominated by the Hindu educated classes. The British, taking Sayyid’s advice and trying to get closer to the Indians, had got closer to the Hindus, leaving Sayyid and his followers in the cold. The Hindus made the most of British patronage. Hindu Congress stalwarts had
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titles showered on them, the barristers among them were elevated to the Bench, and others were invited to serve on the Viceroy’s Legislative Council. The partnership to rule India that Sayyid had envisaged duly developed, but the Indian component of that partnership was Hindu and not the Muslim aristocracy that Sayyid had wished. Hindu leaders of the Congress excelled in flattery, sycophancy, moderation, meekness and humility.
In the meantime Sayyid Ahmad Khan had been to England and there discovered that ‘all good things, spiritual and worldly, which should be found in man, have been bestowed by the Almighty on Europe, and especially on England’.7 In 1878 the Viceroy invited Sayyid to join his Legislative Council, which he did. Only the year before the Viceroy had laid the foundation stone of the Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century it must have been disconcerting for Sayyid to find that the Hindus excelled in loyalty to the British as well as in English education. The ‘Hindu’ Congress was a mirror image of his own precepts. In spite of all his loyalty to the British, Sayyid refused to crown his loyal career by joining the Congress. This was because Sayyid owed a loyalty that was even greater than attachment to the British—his devotion to the Muslim cause in India. It was right and natural for the ‘Hindu’ Congress to clamour for a European form of government in India, for that would eventually mean majority rule and the Hindus outnumbered the Muslims three to one.
Sayyid wanted ‘all the good things’ of Europe except democracy. In a democratic system, argued Sayyid, the Muslims would become a permanent minority ‘like the Irish at Westminster’8. Sheltering behind his earlier ban on Muslim participation in politics, Sayyid told the Muslims to hold aloof even from the loyalist Congress. Muslims did not need a Congress to demonstrate their loyalty. They were not to participate in anything where voting procedures played a part. A handful of Muslims who joined the Congress were denounced and all but excommunicated. During the 1880s the British Government, now feeling fully secure and confident of an indefinite and unchallenged hold over India, began to desvise ways of extending elementary participation to the loyal westernised Indians. Sayyid embarked upon a campaign to dissuade the British from introducing any semblance of democracy to India. Using the Viceroy’s Legislative Council as his platform, he repeatedly warned the British that ‘so long as differences of race and creed, and the distinctions of caste form an important element in the socio-political life of India….the system of election pure and simple cannot safely be adopted’. In a democratic India, said Sayyid, ‘the larger community [Hindu] would totally override the interests of the smaller community [Muslim]’. As always, he took care to join Muslim interest with British interest and, with prophetic insight, he predicted that elections in India would lead to communal conflicts ‘and the ignorant public would hold [the British] Government responsible for introducing measures which might make the difference of race and creed more violent than ever’.9 Democracy for Indians, in short, was against the best interests of the two minorities in India—the British and the Muslims. The British ignored Sayyid’s advice and in 1892 the Parliament at Westminster passed the Indian Councils’ Act. Thus began the ‘liberal’ phase of British policy in India which in time led to the Government of India Act of 1935 giving ‘home rule’ to India and ultimate independence in 1947. But in the intervening years Sayyid’s followers (the sage having died in 1898) abandoned political isolation in 1906, when the Muslim League was founded at Dacca, demanded a State for themselves in 1940, and secured Pakistan seven years later.
The interests, attitudes and motivations of the members of the Muslim élite who became rulers of Pakistan are primarily responsible for the social, economic, and political conflicts that emerged in the new State after independence in 1947. The inability of the rulers to adjust to the aspirations and interests of the people of Pakistan has ultimately led to civil strife, external intervention, and defeat in the East. The story of Pakistan can henceforth be told in the social context of the development of the Muslim ‘protestant élite’.
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Ėlite Interests and Attitude
Historically, the first and foremost interest of the westernised Muslim élite was to overtake the Hindu educated classes in English education and to develop a partnership with the British in the Government of India. In a very short time from the founding of the college at Aligarh, the Muslim élite, proportionate to its size, began to receive a substantial share of titles and jobs in British administration and hierarchy. But the Hindu élite had been equally loyal to the raj and versatile. The Muslim élite failed to outbid the Hindus in loyalty or to overtake them in education. The Hindu élite having gained a 50-year start in education, pulled further and further away and the Muslim élite, try as it might, had no chance of catching up. The British rewarded and valued Hindu loyalty at least as much as Muslim loyalty. In Sayyid’s lifetime it was clear that the Muslim aristocracies’ return to political preponderance through the back door was a vision that could not be fulfilled. Nevertheless, as the Congress moved to seeking for India ‘Dominion status within the British Empire’, the Muslim élite remained wedded to the ideal of British raj for ever to prevent India from falling to the Hindus.
Another interest of the Muslim élite was the prevention of any form of democratic development in India. Not without some justification, the Muslim élite viewed the prospect of democratic India with great apprehension. This attitude became so ingrained in the Muslim élite mind that it was carried into the post-independence period and prevented the rulers of Pakistan from seeking any kind of mass participation in the Government of the new State. The Muslim élite from the days of Sayyid’s Ahmad Khan was a minority within a minority. Such a group could maintain its privileges only through some mechanism of ‘safeguards’. In Sayyid’s lifetime the British had, in spite of his protests and warnings, begun to introduce rudimentary democracy to India. Once the British envisaged, in however distant a future, the eventual transfer of power in India, the strategy that Sayyid had bequeathed to his followers collapsed. Henceforth the Muslim élite must seek less participation and more safeguards. Participation on equal terms meant certain subjugation to Hindu rule. There could be no question of ‘equality’ between unequals. A necessary corollary of this was that ‘merit’ alone could not do justice to the Muslim élite. A larger Hindu educated class produced more men of merit than a much smaller Muslim educated group. Government service had been the backbone of Muslim aristocracy ever since the Muslims set foot in India. Jobs in British administration and the armed forces, if allocated on the basis of merit alone, would be monopolised by the Hindus.
On 1 October 1906 a deputation of the Muslim élite met the Viceroy, Lord Minto, at Simla. The deputation did not claim to represent the Muslims of India as a whole—nor did it. The opening sentence of the address it presented to the Viceroy made this point explicit. The deputation was only representative of ‘we, the undersigned nobles, jagirdars, taluqdars, lawyers, zamindars, merchants and others…’10 This point is crucial to the argument developed in this book because the men who called on Lord Minto were among those who founded the Muslim League later that year. It was the Muslim League that eventually demanded and secured the State of Pakistan. The deputation’s address to the Viceroy is a crucial document for the understanding of the motivations, interests, and attitudes of the élite group which replaced the British as the rulers of Pakistan. As such it is worth a detailed examination.
The nobles told Lord Minto that they appreciated ‘the incalculablé benefits conferred by British rule on the teeming millions…of India, and have every reason to be grateful for the peace, security, personal freedom and liberty of worship that we now enjoy’. The Muslim nobles’ main purpose in calling on the Viceroy, they said, was to present ‘our claim to a fair share’ of representation in the Legislative Chambers. On the principle of representation, the nobles held that ‘the position accorded [to Muslims] in any kind of representation, direct or indirect, and in all ways affecting their status and influence should be commensurate, not merely with their numerical strength, but also with their political importance and…the position which they [the Muslim aristocracy] occupied in India a little more than a hundred years ago and
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of which the traditions have naturally not faded from their minds’.
Then, in a passage that Sayyid Ahmad Khan himself could not have written better, the nobles regretted the introduction of ‘representative institutions of the European type…in the social, religious, and political conditions obtaining in India’. The adoption of European institutions, they argued, ‘is likely, among other evils, to place our national interests at the mercy of an unsympathetic majority’. They then served notice on the Viceroy that the Muslim aristocracy was about to abandon the prohibition on participation in politics that Sayyid Ahmad Khan had decreed. Because the British Government had introduced representative institutions with insufficient ‘care and caution’, the Muslims ‘cannot any longer in justice to our national interests hold aloof from participating in the conditions to which their policy has given rise’. After acknowledging that Muslims shared some ‘interests in common with our Hindu fellow-countrymen’ the nobles claimed that the Muslims had ‘additional interests of our own which are not shared by other communities’.
What constituted ‘political importance’ and what were the Muslims’ ‘additional interests’? On the first there was a clear answer that the Muslim nobles themselves provided. ‘The political importance of a community [they stated], to a considerable extent gains strength or suffers detriment according to the position that the members of that community occupy in the service of the State’. The Muslim nobles were not saying that their position in the service of the raj was already such as to give them the political importance they claimed. Quite the reverse : what they were saying was that the Government should reserve ‘a due proportion’ of all jobs in the service of the Crown for Muslims, irrespective of merit. The competitive principle in recruitment to Government services, they argued, would lead to ‘the monopoly of all official influence by one [Hindu] class’. In an oblique reference to the Muslims’ long tradition and experience of government administration, as opposed to the Hindus’ long tradition of subservience, the nobles drew Viceroy’s attention to Muslim ‘character’ which ‘we venture to think is of greater importance than mere mental alertness in the making of good public servants’. The nobles were in fact repeating what had been a consistent theme of Sayyid Ahmad Khan, namely, that the British and Muslim aristocracies were inherently superior, by virtue of their common history and tradition as rulers, to the upstart, though articulate, Hindu educated class. There was one difficulty. The case the Muslim nobles presented was that of a minority, but Muslims were also a majority in a handful of the Indian provinces. In the Muslim majority areas the same arguments could equally be put forward by the Hindus. The nobles nevertheless complained that even in the provinces where the Muslims were a majority they were ‘often treated as though they were inappreciably small political factors…This has been the case, to some extent in the Punjab, but in a more marked degree in Sind and in Eastern Bengal’.
The deputation went on to demand, in addition to a fixed, reserved quota of jobs in the administration, a system of separate electorates for Muslims in the nascent democracy of India. The principle of separate electorates was defined as a fixed ‘proportion [of seats] to be determined in accordance with the numerical strength, social status, local influence, and special requirements of either community. Once their relative proportion is authoritatively determined, we would suggest that either community should be allowed severally to return their own representatives…’ These principles, said the Muslim nobles, should also determine appointments to the High Court Bench, to election and nomination for district and provincial councils and to nomination to the Viceroy’s Legislative and Executive Councils. A similar right was claimed to representation on the senates and syndicates of universities. The separate electorates and the quota system were the ‘additional national interests’ of the Muslims. The Muslim nobles had one advantage over the Hindus—they were, like the British rulers of India, true blue aristocrats with a long tradition of autocratic rule. Their words were sweet music to the ears of Lord Minto. Democracy in Britain itself was still nearly a half century away from one man one vote. The franchise in England had for centuries been based on property qualifications and reserved seats in the House of Commons. Why not in India? Lord Minto granted separate electorates and reserved seats to the
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Muslims.
At some risk of repetition, a few of the outstanding features of this episode need to be underlined. The Muslim nobles, like all aristocracies the world over, were no democrats. They were opposed to the whole concept of democratic participation in autocratic government which they considered the form of government most suited to India. But if democracy must be introduced, it should not be a replica of European institutions but a special brand weighted heavily to ensure their representation. For such participation aristocratic ‘character’ was preferable to meritocracy. The nobles needed ‘safeguards’ from the onslaught of the open competitive principle in recruitment to the service of the State. Equality among unequals was unfair and those who were unable to compete on equal terms must be granted special privileges. Numbers entered into it only to determine the ‘quota’ of seats. Once that had been determined, the Muslim aristocrats were entitled to all the seats and privilege and patronage from the raj. Lord Minto’s acceptance of the Muslim nobles’ demands, especially the demand for separate electorates, is widely regarded by historians as the first step that led inevitably to the eventual partition of India. We must discuss the origin of separation a little later, but the fact remains that the Muslim masses of India did not support the Muslim élite’s demands untill India had experienced majority Congress rule after 1937. The acceptance of the Muslim aristocracy’s demands by Lord Minto affected Muslim development in India in a way that traditional historians have ignored.
First and foremost, a reserved portion of jobs, seats, privileges, and partronage removed from them what little incentive to hard work there might have been. Aristocracies, though quick to see a threat and fight with ‘character’ to maintain supremacy, tend, in the absence of a threat, to be lazy and luxury-loving. Lord Minto virtually told them to go and enjoy themselves, cultivate their culture and love of poetry, sport and beef, and patronage and rewards would be served up to them on a plate. All that the Muslim young men needed was to spend the required number of years at a university and come out with a B.A. to be sure of a place in government service. The more conscientious among them who got good degrees entered the Indian Civil Service (I.C.S.) quota reserved for Muslims, and the less bright went into the army, police, revenue, and other subordinate departments. Muslim colleges, in order to supply the secure market for guaranteed jobs, lowered their standards and examinations became a farce and degrees a fraud. Students who should have failed or at best got Thirds were given Firsts. The quality of those who actually managed to get third class degrees can only be wondered at. The Firsts and Seconds went into jobs reserved for them, and the Thirds became teachers! At a stroke Lord Minto had destroyed the standard of Muslim scholarship which had at one time been respected the worl over.
Of the traditional Muslim education W. H. Sleeman has written : ‘After his seven years’ study, the young Mohommadan binds his turban upon a head almost as well filled with the things which appertain to these three branches of knowledge as the young man raw from Oxford—he will talk as fluently about Socrates and Aristotle, Plato, Hippocrates, Galen and Avicenna’.11 While once Muslim learning was for the love of knowledge and enlightenment, the new ‘westernised’ pseudo-education was no more than a pretence for apeing the British. To impersonate the British and an alien culture became the hallmark of ‘education’ and the guaranteed rewards that followed made mediocrity ‘respectable’. The motivation of this job and privilege hunting élite was personal advancement in its worst possible form rather than ‘public service’. The opportunities for bribery and corruption in a system of government where the line of command was long and authority remote turned these ‘public servants’ into acquisitive and greedy bureaucrats. The best and most stable colonial administration is one where the colonising power is seldom seen. These loyal Indian servants of the raj were a necessary and natural instrument of imperial power. They were ‘indigenous’ but by education, training and temperament arrogant and just sufficiently alienated from the population.
Seconed, Lord Minto’s offer of reserved seats on a restricted franchise also obviated any need
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that there might have been for the Muslim aristrocracy to cultivate contact with the general mass of the Muslim population of India. This saved the Muslim aristocrats the inconvenience of having to travel to the thousands of villages scattered all over a country where there were inadequate roads and few railways. The local zamindar (landlord) who brought in the land tax for the British could also be trusted to bring in the votes. In any case, few of the millions of peasants had a vote to give.
Sayyid’s followers entered city and small town politics which were well controlled by the bureaucracy. Wining and dining with officials secured the desired membership of the district boards, the municipal councils, and the provincial assemblies. Membership of the Viceroy’s Legislative Council was by nomination which was secured through means other than the incipient Indian democracy. Taken as a whole, what the Muslim nobles demanded from the Viceroy and received in full from Lord Minto was a guaranteed share in the rewards and patronage of the raj in return for coutinued loyalty. But the social cost of Minto’s ‘generous’ concessions to the Muslims of India has proved so great that the people of Pakistan are still paying for it with their sweat and blood. From this point onward to the present day there has been no meaningful communication between the Muslims who after the fall of the Moghul empire sought refuge in mosques, and those who took the ‘high road to infidelity’.
While the mullah and his flock stuck to the ritual in Islam waiting for God to destroy the infidels and deliver the world to them, a handful of Muslims joined the infidels in keeping the devil supreme. Those who waited for God to act in their behalf tilled the soil meanwhile and eked out a subsistence from a form of agriculture at a level of technology that had remained unchanged for perhaps a thousand years. As their numbers naturally multiplied, they were joined by Muslim artisans from towns who had been made idle by the import of a higher level of European techology, and in particular by the import of mill-made Lancashire cloth. The level of European technology so frightened the mullah that travel on the railway was pronounced un-Islamic! Simple, devout Muslim villagers in the latter part of the nineteenth century and in the first decades of this one feared the towns. To the bulk of the Muslims of India, towns became foreign territory. As recently as the late 1940s one met some men and many women in Indian villages who had never left the immediate surroundings of the village of their birth. Visitors from towns were looked upon with suspicion. To keep the village life safe and uncontaminated by town life, village elders ensured the prompt payment of land taxes to avoid having to see the tax collector. Village elders, among whom the local mullah was always one, also maintained an iron discipline to ensure that crime did not bring about a visit from the dreaded police. Local disputes were settled as far as possible locally. Only the bigger landlords took their disputes to the courts and their produce to the markets.
This meant that for up to 80 per cent of the population of India, British rule was an unhappy but distant interlude in which the towns were colonised and a handful of Hindu and Muslim Indians were turned into Europeans. The ‘educated’ Indians in turn regarded the villagers as little more than animals, as their treatment of coolies, domestic servants, and other manual workers shows to this day. Coupled with these attitudes was a desire to ‘civilise’ the Indian masses as they themselves had been ‘civilised’ by European influence. Indeed, the ‘modern’ Indians began to feel some of the ‘white man’s burden’ on their own shoulders. They felt their responsibility to their country and its ‘ignorant’ people so deeply, and took it so seriously, that they determined to replace the white man altogether. Thus began the movement for India’s independence.
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2 The Road to Pakistan
The Europeanised Indians who led India’s independence movement—both Hindu and Muslim—represented no one but themselves. They were a handful of fortunate Indians who had done extremely
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well out of British tutelage. For their loyalty and willing acceptance of an alien language and culture, the British had offered them enormous rewards by way of jobs, titles, estates and social status. The men who became leaders of Indian ‘nationalism’ and ‘patriots of the front rank’ were in fact the very people who had willingly abandoned their Indian identity and had helped British rule take deep roots in the soil of India. When they turned round and asked the British to leave they were biting the hand that fed them. The British, knowing the languid and tame nature of this élite group, merely ignored them. In any case, so long as the 80 to 90 per cent of the Indian masses were ‘happy’ in their remote villages, untouched by the new ‘civilisation’ of European nationalism, the few men in the Congress of the town dwellers could do little to shake the supremacy of the monolithic colonial bureaucracy. One attribute of western education was that it made the ‘educated’ incapable of political or any other form of social communication with the Indian masses.
Religion in Politics
The first man to grasp this fundamental truth about India was a Hindu barrister—Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. He solved the problem of political communication with the Indian masses in the most simple and effective manner open to him—by becoming a Hindu ‘saint’. For a man, on his own admission, of sensuality and proneness to sexual indulgence and luxury, this must have been a difficult decision. Gandhi was above all else a Hindu. He sought Hindu salvation (Maksha) which included the renuncation of worldly desires. He established instant communication with three out of every four Indians who were Hindus by throwing away his Savile Row suits and by wrapping himself up in a dhoti (loin cloth). He became the symbol of Indian poverty, of India’s Hindu identity, and his various terms in prison made him a symbol of India’s captivity.
The Hindu masses recognised him as one of them and he became their Mahatma (holy man). The fact that he was a Hindu first, a Hindu second, and a Hindu last was freely acknowledged by him. He came to politics to achieve supremacy for his religion. In Young India of 11 September 1924 Gandhi wrote :
I am but a humble seeker after truth and bent upon finding it. I count no sacrifice too great for the sake of seeing God face to face. The whole of my activity whether it may be called social, political, humanitarian or ethical is directed to that end. And as I know that God is found more often in the lowliest of his creatures than in the high and mighty, I am struggling to reach the status of these. I cannot do so without their service. Hence my passion for the service of the suppressed classes. And as I cannot render this service without entering politics, I find myself in them.
Gandhi combined his political and his religious objectives, which were one in any case, into a single concept of Swaraj. The inward personal or religious Swaraj was to be achieved by shedding fear and greed; the outward political Swaraj was to be achieved by liberating India from the foreign yoke. In an instant, by mixing religion with politics, Gandhi turned the upper-class Congress into a mass organisation, or more precisely into a party of Hindu solidarity. The mosque-preserved Muslim was alarmed. He had been waiting and praying for a Saladin to come and restore India to the Muslims; the man who actually arrived was Gandhi, án idol-worshipping Hindu, who threatened to establish Ramraj* in India. The distant prospect of Hindu majority rule that had haunted Sayyid Ahmad Khan was no longer so distant after all.
* Ram is a Hindu god who is believed to have ruled over India in prehistoric times. Now a purely mythological figure.
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The ignorant mullah had in the meantime kept Muslim hopes alive by constantly referring to the Ottoman Caliph of Turkey as custodian of the Islamic glory which was to return. Before and during the First World War men like Maulana Mohammad Ali and Abul Kalam Azad had stirred up considerable indignation among Indian Muslims against the ‘anti-Muslim policies of the Western powers’. In the war against Turkey many Muslim soldiers of the Indian Army deserted when faced with the prospect of having to shoot at brother Muslims. Azad and Ali, unlike Sayyid Ahmad Khan in his Aligarh Movement, regarded as common Hindu-Muslim struggle against the British as jihad (holy war). Indignation built up among Indian Muslims against the British who were seen as intent upon the destruction of the Caliphate (Khilafat) in Turkey. Gandhi, the apostle of non-violence, having campaigned for Indians to join the army during the war, now saw his opportunity to secure Muslim following as well. He attended the two Khilafat Conferences at Delhi (November 1919) and at Allahabad (June 1920). Just as his call for Ramraj had turned the Congress into a mass party with popular Hindu following, Gandhi’s advocacy on behalf of the Caliph of Turkey brought the Muslims out of their village and town mosques and into the Congress camp. The Congress under Gandhi, for one brief moment in the history of India, became a ‘national’ platform.
Gandhi’s tactics were clear : he understood better than any other Indian leader the pull of religious orthodoxy with Hindu and Muslim masses alike. Religion had to play a leading part in India’s ‘national’ politics. In addition to securing mass Muslim support through his leadership of the Khilafat Movement, Gandhi also succeeded in isolating the Muslim ‘educated’ élite from the Muslim masses. Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s ban on Muslim participation in the Congress had been breached, and he had proved to the Muslims that loyalty to the British paid no dividends, Gandhi had in fact undone, or so he thought, most of the work of Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the Aligarh Movement. But Gandhi’s move backfired when there were anti-Hindu riots and it became obvious that Muslim sentiment, when aroused in the name of religion, did not distinguish between the foreign power and the infidel indignous neighbours, the Hindus. Gandhi called off the movement before the Turks themselves deposed the Caliph.
Among those who had seen through Gandhi’s tactics was Mohammad Ali Jinnah, later the founder of Pakistan. Jinnah, an ardent Congressite who was also prominent in the Muslim League, resigned from the Congress over Gandhi’s Khilafat tactics—a break that was to prove more costly to the Congress than any short-term political gains Gandhi may have made. The moment the Khilafat Movement collapsed and the Caliphate itself was abolished, the Muslim masses abandoned both the Congress and the Muslim League as quickly as they had flocked to join them.
This experiment in mass participation in politics was the first of its kind since the Mutiny in 1857. For the leaders the lessons were painful : it was clear that the Indian masses, Hindu and Muslim, would only respond if a religious issue was involved. By the very nature of the two religions—Islam and Hindustan—no one religious issue could be found to produce the desired result of Hindu-Muslim co-operation in the struggle for India’s independence. The problem of Hindu support and awakening had been solved by Gandhi’s shrewd image of a ‘saint’. But the more saintly he became, the less the Muslims trusted him. The Khilafat experiment in inter-communal action against the British left Gandhi more isolated from the Muslims of India than he had been before. Even his leading Muslim partner in the Khilafat Movement, Maulana Mohammad Ali, ended up by advising Muslims not to follow the Congress or Gandhi’s leadership whom he accused of working for Hindu domination over the Muslims. Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s followers breathed again. Into the bargain the aristocratic Muslim League acquired a brilliant new advocate in Jinnah.
It was not only Jinnah and the Muslims who were disillusioned by Gandhi’s leadership of the non-co-operation movement. Many Hindus who had been deeply influenced by Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali philosopher and poet, felt equally uneasy. Tagore’s vision of a harmonious integration of both
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East and West in a new culture of India had obvious attrations for the newly educated Indians. But Gandhi’s saintly act had so infused the political climate with religion that no popular political movement was possible in India without Gandhi’s blessings. It was Gandhi—not Jinnah—who closed the door on a ‘national’ secular development of Indian politics in the twentieth century. Jawaharlal Nehru, who came to prominence in the Congress in the early 1920s, was representative of the group that held that political liberation and economic development were the primary objectives of the Congress and should be pursued outside a religious framework. Nehru lacked belief in formal religion and regretted the Hindu ‘revivalist character’ of Gandhi’s campaign. He found Gandhi ‘a very difficult person to understand’ whose ‘language was almost incomprehensible to an average modern’. But Nehru had to compromise, for the future of anyone born in a Hindu household, however devoid of formal beliefs, in Gandhian India was bleak outside it.
In his An Autobiography, Nehru has admitted : ‘I disliked the exploitation of the people by the so-called men of religion but I still toned down towards it…The spiritualisation of politics, using the word not in its narrow religious sense, seemed to me a fine idea. A worthy end should have worthy means leading up to it. That seemed not only a good ethical doctrine but sound practical politics, for the means that are not good often defeat the end in view and raise new problems and difficulties’.1 The one man who could have rescued India from Gandhian Hindu revivalism, in which Muslims could neither participate nor feel secure, himself gave in to it. The politician in Gandhi was equally shrewd. Gandhi let Nehru run the ‘secular’ wing of the Congress towards political liberation and economic progress, while he himself became the spiritual leader who gathered his flock in the name of religion and delivered their votes to the Congress. In this way the dual Gandhi-Nehru leadership united the traditional Hinduism of India and the modern educated Tagorean Hindu on the same ‘national’ platform of the Congress. This was a neat arrangement which proved extremely effective in presenting the British Government with a united will of three-quarters of India. By any democratic standards an organised party leadership that enjoyed such overwhelming popular support could not be defied of defeated.
The nature of this consensus however was religious, dominated by emotion, passion and blind faith. Men of reason like Nehru were dismayed but found themselves caught in a current that swept them along. The ‘modern’ Hindu reason allowed itself to be swept along by Hindu passion, but the non-Hindu jumped for safety. Among those who preferred to stand aside was Jinnah.
The Economic Factor
India had been colonised by the East India Company. There is no need here to go into the various theories of imperialism, particularly those advanced by J. A. Hobson and Lenin. The defeat of the Nawab of Bengal at Plassey (1757) at the hands of Clive opened the door for the wealth of Muslim India to be drained off and shipped to England. The tributes in gold and jewels extracted by Clive turned the former Muslim aristocracy into paupers. The company and its servants received over £4 millions under the treaties that were made after Palssey. John Strachey in The End of Empire estimates that Bengal paid a tribute of about £15 million a year for 50 years.2 Much of it was used to build up the private fortunes of the company’s servants. But the company was not to be allowed to bring Indian manufactures to Britain. An import duty of no less than 75 per cent was imposed on Indian textiles to protect the infant textile industry of Lancashire. Centres of Indian manufacturing, including Dacca and Murshidabad in Bengal, were destroyed. The Indian artisan class lost its home market through the pauperisation of the Muslim aristocracy, and it lost the European export market through the operation of mercantilist policies in England. A whole generation that might have produced in India inventive men like Arkwright, Wyatt, Watt, Cartwright, and Crompton, was displaced and thrown back on to agriculture.
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Nor was agriculture in India allowed an unbroken development. The Settlement and the Resumptions uprooted established agricultural families and in their place were planted absentee landlords. The Tulls and Townshends of Indian agriculture were aborted before they could be born. In the first Bengal famine of 1770 over a third of the population died. In the destruction of the Muslim dominated Indian economy men like Omichund, the Hindu millionaire merchant of Calcutta, co-operated and conspired with the British.8 The pattern was repeated throughout India, except in the Punjab where Muslim feudal lords were used to break Sikh power. Little wonder then that the Hindus, having made enormous gains at the expense of the Muslim middle classes, turned with enthusiasm and alacrity to learning the English language and participating in the new economic order in India. Within 50 years of the consolidation of British power, the whole of the Muslim middle class was replaced by a new Hindu middle class. While the political pre-ponderance of the Muslims passed to the British, the economic advantage within India passed to the Hindus. There was no religious prohibition against usury in Hinduism to inhibit Hindu participation in modern banking and insurance introduced by the British. Usury had long been practised by the Hindu bunya class. While the Muslims sulked in mosques, the Hindus overtook them in administration, in industry and in commerce.
The new economic order in India was mainly concerned with supplying raw materials for the manufacturing industry in Britain. The output of Indian agriculture was controlled by men Lord Bentinck in 1829 called ‘a vast body of rich landed proprietors deeply interested in the continuance of the British dominion and having complete command over the mass of the people’. These were the Hindu proprietors created by the Permanent Land Settlement of 1793 introduced by Lord Cornwallis. These landlords and zamindars expropriated the peasants by impounding as much as 50 per cent of the produce as ‘ground rent’. After paying the land revenue, the zamindars sold the produce to the exporters of Bombay and Calcutta. Often the peasants, mainly Muslims in Bengal and Bihar, received no payment whatever and the price paid by the exporter was pocketed by the landlord and the supplier between them.
In a sense, Indian agriculture now produced ‘output’ with little or no ‘input’. The input of seed was saved by the peasent; this cut into the peasants’ consumption and added to the share of middlemen in subsequent years. The British policy of keeping agricultural prices depressed had two objectives : the cheap supply of primary produce to Britain and the cheap supply of food to the towns within India where discontent had to be contained. A poor peasantry in any case was more easily controlled by feudal landlords who did not mind low prices because all that they received was clear profit anyway. In any case, few in India understood the mechanism of terms of trade as between the rural and urban sectors of the economy. The newly rich Hindu middle class was so pleased and surprised to be rich that it scarcely had time or the need to complain about relative prices. Ostentations consumption by the upstart Indian rich channelled most of their ‘savings’ back to the British who supplied the articles of ostentation. Local savings were turned into profits for British companies operating in India.
A few of the Indian traders and landowners sent their sons to England for education. In London most young Indians ended up reading for the Bar. It is no accident of history that all three men—Gandhi, Jinnah, and Nehru—who were to decide the fate of India were barristers. India up to the First World War did not produce a single outstanding economist. There was no Indian Adam Smith or Alfred Marshall. Between the wars the few economists who graduated from the London School of Economics either specialised in ‘Government’ or became so immersed in the Keynesian excitements in the West that they forgot to think of the economic problems of their own country and people.
Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s movement stressed loyalty to the British and ‘western’ education, but there was precious little in it for economic amelioration of the Muslims of India. Government service and the army became the refuge into which the half-baked products of the Aligarh Movement flocked. Sayyid was a northerner and a Moghul and showed little awareness of the existence, let alone the problems, of
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the Muslims of Bengal who had suffered most at the hands of the British. For him and his associates the important thing was to restore the former Muslim aristocracy of the Moghuls in a partnership with the British. He in fact entered a race in which the Hindus had been running for half a century or more. The Muslim aristocracy’s partial success in winning some favour from the British was due as much to the initiative of such Englishmen as William Hunter as to Sayyid’s campaign. Sayyid did from time to time talk of the economic plight of the Muslims, but the poverty that worried him was that of the Muslim middle classes who had been dispossessed. While Sayyid and his followers admired ‘all good things’ of Europe, they failed to look into the socio-economic forces that had given rise to the Industrial Revolution there. Contact with the West aroused their apeing instincts but somehow failed to produce the creative zeal that made England great. Import of everything—goods as well as ideas and intellect—became a way of life of the so-called educated. Buying, selling and consuming of goods with the label ‘Made in England’ became a craze in India. The few goods that the Indian handicraft industry still produced as an adjunct to agriculture lost their market. The artisans who had survived the British slaughter of Indian industry were finished off by western-educated Indians.
The Hindu trading class however was well established in the new economic order in India. Its size was small relative to population, but it was there and did well. Some, like the Birlas, Tatas, and Dalmias, entered industry and became extremely big and powerful. It was from this Hindu trading class that the Congress and Gandhi drew much of their financial support. The western-educated Indians realised the enormous new opportunities for investment and profit that would become available in an independent India ruled by them. It is no exaggeration to say that the initial impetus for Indian independence came from the Hindu moneyed classes. Their primary concern was not the restoration of the honour of ‘Mother India’; they wanted above all to eliminate British economic preponderance and to inherit India’s wealth.
This explains the failure of the Congress to follow a consistent economic policy throughout India. The Congress attitude to such fundamental economic issues as agrarian reforms varied from province to province depending on the position of the Hindus in each province. For instance in 1937 the Congress Government of the United Provinces introduced the Abolition of Zamindari (Feudalism) Bill in the provincial assembly. In that province the peasants were predominantly Hindus and some of the largest landlords were Muslims. But when in the same year the Muslim League Government of Bengal introduced an identical Bill to abolish feudalism there, the Congress opposed it. In Bengal the position was reversed—the vast majority of the peasants were Muslims and the landlords were Hindus—and so was the attitude of the Congress. In the Punjab the provincial Government led by a Muslim tried to legislate to reduce the exorbitant rates of interest charged by Hindu moneylenders in rural areas where the peasants were predominantly Muslims. A survey had revealed that as many as 83 per cent of the peasants were in debt. The measure was opposed by the Congress which called it the ‘Black Laws’ of the Punjab.
Compared with the all-pervading influence of the Hindu monyed classes in the Congress, the influence of the Muslim capitalists in the Muslim League was slight. This was not because the Muslim League before 1940 was a more egalitarian body; it was merely because Muslim capitialists were few and far between. Indeed, there were hardly any Muslim capitalists at all. Members of a small community of a Muslim quasi-caste known as Memons were largely small traders, as were members of the Bohra, Khoja Insashari, and Khoja Ismaili groups. All of them originated in Gujrat and Kathiawar and had little contact with the Muslims of northern India who formed the backbone of the Muslim Leauge. The capital that these Muslim groups commanded was very small in relation to that of the vast Hindu cartels. In fact the opportunities for investment in India were so controlled by the Hindus that it was virtually impossible for Muslim capital to break into the top stratum. Many of the larger and more enterprising of these Muslim capitalists had migrated with their capital and founded large enterprises in East Africa, the Persian Gulf, and Burma.
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In India the jute and cotton mills of Calcutta and Ahmadabad were entirely controlled by Hindu or British companies, as were banks and insurance companies. Even in the Muslim majority provinces of Bengal, Punjab, and Sind, all the middleman activities, including credit, marketing and transportation, were controlled by the Hindus. None of this, however, entered the Muslim League’s consiousness until after the Pakistan demand had been formulated in outline if not in detail.
The Muslim League Leadership
Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s campaign for western education created the men who founded the Muslim Leauge in 1906. The Pakistan concept however, contrary to popular belief, was not a child of the Muslim League. The Pakistan scheme had been proposed at least 10 years before the so-called ‘Pakistan Resolution’ was passed at the Lahore session of the Muslim League in March 1904. It is significant that the 1940 resolution merely hinted at partition but neither the word ‘partition’ nor ‘Pakistan’ was used. Indeed, as late as 1943 Jinnah complained that ‘Pakistan is a word which is really foisted upon us and fathered on us by some section of the Hindu press and also of the British press’.4 In the same speech Jinnah denied that either the Muslim Leauge or himself was responsible for coining the word ‘Pakistan’. The word, he said, was coined by ‘some young fellows in London’ in 1929-30. The motive of those who gave the Lahore Resolution the name of Pakistan, said Jinnah, was to ‘Give the dog a bad name and then hang him!’ But, he agreed, the ‘bad name’ of Pakistan was preferable to ‘this long phrase…[of the]….Lahore Resolution’. He added : ‘We thank you for giving us one word’. Jinnah was not a man who allowed anyone to ‘foist’ anything on him. It is agreed by his friends and foes alike that Jinnah was a master politician, a brilliant debater, an obstinate opponent, and a skilful negotiator. Why then did Jinnah allow his opponents to foist ‘Pakistan’ on him? Or, why was the Muslim League led by Jinnah reluctant to be identified with the Pakistan idea?
The answer is that the Muslim League was started by men most of whom were instruments of British imperialism. They were men who had been ‘ennobled’ by the British raj. The former Muslim aristocracy of the Moghul period that acquired western education became a parasitical middle class. These Muslims did not share the pent-up exasperation of the peasants they exploited or the misery of the shanty-town dewllers of British India. These were the men who founded the Muslim League as a platform from which to claim their ‘just’ share of ‘rewards’ and seats in the so-called ‘re-presentative’ institutions that the British introduced. It was this ‘right’ that they claimed from Lord Minto in 1906. They were men of no revolutionary vision vigour; they were the men who were seated in the front rows of darbars held for British viceroys, governors, and visiting royalty as evidence of local support for the British raj. Some of these men were periodically shipped to England and paraded before the British Parliament and people as evidence that India had been ‘civilised’ by the British and that the Indians were grateful to the King Emperor. Knighthoods and various ‘Khanhoods’ were bestowed on them. In flattery, sycophancy, meekness, humility and conservatism these Muslim Leauge leaders were the equal of those Hindus who became the leaders of the ‘national’ Congress. Their interests were served by the continuation of British preponderance in India. Jinnah himself first joined the Congress and later, when he agreed to join the Muslim League as well, he made it clear that ‘loyalty to the Muslim League and the Muslim interest would in no way and at no time imply even the shadow of disloyalty to the larger national cause [of the Congress] to which his life was dedicated’.5
From the time Jinnah joined the Muslim League he dedicated himself to the task of forging a one-nation India. His objective was the creation of a united nationalist front of the western-educated Indians, Hindus and Muslim. At his initiative the League and the Congress began to hold their annual sessions in the same city at the same time. In 1915 Bombay was chosen as the venue of the two simultanenous party sessions. By a coincidence the two men who were to preside over the respective Congress and League
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sessions, Lord Sinha (a Bengali Hindu) and Mazhar-ul-Haq (a Muslim), travelled to Bombay in the same train. Each showed the other his presidential address. By mistake each carried away the other’s document. At Bombay each read out the other’s address without either being unduly embarrassed.
Jinnah’s one-nation was in the making and was consummated a year later at Lucknow. In 1916 Jinnah masterminded an agreement between the Leauge and the Congress at Lucknow where the two parties assembled for their annual sessions. This agreement is known as the Lucknow Pact and Jinnah, for his part in bringing it about, was hailed as ‘ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity’. But what was the Lucknow Pact about? It was no more than a constitutional arragngement on how seats in the provincial legislatures were to be shared between the Hindu dominant casts and the Muslim nobles. The pact did not concern itself with any of the socio-economic problems facing the Indian masses—Hindu or Muslim. At Lucknow the Hindu and and Muslim leadership presented a united demand for ‘constitutional reforms’ which was a euphemism for greater opportunity for the western-educated Indians to further their interests.
The British rewarded them with a limited partnership known as the ‘dyarchy’ under the Government of India Act of 1919. What was meant by ‘dyarchy’ was in fact the kind of partnership between the imperial power and a loyalist indigenous leadership that Sayyid Ahmad Khan had striven to create. The outcome differed from Sayyid’s vision only in so far as the major partners of the British were Hindus rather than Muslims. Those Indians who joined the ‘dyarchy’ ministries—both Hindu and Muslim—showed little or no concern for the people of India. Nevetheless, they soon discovered that their loyalty to the raj was not sufficiently rewarded—rewards always fell short of their expectations. This was because without control over taxation and revenue, subjects ‘reserved’ for the British, their ‘power’ was nominal. The ‘dyarchy’ experiment also got mixed up with the Khilafat Movement and Gandhi’s determination to arouse the masses by appealing to the religious emotions of the people. Jinnah, the ‘ambassador of Hindu-Moslem unity’, saw his one-nation ruined by Gandhi. The Hindu-Muslim honeymoon started at Lucknow in 1916 was at an end. The millions of untutored superstitious Hindus followed Gandhi in his various days of ‘humility and prayer’ together with ‘non-violent civil disobedience’ that almost invariably led to more violence.
The Muslim nobles and the followers of Sayyid Ahmad Khan found that the ‘dyarchy’ and the Lucknow Pact gave them more ‘seats’ and privileges than they could have hoped to secure by themselves. Any pressure on them to intensify political activity was removed. While Gandhi shrewdly closed the gap between the Hindu élite and the Hindu masses, the gulf dividing the Muslim élite from the Muslim masses widened. After the brief interlude of the Khilafat Movement, the Muslim masses returned to their fields and their mosques to say more prayers. The British answered Gandhi’s challenge by a degree of repression that India had not known since the Mutiny over sixty years before. The infamous Rowlatt Act that gave the Government powers of detention and trial without jury was introduced. In the Punjab martial law was resorted to. Repression reached its peak on 13 April 1919 when General Dyer ordered his troops to shoot at a peaceful meeting attended by several thousand people in the walled area of Jallianwala Bagh at Amritsar. At least 400 were killed and another 1,000 injured. Hindu revivalism led by Gandhi and British imperial power were pitched against each other.
This was a new situation for which the Muslim League leadership of the nobles, landlords, and loyalist élite was not prepared. Jinnah protested against Gandhi’s methods and told him that his appeal was mostly to ‘the inexperienced youth and the ignorant and the illiterate’. He added : ‘All this means complete disorganisation and chaos. What the consquences of this may be, I shudder to think and contemplate’6. Jinnah was obviously against the masses’ participation in politics, for in India this would mean having to appeal to the ‘ignorant and the illiterate’. He believed in the ‘constitutional method’ that ensured the supremacy of the few who had been emancipated and educated by western influence. Jinnah regareded Indian masses, Hindu or Muslim, as unfit for political participation. It is this attitude of
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contempt towards the ‘ignorant and illiterate’ masses that the rulers of Pakistan have inherited from Jinnah in full measure. In the 1920s Jinnah was not prepared to stoop down to the level of Gandhi. He resigned from his first love—the Indian National Congress—and withdrew from the political arena. During the twenties the Muslim League existed only in name. Jinnah had retained his membership of the Leauge, but took little part in its deliberations; not that the Leauge deliberated much anyway. Jinnah, who had married a Parsee girl, now restricted his social life to the wealthy Parsee community of Bombay and met few Hindus of Muslims. His occasional forays into politics were brief and unhappy. Whenever he came out of his shell he lectured Hindus and Muslims alike on the need for re-creating the one Indian nation that Gandhi’s campaign had destroyed. In 1929-30 he made one more gallant but futile attempt to get the Congress to accept a partnership with the Muslims. But by now the Congress had become so powerful that Gandhi and Nehru determined to impose a one-nation solution on the Muslims whom they had alienated.
After the second Round Table Conference in London in 1931, Jinnah stayed back in England and settled down to a practice at the Bar. As Bolitho puts it, Jinnah became ‘an English gentleman, retired from the fury of Indian politics’. Jinnah had no solutions to offer to the problems of India. His own description of the Muslim League leaders at the time of the Round Table Conferences was an apt one. He called them ‘toadies and flunkeys’ of the British and a few ‘traitors in the Congress camp’. The Muslims of India, he said, were ‘dwellers in No Man’s Land’. How had the ‘toadies and flunkeys’ come to lead a people who had one conquered India and ruled the sub-continent for 800 years? The answer is that Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s campaign for Muslim education and loyalty to the Imperial raj could hardly fail to create social and political conditions which produce just this type of simple yet pompous class of half-wits.
While the mullah led the ordinary Muslim in prayer beseeching Allah to restore the dominion of the world to the Muslims, the ‘educated’ Muslims jockeyed for positions. If the ‘educated’ Muslims prayed at all, they prayed for the British raj to go on for ever. A few who remained with the Congress—the men Jinnah called ‘traitors’—were merely being more realistic. They recognised that the Congress was going to get power one day and accordingly hedged their bets. They wanted to be close to the ruling class whichever it turned out to be. After all, Jinnah himself had been an ardent ‘nationalist’ and a Congressite until Gandhi’s Hindu revivalism had driven him out.
Jinnah mercifully was the exception to the general rule. He was not a product of the Aligarh Movement. He came from a Khoja family that had little contact with the upper-class Muslims of northern India. There appears to have been little religious influence in his life. Yet he was not totally free of religious feelings. When he married his young Persee bride, she first went through a ceremony of conversion to Islam. When he had gone to England in 1892 to read for the Bar he had joined Lincoln’s Inn ‘because there, on the main entrance, the name of the Prophet was included in the list of the great law-givers of the world’. Even his political consciousness had a religious tinge. He regarded the Prophet as ‘a great statesman, and a great sovereign’. For the rest, his political beliefs were shaped by Lord Morley’s Liberalism. ‘I grasped that Liberalism’, he said later, ‘which became part of my life and thrilled me very much’.7 He drew his early political inspiration from the source of all Muslim inspiration—the Prophet’s short-lived dominion. But the over-whelming influence of England Liberalism made him an Indian nationalist. By the time his dream of a Liberal one-nation in India had been shattered, English Liberals had also retired to the suburbs. Jinnah had joined them there with a house on Hampstead Heath—a ‘retired English gentleman’—leaving the field of Indian politics to toadies, flunkeys, and traitors.
During his semi-retirement in London however he does not seem to have made any study of the social and economic forces that had shaped the politics of England since he had been a student in London in the 1890s. He was a brilliant lawyer and a politician. A lawyer can survive in the closed world of the law courts oblivious of the social forces around him. A politician however cannot live without a ‘cause’.
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Jinnah had lost the cause of one-nation in India. His narrow legal education did not equip him to dig deep into his own consciousness, into history, into religion and philosophy, and come up with a new ‘cause’. And, like all Muslims and most Hindus of this period, Jinnah was completely unaware of the socio-economic forces at work. To them independence was merely a question of ‘constitutional development’. A new cause that Jinnah could take up had to be a ‘constitutional’ solution to the problems of India.
In 1933 a young Muslim, son of a nawab and born a true-blue aristocrat, came to London on his honeymoon. His name was Liaquat Ali Khan, the future Prime Minister of Pakistan. Liaquat went to see Jinnah at his Hampstead Heath home and implored him to return to India. Liaquat told Jinnah that the Muslims of India needed him. But even Liaquat could not tell Jinnah what he was needed for. No solutions had emerged and no new ‘cause’ had been defined. In April 1934 Jinnah paid a brief visit to India and told the Muslim League that ‘nothing will give me greater happiness than to bring about complete co-operation and friendship between Hindus and Muslims’. He was back to his old ‘cause’ of one Indian nation. But Jinnah found the political climate of India still as hostile to his brand of England Liberalism as ever and he returned to England.
A few months later the Government of India Act 1935 was passed giving the provinces full self-government and incorporating the Communal Award providing separate representation for Muslims. It is widely believed that Jinnah returned to India in 1935 to build up the Muslim ‘identity’ as a prelude to the Pakistan demand. Quite the reverse appears to have been the case. He was still an Indian nationalist and still wedded to the old ‘cause’ or one-nation. But now he approached it from another angle. He was still after unity and understanding, only the method had changed. In March 1936 Jinnah told the Muslim Leauge workers :
The Hindus and Muslims must be organised separately, and once they are organised they will understand each other better, and then we will not have to wait for years for an understanding….I am helping eighty million [Muslim] people, and if they are more organised they will be the more useful for the [Indian] national struggle.8
The old campaigner, the ‘ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity’, had changed little. His supreme loyalty was still to the ‘national struggle’ of India. The separate Muslim nation of which he was to become ‘Father’ less than a decade later was not as yet even a glint in Jinnah’s eyes. During his years in England he had ignored the ‘young fellows in London’ who were already talking of ‘Pakistan’.
The Concept of ‘Pakistan’
The clue to the understanding of the conflicts in contemporary Pakistan is the basic divergence of the State of Pakistan from the concept to which the name originally applied. This divergence explains the absence of the word ‘Pakistan’ from the Lahore Resolution of 1940 and Jinnah’s later complaint that it had been ‘foisted’ on him ‘to give a dog a bad name and then hang him’. Why did Jinnah regard Pakistan a ‘bad name’? Choudhry Rahmat Ali, who coined the word ‘Pakistan’, explained it thus :
Pakistan is both a Persian and Urdu word. It is composed of letters taken from the names of all our homelands—‘Indian’ and ‘Asian’. That is, Punjab, Afghania (North West Frontier Province), Kashmir, Iran, Sindh (including Kutch and Kathiawar), Tukharistan, Afghanistan and Balochistan. It means the land of the Paks—the spiritually pure and clean. It symbolizes the religious beliefs and ethnical stocks of our people; and it stands for all the territorial constituents of our original Fatherland.9
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What, one may ask, had Iran, Afghanistan, and Tukharistan* to do with a State called Pakistan to be carved out of British India? And where, one may ask, was Bengal which had a larger Muslim population than any other province of British India? Choudhry Rahmat Ali and his collegaues at Cambridge included the old Moghul capital of Delhi in their Pakistan scheme, and Delhi did not even have a Muslim majority. For Bengal, Rahmat Ali proposed a separate federation of Bengal and Assam to be Known as Bang-i-Islam. In the south he also proposed a State to be called Usmanistan formed by the British princely State of Hyderabad. But Rahmat Ali specially excluded Bengal in the east and Hyderabad in the south from what he called the ‘Paks—the spiritually pure and clean’. The clue to the exclusion of the Muslims of Bengal from the concept of Pakistan is found in the reference to ‘our original Fatherland’ and this in turn explains the inclusion of Iran, Afghanistan, ‘Tukharistan’, and even Delhi. Rahmat Ali claimed that ‘Allah showed me the light, and led me to the name Pakistan.’ On the face of it, it would appear that Rahmat Ali’s claim would also include Allah’s guidance to the territorial definition he gave to Pakistan. If so, as a humble Muslim, the author finds it difficult to believe that Allah would leave out the sacred lands of Arabia and Palestine from His scheme for the ‘land of the Paks—the spiritually pure and clean’—especially as these lands were geographically contiguous with the territories proposed for Pakistan. Neither could any definition of ‘our original Fatherland’ leave out these territories.
Still more perplexing would be the inference that the Muslims living in the territories designated by Rahmat Ali were somehow more ‘spiritually pure and clean’ than other Muslims living both to the east and west of the proposed State. If, as is more likely, the ‘guidance’ was for the future map of India alone, then the inclusion of Iran and Afghanistan is inconsistent. Iran, particularly the Persian language and literature, had deeply influenced the Indian Muslims and Persian had remained the court language of the Moghuls. This, together with the inclusion of Delhi in Pakistan,10 suggests that the Rahmat Ali plan drew its inspiration largely from the memory of the Moghul Empire rather than from the more distant memory of Islamic glory.
The phrase describing the people of Pakistan as ‘spiritually pure and clean’ also gave the idea a strong ideological flavour, Indeed, the Pakistan concept was the counterpart of Gandhi’s Ramraj that had so sickened Jinnah. With his roots firmly planted in Morley’s Liberalism, Jinnah could hardly have gone through the spiritual experience necessary to grasp the Pakistan scheme. The products of the Aligarh Movement, organised in the Muslim League, had equally repudiated Rahmat Ali’s Pakistan. The Muslim Leauge leaders at first called it ‘only a student’s scheme’ which was ‘chimerical and impractical’. Knowing Jinnah’s and the Muslim Leauge’s hostility to the Pakistan scheme, the Hindu press gave the Lahore Resolution a ‘bad name’ and called it ‘Pakistan’. Choudhry Khaliquzzaman in his book, Pathway to Pakistan, confirms that Jinnah ‘resisted the temptation of using the word Pakistan’. Jinnah changed his mind, says Khaliquzzaman, after ‘Pakistan’ had become a ‘household word’11 among the Muslim masses of India—the masses who had given no support to the Muslim League for 40 years. Once the idea had electrified the Muslim people, the Muslim League of the nobles and its leader, Jinnah, jumbed on the Pakistan bandwagon. The name Pakistan had been ‘foisted’ on Jinnah not by the Hindu press but by the Muslims of India.
The concept of Pakistan had yet another origin. In Pakistani folklore and official historiography, Dr. Mohammad Iqbal (1873-1938), is credited with having first proposed the partition of India. In 1930 Iqbal was invited to preside over the Muslim League session at Allahabad. Iqbal was one of the very few men in India who had delved deep into western philosophy and political thought, and had studied economic and social changes in Europe. His early traditional education had equipped him with a complete command over the Urdu, Persian, and Arabic languages. His later education had been western. He read philosophy and ethics at Trinity College, Cambridge, and took a doctorate in philosophy from Munich.
* Muslim Central Asia.
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And inevitably he too was called to the Bar. He was perhaps the only man who drew as much from the history and philosophy of Islam as from western thought. In a sense Iqbal was perhaps the only ‘whole man’ produced by the meeting of the East and the West in India. He was a philosopher, a thinker, and a visionary. His medium of expression and communication was poetry.
Iqbal’s assessment of the political, social and economic ills of India, and in particular of the Muslims of India, had a depth and dimension which the ‘educated’ Muslims of the Aligarh Movement were ill-equipped to comprehend. His assessment of the so-called educated Muslims of India was scathing. Iqbal wrote :
I shed tears of blood at the indolence of the Muslim;
Your carpets are Persian, your sofas Western!
and he contrasted them with the early pioneers of Islam who lived simple, austere lives, and conquered half the world. Iqbal believed in dynamism and action which he defined as ‘movement’. He placed great emphasis on the development of the ‘Self’ to a point where the individual lost his identity in the social world. Religion was a social contract that lifted the inidividual to a higher state of fulfilment in harmony with the social order of which the individual was a part as well as the architect. The sublimation of the fully developed ‘Self’ to a selfless social order was the ideal of peace within and peace without. Iqbal was deeply conscious of the centuries of decay suffered by the once virile Muslim intellectual tradition. He attributed this to the political decline of Muslim power. The revival of Muslim political power was essential for the revival of intellectual traditions, and yet political reivival could not be achieved without the prior infusion of new ideas.
During 1928-29 Iqbal delivered a series of lectures entitled ‘The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam’. He made a plea for the reconstruction of ‘Muslim religious philosophy with due regard to the philosophical traditions of Islam and the more recent developments in various domains of human knowledge’. Iqbal’s presidential address at the 1930 Allahabad session of the Muslim League is the most celebrated document of Pakistani court historians. The most quoted passage in which Iqbal foreshadowed modern West Pakistan is where he says that ‘the formation of [a] consolidated North-West Indian Muslim State appears to me to be the final destiny of the Muslims, at least of North-West India’. His references to Bengal were only in the context of ‘majority rights to be secured by separate electorates’. In another passage to which no Pakistani historian has had the courage to draw attention, Iqbal condemned the early leadership of Jinnah. Among the ‘pitfalls’ into which Muslim political leaders fell,’ said Iqbal, ‘was the repudiated Lucknow Pact which originated in a false view of Indian nationalism’. The Congress-League Pact for which Jinnah had been hailed as ‘ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity’, Iqbal told the Muslim League, had ‘deprived the Muslims of India of chances of acquiring any political power in India’. He condemned this approach of the Muslim League and of Jinnah as a ‘narrow-visioned sacrifice of Islamic solidarity’.12
Jinnah had gone to settle in England and the Muslim League ignored Iqbal’s precepts. Despite the ‘final destiny’ that Iqbal had so clearly indicated, another decade was to pass before the Muslim League’s Lahore Resolution. Iqbal’s concept of a Muslim State in India and Choudhry Rahmat Ali’s Pakistan scheme had one thing in common—both appealed to the extra-territorial loyalties of the Muslims in India. While Rahmat Ali spoke of the links with ‘our original Fatherland’, Iqbal reminded Indian Muslims of their ‘duty towards Asia, especially Muslim Asia’. So far as is known Iqbal himself never used the word ‘Pakistan’, though it is inconeivable that he had not heard of it.
Fundamentally both men, Iqbal and Rahmat Ali, were appealing to the strong religious and traditional susceptibilities of the Muslim masses. They made the mistake of believing that the Muslim
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League and the westernised Muslim élite would be equally susceptible to their ideas. In their attempts to infuse the Muslims of India with their ideas of a distinct Muslim identity they failed to distinguish between the Aligarh Movement and the general body of Indian Muslims. The Muslim League leaders were products of western education as much as the Hindu leaders of the Congress. Being ‘westernised’, these men were ‘interest’-orientated. The threat they perceived from Hindu domination was to their vested interests and not to their religion or to the Muslim masses. They were, as at Lucknow in 1916, quite prepared to do a deal with the Hindus if only the Congress would take notice of them. All they wanted to ensure was that in a free India they would have ‘reserved’ seats to protect their urban interests and guaranteed employment in the various government services. Their concern was not and had never been the welfare of the Muslims of India.
How little of the message of Iqbal or Rahmat Ali had reached the Muslim League was apparent in the 1937 elections campaign. The League and Jinnah insisted that they were loyal Indian nationalists merely claiming a right to stand on the same platform with the Congress. ‘The Muslim League [said Jinnah] stands for full national self-government for the people of India. Unity and honourable settlement between Hindus, Muslims and other minorities is the only pivot upon which national self-government for India…can be constructed and maintained’. The Social and economic programmes of the Congress and the Muslim Leauge as put to the people of India by their respective manifestos for the 1937 election, were identical. The only difference was that the League was opposed to ‘any expropriation of private property’. The Muslim masses of India had little private property to protect.
In the Punjab, the stronghold of modern Pakistan and its ruling class, the Leauge in 1937 secured only one out of 86 Muslim seats. In Bengal the League did better, winning 37 out of 119 seats. In the North-West Frontier Province and in Sind the League did not win a single seat. Out of a total to 159 seats in the ‘original Fatherland’ areas of Rahmat Ali and in the ‘final destiny’ areas of Iqbal, the League secured the grand total of only one seat! In the rest of India the League, led by Jinnah, did somewhat better but still won only 104 out of a grand total of 489 seats reserved for Muslims. The League’s share of Muslim votes throughout India was a mere 4.5 per cent. But equally significant was the fact that the Congress fared even worse in Muslim areas, winning only 26. The 1937 election made it clear that the Muslim masses were interested in neither of the ‘nationalist’ parties—the Congress or the League. The League was a party of nobles and reactionaries and the Muslim masses knew it.
In 1937 Iqbal was in poor health and his eyesight was failing. Perhaps he knew that his life was coming to a close. He died in April 1938. During the last year of his life Iqbal was deeply distressed by the failure of the League to adopt a political programme that he had been advocating for nearly a decade. For him time had run out. He saw in Jinnah the qualities necessary to lead the Muslims of India if only Jinnah could be persuaded to abandon his nationalist outlook, and if the Muslim League could be turned into a mass organisation. These were big ‘ifs’. But for a man on his deathbed, it was worth trying. Iqbal took to writing letters to Jinnah.13
Iqbal told Jinnah to lead the Muslim League away from the nobles and the vested interests and to make it a mass organisation. ‘The League will have to finally decide [wrote Iqbal] whether it will remain a body representing the upper classes of Indian Muslims or the Muslim masses who have so far, with good reason, taken no interest in it. Personally I believe that a political organisation which gives no promise of improving the lot of the average Muslims cannot attract our masses’. He reminded Jinnah that ‘the problem of bread is becoming more and more acute’ and that the average Muslim believes ‘that this poverty is due to Hindu moneylending or capitalism’. This was a clear invitation for Jinnah to abandon his attempts to achieve an ‘understanding’ with the Congress and to charge the Hindus with economic exploitation of the Muslims. If the League can give no promise of eradicating Muslim poverty, wrote
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Iqbal, ‘the Muslim masses will remain indifferent to it as before’. Iqbal’s answer to the problem of Muslim poverty was the application of the Islamic concept of masawat (equality) in which ‘at least the right to subsistence is secured to everybody’.
But Iqbal knew he was writing to a man immersed in English Liberalism. To make his meaning clear to Jinnah, he added : ‘For Islam the concept of social democracy in some suitable form…. is not a revolution but a return to the original purity of Islam’. To achieve social democracy and to solve the ‘problem of bread’ among the Muslims of India, wrote Iqbal to Jinnah, ‘it is necessary to redistribute the country and to provide one or more Muslim States with absolute majorities’. Iqbal insisted that ‘the time for such a demand has already arrived’. Knowing Jinnah’s weakness for flattery, Iqbal expressed the hope that ‘your genius will discover some way out of the present difficulties’. Having showed the way, Iqbal was inviting Jinnah to claim it as his own discovery. Less than a month later Iqbal again wrote to Jinnah saying ‘you are the only Muslim in India today to whom the community has a right to look up [sic] for safe guidance through the storm which is coming…’ Iqbal again repeated his belief that ‘a separate federation of Muslim provinces….is the only course by which we can secure a peaceful India and save Muslims from the domination of non-Muslims. Why should not the Muslims of North-West India and Bengal be considered as nations entitled to self-determination just as other nations in India and outside India are?’
Jinnah later claimed that he did not keep copies of his replies to Iqbal nor could Jinnah’s letters be found among Iqbal’s papers. It would appear, however, that Jinnah gave little importance to Iqbal’s ideas and that he did not regard Iqbal as a serious political thinker. When Jinnah addressed the Muslim League at Patna in December 1938—eight months after Iqbal’s death—he first expressed sorrow at the death in that year of Maulana Shaukat Ali. Next Jinnah regretted the death of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk of Turkey, calling him ‘a great hero’ of the Islamic world. Only lastly Jinnah mentioned the passing away of Iqbal whom he called the ‘composer of the finest poetry in the world’. There was no mention of Iqbal’s political philosophy or of the fact that in 1930, from the same platform as was now occupied by Jinnah, Iqbal had delivered the address foreshadowing the partition of India.
The inescapable conclusion must be that the concept of ‘Pakistan’, in whatever form, was in conflict with the cardinal political beliefs of Jinnah and went against the grain of the Muslim upper classes. Jinnah still wore his Savile Row suits and preferred his image as an Indian ‘English gentlelman’ to being an ordinry Indian Muslim. Inevitably he led an upper class League of the nobles and the feudal lords in which the Muslim masses with good reason took no part.
The Road to Pakistan
As the decade of the 1930s drew to a close and the big powers moved closer to a European holocaust, India moved into the last and decisive phase of its ‘struggle for independence’. The third major crisis of British power in India was approaching. The two previous crises were both largely Muslim affairs—the Indian Mutiny and the Khilafat Movement. The activities of Sayyid Ahmad Khan, his followers, and the Muslim League have been treated by most historians as representative of the whole of the Muslim population of India. The fact however is that the Aligarh Movement and the Muslim League represented a Rightwing reactionary fringe. The Muslim masses of India treated them with contempt and regarded them as tools of imperialism which is exactly what they were. The Muslim élite that had grown enormously rich under British patronage did not lead or represent the Muslim masses who had formed the backbone of the two previous attempts to oust the British.
For the first time the initiative for India’s independence had passed to the Hindus. Not that the Hindus were going to fight—they were led by a ‘non-violent’ Mahatma—but the sheer weight of Hindu
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numbers gave them the advantage. Gandhi’s saintly act had ensured that every Hindu turned out to vote for the Congress and the vote was the weapon with which the Congress planned to drive the British out and dominate, if not actually crush, the Muslims. The vote was not a secret weapon that the Congress invented; it was introduced to India by English Liberalism of which Jinnah was a leading exponent. True, the Muslim League nobles had taken the sting out of the popular franchise by securing separate electorates and reserved seats for themselves, but they were such an incompetent bunch of armchair politicians that they could not secure even a majority of reserved Muslim seats in the elections. Indeed the interests of the Muslim League leadership—the upper class Muslims—were identical with the interests of the upper class Hindus who led the Congress. Though the economic interests of the Muslim community in India were in most cases diametrically opposed to the economic interests of the Hindu community, the League’s 1937 election manifesto, according to Khaliquzzaman, ‘had practically been modelled on the Congress economic programme’. Small wonder then that fewer than 5 per cent of the Muslims of India voted for the Muslim League.
But even to accept that the Muslim upper classes modelled their economic programme on the Congress manifesto because their élite interests were identical is to attribute to them more intelligence and political articulation than they in fact possessed. The more likely explanation is that these Muslim nobles were so ignorant of economic forces at work, so alienated from the Muslim masses, and intellectually so bankrupt that when faced with the problem of having to write a manifesto they simply had to ‘model’ it on the Congress programme. Most historians of British India are agreed that Muslims were an economically backward community and the bulk of the wealth of India, such as it was, was owned and controlled by the Hindus. The influence of men like Jawaharlal Nehru had introduced a shade of ‘socialistic’ thinking in the Congress programme. It might have been expected that the Muslim League, claiming to represent the economically backward community, would, while taking the Congress economic programme as their model, attempt to strengthen the influenc of the ‘Left’ in the Congress. Quite the contrary; the only spark of originality the Muslim League produced in adapting the Congress programme was to insist on the ‘Islamic’ sanctity of existing property rights. It did not of course occure to the League nobles that while they were thus protecting their landed estates (which were gifts of an imperialist power), they were also ensuring that the Muslim masses would remain a backward and exploited community into the distant future.
But perhaps the Muslim nobles of India were practical men—they knew that in a democratic’ India they would never get a chance to hold office except in coalition with the Congress, and the Congress would not offer them ministerships if their programme differed materially from that of the party with a permanent majority. So in the interest of a few seats in the cabinet in the gift of the Congress, the Muslim League was prepared to betray the Muslim community’s interests so long as the estates of the landed gentry were not threatened. In 1937 the Muslim upper classes were ready to be purchased by the Congress. The price the Muslim League asked for was not high—continued patronage of the Muslim nobles on at least the same scale as they had enjoyed under the British. The price once agreed, said the Muslim League, should be guaranteed by constitutional ‘safeguards’. The ‘safeguards for minority rights’ that the League demanded was a euphemism for the interests of a handful of Muslim aristocratic families. These ‘safeguards’ did not relate to or promise the economic and social amelioration of the lot of the Muslim community. What the Muslim masses were promised—if they were promised anything—was that their poverty would be eradicated through the Congress economic programme which the League would help to implement. At far as the League was concerned, the only interests threatened by the Congress economic programme were those of the Muslim landlords.
The reason the League eventually broke with the Congress was not because it realised that the Muslim interest or identity demanded a separate homeland. The final break came when the Congress refused to share power with the League. In 1937 Nehru believed that the ‘Hindu-Muslim questioin in
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India was confined to a few Muslim intellectual landlords and capitalists who were cooking up a problem which did not in fact exist in the mind of the masses’. Nehru was only party right; he was right in thinking that the League was nothing but a few Muslim landlords and capitalists, but he was wrong to assume that no Hindu-Muslim question existed in the minds of the people. The fact was that the Muslim landlords and capitalists, and the Hindu-Muslim question existed separately. The Congress agreed to include League leaders in provincial cabinets on condition that the League MPs accepted the Congress Party whip and ceased to function as a separate parliamentary group. It was on this issue that the negotiations broke down in the United Provinces (U.P.) and Khaliquzzaman, who had been offered a place in the cabinet, decided to sit in opposition.
The U.P. episode is widely regarded as a turning point in the history of Muslim separatism in India. Had the Congress offered one more seat in the cabinet for Nawab Ismail Khan and had it not demanded the virtual winding up of the League’s parliamentary group, the League leaders might never have discovered a second ‘nation’ in British India—a nation that Iqbal and Rahmat Ali had been talking about for over a decade. By a stroke of good luck or good management the 1937 annual session of the Muslim League met in Lucknow, the capital city of the United Provinces, immediately after the coalition negotiations had broken down. It was there that the League, for the first time since its formation in 1906, opened its membership to ‘every adult Muslim’. Also for the first time in 1937 the Muslim League, while opposing the abolition of feudalism in U.P., passed a resolution ‘to raise the living conditions and increase the wages of labours’. The Muslim League—defeated, frustrated, and jilted by the Congress—was beginning to discover the Muslim masses. The manifesto ‘modelled’ on the Congress economic programme was not longer because the League had been refused two seats in the cabinet!
The genesis of the ‘Pakistan’ demand lay in the failure of the Muslim and Hindu élite groups to agree on how to share the fruits of office and independence and not in the irreconcilability of Hindu and Muslim interests. The Muslim League leaders began to think in terms of a separate State not because the Muslims of India would not survive without it but because in a separate State they would be the ruling class. The League had taken no notice of the ‘Pakistan’ cocept during the thirties because its leadership still hoped to secure guaranteed patronage from the Congress. In 1940, when that hope had finally disappeared, Jinnah discovered what the Muslim thinkers and masses had known all along—that there were two nations in India.
Having discovered, reluctantly and by default, that the ‘Pakistan’ concept appealed to the Muslim masses who hankered after a past glory, Jinnah took it up as if it was his own idea. He then emulated Gandhi and threw away his wardrobe of Savile Row suits and put on the Muslim traditional dress of sherwani and shalwar and karakuli cap. The cap became known as the ‘Jinnah cap’. In his tall, upright, handsome figure the Muslim masses saw the shade of Saladin and a glimpse of the Caliph.
It would be tedious to recount the final ‘struggle’ for Pakistan between 1940 and the holocaust of 1947. In those seven eventful years Jinnah and the Muslim League gave the Muslims of India nothing but slogans—those catch-words that come more easily to Righ-wing reactionary politicians than concrete policies. Jinnah, a brilliant political tactician and public debater, forced the Congress veterans into errors and then exploited them. He was more than a match for the British viceroys, and the Congress leaders, including the saintly Gandhi, could do little to stop Jinnah leading the people of Allah to the land of the ‘spiritually pure and clean’. On the way to the promised land for God’s Chosen People, Jinnah discovered that these people were also hungry and among the poorest in the world. Jinnah and his colleagues had no notion as to the causes of Indian or Muslim poverty; they had even less idea how they would go about turning Pakistan into a land of milk and honey. But that mattered little so long as the right promises were made, because the mosque-preserved people of God were too ignorant to know that such promises would
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be of little substance. For the first time in his life Jinnah also discovered the existence of Muslim peasants who lived in the millions of mud huts in the thousands of villages scattered all over the Indian countryside.
Jinnah sent packs of Muslim League workers into remote villages. One of the author’s earliest memories is of the arrival in our ancestral village in northern India of three young men carrying the Muslim League flag—the Islamic crescent and star on a deep green background. The three were students from Aligarh University. They planted the flag in the village square and a crowd of little boys gathered around them. The League emissaries then started shouting Allah-o-Akbar (God is Great) and showed the boys how to salute the flag. We all did. This circus in the centre of the village and the cry of Allah-o-Akbar which was joined by the boys soon brought the adults and the village elders out to watch. When a good crowd had assembled the cheerleader among the three suddenly shouted ‘Pakistan’ and his two colleagues responded ‘zindabad’ (long live). The second time the cheerleader said ‘Pakistan’ we boys gave a full-throated yell of ‘zindabad!’ On the the third cue of ‘Pakistan’ the adults also joined in and, throwing their arms up in the air, cried ‘zindabad!’ To the boys’ disappointment the cheerleader stopped calling ‘Pakistan’. Instead he raised both his arms and we were quite. He then made a speech. Within an hour our quite village had been turned into a ‘Pakistan village’. After visiting a few houses and walking around the village showing the flag, the three passed on to the next village. But our otherwise quiet village had been transformed. Every piece of green material our mothers could find was made into Muslim League flags. We boys who were otherwise bored had found a new game. While the boys endlessly shouted ‘Pakistan zindabad’ our parents seemed little affected. But a few months later they all walked in their bare feet and some carried aged and sick parents on their backs to the polling booth four miles away to vote the Muslim League and Pakistan.
This was repeated all over India. Seldom in history have so few inspired so many with so little effort. In the elections of 1946 the League and Jinnah polled 75 per cent of the Muslim votes. The last milestone in the short road to Pakistan had been passed. A few months later India was partitioned and Pakistan came into being—more by default than by design. But those who became leaders of Pakistan had their own designs. These unfolded in the years after 1947 and are the subject of the following chapters.
০০০
3. By the Right-Wrong Foot Forward
Few new States are born into an international environment more hostile to the infant than was Pakistan. British policy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century had of course encouraged and patronised the Muslim League as a counter to the pressures being mounted by Gandhi’s style of political agitation. But even the British were surprised by the intensity of Muslim religious fervour that Jinnah mobilised into an irresistible separatist movement. In the last few years British policy under the influence of men like Stafford Cripps had turned against the Muslim demand for Pakistan. A ‘united’ India had long been regarded as one of the greatest achievements of British imperial policy. While Downing Street and the India Office in London and the Viceroy in Delhi manoeuvred to keep India united, a number of senior British officers serving in India were converted to the Pakistan idea.
They were the counterpart of the pro-Muslim British lobby that first emerged under the leadership of William Hunter in the 1860s. The motivation of the pro-Pakistan British officers was not greatly dissimilar. These career officers, both civil and military, realised that their chances of staying in the sub-continent would be greater in Jinnah’s Pakistan than in Gandhi’s India. In any case, they had always felt more at home in the company of the beef-eating Muslims. The availability of a relatively small number of senior Muslim offiecrs in the Indian Civil Service gave the British career officers greater hope of
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retaining high office in Pakistan. This made the British opposition to partition that much weaker. But Attlee’s Labour Cabinet, and Mountbatten, the Viceroy, yielded to the Pakistan demand with little enthusiasm.1 In particular Mountbatten and his advisers in Delhi made certain that Jinnah’s Pakistan would be small and ‘moth-eaten’.
The Early Pressures on Pakistan
The provinces of Punjab, Bengal and Assam were all divided not only to give India the Hindu majority districts but also to deprive Pakistan of the jute mills of Calcutta on which East Bengal’s rural economy had been entirely dependent. In the Punjab the Muslim majority district of Gurdaspur was awarded to India, which gave Delhi physical access to the Muslim majority State of Kashmir. The Hindu Maharaja of Kashmir was induced to accede to India despite the Kashmiri people’s agitation to join Pakistan. Acting under the doubtful legality of the Maharaj’s accession, Mountbatten, who had stayed on as Governor-General of the Dominion of India, authorised the occupation of Kashmir by Indian troops. Thus began the first war between the two successor States. At the end of it, when the United Nations arranged a ceasefire on 1 January 1949, India controlled the bulk of the Valley of Kashmir leaving Pakistan in occupation of some barren mountainous areas to the west and north. This gave Pakistan a common frontier with China which was to become important many years later. Field-Marshal Auchinleck, who was Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces and in charge of implementing the partition agreement on military matters, wrote to Attlee that ‘the present India Cabinet are implacably determined to do all in their power to prevent the establishment of the Dominion of Pakistan on a firm basis’.2
Part of the ‘conspiracy’ to prevent the new State from becoming established on a firm basis was to disrupt and destroy the economic fabric of Pakistan. The Hindu minority in Pakistan areas was well placed to achieve this objective. The bulk of the Pakistani output of raw cotton and raw jute was processed in mills located in India and exported to third countries from Calcutta and Bombay. While the peasants who produced cotton and jute were Muslims, all the ‘middlemen’ activities were performed by Hindu traders. One of the reasons why the peasants of Punjab and Bengal had backed the Muslim League’s demand for Pakistan was their belief that they would be freed from the shackles of extortionate moneylenders. Banking and insurance were also in Hindu hands.
In the ten weeks between the 3 June announcement that British India would be partitioned and 15 August, 11 of the 13 banks with head offices in Pakistan had transferred to India. This included all the three banks registered in East Pakistan. Even in normal times the share of reserve funds and paid-up capital of banks in Pakistan areas was less than 10 per cent of British India as a whole. The flight to Hindu capital reduced the banks’ reserves in Pakistan from 50 million rupees in December 1946 to 8.2 million rupees a year later. Thus only 1〖1/2〗 per cent of total British India reserves fell to Pakistan, which inherited 20 per cent of the population.
It was clear that the Muslims had not been their own masters even in areas where they had been a majority. They were growers of primary commodities but the entire structure of economic transactions in exchange, distribtution, transportation, and export and import was controlled by Hindu traders. The relatively modern port of Karachi was also dominated by a strong Hindu middle class and a handful of Hindu business houses. As soon as partition plans became known almost the whole of the Hindu community withdrew from Pakistan areas, taking its capital and know-how. Because the Hindus had been the dominant managerial white-collar class, almost 90 per cent of all officers, shops, banks and insurance companies, and many Government offices, closed down. It is no exaggeration to say that in the months from June to the end of the year 1947, there was little economic activity or trade, and even less administration in Pakistan. When Jinnah flew into Karachi to become head of the new State he flew into a
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vacuum. Nevertheless, this was Jinnah’s and the Indian Muslim’s finest hour. This fact ought not to be lost or belittled through hindsight 25 years later. Indeed the corruption, moral degeneration and intellectual perversion that characterised Jinnah’s élite made their achievement even greater and their finest hour finer still.
Jinnah’s triumph had also been reached at the expense of another vocal, militant, and compact religious community—the Sikhs. The situation was not without irony. Sikhism had been founded in the fifteenth century by Guru Nanak to bridge the enmities between Muslims and Hindus—a halfway house between Islam and Hinduism. Unlike the Hindus, the Sikhs believe in a single God who can be worshipped without images and idols. Their monotheism however differs from the Islamic concept of a Being. The Sikhs’ God is an abstract Truth. In relation to the total population of India, Sikhism attracted few converts but in the five hundred years since Nanak their numbers had grown to over four millions. Almost all of them lived in the Punjab. Their short and at times turbulent history had forced them to be intensely communal and introvert. The Sikhs’ problems of identity and self-defence produced the distinctive features for which they are known—long hair, steel bangle on the right wrist, and a sabre.
One of Jinnah’s few tactical errors had been to alienate the Sikhs. In the final crunch between the Hindus and the Muslims, the Sikhs were caught in the crossifire. Their traditional homeland, the Punjab, was being divided. In the Punjab the Sikhs were outnumbered three to one by the Muslims, and two to one by the Hindus. They raised their demand for a separate State of Khalistan when it was too late and without the advantage of a defined ‘majority’ area. The Sikhs were also haunted by the memory of the brave Ranjit Singh who founded a Sikh empire in the Punjab after securing Lahore from the Moghuls in 1799. He integrated the Punjab into a powerful Sikh State, but after his death in 1839 the British were able to defeat Sikh military power in successive wars. Dalhousie finally annexed the Punjab in 1849. The Sikhs, like the Muslims, had lost an empire to the British. But unlike the Muslims, they were not sharing in the division of the British Indian Empire. When the Sikhs awoke to this reality Pakistan had already been pencilled in on the map. The Sikhs were going to lose Lahore and their estates and holy shrines in West Punjab to the Muslims.
The Sikh military power had been based on guerilla bands called jathas. These now re-emerged to make sure that at least East Punjab in India would have no Muslims left. The carnage in Punjab alone cost at least 50,000 dead and rendered countless millions homeless. The Times correspondent, Ian Morrison, in a despatch from Jullundur on 24 August 1947, gave the following account of the Sikh campaign against the Muslims.
The Sikhs are clearing East Punjab of Muslims, butchering hundreds daily, forcing, thousands to flee westward, burning Muslim villages and homesteads, even in their frenzy burning their own. Their violence has been origanised from the highest levels of Sikh leadership, and it is being done systematically, sector by sector. Some large towns, like Amritsar and Jullundur, are now quieter, because there are no Muslims left. In a two hours’ reconnaissance of the Jullundur district at the weekened I must have seen 50 villages aflame.
The Sikh jathas, armed mobs from 50 to 100 strong, assemble usually in the Gurdwaras, their places of worship, before making a series of raids. Many jathas cross over from the Sikh [princely] States. The Muslims are usually armed only with staves. When threatened, they assmeble on their roofs and beat gongs and drums to summon help from neighbouring Muslim communities, and prepare to throw stones at the attackers. The Sikhs attack scientifically. A first wave armed with fireamrs fires to bring the Muslims off their roofs. A second wave lobs grenades over the walls. In the ensuing confusion a third waves goes in with kirpans—the Sikh sabres, which are also religious emblems—and spears, and the serious killing begins.
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The Sikhs certainly succeeded in clearing East Punjab of Muslims, but in the process they themselves got cleared out of West Punjab in Pakistan. The Sikh logic failed to take into account two unalterable features of their situation : first, in East Punjab, even without the Muslims, they would still be a minority; and second, in India as a whole there would still be nearly 40 milloin Muslims or tem times their number. Neither did the Sikhs get any thanks from the Hindus for having killed or driven Muslim peasants into Pakistan. The Muslim peasantry of East Punjab owed the Hindu moneylenders an awful lot of money. This now became an unrecoverable debt. Neither did the Government of India allow the Sikhs to benefit greatly from Muslim evacuee property in East Punjab. Instead the Sikh refugees from West Punjab were dispersed all over India.
The Government of India was alive to the military potential of the Sikhs. Apart from the Gurkhas and the Marathas, India lacked martial races among its Hindus. Displaced Sikhs were recruited into the Indian Army in vast numbers. Because the army was being raised on the openly proclaimed assumption that Pakistan was India’s ‘enemy number one’, the Sikhs joined in large numbers in the hope of settling their old account with the Muslims in a future Indo-Pakistan war. No fewer than 30 per cent of the commissioned and non-commissioned officers in the Indian Army are Sikhs. As far as the Hindus were concerned, the diversion of Sikh manpower and undoubted energy and ability into the armed forces removed any possible threat to their own profitable preponderance in industry, trade, commerce, banking and insurance. But the injection of Sikh ‘mind’ and Pakistan-phobia into the Indian military set-up led to the creation of a permanent and a powerful anti-Pakistan lobby of ‘hawks’ wanting to have a go at the ‘enemy number one’. For the Sikhs the Indian Army became the vehicle that they hoped would one day take them back to Lahore and to their shrines in West Punjab.3
In addition to the local and immediate hostility of the British, the Hindus and the Sikhs, the infant Pakistan State faced a wider problem of world recognition and understanding. It was not that the States of the world withheld formal recognition; it was merely that for a world immersed in western secular nationalism, Pakistan’s raison d’ȇtre was hard to understand. The geographically bisected map of Pakistan gave it an air of impermanence. The notion that partition was a temporary aberration and the Pakistan State a freak was given air by Indian propaganda at home and abroad. The semantics of this propaganda has centred around two words—India maintaining that Pakistan was a secessionist State and Pakistan insisting on its status as a succeesor State. The secessionist interpretation leaves India the option of claiming the ‘right of reabsorption’ and also strengthens Afghanistan’s claim to the tribal territory in West Pakistan. The successor State status, claimed by Pakistan, on the other hand, entitles the new State to the territorial boundaries of the former British Indian Empire, particularly the Durand Line.
The Saviours of Pakistan
(i) The capitalists : The scorched-earth policy of the departing Hindu middle class did untold damage to the new State. The vacuum they left was in a sense also a free gift to the emergent Muslim middle class. The problem was not how to dispossess and displace an entrenched and hostile middle class, which would have been the case if the Hindus had stayed. The problem was how to find enough Muslims of the right background to take their place. Nor was the problem uniform throughout Pakistan. In East Pakistan, for instance, the administrative vacuum was created not by the migration of Hindu officials, but by the fact that Calcutta, the Bengal capital, had been awarded to India. Thus East Pakistan, which had more than half the population of the new State, inherited virtually no administration above district level. The nature of Hindu migration from East Pakistan also differet in one essential respect—while Hindu capital and other movable property was transferred to Calcutta, the Hindus themselves remained and continued to control the economic life of the province. Here there was no middle-class vacuum to be filled as was the case in West Pakistan.
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While the Hindus of Sind, Punjab, and Bengal were transferring their assets to India, a small band of Muslim entrepreneurs were moving into Karachi. They were not refugees in that they did not leave their homes in Bombay and Kathiawar through Hindu persecution. They were members of the Muslim trading communities or quasi-castes. They had been ‘persecuted’ by the Hindus in so far as powerful Hindu cartels had prevented them from investement opportunities in some of the most profitable lines of commerce and industry. They were Memons, Bohras, Khoja, Insashari, and Khoja Ismaili. The influence of the Ismaili community on Muslim politics in the subcontinent had been deep and abiding. The deputation that called on Lord Minto in 1906 had been led by none other than Aga Khan III, grandfather of Prince Karim Aga Khan. He had been president of the Muslim League from 1909 to 1914. He had also been the leader of the Muslim delegation to the Round Table Conference in 1931. When a young prince in 1896, he had been presented with an address of welcome at Aligarh by none other than Sayyid Ahmad Khan. The Aga Khan had raised three million rupees for Aligarh University. The second most illustrious member of the Ismaili community was the creator of Pakistan himself, Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Both men had been born in Karachi within a year of each other—Jinnah in 1876 and his spiritual leader, the Aga Khan, a year later. Karachi was almost a sacred city to the Ismailis. Jinnah had made his name and considerable fortune at the Bombay Bar where his clients were mainly these wealthy Muslim communities, or Parsee businessmen who were related to him by marriage.
Once Jinnah had taken over the leadership of the Pakistan Movement, he and the Muslim League received enormous financial support from Muslim capitalists. But Jinnah was too upright and basically honest to be anybody’s puppet. During the course of his campaign for Muslim liberation and emancipation he denounced all forms of vested interests, including landlords. He also allowed a large number of Muslim Communists and fellow travellers to hold office in the Muslim League at provincial and district levels. One of them, Danyal Latif, was the author of the Punjab Muslim League’s manifesto which was unanimously passed by the provincial Working Committee in 1944. It declared that in Pakistan key industries would be taken over by the State (beginning with public utility services), private industry would be under public control, a ceiling would be placed on landholdings, and the burden of taxation would be ‘equalised’ by the imposition of new taxes on landowners.
After Pakistan had been created the Muslim League Government of West Punjab took the unusual step of probibiting the further publication of its own pre-partition manifesto. But many in the League were frightened by Jinnah’s apparently progressive ideas. When the Punjab landlords became alarmed by the Left within the League, Jinnah calmed them by saying, ‘The League is not against any interests among the Muslims’. He was right. Jinnah was a man for all seasons and the League all things to all Muslims.
The first batch of the saviours of Pakistan who repaired to Karachi in the second half of 1947 were the wealthy Muslim families from Bombay, Kathiawar, and Gujrat areas in India. Some Memon and Ismaili families, such as Bawanys and Fancies, came from places as far apart as Burma and East Africa. They brought with them large amounts of money in currency notes often stuffed in pillow cases and mattresses, sewn into coat and jacket linings, or hidden in the undergarments of their traditionally overdressed womenfolk. The capital they brought was small compared with what the departing Hindus had taken away from Pakistan. While, according to Jinnah, the Hindus left as part of ‘a deeply laid and well-planned conspiracy’4 to strangle Pakistan at birth, it was not to save the infant State that the Muslim businessmen rushed to Pakistan. Their motivation was self-interest : they were quick to see the opportunity and to grasp it. They came to Pakistan because there the profit margins in a relatively secure environment were likely to be handsome.
Indeed, the arrival of these wealthy quasi-caste Muslims can be described as an economic invasion of Pakistan. By virtue of their successful occupation of Pakistan’s economy at the outset they
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now claim the right to be included among the ‘saviours’ of Pakistan. But when the civil war in East Pakistan began in March 1971 and the country’s economy collapsed, most of the leading business and industrial magnates of Pakistan ran for cover. In the summer of 1971 at least one senior member of each of these wealthy families was in London trying to find avenues of investment in Europe. No doubt a few of those numbered accounts in Swiss banks hide the national wealth that had been pilfered out of Pakistan by these self-styled patriots. Immediately the civil war began the Lombard Bank in London started an extensive advertising campaign in Pakistan offering 7〖1/2〗 per cent interest on deposits. If the truth were known, the flight of several million refugees across the border to India was more than matched by the flight of capital from Karachi to Europe. What rate of return these men have extracted for their initial ‘patriotic’ investment which was brought hidden in mattresses may never be known.
(ii) The landlords : These were home-grown in the sense that, by their very nature, they had to be ‘sons of the soil’. Their origin was comparatively recent. For instance, no large feudal family in West Pakistan could trace back its proprietorship of land beyond the Indian Mutiny of 1857. In the words of the Agrarian Committee of the Muslim League which reported in 1949, the landlords’ estates ‘were rewards given by British Imperialism for services rendered to it. Services rendered against the nation.’ The committee went on to recommend that ‘the birth of freedom must abolish this stigma of the past’ because the landlords ‘contribute in no wise to the agrarian economy of the country and are a parasitical burden on it’. The committee found that ‘considerably more than half of the cultivable area of West Pakistan is owned by landlords who do not directly till the soil, who live on rent, and who cannot therefore be called the producers of national wealth’.5
The landlords were virtual masters of the great majority of the 33 million population of West Pakistan in 1947. No less than 82 per cent of the people were directly dependent on agriculture. The bulk of the tillers of the soil were tenants-at-will with no protection whatever in law. Such tenants leased the land from the landlord on the batai system, that is to say, in return for a fixed share of the produce. The most widely practised system was 50 per cent to the tenant and 50 per cent to the landlord. In most cases the tenant-at-will paid the water rate (about four rupees per acre) and the landlord the land revenue (about two rupees per acre). All the direct costs of cultivation such as provision of cattle, farm implements, and seed were provided by the tenant. This increased the landlord’s share far beyond the nominal 50 per cent. In addition the landlords extracted a tax per hearth and window, and even for every domestic animal or chicken. Some landlords charged a homage on the marriage of their children, and even a tax on the marriage of the tenant or his children. The Muslim League committee estimated that, after taking all these extra exactions and forced labour into account, ‘the landlord’s share is often as high as 75 per cent and sometimes as preposterous as 90 per cent’. This land tenure system practically gave the landlords power of life and death over the tenant and his family. Nor did the tenant-at-will have any bargaining power because the intense pressure on land made the law of demand and supply operate entirely in favour of the landlord. In addition to the tenants-at-will there were about five million landless agricultural labourers who were exploited by the peasantry as well as the landlords.
The view is widely held that the Muslim League and Jinnah in their drive for Pakistan had relied exclusively on the slogan of ‘Islam in danger’. This is not strictly ture. In particular the Muslim rural masses, who had little or no understanding of political issues and who cared even less, did not follow the League simply because there was a cry of ‘Islam in danger’. The Islam the rural masses understood was of the narrow variety that was bred and preserved in mosques. Their religion had become so irrelevant to their miserable existence that the little of it that remained could hardly be reduced further even if a Gandhian Ramraj was declared throughout India. Nor can it be said that the great majority of the rural masses who were tenants-at-will had a political will of their own. They could be aroused and politically involved only if two contradictory conditions were met : (a) that their landlords approved, and (b) that
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they were promised deliverance from the regime of landlordism. The Muslim League, being all things to all Muslims, achieved this impossible combination. Jinnah’s repeated denunciation of capitalism and feudalism and his references to ‘Islamic socialism’ aroused almost as much hope of economic and social emancipation as did the vision of an ‘Islamic State’. Indeed, at least momentarily, even the landlords got carried away by the popular upsurge towards Pakistan.
The League’s Agrarian Committee began its report with a long introduction in which Jinnah (who had died the year before) and Liaquat Ali Khan, the Prime Minister, were extensively quoted on the subject of economic justice and ‘Islamic socialism’. The committee then concluded that :
The economic ideology of the Muslim League therefore is precise and definite. It is based on the democratic and equalitarian principles of Islam in which there is no room for oppression, exploitation or enslavement. More specifically….an application of the ideology of the Muslim League can only mean a liquidation of feudalism.6
The committee, itself headed by one of the largest landlords of the Punjab, Mian Mumtaz Daultana, then added this warning :
Unless a clear and precise programme is formulated which is not based an vague generalisation and pious but insubstantial expression of good intentions, but actually lays down the definite steps by which an unambiguous series of reforms are to be carried out in a specified period, it is not possible [to sustain], nor would there be any justification for sustaining amongst the people any real interest or confidene in the Muslim League.7
The recommendations the committee produced were mild, aiming at ‘adjustment of the social structure in an evolutionary rather than in a violent manner’.8 But the landlords of West Pakistan have for 24 years successfully defended their estates even against evolutionary change and no meaningful land refroms have yet been carried out. For the landlords the saving of Pakistan became synonymous with the saving of their privileged position.
In this respect the two parts of Pakistan developed in opposite directions. In East Pakistan at the time of partition nearly half the land was owned by landlords whose holdings often exceeded 10,000 acres. But there was one essential difference—in Bengal the Permanent Settlement of 1973 had imposed absentee Hindu landlords over a largely Muslim peasantry. The creation of a Muslim Pakistan meant that the Hindu landlords either migrated to India or withdrew to urban centres within East Pakistan. The situation was ideal for the Muslim League’s social conscience to find practical expression at the cost of the Hindus. Even there a handful of Muslim landlords in the League held up legislation for almost three years. Ultimately in 1950 the Bengal Estate Acquisition and Tenancy Act was passed and the Hindus’ landed estates disappeared for ever. Although the Act placed a ceiling of 33 acres on the ownership of agricultural land and prohibited sub-letting, it was not accompanied by a programme of redistribution of the acquired estates or the effective emancipation of the peasants who formed no less than 96 per cent of East Pakistan’s population. In the intervening 20 years the pressure of population on land in East Pakistan has almost doubled, producing economic and social unrest on which the Awami League thrived.
(iii) The bureaucrats : The ‘pukka sahib’ in his sunhat and loose-fitting suit lording over the natives produced the deceptive image of a detached but firm administrator and agent of the raj. In fact only the ‘sahib’ in him and his appearance were new; in all other respects he was a direct descendant of the Moghul diwan. In their fundamentals there was little difference between the Moghul and British ideas of good administration. Both empires concentrated on law and order, dispensation of justice, and collection of revenue. Akbar the Great’s administrative system which divided the country into subas (provinces),
37
sarkars (districts), and paragnas (villages) was in all essentials retained by the British. The East India Company had begun its meteoric career by acquiring from the Emperor of Delhi the local functions of the diwan in Bengal. As the company’s territories grew to include Bihar and Orissa, administrative plans were drawn up by Hastings in 1772 and by Cornwallis in 1787. The district officer was redesignated Deputy Commissioner or Collector. He became the collector of revenue and a civil judge with magisterial powers and was invariably a Briton.
The Moghul system was less centralised than the British, but this may have been due to the limited supply of Europeans to take up all the posts in the higher échelons of the hierarchy. Gradually the office of the Deputy Commissioner underwent various reforms, including the partial separation of his judicial and executive powers, as more Europeans became available. The essential point is that the basic structure and purpose of administration changed little with the end of the Moghul Empire—the most visible change being the replacement of district Muslim administrators with British. The only people who remained largely unaffected were the Hindus who held subordinate positions under both the British and the Moghul systems.
The Muslim administrators who were ousted from their high positions were unwilling to join the Hindus as messengers and clerks. So they stayed out altogether. Almost a hundred years were to pass before Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the Aligarh Movement persuaded the children and grandchidren of the former Moghul administrators to enter British service. Just as separate electorates for the Muslims had taken the sting out of ‘representative’ institutions in India, a quota system that guaranteed the Muslims a proportion of all government jobs deprived the Hindus of the advantage of merit in competitive examinations. The British Government of India of course had its own motives for ending the Hindu monopoly of administrative, police and judicial services. British policy went further and favoured the minority groups in recruitment to the coercive arms of the State. They would favour Muslim policemen in Hindu majority provinces and Hindu or Sikh policemen in Muslim majority areas. This ensured that the majority always regarded the minority as agents of imperialism, making the communal conflict worse than it need have been. But this phase of British policy did not start until the 1920s—too late for Muslims effectively to challenge the long-established Hindu preponderance. Even the quota system applied to new recruitment and could only improve the Muslim representation in the long term. Just as the Congress opposed the separate electorates, the Hindu intelligentsia found its superior merit thwarted by the upstart Muslim for entry to some of the most prestigious, rewarding and secure careers in the civil service.
The Muslim officers who got in to fill the quota for their community were by and large of inferior academic quality, but they came from feudal and aristocratic families which often traced their ancestry to Moghul princes, vazirs and nawabs. In any case, they had the aristocratic ‘character’ that suited them in their rôle as servants of an imperial power. What they lacked in ability they made up in greater loyalty to the British. Displacement of the Hindu as the natural and necessary ally of the British had been a primary objective of the Aligarh Movement. With the intensification of nationalist agitation and Gandhi’s Hindu revivalism the sense of insecurity among the Muslim masses was heightened. The emergence of a handful of Muslim district officers was hailed by the Muslim peasantry as protection from the Hindu landlords and moneylenders. The British had dispensed all the local patronage through district officers and this enabled them to bypass the Congress worthies who could offer no rewards for local support.
When after the 1937 elections the Congress took power in the United Provinces and the Muslim League formed the provincial Government in Bengal, the communal conflict over jobs took a new turn. The Congress Government in the United Provinces took steps to oust the Muslim officers from their favoured positions in the provincial services. As a tit-for-tat the Muslim League Government of Bengal took steps to reduce the Hindu domination of the civil service there. The League Government of Bengal went further during the Bengal famine of 1943. The famine was made worse by the Hindu merchants who
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held bcak the stocks of foodgrains in the hope of pushing the prices even higher. H.S. Suhrawardy, later Prime Minister of Pakistan, was then the Minister of Supply in Bengal. He took the opportunity of setting up Muslims in the food supply business with the Government providing the capital as well as bearing the initial losses. When attacked by the Congress opposition for communal bias, corruption and favouritism, Suhrawardy openly admitted on the floor of the House that he was merely ‘redressing the balance’ in favour of the Muslim community. He charged the Hindus with having kept the majority Muslim community of Bengal out of the most lucrative distributive trade.
The limited experience of ‘self-government’ under the 1935 Act had shown clearly that democratic government in India, by whatever party, was going to be government of the middle classes, by the middle classes, and for the middle classes. The fact that both Hindu and Muslim officers of the bureaucracy in India remained uninvoled in politics until as late as the 1940s was due largely to the strong tradition of political impartiality in the British civil service. In any case the mercenary instincts of the officers made them more cautions than patriotic. It was not until the Labour Government at Westminster named Mountbatten as the last Viceroy of India, with a time limit within which to liquidate the British Indian Empire, that it became clear that the British were actually leaving. While the Hindu officers had surreptitiously sided with Congress for over a decade or more, Muslim officers had kept their options open. If they had any preference for Pakistan, they did not show it until after after the Muslim League’s election triumph of 1946. Once these Muslim officers were sure of not backing a loser, they too jumped on the Pakistan bandwagon.
In October 1946, when the League decided to join the Interim Government, there occurred one of the most bizarre incidents of all. The Congress had to drop three Members (as Ministers were then called) from the Executive Council (as the Cabinet was then known) to accommodate the League nominees. This was relatively easy. The difficulty arose over the allocation of portfolios. Lord Wavell, then Viceroy, and Jinnah insisted that at least one of the major departments of State should be held by the League. Wavell suggested to the Congress that it should give up the Home Department. The Congress, however, was reluctant to let the League take control of the country’s police. In any case, Sardar Patel, who held the Home portfolio, was reluctant to give up his position of enormous power and influence. Wavell had ruled out the League’s holding the Defence Department. That left only Finance. Abul Kalam Azad has admitted that the Congress finally agreed to offer the Finance Department to Jinnah in the hope that he would refuse the offer because ‘it was a highly technical subject and the League had no member who could handle it…If on the other hand the League nominee accepted the Finance portfolio, he would soon make a fool of himself’.9 When Wavell conveyed the offer to the League, Jinnah did not jump at it. He told Wavell he would reply the next day. Jinnah, the unquestioned leader of the 100 million Muslims, did not have one man in his band of future rulers of Pakistan who could handle Finance. Such was the ‘talent’ he was leading to the ‘promised land’.
During the evening when Jinnah must have been wondering what to do, the news of the Viceroy’s offer reached Chaudhri Mohammad Ali, a Punjabi Muslim officer who was then Financial Adviser to the Military Finance Department. Mohammad Ali contacted Jinnah and, according to Azad, ‘assured Mr. Jinnah that he need have no fears. He would give every help to Mr. Liaquat Ali (the League nominee) and ensure that he discharged his duties effectively. Mr. Jinnah then accepted the proposal and accordingly Liaquat Ali became the Member for Finance’.10
This turned out to be a disaster for the Congress. The Finance Member scrutinised every proposal by other Departments, and particularly the proposals made by the Home Office. Sardar Patel soon found that he could not even appoint a messenger without Liaquat Ali’s prior approval. When Liaquat Ali presented the Budget he imposed swingeing taxes on the wealthy and on businessmen and industrialists, who were mainly Hindus and supporters of the Congress. The Muslim Finance Member justified these
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taxes oin the ground that socialism was part of the Congress programme. The Congress had had enough and Sardar Patel became the first leading Hindu convert to the demand for Pakistan. Having helped the League at a critical point, Chaudhri Mohammad Ali and with him the entire Muslim officer class acquired a stake in Pakistan.
The incident also showed clearly the bankruptcy of the Muslim League in the kind of manpower that would be required to run a State. And if the Congress leaders did not think the League had the ability to run a major department in the Government of India, they certainly did not think Jinnah and his Working Committee were capable of running a whole new State. Perhaps this is what Nehru had in mind when he told General Sir Frank Messervy that ‘his deliberate plan would be to allow Jinnah to have his Pakistan, and gradually make things so impossible economically and otherwise for Pakistan that they would have to come on their bended knees and ask to be allowed back into India’.11 The creation of Pakistan was going to place an enormous burden on the civil servants under the best of circumstances; the actual circumstances in 1947 could hardly have been less propitious. In the struggle to ‘save’ the new State the civil servants were destined to play a crucial part.
But the trouble was that there were not enough of them. As is well known, the élitist Indian Civil Service had been the backbone of the British colonial administration. On the eve of independence there were 1,157 I.C.S. officers serving in undivided India. Of these more than half—608—were still British. Of the remaining 549 Indian officers, only 101 were Muslims. Those who actually opted to serve in Pakistan numbered 95. Of these 95 twelve belonged to the Indian Police Service. The new State had only 83 I.C.S. officers of the top administrative grade to be divided between four provincial governments and the Federal Government at Karachi. Of these, two—the Federal Government and the East Bengal Government at Dacca—had to be started from scratch. Even more telling is the fact that only one of the 83 officers was an East Bengali Muslim. About a third were Punjabis, and the remainder were mainly from the Muslim minority areas in India, notably from the United Provinces.
(iv) The mullahs : For over two centuries the mullah had waited for the will of God to manifest itself and banish the Christian infidels, destroy the upstart Hindu, and restore India to his mosque-preserved Muslims. In the middle of the twentieth century God appeared to shake the world all right as the mullah expected He would. The Christian infidels, weakened by their own wars in Europe, were voluntarily packing their bags and preparing to leave India. But to the mullah’s great chagrin the men about to become rulers of a new Muslim State were precisely those who had defied his ‘Islamic’ authority and taken the ‘high road to infidelity’. Political power was returning, but God appeared to have chosen those among the Indian Muslims who had allowed their soul to gather European dust and lust. The mullah, who was all set for Heaven, found the world bypassing him. He was rightly alarmed. The mullah decided to oppose the Muslim League’s demand for the partition of India.
The self-appointed custodians of Islam in India had become so alienated from the Islam of the Prophet that they began to equate freedom to worship with freedom of political action. In the mullah’s Islam there was no justification for territoriality. Islam, argued the mullah, was a universal religion which could not be contained or defined in terms of a territorial nationalism. The mullah conveniently forgot that even in its early days Islam made little headway until the Prophet had acquired a territorial foothold at Medina. The Prophet’s dominion became the inspiration for the subsequent territiorial expansion of Islam. For many hundreds of years Muslim kings and foreign rulers of Muslim countries had found it expedient to keep the mullah out of touch with political reality. Because most rulers and ruling classes pursued the world and its wealth and luxury, the mullah came to believe that political power corrupts the soul. In the Islam of the mullah, political power and Muslim domination in a territorial State were not relevant to the Muslims’ overriding conern in life—to achieve personal piety and salvation in the Hereafter. He held up the corrupt rich as example of what would happen if ‘the world’ was pursued. ‘The
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poor are closer to God’ became a standard mullah doctrine. Because he was in no position to help his flock out of the abyss of poverty, he converted poverty into a permanent and abiding virtue. No one dies before the appointed day, so all those who died of starvation died ‘natural deaths’. The ‘Will of God’ that had defeated the Muslim rising against the British in 1857 was still supreme and the Hindu must be allowed to replace the British. The most outstanding mullah who opposed the Pakistan demand was Abul Kalam Azad.
I must confess [wrote Azad] that the very term Pakistan goes against my grain. It suggested that some portions of the world are pure while others are mipure. Such a division of territories into pure and impure is unIslamic and a repudiation of the very spirit of Islam. Islam recognises no such division and the Prophet says, ‘God has made the whole world a mosque for me’.12
It may be recalled that Choudhry Rahmat Ali, the originator of the word ‘Pakistan’, had also claimed divine guidance for his scheme of partition. If both Ali and Azad are to be believed, and both were honorable men, then the God of the Muslims was leading some of His Chosen People in one direction and others in the opposite direction.
But not all mullahs were against the Pakistan idea. Perhaps the most prominent who neither supported the Pakistan demand nor opposed it was Abul Ala Maudoodi who founded the Jamat-i-Islami (the Islamic Party) in 1941. Maudoodi regarded the Pakistan scheme as basically sound but equally he regarded the westernised Muslim group as, at best, insincere in its professoions of Islam. He wrote : ‘From the League’s Quaid-i-Azam (the Great Leader, namely Mr. Jinnah) down to the humblest leader, there was no one who could be credited with an Islamic outlook and who looked at the various problems from an Islamic point of view’. Maudoodi asked the Muslims to take a close look at the personalities of Muslim League leaders. In particular he pointed out that these clean-shaven gentlemen in their western suits had failed to mould their personal lives according to the dictates of Islam. He pointed at the League leaders’ emancipated Begums who defied all standards of ‘Islamic’ modesty and appeared in public with or without their husbands. These men, said Maudoodi, did not say their daily prayers and defied God in Ramadan by not undergoing the discipline of fasting. How could such men who failed to mould their personal lives according to the teachings of Islam, asked Maudoodi, be trusted to establish an Islamic State in Pakistan? Maudoodi, however, was a relatively minor figure before 1947.
The chief Muslim divine in India was Maulana Husain Ahmad Madani, president of the Jamiyat-ul-Ulema-i-Hind. Maulana Madani issued a fatwa (religious edict) in 1945 forbidding the Muslims of India to join the Muslim League. He said that the League’s Quaid-i-Azam was ‘Kafir-i-Azam’ (the great heathen). By then it was too late. The Muslim League’s green flag bearing the Islamic crescent had been carried to every nook and corner of India. The right promises had been made. To the Muslim peasant in India almost anything under the League would be better than a Gandhian Ramraj.
The mullah, whether he knew it or not, was also engaged in a political struggle. He wanted to prevent the leadership of the Indian Muslims from passing to the ‘heathen’ Jinnah and the westernised group. In this struggle the mullah party was outmanoeuvred by Jinnah’s superior skill. The western techniques of political articulation were acquired through western education which the mullah lacked. The British preferred to deal with Jinnah rather than with the mullah who spoke little or no English. In any case, if the British were leaving they were going to make sure that the successor States were dominated by those who accepted British influence most and were most likely to continue the ‘civilising’ work started under the raj. Fortune and history favoured Jinnah who, on 7 August 1947, flew into Karachi to become Governor-General of Pakistan. While Jinnah flew to his final destiny in a Dakota provided by Mountbatten, the mullah followed him in his bullock cart. The League had won but the mullah was not to be cheated. Jinnah was not going to have his cake and eat it to the exclusion of the mullah.
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If Jinnah and the League could not be defeated in India, they would have to be defeated in Pakistan. The battle was lost, but the war was still on. Jinnah—the generalissimo, the saviour, the Father of the Nation—was old and known to be in poor health. The war of succession in Pakistan would have to begin after a pause for regrouping and recovery from the first phase of the struggle that had just ended. Jinnah did not keep them waiting for long—he died on 11 September 1948—only 13 months after Pakistan had been created.
০০০
4. The Road to Despotism
The people of Pakistan awoke to greet the dawn of freedom only to be confronted with the thick black clouds of communal fury, wholesale extermination of the Muslims in East Punjab, and social disruption and economic destitution of many millions of men, women and children. For a people who were determined not to allow these menacing storms to wreck the ship of State at its launching, no sacrifice appeared too great.
A Punjabi Muslim peasant of Jullundhur had seen his wife’s throat cut by a Sikh sabre and had been forced to witness the rape and subsequent murder of his fifteen-year-old daughter. He reached Lahore in a refugee train. As the train pulled up, Muzamdar—for that was his name—threw himself to the ground and kissed the soil of Pakistan, tears of joy streaming down his face. Muzamdar had reached the promised land. The stone slab of the railway platform that Muzamdar kissed was burning hot under the August sun. But his dry lips caressed the stone with a reverence that cooled his soul. He would have lingered there somewhat longer if a Pakistani police inspector’s boot in his ribs hadn’t forced him to roll over. The inspector followed through and pulled Muzamdar up to his feet, holding him by the scruff of his neck. For having licked what Muzamdar thought was the sacred soil of Pakistan, the inspector called him a ‘dirty pig’. The red hot blood of a hungry man who had not eaten for three days rushed to his head—for the last time he had been called a pig was by the Sikh who had raped and then killed and mutilated his young daughter. He flung himself at the inspector, but fortunately for the latter Muzamdar passed out and fell flat on the sacred soil once again, bleeding from a cut forehead. When he came to he was in hospital. Ten minutes later he was discharged as ‘fit’ and left to fend for himself in the great city.
Muzamdar went into a mosque where he washed himself and said a prayer. It was the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. At sunset people brought food to the mosque. Muzamdar did not know whether he was fasting, but he could not remember when he had last eaten. He joined the faithful and ate. He slept in the mosque, he stayed in the mosque the next day not knowing where to go, he slept the following night in the mosque again. Days and nights passed and Muzamdar stayed there saying more and more prayers. He is still there, living in a room at the back of the mosque. Recently he became the mosque’s muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. Originally the catchment area of the mosque consisted of about fifty houses of working class families and a few petty traders. Then the mosque was always full. About 10 years ago a modern middle-class housing estate began to be built around the mosque. When the houses were completed the mosque itself was rebuilt with a dome and a pair of minarets and marble floors were laid. That is when a small room was built for Muzamdar, because the new middle-class faithful objected to his sleeping on their expensive floor. While the population surrounding the mosque has steadily grown, the attendance at prayers has steadily declined. Though few now answer his call to prayer, Muzamdar is now a salaried muezzin receiving 50 rupees (£2.50) a month. Talking to him in 1970 one had the distinct impression that he was happier before the mosque was rebuilt and before the ‘sahib’ class moved in aroung it.
The policemen’s boot that had dug into Muzamdar’s ribs was no abstraction; it was symbolic of a reality that Muzamdar was too simple to perceive. It meant above all that independence would make no
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difference to the nature of authority in Pakistan and that the birth of freedom was not to be mistaken for a turning point in history. The gentlemen’s gentlemen who now became gentlemen in their own right were going to make sure that no misunderstanding arose as to who would be in control of this God-given country. If the people thought they were going to be treated differently or that any of the existing social, economic, or political relationships would change they had another think coming.
Gentlemen in Control
There is ample evidence to support the view that no one in the Muslim League visualised any change in the structure of society as it had taken shape during the raj. The 83 Muslim officers of the Indian Civil Service who were charged with creating the new Government of Pakistan can scarcely be blamed for re-creating as exact an image of the raj as they could. They were not politically motivated men committed to creating a ‘people’s Government’. They were a mercenary class originally hired by a foreign power. But it is not strictly true to say that they had no ‘political’ experience. For long periods all ‘representative’ institutions in British India had had ‘official majorities’ nominated to the ‘councils’ or ‘legislatures’ to override the ‘popular’ view of the politicians. As District Commissioners they were trained to dispense local patronage and to outflank ‘Congress agitators’. The draconic laws of the raj made most politicians appear criminals or near-criminals. A certain repugnance against the politician was part of the officers’ make-up and arrogance. Few politicians on the other hand had the administrative experience of which the officer was the proud repository.
In addition to the I.C.S., the British raj relied on a special cadre called the Indian Political Service. The majority of the ‘political’ officers were drawn from the British Indian Army. They were concentrated in provinces like the Punjab and the North-West Frontier. The army officers were preferred in these areas of headstrong ‘martial’ races like the Pathans and the Punjabis because administration there had to be paternal and authoritarian to a much greater degree than elsewhere in India. The most illustrious ‘political’ officer who joined the Pakistan bureaucracy was Major-General Iskandar Mirza.
Jinnah himself had no blue-print for the new State. When he arrived in Karachi to become the Governor-General he admitted he had not expected to see Pakistan in his lifefime. If Jinnah had a plan at all it was to retain and ‘develop’ the administrative structure of the fallen raj. He envisaged the retention of British officers in senior posts for a period of ten years. One of his first acts as Governor-General was to appoint British governors to three of the four provinces and a British officer commander-in-chief to the Pakistan Army. It was not Jinnah’s fault that independence came wrapped in the Government of India Act 1935. The Act had been drafted and passed by the Westminster Parliament as a halfway house towards independence. It gave ‘self-rule’ to the provinces but kept the powers of the Viceroy and the provincial governors supreme. Those who drafted the Act in 1935 would have been horrified if they had realised that their handiwork was to become the constitution of a sovereign state. The Act, even if it can be claimed that it was designed specifically for India, was designed for a highly centralised bureaucracy run by a Viceroy from Delhi with the Congress providing the Ministers. In 1935 when the Act received the Royal Assent, Jinnah was still a ‘retired English gentlemen’ in London, and the Muslim League moribund in India. Few had then heard of Rahmat Ali’s ‘chimerical’ Pakistan. By no stretch of the imagination could the Act be said to be relevant to any of the constitutional problems facing the new State. It was a secondhand garment that Jinnah acquired in a Delhi shop and the tailor’s agent, Mountbatten, delivered to him personally in Karachi on 14 August 1947.
Whom did the garment fit? It certainly did not fit the new geographically bisected State of Pakistan. It did not fit the Muslim political culture which the mullah had preserved and protected from alien influences. It did not provide the framework within which the political will of the people of Pakistan could find expression. Its lines of communication were designed to carry orders downward from the
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centre, but no comparable channels existed to make the central authority responsive to signals from the base. The policeman’s boot reached the ribs of the people at will, but the boot was insulated against feeling or communicating the pain suffered by its victims. The garment however was a reasonable fit on Jinnah as the new ‘Viceroy’, a closer fit on the feudal landlords of the Muslim League as ‘representatives’ of the people, and a perfect fit on the officers of the Indian Civil and Political Services, for whose benefit it was originally tailored.
Jinnah took his rôle as Governor-General very seriously. As a constitutionalist and a lawyer he knew well the enormous powers conferred on the Governor-General by the Act.1 Jinnah’s decision to become Governor-General rather than Prime Minister of Pakistan, as was widely expected, is one of the most controversial and widely debated episodes. Mountbatten had clearly indicated his preference for remaining as joint Governor-General for both the successor Dominions. For ten years Jinnah had ruled the Muslim League like an absolute dictator. He had to, for it is inconceivable that the League would have functioned at all otherwise. The level of competence of League leaders below the President was so low that Jinnah simply had to act as an unofficial viceroy of Muslim India. But he took care to acquire this position cosntitutionally—the League Working Committee always delegating powers to the President.
He also acquired some of the ‘viceregal’ powers through the skilful manipulation of the colonial system. For instance, in 1941 the Viceroy invited the Muslim Premiers of Punjab, Bengal, and Assam to join his National Defence Council. The three Premiers, Sir Sikander Hyat Khan (Punjab), Sir Saadullah (Assam), and Fazl-ul-Huq (Bengal), accepted the Viceroy’s invitatioin. Jinnah knew of the Viceroy’s move but said nothing. As soon as the appointments had been announced, Jinnah publicly challenged the Viceroy’s right to appoint Muslim Premiers without his prior approval. As President of the All-India Muslim League, Jinnah insisted that he alone could nominate Muslim members of the Viceroy’s National Defence Council. He ordered the three provincial Prime Ministers to resign. They did. Jinnah had defied the Viceroy and he had forced three of the strongest men in India to give up high office.
This was power indeed. No praise can be too high for Jinnah’s tactical skill. He outmanoeuvred them all. He had no direct patronage to offer, but from 1941 not even the Viceroy could offer patronage without Jinnah’s approval. Jinnah had become the unofficial viceroy of Muslim India and that is how he ran the Muslim League. His choice of Governor-Generalship for himself was a mere de jure formalisation of the de facto position he had occupied for many years. By ostentatiously defying the Viceroy, the Hindu Congress and the powerful feudal interests, Jinnah acquired a mesmeric hold over the Muslim masses. Few men in modern history have commanded such total allegiance, even adulation, of the mass of the people. His final authority rested in his hold over the masses. He had given self-respect and confidence to a people who had been the weakest and most downtrodden for nearly two hundred years. To them he was a demigod and his word was law.
But Jinnah was no demagogue; although, in his 11 months of active rule over Pakistan (for the last two months of his life he was mortally ill), he set the example that lesser men have imitated and so become despots. To this day every Pakistani politician or civil or army officer justifies his demagogic behaviour by quoting Jinnah or citing his example. One of the most bizarre episodes occurred during the election campaign of 1970. The Pakistan People’s Party led by Z.A. Bhutto was using the campaign slogan of ‘Islamic Socialism’, and justifying it on the ground that Jinnah had used the phrase. The Right-wing New Times of Rawalpindi conceded that Jinnah had used the phrase, but insisted that Jinnah had used a small and not a capital ‘S’ in ‘socialism’. The leaderwriter went on to say that because Jinnah had also helped many wealthy Muslim families and set up banks and insurance companies the father of the nation could not be accused of socialist leanings.
On two or three occasions when Jinnah addressed the civil servants of Pakistan, he warned them
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against ‘politicians’. By then Jinnah regarded himself ‘above politics’, though he remained President of the Muslim League, Speaker of the Constituent Assembly and the Legislature, and Head of State. He referred to the Government as ‘my Government’ and to Ministers as ‘my Ministers’ and presided over Cabinet meetings. He left no one in any doubt where the final authority lay. He did not regard himself as the ‘constitutional’ Head of State acting on his Ministers’ advice. Jinnah used the full range of powers conferred on the Governor-General by the 1935 Act. He retained the viceregal system and encouraged his provincial governors to do the same. Sir George Cunningham, who had been governor of the North-West Frontier from 1937 to 1945 and had then returned to become Rector of St. Andrews University, was recalled by Jinnah and appointed governor of N.W.F.P. once again. Cunningham, in a report sent to Jinnah on 8 May 1948, wrote :
What I have been striving for, for some years past, is to get the good right-wing members of the old Congress Party to join up with those elements—Khans, professional men, villagers, etc.—who used to oppose Congress and are now united under the Muslim League.
Khalid Bin Sayeed, a sympathetic yet far from ‘court’ historian, writes :
There is no doubt that it was the inspiring leadership of Jinnah and the dedicated efforts of the civil servants which enabled Pakistan to succeed in this struggle for survival [against Indian economic pressures]. It was felt that Pakistan could not overcome these difficulties by relying on the ability and skills of politicians…Jinnah called upon the Governors and civil servants to keep a close watch over the Cabinet meetings and other activities of the politicians.2
Why the politicians were considered less dedicated to Pakistan than civil servants is not clear. Admittedly the politicians came from the feudal aristocratic class who had enormous vested interests to protect. But equally clearly they were men who had given Jinnah unstinted support. The civil servants were obviously more ‘effcient’ and better educated men, but they too came from the same feudal aristocratic class and also had their own vested interests to protect and promote. In addition, the Muslim civil servants were no revolutionaries and had jumped on the Pakistan bandwagon at the eleventh hour. As a class of mercenaries they would have been equally happy serving in a united India or, better sitll, the raj itself if it had continued. By handing over Pakistan to these men Jinnah, perhaps unwittingly, ensured that the raj would continue by proxy.
One result of Jinnah’s clear preference for the supremacy of the bureaucracy was that the civil servants acquired a vested interest in prolonging the constitutional framework of the 1935 Act. The new constitution which the Assembly was drafting was likely to be a politicians’ constitution. To disrupt the constitution-making process and to hang on to the 1935 Act was necessary for the buearucracy to remain supreme. For a short period between Jinnah’s death in September 1948 and before Liaquat Ali Khan, the Prime Minister, was assassinated in 1951, the Governor-General did become a mere constitutional Head of State. Khawaja Nazimuddin, the East Pakistan leader, had succeeded Jinnah as Governor-General, but he was a relatively minor figure compared with Liaquat who had been general secretary of the Muslim League and Jinnah’s right-hand man for ten years before partition. When Liaquat also became President of the Muslim League, the leadership of the ruling party and the office of Prime Minister were, in the true parliamentary tradition, united. When Liaquat fell to an assassin’s bullet, Nazimuddin stepped down to become Prime Minister. But the more significant change that occurred was that Ghulam Mohammad, a former civil servant who had been Finance Minister since 1947, moved up and became Governor-General. With the 1935 Act still in operation and the memory of Jinnah’s use of viceregal powers still fresh, the bureaucracy had virtually taken over the State.
The Unholy Alliance
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During 1947-49 Pakistan’s economy had been quietly taken over by the Muslim trading classes from Bombay, Kathiawar, Burma, and East Africa. Ostensibly the came to ‘save’ the tottering State; in fact they came to make more money. The ‘House of God’ was falling down because its Hindu pillars had suddenly withdrawn. The Muslim immigrant traders quickly moved into position and stopped the rot. But the same facility was denied to the peasants and cultivators who came as destitute refugees from East Punjab, the United Provinces, Bihar and other parts of India. Muslim traders could replace Hindu traders in towns and cities, but Muslim refugee peasants could not immediately settle on land vacated by departing Hindus and Sikhs. There was more land in Pakistan than capital, but whereas the landlords had stayed, the capitalists had gone. When Mian Iftikharuddin, a left-wing Muslim Leaguer who was Minister of Refugees and Rehabilitation in the Punjab Government suggested that refugees should be settled on landlords; estates, he was forced to resign. The significance was clear—there was one law for the rich trader and another for the millions of destitute peasants like Muzamdar.
If the resettlement of the refugees on agricultural land was unacceptable to the landlords, there was only one alternative—they must be forced to become wage-earning urban labourers. This solution of the refugee problem presupposed the existence of industrial employment. In fact there was no industry in areas that became Pakistan; at partition, industry contributed only 1 per cent to the new State’s Gross National Product. If the factories did not exist to provide the refugees with employment, they would have to be built. In the meantime the refugees would have to slum it out. Just as the landlords had a large pool of landless agricultural labours to draw upon to supplement the tenants-at-will, the refugees in towns became factory fodder at below subsistence wage levels.
The abundant supply of cheap labour is a strong incentive to industrialisation. But this on its own did not prove enough to make the traders invest in industry. The landlord politicians and the civil servants exhorted the capitalists to invest in industry without any significant response. The business men must have known the opportunities in industry that undoubtedly existed, but they held out for more incentives and a better deal from the Government. The Finance Minister consulted a committee composed of business men. The committee predictably advised the Government that taxes were too high. The Finance Minister obliged by cutting supertax rate by a third and raising the ceiling at which the tax became payable from 150,000 rupees to 250,000 rupees a year. At the same time swingeing new taxes were imposed on items of consumption by the lowest income groups. The new taxes levied on the poor more than compensated the Exchequer for the concessions made to the wealthy and left a balance to meet increased defence and other State expenditure. It may be noted that the economic policies of the Muslim League Government in Pakistan were the exact opposite of the economic policies made by the League for India when Liaquat Ali Khan was Finance Minister in the interim Government at Delhi.
Industrialisation of the country had also emerged as a supreme ‘national interest’ as a result of a full-scale economic war between Pakistan and India.8 This economic war coincided with the Korean war and the boom it caused in world commodity prices. Pakistan had precipitated the economic war by the decision in September 1949 not to devalue its rupee in line with sterling as India had done. With an overvalued rupee, and cotton and jute in high demand throughout the world, Pakistan’s export earnings reached astonishing peaks in 1950-51. But the landlord-politicians and civil servants combined to prevent these enormous funds from reaching the growers. They imposed high export duties to ensure that the growers’ boom earnings accrued as income to the Government. That would not have been too bad if the Government had then used the funds on nation-building and welfare projects. But instead these funds in foreign exchange were placed at the disposal of the business community so that they could import consumer goods in vast quantities. With only nine rupees to pay for each pound sterling, the importers’ costs were low. But in the home market, starved of consumer goods as a result of the cessation of supplies from India, these goods could be sold at scarcity prices. What should have been the national surplus was thus turned into enormous profits for a handful of Karachi traders.
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The ‘Open General Licence’ for imports was continued for several months after it had become clear that the Korean boom was ending and leaner times lay ahead. The enormous national wealth that agricultural producers had put at the disposal of the Government was squandered. This transfer of the surplus earnings from Government to private hands nevertheless served a useful purpose. Once imports had to be stopped, the demand for comsumer goods in Pakistan became a highly protected market for the enterprising industrialist. In a matter of months the traders who before the Korean war boom counted their fortunes in thousands or in hundreds of thousands found themselves multi-millionaires with large stocks of idle money. So soon after partition had their patriotism been rewarded. Pakistan was paying off. The protected market for industrial investment that emerged after the collapse of the Korean boom stirred their patriotism even further. There then followed a period of large investments in industry and profit margins as big as those that prevailed during the regime of the ‘Open General Licence’.
The buearucrats were delighted that the capitalists had taken up the ‘national interest’ of industrialisation. The trump card was still held by the civil servants—they were to allocate the highly scarce foreign exchange without which few industries could be set up. An important licensing system made the industrialist entirely dependent on the civil servant. A licence to import virtually anything became a licence to print money. Not even the raj had placed such powers of patronage and opportunities for quick riches in their hands. For the new entrepreneur the stakes were high. A cut for the civil servant was better than no joint at all. The civil servants’ pay compared with the riches of the articulate Memon or Khoja was molecular. The conditions were ideal for bribery, corruption, nepotism and favouritism to flourish. For politicians the rewards of office became astronomical. The difference between being in office and in opposition was many hundredfold greater than the difference between the salaries of a British Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. The rewards did not stop there. A senior civil servant or a Minister could set up in business all his children, sons-in-law, and cousins (his and his wife’s—first, second, third, fourth, and so ad infinitum). Or he could get them lucrative jobs in trade or industry, or even in the civil service itself.
An even greater attraction was that he could marry his daughter or son into a rich family. Many did. The ‘Islamic’ system of dowry allowed for huge sums in cash or kind to change hands. A partnership between the landlord-politicians, the civil servants, and the capitalist entrepreneurs deveoped and began to run this God-given State as a private estate. Their unholy alliance was cemented by the occasional links of holy matrimony. Private enterprise was private indeed.
The Mechanism of Exploitation
It is this triumvirate of landlords, civil servants and entrepreneurs which has ruled Pakistan from the early 1950s. The ‘political instability’ of frequently changing governments between 1953 and 1958 was caused by two factors : (a) personal rivalries among the politicians who were all anxious for a lion’s share in the free for all, and (b) the civil servants’ natural desire to keep shuffling the pack of politicians in order to prevent the emergence of a ‘national’ leadership capable of ordering them about.
The mechanism of exploitation in Pakistan was no different from that in other countries at a comparable stage of economic development. Exploitation is an emotive word. But a degree of ‘exploitation’ is an essential prerequisite to economic development under all economic systems, whether of the capitalist West or of the Communist East. It merely means the forcible extraction of ‘surplus value’ or savings or capital from people who can scarcely afford to save. In underdeveloped countries, with the bulk of their populations engaged in agriculture, this implies the exploitation of the agricultural sector of the economy. The existing dominant sector of the economy thus provides the surplus for investment in the direction desired.
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In British India the function of extracting ‘surplus value’ from the country’s vast agricultural sector was performed by the feudal landlords and zamindars who collected between 50 to 90 per cent of the peasants’ output in rent and taxes, leaving the growers with a bare subsistence. From the landlords the surplus found its way to traders who either exported the produce or sold it to the urban population. The money proceeds of these transactions reached the industrial entrepreneurs through the banking system which was Hindus-or British-controlled. This was true of the agricultural ‘surplus’ from all parts of India, whether the peasants and landless laboureres concerned were Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, or untouchables.
The areas that became Pakistan produced no less than 40 per cent of British India’s agricultural produce. The two major cash crops, cotton and jute, were largely grown in Pakistan areas. This means that of the total invested capital in British India, at least 40 per cent had been the ‘surplus’ provided by Pakistani peasants. But the physical assets resulting from this investment were virtually all located in areas that remained in India at the time of partition. These assets were not divided, nor was the Muslim League of the landlords concerned with them. The huge industrial complex that India inherited from the raj represented the ‘savings’ of Muslim peasants over at least 100 years. Had the Muslim League been anything other than a landlords’ party, it would have demanded that Pakistan should receive, as part of the partition agreement, a sum of money as compensation for the loss of industries built with Pakistani capital.
All that the League did was to blame the British for a ‘lopsided’ policy of location of industry. A common view held by most Pakistanis today is that the British and the Hindus deliberately left the Muslim majority areas of India underdeveloped. Be that as it may, if the fault lies anywhere it lies with the Muslim landlords—at least of the Punjab and Sind—who had been willing agents of Hindus and British interests. The only qualification this view requires is that some early capital for India’s industrialisation had come from Britain. But there again much of the ‘British’ capital had been the ‘surplus’ earned by Britain in its trade with India and the tributes extracted from Bengal and other provinces. In any case, in subsequent years, and particularly during the two World Wars, far more ‘British’ capital had been repatriated to Britain than had come to India to build the railways and the ports in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
The peasants of Pakistan had already paid once for the industrialisation of India, but all their past savings had been lost when the industrial areas remained in India. If Pakistan now decided upon rapid industrialisation, the peasants would have to pay the price a second time. This is precisely what happened. The Muslim Leauge was not a peasants’ party, which could be expected to ensure that the burden on growers was at least bearable. One of the saddest aspects of western education and influence in India was that those who acquired it felt they had been ‘emancipated’ from dependence on agriculture. The whole ‘western impact’ on India left Indian agriculture untouched. While thousands of Indians became physicists, doctors, lawyers, or even economists, not one of this crowd of so-called ‘advanced men thought of bringing European techniques of agriculture to India. While the advanced Indians spoke faultless English, mastered the intricacies of English law, literature and philosophy, or flew aircraft, the Indian peasant tilled the soil with a plough that hardly scratched the surface.
Even the earth got tired of throwing up crops year after year for hundreds of years with little or no input. For instance, the yield of rice in India per acre, 1,000 pounds during the First World War, had dropped to 700 pounds per acre in 1939. One of the indicators of industrialisation is that the proportion of population dependent upon agriculture begins to fall and the proportion of those working in industry, services, trade and other urban occupations rises correspondingly. Industrialisation of India however was accompanied by a reverse movement of population. In 1891 only 61.6 per cent of Indians were dependent on agriculture, but after full 40 years of industrialisation this proportion had risen to 67 per cent in 1931. These proportions were 82 per cent in areas that became West Pakistan and no less than 96 per cent in
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what was to become East Pakistan—an average of 90 per cent for Pakistan as a whole. The explanation must be that neither the type of industry nor the level of technology which Britain introduced to India suited to the needs of the people of India as a whole. British entrepreneurs can hardly be blamed for setting up capital intensive industries in a country where labour, though plentiful, was also inefficient. It was the duty of Indian entrepreneurs and political leadership to ensure that this did not happen. But Indian entrepreneurs, mainly Hindus, were more interested in matching European achievements with their own rather than with absorbing surplus labour in India or preparing their countrymen for a future technological society.
The Mulim products of Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s Aligarh Movement had not had the chance to emulate the Hindu entrepreneurs in India before 1947. Finding themselves the proud rulers of a whole new State of Pakistan, they decided to catch up with the example set by the Hindu industrialists. There is no doubt that Pakistan needed industry. The lesson was driven home during the trade deadlock and full-scale economic war with India during 1949-51. In the year before the deadlock Pakistan imported no less than 63 per cent of its requirements of manufactured goods from India. The trade deadlock turned industrialisation of Pakistan into a ‘national interest’. Obviously Pakistani agriculture—that is, 90 per cent of the people—would have to pay for this industrialisation.
The option of picking industrialisation as the leading sector had a number of attractions for the Pakistan rulers. It would save their having to communicate with the peasants or to try to educate them into using such advanced pieces of machinery as tractors. They would not have to endure the hardship of having to travel into the countryside and getting the dust of the sacred soil on their highly polished shoes and carefully pressed English suits. Their landlord allies were in any case extracting the required ‘surplus’ efficiently enough. So long as the landlords were not disturbed they could be relied upon to deliver the goods to Muslim urban entrepreneurs as they had done to Hindu traders. Industrialisation also obviated the need for land reforms. In fact 90 per cent of the people of Pakistan could be left undisturbed as the British had left them. And were not he British the best administrators in the world? The option of industrialisation suited all the three partners in the triumvirate of the ruling élite—the servants, the landlord-politicians, and the entrepreneurs.
In their enthusiasm for industrialisation, the rulers of Pakistan ignored one simple fact—that the country’s agriculture was already reaching a point when it would need both technological and social change to sustain its ouput. About 200 years of relentless squeeze, and the mounting pressure of population, had already in 1947 turned East Bengal into a rural slum. East Pakistan did not produce enough foodgrains, mainly rice, to feed its population. What the alluvial soil of East Pakistan did produce in abundance was jute. This major export cash crop however was just the agricultural wealth that was required to pay for industrialisation. The situation in West Pakistan was only a little better. There, particularly in the Punjab, the land had been comparatively recently colonised and brought under the plough with sturdy and articulate Punjabi peasants as cultivators. But virtually all West Pakistan’s agriculture was dependent for water on canal irrigation, and the new international frontier which the Muslim League accepted for the new State left the canal headworks in India. As the conflicts between the two States escalated, India threatened to stop the flow of water into Pakistani canals. Droughts were common, and agriclutural output fluctuated a great deal from year to year. Moreover in West Pakistan too there was a major cash crop—cotton.
The new Government of Pakistan allowed itself to be deceived by the fact that 40 per cent of the grain resources of British India had fallen to Pakistan for only 20 per cent of the population. In actual fact Pakistan was a net importer of foodgrains, mainly rice and wheat, for almost three years after 1947. This shortage was put down to the disruption of normal economic activity caused by the disturbances that accompanied partition. It was not until 1950 that West Pakistan produced a nominal surplus, after meeting
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the deficit in East Pakistan, of 195,000 tons. The following year the exportable surplus grew to 260,000 tons, only to be turned into a deficit of 300,000 tons in 1952. For almost 20 years since then (with the solitary exception of the bumper crop years of 1954-55) Pakistan has been a food deficit country. Famine conditions have only just been avoided with the help of imports from the United States under Public Law 480.
The obvious need in the years immediately following independence was to develop the agricultural economy of Pakistan. It is widely accepted that, in countries where agricultural methods have not markedly changed for perhaps a thousand years, the return for each unit of additional input in agriculture is several times greater than the investment of an equivalent unit of resources in industry. This certainly was the case in Pakistan. If optimum return per unit of scarce resources had been the only criterion, there is no doubt that agriculture was the most significant sector of the economy. But to have accepted that would have meant that the educated classes would have had to take their boots off and go into the villages and fields to educate the cultivator and to emancipate him socially and politically.
Instead it was decided to squeeze the peasant as he was. There was no need to fatten him up first. No Governement which sets about the task of squeezing 90 per cent of a State’s already emanciated population can achieve its objective if at the same time it has also to rely on the popular support of the very people who have to be squeezed. A dictatorship of the urban interest groups controlling all the coercive organs of the State is an essential prerequisite of exploitation on such a vast scale. The need for such a dictatorship was answered by the alliance between the bureaucrats, the landlord-politicians and the capilatlists which developed in Pakistan in the years immediately following independence. Neither was this an accidental or unforeseen development : the whole history of the Muslim League, from the time the Muslim nobles called on Lord Minto in 1906, to 1947 clearly showed that its leadership represented class interest in its most blatant form.
The extent of the exploitation of the peasants in almost incalculable.4 The salient feature of the process was the price mechanism. The bureaucrats assumed that the peasant in his rags was insensitive to price changes; that his fatalism and superstition would drive him to greater exertions if the rewards were lower than if the rewards were higher. Export duties were used to lower the prices to the producer. The Government further depressed the prices of foodgrains through price controls, rationing, and compulsory procurement. The peasant in wheat surplus areas for instance could sell his surplus to Government agencies only at prices even lower than those prevailing in the open market. Subsequent studies however showed clearly that the peasants in fact responded to price incentives in much the same way as the ‘modern’ man of the industrial-urban sector. This applied as much to the jute and tea growers of East Pakistan5 as to the cotton and wheat growers of West Pakistan.6 Later estimates suggested that changes in cropping patterns alone, when induced by a mere 10 per cent increase in price, would increase output by about 50 per cent with little or no change in input or technique.7 This is one example of the enormous wealth that could have been produced by the mainly agriculture economy of Pakistan had it not been strangled by the urban interests.
The price disincentive in Pakistan led to another leakage of agricultural wealth. This was brought about by the widespread smuggling of wheat from West Punjab and Sind to East Punjab in India, where prices were often twice those prevailing in Pakistan. Similarly, a lucrative trade in the smuggling of jute developed between East Pakistan and West Bengal. The peasant however was too inarticulate to engage in smuggling. The smuggling trade was controlled by the landlords of Sind and the Punjab. The landlords’ supply of wheat was their share of the batai system, i.e. 50 per cent of the produce from tenants-at-will. Police forces in country districts were often manned by sons, brothers or cousins of the peasants who were the landlords’ tenants. Often the landlords regarded the police as their private army. Such forces of ‘law and order’ were quite incapable of defying the landlords and effectively dealing with
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smuggling. Thus, while the peasants sold their surplus to the compulsory procurement centres of the Government, the landlords sold their surplus to ‘the enemy’ across the border. In East Pakistan the jute trade was controlled by Bengali Hindu traders who had interests on both sides of the international border. They procured cheap jute from growers in East Pakistan and supplied it to the jute mills controlled by their associates in West Bengal. In this way the middleman activities of the landlords in West Pakistan and Hindu traders in East Pakistan prevented the price incentive of the smuggling trade from influencing the cropping decisions of the peasants.
Even the crude law of supply and demand was not allowed to operate in favour of the peasants. When production was falling, when large quantities were being smuggled, and when the population was increasing at well over 2 per cent a year, the shortfall in domestic supply might have been expected to push up prices. This happened briefly during 1951-52, and may have given the peasants the incentive which led to the bumper crops of 1954-55. After that even this channel by which higher prices reached the peasants was blocked by the unlimited supply of surplus U.S. wheat which became available to ‘America’s most allied ally;.
The Emergence of the Army
The Commonwealth into which both Pakistan and India were born provided a tangle of umbilical cords connecting the new States with the ‘Mother Country’. The British Crown was the symbol of paternity while Imperial Preferences and the Sterling Area were the mother’s milk nourishing the new Dominions. The strongest of the umbilical cords was in fact the army, though this was not apparent immediately after partition.
The Pakistan Army had of course, in the words of Ayub Khan, ‘inherited a great tradition of loyalty, sense of duty, partriotism, and complete subordination to civil authority’.8 But the tradition was flexible. In October 1947 Jinnah flew to Lahore as the Indian troops began the occupation of Kashmir. Jinnah, the supreme civil authority in Pakistan, ordered the Pakistan Army to enter Kashmir. The order was not obeyed and instead, in the words of Bolitho, ‘Field-Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck flew to Lahore at an hour’s notice and reasoned with the Quaid : he explained that the presence of Indian troops in Kashmir was justified, since the Mararaja had acceded; any action by the Pakistan Army would force him to withdraw all British officers, including the commanders-in-chief of both India and Pakistan. The desperate move was abandoned’.9 What appears to have happened was that Jinnah ordered his acting commander-in-chief, General Sid Douglas Gracey, to send Pakistan troops into Kashmir, Gracey, instead of obeying the civil authority, told Auchinleck10 who flew to Lahore from Delhi and held a gun, in the form of a threat to withdraw British officers, at Jinnah. Jinnah had to yield. Obedience to civil authority, at least in the colonial system, could be ignored.
The British themselves had used distinguished soldiers in political rôles in the colonies. For instance, the last two Viceroys of India, who ordered politicians about and put them in prison if necessary, were soldiers. This aspect of the senior officers’ rôle could hardly escape the notice of ‘Indian’ officers in the British Indian Army. Ayub Khan was general officer commanding in East Pakistan from January 1948 to November 1949. His account of dealings with civil authority there, including the Chief Minister, Khawaja Nazimuddin, and other politicians, reflects the typical British colonial officer mind.11
Ayub Khan, who became commander-in-chief of the Pakistan Army in January 1951, and Major-General Iskandar Mirza, the ‘civil servant’ of the Indian Political Service who was defence secretary, were both Sandhurst graduates. Mirza’s mind was that of a political intriguer. He had had long experience as a British Political Agent on the North-West Frontier. Ayub was a simple soldier who did not expect to reach the rank of Brigadier in the British Indian Army.12 He, like the the good soldier he was, tended to
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see issues in black and white. Soldiers are trained to do so; otherwise they would be haunted by doubts. One such simple fact that he grasped well was that ‘Pakistan’s survival was vitally linked with the establishment of a well-trained, well-equipped, and well-led army…and the army behind the people of Pakistan is still a sure guarantee that our enemies will not be able to weaken us’.13 The army then for Ayub Khan was the repository of the life and honour of the nation.
Ayub Khan’s mind was that of a mercenary commander of a mercenary army. Soldiers have played crucial rôles throughout Islamic and Muslim history. On the face of it Ayub’s approach would seem in the best traditions of the great and glorious Muslim record as conquerors, civilisers, administrators, and rulers. Indeed, much of the folklore of the Punjab and North-West Frontier reflects the people’s long tradition as fighters. The Punjabis and the Pathans have been eulogised by the British for their quality as soldiers. This image of the people of the area is not quite accurate. The British discovered their martial qualities only because these areas first put up a stiff resistance to the invading Europeans and later fought equally bravely as soldiers in the British Indian Army. In fact the Punjabis and the Pathans are, besides being brave soldiers, extremely versatile people. They are good at almost anything they care to turn their minds to. The Pathans for instance make rifles as a cottage industry. British officers who have been shot at by these weapons and others who have captured and examined them have been unable to distinguish between the home-made product of the Frontier and the real thing from Europe. Throughout their 100-year rule the British never quite subdued the Frontier. They would not have ruled the area at all had men like Ayub Khan and his father not betrayed their own people. While most Pathans shot at the British, some Pathans joined the British army and shot at their own people. Ayub Khan records with some pride that he came from a tribe which was ‘involved in a long and bitter struggle against the Sikhs and the British’.14 That may be so, but Ayub’s family had an equally long record of loyal service to the British.
The Muslim officers of the British Army were mostly the sons of the feudal lords who had been pillars of the raj. In its early days the colonial system provided outdoor relief for the poor relations among the English aristocracy. In its later stages the system extended this facility to the sons of the loyal natives. In social and political terms there was no difference between the ‘pukka sahib’ of the Indian Civil Service and the (Hindu, Muslim or Sikh) army officer. But there was a fundamental difference between the Muslim armies that conquered India and the army Ayub Khan commanded in Pakistan. The former Muslim armies that came to India aspired to achieve the supremacy of Islam, though the emperors who led them were probably more interested in their own supremacy. Moreover the former Muslim armies were ad hoc armies in the sense that the warriors were not professional soldiers. They fought for the ‘glory of Islam’ as they understood it and then returned to civilian life. Just as Islam had discouraged, indeed prohibited, the emergence of a paid professional ‘clergy’, it had also enjoined participation in jihad on all able-bodied men who would fight for a ‘cause’ and not for reward. In the Islamic teachings mercenaries made bad soldiers and could not be relied upon. This led to another characteristic of Muslim armies—the officers were superior to others only on the battlefield. Once the battle was over officers and men lived, ate, and slept together. There was no officers’ mess of the kind that bred men like Ayub Khan.
The whole of the army, like the civil administration, which Pakistan inherited was a band of mercenary men. But some were more mercenary than others. The main dividing line was between officers and other ranks. The ordinary soldier joined the army to escape from the alternative of becoming tenant-at-will of the landlord. The life of a sepoy was relatively secure in an otherwise insecure environment. The pay was bad, but labourers’ wages were even lower. For a bit of discipline and drill the peasant escaped the rapacity of the landlord. In the Punjab and the Frontier the British built no industry. Could it be that this was a deliberate policy to confront the Punjabis (including the Sikhs) and the Pathans with Hobson’s choice of either accepting subjection by the British-appointed landlords or joining the army? Whatever the reasons, at the outbreak of the Second World War the Punjab’s share of the Indian army’s manpower was no less than 48 per cent. This proportion shrank during the war as recruitment spread to
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include ‘unmartial’ races of the southern provinces, but the absolute strength of the Punjabis and Pathans increased.15 The Muslims formed a good half of the combined Punjab and Frontier men in the British Indian Army. But the British had taken good care to keep the Muslim fighting men well dispersed throughout the great war machine. There were no Muslim units as there were Hindu ‘caste’ units entirely manned by Marathas and Dogras. Muslim soldiers who were to form the Pakistan Army arrived in Pakistan in fragments. But the raw material was of high fighting quality. Muslims however were better endowed with army officers. Muslim officers made up nearly a third of the total number of ‘Indian’ officers in the British Indian Army of 1946-47. Out of a total of 310 ‘Indian’ officers of the rank of Captain and above, 100 were Muslims—1 Acting Colonel, 3 Lieutenant-Colonels, 16 Majors, and 80 Captains.16 Of the remaining 210, most were Hindus. But the total number of officers in the British Indian Army was 2,656 of which no less than 2,346 were still British. Neither the Muslims nor the Hindus had any Field-Marshals, Generals, Lieutenant-Generals, or Major-Generals.17
The big difference between the Muslim and Hindu officers of the British Indian Army was that the Hindu officers had kept in touch with their ‘national’ struggle led by the Congress while the Muslim officers had simply watched Jinnah’s struggle. Abul Kalam Azad reveals how the Congress leaders were greeted everywhere they went by members of the armed forces, including the officers.18 Not so the Muslim League leaders. Muslim officers of the armed forces, like their civilian counterparts, were not sure of the outcome of the political struggle and were not going to chance their arm in case Jinnah lost. The Muslim civilian officers made amends by jumping on the Pakistan bandwagon at the eleventh hour; not so the Muslim army officers, who preferred to leave it until the thirteenth hour. Ayub Khan explains this by saying that Muslim officers ‘had no real knowledge of the personalities involved in this political struggle; and by training we had been taught that as army officers we should stay out of the political arena. So the politicians were largely an unknown quantity to us, as we were to them’.19 But their British mentors must have taught the same lesson of political neutrality to the Hindu officers who openly sided with the Congress. The more likely explanation is that the Hindu officers knew that the Congress would have a State, while Muslim officers were uncertain whether Jinnah would succeed in dividing India. Ayub Khan at any rate was taking no chances with his personal future.
All this is perhaps unfair to men who were trained to play safe, especially if the ultimate outcome of a battle was in doubt. They were mercenaries and behaved as good hired servants should. But once the political struggle had been won and Pakistan had been created, their conduct should have been transformed. Ayub Khan claims that it was. He writes :
And for me…everything changed when our country gained freedom on 14 August 1947. We had a new reason for living and working, a compelling urge to work to the very limit of our capacity. Because I was striving for my own free country, no difficulty seemed insurmountable and no challenge or sacrifice seemed too great. It would be impossible to exaggerate the way my life and my whole outlook changed after the State of Pakistan came into existence.20
This is of course how it should have been. But was it? Unfortunately the evidence is overwhelmingly against Ayub Khan’s claim. The situation in Pakistan for some years after partition required enormous sacrifices by all sections of the population. There were those, like the refugees, who had involuntarily lost all they had. Many hundreds of thousands had lost their lives so that others might live in freedom. The Pakistan Government, as part of an economy drive, abolished some of the extra payments that were available to members of the armed forces. If to Ayub Khan and his fellow officers ‘no challenge or sacrifice seemed too great’ then they should have accepted the economy measures with good grace. Instead Ayub Khan complained that ‘all the perquisites available in the army for long and meritorious service had been taken away by the Government. No honorary commissions could be given nor any monetary awards made to men in the ranks’.21 Ayub Khan, contrary to his claim, in fact found the
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sacrifice of ‘perquisites’ too great. To restore these perquisites to his officers and men, Ayub started an ‘arduous battle’ with the Ministry of Finance.22 The ‘new reason for living and…a compelling urge to work’ that independence gave Ayub was evidently not enough. In addition he and his men required ‘adequate incentive to work’ in the form of monetary rewards and personal ‘security’.23 Demanding resources for the provision of modern weapons is one thing, but to insist that ‘perquisites’ were essential to make men fight to defend their freedom is another. But perhaps this was to be expected from men who had kept themselves aloof from the national struggle for freedom. In the years between 1940-47 when the ordinary Muslims of India were defying the Hindu majority and the British, these men of the future army of Pakistan had been busy defending the alien raj. After independence had been won without their assistance, these mercenary men found themselves the supreme defenders of that freedom. They insisted that the people of Pakistan should now pay them not only the rate for the job they got from the British, but a great deal more.
Expenditure on defence has claimed an exceptionally large share of the resources of Pakistan. The following table shows the total revenues of the Central Government of Pakistan and the share claimed by the armed forces during the years 1947 to 1961.
The author accepts that the threat to the security of Pakistan from India was every bit as serious as the Government of Pakistan has always said it was. That the defence of Pakistan has always been a supreme national interest cannot be denied. Nor was the Government of Pakistan wrong in committing all necessary resources to ensure that the country was adequately defended. The question which must be asked however is whether all that went under ‘defence expenditure’ was in fact necessary for the defence of Pakistan?
Total Revenue and Defence Expenditure of the Government of Pakistan
Year Revenue (millions of rupees) Defence Expenditure (millions of rupees)
1947-48 198.9 154.1
1948-49 667.6 577.6
1949-50 885.4 752.2
1950-51 1,273.2 703.0
1951-52 1,448.4 907.9
1952-53 1,334.3 994.6
1953-54 1,110.5 802.3
1954-55 1,172.7 713.4
1955-56 1,435.8 814.3
1956-57 1,298.3 820.0
1957-58 1,495.8 742.9
1958-59 2,070.2 1,044.2
1959-60 1,758.4 1,005.4
1960-61 1,713.7 1,012.2
Source : Budgets of the Government of Pakistan.
This question was first raised as early as 1952 by none other than the high-powered Economic Appraisal Committee appointed by the Government of Pakistan under the chairmanship of the Minister for Economic Affairs, Mr. Fazlur Rahman.24 After reviewing defence expenditure and finding that it had constituted between 54 and 86 per cent of the total revenues of the relevant years, the committee commented :
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All these figures are very high. Effort must therefore be made to economise in defence expenditure, both on revenue and capital accounts. We recognise the paramount importance of maintaining our freedom, but excessive expenditure in this field may affect outlay on development and development alone can sustain the expenditure on defence. Expenditure on defence must therefore bear a definite relationship to the total resoures available and a balance should be maintained between the allocations made for defence and development. The correct balance will be the minimum expenditure on defence consistent with security, and the maximum expenditure on development consistent with resources. The Government must take the people into confidence in order to secure their intelligent co-operation in the programmes of defence and development.25
This shows that as early as 1952-53 influentcial opinion within the Government regarded the defence expenditure as extravagant. The Economic Appraisal Committee must have had access to a breakdown of what passed for ‘defence expenditure’. These details are of course State secrets and not available to the author. Nevertheless, the average Pakistani is not without all knowledge. For instance, it is known that from 1954-55 when Pakistan joined the western-sponsored Bagdad Pact (now CENTO) and the South-East Asia Treaty Organisation, almost all the hardware for the armed forces was provided free by the United States. The New York Times estimated that from 1954 to 1965 U.S. military assistance to Pakistan amounted to 1.5 billion dollars.26 It can be safely assumed that military aid from the U.S. during this period met all, or nearly all, the import requirements of the Pakistan armed forces. This expenditure had claimed a large proportion of Pakistan’s foreign exchange resources before 1954. Thus the availability of American military aid after 1954 should have reduced the volume and share of ‘defence expenditure’ met from Pakistan’s own resources. This did not happen. The enormous savings made through American military assistance were merely transferred to internal ‘defence expenditure’. This expenditure in the main amounted to the provision of more and more comfort and luxury for the officers of the armed forces and their families. The ostentations living to which military officers have become accustomed is all too evident in Pakistani society today. The defence of a European middle-class standard of living for a handful of people is now the supreme ‘national interest’ of a very poor country.
During the decade of the 1950s the officer corps of the armed forces of Pakistan—not the ranks—emerged as the largest single interest group in the country. These men exploited the tendency of a largely traditional Muslim society to equate armed strength with national prestige, power and ‘progress’. Just ast the Muslim masses had seen a glimpse of the Caliph in Jinnah, they now saw a lurking shadow of a Saladin in every officer in uniform. The tall, upright, almost handsome figure of Ayub Khan inspired confidence among an otherwise disillusioned people.
While Ayub Khan perfected the ultimate weapon of internal suppression, his friend Iskandar Mirza had got himself appointed Governor-General in October 1955. Mirza brought to the job the full bag of tricks he had learned as a British Political Agent on the North-West Frontier. Until he ascended the Viceregal throne with the 1935 Act still the ‘constitution’ of Pakistan, Mirza had masterminded the political coalitions which appeared to rule the country. Once in the driving seat, ‘the Governor-General proved expert at dividing his opponents, and thus obtaining a free hand to deal with administrative problems’.27
In March 1956 the 1935 Act was at last replaced by a Constitution passed by the Assembly. Mirza now became President of the ‘Islamic Republic of Pakistan’ which the new Constitution proclaimed on 23 March—the day on which the Pakistan Resolution of the Muslim League had been passed in 1940. The text and provisions of the new Constitution made no difference to Mirza’s style of political agentry and viceroyalty. Even as President of the Republic ‘General Iskandar Mirza insisted upon exercising his powers to dismiss and create Ministries.28
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Mirza the arch-bureaucrat was chairman of the triumvirate and effective power was exercised by civil servants who were controlled by the capitalists of Karachi. Ayub Khan himself has said that the capitalists’control of the Government in Karachi made it necessary for him to move the capital to Rawalpindi.29 The landlord-politicians were happy that their estates had not been threatened. Part of the purpose of Mirza’s fast changing coalitions was to give all the landlords a turn in political office. Another purpose was to discredit the politicians as a whole. This was necessary because some of the politicians such as Suhrawardy, Firoz Khan Noon, and Dr. Khan Sahib had considerable popular following. Each had a spell in office, with the civil service making sure that none succeeded or enhanced his reputation.
By 1958 Mirza had tried out all politicians and each stood condemned for failing to deliver the goods that Mirza and his mandarin class controlled. Mirza tried to make the people believe that he was a ‘good guy’ and that the politicians were incorrigible rogues. In the meantime Ayub Khan and his fellow officers in the army, having consumed the bulk of the country’s resources for over a decade, were getting restless. They were men of action and there had been precious little action of their liking, except the boredom of peacetime drill and routine. They had trained themselves to defend the country from external aggression which was expected from India or Russia. As time passed neither India nor Russia seemed anxious to invade Pakistan though each made threatening noises. If the external enemy would not oblige, an internal enemy would have to be invented and the country ‘saved’ from within. A crown of success was desperately needed by a group of men who had drained their own people and the country’s resources.
Further inaction had the added disadvantage that the officers risked losing the chance for ever. The country’s first general election was due early in 1959. If the politicians were allowed a popular mandate under the new Constitution, both the politicians and the Constitution would become rather more difficult to dispense with. The time to strike had arrived. Mirza had prepared the ground extremely well. Ayub Khan simply took a train to Karachi where Mirza had been waiting. Ayub was certain that Martial Law would not be resisted because ‘the people were completely fed up with the state of affairs and desperately wanted a change. And they had great respect for the army.30 On the evening of 7 October 1958 Mirza dismissed the Central and all the Provincial Governments, dissolved all the Assemblies, abrogated the Constitution, abolished all political parties (many of whom were Mirza’s own creation), declared Martial Law and appointed Ayub Khan Chief Martial Law Administrator and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces. Mirza himself remained President only to be removed and exiled by his protégé three weeks later.
There is no doubt that the change was popular with the masses who believed that the dictatorship of the triumvirate had been ended. The new order was also a dictatorship, but the masses believed that their armed forces would be honest dictators, Above all, the peasants and the workers believed that the hold of the capitalists, the feudal landlords and a corrupt bureaucracy would be broken. The new regime promised to carry out land reforms and other changes which had been blocked by the politicians for over a decade. Ayub Khan promised them all these things and more—a new Constitution and elections as soon as ‘the mess’ had been cleared up. The people were prepared to wait.
০০০
5. Despotism to Civil War
The ‘Islamic Republic of Pakistan’ had long been little more than what Marx had contemptuously called the ‘executive committee of the bourgeoisie’. In October 1958 Ayub Khan became chairman of the Committee. The officer who did not expect to reach the rank of Brigadier in the British Army now promoted himself Field-Marshal. Neither was Ayub Khan’s self-propelled meteoric career the exceptional case of an ambitious individual making good through hard work. His rise typified the rise of the whole of his class in Pakistan since independence. He did not accept Iskandar Mirza’s invitation to become
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chairman in order to dismiss the executive committee. His coup was meant only to eliminate personal rivalries that gave the bougeoisie a bad name. Some leading politicians—the ‘bad men’ of democracy—were put into cold storage for a number of years through being ‘disqualified’ from ‘public life’. That was no hardship to the individuals involved because in fact Ayub Khan had effectively disqualified the whole nation from politics. His American friends were so delighted at having an undisputed baron to deal with, that U.S. economic aid to Pakistan trebled in one year—going up from 61 million dollars in 1958 to 184 million dollars in 1959.
An Honest Misunderstanding
The news of Ayub Khan’s coup on the night of 7 October 1958 spread like wildfire the following day. The press and the radio announced the Martial Law regulations prescribing death for smugglers and blackmarketeers. As night fell again the sky was illuminated by thousands of bonfires in all urban centres. The unsuspecting observer could be excused for thinking that the nation was celebrating the advent of a new era. In fact what was being burnt were hoarded and smuggled goods, business papers and private accounts, and even hoarded wealth in banknotes. Everyone destroyed all he could before the honest brigade of Ayub Khan caught up with him. But not everyone had shared in the ‘free for all’. Those who had no actual incriminating evidence to burn felt obliged to burn something. Having had a bonfire became a symbol of having made a clean break with the corrupt past and having made the new era’s resolution of honesty. The author’s father in a refugee suburb of Karachi was among those who had nothing genuine to burn. A neighbour pointed out to him that his son had been ‘involved in student politics’ and if there were any of his son’s papers still in the house it would be worth having a bonfire. That night a valuable collection of the author’s old diaries, letters, papers, newspaper clippings, and even some books went up in smoke.
Simple folk were not the only ones to be deceived, though they suffered most. Even hardened smugglers, blackmarketeers, tax dodgers, and foreign currency holders were forced into taking cover as Ayub’s image of ‘a colossus of justice bestriding the corrupt world of Pakistan’1 was conjured up for popular consumption. The Karachi Customs and Anti-Smuggling Police managed to seize goods and gold bullion worth 20 million rupees in a month. Their combined haul over the previous 11 years had been worth only 30 million rupees. Smugglers stopped the moonshine trade and the price of wheat rose sharply in the areas of India closest to West Pakistan. Tax dodgers declared 1,340 million rupees worth of concealed income. Illegal foreign exchange held in Pakistan and abroad was surrendered to the tune of 82.6 million rupees. M.A. Khuro, a former Chief Minister of Sind and a powerful landlord, was arrested for having sold a car on the black market. A large number of former Ministers, members of the Assemblies and others were proceeded against for corruption. More than 1,500 civil servants—but only 13 of them from the top cadre—were dismissed or compulsorily retired.2 The nation was told that throughout history its saviour had risen from the ranks of the army.3
This was a well conceived and superbly executed public relations exercise which also had other merits. For example, it gave the country a handful of easily identifiable individuals as scapegoats which left the élitist system as a whole free from blame; it also put enormous resources at the disposal of the new regime with which to reward loyalty. The revenues of the Central Government jumped from 1,495 million rupees in 1957-58 to 2,070 million rupees in 1958-59. Predictably enough, the bulk of the additional resources went to boost the ‘defence expenditure’ which rose from 742 million rupees in the year before the coup to 1,044 million rupees in the first year of the Ayub raj.
This rise in ‘defence expenditure’ was only the visible immediate reward offered to the armed forces for loyalty to the country’s ‘saviour’. The invisible rewards were perhaps even greater. A
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Lieutenant-Colonel who became Martial Law Administrator of a sector in Sind had for months before the coup been trying to persuade a bank to lend him 100,000 rupees to build a bungalow. The bank had been reluctant. The Colonel now wrote again and signed ‘Martial Law Administrator’. The loan was granted. The author met the Colonel in Islamabad in November 1969. He was supervising the construction of his fourth bungalow in 10 years. This one, the good Colonel boasted, was costing 200,000 rupees, and the bathroom tiles, sanitary and electrical fittings, and even the door handles, had been ‘imported specially from England’. The Colonel was driving a Japanese Toyota and his wife an Italian Fiat. His son was at an engineering college in Lahore on a scholarship from the army. All part of the ‘defence expenditure’? Who knows? How did the good Colonel raise the money for the fourth bungalow? ‘A loan from the Government.’ How does the good Colonel propose to pay it back? ‘I shall try to get a foreign embassy to rent it from me. They pay at least twice the going rate. Failing that, I shall let it to an officer friend’. And how will the officer friend afford the rent? ‘The Government pays his rent’. How much it that? ‘Two thousand rupees a month.’ And you will pay it back to the Government? ‘Yes.’ A neat arrangement; an ingenious application of the theory of circular flow of money.
But army officers were and are not the only ones on this merry-go-round. Mr. A is secretary of a Government department and Mr. B is secretary of another department. Each has a bungalow built in Islamabad with loans form the Government. A lives in B’s bungalow and B lives in A’s. The Government then pays A rent for B’s entitlement of accommodation, and also pays B rent for A’s similar entitlement. The amount of rent is not related to the officer’s salary. Often the rent paid for an officer’s accommodation is equal to his salary, in a few cases it is more. The most senior officers and Ministers are also entitled to up to six air-conditioners in their bungalows. These air-conditioners, needless to say, have to be imported and paid for in scarec foreign exchange often earned through the export of primary commodities produced by the ill-fed, ill-clad, emaciated peasants of East and West Pakistan who adorn the OXFAM advertisements in British newspapers.
In 1958 Ayub Khan had flashed his indicator to the Left and turned sharply to the Right. He made the civil servants and the army officers the unchallenged rulers of Pakistan and the largest single vested interest in the country. Their power and riches however had to be secured from the greed of the other members of the unholy alliance—the landlords and the capitalists.
Land Reform for Landlords
To be fair to Ayub Khan, there was an element of ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ in his reforms within the limit imposed by the size of each partner in the alliance. Some land reforms had to be carried out and the regime seen to be acting against feudalism. Equally, such reforms were not to hurt too many landlords; at least the greatest number of them should have cause to feel reasonably well treated. In any case, the landlord performed the essential social and economic function of squeezing the peasant on behalf of the dominant urban interest. The landlord was indispensable in the process of exploitation and had to be retained. Like the Muslim League in the 1940s, the Ayub regime had to take up an anti-feudalist posture without actually hurting the landlords. ‘I was not thinking [writes Ayub Khan] of land reforms as a punitive measure…I wanted to fix the maximum land-holding at a level which would provide adequate income to a [landlord’s] family to work whole-time on land and to invest in its modernisation and development….The requirements of social justice and the interests of economic development are not always indentical.4 Another requirement which Ayub Khan does not mention was that the bulk of the army’s oifficers came from middle-sized landlord families and radical land reforms were likely to lose the President their suport.
The much publicised ‘Land Reforms Commission’, under the chairmanship of a civil servant, was appointed on 31 October 1958—only three weeks after the coup that Ayub Khan called a ‘revolution’. Of
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the commission’s seven members, two represented large landed interests. One was considered ‘progressive’, but none could speak for the peasants, the tenants-at-will, or the landless agricultural labourers. There was not a great deal of work to be done because the ground had been gone over many times by a number of committees and commissions. The commission reported on 21 January 1959 and the regime immediately accepted its recommendations. Of the 8.6 million acres affected, the landlords retained 6.4 million acres. The 2.2 million acres resumed by the State were to be distributed among 150.000 tenants. About 6,000 landlords were to keep three times the land made available to 150,000 tillers. The ceiling on land holding recommended by the commission was 500 acres to irrigated land and 1,000 acres of unirrigated land. The Muslim League committee ten years before had recommended a ceiling of 150 acres of irrigated land.5 The lands ‘lost’ by the landlords also brought them handsome compensation in the form of 4 per cent bonds. The tenants were offered resumed land for purchase. Few could pay for land from their current surpluses or savings. Credit was controlled by the landlords who also charged exorbitant rates of interest. Either way the handful of tenants who could secure proprietorship were back in the landlords’ control. Papanek’s verdict on Ayub Khan’s ‘land reforms’ is apt.
The programme [he writes] was not conceived as a radical reform. In execution it was further affected by exceptions. Only a small fraction of the land in West Pakistan was redistributed under land reform. The programme did provide increased security of tenure in some areas and my thereby have made a contribution—though neither measurable nor documentable—to increased output.6
So much for Ayub’s concern for ‘economic development’. Neither was Ayub Khan putting the landlords out to pasture out of politics. When in October 1959 Ayub produced his constitution, now famous for its ‘Basic Democracy’, it became apparent that the landlords were back in business. Having had their estates ‘legitimised’ through the window dressing of ‘land reforms’, the landlords were prepared to repay the regime by mobilising political support in the countryside for the pukka sahibs in their air-conditioned offices. When the new National Assembly was ‘elected’ by the 80,000 ‘Basic Democrats’ it was found that no fewer than 70 of its 156 members were landlord.7 Their strength was even greater in the West Pakistan Provincial Assembly—76 landlords out of 155 members.
Rewards for Robber Barons
Having thus rewarded the landlords with ‘land reforms’ and having made the civil-military bureaucracy supreme, Ayub turned his attention to the third group in the ruling triumvirate—the capitalists. This last group had suffered most through honest misunderstanding about the true nature of the regime. Hidden wealth accumulated over a decade had been surrendered in a panic. Ayub himself was surprised. ‘Why did you do it?’ he asked a business man, who relied :
In one of your photographs, I saw you with your finger pointed like this, and your mouth screwed up like this. I said to myself : ‘This man will not leave us alone. He will go for us if we don’t respond’. So we all sat together and decided to play the game. In any case we were paying 33 per cent income tax as against 75 per cent, so we thought we were getting away rather lightly.8
Like the landlords, the tax dodgers, smugglers and blackmarketeers were also getting off lightly. Indeed for tax evaders the normal rate of tax was cut by more than half—a reward for past dishonesty. There were those who had surrendered smuggled goods. The big-hearted Ayub Khan ordered that these goods should be returned after charging customs duty. To his Cabinet, Ayub Khan explained that Martial Law ‘was not an instrument of tyranny or punishment…Normal trade and business must be re-established.
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There was a sense of fear in business circles and it was important to restore business confidence’.9 The smugglers who had their wares returned to them and businessmen who had to pay less than half the tax they had evaded could hardly fail to regain confidence. The greatest number of all these categories were made happy and loyal to the regime.
In the next ten years the three partners in the triumvirate—the civil and military bureaucracy, the landlords, and business and industrial entrepreneurs—were merged into a single powerful group of the ruling bourgeoisie. There was cross fertilisation of their talents and interests. A number of army officers transferred to the C.S.P. (Civil Service of Pakistan)—successor to the I.C.S.). Many civil and millitary officers retired early of left the service of the State to take up directorships of companies controlled by the twenty largest capitalist families. These families controlled 66 per cent of the country’s industrial investment, 80 per cent of banking, and 97 per cent of insurance. Ayub’s eldest son, Captain Gohar Ayub, left the army and entered the world of private enterprise to such good effect that the President’s family became among the richest in the country. Cabinet members and their families acquired large shareholdings in some of the largest companies. Huge industrial combines set up with public funds were handed over to private enterprise at give-away prices. One of these, the Karnaphuli Papar Mill—the largest papar mill in Asia—was handed over to the Dawood family. The investment was worth about 80 million rupees; Dawood paid only about 20 million rupees.10 Examples could be multiplied hundreds of times over.
A new capital city, Islamabad, was built in the Potwar Plateau near Rawalpindi because, as Ayub Khan put it, ‘constant contact with business men had a corrupting influence on Government servants and many of them succumbed to temptation’.11 The chairman of the commission which recommended the transfer of the capital from Karachi to Islamabad was General Yahya Khan, later commander-in-chief and President. The author visited Islamabad in the winter of 1969-70. There he met the Colonel who was having his fourth bungalow built, the officers who were living in each other’s bungalows, and a great many other people engaged in legalised peculation. There the author also discovered a new kind of ‘embassy’. These belonged to Karachi business houses. In them live ‘ambassadors’ and other ‘executives’ of the rich families. One such ‘ambassador’ explained to the author that his job in Islamabad was to ‘dole out bribe’. He personally dealt with the ‘highest in the land’. What is the size of your excellency’s budget? ‘Sufficient,’ said the ‘ambassador’ in the style of the Rolls-Royce salesman who told an inquisitive American customer that the car had ‘enough’ horse power.
The Outsiders
Ayub’s system however had one great weakness—it left a large part of even the western educated élite dissatisfied. Those who were not in civil or military service, in big business, or connected with feudal families and little to look forward to and no immediate rewards. Two of the largest groups among the outsiders were (a) journalists and unemployed intellectuals, and (b) university teachers and students. A third group which had little or no western education but enjoyed enormous influence in the country was that of the mullah. The mullahs controlled 40,000 mosques in West Pakistan alone and a similar number in East Pakistan. The mullahs had kept up a din of protest ever since 1947 by calling for an ‘Islamic State’. A fourth group, still unorganised but potentially powerful, was that of urban industrial workers. Their largest single concentration was at Karachi where most were refugess from India. Other important concentrations of industrial labour were at Lahore, Hyderabad, and Lyallpur in West Pakistan and at Dacca, Chittagong, and Mymensingh in East Pakistan. In addition to these four groups, there were the peasants—the tenants-at-will, the smallholders, and the landless agricultural labourers—comprising 90 per cent of the country’s population. The peasants were still to be squeezed to pay for the ‘defence expenditure’ and for the ‘national interest’ of wasteful industrialisation. Ayub Khan’s bureaucracy
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proceeded to deal with each of these groups.
The Rape of the Press
The press is anathema to bureaucracies. If there is one universal social ‘law’ it is the greater the power of bureaucratic control over a country the more controlled is the press. This is best demonstrated by the fate of the press in Communist and other one-party States. A subsidiary ‘law’ of equal validity is that no group is more active in defence of the freedom of the press in non-Communist countries than the Communists. It was therefore to be expected that the consolidation of the bureaucratic raj in Pakistan would lead to reduced freedom of the press.
Dictatorships feed on ignorance. Knowledge in any shape or form is a threat to their existence. Information that is not converted into prescribed forms is deadly poison. A dictator and his mercenary servants cannot tolerate a social conscience of any kind, except their own. The largest single thorn in the side of the reactionary rulers of Pakistan since independence had been Provressive Papers Limited of Lahore. The company had been founded in pre-partition days by Mian Iftikharuddin, a left-wing Muslim Leaguer and a Punjabi landlord. It published two dailies, the Pakistan Times in English and Imroze in Urdu, and an Urdu weekly, Lail-o-Nahar.
The Communist Party had long been banned in Pakistan and Pakistani Communists were too bourgeois to attempt anything as dangerous as an underground organisation. The handful of Pakistani ‘Marxists’ who existed would probably qualify as liberals in Italy or France. It was this harmless group that dominated the Progressive Papers. But these liberals nevertheless had a mild social conscinece which found expression in the three publications. The story of the night of the long knives when Ayub’s bureaucracy took over physical control of Prograssive Papers has now been told by Mazhar Ali Khan who was at the time editor of Pakistan Times.12
In 1960 the regime promulgated the Press and Publications Ordinance. The pukka sahibs were so short of original ideas that the Ordinance to stifle the press had to be modelled on the instrument the British used to stifle the press in India—the Press (Emergency Powers) Act 1931. No newspaper or periodical could be published without a licence known as ‘declaration’ from the Government. Among the 15 categories of ‘offensive’ writing for which various penalties were prescribed included ‘bringing directly or indirectly into hatred or contempt the Government established by law’. Books causing offence to the Government could also be impounded and banned. Even this draconic law was found insufficient to deal with the daily Ittefaq of Dacca in 1966 when its editor was put in preventive detention under the Defence of Pakistan Rules.
The Press and Publications Ordinance of 1960 was followed up in 1964 by the creation of the National Press Trust. The Trust was conceived as a device for placing a battery of newspapers and periodeicals at the disposal of the regime. The ‘Government gave support to the idea because it promised, more than individual ownerships, to raise the standard of journalism and editional policy.13 In fact Trust was the brainchild of Altaf Gauhar, Secretary, Ministry of Information an Broadcasting. The ‘founders’ were 39 in name, but far fewer in fact. The house of Dawood, the richest of the top twenty families, provided five distinct founders as did some others. The trustees in effect donated a vast sum of money to enable the Government to take over some of the leading newspapers in the country. The Trust now has twelve newspapers. These are : the Morning News, Karachi and Dacca; the Pakistan Times, Lahore and Rawalpindi; the Imroze, Lahore and Multan; the Mushriq, Lahore, Peshawar, and Rawalpindi; the Dainik Pakistan, Dacca; The Akhbare Khawateen, Karachi; and the Sports Times, Lahore. It is perhaps the largest newspaper combine anywhere in Asia or Africa. The newspapers and periodicals that were left alone were those which needed no prompting to do their duty to the country, i.e., the regime. Any newspaper proprietor or editor who may at any time get any bright ideas had to remember the fate of
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those who had bright ideas or a twinge of social conscinece before him.
University teachers and students who have traditionally formed the most vocal and defiant group in the Asian setting were dealt with by equally draconic University Ordinances. Teachers, classed as ‘government servants’, were automatically disqualified from politics. Vice-chancellors became more concerned with police functions than with maintaning academic standards. Students could be expelled and have their degrees withheld or even withtrawn. University teachers could not send research papers for publication without the approval of the vice-chancellors and their heads of department. Departments of political science, economics, international relations, and other ‘sensitive’ disciplines were carefully watched as were their research projects. Members of Ayub’s Central Intelligence Department (C.I.D) were known to have registered as students in order to keep a watch on lecturers and students. Seminar discussions were spied upon. After the author had delivered a lecture on the foreign policy of Pakistan at Dacca University in February 1970, a student came up and said, ‘Sir, you were really brave; there was a C.I.D. man present!’
The Mullahs in Revolt
The mullahs and their mosques have traditionally been islands of freedom throughout Muslim history. Muslim monarchs and alien powers alike have found it expendient to keep clear of this whirlpool of ‘Islamic’ tradition. But of course fools rush in where angels fear to treat. The mullah’s logic and his free-thinking and outspoken Friday sermons were an embarrasment to modern Government in Pakistan. That part of the Friday sermon which recalls the glory of the Prophet’s dominion and of the first four Caliphs of Islam is an obligatory part of the ritual and could not be eliminated. So long as this was done in Arabic which nobody understood it mattered little. The Pakistani mullah, however, started translating it into Urdu or Bengali or even Punjabi and Pushto for maximum effect. He recalled how the Caliphs slept on the floor and lived in rags, but carried food to the poor, the widows, and the orphans before they fed their own families or themselves. By implication the mullah invited the faithful to compare the Prophet’s social and economic system with the ‘Islamic Republic of Pakistan’ where the President’s family and courtiers had amassed private fortunes while the people died of hunger and disease. To control the press and the universities is one thing; to stop the mullah is quite another. In any case, the British had left behind no guidelines on how to check the determined mullah or how to suppress freedom of speech inside the mosque. The political content of the mullah’s sermons increased as the opportunities for expression outside the mosque declined. And mullah had a regular captive audience which no dictatorship could command.
A regular feature of Pakistani politics ever since independence has been the running confrontation between the mullah party and the ruling élite. The first round was won by the latter under Jinnah’s leadership. The mullah had followed Jinnah to Pakistan to challenge the pukka sahib’s authority. He had kept up constant pressure for Pakistan to be made into an ‘Islamic State’. What the mullah did not realise was that he too was as alienated from the Islam of the Prophet as Jinnah and the westernised élite. While the mullah remained wedded to the ritual in Islam, he had no notion of how to go about organising a modern state and its socio-economic structure accoding to the teachings of Islam. Like Jinnah, the mullah also prescribed a sovereign remedy for every malady. He was quite incapable of answering such simple questions as how a modern Caliph of a vast State would ‘carry’ food to the poor. Though the mullah had no answers, he asked all the embarrassing questions. His great weapon was rhetoric. He could expose contradictions but could offer no synthesis.
This kind of human animal is maddening enough for the ‘rational’ westernised mind. Such irrationality, however, was not the mullah’s only fault. Entrenched as he was in about 80,000 mosques in
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every nook and cranny of the countryside and the urban centres alike, the mullah also commanded enormous following and resources. The mullah in fact is the only truly ‘national’ institution in Pakistan. Unaided by a centralised ‘Church’ or a modern exchequer, the mullahs collected an estimated 600 million rupees a year in religious dues and charities such as zakat, sadqa, and fidya.14 In other words, the diffuse and informal mullah organisation collected nearly twice as much as the 347 million rupees the Government hoped to raise from all forms of direct taxation during 1968.15
No dictatorship could be totally effectively while the mullah was still free. Ayub’s bureaucracts hatched a plan for bringing the mosque and the mullahs under State control. For this purpose the regime set up the Auqaf (religious trust) Department. The department’s scheme, reported the Pakistan Times, ‘when implemented in full, will furnish every mosque….with trained and educated moulvis capable of imparting not only religious education, but also well versed in economic, social, and health matters’.16 The Auqaf Department had been set up in January 1960, but by 1968 it had managed to acquire control over only 450 mosques—barely 1 per cent of the total. The mullah had put up stiff resistance and had shown no preference for becoming a salaried civil servant. Having beaten off the takeover bid, the mullah turned the tables on the regime. In 1967 all the mullahs openly defied the Government and forbade the people to follow the official committee set up to determine the lunar phases in order to fix the date of religious observances. The Government committee fixed 12 January for the major Muslim festival of Eid that marks the end of Ramadan. The mullahs said it should be 13 January. In the controversy that followed about 94 per cent of the people of Pakistan followed the mullahs. The civil servants, military officers, and the rich middle class found themselves isolated.17
The mullahs also started a whispering campaign against Ayub Khan, his family, and other leading members of the regime, including senior civil servants. Some of the stories put out about Ayub would be highly slanderous if they were not true. Some were just good political jokes. There was one about Ayub having gone to Heaven for consultation about the affairs of the ‘Islamic Republic’. While there he nearly carried out a coup against the Almighty. During 1967-68 the mosques—not the non-existent ‘Marxist cells’—became the centres of anti-Ayub agitation. As always the mullahs were too unorganised to drive the advantage home. The mullahs merely succeeded in shaking the élitist rule to its very foundations. The final toppling job was left to the workers, the peasants and the students. But before the demolition squad moved in, Ayub had tried to perpetuate his rule through a guerrilla war in Kashmir.
The move back-fired when India invaded Pakistan across the international frontier near Lahore on 6 September 1965. It ended on 23 September when a United Nations Security Council demand for a ceasefire was accepted and implemented by both sides. Pakistan charged India with ‘unprovoked aggression’ and India accused Pakistan of seeking a military solution in Kashmir. The war left both participants exhausted. Neither the enormous Indian war machine nor the comparatively puny Pakistan Army acquitted itself with credit. If the Indian Army failed to inflict a military defeat on a neighbour only a quarter of its size, Indian diplomacy finally clinched the argument at Tashkent in January 1966. The slight advantage, psychological and military, which the Pakistan Army had gained on the field, was surrendered by Ayub at the conference table.
Kashmir in Perspective
The world has heard almost as much about the Kashmir dispute in the last 25 years as, for instance, about Vietnam, Palestine, Berlin, and Korea. Usually the conflict has been presented as a dispute over territory between the two neighbouring ‘great powers’ of the subcontinent. The first war in Kashmir (1947-48) ended in a ceasfire arranged by the Security Council. In fact the Kashmir dispute arose because the political struggle of the people of Kashmir had been waged outside the Congress-League framework.
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Neither the ‘national’ Congress nor the Muslim League had a following in Kashmir. While the ‘national’ struggle in the rest of British India had been waged outside the imperial power, the people of Kashmir had been engaged in a separate struggle against the tryranny of their Maharaja.
The Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir had acquired the State from the British in 1846 for a sum of 7.5 million rupees. Until then the State had been part of the Sikh empire of Ranjit Singh. When the British finally defeated the Sikhs and annexed the Punjab, they sold Kashmir to Gulab Singh under the terms of the Treaty of Amritsar. The rule of Gubab Singh and his successors in Kashmir was more tyrannical and repressive than even the British raj in the rest of India. The people of Kashmir, nearly 80 per cent of whom are Muslim, rose against their ruler long before the uprising against the British. In 1931 when the Muslim League was moribund and Jinnah had become ‘a retired Englishman’ in Hampstead, an uprising by the Kashmiris was ruthlessly suppressed by the ruler. A year later Shaikh Abdullah formed the State’s first political party—the All Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference. In 1934 the Maharaja conceded a Legislative Assembly—a year ahead of the Government of India Act of 1935. The much abused Muslims of Kashmir had fought for freedom longer and achieved a good deal more than the Indian Muslims outside Kashmir. In 1939 at Shaikh Abdullah’s initiative the ‘Muslim’ Conference was turned into a ‘National’ Conference. In Kashmir this was a step in a direction opposite to the movement in the rest of British India where the Muslim League passed the ‘Pakistan Resolution’ in 1940.
Shaikh Abdullah’s move was not as ‘secularist’ and ‘anti-Muslim’ as Jinnah and the Muslim League made it out to be. In Kashmir Muslims were an overwhelming majority and a ‘national’ platform made little difference to Muslim preponderance. Just as Gandhi could pursue the ideal of Ramraj under the cover of a ‘national’ Congress, Shaikh Abdullah could pursue Muslim resurgence in Kashmir in the name of a ‘national’ Conference. This, however, was not good enough for Jinnah and the Muslim League. Abdullah’s ‘national’ approach was meant to unify the people of Kashmir in their struggle against the Maharaja, who was the only instrument of Hindu domination in Kashmir. But for Jinnah and the Msulim League a ‘national’ approach was a denial of the ‘two-nation’ theory. They failed to see that the ‘two-nation’ theory, if applied to Kashmir, would divide the State to the disadvantage of the Muslims as it was meant to divide the subcontinent to the disadvantage of the Hindu majority. For their stand Jinnah and the Muslim League can claim credit for consistency, but little credit for political foresight and statemanship. The net result was that the leadership in Kashmir was divided. In 1942 Chaudhury Ghulam Abbas, general secretary of the Kashmir National Conference and a close confidant of Abdullah, broke away and revived the Kashmir Muslim Conference.
This split in the Kashmir people’s movement, at the instigation of Jinnah, was welcome to the Maharaja. In 1946 he had both Abdullah and Abbas arrested. Shaikh Abdullah was sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment for sedition. By then Abdullah had acquired a charismatic hold over the people and become known as the ‘Lion of Kashmir’. Abbas’s Muslim Conference had not alternative but to trail behind Abdullah. Earlier in 1944 Jinnah had gone to Kashmir at Shaikh Abdullah’s invitation. There they argued over ‘ideology’, i.e., whether Abdullah’s movement was ‘Muslim’ or ‘nationalist’. Jinnah, who had become the Quaid-i-Azam (the Great Leader) of India’s Muslim minority, failed to adjust to the Kashmiri Muslims’ approach as a majority in their State. Neither could Jinnah reconcile himself to the existence of a rival charismatic leader like Shaikh Abdullah. Jinnah’s visit ended when, misjudging the mood in Kashmir, he openly attacked the Kashmir National Conference. There were demonstrations against him and he left. From Murree Jinnah sent the Maharaja a telegram asking him to crush Abdullah. Later in 1946 when Abdullah launched the ‘Quit Kashmir’ movement—not against the British but against the Maharaja—Jinnah and the Muslim League withheld their support and thus helped the ruler to imprison the ‘Lion of Kashmir’. By contrast, the Congress backed Abdullah and appointed a lawyer to defend him.
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This was the background when in 1947 the Indian Independence Act gave the Maharaja the option of acceding to either India or Pakistan. The Maharaja hesitated and the predominantly Muslim population of the State revolted against him. The people of Kashmir were undoubtedly demanding to join Pakistan. The situation got out of the Maharaj’s control and Nehru, now Prime Minister of India, persuaded him to release Shaikh Abdullah in September 1947. Abdullah first sent an emissary, G.M. Sadiq, to Pakistan to negotiate. Jinnah, instead of meeting Sadiq and coming to an arrangement, did not even grant him an audience. At the same time Pakistan radio and press launched a strong attack on Abdullah and the Kashmir National Conference. Sadiq returned to Srinagar, the Kashmir capital, empty handed. Abdullah then went to New Delhi and approved the accession of Kashmir to India. But he made the accession conditional. He was appointed Chief Emergency Administrator of Kashmir in October 1947 and ‘Prime Minister’ of the State in March 1948. In August 1953 Abdullah was ‘dismissed’ on Nehru’s orders and returned to the gaol where he remained for another 10 years. There is no doubt that had a referendum been held in Kashmir, as it was in the North-West Frontier Province where a Congress Government was in office at the time of partition, the vast majority of the people of Kashmir would have voted to join Pakistan. Such a referendum, in the form of a plebiscite, was promised to the people of Kashmir by the Security Council in 1948. India then accepted the principle of plebiscite but has since obstructed all attempts at arranging one. The kindest thing that can be said for Jinnah and the Muslim League’s rôle in losing Kashmir is that they failed to understand the nature of the politicalo struggle in Kashmir.
The Rôle of the Kashmir Dispute
The subsequent history of Kashmir is one of a territory in dispute between two neighbouring States. No one now remembers it as a State the people of which have been denied their right of self-determination. India has, over the last 25 years, taken steps to annex and ‘integrate’ the State into the Indian Union through a puppet regime. As recently as July 1970 the Guardian found it ‘ironic that India’s position in Kashmir should be increasingly challenged from within at a time when Kashmir’s status as a major unsettled international dispute is declining’.18 The Hindustan Times, reporting on a Kashmir People’s Convention held in Srinagar in summer of 1970, said that ‘but for a few feeble voices heard in our [Indian] favour, most of the delegates favoured either accession to Pakistan or creation of an independent Kashmir’.19
The fate of the four million people of Kashmir however is not the saddest part of the story. For the Indian élite the capture of Kashmir became a consolation prize for the ‘disaster’ of partition. For the Congress Government of India, Kashmir became the symbol of its refusal to accept the two-nation theory of the Muslim League. For the Pakistani élite Kashmir came to symbolise the ‘unfinished business’ of partition. It meant that the two élites, one Hindus and one Muslim, could continue their enmity into the post-independence period. Why were the élites who inherited power on the subcontinent prepared, almost anxious, to engage in international conflicts with each other—conflicts which they must have known would place crippling burdens on their already overburdened peoples? A short answer—albeit with the help of hindsight—must be that the dominant groups who acqured political power at independence had no intention of releasing the creative energies of their people or mobilising the resources of their countries, for the enormous task of improving the living conditions of long-suffering humanity on the subcontinent. For these élite groups ‘independence’ meant unfettered opportunities for themselves and not a prelude to freedom from want, hunger and disease for the peoples of the two successor States. They hungry masses of India had been fed on a mixed diet of anti-colonialism, communalism and nationalism while the British were still there. After ‘independence’ the same diet could not be continued without a confrontation beteween Pakistan and India.
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Nehru’s non-aligned anti-imperialist posture in international affairs served the purpose of retaining anti-colonialism beyond independence; the occupation of Muslim Kashmir preserved commualism for an indefinite period; and confrontation with Pakistan mobilised Hindu nationalist emotions. Nehru and the Congress thus ensured that the people of independent’ India would go on being content with the old diet of chauvinism, and the ruling élite would not have to deliver to the hungry masses all the good things of life that they had been promised. In the name of the ‘national interest’ of retaining Kashmir and defending India from Pakistan, the Indian élite could go on allocating to itself the resources which should have gone to relieving the poverty of the Indian masses. The myth of the danger to ‘Mother India’ from the Muslim north-west, of which Pakistan was the ‘first instalment’, has been assiduously cultivated.20 This gave the Indian élite, like its Pakistani counterpart, all the reason in the world to spend the bulk of the Government’s resources on ‘defence’ which ultimately means the defence of élite domination within India. It is this ‘functional’ aspect of holding Kashmir that explains India’s persistent refusal over 25 years to settle the dispute with Pakistan.
In Pakistan the Kashmir issue and confrontation with India—though not initially of Pakistan’s choice—have been used to similar effect, only to a much greater extent. The rise of the Pakistan Army as the largest single vested interest and political force in the country is directly related to the existence of the Kashmir dispute.21 If the subcontinent’s total population of nearly 700 million, after 25 years of ‘independence’, is even poorer today than it was under the infamous British raj, it is because of their collective ‘sacrifice’ for the four million people of Kashmir. And the poorer they get, fighting to retain or liberate Kashmir, the more ‘investment’ they acquire which in turn needs even greater ‘sacrifices’ for the ultimate victory that has been promised. In the meantime a handful of the guardians of ‘national interest’, in India as in Pakistan, get even richer while the poor get even poorer. Defence expenditure in both Pakistan and India has become a rich source of outdoor relief for their respective ruling élites.
Rumblings of Revolt
No people as poor as those of Pakistan can go on making sacrifices over more than 20 years without an end in sight. Demands of welfare ultimately force a critical reappraisal. This is not peculiar to a poor people continuously living at or below subsistence level. Even the relatively highly developed peoples cannot sustain such costs indefinitely. The British people had, between 1935 and 1945, experienced a decade of rearmament and wartime mobilisation of resources and manpower. At the end of the period they voted Churchill, the war hero, out of office and opted for a Labour Government which promised greater welfare and less jingoism. Indeed it was the war weariness of the people of Western Europe as a whole which brought the now celebrated Marshall Plan into being. The U.S. offered assistance, in the words of George Marshall at Harvard on 5 June 1947,…‘to assist in the return of normal economic health….without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace. Our policy is directed…against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos…’22 Even in 1947 the ‘hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos’ in Europe was nothing when compared with Asian conditions then or since.
The new constitution which Ayub Khan gave to Pakistan in 1962 has become known for its conception of ‘Basic Democracy’. The philosophy of the constitution, however, was that of Iskandar Mirza who had advocated ‘controllled democracy’ under the rule of ‘one good strong man’. Rule by strong men, good or otherwise, is not incompatible with deomcracy per se. Many U.S. Presidents and European rulers have wielded almost dictatorial powers. Their ‘free’ democracise have failed to prevent some from becoming demagogues and others from remaining ‘good men’. The truly ‘controlled democracies’ are of course one-party states, chiefly Communist. Ayub’s was neither a ‘free’ democracy nor a one-party system. Like ‘free’ democracies Ayub allowed a multi-party system, but in its working the system ensured that the President’s and bureaucrats’ party would always win. It was an ingenious arrangement in which adult franchise produced an electoral college of 80,000 Basic Democrats who could then be ‘persuaded’ to re-elect the President and the Provincial and National Assemblies.
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Like all such ingenious arrangements, the system was in fact too clever by half. Its basic weakness was that the electoral college of 80,000 was too large to command the authority of a Parliament and too small and too exposed to bureaucratic manipulation to reflect opinion in the country. Fortunately for their victims, dictators invariably over-estimate their strength. So with Ayub who, between 1962 and 1964, felt so secure that he allowed a semblance of opposition to exist. A handful of brave Pakistani journalists began to attack the regime. Soon they were all silenced one by one. Sardar Bahadur Khan, brother of Ayub, was leader of the opposition. His attacks on the regime were outspoken. The regime reacted by creating the National Press Trust to take over dissenting newspapers. At the same time during 1962-64 the students of Dacca, Karachi and Lahore, and railway workers and school teachers in West Pakistan, managed to get many of their demands accepted. They employed the method of strikes, processions, slogan shouting, brick throwing and in some cases arson, to press their demands. Within a couple of years of the coming into force for the new Constitution it became clear that Basic Democracy provided not channel of communication between the rulers and the ruled; the authority after 15 years of independence was as insensitive as the policeman’s boot that had struck Muzamdar in 1947.
It was against this background, witht the regime increasingly isolated, that the system faced its first major test—the presidential elections of the winter of 1964-65. Ayub Khan was of course the candidate of the three-part alliance of the bureaucracy, the landlords, and vested interests. Ayub must have hoped that in the absence of strong leadership among his opponents (who moreover were also hopelessly divided among themselves) the contest would be a mere formality. Then things began to go wrong for the President; five of the largest parties created the Combined Opposition Party (C.O.P) to put up a joint candidate for the presidency. The opposition faced the election with the knowledge that Ayub’s bureaucrats would ensure victory for the President. The C.O.P. therefore almost ignored the 80,000 Basic Democrats who had the vote. Instead the opposition conducted a campaign in the style of an American presidential election as if every Pakistani man and woman was going to vote. The opposition’s purpose was to get the people worked up into a frenzy, possibly against the President. The C.O.P., much to Ayub’s and the bureaucracy’s emberrassment, persuaded Miss Fatima Jinnah, the frail and ageing sister of the late Father of the Nation, to be their candidate.
This was a googly which could conceivably beat Ayub’s wide bat and even possibly get past the bureaucracy’s net. Miss Jinnah was widely respected by the masses in all parts of Pakistan, East and West, and had long carried the popular acclaim of ‘Mother of the Nation’. She was in a sense a far greater ‘national’ figure than Ayub Khan. The old lady stumped the country, drawing huge crowds wherever she went. She did not have to mince her words. She derived her authority directly from the ‘glorious past’ and her dead brother. Miss Jinnah kept up ‘relentless pressure and was out of the regime’s control. She succeeded in the opposition’s main purpose—to expose the true nature of Ayub’s dictatorship to the masses.
Miss Jinnah’s campaign demolished all the barriers against freedom of speech that the regime had so carefully erected. Almost everyone the author talked to in Pakistan, including some of the leading supporters of Ayub, agreed that Miss Jinnah’s campaign had effectively turned the masses against the President. They all agreed that had it been a direct election by popular vote, Miss Jinnah would have won by a wide margin. As it was, Ayub won. Even in the electoral college Miss Jinnah’s impact had been quite considerable : in East Pakistan almost 47 per cent of the Basic Democrats voted for her, and in West Pakistan (the home of feudalism) her share of votes was a respectable 26 per cent. Ayub had ‘won’, as he was bound to, but Miss Jinnah’s campaign had effectively killed the regime and doomed the Basic Democrats. With the people expecting victory for Miss Jinnah, the vote for Ayub showed clearly that the Basic Democrats were a device not for the expression of the will of the people but for the negation of that will. In a ‘free’ democracy when elected representatives deviate from the popular will, the people wait patiently until they can change the Government next time round. Ayub’s ‘controlled’ democracy on the
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other hand offered no such hope for peaceful change in the near future. The Basic Democrats could never again be relied upon to reflect the popular mood. The people of Pakistan realised that they were faced with a self-perpetuating dictatorship. The only course open to them was that of public demonstration, riots and open revolt—a conclusion that the students, the teachers and railway workers had reached even before the election farce had been enacted.
Ayub’s backers—the industrial robber barons, the landlords, and the army and civil bureaucracy—also realised that their man had been effectively beaten; that the workers, the peasants, the students, would revolt and sweep aside the whole edifice of élitist rule and economic domination.
Ayub, while outwardly claiming that the election had vindicated his and the regime’s popularity, also realised that he would have to do something extraordinary to retain his throne. He needed a multi-edged weapon which would (a) divert public attention away from demestic issues—the issues on which Miss Jinnah had thoroughly exposed him; (b) increase his personal hold over the army; and (c) place even greater powers of internal repression at his disposal—just in case. Such an issue could only be in the sphere of foreign policy, preferably one involving limited military action, to produce maximum mileage out of chauvinism. At this stage the connection between a discredited dictator’s political requirements for survival and the two wars—over the Rann of Kutch and over Kashmir during 1965—can only be largely conjectural. What is not conjecture is that after the September war with India, Ayub declared himself the victor. The whole of the regime’s propaganda machine was mobilised for building up Ayub’s image as the great war leader who had inflicted a crushing defeat on India. Perhaps even more significant was the emergency that was declared during the war. The war ended, but the emergency, which allowed unlimited powers of arrest and detention without trial and the curtailment of even those rights and freedoms that Ayub’s own Constitution ‘guaranteed’, remained in force.
Euphoria of ‘victory’ and war-induced chauvinism are by nature ephemeral. Ayub’s surrender to Soviet pressure at Tashkent turned the euphoria into bewilderment. Nor could the regime sustain chauvinism with continued anti-India propaganda because, according to the terms of the Tashkent Declaration, Ayub had agreed to stop it. The news of the Tashkent Declaration caused dismay in Pakistan. There were a number of anti-Tashkent demonstrations and riots in both East and West Pakistan. Opposition leaders who had supported the war began to denounce the return to the status quo ante. A new arms race began on the subcontinent and Pakistan’s ‘defence expenditure’ leapt by 137.5 per cent in one year, going up from 1,243.5 million rupees in 1965 to 2,939.6 million rupees in 1966. Swingeing new taxes falling largely on the lowest income groups, and the widespread use of emergency powers to suppress dissent, turned Pakistan into a garrison State. Throughout 1966 and 1967 the rumblings of revolt could be heard from all parts of the country. The line was held not so much by repression which was widespread, but mainly by opposition leaders who feared that a popular revolt against the regime would leave little of the élitist rule for them to inherit.
The rumblings of revolt against the tripartite alliance headed by Ayub had no leaders and no organisation. It was a spontaneous feeling of the great mass of people that they were even worse off in the Pakistan of their dreams than they had been in the nightmare of the late British raj. The discontent that enveloped the whole country was a seamless garment without trace of Right-Left or East-West divisions. The spark that set the power keg of discontent alight was provided by students at Karachi who went on strike in October 1968. The Government reacted by closing down all schools, colleges, and Karachi University. From Karachi the student discontent travelled to Rawalpindi, the interim capital, where it erupted in the first week of November. On 10 November at Peshawar in the North-West Frontier Province a student, Hashim Umar Zai, fired two shots which missed Ayub Khan who had just started addressing a public meeting. Three days later Ayub ordered the arrest of Z.A. Bhutto, chairman of the Pakistan
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People’s Party, ans Wali Khan, president of the National Awami Party. Within a month the revolt had spread to most towns and industrial centres in West Pakistan. In the first week of December Dacca erupted with a general strike in support of the agitation in West Pakistan. Students at Dacca University were again in the forefront, but Maulana Bhashani, the 86 years old peasant leader, electrified the whole province by involving the rural masses and urban workers. The people of Pakistan as a whole were united in a struggle to topple the regime. This degree of ‘national’ unity had not existed in Pakistan since the struggle against the British and the Hindu Congress which had ended in 1947.
Once the tinder of poverty, hunger, and disease had set the country alight, the élitist ‘opposition’ groups emerged to try and divide the people into Right and Left and East and West. The only manoeuvre that could keep the ruling clique in power was the turning of the fury of the people away from the regime and against each other. The out-of-office ‘leaders’ united in a Democratic Action Committee (D.A.C.) to negotiate the peacful ‘transfer of power’ from Ayub to themselves. At the height of the agitation Mr. Bhutto, the darling of the Left, announced himself a candidate for the Presidency at the 1970 elections. Clearly Mr. Bhutto did not expect that the revolt would succeded. On 22 February 1969 Ayub released Shaikh Mujibur Rahman who had been held since 1967 on charges of conspiring with India. All charges of treason against him were dropped.
The day before, Ayub had announced that he would not be a candidate at the next ‘election’. Mujib joined the D.A.C. leaders at a Round Table Conference with Ayub in Rawalpindi. The purpose of releasing Mujib was fulfilled at the conference table when the Awami League leader introduced the East-West dimension into the conflict by pressing his Six-Point demand for regional autonomy for East Pakistan. The West Pakistan ‘leaders’ opposed Mujib’s demands ‘on behalf of the people of West Pakistan’. Other demands of the Democratic Action Committee were a federal and parliamentary form of government, elections on the basis of adult franchise, release of political prisoners, lifting of the ‘emergency’ that had existed since the 1965 war, and the return of Progressive Papers Limited to its original owners. Ayub accepted all the ‘political demands’ except the return of the Progressive Papers to the Leftists. This was a master stroke by Ayub to divide the D.A.C. into Left and Right. The Right wing agreed to drop the demand which would have given the Left back its voice. In addition to the East-West dimension introduced by Mujib, the future of Progressive Papers brought the Right-Left conflict into the negotaitions.
These negotiations in Rawalpindi were, however, quite irrelevant to the mood of the people of Pakistan. They ignored the political manoeuvrings in Rawalpindi and kept up a ceaseless struggle against the existing social, economic and political order. They resorted to gherao (siege) of their factories and offices. They held managing directors gheraoed in their offices until wage rises ranging from 25 to 100 per cent were awarded. Workers in Karachi took over several factories. Bhutto judged the mood of the people and declared that he was a ‘socialist’. He later qualified it by saying his socialism would be of the Scandinavian variety. Bhutto was not the only one to have discovered the source of the unrest that was driving the masses to press their needs through a revolt that had sustained itself without leaedership or organisation for almost six months. The Council Muslim League had in September 1968 adopted a resolution ‘to ensure the establishment of Islamic social and economic justice for all the people of Pakistan’. The party’s programme included ‘national’ ownnership of all sources of capital, all heavy industry, and all sources of energy; a State monopoly of foreign trade; minimum wages and free trade unions; a ceiling on private incomes, low-cost housing, end of feudalism, agricultural co-operatives, and price support for agriculture. ‘Every citizen of Pakistan [declared the League] shall be the beneficiary of a complete system of social security. The social insurance system will be intended to furnish every person, particularly low-income groups, with social security from the cradle to the grave’. The trouble with the Council Muslim League’s programme was that it was passed by the same people who had in 1944 adopted a similar programme. That manifesto, as we have seen, had not only been forgotten but its further
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publication prohibited by the Muslim League Government of the Punjab. No such programme was put to the Round Table Conference either by the Council Muslim League or by any other of the ‘opposition’ parties. All that these parties wanted was a share in power while Ayub merely sought to divide them.
The popular pressure, however, gave Ayub and these leaders no respite. The country could only be saved for continued élitist rule by the élite’s final weapon—their standing political party in uniform—the army. The army commander, Yahya Khan however made it clear that he would willingly ‘save the country’ from its own people on condition that Ayub went and took his Constitution with him into oblivion. Ayub had no choice. On 26 March 1969 Ayub handed over the country to Yahya Khan who imposed Martial Law. Predictably he promised elections ‘as soon as possible’ and a transfer of power to the ‘elected representatives of the people’. The point to emphasise is that with the substitution of Yahya for Ayub in the President’s House in Rawalpindi, the nature of the regime changed little. 1969 was yet another truning point when the history of Pakistan failed to turn.
At the end of 1968, at the height of the agitation, Ayub Khan had given a warning that ‘a collapse of the political system established by him would lead to civil war’.23 Ayub was obviously not referring to the virtual state of civil war between the masses and his regime that had then been going on for three months. There was at that time an extraordinary unity among the people right across the country, East and West. What then did Ayub mean by civil war? Who would fight whom? Or was there already a plot being hatched by senior bureaucrats and army commanders to use another period of Martial Law to divide the country into its component parts, arouse regional feelings, let elections produce a fragmented Assembly, create confusion and conditions of civil war, and enable themselves to go on ruling with or without the politicians’ help?
These and similar questions will have to be answered by the Pakistani historian and political scientist of the future. They have not occurred to the author with the help of hindsight after the East Pakistan tragedy. The author had gone to Pakistan in June 1969 (three months after Yahya’s disastrous reign began) and stayed there until April 1970. On the evening of 28 November 1969 he was a dinner guest at the house of a senior military officer somewhere in Pakistan. That evening Yahya Khan broadcast to the nation spelling out the details of his ‘plan’ for holding elections in the country as a prelude to the ‘transfer of power’ he had promised in March. The author had the privilege of listening to the President’s broadcast in the company of army officers. The grave questions raised above first crossed his mind during the after-dinner discussions which followed the President’s broadcast. The material presented in the next chapter is not in support of the conspiracy theory of history, but comes close to it.
০০০
6. Right v. Left to
West v. East
Tyrannies, Aristotle pointed out, are all ‘quite short-lived’.1 That depends on one’s view of how short is ‘short’. Ayub Khan’s ten years were undoubtedly too long for those who had to endure them. Modern tyrannical systems tend to become institutionalised, i.e., they become diffuse and self-perpetuating. It was therefore not to be expected that repression in Pakistan would end with Ayub Khan’s departure. Indeed it appears that the tyrants of Pakistan had taken care to ensure that they survived the chief architect of their system.
In January 1969, after four months of relentless revolt against the regime, the partners in the ruling triumvirate began to pull in different directions. While the ‘top [army] commanders remained solidly behind Ayub’, the ‘twenty families started backing rivals’.2 In the background ‘some of Ayub’s close advisers and leading bureaucrats [were] still trying to continue the Presidential system with certain
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modifications’.3 Not even the National Assembly, which had been elected by the 80,000 sycophant Basic Democrats and in which Ayub had a permanent majority, was allowed to debate the riots and police firings.4
The regime used a variety of coercive devices to enforce compliance. For instance, school and college teachers in Karachi and other West Pakistan cities had their salaries withheld for four months. By January they were ‘on the point of starvation’.5 It is well known that West Pakistani troops were used in East Pakistan. What is less well known is that within West Pakistan the ethnic diversity of the people and troops was similarly used. In Karachi, a predominantly refugee city, the Frontier Constabulary was used to deal with a crowd attacking the house of a supperter of Ayub.6
Still later Ayub Khan’s supporters from his home district in the North-West Frontier Province were brought in to stage demonstrations in favour of the regime. One such demonstration took place in Rawalpindi, the interim capital, on 8 March. The Times reported :
President Ayub Khan’s supporters, chanting “Down with socialism, Islam is our way” opened fire with shotguns on a crowed of Left-wing demonstrators in Rawalpindi….Lorry loads of Pathans from President Ayub’s Hazara constituency had driven through the city brandishing shotguns, staves, and knives and yelling anti-Communist slogans…The police cheered at the sight of civilians fighting among themselves.7
The first indication that Ayub was prepared to talk with opposition leaders came in a leading article in the Pakistan Times of Lahore on 29 January. The editor of the Pakistan Times, Z.A. Suleri, was the only journalist in direct contact with Ayub.8 But before the beleaguered dictator made a move to enter into talks, he had secured his flanks by placing four of the five biggest cities under army control.9 When Ayub formally announced his willingness to talk, he limited the offer to ‘responsible opposition leaders’, thereby excluding Bhutto who was under arrest, and Shaikh Mujibur Rahman who was on trial facing charges of having conspired with India to secure the secession of East Pakistan. Like most rulers of his type, Ayub suffered from the illusion that he and his regime were the only true custodians of the ‘national interest’. The President insisted that in his talks with the opposition leaders he would ‘agree to nothing that would endanger Pakistan’s integrity and security’.10 The offer to talk only to ‘responsible’ leaders, Bhutto pointed out, was ‘an attempt to split the opposition’.11 After a few more riots and shootings up and down the country, Ayub opened the invitation to ‘all opponents’ to meet him at Rawalpindi on 17 February.
As the opposition leaders started packing their bags to go to Rawalpindi, students who had started and sustained the revolt gave a warning that they would turn against those who ‘compromised with Ayub’.12 On 10 February the West Pakistan High Court ordered the release of Bhutto. The Awami League, a partner in the Democratic Action Committee, refused to talk with the President unless Shaikh Mujibur Rahman was released. Ten days before setting him free, Ayub had categorically stated in Lahore that the would not agree to releasing Rahman.13 It was clear that Ayub was manoeuvring to divide the opposition and attempting to do a deal with the Right-wing ‘responsible’ leaders. A new wave of violence swept the country and demonstrators in Lahore demanded ‘Death to Ayub’.14
Bhutto, emerging triumphant from prison, refused the Government’s offer of an aircraft to take him home, saying a bomb had been planted in it.15 Arriving in Karachi a few days later, Bhutto promised ‘Islam, socialism, and democracy and a 1,000-year war to liberate Kashmir’.16 Bhutto refused to attend the Round Table Conference between the politicians and Ayub. He proved a good judge of the mood of the country, and especially of the students. Other politicians, more eager to start talking, arrived at Rawalpindi in a Government aircraft to be greeted by students carrying banners which said ‘No
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negotiations’ and ‘Don’t surrender to Ayub.’17 Three days later it became clear that even the army commanders had withdrawn their support from the President. On 20 February, Ayub announced his decision not to be a candidate at the next election. He recognised that the ‘people want direct elections on the basis of adult franchise’. The small print in his broadcast speech retained on option for himself. ‘If we are unable to reach any agreement with the opposition then [said Ayub] I shall have…to place directly before you my constitutional proposal…’18 Neville Maxwell, The Times correspondent in India and Pakistan, wrote the epitaph. He called it ‘Ayub’s failure to create a polity without politics’.19
Most commentators asked themselves : who and what next? All were agreed it would be Bhutto or Air Marshal Asghar Khan, a former air force chief who had fallen out with Ayub. British newspapers at this time could not even spell the name of Mujibur Rahman; one called him ‘Muji Burrehman’.20 While other politicians converged on Rawalpindi, Bhutto proceeded to Dacca. There he was ‘welcomed as a hero’.21 To the Bengalis he prescribed the same sovereign remedy—‘Islam, socialism, and 1,000-year war’. In the meantime another and perhaps a more genuine socialist, the Maoist Maulana Bhashani, had been demanding a socialist revolution. Suddenly the air was thick with socialist slogans. The mullahs, who had traditionally accepted the capitalist version of Islam, were frightened. The mullah party beagan to ‘denounce socialism from the pulpit’ up and down the country.22 The situation was so confused that friends and foe were hard to distinguish. In Hyderabad pro-Ayub demonstrators were surprised when police used teargas and batons to disperse them.23
In the first week of March 1969 it became clear that the underlying causes of the unrest were deeper and more widespread than Ayub or the ‘loyal opposition’ had realised. Ayub’s announcement that he would step down and the country would revert to direct elections and a parliamentary system failed to halt the revolt. The Right-wing opposition leaders appeared satisfied with the constitutional concessions they had managed to extract from Ayub. The Democratic Action Committee was then dissolved and the individual parties began to prepare for elections. The workers however were not prepared to wait for elections for an improvement in their pay and conditions. They perhaps realised that adult franchise and direct elections would also mean that their bosses would be back in power. For over a decade they had been denied the use of their power of collective bargaining. They took the opportunity of a greatly weakened regime to use their collective power against the employers.
Karachi once again showed the way. On 5 March over 10,000 dockers, postmen, and textile workers struck. Two men were killed when a factory watchman opened fire on striking workers.24 From Karachi the workers’ revolt spread to all parts of East and West Pakistan. The Times called it the ‘second phase of revolt in whcih labour unrest has broken out with systematic attacks on large factories belonging to twenty families who control the bulk of the nation’s wealth’.25 By the middle of March ‘more than one million Pakistanis including industrial labourers, technicians, doctors, telegraph and telephone engineers, teachers, and postmen’ were on strike for better working conditions and pay.26 The two politicians who identified themselves with the workders and the peasants were Bhutto of West Pakistan and Bhashani of East Pakistan. While Bhutto received a ‘hero’s welcome’ in East Pakistan, Bhashani toured West Pakistan where he told the workers in Karachi to take over the mills if the owners rejected their demands’.27 While Bhashani was still in Karachi, reports began coming in of a general peasants’ uprising in the East. One report spoke of instant executions of ‘wrongdoers by clubbing or knifing before mobs of wildly applauding peasants’.28 The civil war in Pakistan was typified by an attack on Bhashani on 15 March. The octogenarian socialist mullah was travelling by train from Lahore to Karachi. He was dragged from his seat and beaten up. It was generally believed that Bhashani’s attackers were followers of the ultra Right-wing religious revivalist party, the Jamat-i-Islamic. They shouted ‘we shall skill Bhashani’. Other passengers in the train and railway police saved Bhashani from being lynched. Two days later Dacca, the capital of East Pakistan, erupted in violence in protest against the attack on Bhashani in West Pakistan.
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The Right-Left Polarisation
By mid-March 1969 the uprising against Ayub Khan had turned into a full-scale revolutionary situation in which the urban industrial workders, the white-collar workers, the peasants, and the dissatisfied intellectuals were in revolt against the entire bourgeoisie. An old, old myth had been exploded—that Muslims made a docile working class, too much under the influence of religion as the opium of the masses, too ready to regard poverty ans hardship as the will of God to think of revolt and revolution. It became clear that just as the Muslim upper classes reconciled their parasitical conduct with Islam, so the Muslim proletariat had begun to think of revolt as ‘Islamic’. In other words, religion left both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat free to behave in their class interest in a class-ridden society. The political initiative had decidedly passed from the Right to the Left. It was clear that the dominance of the Muslim bourgeoisie in Pakistan could not be secured in a new parliamentary democracy dominated by the Right-wing parties. Suddenly politics in Pakistan were about wages, prices, and the riches of the ‘twenty-two families’. Immediate electoins would mean the rout of the Right wing that had ruled Pakistan since 1947. The old feudal/capitalist/bureaucratic order, almost on its knees, needed a breathing space in which to ‘save the country’ for itself. The partners in the ruling alliance, who had started pulling in different directions, needed another period of ‘stability’ to regroup and to beat off the challenge of the hungry masses. If the people were to be persuaded to forget their hunger and poverty, they would have to be given new non-issues to occupy their minds and to prepare them for new ‘sacrifices’. There was no alternative to a takeover by the Left—except another period of Martial Law to provide the desired continuity and ‘stability’ under the guise of preparing the country for elections and a return to democracy.
The second phase of the revolt involving millions of workers was hardly two weeks old when the Financial Times reported ‘strong and persistent rumours that Martial Law was in the offing’.29 On 17 March the Government confirmed that ‘ships loaded with Pakistani troops, tanks, and other armaments had sailed from Karachi to East Pakistan’.30 A day later Ayub’s Home Minister, Vice-Admiral A.R. Khan, told foreign journalists that the country was under ‘mob rule’ and that police and civil force were not strong enough to tackle the situation.31 Bhutto immediately accused Ayub of ‘trying to engineer a coup to try and keep the Left in Pakistan out of power’.32 In the next few days the Government propaganda machine put out stories telling the world that millions of armed peasants were advancing on Dacca. The citizens of Dacca were said to be ‘arming themselves and setting up defence committees to meet the peasants converging on the city from several directions.’33
On 25 March, Ayub Khan resigned and invited the Pakistan Army commander, General Yahya Khan, to assume his ‘legal responsibilities’. In fact Ayub’s own ‘law’—the 1962 Constitution—laid down that in the event of the President’s resigning, the Speaker of the National Assembly would take over as Acting President. Nowhere was the ‘legal responsibility’ of the army commander defined to include taking over the Presidency. Suddenly the ‘armies of peasants (advancing on Dacca) melted away—if, indeed, they ever existed in the first place’.34 All-India Radio in fact tried to engineer a peasant uprising in East Pakistan by reporting on 31 March that their leader Bhashani had been arrested. In fact Ian Wright of the Guardian met Bhashani at Santosh on the same day.35 The author subsequently made extensive personal inquiries in East Pakistan but found no shred of evidence to suggest that any such ‘armies of peasants’ ever existed. On the other hand he met a number of civil servants and army officers who admitted that the stories had been put out to justify the imposition of Martial Law.
While the tales of crucifixion, lynching, and clubbing of ‘wrongdoers’ and stories of armies marching on Dacca were figments of the bureaucrats’ imagination, what was undoubtedly true is that urban workers were in open revolt. The day after Yahya’s reign began, The Times reported that the whole country submitted ‘calmly to martial law’.36 To some extent this was true, but pockets of revolt persisted. One of Yahya’s first acts was to ban strikes. Chittagong witnessed the ‘slowest go slow’ where textile
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workers, to avoid fourteen years’ imprisonment for striking, ‘stand motionless in front of their machines…Every hour on the hour they make just two movements on their looms and return to immobility’.37 In coalifields near Quetta troops shot and killed a number of strike leaders.38 On the day Yahya promoted himself President, 30 strikers were arrested and imprisoned in Dacca.39 Two days after Yahya Khan had said that his ‘sole aim was to protect the life, liberty, and property of the people, to pull the country back to sanity, and to put the administration back on the rails’,40 The Times reported that ‘many Pakistanis are still sceptical and they fear another long period of military rule’.41 By the first week of April, Yahya felt secure enough to announce that the country would be governed ‘as nearly as may be’ in accordance with Ayub’s Constitution.42 But, he insisted, among the Constitution’s provisions which would remain suspended were those that guaranteed the people certain ‘fundamental rights.43 The long suffering Pakistanis continued to whisper that ‘Ayub’s ghost is back’.44
The Right wing, particularly the richest of the families, felt so reassured that Captain Gohar Ayub, who had become a millionaire during his father’s reign, challenged his detractors to prove the ‘wild rumours’ about his financial and business affairs or face punishment under Martial Law.45 Like Ayub before him, Yahya too began by announceing a general amnesty for tax evaders.46
What time scale did Yahya have in mind for restoring democracy? At his first press conference he said the task ‘should not take years, but it could not be accomplished in days’. Elections would be held as soon as ‘the health of the country was restored’.47 He added that ‘political passions required considerable time for cooling down. It was most important to establish a sound basis of discipline before the rough and tumble of politics and electioneering recommenced’.48 The Times assessment was that ‘President Yahya’s press conference…indicated that Pakistan’s progress to parliamentary elections will be rather slow…’49 Two weeks later Yahya confirmed this by saying that a new electoral roll of about 60 million voters would have to be prepared because ‘there were many bogus names on the rolls’.50 He had thus inadvertently confirmed what many had suspected all along—that even the elections of Basic Democrats under Ayub had been rigged.
Yahya insisted, however, that the press was free and that there was no censorship. All he demanded from journalists was ‘responsible’ reporting and comment.51 On the same day shamsuddoha, editor of East-West Review, was sentenced to a year’s rigorous imprisonment by a summary military court ‘for criticising the continuation of a Martial Law administration’.52 The press in fact did not even feel to report on strikes that were called in defiance of martial law. The author walked through the Sind Industrial Trading Estate in Karachi in August 1969 and found more than 20 factories shut down by strike or lockout and workers loitering about. A few weeks later workers took over the Paracha Textile Mills and police had to rescue its general manager, Mr. I.A. Naqvi, from his office where he was held hostage until the management granted the workeds’ demands. None of these strikes or incidents found a mention in any of the Karachi newspapers. In February 1970 the author went to the Karnaphuli industrial complex near Chittagong and found that 10,000 jute workers there had been on strike for two weeks. The jute and paper mills there were controlled by the Dawood family which also provided five founders of the Government-sponsored National Press Trust. Not surprisingly, labour troubles at his mills found no mention in the press. Faced with widespread defiance of the law against strikes, Yahya ‘withdrew the regulations against them’.53
Towards the end of 1969 the employers realised that the regime was powerless in dealing with the determined defiance of Martial Law by the industrial proletariat. The mill owners were frightened. Nineteen of the leading industrialists decided to hold out an olive branch to the workers. These frightened men suddenly discovered a philosophy. They signed a joint declaration which was printed in huge advertisements in most newspapers in East and West Pakistan. It said :
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We believe that industry belongs to the country and we are just custodians of our individual units, in partnership with lobour. We should, therefore, jointly take responsibility for the economy of the country and boost up production to raise the living standards of our people.54
The advertisement of course did not say how the proposed ‘partnership with labour’ would be consummated. The only recipe offered was to ‘boost up production to raise the living standards of our people’. Pakistani workers were familiar with this argument. They knew that for twenty years every boost in production had led to higher prices and relatively lower wages.
In the autumn of 1969 the regime announced a ‘Labour Policy’ which provided for a minimum monthly wage of 144 rupees (about £8). This was highly publicised and ‘accepted’ by the employers. The author persuaded his younger brother Inam, then aged 21, to become a labourer in a Karachi factory. Inam endured his 12-hour working days, six days a week, for a whole month with remarkable dedication to the experiment. His wage was fixed at 144 rupees. At the end of the month he was paid 108 rupees. The deductions, he was told, were for the five Sundays in that month and other ‘rest periods’ such as the mid-day meal breaks.
The workers ignored both the employers’ offer of a ‘partnership’ to boost production and the regime’s Labour Policy. They went on striking. In the first week of November many of the factories at Kot Lakhpat Industrial Area in Lahore were shut down by strikes. The management resorted to public appeals printed as advertisements. Another joint appeal by employers said :
We….very much regret to note the industrial unrest in some units and appeal to all patriotic citizens and workers to help in bringing about peaceful conditions for fruitful negotiations…We hope the labour leaders would also contribute towards the normalisation of the conditions in larger interest of the country.55
While the management appealed to workers’ ‘patriotism’, the Governor of West Pakistan, Air Marshal Nur Khan, said that ‘the Government cannot allow any group to disrupt peace and tranquility’. The Governor sent a police party led by a magistrate which ‘moved from one factory area to another to ensure that workers do not take out unlawful processions or hold illedgal meetings at public places’.56
There is no doubt that the civil war in Pakistan which started in 1968 was between the utter and degrading poverty of the masses and the affluenc of the ruling bourgeoisie. The latter’s use of its final weapon, the army, and the imposition of yet another Martial Law regime made little difference. The tinder of poverty and frustration that had accumulated over two decades, continued to smoulder throughout East and West Pakistan. It threatened to engulf in flames the politicians and the entire élitist raj. It was difficult to see how the Right wing, backed by the buearucracy, would manange to retain its preponderance in the freely elected Assembly and Government which had been promised. The ‘political passions’ that Yahya wanted to subside before elections could be held were refusing to go away precisely because they were not passions at all—they were the cry of a long-suffering, emaciated, hungry people.
The Politics of Delay and Division
In these circumstances the élitist order’s only remaining hopes of survival were (a) the continuation of Martial Law for as long as possible and, when this was no longer possible (b) the election of a fragmented Assembly which could then be manoeuvred into coalitions by a General-President; in short a return to the system operate by Iskandar Mirza in the mid-1950s. The strategy required a mixture of delay and diversion. The buearucracy had followed this strategy since independence and was well suited to advise and guide the President.
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Yahya Khan’s ‘sincerity’ and ‘integrity’ have been widely acknowledged int he world’s press. Commenting on the country’s first general elections in December 1970, the author himself wrote : ‘Whatever may happen tomorrow and the day after, today at least one man deserves respect for his integrity and honesty of purpose. He is General Yahya Khan, who had greatness thrust upon him 18 months ago and has brought his country safely to its first general elections. For this his place in history as a benefactor of his people is assured’.57 This was praise indeed from one who had always—and certainly since that dinner party with army officers in November 1969—suspected the generals’ intentions. Neither were these suspicions peculiar to a hypersensitive observer of the Pakistani scene. Both Shaikh Mujib and Bhutto had repeatedly accused the ‘faceless men’ of the bureaucracy of trying to sabotage the plan for holding elections in the country.58
It is not difficult to see why Mujib and Bhutto suspected the regime’s sincerity. While Mujib had demanded elections ‘within six months’,59 the bureaucrats’ plan provided for an election campaign lasting 10 months from January to October 1970. Later the election was postponed to December. Bhutto, on the other hand, claimed that ‘a majority of the political prisoners now serving jail terms’ were his party workers.60 He also accused the regime and the ‘reactionary papers’ controlled by the National Press Trust of promoting Right-wing ‘paper leaders’.61 Bhutto found the military Governmemt ‘not impartial’ as between parties.
In the winter of 1968-69 it had become clear that the two leading Left-wingers in the country, Bhutto in the West and Bhashani in the East, commanded the overwhelming support of the workers and peasants who were in revolt against the élitist system as a whole. Mujib, the leader of the Right wing in the East, had come out of prison only in February 1969 and his Awami League needed time to wrest the initiative from Bhashani’s National Awami Party. But Mujib held the trump card—his six points for regional autonomy. He calculated that in six months he would be ready to sweep the polls. By the end of 1969 the Right wing in both West and East Pakistan had made sufficient progress for S.R. Ghauri of the Government-controlled Morning News, who is a local correspondent for the Guardian, to write : ‘Bhutto and Bhashani have developed a sudden distaste for democracy—neither of them is expected to make a spectacular showing in the elections’.62
The bureaucrats’ plan was working and the Right wing was gaining ground—or so they thought. They were only partly right. In East Pakistan the Left led by Bhashani was in disarray precisely because there the Left was more genuine and close to the people. The National Awami Party was split into two major factions—the Bhashani NAP and the Requisitionists led by Wali Khan of the North-West Frontier. These were further divided into Naxalites and moderates. In addition there were other groups led by such headstrong revolutionaries as Abdul Haq Toha, Kazi Zafar, Hetem Ali Khan, and Jiten Ghosh. These men either differed on doctrinal grounds or led strong workers’ and peasants’ contingents in different parts of East Pakistan. The NAP had no organisation worth the name and relied larged on Bhashani’s mesmeric hold over the peasants. While Bhashani was adept at echoing the frustration and deprivation of the people, he was quite incapable of turning his militancy into the political direction and controlled party discipline necessary to win an election.
Mujib, essentially the leader of the Bengali bourgeoisie, knew Bhashani’s weakness. He also had an organisation and the cream of Bengali intellectuals behind him. Their economics was more relevant to a Hampstead set than to the actual needs of East Pakistan. In this the Awami League in Pakistan was not unlike the Muslim League in British India before partition. The Awami League’s predominant interest was to wrest power from the military and to prevent it from passing to the Left. Mujib used the standard bourgeois tactics of identifying an easily identifiable ‘out-group’ as the enemy. Slogans come more easily to this type of leadership than actual politicies. He had given notice of this as early as March 1969. Soon after his release from prison he said that ‘during the past 20 years the western province (West Pakistan)
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had sucked the blood of Bengal dry’.63 He was of course not concerned with the fact that the ruling élite had sucked the blood of the people of West Pakistan dry as well. To pitch his appeal at an even more dangerous emotional level, Mujib used the slogan ‘Joi Bangla’—victory for Bengal. His six-point formula was of course designed to give East Pakistan absolute control over all its own resources. There was nothing in it however to indicate that the Bengali bourgeoisie, having got control over resources, would treat the people of East Pakistan in a different way from that in which they and the people of West Pakistan had been treated by the parasitical rulers. All indications were—and this was freely admitted by all those the author talked with in Dacca—that the Awami League was ‘just another Muslim League’. In particular the student militants repeatedly made the point that ‘let us first get rid of Yahya and we shall then deal with the reactionaries of the Awami League’.
Early in the election campaign it became apparent that some of the largest industrial families were backing the Awami League. When Shaikh Mujibur Rahman went to Chittagong, the Dawood family put a fleet of cars at his disposal.64 He had initially been employed by the Haroon family of Karachi. During Mujib’s years of imprisonment the Haroons maintained his family. The Dawood and Haroon houses were of coures among those in West Pakistan who had ‘sucked the blood of Bengal dry’. The money for Mujib’s modest house in Dacca, about 10,000 rupees, was given to him by H.S. Suhrawardy.65
Neither was Mujib’s political philosophy any different from that of all the Right-wing forces who had ruled Pakistan since 1947. ‘Our aim [said Mujib] is to have a federal parliamentary democracy on the pattern of British democracy’.66 All he was seeking was the fruits of office, patronage, and opportunities for the Bangali bourgeoisie which it had been denied by the West Pakistani élite. The struggle for ‘regional autonomy’ for East Pakistan was a struggle to replace the non-Bengali middle class with a Bengali middle class. There was precious little in it for the people of East Pakistan. On the other hand Bhashani was talking of ‘an Islamic Cultural Revolution’ to establish ‘the rule of the peasants and labourers who constituted over 90 per cent of the population’.67 Bhashani’s reaction to Mujib’s ‘democracy on the pattern of British democracy’ would be unprintable.
In the Awami League’s struggle with the Left in East Pakistan, Mujib needed all the help he could get from Yahya. Mujib’s most pressing need was time in which to spread his charisma and the slogan of ‘Joi Bangla’ to counter Bhashani’s call for a ‘people’s government’. He asked for six months and was rewarded with a whole year. His second requirement was that the President should not pre-empt the issue of ‘regional autonomy’ and render his six points obsolete. They were needed for mass consumption and for whipping up support for the Bengali Right wing.
Yahya was more than obliging. In his broadcast speech of 28 November 1969—the speech the author heard in the company of army officers—Yahya gave details of his plan for holding elections, the framing of a new Constitution and the eventual transfer of power. Yahya said that after holding talks with leading politicians and listening generally to opinion in the country, he had identified two sets of constitutional issues. There were those on which ‘there is no disagreement and these can be considered settled’. These were identified as a parliamentary federal form of government, direct adult franchise, fundamental rights of citizens and their enforcement by the law courts, independence of the judiciary, and the Islamic character of the constitution which should preserve the ideology of Pakistan. Yahya Khan then named ‘three major issues’ on which ‘opinions were divided’. These were (a) the issue of One Unit (this referred to demands in West Pakistan that the former provinces of Sind, Punjab, Baluchistan, and the North-West Frontier, which had been merged into a single administrative unit, should be restored); the issue of one man one vote (under the 1956 Constitution, East Pakistan which had a larger population had accepted parity of representation in the National Assembly); and the relationship between the Central Government and the federating provinces. Yahya Khan said that ‘great harm would be caused if these [major issues] are pitched back in the election arena as there is danger of these issuse creating
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unnecessary bitterness on emotional grounds and thereby causing delay in the peaceful transfer of power’.
Yahya went on to defuse the first two bombs. He announced that One Unit in West Pakistan would be abolished before the elections and the former provinces restored. He also announced that representation of the two wings of Pakistan would be on the basis of one man one vote, thus for the first time giving East Pakistan a guaranteed majority in the Assembly. He said that the generally agreed issues, and the two controversial issues which he had decided, would form the basis of a Legal Framework Order to serve as a provincial Constitution on the basis of which elections would be held.
Yahya left the third and by far the biggest of the bombs—that or ‘regional autonomy’—undisturbed. It was of course needed by Mujib against his enemy, Bhashani. The issue of regional autonomy, said Yahya, would have to be resolved by the Assembly. He agreed that ‘the people of East Pakistan did not have their full share in the decision-making process on vital national issues’ and that ‘they were fully justified in being disatisfied with this state of affairs’. He accepted the need for ‘maximum autonoumy to the two wings of Pakistan as long as this does not impair national integrity and solidarity of the country’. Another issue he left for the Assembly to resolve for itself was that of its own voting procedure. But the voting procedure the Assembly should evolve, said Yahya, ‘should be just and fair to representatives of all regions of Pakistan’. In other words, East Pakistan with a guaranteed majority must not use it for constitution-making because it would then not be ‘just and fair’ to other regions.68 Yahya had thus left Mujib armed with his autonmy issue, and planted an additional bomb of regionalism in the Assembly building.
Bhashani was quick to see through the trap. He congratulated Yahya Khan ‘for solving 75 per cent of the constitutional problems’ and appealed to the President similarly to ‘settle the remaining issue—of provincial autonomy—before the general elections’.69 Bhashani of course realised that the initiative on autonomy was with Mujib and he [Bhashani] was anxious to get on with his ‘Islamic Cultural Revolution’ and the ‘rule of the peasants and labourers’.
The impact of Yahya’s package in West Pakistan was the exact opposite to that in the East. There the elimination of the One Unit issue from the political arena disarmed the Right-wing leaders whom the regime and Government-controlled newspapers were trying to help. For Bhutto the One Unit issue had been an embarrassment. He did not want to support the break up of One Unit for fear of alienating his supporters in the Punjab, and he did not want to oppose it for fear of annoying the Sindhis of his own home province. The prior settlement of the One Unit issue left Bhutto free of any regional encumbrances within West Pakistan. He was left with one issue—socialism. By calling it ‘Islamic socialism’, Bhutto also challenged the Right-wing mullah party led by the Jamat-i-Islami, on its own ground. This is roughly what Jinnah had done in the drive for Pakistan. In their divers ways both Mujib and Bhutto were following in the footsteps of the Father of the Nation. Like Jinnah before him, Bhutto, too, succeeded in outflanking the mullahs. Yahya’s package also diverted the attention of West Pakistani politicians as a whole to resisting East Pakistan’s demands for autonomy. In their hands ‘integrity’ of the country became the antithesis of ‘autonomy’.
The Politics of Autonomy
Mujibur Rahman’s call for ‘autonomy’ for East Pakistan’ was of the same genre as the Congress demand for ‘dominion status within the British Empire’ had been. It stopped short of ‘treason’ but went far enough towards eventual independence. It allowed Mujib to remain a loyal Pakiatani and therefore a ‘moderate’, but it also allowed others within his party and outside it to push towards secession. Mujib’s Awami League was by far the largest single party in East Pakistan, but it was by no means certain that it could command an overall majority even there.
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Mujib was faced with a difficult and complex situation. During the revolt of 1968-69 which toppled Ayub, the Awami League had been moribund with Mujib locked up in prison. That revolt in urban centres had been led by an East Pakistan Students’ All-Party Commmittee of Action and by Bhashani in the countryside. In a land where no less than 96 per cent of the population lives in villages, the peasant leader Bhashani was better placed than Mujib, the leader of the tiny urban bourgeoisie. While Mujib’s long terms of imprisonment had given him some charisma, Bhashani’s charisma was no less. Mujib had no credit to draw on from the Awami League’s or his own part in bringing down Ayub while Bhashani had. In addition, Mujib had committed the cardinal sin of going to the Round Table Conference called by Ayub and appearing to want to compromise with the hated dictotor, while Bhashani and Bhutto had stayed away. Thus Mujib was far from the certain front runner that he has subsequently been assumed to have been.
Mujib had three major assets : (a) he had been the first to define ‘autonomy’ in the six points he announced at Lahore in January 1966; (b) he had suffered imprisonment; and (c) the Awami League had been founded by Suhrawardy as long ago as 1949 and Mujib had inherited the leadership of the Bengali bourgeoisie directly from the late leader. Mujib’s and the Awami League’s autonomy platform had, however, been raided and every political party in East Pakistan now stood on it. The six points were merely a constitutional formula and, like all ‘lawful’ bouregois proposals, neither provided for nor proposed any social or economic change. During Mujib’s absence in prison the Students’ All-Party Committee of Action had drawn up an elevent-point programme which went further. Three of the eleven points were : (a) nationalisation of banks, insurance companies and all big industries; (b) reduction of taxes falling on peasants, and (c) fair wages and bonus for workers. The slogans that had held the masses during 1968-69 had been given by Bhashani. These were jago, jago, Bengali krishak jago (awake, awake, Bengali peasants awake), and jago, jago, Bengali sramik jago (awake, awake, Bengali workers awake). These slogans and the workers’ and peasants’ awakening were an embarrassment to Mujib and the Awami League. They had to think of a better slogan to divert the masses’ attention from hunger and poverty and also from Bhashani. They then used the ultimate weapon of the bourgeoisie everywhere—that of nationalism. They gave the slogan Joi Bangla and began calling East Pakistan Bangladesh—land of the Bengalis. The political rivalries within East Pakistan—not West Pakistani repression—were pushing the Awami League and Mujib towards de facto secession.
To some extent Mujib had history on his side. The Muslim League’s Lahore Resolution of 1940 which proposed partition had demanded that ‘the north-western and eastern zones of India should be grouped to constitute Independent States in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign’.70 That resolution had been moved by the Bengali peasant leader Fazl-ul-Haq. Bengali Muslims led by Fazl-ul-Haq and Nazimuddin had been the first in British India to back Jinnah’s call for Pakistan. Mujib made the most of this and ‘took particular care to debunk criticism of his party and its leaders of [sic] attempting to secede from Pakistan in collusion with Indian agents, or of deviating from the path of Islam or the Pakistan ideology’. He said he wanted ‘to start from scratch on the basis of Lahore Resolution’.71 This is important because the Lahore Resolution had used both words—‘autonomous’ and ‘sovereign’—to describe the relationship between East and West Pakistan. Mujib was for the moment talking of autonomy alone but had the option, still using the same text, of converting it into sovereignty. In any case the people of East Pakistan had long been ardent Pakistanis and would have to be weaned carefully. Yahya had of course allowed him time and had left the autonomy bomb undefused.
Indeed, once the election campaign had officially started on 1 January 1970, Mujib went out of his way to ask Yahya publicly not to grant autonomy to East Pakistan before the election.72 Addressing the Awami League’s first mammoth rally of the campaign in Dacca on 11 January, Mujib also declined to enter into a United Front of all parties in East Pakistan who were also campaigning for autonomy. The
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author’s interpretation of Mujib’s strategy may be suspect in some quarters because he is not a Bengali. It is therefore necessary to turn to a supporter of Mujib.
At the end of 1969 a group o Dacca academics, lawyers, and other Awami League intellecturals brought out a weekly called Forum. It was published by Dr. Kamal Hossain, constitutional adviser to Mujib. The editor was Hamida Hossain and executive editor Dr. Rehman Sobhan, Reader in Economics at Dacca University. Commenting on Mujib’s strategy, Forum wrote :
The time has come what the no-alliance tactics of Awami League needs to be closely scrutinised as to its efficacy in realising the parties’ (sic) proclaimed political goals. Mujib’s oration at different public meetings…has so far covered a wide range of policy issues from nationalisation to foreign policy but has failed to throw sufficient light on the most crucial question : how would it be possible to get his six points incorporated into the next Constitution? His reiterated objection to forming an electoral alliance has been supplemented by his refusal to press for the settlement of substantive autonomy for East Pakistan prior to the general election. This confirms his eagerness to use six points as a best-selling item for the specific purpose of winning maximum Assembly seats from East Pakistan. Towards that end he neither wants Yahya to pre-empt the quantum of autonomy…nor does he want an alliance with other pro-autonomy forces for fear of sharing his charisma and the charm of six points with them.
But in his eagerness to capitalise on his brand of autonomy, he is knowingly or unknowingly assuming a tremendous responsibility upon himself of carrying his demand to its logical conclusion without compromising its contents. While his present tactics will allow Mujib to capture a majority of seats from East Pakistan, he obviously cannot get a constitution of his choice on the basis of his strength in one province alone. To achieve even a simple majority in the House, he will have to look for potential associates both in East and West Pakistan. But in West Pakistan there is hardly any political group today which will not insist on deleting some popular provisions of the six points….This hostility is likely to surface prior to the authentication of the constitution by the President, who has already kept his options open by declaring that he is not going to perform the role of a mere signing machine…
…if Mujib tries to readjust his position after the general election, he will fine such options highly dangerous. After the tremendous build-up of mass feelings through his campaign for six points and chanting of Joi Bangla any search on his behalf for a workable compromise…will be looked upon by the average man, including his party youngsters, as a crude attempt to barter away some of the province’s rights He will also be very vulnerable from the flank due to his policy of exclusion of other pro-autonomy forces in the province…..The political options before him pose a dilemma….On one side if he endeavours to make post-election modifications in the six points with a view to present a workable constitution to the country, he will inevitably impose serious strains on his popularity. If on the other hand he gives precedence to his popularity, he will have to preserve an uncompromising posture…The can only precipitate a serious deadlock in the Assembly…But should Mujib choose to carry the fight for autonomy to the street after failing in the Assembly, he would not only need fundamentally to reorganise his party…but would also require close co-operation from other pro-autonomy forces within this province.78
The author of the article, Muyeedul Hasan, had thus written the tragic scenario that was to unfold up to the election in December 1970 and after, until the army crackdown in March 1971. The author had a 75-minute discussion with Rehman Sobhan in the Forum office in Dacca in February 1970. Sobhan confirmed that Mujib was aware of the dangers and added, ‘Bengali nationalism is now th thing’. When asked about Pakistani nationalism, Sobhan replied, ‘It may
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linger through the inertia of history’. So Mujib and the Awami League knew what they were doing. Confirmation came a few days later when Mujib, speaking at Kushtia, said that if autonomy was not achieved constitutionally, he would launch a ‘mass movement’.74 Later Mujib was to say that he would sacrifice another million lives to achieve autonomy for East Pakistan.
While Mujib was prepared to sacrifice lives by the million, he was not prepared to sacrifice any of his own so-called ‘principles’. It is understandable why Mujib would not want to compromise, or appeared to do so, with a self-appointed dictator such as Yahya undoubtedly was. Mujib’s obstinacy in refusing to come to terms with fellow Bengalis is less understandable. His stand may have been courageous, but it was courage of the reckless. Whether he knew it or not during 1970, he lost effective control over the Awami League and particularly its militant Left. Indeed, Mujib’s no-alliance policy forced the militants virtually to abandon their own parties and to flock to the Awami League. It was the kind of situation in which the Indian Communist Party had advised its ‘Muslim’ members to join the Muslim League and work for an ‘Islamic Pakistan’. The Awami League ceased to be a political party—it became an unruly mob. The militants, in the name of the Awami League, began to harass the extreme Right. Meetings and rallies organised by the Pakistan Democratic Party and the Jamat-i-Islami, and their party offices, were raided and often set on fire. The Left was reinforced by Naxalites from Calcutta. In later official Pakistani propaganda, these armed men came to be called ‘Indian infiltrators and miscreants’.
By May it was clear that Mujib had successfully isolated Bhashani and his National Awami Party. Bhashani, having ‘little faith in democracy as a vehicle for social and cocnomic change’,75 tried to get ahead of the Awami League’s inexorable march to overwhelming victory at the polls by calling for a ‘people’s movement’. What Bhashani did not realise was that his militants had already deserted him and were now operating under the cover of the Awami League. For his Maoist followers, Bhashani was a moderate calling for an ‘Islamic Cultural Revolution’. The revolutionaries began to use Bengali chauvinism. The eight million non-Bengali Muslims—the Bihars—who had settled in East Pakistan after partition in 1947, became their target. In June the Guardian reported that ‘the situation has already reached a point where anybody who can get out is leaving Most of those leaving East Pakistan are West Pakistanis….Civil servants who are forced to live in East Pakistan are taking the precaution of sending their families home. Even some well-to-do Bengalis are…moving to West Pakistan’.76 Some of the excesses of West Pakistani troops and army officers after March 1971 ought to be seen as the behaviour of men who had been living in fear and away from their families for more than six months. This does not excuse them, but it helps to explain the ferocity of their conduct.
As if the Awami League bandwagon was not already hurtling downhill and out of control at a frightening speed, the cyclone which hit the Ganges delta in November, killing 200,000, gave Mujib the justification for not even trying to control it. The regime bungled the early relief operations and the bureaucrats were seen by a shocked world for what they were—an alienated group of men who did little and cared even less for the mass of suffering human beings in their charge. It took Yahya Khan a whole week to declare the ravaged delta a ‘major calamity area’. Even the Government-controlled Right-wing Dacca daily, the Morning News, was moved to anger. In a banner headline across the front page the newspaper asked, ‘where is Relief?’ Yahya later flew to Dacca and took personal control of relief operations, but it was too late. The damage had been done. Bengali minds were frozen solid with hatred for the West Pakistani bureaucrats. Bhashani took the opportunity of calling for an ‘Independent East Pakistan’.78 Mujib merely promised ‘a million more lives’ to achieve ‘autonomy’.
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The Election and its Aftermath
In the elections of 7 December 1970 the Awami League captured all but two of East Pakistan’s 162 seats. Mujib’s victory was a triumph for his oratory and skillful electioneering at the emotional, some would say irresponsible, level. He did not want to share power or Assembly seats with any other group even in East Pakistan. He had achieved that objective. He had also achieved the larger objective of comanding a clear majority in the National Assembly over the combined strength of all parties in West Pakistan. Bhutto, the other rabble rouser, had also emerged triumphant from West Pakistan where his Pakistan People’s Party captured 81 of the 138 seats*
The result of the election however suffered from two weaknesses. In East Pakistan it gave no representation whatever to the enormous following commanded by the minority parties, particularly those of the extreme Left—the have-nothing group—and of the extreme Right-the have-mosts. Power was concentrated in the hands of the upstarts, intellectuals, and have-not-enoughs of the Bengali bourgeoisie in the Awami League. Both the extremes distrusted the Awami League. For the extreme Left, Mujib was too far to the Right. For the extreme Right, he was too far to the Left. Nor had the Awami League taken enough care in the selection of candidates to ensure representation for the entire spectrum of Bengali society. Every Bengali of whatever persuasion wanted ‘autonomy’, but not everyone wanted the Awami League. According to a detailed analysis of the voting pattern, only 39.8 per cent of the electorate in East Pakistan voted for the Awami League candidates.
In West Pakistan Bhutto’s victory was similar. But there there was no major party further to the Left of Bhutto. All the Right-wing parties were almost annihilated. The outstanding features of the result were two : (a) that landlords in a feudal society could no longer rely on the peasants’ vote as a matter of course, and (b) that the kind of Islam the mullah preached commanded little political following. The election accurately reflected the Righ-Left polarisation in West Pakistan. The people had voted with their empty stomachs. While Mujib had fed his hungry masses on a diet of ‘autonomy’ and six points, Bhutto had held out the promise of smashing the hated ‘twenty-two families’ with a programme of ‘Islamic socialism’ that included wholesale nationalisation.
The electorate by its verdict demanded peaceful revolutionary change—a contracdiction in terms—through a process which is necessarily gradualist. Suddenly the civil and military bureaucrats, the feudal lords and the ‘twenty-two families’ who had monopolised power and wealth since independence found themselves entirely without representation. To accept and implement the election result would mean a degree of shift in the power base of the society that ruling classes do not normally accept peacefully. Resistance was certain—the only question was how it would come.
The tripartite alliance of bureaucrats, landlords and industrial magnates had two more cards to play—power was still held by the bureaucrats with Yahya as their front man, and Bhutto, a true-blue aristocrat, had been one of them and part of the Establishment. In the run-up to the election Yahya had imprisoned more of Bhutto’s followers than of any other party. The Government-controlled press had promoted his Right-wing rivals. After the election Yahya, looking for a possible ally, developed a liking for Bhutto. In the wings of course stood the highly efficient instrument of internal repression—the army.
* The National Assembly was to consist of 300 elected seats (162 from East Pakistan and 138 from West Pakistan). An additional 13 seats were reserved for women to be elected by the Assembly itself (seven from East and six from West Pakistan), making a total of 313. In newspaper reports it was assumed that all the seven women from East Pakistan would be Awami League nominees and the party’s total was given as 167. In West Pakistan it was assumed that four of the six women would be Bhutto’s nominees. The P.P.P. total was therefore reported as 85 seats.
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The army however could not be used in both parts of Pakistan at once. Ayub Khan had tried it in 1968-69 and failed. Bhutto’s support in the Punjab had been overwhelming, and the army was so overwhelmingly Punjabi that it could not be used in West Pakistan. The only place where the soldiers could be relied upon to fire at civilians was in East Pakistan.
This scenario appears close to the conspiracy theory of history, but this is not the author’s intention. What is true is that such events as those that unfolded in Pakistan after the election have given ries to such theories. Conspiracy need not necessarily involve a cabal in a dimly lit smoke-filled room. Conspiratorial behaviour by a number of key individuals may follow from habit, or from pressures, or both. In Pakistan there does not appear to have been a conscious conspiracy to abort the political process once again. But this course had been followed by the élitist regimes so often before that as pressures mounted there may have been an unconscious preference for doing again what had been successfully done before. For instance, although Yahya called Mujib ‘Mr. Prime Minister’ in January, his description of Mujib as a ‘traitor’ in March carried greater conviction to those whose natural inclination was to regard the Awami League as secessionist. In the triangular dialogue that developed between Yahya, Bhutto and Mujib during February and March, it was natural for Yahya to side with Bhutto. Yahya’s own Legal Framework Order—the provisional Constitution—insisted that the Assembly should devise its own voting procedures and should produce a constitution in 120 days or stand dissolved. It was natural for the minority party in the Assembly—Bhutto’s—to insist that Mujib should make concessions in negotiations outside the Assembly. It was equally natural for the majority party—Mujib’s—to insist that all issues should be decided in the Assembly.
Constitutionally—according to the rules laid down by Yahya—Mujib was right. Yahya ignored his own rules and first delayed the convening of the Assembly as a form of pressure on Mujib. Then, when threatened by Bhutto with a boycott, Yahya again yielded to Bhutto and ignored the demands of the majority party—the Awami League. It was Bhutto who first threatened to take the issue to the streets when he called on his supporters to ‘strike from Khyber to Karachi’.79 Yahya gave in and called off the National Assembly which was due to meet in Dacca on 3 March. The two men had met just prior to Bhutto’s threat and Yahya’s hasty announcement that the Assembly session would be postponed sine die. From Dacca it looked very much like the ‘conspiracy’ Mujib had always told the Bengalis to expect.
Mujib’s reaction was predictable, as it was inevitable. The time had come for him to launch the ‘struggle’ he had promised ‘after the polls’. He too called for a strike. Not given to half measures, he called for a five-day strike. It was probably thought necessary to call a prolonged strike to pre-empt his rival Bhashani. In the past Bhashani’s frequent strike calls had been more successful than Mujib’s. Bhashani too was on the warpath. Having been mauled by the Awami League in the election, Bhashani had been going round trying to reassert his authority. A prolonged strike called by Mujib would not allow Bhashani time to demonstrate his own strength in the streets. Having successfully kept Bhashani out of the Assembly, the Bengali bourgeoisie was now anxious to exclude him from the streets as well.
There was however an essential difference between Bhutto’s call for a strike in West Pakistan and Mujib’s call for one in East Pakistan. Unlike Bhutto, Mujib was sitting on a dangerous powder magazine of hatred and Bengali chauvinism which he had filled in his drive for exclusive and unmitigated power. In January 1970, as Muyeedul Hasan had pointed out, Mujib had failed to face the vital question : how would it be possible to get his six points incorporated into the next constitution? In March 1971 the question had to be answered. Mujib’s answer was his slight but absolute majority—167 out of 313 seats—in the Assembly. If he were thwarted there—‘a million more lives’. It was the latter ‘sacrifice’ he now offered.
Yahya and Bhutto may have been stalling, but Mujib was not blameless. He insisted on the ‘right
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of the majority’ but he ignored another equally strong precept of ‘parliamentary democracy on the pattern of British democracy’ which he was anxious to establish in Pakistan. This demands that the party leader who wins an election declares himself a national leader and promises to govern in the interest of everyone, including those who may have voted against him. Within days of his impressive victory, Mujib should have flown to the capital, Islamabad, and toured West Pakistan. This is precisely what his predecessor as leader of the Awami League, Suhrawardy, had done in 1954. In August 1969, long before the election, when Mujib had gone to Karachi, the author had witnessed the enthusiastic reception he had been given there. After his election victory, Mujib would no doubt have been welcomed in West Pakistan as a national leader. Mujib did utter ‘Joi Pakistan’ once, but failed to follow it up. The rabble rouser had a chance to turn into a stateman. He threw it away. Instead he stayed in Dacca, wallowing in the adulation of his converted followers—and still breathing fire to warn the exploiters from West Pakistan. The gravest charge that Yahya has made against Mujib is unanswerable. The White Paper, with much justification, says :
All major West Pakistani political leaders, including Mr. Bhutto, the leader of the largest political party in West Pakistan, flew to Dacca to negotiate a settlement with Shaikh Mujibur Rahman. The President of Pakistan also visited Dacca…and is publicly on record as describing Shaikh Mujibur Rahman as the future Prime Minister of Pakistan. Shaikh Mujibur Raham however failed to respond to several invitaions to visit West Pakistan.80
Instead, long before Bhutto and Yahya began to stall and even before polling had taken place in the nine constituencies affected by the cyclone, Mujib was telling the foreign press that ‘if it is needed I will call for a revolution’.81 The conclusion cannot be avoided that Mujib was on the warpath even before he was provoked. This must cast more than a shadow of doubt on his protestations that he believed in the democratic method. In retrospect it has become abundantly clear that some of the top men in the Awami League regarded their mandate for ‘autonomy’ as a sufficient justification for secession and sovereignty.
In any case, at the beginning of March Mujib was ready to be provoked. Yahya and Bhutto had given him the excuse for launching his ‘revolution’. By calling a five-day strike, Mujib sparked off the powder magazine of hatred and communal frenzy. Hordes of Bengalis indulged in an orgy of murder, rape, arson and looting. The victims were West Pakistanis and Bihari Muslims throughout East Pakistan. This gave Yahya and the ‘law and order’ brigade of bureaucarts the excuse they in turn were looking for. Lieutenant-General Tikka Khan, a tough soldier known for his hawkish views, was appointed to replace the affable Vice-Admiral S.M. Ahsan as Governor of East Pakistan. Ahsan, who had been Governor for two years, had developed an excellent personal relationship with Mujib and was generally liked by the Bengalis. He is believed to have advised against seeking a military solution in East Pakistan. A basic weakness of autocratic rulers everywhere is that they only accept the advice the like to hear. For tendering sound advice Ahsan was dismissed.
Tikka Khan arrived in Dacca on 7 March. By then the Awami League was running a parallel administration. No taxes were being paid and people needed the Awami League’s approval to draw their own money from the banks. No High Court judge could be found to administer the oath of office to the new Governor. Mujib’s ‘revolution’ was in full swing. But it is one thing to control the offices and paralyse the administration : it is quite another to control the mobs. The Awami League ‘volunteers’ could hardly handle a situation which was often beyond the control of even the professional police. In the first phase of the ‘revolution’ Mujib’s followers were taking lives rather than sacrificing their own. According to Martin Adeney of the Guardian, in Chittagong early in March the so-called followers of Mujib ‘killed about 2,000 people, laying waste hundreds of square yards of squatter colonies’.82
Mujib and his followers were not alone in regarding the situation as a deliberate plot to deprive
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the majority of its rights. Most political parties in East Pakistan who had been defeated by the Awami League protested equally strongly. These included the National Awami Party, the Bangla Chatra League, the Bangla National League, and even the Jamat-i-Islami.83 Mujib said, ‘It is only too clear to the people of the country and indeed the world that it is a minority group of western wing [West Pakistan] which has obstructed and is continuing to obstruct the transfer of power.’ He called it a ‘conspiracy of the vested interests’.84 Nor were Mujib and the Bengalis alone in seeing it as a conspiracy to ‘maintain the dictatorship of the minority.’ Air Marshal Nur Khan, who had been Yahya’s partner in the coup that brought him to office and who was later Governor of the Punjab, said that ‘it was the legal right of Shaikh Mujibur Rahman to rule the country.’ He feared that ‘the bureaucracy and advisers were playing a regrettable role in worsening the situation’.85
Yahya appeared to yield and recalled the Assembly to meet in Dacca on 25 March. Bhutto dropped his conditions and agreed to go to the Assembly. Mujib was quick to point out that Yahya had not consulted him as the majority leader in deciding when and where the Assembly should meet. ‘This negligence [said Mujib] towards the leader of the majority party was in fact a dishonour shown to the 70 million people of Bangladesh’. Mujib also regarded the arrival of Tikka Khan as an unfriendly and threatening gesture by Yahya. Mujib became convinced that he was about to be arrested. Though he had no known plans for leaving Dacca, he told a rally to obey his colleagues if he was not ‘in their midst’. At the same time he laid down four more conditions of this own for going to the Assembly. The first of these was the ‘immediate withdrawal of Martial Law’. In effect he was asking for the disarming of Tikka Khan. In the meantime more ships loaded with troops and ammunition began docking at Chittagong.
On 15 March Yahya Khan flew to Dacca for talks with Mujib and on 25 March the President flew back with orders to the soldiers to ‘do their duty and fully restore the authority of the Government’. Mujib was arrested and inprisoned in West Pakistan as he expected he would be. There are three versions of what happened in Dacca between the three men—Yahya, Bhutto, and Mujib. Yahya’s version was published as a White Paper.86 Bhutto’s version is unlikely to be greatly dissimilar. Mujib’s version will be believed in Bangladesh. What is certain is that the Awami League version put out from Calcutta is also highly coloured.87 What it does not explain is why men like Nurul Islam and Tajuddin Ahmed, ‘Acting President’ and ‘Prime Minister’ of Bangladesh respectively, had to flee to India. After all their leader, Mujib, stayed put and faced imprisonment.
Civil wars, like international wars, are occasionally unavoidable. The one that raged in East Pakistan was brought about by the ineptitude of those who had ruled the country without a mandate and by the Awami League’s own extremists. Just as the bureaucrats, with past successes to encourage them, were moving towards another coup, so Mujib was haunted by past failures. As Adeney of the Guardian put it, ‘Perhaps the secret of Mujib’s failure to compromise successfully was that he never expected to succeed. That after 10 years or so in gaol he expected that something would come in his way. Certainly he saw himself as a martyr’.88
The Awami League’s greatest weakness was that while it had a vast following, it did not control the behaviour of its followers. To the Bengalis’ eternal shame the first blood in the civil war was drawn by them. They killed, looted, burnt, and raped innocent West Pakistani civilians and non-Bengali Muslims—the Biharis—for three weeks before 25 March, taking an estimated 100,000 lives (including seven of the author’s relatives in Sylhet; four of them were children under nine and two were women). Mujib failed to rise to the occasion to stop this earnage. Bhashani, the people’s man, was the only one to condemn the senseless killing of Bihari Muslisms.
The worker’s revolt in the country as a whole—East and West—which began in 1968-69 and first
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brought down Ayub and then voted the élite out of existence, had been turned into an East-West confrontaion. There was no further need for Yahya to hand over power. There was a war on and only the army could fight it. On the day Yahya ordered the army to restore his authority in East Pakistan, in West Pakistan workers occupied the Rustam Sohrab Cycle Factory in Lahore, took over the management and hoisted a red flag. At the neighbouring industrial centre of Lyallpur in the Punjab rioting workers burnt down a police post, two official cars, the town hall and two cinemas. The press censorship that Yahya Khan imposed came too late to stop detailed accounts of the workers’ revolt in West Pakistan from appearing in newspapers.89 At this point Yahya, the regime and the élite were under pressure in West Pakistan as well.
The tinder of poverty in both East and West Pakistan was still smouldering despite the ultimate diversion of civil war. Bhutto had played into Yahya’s hands. Yahya, acting on behalf of the bureaucracy and the vested interests, had destroyed Pakistan more effectively than Mujib’s six points could have done. This was one coup that could not possibly succeed.
০০০
6. Images at War
The Indian paranoia over Pakistan is directly linked with the sense of insult average Hindus feel from the knowledge that the Muslim minority ruled over them from when Qutbuddin Aibek established his empire in the twelfth century, and that, just when the Hindus were about to take over control of their ‘Mother India’ after another hundred years of a European raj, the wily Muslim managed to divide it. This has produced the fear that the ultimate goal of the Muslim must be to rule all over India once again. Krishna Menon, foreign policy adviser to Nehru and Defence Minister until 1962, in the outstanding exponent of this view. Menon regards Pakistan as the first instalment of Muslim revival on the subcontinent.
Nationalism in Pakistan and India
Hans Kohn says that nationalism ‘….is first and foremost a state of mind, an act of consciousness…’1 In order even to begin to explain or understand almost any human behaviour on the South Asian subcontinent, one has to come to grips with the dominant factor in the state of mind and conscisousness of the actors. This facto is commonly recognised in the west to be ‘religion’. In fact religion in this sense is not what is commonly understood by that term—a set of dogmas believed and sometimes practised by individuals. Religion in this context has very little to do with dogma and doctrine. Religion that influences the political behaviour of individuals and groups, like many other variables in behavioural equations, is merely a symbol standing for the indelible memory of a common historical experience. A Hindu is one who regards the history of India as one long record of the failure of native Indians to assert themselves against successive alien invasions. A Muslim is one who regards the history of India as part of the glorious past of Islamic expansion and domination. More than a thousand years of living together on the subcontinent have failed to produce the ‘shared historical experience’2 that is said to shape a homogeneous nation. It would appear that, in addition to a shared historical experience, there must also be a common interpretation of history.
Images of the past lead to images of the future. The Hindu interpretation of history seeks to restore the honour of ‘Mother India’ in all territories that were formerly under successive alien rule—first Muslim and then British. It is this image of the future which demands the dismemberment of Pakistan. Or, as Selig S. Harrison has put it, ‘the fulfilment of Indian nationalism requires an assertion of Hindu hegemony over the Muslims of the subcontinent in some form or another’.3 It was this requirement of
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Indian nationalism which was thwarted by the partition of British India in 1947.
The Muslim interpretation of the past seeks to retain those parts of the subcontinent in which Muslims are a majority. It was this image of the future which was conjured into existence by partition. The creation of Pakistan was the shattering of the Hindu-Indian image of the future—a part of that image was immediately retrieved by the military occupation of Muslim Kashmir. It was this shattering of the Hindu image which always made Nehru emotional on issues concerning India and Pakistan. He often accused the outside world of a lack of ‘understanding’ of India’s point of view in relations with Pakistan. There has always been a wide gap between Indian moralising attitudes on issues in the rest of the world and Indian attitudes towards Pakistan.4 For India the frontiers of Pakistan represent cracks cause by the shattering of a self-portrait which had sought to impose an unrealistic image of the ‘historic unity of India’. Hugh Tinker defines it thus :
The historic unity of India is a theme which nationalist writers insist upon. It is not an empty dream. The eternal snows of the Himalaya, the greater rivers of sind (Indus) to the west and the Brahmaputra to the east form the legendary boundaries of Mother India, Bharat Varsa. This idea is expressed in political terms in the concept of Cakravartin, universal emperor, and the ideal has been almost realised in epic periods of Indian history. The vision is realised in socio-religious terms in the grand design of Hinduism….From Sind to Brahmaputra, the priestly authority of the Brahmin receives supreme regard, while the despised, subhuman degradation of the Untouchable is equally universal.5
How unreal was this image is also pointed out by Tinker when he says that ‘the hundred years of British rule formed the only time when India was effectively linked together as an entity’.6 Unity in diversity may be an attractive idea, but the fact remains that such a unity has never been achieved on the subcontinent through the voluntary co-operation of the diverse units. The experiecnce of continental Europe at a comparable stage of history is similar. The European ‘culture’ and Christianity’ failed to prevent the ‘Balkanisation’ of Europe. The so-called ‘historic unity of India’ was a delusion or, at best, the rationalisation of a unity which was forced upon the subcontinent by a colonial power. The image of a unified landmass as the land of the Hindus was internalised through such ‘patriotic’ Hindu religious songs as the Bande Matram (Hail Mother). It first appeared in Anandamath, a Bengali novel by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee published in 1882. The story featured the children of Kali (Hindu goddes of war) fighting to clear India of all aliens, including the Muslims. Appeals were also made to the Bhagavad Gita. Men like Bal Gangadhar Tilak used the Gita to justify the forcible conversion of Muslims to Hinduism and the killing of those who might resist.
This militant Hinduism was encouraged by Gandhi’s Hindu revivalism, though in the Gandhi himself was assassinated by a Hindu puritan when the Mahatma tried to stop the genocide of Muslims at the time of partition. Men like Nehru were of course entirely free of such extremism. But in the vast Hindu society he led, Nehru was in a very small minority. His greatest achievement—a hollow one—has been the formal commitment to secularism which is written into the Indian Constitution. So far, in spite of the legislation abolishing it and making it a criminal offecne, India has not even succeeded in eliminating that aspect of the caste system that ostracises millions of Hindus as untouchables. Anti-Muslim riots also remain a regular and ugly feature of Indian society.
Nehru’s secular nationalism—the nationalism of the westernised Hindu élite—relies upon Hindu militant nationalism to achieve political mobilisation. The anti-Pakistan animus in foreign policy is an essential prerequisite for internal stability in India. It keeps alive the hope that some day the unified ‘Mother India’ of Hindu dreams will be realised.
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Pakistani nationalism, on its side, is not without its delusions of grandeur—the grandeur of the caliphs of Damascus, Bagdad, and Cordova; and the epic victories of Tariq, Saladin, and Babur. The Muslim concept of nationalism does not recognise geographical, ethnic, or linguistic boundaries. In its internationalism it has features in common with Zionism. The image of the past that inspires the Jews is a much more distant and mythical one than that which inspires the Muslims. When Indian national identity began to acquire Hindu symbolism, Muslims found themselves unable to identify with it. Neither could a minority thinly spread over a subcontinent acquire a sentimental attachement to the political geography of the raj. Nor was the Muslim image of the past much help in concentrating their minds on British India. Muslim empires in the area had at various times extended from Kabul to Calcutta.
This absence of an identity defined in terms of a territory threw Muslim thinkers in British India into confusion. Throughout history territory had been incidental to Muslim identity. The advent of the age of the territorially defined nation-state in Europe, and the breakup of the Ottoman Empire into national units, made the Muslims of India feel insecure. This confusion over national identity was reflected in the writings of Iqbal which inspired the Indian Muslims. Iqbal’s first call was for the Muslims to regard the whole of India as the sparrow regards the orchard. But he also preached internationalism and echoed the Prophet’s dictum that God had made the whole world a mosque for the Muslims. Still later Iqbal called on the Muslims to unite from the Nile to Samarkand. Finally, he called for the partition of British India.
It was not until 1940 when the Muslim League published its map for Pakistan that the Muslims of British India acquired a territorial identity. Indeed, the Europeanised Indian Muslim élite could not operate outside a territorially defined nationalism. The Pakistan idea provided it for them. Once a territory had been defined, Jinnah came into his own and led the introduce to the promised land.
The partition of 1947 however not only shattered the Hindu image of ‘Mother India’; it also shattered the Muslim image of Pakistan. The latter image had been created by the Muslim League map which showed the whole of the Punjab, Bengal, and Assam in Pakistan. In the event half of the Punjab, West Bengal, and nearly all of Assam were awarded to India. The Muslim image of Pakistan might have been adjusted to the new boundaries if the State had been allowed to include all the Muslim majority areas—according to the principle on which partition was based. But even the ‘moth-eaten Pakistan’ (Jinnah’s phrase) which was conceded was further truncated by India’s occupation of Muslim Kashmir. This was an act of senseless folly which sealed the fate of the subcontinent. It was interpreted in Muslim Pakistan as Hindu India’s continued commitment to the territorial boundaries of Hindu nationalism as expressed in the mythical concept of ‘Mother India’.
From 1947 to this day the story of Pakistan-Indian relations is a story of two shattered, incomplete, self-images each trying to restore itself at the expense of the other.
The Strategy of Conflict
There was one important difference between the two incomplete, competing and incompatible images. For Pakistan’s territorial self-image to be restored all that was required was a settlement in Kashmir; India’s shattered self-image required the reabsorption of the whole of Pakistan.
This formation of the post-partition conflicts on the subcontinent however is a simple billiard-ball model in which each tries to push the other off the table. There is evidence that neither India nor Pakistan followed the strategy of total victory over the other. Pakistan had only 24 per cent of the area and 18 per cent of the population of British India and its resources were even smaller and less developed. There could not possibly be any question of Pakistan’s trying to invade the whole of the subcontinent and re-
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establishing the Moghul Empire. India’s size (….did not text clear….) invasion and reabsorption of Pakistan a credible option. Nehru set his face against this. But even Nehru had to satisfy militant Hinduism by showing that he was not abandoning the commitment to ‘Mother India’. This he chose to do by (a) refusing to recognise the Muslim character of Kashmir and Pakistan’s claims to it; (b) trying to keep Pakistan weak; and (c) practising an international diplomacy designed to create an Afro-Asian sphere of influence in which Pakistan would be under Indian hegemonic patronage. This threefold strategy of Indian policy towards Pakistan has been relentlessly pursued over 25 years.
Pakistan’s greatest weakness was not that it had been deprived of a complete image through the Indian occupation of Kashmir; almost all Pakistan’s difficulties arose from the fact that the control of the new State soon into the hands of those who cared little either for Kashmir or for the people of Pakistan itself. They were opportunist politicians, feudal landlords determined to preserve their estates, careerist and mercenary civil and military officers, and of course the acquisitive entrepreneurs. They can probably be charged—and history probably will so charge them—with having preferred their own interests to those of the nation they claimed to lead. The almost universal hatred of ‘the twenty-two families’ in Pakistan, and the vociferous demand to ‘hang Yahya’ that was heard in West Pakistan after the military defeat of 1971, are indicative of the mood of the nation.
It is not however for the Pakistani people to complain that they were led by such men. The fact remains that these were the only ones that the nation produced with any claim to qualities of leadership and organisational expertise. The mullah was so concerned with the exact length of his trousers, the size of his beard, and the ritualised ‘Islam’ that he preached and practised, that the ‘good Muslim’ had no time to ponder over the problems of defence, economic developement, administration, and nation-buliding. The image of Islam projected by such men, among them Mandoodi, has contributed almost as much to the tragedy of Pakistan as the incompetence and irrelevance of the heathen élite. The mullah indeed bears a greater responsibility in so far as he was more directly in touch with the masses than the pukka sahib who was in any case the creation of an alien culture.
The ‘ideology of Pakistan’ in fact had no following either among the mullah party or among the sahib class. The phrase is an abstraction which is understood only by the masses. Even the massas ‘understand’ it in the sense that they thought it must have some meaning to those who used it. Those who used it did so in the knowledge that they did not really have to understand it so long as the people thought they did. And so the phrase has got bandied about in the arena of the country’s internal and external struggle for survival.
In the external struggle part of the ‘ideology’ of Pakistan was the commitment to liberate Kashmir. When the commitment was made there is little doubt that it was sincere. The fear that India would be tempted to invade a weak Pakistan was equally well founded. But what the élite understood by this was that Pakistan should be militarily strong. In the process of seeking military strength however the rulers of Pakistan destroyed the ultimate strength of national cohesion. This meant that the army had to be used to impose an artificial unity and ultimately to prosecute a self-destructive civil war. India’s objective of keeping Pakistan weak was achieved through the unexpected route of diverting the enemy’s resources to wasteful defence expenditure.
In foreign policy Pakistan for a time succeeded in avoiding hegemonic control by India. This was done through the shortsighted but effective manipulation of the internaitonal environment of the 1950s in which the dominant factor was the Cold War. Pakistan became an enthusiastic member of America’s anti-Communist crusade. Its membership of the Bagdad Pact and the South East Asia Treaty Organisation gave it an international status and identity different from India’s, which made Nehru very angry. Nehru accused Pakistan of bringing the Cold War to India’s doorstep. The Soviet Union which had earlier tried
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to cultivate good relations with Pakistan, became an enemy. India tried to get Pakistan ostracised in the Afro-Asian club with limited success.
While the Pakistani rulers were busy relishing the patronage bestowed on them by Eisenhower and Dulles, the John F. Kennedy team was preparing to take over the White House. Indian diplomacy almost ignored the Republican Administration in Washington and concentrated on the Democratic aspirants to office. Ayub, who had established his dictatorship two years (….did not text clear….) not to distinguish between an ally (Pakistan) and a non-aligned India.7 There was in fact more to it than that : soon after taking office Kennedy sent his Vice-President, Lyndon Johnson, on a tour of Asia with an express request to Nehru ‘to extend his leadership to other areas in South-East-Asia’. Also in 1961 Louis Fisher in his book Russia, America and the World, put forward a plan for a confederation between India, Pakistan, and Kashmir with Srinagar as the new capital.8 For Pakistan the American connection became counter-productive after the brief Sino-Indian conflict of 1962. Then President Kennedy and Harold Macmillan, the British Prime Minister, offered military aid to India on a massive scale and Nehru accepted. Pakistan’s alliance with the U.S. virtually at an end.
Pakistan’s next move to escape Indian hegemony was to turn to China. To everyone’s surprise, including Pakistan, China’s response was positive. China no doubt was acting on the precept that the ‘enemy’s enemy is a friend’. The Pakistani rulers however read more into Chinese ‘friendship’ than was there to read. Perhaps emboldened by the Chinese connection, Ayub Khan tried to engineer a revolt in Indian-occupied Kashmir in 1965 with tragic consequences for himself and for the country. The only positive result of the war was that the Soviet Union for a time after Tashkent became more neutral as between Pakistan and India. That however was irrelevant to a State which soon after the 1965 war, began to drift towards internal disorder and civil war.
The Prelude to War
There have been few, if any, civil wars that have not involved external intervention in some form or another. India’s involvement in a civil war in Pakistan was as natural as it was inevitable. The only question was the degree and level of this involvement and whether it would lead to internaitonal war. In strict international law India can be accused of interference in the internal affairs of another State; in strict logic however India could have avoided it only by exercising a degree of restraint unusual among hostile neighbours. In any case, India was first associated with the movement for autonomy in East Pakistan by the opponents of Shaikh Mujibur Rahman and the Awami League. In 1967 Ayub Khan had Mujib arrested and charged with having conspired with India to secure the secession of East Pakistan. It was called the Agartala Conspiracy Case after the Indian border city where the Awami League conspirators were alleged to have met Indian agents. Mujib has always called it the ‘Islamabad Conspiracy Case’, alleging that the whole thing was fabricated by Ayub and his bureaucrats in West Pakistan.
After the invasion and occupation of East Pakistan by India on behalf of the Awami League there is an inevitable tendency in West Pakistan to believe that the Agartala case was not a trumped up charge after all; that Mujib had always been part of an Indian conspiracy to destroy Pakistan. The truth of the matter will of course never be known. It is diffucult to believe however that Ayub, had he the evidence he claimed he had, would have let Mujib go free as he did. It has also to be considered that in Pakistan political adversaries make a habit of accusing each other of being Indian agents. During the election campaign even Bhutto was accused of having once offered half of Kashmir to India.9 Bhutto had put himself forward as the one who did not want the 1965 ceasefire. Air Marshal Nur Khan, who commanded the air force during the war, told the country that ‘Mr. Bhutto is wrong when he says he wanted war with India. It is we [the service chiefs] who wanted the war’.10 The ghost of India has loomed so large in the domestic politics of Pakistan that it would be unsafe to convict Mujib and his colleagues of a long-
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standing conspiracy with India to break up Pakistan. This is particularly so because almost invariably the accusations of collusion with India have been made by the ruling clique, the sycophants and those close to the centre of power. They have freely used the familiar technique of identifying internal opponents with the external enemy.
What is undoubtedly true is that once the chance to remove the ‘stigma of Pakistan’ from one corner of ‘Mother India’ offered itself, Hindu India seized it with both hands. India also encouraged the secessionist elements in East Pakistan. During the 1969 upheaval All-India Radio had tried to provoke an uprising of Bengali peasants by falsely announcing that Bhashani had been arrested. Again during the Bhutto-Mujib talks in Dacca in February 1971, the All-India Radio announced ‘deadlock’ when the participants were reporting ‘progress’. A few weeks earlier the hijacking of an Indian airliner to Lahore by two alleged Kashmiri ‘freedom fighters’ had been used by India to ban overflights between East and West Pakistan. Yahya later claimed that the hijackers were Indian agents and the incident had been a deliberate plot to give India an excuse to ban overflights.
India may have been guilty of all this, but it could not possibly be accused of engineering the political crisis in February and March which led to civil war. That crisis arose almost entirely from the actions of the regime and its friends in West Pakistan. It was Yahya who first stalled in calling the Assembly into session, and it was Yahya who adjourned it sine die, provoking Mujib into calling his supporters out into the streets. It was Yahya who finally called out the army to suppress the Awami League in one of one of the bloodiest actions taken by professional soldiers against an unarmed civilian population. It is of course true that Mujib had offered ‘a million more lives’, but Yahya didn’t have to take them. On the other hand Mujib’s and the Awami League’s commitment to Pakistan appears to have been paper-thin. When leaving London for his triumphant return to Dacca, Mujib said at Heathrow Airport, ‘I never considered myself a Pakistani and I never shall’.11 Mujib’s earlier protestations that he was a loyal Pakistani and that all he wanted was ‘autonomy within on Pakistan’ would appear to have been less than genuine, though changed circumstances may alter commitments and even memories.
India finally went to war when it became clear that the Awami League or the various mukti bahinis, although armed and trained by India, were incapable on their own of dislodging, or even seriously harassing, the Pakistan Army. The escalation of Indian involvement between March and the invasion in November was a slow, gradual process. This is not to say that the invasion was not planned. Reporting on the early progress of the invasion The Times wrote, ‘Clearly the Indian Army has had a long-standing plan for the invasion of East Pakistan’.12 This however is less important because it is the business of the general staffs to have plans. What is more important is when the political decision to go to war was made in New Delhi. It appears to have been reached at the end of June or early in July.
India’s first tentative steps towards war resulted from the total victory for Indian propaganda in the early stages of the crisis. Yahya and his generals had earned the odium of the world’s press by one of those acts of folly that only the most imbecile can commit. They bundled the whole of the strong international press corps assembled in Dacca into a Boeing and flew them to Karachi. Both at Dacca and at Karachi the reporters were subjected to most insulting personal searches and their notes, films, and tapes were taken away. The newsmen who were so treated soon turned Yahya into another Hitler or Attila. But seldom has history produced a more incompetent bunch of rulers as those that now held the people of Pakistan. They were not even efficient in their folly. In the process of rounding up the foreign press in Dacca on the night of 25 March, they missed two who managed to avoid the dragnet—Simon Dring of the London Daily Telegraph, and Michel Laurent, an Associated Press photographer. Dring’s report in the Daily Telegraph of 30 March left little for the imagination.
Indian imagination however proved more fertile. The jilted, insulted, and expelled foreign press
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corps and hundreds more from all over the world now converged on Calcutta. There the wildest of stories about ‘genocide’ and ‘pogrom’ were fed to them. They filed these stories as facts to all corners of the world. The ‘Radio Free Bangladesh’ remained the most quoted source for almost two weeks until the assembled reporters themselves discovered that it was none other than the Calcutta station of All-India Radio. The mind of the world’s press was by then made up. No amount of denials from Islamabad or Dacca could now be believed. A handful of carefully chosen foreign reporters were subsequently taken on a conducted tour of East Pakistan. They saw ‘normalcy’ of sorts, but they also saw a great deal of damage. Not all this damage had been caused by the Pakistan Army. A Bengali Hindu journalist, Sasthi Brata, went deep into East Pakistan and then flew out of India to write his report.
The Guardian, a champion of Indian democracy, while publishing Brata’s report, admitted that if it had been written ‘while he was in India, he would undoubtedly have been arrested’.13 Brata showed clearly that the mukti were in fact Indian soldiers and that even the Indian Air Force had been in action strating cities in East Pakistan. Such was the ‘freedom of the press’ in India. Telling the truth about Indian involvement became a crime. And the world’s press took Indian propaganda for gospel truth. When some of the more conscientious foreign reporters realised that they were being misled, they began visiting the arena. As soon as reports adverse to India began appearing, foreign reporters were stopped from leaving Calcutta. They then had to rely on daily ‘briefings’ by Indian officials in Calcutta and in Delhi. If they wanted to go and check the ‘facts’ they had to have permits, and applications for permits to leave Calcutta were referred to Delhi. There they mostly got lost in Indian red tape.
Having won the propaganda battle, the Indians pinned their hopes on the monsoon season. It was thought that soldiers from the arid West Pakistan would not be able to operate in the lakeland conditions of Bengal. The monsoon, when it came, deposited more water on the Indian side of the border, streching right up to Uttar Pradesh, than in East Pakistan. For several weeks the whole of North-Eastern India was flooded, and such unlikely places as Lucknow had to be evacuated. For the Pakistani soldiers this was one lucky break in the otherwise bleak situation into which their generals had put them. So the chance of defeating the Pakistanis with the help of the monsoon was lost.
In the meantime the political situation began to worsen for the Awami League’s ‘Government’ which had been set up in Calcutta in April. The Awami League had had no mukti type revolutionary element of its own. It was the party of the Bengali bourgeoisie. Mujib had earlier alienated all the other pro-autonomy forces of the Left by refusing to do a deal with them. But the Left had not been crushed by the Awami League steamroller—the Left had simply jumped on it. In West Bengal the East Pakistani Left found new recruits from among the local Naxalites. They and the Awami League’s lawyers and lecturers made strange bedfellows. The ‘Government’ in fact had no authority over the guerrillas—the two represented extremes brought together by Yahya’s thunderbolt. The revolutionaries were doing all the fighting whlie the Awami League hogged all the limelight. In the Bangladesh movement in West Bengal the revolutionaries began to demand participation and recognition. The Awami League at first refused to share its charisma. Later the ‘Government’ had to yield; the Left, including Bhashani’s National Awami Party and the Communist Party ‘achieved a formal position in the Bangladesh leadership through the creation of a consultative committee’.14
Now Mrs. Gandhi faced the same problem as Yahya had done in his saner days. Then Yahya had met Mujib’s wish and allowed the Right-wing Awami League to keep the ‘autonomy’ issue alive to help it defeat Bhashani’s revolutionaries. Bhashani too had reached India, but instead of being put up in Calcutta’s luxurious Theatre Street, he was put into prison. The muktis were not making any progress inside East Pakistan, but they were capturing new recruits at an alarming rate in Calcutta and in the refugee camps. The longer the struggle went on the stronger would grow the muktis and the weaker would become the Awami League. Mrs. Gandhi of course could not organise an election as Yahya had done. She
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was having trouble enough with her own revolutionaries who had managed to commit 400 political murders in West Bengal inside six months.15 The situation had never been so bad even in East Pakistan before March. The only way to stop the revolutionaries from taking control of Bangladesh in exile, and eventually in East Pakistan, was for the Indian Army to transplant the Awami League ‘Government’ from Calcutta to Dacca. And that meant war.
This was an argument which India could hardly use openly. The public and diplomatic lever was provided by the refugees. The first batch of rerfugees who arrived in India were not the ones who fled from the Pakistan Army’s use of its overkill capacity. About a quarter of a million non-Bengali Muslims—the Biharis—had fled to India in the first three weeks of March which was the period of the Awami League’s reign of terror. The Biharis are the former Indian citizens who had been driven out of India in 1946-47 by Hindu communalism and were now being driven back into India by Bengali chauvinism. The rest fled after 25 March. The first Bengali Hindu refugees were largely those who had only heard of the army’s action from ‘Radio Free Bangladesh’ (the Calcutta station of All-India Radio) which constantly advised listeners in East Pakistan bhago, bhago, India bhago (run, run, run to India). These refugees were mainly Hindu peasants from rural areas which the Pakistani soldiers did not reach (…did not text clear…) rural East Pakistan had remained open country for several weeks after 25 March. In this period many western correspondents had gone deep into East Pakistan from India to film and to report. The third batch of the refugees was a steady trickle which the Indian officials reported at 50,000 a day. In all just over two million people—albeit two million too many—crossed the border. Indian propaganda soon put the figure up, at one stage at the rate of half a million a day, to 10 million. All attemps by Pakistan to have imperial observers to determine the exact number of refugees and to help with their repatriation were thwarted by India. Mrs. Gandhi would not agree to U Thant’s offer of U.N. observers on her or Pakistan’s side of the border.
Suddenly the ‘burden’ of the 10 million refugees was so great that, in spite of overseas aid, giant India was in danger of falling apart. The western world, which thinks nothing of paying progressively less for the primary produce of poor countries, now indulged in a show of humanitarian concern. The British press and Mrs. Gandhi had an orgasm of self-righteousness over the refugees. Their concern for this suffering humanity would be more touching had it not been for the fact that almost 90 per cent of the over 550 million people of India normally live in conditions no better than those experienced by the refugees. The author has been a refugee on the subcontinent and has experienced ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ poverty—the latter is often better. The kind of newspaper photographs of refugees that became familiar to the world in the summer of 1971 could be shot at any time in any town or village in India or Pakistan. The newspaper reporters who have become so familiar with Calcutta in recent months would testify to the utter degradation of the mass of humanity around that great city. Indeed, many refugee camps were invaded by the destitutes of Calcutta because they got more there masquerading as refugees than is their normal ration in the great Indian democracy. The bureaucracy in India is in any case no less corrupt than its Pakistani counterpart. The concern of the Indian officials for the refugees did not prevent supplies meant for the destitue from ‘finding their way on to the black market’.16 Nevertheless the refugees were a powerful emotive issue which, when mixed with a little perennial Calcutta Cholera, put India’s position and image in the contact as a whole beyond reproach.
At this stage developments on the diplomatic front may have encouraged the Indian decision-makers to consider war as a serious option. In Paris on 21 June the western aid consortium ‘postponed discussed of fresh aid for Pakistan until a political settlement of the conflict between East and West Pakistan is in sight’.17 The consortium had thus reversed its position of the year before when Yahya Khan had been told that ‘democratic advance must not hamper the country’s ability to service its debts’.18 Pakistan owes the consortium members the colossal sum of five billion dollars. This was money borrowed by the bureaucracy and largely squandered on ostentations consumption by the élite and the
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army officers under the cover of ‘defence expenditure’. Bhutto and other opposition leaders had threatened to disown the debt. The Awami League felt no obligation to take on this enormous financial commitment saying, with some justification, that little, if any, of it had been spent in East Pakistan. To Mujib this was mainly a West Pakistani debt. Pakistan’s creditors in 1970 no doubt feared that a genuine democracy in Pakistan would put their ‘investment’ in jeopardy. On the other hand, if Yahya agreed to Mujib’s six points (which included a separate foreign trading account) he would lose the export earnings so necessary to service the country’s debts. Pakistan was paying 200 million dollars a year in interest charges alone, which represented a fifith of the country’s total export earnings in good years. Yahya in effect had been told by his friends abroad not to let go the foreign exchange earnings from the export of East Pakistan jute. Yahya did just that and was then told to seek a ‘political settlement’. The consortium’s changed attitude meant that the Pakistani bureaucrats had at long last lost the support of their international backers. The era of the ‘favourite child’ treatment of Pakistan by the western aid-givers was at an end. To stop succour reaching Pakistan from the west had been a prime objective of Indian foreign policy for almost two decades. This had been achieved at the most propitious moment.
One the same day as the aid consortium was meeting in Paris to tell Pakistan that no more cash would be forthcoming, the Indian Foreign Minister, Swaran Singh, was meeting Mr. Heath and Sir Alec Douglas-Home in London. A joint statement issued (….did not text clear…) of refugees and creating conditions that would enable them to return home’. Sir Alce and Singh also ‘agreed that a political solution must be found which would be acceptable to the people of East Pakistan’.19 Pakistan had in the meantime set up some reception centres for returning refugees and a few had started going back. The arrangements were inspected by Prince Sadruddin, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Sadruddin found the arrangements satisfactory whereupon India dubbed him ‘Yahya’s stooge’.20
The diplomatic pressure of Yahya Khan for the release of Mujib and for a ‘political settlement’ succeeded only in pushing him further along the road to war, defeat, and disaster. Yahya, having first caller Mujib a ‘traitor’, had then announced that he was being put on trial for his life. In order to secure total mobilisation in West Pakistan for his war effort in the East, Yahya had used all the usual superlatives. Yahya responded to pressure by announcing ‘fresh steps’ to transfer power to the ‘representatives of the people’. In a broadcast speech on 28 June he announced that a new Constitution was to be drafted by a ‘committee of experts’, by-elections were to be held to fill the vacancise caused by the disqualification of the secessionists of the banned Awami League, and civilian Government was to function under ‘cover of Martial Law for a period of time’. The plan would take ‘four months or so’ to implement. Mujib would stay in prison and the Awami League in Calcutta.21
The Diplomacy of War
Yahya’s plan for a transfer of power, such as it was, appears to have led Mrs. Gandhi to the conclusion that the Indian Army would have to be used to install Awami League in Dacca. Early in July refugee relief and other activities along the East Pakistan border were brought under the direct control of New Delhi. The first indications that Indian policy had undergone a fundamental change and that some grave unannounced decision had been made in New Delhi began to be noticed by foreign relief workers and reporters in and around Calcutta. The Indian Government called off the airlift of refugees by Soviet and American aircraft from Bengal to Mautiya (…did not text clear…) which had been going on since 17 June. The Observer correspondent in Calcutta reported that ‘the Indian Government has given no reasons for its abrupt move, apparently made by New Delhi against the advice of Indian officials in the border areas’. It was not that the decision to stop the airlift was taken to keep the refugees close to the border for eventual repatriation. The Indian Government also stopped the use of American C/130 transport carriers for flying relief supplies to Tripura State. The ban in fact was on all foreign personnel in the area, including relief workers. Among those removed was Dr. Olav Hodne, the Norwegian director of a Scandinavian medical
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team who had lived in the area since 1947. The Observer reported that ‘the Indian Government also seems to be concerned about the presence of so many foreigners in the restricted zones along the Indo-Pakistan border….With Pakistan accusing the Indian Army of actively supporting the resistance fighers, the Indian Government is anxious to avoid complications likely to arise from the presence of foreign observers’.22
Mrs. Gandhi’s Bismarckian war dance had begun. It may well be that the preparations had gone on for almost two years. In the summer of 1969 Mrs. Gandhi emberked on a series of diplomatic moves which were described by Inder Malhotra, an Indian jounralist who writes for the Guardian, as designed ‘to contain Pakistan’.23 At the same time Mr. Brezhnev had stated that ‘the course of events is bringing to the fore need to create a collective security system in Asia’.24 But none of the Asian countries who might be thought to be prospective participants in such a collective security system, including India, showed any overt interest. In the west the Brezhnev design for Asia caused a flurry of speculation but as nothing appeared to materialise, it was soon forgotten. Indian diplomacy however had been alert to the possibilities inherent in the Russian move. After the Indo-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Co-operation had been signed in New Delhi in August 1971, Indian officials disclosed that the draft of the treaty had been ‘lying on the table’ for two years. In other words, as long ago as the summer of 1969 India had taken an option on becoming the centrepiece of the Brezhnev design for Asia. Pravda’s comment on the Indo-Russian treaty was a close paraphrase of the Brezhnev statement. Futher development of friendly relations [said Pravda] between the two great countries has important significance not only for the U.SS.R. and India—it will promote the consolidation of peace in Asia and the whole world’.25
In the west comment on the Indo-Soviet alliance was muffled by the realisation that in view of the American-Soviet détente it could do the west no harm. If anything, it was an anti-Chinese move and if it did any harm to Pakistan nobody really cared. Western commentators were so anxious not to find fault with Mrs. Gandhi at the very moment of her supreme Bismarckian act that they all got themselves to believe that ‘India has surredndered her option to go to war’.26 In the event, as we now know, Mrs. Gandhi had done nothing of the kind. In fact India had strengthened its option on war. Only this interpretation explains the timing of the signing of the treaty two years after it had been prepared.
In the two years while the treaty had been lying on the table there had been other straws in the wind. During 1969 President Nixon’s Asian policies had been moving strongly in the direction desired by India. Mrs. Gandhi was moved to say that the U.S.’s Asian policies ‘are coming a long way towards India’s’.27 For the moment therefore there was no incentive for jumping on the Breznev bandwagon, so long as a seat was reserved. During 1970 Yahya Khan’s diplomacy had been no less successful. The Russians had agreed to build a steel mill near Karachi and to supply arms to Pakistan, as did the U.S. and China. The Russians had also completed the construction of a modern highway connecting Mary in Soviet Bukhara with Karachi via Herat, Dilaram, and Kandahar in Afghanistan. For the Soviet Union this opened up the prospect of access to a warm water port which had been the dream of all Russian rulers since Peter the Great.28 Perhaps the Russians too had their reasons for keeping the draft treaty out of sight. Mao Tse-tung had added to India’s hopes of a détente with China when at a May Day rally in Peking he told the Indian envoy that the two ‘great Asian countries should come together’.29 Throughout 1970 Pakistan retained a diplomatic advantage over India with useful relations with the U.S., Russia, and China. Repeatedly India protested against U.S. and Russian arms supplies to Pakistan and there were scenes of anger in the Lok Sabha.30 It was clear that so long as Pakistan remained a unified State occupying strategic positions on the fringes of the Middle East as well as South-East Asia, none of the super powers would want to be without influence in Islamabad.
It was this international position of Pakistan which was destroyed by Yahya’s military madness in East Pakistan. At least one of the three super powers, the Soviet Union, was now prepared to forgo
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influence in Pakistan. The Russians became convinced that Pakistan as a unified State was finished and that the emergence of an independent State in Bengal was only a matter of time. Soviet influence in South-East Asia would depend on influence in Bangladesh. West Pakistan on its own as a Middle-Eastern country had much less attractions; the Soviets already had all the influence they needed in the Middle East. And since the independence of Bangladesh in relation to India was unlikely to be greater than the independence of Czechoslovakia in relation to itself, the Soviet Union had to help India bring about the birth of Bangladesh. In the process the Brezhnev scheme would be promoted and the Soviet naval forces would be the dominant influence in the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal.
Similar sums had been done in New Delhi. Early in July the Indian Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses published a report prepared by its director, Mr. Subrahmanyam. It was called Bangladesh and India’s National Security—the Options for India. The report, after a detailed examination of the alternatives available to India, recommended war to carve out a proportion of East Pakistan territory where the provisional ‘Government’ of Bangladesh could be set up with all the de facto and de jure attributes of sovereignty.
‘There is no doubt [wrote Subrahmanyam] that the Security Coucil would meet to call upon both nations to end the fighting. Whether the fighting should be ended immediately or continued for a period of time is a matter for India to consider’. The report also discussed at length the possibility of Chinese intervention. Subrahmanyam stopped short of concluding that China would definitely not intervene, but added : ‘Considering the limited stakes the Chinese have in this issue, it does not appear to be militarily meaningful for the Chinese to undertake this type of operation involving such high military risks’. Small Chinese incurious along the Himalayan border, said Subrahmanyam, were an acceptable price for the establishment of Bangladesh.31
It is unlikely however that Mrs. Gandhi and the Indian Government found even the likely Chinese ‘incurisions’ as acceptable as Subrahmanyam, or that they dismissed the fear of Chinese intervention on a massive scale quite so easily. India’s official nervousness was greatly increased after the visit of Henry Kissinger to Peking and detection of ‘similarities in American and Chinese attitudes to Pakistan’.32 Swaran Singh also admitted in the Indian Parliamment that ‘Dr. Kissinger had failed to give Mrs. Gandhi any assurance that arms aid to Pakistan would stop’.33 Indeed, Kissinger appeared to have done the opposite—he had warned Mrs. Gandhi that if China intervened India could not expect the U.S. to bail it out.34 No sooner had Kissinger gone home from Peking than Mrs. Gandhi wrote a conciliatory letter to Chou En-lai so as to try to ‘open a dialogue’. She got no reply.35
Mrs. Gandhi’s letter to Chou was kept a closely guarded secret for over a month and was disclosed only after the treaty with the Soviet Union had been signed. Though the official U.S. attitude had been less than satisfactory for India, Nixon was having trouble in the House of Representatives. On July 15 the House Foreign Affairs Committee had voted to cut off all aid, economic and military, to Pakistan. This followed the episode over the World Bank report on East Pakistan. The president of the Bank, Robert Mcnamara, suppressed the report prepared by Peter Cargill, the Bank’s South Asia expert, but its contents were published by the Washington Post. Whatever the Nixon line with Mrs. Gandhi, it was clear that the U.S. President would have great difficulty in justifying any American intervention to save Pakistan. Edward Kennedy’s highly publicised visit to West Bengal and the refugee camps had a similar effect on American public opinion.
The treaty with the Soviet Union assured India that a bigpower ally would use its veto in the Security Council to stop the inevitable call for a ceasefire. At the same time the Indo-Soviet alliance increased the chances of China’s acting to stop the spread of Russian’s ‘social imperialism’. Throughout these months China gave the official Pakistan version of the conflict while Russian media rellied
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exclusively on India’s official propaganda. Under the circumstances the war would have to be postponed until the Himalayan passes were covered with snow, making Chinese intervention that much more difficult and less likely.
In the interregum Mrs. Gandhi decided to hold the world’s attention with a tour of the western capitals. Her maternal charms and even charisma, projected against the ferocious image of Yahya, worked wonders. She played her cards well, emphasising the ‘restraint’ she had exercised and collecting high praise for her statemanship. She of course did not tell her hosts that war had been decided upon. Everywhere she went she was promised more financial help for the refugees and more pressure on Yahya Khan for a ‘political settlement’. Yahya Khan, in an attempt to counter Mrs. Gandhi’s highly successful world tour, committed his greatest diplomatic blunder—he sent a delegation headed by Bhutto to Peking which forced the Chinese to define their position. This was done by Chi Peng-fei, then Acting Foreign Minister; in a speech at a banquet given for Bhutto in Peking on 7 November, China merely promised that ‘should Pakistan be subjected to foreign aggression, the Chinese Government and people will, as always [i.e., as in 1965], resolutely support the Pakistan Government and people in their struggle to defend their State sovereignty and national independence’.36 This was no dederrence to Mrs. Gandhi. India could withstand the 1965 level of Chinese ‘support’ which would amount to no more than bellicose noises. There would be no armed intervention by China. Chi went on to advise his Pakistani guests that ‘reasonable settlement should be sought by the Pakistan people themselves’. There was no joint communiqué and no commitment by China. Yahya and Bhutto had overplayed their Chinese cards. Bhutto’s visit to China reassured the Indians more than it helped Pakistan. When Mrs. Gandhi returned from her western tour, she had no more worries—Pakistan had been successfully isolated. In November even the United States stopped arms shipments to Pskistan and snow covered the Himalayan passes. The time had come for the coup de gráce.
And so to War
Indian diplomacy, world opinion, and above all their own ineptiude had left the rulers of Pakistan no option but defeat. They could either fight and lose or they could fly Mujib out to Dacca and hand over East Pakistan to him. There were those in West Pakistan who wanted neither—they wanted war and victory! Bhutto had been made wiser by his visit to Peking. ‘Yes, mistakes have been made [he said]; we have all made them; they [the Awami League] have been stupid, and our shortcomings are endless and we are in a terrible muddle—I grant you all that. But now one thing matters—there has to be a massive political dialogue’.37 In the same interview with Gavin Young of the Observer, Bhutto admitted that ‘Pakistan can probably hope for little real help’ from China.
All this was known to the world outside, but nothing of it was known to the people of Pakistan. A strict press censorship had been in force since March. While large areas of East Pakistan had been lost to the Indian Army, newspapers in West Pakistan were reporting victories of epic proportions. A war fever gripped the country and every Pakistani wanted to ‘crush India’. While the world knew, India knew, and Yahya and Bhutto knew, that China would not intervene, Bhutto’s visit to Peking and its outcome were projected as if Chinese troops had already started moving. In short, the rulers of Pakistan had become prisoners of their own lying propaganda. Even as soldiers they had committed the cardinalk sin of not allowing themselves an outlet for honourable retreat. They were so sensitive about their honour that they appeared to prefer the destruction of the State to their own loss of face.
It was this stubborn streak in Yahya, his generals and their bureaucrat advisers which prevented them from doing, in the third week of November, what Bhutto had to do a few weeks later—release Shaikh Mujibur Rahman unconditionally. The release of Mujib and negotiations with him had been the
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only credible alternative open to them since at least June. Mujib would probably not have compromised to save Pakistan as a single federal State. He would probably have insisted—though this is by no means certain—on outright independence for Bangladesh. But he would certainly not have handed over the Pakistan Army of 93,000 men to India where these men are at the time of writing, prisoners of war. Mujib’s release would also have saved East Pakistan from Indian military occupation and the destruction caused by the war. A negotiated separation would have been less costly and a great deal less painful in all respects—including the exchange of civilians and army personnel, and the protection of the Bihari Muslim minority soon to be hopelessly isolated. Perhaps, given the chance, Mujib would have retained many economic links with West Pakistan, if only to prevent Bangladesh from becoming too dependent upon India. Even national honour and integrity, if these words had any meaning at all after the events since March, might have been secured in a confederal arrangement between East and West Pakistan. Thus, even on the assumption that Mujib would not have settled for anything short of total independence, there was something to be gained, or at least saved, by handing over East Pakistan to him.
It is important to remember that Mujib would have been in a much weaker—even a difficult—position hae he been released at almost any time before the Pakistan Army’s surrender of 16 December. Without the Indian occupation force to back him up, and with Pakistan’s sovereignty still intact, Mujib would have had to take into account the fact that his mandate, based on only 39.8 per cent of the vote, was for autonomy within one Pakistan and not for independence. In any case, he would have had to come to terms with the strong pro-Pakistan sentiments of a substantial proportion of the Bengali Muslims. Mujib, without the Indian Army, would have had to come to terms with all those in East Pakistan who had opposed him. He might indeed have needed the Pakistan Army itself to prop up an Awami League administration or to disarm the revolutionaries of the mukti bahinis whom he did not control.
By the end of November Yahya should have been in no doubt of Indian plans to invade and occupy East Pakistan and set up an independent Bangladesh. The Indian Army’s invasion of East Pakistan had in fact begun on 22 November. Large battles were being fought daily on at least four fronts. Even the Guardian, which for months past had seen nothing wrong with Indian involvement, was moved to accuse Mrs. Gandhi of provoking war.38 On 30 November Mrs. Gandhi spelt it out to Yahya when she said that the ‘presence of Pakistani troops in Bangladesh is a threat to our security’.39
Yahya must have known that he had no chance of holding (…did not text clear…) With only 20 Sabre jets in East Pakistan, the Pakistan Army there could hope for little air cover. The decision that Yahya had postponed for nine long agonising months had to be taken. Yahya took it—the wrong decision. He sent his air force into action from the West and bombed several military airfields in India. The air raids of 3 December were more successful in demonstrating the navigational skill of the Pakistani pilots than their bombing expertise. Pakistani aircraft penetrated deep into Indian territory as far as Agra, the city of the Taj Mahal, 350 miles from the Punjab border. Yahya claimed that the air force struck after Indian ground troops had attacked all along the border with West Pakistan. India claimed that Pakistan troops struck all along the border at the same time as the bombing raids on Indian military airfields. It is difficult to know for certain who opened the western front—but most probably Yahya did.
What Yahya should have done, even as late as 3 December, is of course to have released Shaikh Mujibur Rahman. Instead, he plunged the whole country into an all-out war—a war he must have known Pakistan would lose. He had obviously written off East Pakistan. The opening of the western front was probably an attempt to grab some territory in disputed Kashmir and in Indian Punjab. If so, militarily the move made some sense. India had four divisions in Kashmir, and Pakistan had four divisions in East Pakistan. If Pakistan could capture four Indian divisions in Kashmir, they would have a major bargaining counter. What the Pakistani generals ignored however was that, unlike East Pakistan, Kashmir and the Punjab were not isolated parts of India. In any case it is difficult to see why the Pakistani generals thought
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they would be able or allowed to capture Kashmir or other Indian territory in the west. And West Pakistan itself was not without its ‘soft belly’ in Sind bordering on Rajasthan. In the event India quite predictably more than held the line in Kashmir and the Punjab, and captured large areas of Pakistani territory in Sind.
In a short war the campaign in Kashmir and the Punjab was always likely to be a repeat of the 1965 deadlock with neither side making any major gains. This is exactly what happened in the December war with the difference that on this occasion India holds more Pakistan territory in Kashmir and Sind than it did in 1965.
The release of Shaikh Mujibur Rahman, even as late as 3 December, would have forced India to stop its advance towards Dacca. It cannot be argued that the Pakistan Army hoped to hold the Indian advance long enough to force the Security Council into imposing a ceasfire. By then Indian strategy had become clear. The Indian Army was ignoring all major urban centres near the border where Pakistani garrisons were concentrated. The invaders were stabbing deep into those areas where the Pakistan defences were thinnest. The Indian Army curved round the cities, cutting communications and leaving Pakistani forces isolated. This was the spider killing the fly and going straight to the heart—Dacca.
If the Pakistani generals in Rawalpindi had not seen through the Indian plan by 3 December, they must be the most incompetent generals ever to fight a war. There is evidence that both General Niazi, the army commander in East Pakistan, and Major-General Farman Ali Khan, military adviser to the Governor, realised their impossible situation and advised Yahya accordingly.
To most Pakistanis, including the author, the surrender made no sense : if an available political solution had not been acceptable, then why surrender? If the integrity of Pakistan was so sacred as to exclude talks with Mujib, then indeed the Pakistan Army should have fought to the last man. Defeat is bad enough, but acceptance of defeat is worse. This may sound emotional, but there comes a time when emotion is an essential part of reason. Was Winston Churchill being emotional when he determined to remain defiant after the fall of France? But of course reason can be allowed to include emotion only by those who are normally reasonable men. The call to ‘fight, fight, and fight again’ usually comes from defeated people—like Bhutto’s final outburst and walk-out from the Security Council. But the call can also come from a deep seated rational belief in one’s cause. It is this rational belief in Pakistan that the ruling élite—the military and civil bureaucrats, the landed aristocracy, and the business robber barons—lacked from the beginning. To them Pakistan was not a land of the people, but God’s own gift to the Muslim bourgeoisie.
(…did not text clear….) Gandhi will no doubt strike a hard bargain, but the people the President needs to watch just as closely are those nearer at home. These are the men who surrounded Ayub and Yahya. These professional sycophants, countries, and hangers-on are still in business and flourishing. They are probably already trying to identify themselves with the President and his party. The President will be judged by his actions as well as by the company he keeps.
Pakistan was right, is right and the concept of the State remains valid irrespective of the failure of its rulers. A people who been deprived of the chance to order their own affairs cannot be said to have failed. But equally the people of Pakistan cannot for ever go on blaming their rulers. History seldom forgives those who make a habit of tolerating an incompetent, corrupt and self-perpetuating oligarchy. There is still time for them to save their freedom, but for that they need to make a genuinely fresh start. An essential first step is a more realistic image of the past and a new vision for the future.
০০০
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Notes
Chapter 1
1. For a brief account of the life of Prophet Mohammad and the Capliphs of Islam, see Ameer Ali, Syed, A short History of the Saracens (Macmillan, various editions between 1889 and 1961).
2. Griffin, Lepel H., The Punjab Chiefs (Lahore : T.C. McCarthy, 1865) pp. 57, 116, 534, and 567.
3. Cited, Bolitho, Hector, Jinnah : Creator of Pakistan (Karachi : Oxford University Press, 1966) p. 53.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., p. 40.
6. Edwardes, Michael, Raj, (Pan Books, 1969) p. 57.
7. Cited, Graham, G.F.I., The Life and Works of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan (Hodder and Stoughton, 1909) p. 127.
8. Aligarh Institute Gazette, 23 November 1886.
9. Cited, Coupland, R., India, A Restatement (Oxford University Press, 1965) p. 93.
10. Struggle for Independence (Karachi : Pakistan Publications, 1958) Appendix II, p. 3.
11. Sleeman, W.H., Rambles of an Indian Official (J. Hatchard, 1844) II, 283.
Chapter 2
1. Nehru, J., An Autobiography (Bodley Head, 1953) p. 73.
2. Brown, M.B., After Imperialism (Heinemann, 1963) pp. 41—8.
3. Orme, R., History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan (London : 1768) vol. II.
4. Ahmad, Jamil-ud-din, Speechess and Writtings of Mr. Jinnah (Lahore : Ashraf, 1960) vol. 508—9.
5. Bolitho, p. 58.
6. Ibid., pp. 83—4.
7. Ibid., p. 9.
8. Ibid., p. 112.
9. Cited by Sayeed, Khalid Bin, Pakistan : The Formative Phase (Oxford Univerisity Press, 1968) p. 105.
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10. Rahmat Ali’s letter to Khaliquzzaman dated 12 December 1938, reproduced in Khaliquzzaman, C., Pathway to Pakistan (Lahore : Longmans, 1961) pp. 200—1, and appendix VI.
11.Ibid., p. 341.
12. Struggle for Independence, pp. 12—27.
Chapter 3
1. Campbell-Johnson, Alan, Mission With Mountbatten (Robert Hale, 1951) passim.
2. Connell, John, Auchinleck (Cassell 1959) pp. 920—1.
3. Dr. Jagjit Chauhan, general secretary of the World Supreme Council of Sikhs, claimed in London on 3 October 1971 that ’80 per cent of the Indian Army consists of Sikhs’. He was talking to John Windsor, a Guardian reporter, at London Airport before leaving for New York to hell the United Nations of Indian atrocities against the Sikhs.
4. Ahmad, J., vol. II p. 423.
5. Report of the Agrarian Committee (Karachi : Pakistan Muslim League, 1949) p. 23 and passim.
6. Ibid., p. 6.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., p. 7.
9. Azad, Abul Kalam, India Wins Freedom (Calcutta : Orient Longmans, 1959) p. 166.
10. Ibid., p. 167.
11. Cited by Sayeed, Pakistan : The Formative Phase, p. 260.
12. Azad, p. 142.
Chapter 4
1. For a discussion of Jinnah’s powers and his own assessment of his rôle, see Sayeed, Pakistan : The Formatives phase, pp. 233—300.
2. Ibid., p. 299.
3. For a detailed account of the economic war, how it was ‘won’ by Pakistan and at what social and economic cost, see the author’s The Functions of International Conflict : A Case Study of Pakistan, forhtcoming.
4. For discussion of the neglect of agriculture and squeezing the peasant, see Papanek, Gustav F.,
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Pakistan’s Development : Social Goals and Private Incentives (Karachi : Oxford University Press, 1968) pp. 145—225.
5. Clark, Ralph, ‘The Economic Determinants of Jute Production’, FAO Monthly Bulletin of Agricultural Economics and Statistics, vol. VI, No. 9, September 1965.
6. Falcon, Walter P., ‘Farmer Response to Price in a Subsistence Economy’, American Economic Review, LIV 3 May 1964.
7. Revelle Report on Land and Water Developement in the Indus Plain (Washington : U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964) pp. 1—10.
8. Khan, Ayub, Friends Not Masters (Oxford University Press, 1967) p. 39.
9. Bolitho, p. 207.
10. Stephens, Ian, Pakistan (Pelican Books, 1964) pp. 249—50.
11. Khan, Ayub, pp. 23—30.
12. Ibid., p. 38.
13. Ibid., p. 21.
14. Ibid., p. 2.
15. Stephens, p. 167.
16. Sayeed, p. 305.
17. Major-General Iskandar Mirza had transferred to the Indian Political Service in 1926.
18. Azad, pp. 125—7.
19. Khan, Ayub, p. 19.
20. Ibid., p. 21.
21. Ibid., p. 31.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., p. 43.
24. Other members of the Economic Appraisal Committee were : Mir Laik Ali, Zahid Hussain, M. Afzal Hussain, Ghulam Faruque, Mohemedali Habib, M.A. Ispahani, Muazzamuddin Hossain, and A.F. Atwar Husain.
25. Report of the Economic Appraisal Committee (Karachi : Government of Pakistan, 1953) p. 152.
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26. New York Times, 29 August 1965.
27. Williams, L.F. Rushbrook, The State of Pakistan (Faber, 1966), p. 156.
28. Ibid., p.157.
29. Khan, Ayub, p. 96.
30. Ibid., p. 72.
Chapter 5
1. Sayeed, Khalid B., The Political Systems of Pakistan (Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1967) p. 94.
2, Ibid., p. 94—5.
3. Mah-i-Nau (Urdu Monthly) : Karachi, February 1959, p. 29.
4. Khan, Ayub, p. 88.
5. Report of the Agrarian Committee, p. 32.
6. Papanek, pp. 167—8.
7. Ahmad, Mushtaq, Government and Politics in Pakistan (Karachi : Pakistan Publishing House, 1963) p. 273.
8. Khan, Ayub, p. 76.
9. Ibid., p. 82.
10. Details in the Guardian 26 February 1970.
11. Khan, Ayub, p. 96.
12. Forum (Dacca : 7 February 1970).
13. Twenty Years of Pakistan 1947—1967 (Karachi : Pakistan Publications, 1967) pp. 542—3.
14. Dawn (Karachi : 12 May 1968).
15. The Budget, 1967—68 (Karachi : Government of Pakistan).
16. Pakistan Times, 22 April 1958.
17. For a detailed account of how the mullahs defied he regime, see the author’s The Functions of International Conflict : A Case Study of Pakistan.
18. Guardian, 14 July 1970.
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19. Cited, Ibid.
20. Brecher, Michael India in World Politics : Krishna Menon’s View of the World (Oxford University Press, 1968).
21. (…did not text clear…) in Pakistan of the State’s involvement in external conflicts, see the author’s The Functions of International Conflict : A Case Study of Pakistan.
22. Cited in General Report, Committee of European Economic Co-operation, 1947.
23. Guardian, 31 December 1968.
Chapter 6
1. Aristotle, Politics, translated by Ernest Barker (Oxford, 1946) p. 245.
2. Daily Telegraph, 22 January 1969.
3. Guardian, 10 March 1969.
4. Daily Telegraph, 28 January 1969.
5. Guardian, 29 January 1969.
6. Guardian, 26 January 1969.
7. The Times, 9 March 1969.
8. Guardian, 30 January 1969.
9. Daily Telegraph, 29 January 1969.
10. The Times, 3 February 1969.
11. The Times, 2 February 1969.
12. Ibid., 9 February 1969.
13. Daily Telegraph, 12 February 1969.
14. Guardian, 14 February 1969.
15. Ibid., 13 February 1969.
16. The Times, 16 February 1969.
17. Ibid.
18. Guardian, 22 February 1969.
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19. The Times, 22 February 1969.
20. Daily Telegraph, 13 March 1969.
21. The Times, 24 February 1969.
22. The Times, 28 February 1969.
23. Ibid., 26 February 1969.
24. Guardian, 7 March 1969.
25. The Times, 7 March 1969.
26. Ibid., 15 March 1969.
27. Guardian, 18 March 1969.
28. Ibid., 19 March 1969.
29. Financial Times, 13 March 1969.
30. Ibid., 18 March 1969.
31. Ibid., 20 March 1969.
32. Ibid., 21 March 1969.
33. Guardian, 25 March 1969.
34. Sunday Times, 30 March 1969.
35. Guardian, 1 April 1969.
36. The Times, 27 March 1969.
37. Ibid., 31 March 1969.
38. Ibid., 2 April 1969.
39. Daily Telegraph, 31 March 1969.
40. Guardian, 27 March 1969.
41. The Times, 31 March 1969.
42. Guardian, 5 April 1969.
43. The Times, 5 April 1969.
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44. Sunday Times, 6 April 1969.
45. Guardian, 8 April 1969.
46. Daily Telegraph, 25 April 1969.
47. Guardian, 11 April 1969.
48. Daily Telegraph, 11 April 1969.
49. The Times, 14 April 1969.
50. Daily Telegraph, 23 April 1969.
51. Dawn, 29 July 1969.
52. Guardian, 29 July 1969.
53. Guardian, 14 November 1969.
54. Guardian, 1 December 1969.
55. Pakistan Times, 19 November 1969.
56. Ibid.
57. Guardian, 9 December 1970.
58. See, for instance, Dawn, 25 September 1970 and 4 October 1970.
59. Guardian, 3 November 1969.
60. Dawn, 21 September 1970.
61. Ibid.
62. Guardian, 1 January 1970.
63. The Times, 12 March 1969.
64. Guardian, 26 February 1970.
65. These details were supplied to the author by Sultan Sharif, general secretary of the U.K. Awami League, who is also a family friend of Shaikh Mujib.
66. Guardian, 3 November 1969.
67. Dawn, 7 January 1970.
68. Quotations of Yahya’s speech are from the text published in Dawn, 29 November 1969.
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69. Dawn, 7 January 1970.
70. Struggle for Independence, p. 40.
71. Dawn, 9 August 1969.
72. Pakistan Observer, 12 January 1970.
73. Forum, 31 January 1970.
74. New Times, Rawalpindi, 8 March 1970.
75. Guardian, 1 June 1970.
76. Ibid.
77. Morning News, 19 November 1970.
78. See the author’s report in the Guardian, 24 November 1970. Bhashani’s speech was also carried in other British newspapers.
79. Dawn, 1 March 1971.
80. White Paper on the Crisis in East Pakistan, Islamabad : Government of Pakistan, August 1971, p. 10.
81. Ottawa Globe and Mail, 7 January 1971, Cited Ibid.
82. Guardian, 29 March 1971.
83. Dawn, 7 March 1971.
84. Ibid., 8 March 1971.
85. Ibid., 7 March 1971.
86. White Paper on the Crisis in East Pakistan, op. cit., p. 10.
87. Tajuddin Ahmed’s statement at the inauguration of the ‘Sovereign Democratic Republic of Bangladesh’ on 17 April 1971, issued in London by the Bangladesh Students’ Action Committee, 120 High Holborn, London EC1.
88. Guardian, 20 March 1971.
89. Pakistan Times, Dawn, and Sun, 26 March 1971.
Chapter 7
1. Kohn, Hans, The Idea of Nationalism (New York : Macmillan, 1944) pp. 10—15.
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2. See Rupert Emerson’s definition of a nation in From Empire to Nation (Boston : Beacon Press, 1962) p. 103.
3. Harrison, Seling S., ‘Troubled India and Her Neighbours,’ Foreign Affairs, January 1964.
4. Ibid.
5. Tinker, Hugh, India and Pakistan, A Political Analysis, 2nd ed. (London : Pall Mall, 1967) p. 2.
6. Ibid.
7. Khan, Ayub, op. cit., p. 133.
8. For details of these moves and Pakistan’s reactions to them, see Choudhury, G.W., Pakistan’s Relations With India (London : Pall Mall, 1968) pp. 251—78.
9. New Times, 10 March 1970.
10. Dawn, 22 September 1970.
11. The Times, 10 January 1972.
12. Ibid., 7 December 1971.
13. Guardian, 18 September 1971.
14. Ibid., 15 September 1971.
15. Ibid., 2 August 1971.
16. Sunday Times, 12 September 1971.
17. Guardian, 22 June 1971.
18. Ibid., 9 December 1970.
19. Ibid., 22 June 1971.
20. Ibid.
21. Text of Yahya’s speech in Pakistan News, 1 July 1971.
22. Observer, 18 July 1971.
23. Guardian, 6 June 1969.
24. Ibid., 17 June 1969.
25. Ibid., 12 August 1971.
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26. Observer, 15 August 1971.
27. Daily Telegraph, 2 August 1969.
28. See the author’s article, ‘Pakistan Lives by Diplomacy’, in the Guardian, 14 November 1970.
29. Financial Times, 4 August 1970.
30. Guardian, 10 November 1970.
31. Peter Hazelhurst’s summary of the Subrhmanyam report in The Times, 13 July 1971.
32. Guardian, 17 July 1971.
33. Ibid., 13 July 1971.
34. Ibid., 28 July 1971.
35. Ibid., 26 August 1971.
36. Text of Chi Peng-fei’s speech in Pakistan News, 15 November 1971.
37. Observer, 14 November 1971.
38. Guardian, leading article ‘India Provokes War’, 30 November 1971.
39. The Times, 1 December 1971.
০০০
Appendix I
The Lahore Resolution 1940
(1) While approving and endorsing the action taken by the Council and the Working Committee of the All-India Muslim League, as indicated in their resolutions dated the 27th of August, 17th and 18th of September, and 22nd of October, 1939, and 3rd of February 1940, on the constitutional issue, this session of the All-India Muslim League emphatically reiterates that the scheme of Federation embodied in the Government of India Act, 1935, is totally unsuited to, and unworkable in, the peculiar conditions of this country and is altogether unacceptable to Muslim India.
(2) It further records its emphatic view that while the declaration dated the 18th of October, 1939, made by the Viceroy on behalf of His Majesty’s Government is reassuring in so far as it declares that the policy and plan on which the Government of India Act, 1935, is based will be reconsidered in consultation with the various parties, interests and communities in India, Muslim India will not be satisfied unless the whole constitutional plan is reconsidered de novo and that no revised plan would be acceptable to the Muslims unless it is framed with their approval and consent.
(3) Resolved that it is the considered view of this session of the All-India Muslim League that no constitutional plan would be workable in this country or acceptable to Muslims unless it is designed on
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the following basic principle, namely, that geographically contiguous units are demarcated into regions which should be so constituted, with such territorial readjustments as may be necessary, that the areas in which the Muslims are numerically in a majority, as in the North-Western and Eastern Zones of India, should be grouped to constitute ‘Independent States’ in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign.
(…did not text clear…) specifically provided in the constitution for minorities in these units and in these regions for the protection of their religious, cultural, economic, political, administrative and other rights and interests in consultation with them; and in other parts of India where the Mussalmans are in a minority, adequate, effective and mandatory safefuards shall be specially provided in the constitution for them and other minorities for the protection of their religious, cultural, economic, political, administrative and othe rights and interests in consultation with them.
This session further authorises the Working Committee to frame a scheme of constitution in accordance with these basic principles, providing for the assumption finally by the respective regions of all powers such as defence, external affairs, communications, customs and such other matters as may be necessary.
০০০
Appendix 2
The Six Points of the Awami League
Point No. 1
The character of the government shall be federal and parliamentary, in which the election to the federal legislature and to the legislatures of the federating units shall be direct and on the basis of universal adult franchise. The representation in the federal legislature shall be on the basis of population.
Point No. 2
The federal government shall be responsible only for defence and foreign affairs and subject to the conditions provided in (3) below, currency.
Point No. 3
There shall be two separate, freely convertible currencies for the two wings of the country or in the alternative a single currency, subject to the establishment of a federal reserve system in which there will be regional federal reserve banks which shall devise measures to prevent the transfer of resources and flight of capital from one region to another.
Point No. 4
Fiscal policy shall be the responsibilty of, and the power of taxation shall vest in, the federating units. The federal government shall be provided with requisite revenue resources for meeting the requirements of defence and foreign affairs, which revenue resources would be automatically apprpriable by the federal government in the manner provided and on the basis of the ratio to be determined by the procedure laid down in the Constitution. Such constitutional provisions would ensure that the federal government’s revenue requirements are met consistency (…did not text clear…) policy by the governments of the federating units.
Point No. 5
Constitutional provisions shall be made to enable separate accounts to be maintained of the foreign
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exchange earnings of each of the federating units, under the control of the respective governments of the federating units. The foreign exchange requirements of the federal government shall be met by the governments of the federating units on the basis of a ratio to be determined in accordance with the procedure laid down in the Constitution. The regional governments shall have power under the Constitution to negotiate foreign trade and aid within the framework of the foreign policy of the country, which shall be the responsibility of the federal government.
Point No. 6
The governments of the federating units shall be empowered to maintain a militia or para-military force in order to contribute effectively towards national security.
০০০
Appendix 3
The Eleven Points of the East Pakistan Students’ All-Party Committee of Action
1.(a) Restoration of provincialised colleges to their original status.
(b) Extension in number of schools and colleges.
(c) Night shift arrangements in provincial colleges.
(d) 50 per cent reduction in tuition fees.
(e) Bengali as medium of instruction as well as work in all offices.
(f) Hostel charges to be subsidised by 50 per cent.
(g) Increase in salaries of teachers.
(h) Free and compulsory education up to class VIII.
(i) Medical University to be set up and Medical Council Ordinance to be withdrawn.
(j) Facilities for condensed course for polytechnic students.
(k) Train and bus concessions.
(l) Job opportunity guarantee.
(m) Repeal of University Ordinance and full autonomy for universities.
(n) Repeal of National Education Commission and Hamoodur Rahman Reports.
2. Parliamentary democracy on basis of universal franchise.
3. (a) Federal form of government and sovereign legislature.
(b) Federal government’s powers to be confined to defence, foreign policy, and currency.
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4. Sub-federation of Baluchistan, North-West Frontier Province, and Sind with regional autonomy for each unit.
5. Nationalisation of banks, insurance companies and all big industries.
6. Reduction in rates of taxes and revenue on peasants.
7. Fair wages and bonus for workers.
8. Flood control measures for East Pakistan.
9. Withdrawal of all emergency laws, security acts and other prohibitive orders.
10. Quit SEATO, CENTO and Pakistan-U.S. military pacts.
11. Release of all detainees and political prisoners including those of Agartala Conspiracy case.
০০০
Appendix 4
Chronology of Events
1969
20 February After five months of open revolt against his régime, Ayub Khan announced that he would not stand for re-election as President. He acknowledged that the ‘people want direct elections on the basis of adult franchise’.
23 February Bhutto given a hero’s welcome in Dacca.
26 February A round table conference between Ayub and Right-wing politicians began in Rawalpindi; Bhutto and Bhashani stayed away.
5 March The ‘second phase’ of revolt against Ayub began when 10,000 workers in Karachi went on strike.
8 March Ayub Khan’s supporters from the Hazara district attacked Left-wing demonstrators in Rawalpindi.
11 March Shaikh Mujib arrived in Rawalpindi to attend the round table conference. He said he would not compromise on six points.
12 March Air Marshal Asghar Khan warned that ‘the imposition of Martial Law would only benefit the enemies of Pakistan’.
13 March Ayub announced that he would accept the principle of parliamentary form of government and direct adult franchise; he refused to restore the four provinces in West Pakistan, or to grant autonomy to East Pakistan.
15 March More than a million workers throughout Pakistan were reported on strike; factory workers were joined by doctors, lawyers, technicians, teachers, postmen, and others. Bhashani attacked in a train in West Pakistan.
17 March General strike in East Pakistan in protest against the attack on Bhashani.
Government confirmed reports that ‘ships loaded with troops, tanks, and armaments’ had sailed for East Pakistan.
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19 March Official sourecs began giving out reports of ‘people’s courts’ and ‘instant executions’ of ‘wrongdoers’ in East Pakistan.
21 March Bhutto accused Ayub of attempting to engineer a coup.
25 March Ayub Khan resigned; Yahya Khan appointed Martial Law Administrator; strikes, marches, public meetings and all political activity banned.
27 March Asghar Khan was refused permission to call a political convention.
30 March Bhashani proposed a ‘National Government’; widespread defiance of Martial Law reported from East Pakistan; thirty strikers arrested in Dacca.
31 March All-India Radio wrongly announced that Bhashani had been arrested.
1 April Troops shot and killed leaders of miners on strike at a coalfield near Quetta.
4 April Ayub Khan’s Constitution partially restored, but ‘fundamental rights’ remained suspended.
8 April Abdul Rashid Shaikh, a student leader, gaoled for one year’s hard labour for ‘trying to convene a meeting’.
10 April Yahya said the task of restoring democracy ‘should not take years, but it could not be accomplished in days’.
7 May Kosygin turned down Mrs. Gandhi’s appeal to stop the supply of Soviet arms to Pakistan.
23 May Bhutto called for Pakistan’s immediate withdrawal from SEATO, CENTO, and the mutual defence pacts with the United States.
30 May Kosygin arrived in Islamabad for talks with Yahya.
23 June Pakistan Democratic Party formed in Dacca.
4 July Pakistan and India signed agreement to end the Rann of Kutch dispute.
17 July (…did not text clear…) Ashgar Khan demanded an inquiry into the ‘conduct of Field Marshal Ayub Khan’.
28 July Shamsuddoha, editor of East-West Reviw, sentenced by a military court to a year’s rigorous imprisonment ‘for criticising the continuation of a Martial Law administration’.
Yahya Khan said in a broadcast that the press in Pakistan was free and that he would ‘always welcome healthy and constructive criticism’.
30 July Martial Law Regulation No. 51 banned the publication of ‘any statement which is offensive to the religion of Islam or which is disrespectful to Quaid-e-Azam [Mr. Jinnah] or which is calculated to have a prejudicial effect on the integrity of Pakistan’.
5 August Yahya Khan appointed a civilian Cabinet of seven.
8 August Mujib said in Karachi that he wanted to ‘start afresh on the basis of the Lahore Resolution’. He denied deviating from ‘the path of Islam or the Pakistan ideology’.
29 August The ‘silk route’ between China and Pakistan reopened for trade.
24 September Yahya Khan walked out of the Islamic summit at Rabat in protest against the seating of an Indian delegation.
Bhutto accused the bureaucracy of trying to sabotage the plan to hold elections.
3 October After a week of student unrest in Dacca, Yahya ordered the release of four students who had been arrested on charges of trying to organise meetings.
26 October Shaikh Mujibur Rahman arrived in London. The British Government sent an official car for him and allowed him the use of the V.I.P. lounge at Heathrow Airport.
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2 November Six killed and 101 injured in Bengali-Bihari riots in Dacca; Mujib said elections must be held withing six months.
(…did not text clear) centres in Pakistan, the industrialists offered ‘partnership with labour’.
Nur Khan, Governor of West Pakistan, announced steps ‘to ensure that workers do not take out unlawful processions or hold illegal meetings at public places’.
28 November Yahya Khan announced that elections would be held on 5 October 1970; West Pakistan would be broken into four provinces; representation would be on the basis of one man—one vote; the Assembly would settle the issue of ‘regional autonomy’.
1970
1 January Restrictions on political activities lifted; parties began their elections campaigns.
3 January The Industrial Advisory Council meeting in Dacca recommended that the Fourth Five-Year Plan should be deferred until 1972—3. The council noted a 53 per cent shortfall in investment and growth targets for East Pakistan under the Third Plan.
6 January Bhashani called for an ‘Islamic Cultural Revolution’ to establish ‘the rule of the peasants and labourers’. He appealed to Yahya to settle the issue of ‘regional autonomy’ before the election.
11 January Mujib, speaking at a rally in Dacca, asked Yahya not to grant autonomy to East Pakistan before the election; he rejected electoral alliance with other pro-autonomy parties in East Pakistan.
Bhutto said the régime was preventing him from telling the people the ‘truth’ the 1966 Tashkent Declaration.
8 February The East Pakistan Provincial Islamic Conference held in Dacca.
25 February 113 ulema (men of Islamic learning) issued a fatwar (religious decree) denouncing socialism as ‘a great evil and danger for Pakistan’.
(…did not text clear…) after the election to achieve ‘autonomy’.
21 March Maudoodi asked Yahya to make an ‘award’ on autonomy for East Pakistan before the election.
28 March Yahya rejected demands to defer the Fourth Five-Year Plan; defined basic principles of the future Constitution; said ‘uncompromising positions adopted by certain political parties will have to be changed…’
30 March The Legal Framework Order (provisional Constitution) published.
21 June Yahya arrived in Moscow for talks with Kosygin.
23 June Awami League manifesto published.
1 July One Unit in West Pakistan dissolved; the provinces of the Punjab, Sind, North-West Frontier and Baluchistan restored.
Fourth Five-Year Plan launched.
2 August Floods in East Pakistan covered 15,000 square miles, affecting 10 million people; Yahya flew to Dacca and announced that elections would be postponed until 7 December.
20 September Bhutto claimed that ‘a majority of the political prisoners’ in the country were his party workers.
21 September Mujib said the election would be ‘virtually a referendum on his six-point plan for autonomy.
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24 September Mujib accused ‘bureaucracy and vested interest’ of trying to hinder the transfer of power to the representatives of the people.
8 October India protested against the United States decision to resume supply of arms to Pakistan.
22 October Yahya, speaking in the U.N. General Assembly, said ‘a people’s mandate is already taking shape’ in Pakistan.
1 November A van ploughed into a line of dignitaries at Karachi Airport, killing the Deputy Foreign Minister of Poland and three other people.
11 November A cyclone and tidal wave hit the Ganges Delta in East Pakistan, killing 200,000. It took Yahya a week to declare the Delta a ‘major calamity area’.
17 November (…did not text clear…) more promises of Chinese aid.
23 November Bhashani called for an ‘independent East Pakistan’.
Mujib offered ‘a million more lives’ to achieve autonomy.
7 December The country’s first general election since independence held in Pakistan; Mujib’s Awami League captured 167 of 169 seats in East Pakistan; Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party captured 85 of 144 seats in West Pakistan. In terms of votes cast, the Awami League victory was less impressive—only 39.8 per cent of the East Pakistan electorate voted for Mujib’s candidates. (Polling in the nine cyclone afftected constituencies was held on 17 January 1971.)
14 December Professor Ghulam Azam, leader of the East Pakistan Jamat-i-Islami, said in Lahore that the people of West Pakistan should support Shaikh Mujibur Rahman ‘who had never raised the slogan of secession and would never take any such step’.
Bhutto appointed a ‘commission’ of his party to prepare a draft Constitution.
Mujib, replying to a telegram of congratulations from Yahya, said ‘only Constitution based on six-point formula can ensure justice between region and region and man and man’.
17 December Polling held to elect provincial assemblies.
20 December Syed Najiullah, a reporter of the Pakistan Observer, and Shamsuddoha, editor of Interwing, arrested.
21 December Tajuddin Ahmed, general secretary of the Awami League, denied Bhutto’s claim that ‘neither the Constitution could be framed nor a Central Government could be formed without the active co-operation of the Pakistan People’s Party’.
21 December Bhutto repeated in Lahore that any Constitution framed or Government formed ‘by ignoring the People’s Party would fail’. He proposed ‘a grand coalition’ between the Awami League and the P.P.P.
22 December Rafiq Ahmed, an Awami League member of the East Pakistan Provincial Assembly, assassinated at Pabna.
23 December Maulvi Farid Ahmed, vice-president of the P.D.P., said that Bhutto’s pronouncements ‘could turn the situation into an East-West confrontation’.
25 December Bhutto again said that his party ‘could not be deprived of sharing power in the Government’.
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1971
4 January At a public ceremony watched by a million people in Dacca, Mujib administratered an oath of alleegiance to his party M.P.s that they would adhere to the Awami League’s six points. The ceremony was attended by the diplomatic corps.
14 January After talks with Mujib in Dacca, Yahya called him the ‘future Prime Minister of Pakistan’. It was rumoured that Mujib had promised not to cut the army’s budget.
30 January An Indian airliner ‘hijacked’ to Lahore where, after letting the passengers leave, the culprits blew it up. India used the incident to ban overflight by Pakistani aircraft between East and West Pakistan.
13 February Yahya announced that the National Assembly would meet in Dacca on 3 March.
15 February Bhutto said in Peshawar that he and the People’s Party would boycott the Assembly.
Shaikh Abdullah, the Kashmir leader, in a letter published in the Indian Express, accused Hashim, the principal hijaker of the Indian airliner on 30 January, of being an Indian agent. He disclosed that the ‘plot’ to hijack the aircraft was known to the Indian authorities and that the incident was deliberately engineered as a pretext for banning Pakistani overflights.
21 February Yahya Khan dissolved his civilian Cabinet ‘in view of the political situation obtaining in the country.
26 February (…did not text clear…) National Assembly and called for a general strike ‘from Khyber to Karachi’.
1 March Yahya announced that the National Assembly session due on 3 March would be postponed sine die. This, he said, was ‘to give more time to political leaders of East and West Pakistan to arrive at a reasonable understanding on the issue of Constitution making.
Dacca paralysed by strike; curfew imposed; police fired on mob, killing one.
Eight Muslims killed in communal riots in the Indian city of Aligarh.
2 March Military officers appointed to replace civilian governors in the provinces; Mujib launched ‘non-cooperation movement’.
3 March Mujib rejected Yahya’s invitation to an all-party conference to resolve constitutional problems; said the postponement of the Assembly was at the hehest of ‘vested interests and bureaucratic lackey’s (meaning Bhutto), and in intolerable insult to the people’; riots continued throughout East Pakistan, directed against West Pakistani civilians and Bihari Muslims.
5 March Mujib denied All-India Radio report that he had asked the United States to put pressure on Yahya to stop ‘repression’ in East Pakistan; he called the report ‘mischievous and a figment of the imagination’.
6 March Yahya met Bhutto and announced that the National Assembly would meet on 25 March; Bhutto agreed to attend; Lieutenant-General Tikka Khan appointed Governor of East Pakistan; Mujib expected to declare independence at a rally the next day.
7 March At a rally in Dacca, Mujib announced four condtitions for attending the Assembly : immediate transfer of power; withdrawal of Martial Law; return of troops to the barracks; inquiry into the conduct of troops.
8 March Mujib’s non-cooperation movement in full swing;
Government offices closed down; no taxes to be paid.
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9 March Foreign governments began the evacuation of their nationals from East Pakistan.
Bhashani told a rally in Dacca that ‘no power on earth can stop the march of the Bengalese towards freedom and independence’.
14 March Bhutto said ‘power in East Pakistan should be transferred to the majority party there and in West Pakistan to the majority party here’.
15 March Yahya arrived in Dacca for talks with Mujib.
Bhutto said in Karachi that the Awami League and the People’s Party should share power in the Central Government while controlling their own regions. ‘Only such an arrangement will ensure the unity of Pakistan’.
16 March Yahya and Mujib met in Dacca for two and a half hours.
Chittagong dockers, on orders from Mujib, refused to unload a cargo of Chinese arms.
18 March Deadlock reported in Yahya-Mujib talks. Mujib rejected commission of inquiry into army shootings.
19 March Mujib said he was hopeful that a settlement would be reached.
In Karachi, Bhutto said he had declined Yahya’s invitation to join the talks in Dacca. He said the Constitutional formula ‘now on the anvil would be contrary to West Pakistan’s interests’. He also threatened to start a ‘movement’ in West Pakistan.
20 March After another meeting with Yahya, Mujib said ‘we are progressing in our discussions’.
Bhutto changed his mind and agreed to go to Dacca.
21 March Bhutto arrived in Dacca with 12 of his party’s ‘advisers’.
22 March Dacca Radio reported that President Yahya and Shaikh Mujibur Rahman ‘have reached a compromise formula to end the country’s political crisis’.
In a broadcast to the nation, Yahya said : ‘I have no doubt that we shall succeed in resolving the current political crisis’.
Bhutto joined talks in Dacca.
National Assembly session again postponed ‘in consultation with leaders of political parties with a view to facilitating the process of enlarging the area of agreement’.
23 March Republic Day in Pakistan; Pakistan national flag hauled down from buildings in Dacca; a new Bangladesh flag flew over hundreds of houses, including Mujib’s, schools, and many Government offices. The Awami League called it ‘Resistance Day’ and Bhashani dubbed it ‘Independence Day’.
24 March On instructions from Bhutto in Dacca, the People’s Party in the Punjab launched a non-cooperation movemnet. In Lahore the party said it would ‘never forgive the present régime’ if power was transferred to Mujib. The P.P.P. chief in Lahore said in future he would issue ‘day to day orders to the administration from his residence’. The ‘People’s Guard’—a militia raised by Bhutto—announced that it would start a week-long ‘show of force’.
In Chittagong troops attempting to unload arms from a ship were trapped when local people erected barricades at the dock gates.
Final meeting of advisers held in Dacca.
Bhutto said in Dacca that it would be better if he and Mujib entered into direct talks. Other West Pakistani politicians returned to Karachi and reported that the talks had ended in a ‘hopeless mess’.
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25 March Yahya flew back to Karachi.
Mujib accused the army of ‘atrocities and the killing of unarmed people’; asked the people to prepare for the ‘supreme sacrifice’; issued directives to foreign companies to negotiate all export deals through two East Bengal banks—the Eastern Banking Company and the Eastern Mercantile Bank; foreign posts and telegraph agencies ordered to route communications through Manila and London.
East Bengal Regiment, East Pakistan Rifles, the armed reserve police, and the civil police pledged support for the Awami League.
Bhutto said ‘what is sought for East Pakistan is beyond autonomy—it borders on sovereignty’.
Army convoys moved into Dacca.
Mujib arrested.
26 March Yahya, in a broadcast from Karachi, called Mujib a traitor, banned the Awami League, and said he had ordered the army to ‘fully restore the authority of the Government’ in East Pakistan.
Confused reports of heavy fighting from all parts of East Pakistan.
Foreign correspondent expelled from Dacca.
28 March Indian Parliament debated the civil war in Pakistan. Mrs. Gandhi said Indian sympathies for Shaikh Mujibur Rahman arose from the fact that he stood for ‘values cherished by India—democracy, secularism, and socialism’.
Tikka Khan said in Dacca that ‘complete peace had been restored and life was returning to normal in East Pakistan’.
Bhutto said, ‘Thanks to Allah, Pakistan is at last saved’.
30 March India asked U Thant to intervene in East Pakistan civil war.
31 March Indian Parliament passed a resolution calling on other governments to put pressure on the Pakistan régime to stop ‘the systematic destruction of people, which amounts to genocide’.
1 April Twelve Punjabi civilians hacked to death in Jessore’s market place, watched and filmed by foreign correspondents, among them Nicholas Tomalin of The Times.
4 April President Podgorny of Russia, in a message to Yahya, asked the Pakistan President to ‘end the bloodshed and seek a political solution in the interest of peace in the region’.
12 April Yahya received message from Chou En-lai promising support and accusing India of interfernce in the internal affairs of Pakistan.
14 April India protested to Pakistan alleging that Pakistan troops had fired on Indian border villages.
15 April India accused Yahya’s régime of ‘savage and medieval butchery’ in East Pakistan.
17 April Bangladesh proclaimed at a ceremony at ‘Mujibnagar’—a small village on the Indian border.
18 April Pakistan’s Deputy High Commissioner in Calcutta announced his defection to Bangladesh.
23 April Pakistan asked India to close down its mission in Dacca.
10 May Radio Pakistan claimed that the army had secured control of Chittagong.
12 May Yahya Khan announced that he had begun ‘political talks’ with East Pakistan leader, Nurul Amin.
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14 May India reported refugees arriving at the rate of 100,000 a day. Total to date given as two million.
Pakistan crisis debated in the British House of Commons.
15 May Bhutto said ‘now is the time to talk to the East Bengalis’.
M.M. Ahmed, Yahya’s economic adviser, given a cool reception in London.
21 May Yahya asked all ‘bona fide Pakistan citizens’ to return to East Pakistan.
24 May Tajuddin Ahmed, ‘Prime Minister of Bangladesh, said in Calcutta : ‘We wanted to keep Pakistan together and I assure you there was no thought of secession until the army cracked down on us on March 25’.
29 May India asked all aid-giving countries to suspend aid to Pakistan.
Refugee total reported as more than four million.
1 June First reports of Cholera in refugee camps.
4 June 2,500 reported dead from cholera.
5 June Mrs. Gandhi flew to ‘inspect cholera affected areas’.
7 June The Awami League in Calcutta admitted that Mujib had been arrested and was not in hiding ‘somewhere in East Pakistan’.
9 June Sir Alec Douglas-Home, the British Foreign Secretary, said in the House of Commons that ‘peace will not return to East Pakistan until civil government has been restored’.
14 June Bhutto said the visit of a British Parliamentary Delegation was an ‘insult to Pakistan’.
15 June Refugee total reported as 5〖1/2〗 million.
16 June Peter Cargil of the World Bank arrived in Rawalpindi to tell Yahya that no more aid would be forthcoming until the end of the civil war in East Pakistan.
20 June Refugee total reported as six million.
21 June Swaran Singh, the Indian External Affairs Minister, held talks with the British Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary in London.
Aid consortium meeting in Paris adjourned without considering allocatioins to Pakistan.
24 June Britain announced suspension of all aid to Pakistan.
Uproar in Indian Parliament over the continued shipment of U.S. arms for Pakistan.
28 June Yahya announced his plan for the transfer of power in Pakistan in ‘about four months’.
7 July France announced ban on the sale of arms to Pakistan.
13 July (…did not text clear…) World Bank’s confidential report on the situation in East Pakistan.
15 July The U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee voted to halt military and other aid to Pakistan.
A spokesman for Yahya said that Pakistan was considering leaving the Commonwealth.
19 July U Thant suggested the stationing of U.N. observers along the India-East Pakistan border to supervise the repatriation of refugees. India rejected the suggestion.
5 August Fifteen East Pakistani diplomats in the U.S. announced their defection to Bangladesh.
Yahya’s White Paper on East Pakistan published.
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9 August Indo-Soviet Treaty of ‘Friendship, Peace and Co-operation’ signed in New Delhi.
11 August Mujib put on trial in West Pakistan.
Russia and India made a joint demand for ‘urgent steps to be taken in East Pakistan for achievement of political solution’.
17 August Pakistan proposed that a Good Offices Committee of the U.N. Security Council should visit both India and Pakistan. India said such a move by the U.N. would not be acceptable.
18 August Ninety-four of the Awami League members of the National Assembly cleared by Yahya.
31 August Dr. A. M. Malik, an elder Bengali statesman, appointed Governor of East Pakistan. Bhutto called the appointment a ‘whitewash’.
5 September Yahya announced a ‘general amnesty’.
13 September Bhutto and Yahya met in Islamabad. Bhutto reporeted to be pressing for the transfer of power to himself.
14 September Awami League in Calcutta agreed to form a ‘consultative committee’ to include the N.A.P. and the Communist Party.
15 September M.M. Ahmed, Yahya’s economic adviser, stabbed in his office in Islamabad.
25 September Bhutto threatened ‘other means’ to achieve democracy in Pakistan.
26 September The National Awami Party of West Pakistan called for the release of Shaikh Mujibur Rahman.
29 September Mrs. Gandhi and Kosygin, in a joint statement issued in Moscow, called for ‘urgent measures towards a political solution of problems in East Bengal…’
5 October Mahmud Ali, the Bengali leader of the Pakistan delegation to the U.N. General Assembly, accused India of waging a ‘clandestine war’ against Pakistan.
9 October Yahya Khan withdrew ban on political activity in the country but the Awami League remained proscribed.
12 October Yahya Khan announced that the new Constitution drafted by experts would be published on 20 December, the by-elections for the National Assembly would be completed by 23 December, the Assembly would meet on 27 December, followed by the formation of a civilian Government.
14 October Abdul Monem Khan, a former Governor of East Pakistan, assassinated in Dacca.
17 October Jagjivan Ram, the Indian Defence Minister, said that if war came, India ‘would not withdraw from captured Pakistani cities’.
19 October Mrs. Gandhi ruled talks with Yahya Khan. ‘What is there to discuss between India and Pakistan?’ she asked.
29 October Mrs. Gandhi arrived in London at the start of her world tour.
3 November Pakistan Government announced that 53 candidates in the 78 by-elections in East Pakistan had been returned unopposed.
5 November A Pakistani delegation headed by Bhutto arrived in Peking.
7 November China promised Pakistan ‘resolute support’ but advised Bhutto to seek a political solution.
8 November U.S. revoked licences for the export of arms to Pakistan.
On his return from Peking, Bhutto said : ‘We are now in full preparedness to maintain territorial integrity against foreign aggression’.
Refugee total reported as 10 million.
10 November Three Indian battalions, supported by tank and artillery, attacked at Belonia in Noakhali district of East Pakistan.
120
12 November Bhutto said he would not tolerate an East Pakistan-dominated Government after the by-elections. ‘We’ll topple it in 40 days’, he said. India accused Pakistan of more intrusions into its territory.
17 November Heath, Brandt, and Nixon sent to joint appeal to Yahya urging him to embark on a ‘political initiative’.
18 November Mrs. Gandhi, in a letter to U Thant, said Pakistan was ‘seriously preparing to launch a largescale armed conflict with India’.
23 November Indian troops crossed into East Pakistan at several points along the international frontier.
Pakistan declared a state of emergency; Yahya called Bhutto and other leaders for talks in Islamabad.
General Niazi said in Dacca that Indian troops had occupied ‘three or four areas in East Pakistan’.
25 November Yahya said that Indian military activity in East Pakistan was leading the two countries to the ‘point of no return’.
3 December Pakistan Air Force struck at Indian airfields. Indian and Pakistani land forces crossed each other’s borders in the Punjab, Rajasthan, and Kashmir.
4 December The Security Council met to consider the Indo-Pakistan war.
A U.S. State Department spokesman said in Washington that ‘India bears the major responsibility’ for the war with Pakistan.
6 December After three Russian vetoes had blocked a ceasefire resolution, the Security Council agreed to transfer the question to the General Assembly.
India recognised Bangladesh.
7 December The U.N. General Assembly passed a ceasefire resolution by 104 votes to 11 with 10 abstentions.
8 December India said it regareded the General Assembly resolution as ‘impracticable and unrealistetic’.
A spokesman for President Nixon said in Washington that the U.S. had secured Yahya Khan’s agreement for the granting of ‘virtual autonomy’ to Bangladesh and negotiations with the Awami League before the Indian offensive began. The U.S. had kept Mrs. Gandhi informed.
14 December As Indian troops closed in on Dacca, Dr. A.M. Malik, Governor of East Pakistan, and his Cabinet resigned.
16 December Surrender in Dacca. Yahya said : ‘We may lose a battle but final victory in the war of survival shall be ours….the armed forces will not cease their struggle until aggression is vacated and justice prevails’.
17 December Yahya accepted ceasefire in the west.
20 December Bhutto succeeded Yahya as President and Chief Martial Law Administrator.
21 December Mujib moved from prison to house arrest.
Nurul Amin appointed Vice-President.
1972
9 Januaray Mujib flown to London on his way back to Bangladesh.
Yahya Khan put under house arrest.
30 Januaray Pakistan left the Commonwealth.
31 Janurary Bhutto arrived in Peking for talks with Chou En-lai.
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