by John Keay
Democratic representation, however tenuous, nevertheless offered the best avenue for the redress of regional disputes. These were many, and ranged from open revolt in Balochistan and resentment of the immigrant muhajirs from India who were swamping Sind to a mischievous pogrom in Punjab (it was directed at members of the Ahmadi community, followers of a nineteenth-century quasi-prophet whom the orthodox regarded as heretical). No grievances, though, were more acute than those being voiced amid the tangled rivers and teeming fields of distant East Bengal.
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With a population equal to that of all Pakistan’s other provinces combined, East Bengal ought to have been calling the shots. Additionally, its jute industry was Pakistan’s main source of foreign earnings; indeed in the early 1950s the industry was enjoying something of a bonanza thanks to the high demand for hessian by the Western allies fighting in Korea (it was used, among other things, for sandbags). Yet East Bengalis were enjoying none of the benefits. They barely figured in Pakistan’s armed forces or its civil service; and in the administration and judiciary they were represented by Westernised luminaries like the mercurial Calcutta politician Husayn Shaheed Suhrawardy, or Khwaja Nazimuddin, a member of the former Nawab of Dhaka’s family who had succeeded Jinnah as Governor-General. Public services were almost non-existent, and any investment, notably in jute processing, came in the form of concessions to foreign firms. The typically poor farmers and sharecroppers of the province were no better off under West Pakistan’s colonial-style rule than they had been in their ‘rural slum’ under the British. Their only strength lay in their superior numbers and their marked politicisation, which various parties, Islamist, peasant and Communist, strove to mobilise.
In 1950 this simmering resentment found a soft target in East Bengal’s still substantial Hindu community. As landowners, shopkeepers, money-lenders and professionals, some Hindus had decided to stay put in 1947; and their example had been followed by the larger and more widely dispersed underclass of low-caste and casteless Hindus. Heightened in part by communal tension over Kashmir, popular hostility towards the Hindu elite now turned into resentment of all Hindus. East Bengali Hindus of any class were seen as scapegoats for the province’s essentially social and industrial grievances. Official sanction for this anti-Hindu sentiment came in the form of legislation over the size of landholdings and the criteria for public employment, both of which discriminated against Hindus. Harassment and the looting of Hindu properties followed, engendering widespread fear and the first major exodus across the still ill-defined frontier into India.
The effect was instantly apparent in Calcutta.
Suddenly, inexplicably, at the beginning of 1950, what had been a slow and steady trickle of refugees from East Bengal began to swell into a stream. They were coming from Khulna across the delta, a district in East Bengal with a Hindu majority, only 25 miles from Calcutta and as difficult to cordon off as one Berlin from another.8
Taya Zinkin, now a reporter working for the Manchester Guardian, watched as the stream of humanity swelled into a tide that overwhelmed India’s largest city. The Indian sense of outrage was heightened when a visit to East Bengal by the Chief Minister of West Bengal prompted a general riot in Dhaka. More Hindu properties were ransacked, and some four hundred lost their lives. Retribution came swiftly. In West Bengal several thousand Muslim men, women and children, many of whom had fled to Calcutta from riot-torn Bihar in 1946, were massacred by Mahasabha-led zealots. ‘I had seen horror in plenty, in Spain at the beginning of the civil war, above all in Delhi at Partition, but never before had I seen such bestiality,’ wrote Zinkin after picking her way through the mangled corpses in the killing yards of Howrah.9 It was Partition’s ‘madness’ all over again. So much for ‘the hostage theory’, whereby fair treatment of one nation’s minority would be seen as a safeguard for fair treatment of the other nation’s minority. On both sides of the border, the vernacular press carried demands for war. United in shock, Nehru and Liaquat Ali Khan promised inquiries and confidence-building measures.
Such conciliatory gestures from Pakistan’s power-brokers in Karachi did nothing to endear them to their East Bengali subjects. Nor did their centralising tendencies, as displayed over the matter of a national language. More than relations with India or contortions over Islam, it was this purely domestic issue that would expose the fragility of Pakistan. Bengalis spoke Bengali, a medium with a cultural pedigree second to none and which, given East Bengal’s numerical superiority, was spoken by more Pakistanis than any other language. It was, though, incomprehensible to speakers of Punjabi, Sindi, Pashtu and the other tongues of West Pakistan. It was therefore deemed unsuitable as the national language. Jinnah had said as much himself when in 1948 he had decreed that Pakistan’s official language must be Urdu. Protesters had immediately taken to the streets in Dhaka; for once the Quaid-i-Azam had been happy to leave the final decision to the deadlocked Constituent Assembly.
Urdu was scarcely any more popular in the provinces of Pakistan’s western wing. Originally the hybrid lingua franca of the Mughal army, it was written in a suitably Islamic script and had since been enriched by writers and poets. But in pre-Partition India it had been the native tongue principally of the urban Muslim elite. Its adoption for national purposes of education and administration would therefore empower those muhajirs who had migrated from such rarefied milieux and who included most of the League’s leadership.
Beloved of the Karachi bureaucrats, Urdu was further resented in East Bengal on account of its association with the court of Dhaka’s erstwhile Nawabs. Typical of this conservative East Bengali elite was the urbane Khwaja Nazimuddin who, having swapped the governor-generalship for the prime ministership, in 1952 confirmed in Dhaka that Urdu was indeed to be the national language. The news sparked a furore. Dhaka’s students called a general strike, which was supported by various popular groups including the newly formed Awami League. When the demonstrations threatened to get out of hand, the government panicked and the police were ordered to open fire. Four students were killed in the fracas, many injured, and the army had to be called in to restore normality. It was a harbinger of things to come. ‘The Dhaka killings’, a phrase denied to the earlier slaughter of Hindus and reserved exclusively for this comparatively modest affair involving Bengali nationalism, ‘sealed the League’s fate in East Bengal’.10 The killings also signalled the beginning of the province’s second freedom struggle and would provide the future Bangladesh with its first martyrs.
Provincial elections in East Bengal, postponed in 1952 because of the language riots, were eventually held in 1954. The results were no less dramatic for being wholly predictable. A variety of left-leaning parties dominated by the Awami League swept to power, while the Muslim League limped away with just ten seats out of over three hundred. Among the losers were the entire Bengali contingent in the Constituent Assembly in Karachi. The victors then formed a United Front government and immediately demanded the resignation of these Constituent Assembly members, a move which would end the League’s dominance in the highest institution in the land.
If a state without a constitution can be said to face a constitutional crisis, this was it. East Bengal was finally throwing its demographic weight into the scales. ‘Over half of Pakistan’s citizens, all resident in its most inaccessible … province, were opposed to the priorities, policies and constitutional proposals being pursued by the central government. Dhaka and Karachi were on a collision course.’11
The collision was averted only by the suspension of East Bengal’s new government and the imposition of direct rule. Serious ethnic conflict in the jute mills provided a pretext, as did the indiscreet comments of Fazul Huq, the United Front’s octogenarian leader; to eager Indian listeners he had confided his regrets over the partition of Bengal and his hopes for East Bengal’s ‘independence’. This was treason in Pakistani eyes. With the approval of Commander-in-Chief Ayub Khan, General Iskander Mirza, a hardline ex-army Defence Secretary, was despatche
d to Dhaka as Governor. Mirza immediately prorogued the new assembly and placed the province under Governor’s rule, an expedient available under the British-legislated Government of India Act of 1935 which, in the absence of a new constitution, still applied. Over a thousand people were arrested, including the young Awami League activist Mujibur Rahman. Public debate was quashed. What Bengalis ridiculed as West Pakistan’s ‘chocolate raj’ was adopting the strong-arm tactics of its pale-skinned predecessor.
In the light of these events, politicians of every hue began to fear for their authority, and none more so than those in the Constituent Assembly in Karachi. Exposed as less representative than ever, the Assembly sought to forestall its own suspension by reining in the powers of the Governor-General. This merely precipitated the inevitable. Plotted in a London hotel room, the decisive coup of October 1954 was consummated in another bedroom, that of the ailing Governor-General Ghulam Mohamed. Apparently in an agony of backache at the time, the Governor-General lay wrapped in a sheet and rolling on the floor. ‘He was bursting with rage, emitting volleys of abuse, which, luckily, no one understood.’12 Generals Mirza and Ayub Khan, acting in consort, urged a reconciliation between the Governor-General on the one hand and the fearful Prime Minister on the other. But this, it transpired, could be achieved only by the dissolution of the Assembly. According to Ayub Khan, he was himself then invited to take over the reins of state. He refused. The Assembly was dissolved regardless. An emergency government was formed with both Mirza and Ayub Khan in its Cabinet; and a new Constituent Assembly was swiftly selected by the lately installed provincial assemblies. Under orders to expedite the long-awaited Constitution, it got down to business immediately.
In 1955 Mirza, who had by now relinquished the governorship of East Bengal, himself replaced the ailing Governor-General. To accommodate the demands of the East Bengalis he announced the formation of a bipartite Pakistan: East Bengal would constitute one unit as ‘East Pakistan’, and all the remaining provinces would be grouped together in another unit as ‘West Pakistan’. Known as the One-Unit scheme, it won the support of influential Bengalis like Suhrawardy, who in 1956 served as Prime Minister, but it encountered strong opposition from the downgraded provinces of West Pakistan, and in particular from Punjab, which was much the largest and most assertive of these.
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Meanwhile, goaded into action by the junta of bureaucrats and generals, the new Constituent Assembly produced in nine months what its predecessor had failed to deliver in nine years. The country’s first Constitution, promulgated in 1956, declared Pakistan ‘an Islamic republic’ yet did little to substantiate its Islamic credentials. The Governor-General was replaced by a president, which meant Mirza changing his ceremonial dress. National elections were promised, though never held. And the Constituent Assembly simply became the National Assembly. Prime ministers appointed by it came and went. There were four in as many years, most of them nominees of President Mirza and his associates. ‘The whole situation was becoming curiouser and curiouser,’ recalled an Ayub Khan pretending to be as bemused as Alice in Wonderland.13
In West Pakistan, squabbles between remnants of the Muslim League and various other parties over control of their ‘one unit’ turned first vicious, then violent as each formed their own militias. In Karachi the cavalcade of prime ministers meant that a third of the Assembly’s members now held Cabinet rank, And in Dhaka, governors were being dismissed and administrations toppled with a rapidity that even contemporaries found confusing. Matters there reached a climax when in September 1958, during
a second brawl in the East Bengal provincial assembly, the Deputy Speaker was felled by a missile, said to have been either a desktop or a chair. He died as a result. The province’s military authorities thereupon recommended armed intervention; otherwise, it was claimed, the province would dissolve into chaos. Meanwhile, a similar request had come from Balochistan, at the opposite extremity of the country, where the Khan of Kalat, a hereditary leader, had hoisted his ancestral standard in an apparent bid for autonomy. ‘The hour had struck,’ recalled C-in-C Ayub Khan. ‘The responsibility could no longer be put off.’ It was time for what he liked to call ‘The Revolution’.
When the trouble erupted, the C-in-C happened to be enjoying a spot of fishing in Nagar, one of the mountain statelets that comprised the Northern Areas. He returned to Rawalpindi and then took the train for Karachi. President General Mirza, he would later claim, had already decided that the political chaos must be ended. Pakistan was demonstrably unready for democracy. Assailed from within and without, and with even the armed forces in danger of being infected by the strife, the country’s very survival was in jeopardy. A period of stability was needed, and the army alone could guarantee it. Of all the institutions of state only the army had emerged from the aftermath of Partition in a functional form. It was a source of stability and pride in the western provinces from where it was recruited, and it was as yet untainted by the political chaos. To many it seemed more responsible and no less representative than the politicians.
On 7 October 1958, after another round of ministerial musical chairs in Karachi, it was not the hour that struck, as per Ayub Khan’s diagnosis, but the generals. President Mirza and C-in-C Ayub Khan abrogated the two-year-old Constitution, proclaimed martial law throughout both units of the country, dismissed all the assemblies, and named Ayub himself as Chief Martial Law Administrator (CMLA). Troops moved into Balochistan. More took over the nation’s ports and airports, radio and telegraph stations. Political parties were banned, the press was muzzled, and the judiciary washed its hands of responsibility under a recently formulated doctrine of necessity – ‘That which otherwise is not lawful, necessity makes lawful,’ according to the courts. There was almost no opposition. Relief was more in evidence than outrage. The country’s first flirtation with representative government was over; ‘and thus began [its] long experiment with autocracy and oligarchy, with democratic tendencies bursting through from time to time’.14
In a matter of weeks it appeared that ‘the responsibility that could no longer be put off’ could not amicably be shared either: the hatchet-faced Mirza was put on a plane to London for a long and comfortable retirement. To this happy dumping ground, others – presidents, prime ministers, generals and dissidents – would follow him over the years. According to Ayub, Mirza had been intriguing behind his back and had ‘got cold feet’; he favoured a speedier return to civilian rule than Ayub thought advisable. ‘One man was thinking days, the other years. The years won.’15 Surrounded by a group of more amenable associates, among them a still floppy-haired Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (the son of Junagadh’s last Dewan), Ayub Khan began his controversial decade in power.
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Come the fiftieth anniversary of Independence in 1997, the Indian political scientist Sunil Khilnani would mark the occasion with an incisive retrospective entitled The Idea of India. Seven years later Stephen Philip Cohen, an American specialist, followed suit with The Idea of Pakistan. Both works re-examine the formative eras of, respectively, Nehru and Ayub Khan, and both have been highly acclaimed. Neither is a comparative study, but they may perhaps be juxtaposed. It might, for instance, be thought significant that, while an Indian academic took on India, it fell to an American academic to dissect Pakistan. Of more immediate relevance is the revisionist rigour of the India book compared to the alarmist tone of the Pakistan book. Khilnani kicks off with fifty pages on the novelty and importance of Indian democracy, followed by chapters on the economy, urbanisation and Indian identity. The nature of this Indian identity is found to be contentious, but there is no doubting its centrality; nor that of the state as the keel of India’s stability. The country’s trajectory is revealed as a steady, if ponderous, progression.
Cohen is much more cautious. His chapter headings – ‘The Army’s Pakistan’, ‘Political Pakistan’, ‘Islamic Pakistan’, ‘Regionalism and Separatism’ – read like a checklist of unresolved issues. They hint at repetitious crises
and profound uncertainty about the very concept of Pakistan. Though no doom-saying Jeremiah, Cohen addresses the proposition that Pakistan, ‘the first post-World War II state to break up’, is slated to become the next ‘failed state’.16 Five types of failure are offered; Pakistan is found to conform to four of them. Even as Cohen was writing, ‘it was thought to be on the verge of collapse or rogue status …’17 Thus, while India’s ailments invite forensic diagnosis, Pakistan’s plight cries out for the defibrillator. It was ever so. Beset by a bipartite configuration, an assertive military tradition, ambivalence over the role of Islam and a persecution complex in respect of its Indian sibling, Karachi was struggling from infancy. Partition had been no more even-handed in doling out the prospective health risks than it had in divvying up the princely states.
Back in 1958, nowhere was Pakistan’s conspicuous failure as an operational democracy more cruelly exposed than in neighbouring India. Both new nations had had to face identical challenges. Constitutions had to be drawn up, social injustices of caste/class and gender redressed, nationwide elections held on a universal franchise, economic plans formulated, international postures adopted and fissiparous tendencies contained. Yet while Pakistan had failed on nearly all counts, India, despite its far more daunting scale, could claim a reasonable degree of success.