by John Keay
Post-Partition Sylhetis followed in the footsteps of these pioneers. Often indebted to them for arranging work-vouchers, they also relied on them as contacts and employment agents. Catering proved especially popular, and led to the UK’s proliferation of curry houses and ‘balti’ takeaways. By the 1970s almost every ‘Indian’ restaurant in the UK was in fact Sylheti-operated, though the food was not obviously Indian, Bangladeshi or Sylheti.
The migrants’ objective was invariably to improve the social and financial status of their kin and community back home. Initially this meant they were overwhelmingly male, and were intent on amassing savings to remit home for investment in land, housing and marital alliances. By the 1970s more than half of Pakistan’s foreign earnings, and nearly all of Azad Kashmir’s, came in the form of migrants’ remittances. Many migrants planned to return, and often did so more than once. Emigration conferred status and influence back in Pakistan. It also afforded a notable outlet for the expression of South Asian grievances through access to the press and parliamentarians in the UK. Mirpuris, for instance, took to airing their dissatisfaction with Pakistan’s dismal record in restoring communications after the construction of the Mangla dam. Blaming Karachi for treating Azad Kashmir as a colony, they veered away from favouring Kashmir’s integration with Pakistan and became ‘enthusiastic supporters of a Kashmiri entity which would be entirely independent of both India and Pakistan’.14 The 1977 formation of a Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front dedicated to achieving this independent Kashmir would be announced in Birmingham and promoted largely by British Mirpuris.
In Pakistan, as in India, the construction of massive dams (another at Tarbela on the Indus would be begun in the late 1960s) served the crying need for power generation, irrigation and flood control while proclaiming the ambitious intent of Ayub’s newly relaunched nation. In similar spirit, the Field Marshal in 1960 announced the relocation of Pakistan’s capital. From its interim home in overcrowded Karachi it was to be removed to an airy Gotham purpose-built on scrubland near Rawalpindi in Punjab province. There was much to recommend the change. To be known as Islamabad, the site was more centrally located, albeit purely in terms of West Pakistan. Punjab was West Pakistan’s most populous and assertive province, while Rawalpindi was the headquarters of the military. Indeed its firing ranges abutted the new city. Bureaucrats, politicians and foreign diplomats would be more secure there – as well as more readily secured. Construction got under way immediately; occupation followed in stages throughout the early 1960s.
Ayub’s model was Ankara and the Turkish national revival engineered by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in the 1930s. Whether Pakistan could afford such extravagances was debatable, although the economy suggested it could. In a market less restricted than that of India’s ‘permit raj’, manufacturing output grew by over 11 per cent annually in 1960–65, and the economy as a whole by around 5–6 per cent. While India struggled to produce a trickle of outdated European vehicles indifferently made under licence, nifty Japanese saloons began to replace Pakistan’s clapped-out Fiats and Morris Minors. Hilton, Marriott and Pearl tendered for high-rise hotels to upstage the British-era watering holes of Faletti’s in Lahore, Flashman’s in ’Pindi and Dean’s in Peshawar. Peeling posters and unsightly graffiti – a downside of democracy – were removed; everything that could be whitewashed, was. Travellers braving the formalities of the only frontier crossing from India’s Punjab to Pakistan’s Punjab encountered smoother roads, more familiar billboards, fewer beerless bars and almost no beggars. The country seemed to be touched by a recognisable modernity. There was no sign of a personality cult. Ayub’s dictatorship looked to err on the side of leniency.
Yet, though per capita incomes were rising by around 3 per cent per annum, ‘this was mostly because the rich got richer. The poor just got more.’15 Some 220,000 people a year dropped below the poverty line, the majority being in East Pakistan. Meanwhile a mere twenty-two families, largely from the mercantile Muslim community once of Bombay but now of West Pakistan, were said to control an estimated 65–75 per cent of the country’s banking, insurance and industrial assets. Such evidence of private enterprise reassured Pakistan’s US backers, as did its excessive spending on defence. With the armed forces accounting for the lion’s share of the budget, social services like education and public health languished.
Ayub, the first soldier to exercise power in South Asia since Wavell had made way for Mountbatten, preferred the decencies of discipline and loyalty to the cerebral dictates of ideology. Beginning with a flurry of restrictions on everything from commodity hoarding to public urination, his corrective measures were directed especially at lax bureaucrats, corrupt businessmen and venal politicians. Yet though named, shamed and if necessary arraigned, few of them received heavy sentences, and most of these were anyway commuted. Supremely confident in his own notion of authority, Ayub was neither brutal nor vindictive. His land reforms, though relevant only in West Pakistan and scarcely more effective than Nehru’s, were a genuine attempt to reduce the larger holdings and endow the landless. Initiatives in favour of family planning and the reform of Muslim Family Law addressed discriminatory practices of gender and inheritance but were bitterly, and often successfully, opposed by conservative opinion. And in respect of education, though schooling was starved of funds, Ayub claimed that educating the nation was precisely what his ‘Basic Democracy’ was all about.
The centrepiece of his innovations, ‘Basic Democracy’ introduced electoral practices and some local accountability within a hierarchical framework that was probably modelled on the military’s chain of command. The intent ‘was pure Ayub Khan’: to induct the largely uneducated masses into the political process, so encouraging a sense of national responsibility while creating a popular base for the regime.16 All adults were given the vote, but they might exercise it to choose only the 80,000–120,000 ‘basic democrats’ in the lowest tier of the hierarchy. Each of these basic democrats represented about 1,500 voters and, political parties being banned, the first intake was comprised largely of newcomers. In 1960 they obliged their patron by overwhelmingly confirming him as President.
Ten to fifteen basic democrats comprised a ‘union council’ (in rural areas) or a town council; each was responsible for local amenities and for electing one of its members to the next tier. This was the tehsil council, at which level unelected administrators might comprise up to half the membership. Tehsil councils oversaw the work of their subordinate councils, distributed resources among them and chose a representative for the next tier, that of district councils. These followed the same pattern – and so on up the chain of command. The higher the tier, the less the elected element and the greater the administrative presence, not to mention the more pronounced the directive input. It was basic, certainly, but it was not democracy. Though Hindu-ised as panchayati raj by Nepal’s King Mahendra, and later Bengali-ised by Bangladesh’s leadership, it failed to win lasting acceptance anywhere.
In Pakistan it survived for nearly a decade, mainly because Ayub’s political opponents found easier targets. In 1962 the now President Ayub Khan gave Pakistan its second Constitution. Based on his own ideas, drafted under the constraints of martial law and rubber-stamped by a Legislative Assembly chosen by his basic democrats, it reserved sweeping powers to the President and was unmistakably the product of the military. Though it signalled the end of martial rule, only bureaucrats and generals, the mainstay of the regime, welcomed it. The urban intelligentsia were embarrassed by it, East Pakistanis burnt it, and politicians, whether feudalist, federalist, Islamist or Marxist, contested it. Under pressure from within the Assembly and without, amendments were hastily made. As a concession to the religious establishment ‘The Republic of Pakistan’ was changed back to ‘The Islamic Republic of Pakistan’, and as a sop to the politicians the ban on political parties was lifted. Ayub knew when to give way and when not to. Because reinstating direct elections would have undermined the legitimacy of the regime, a proposal to that eff
ect was shot down.
The re-emergence of the old political parties and their combative leaders nevertheless obliged him to seek his own civilian constituency. ‘Basic Democracy’ having as yet failed to yield the desired base of support, he accepted the leadership of a faction of the revived Muslim League, and in 1965 mobilised it in support of his campaign for another five-year term as President. In a face-off with the combined opposition parties led by Jinnah’s aged sister Fatima, Ayub triumphed. But it was a pyrrhic victory. ‘He may have won the election, but he lost the people.’17 Despite the advantage of having devised the electoral system, and despite all the resources of incumbency, only 62 per cent of his basic democrats voted for him. Dictators expected better; to unite the nation behind him, an increasingly defensive Ayub needed a more emotive cause.
The contentious nature of the new Constitution was not the only target of the regime’s critics. Ayub’s subservience to Washington and his failure to get India to relinquish Kashmir were also held against him. Even as the Constitution was being promulgated, New Delhi chose to flex its military muscle in Goa; then within a year India was reeling under the Chinese assault. To Pakistanis the invasion of Goa was bad enough; it was all of a pattern with Nagaland and Kashmir, and further evidence of India’s irredentist ambitions in respect of the whole subcontinent.
Much worse, though, was the wave of Western sympathy that greeted the otherwise pleasing spectacle of India’s Himalayan débâcle. For at least a decade Pakistan had enjoyed preferential access to US weaponry and training, while India relied on purchases from the Soviet bloc and Western Europe. Ayub had once told the US Congress that America had no greater friend in Asia than Pakistan. Hobnobbing with senior Americans, cultivating US aid donors, locking into SEATO and CENTO, and providing air bases for CIA spy planes (one of which, a U-2 flown by Gary Powers, was famously shot down over Sverdlovsk in 1960) was Ayub’s way of redressing Pakistan’s physical and military vulnerability to India’s supposed aggression. But Washington cared little about Indo–Pak relations, and was wary of taking sides over Kashmir. Its prime concern was containing Communism. With its troops already engaged in Vietnam, it had met the news of a Chinese breakout along the Himalayas with alarm, then alacrity. As C-30 transports began disgorging state-of-the-art ordnance at Indian airports, Pakistanis felt betrayed. They were no longer America’s only arms-favoured nation in South Asia. A decade of kowtowing to Washington had got them nowhere. Resentful mobs stormed through Karachi and sent foreigners scattering for cover at Flashman’s in Rawalpindi.
By settling Pakistan’s Himalayan frontier with China, Ayub too signalled his disquiet with Washington. But he was still seen as the architect and champion of the US relationship, and was thus tainted by what Pakistanis called the American ‘betrayal’. Bhutto, his fiery Foreign Minister, had a better record in this respect. Berating India for its occupation of Kashmir, and the West for failing to condemn it, Bhutto welcomed Zhou Enlai to Pakistan and portrayed an India-hostile Beijing as a more sympathetic ally than Washington. Meanwhile Kashmir was convulsed by the mysterious affair of the Prophet’s hair; Sheikh Abdullah’s olive-branch visit came and went; Nehru died; and Shastri provocatively pruned back J and K’s special status, then re-arrested the Sheikh. To Bhutto it was self-evident that neither diplomacy nor defeat had softened Indian intransigence over Kashmir. Moreover, there was no guarantee that India’s newly supplied US arms would not be employed there. On the other hand, the untried Shastri was no Nehru; the Indian army had lately been exposed as incompetent; and nothing was better calculated to disarm criticism of the Ayub regime than a call to arms over Kashmir. Bhutto saw his moment.
Campaigning for Ayub during the 1965 presidential election, he savaged New Delhi’s determination to ‘merge the occupied part of Kashmir with India’, and vowed retaliation. ‘You will see better results in the very near future,’ he declared.18 Then, the election out of the way, he delivered. In April 1965, while Ayub was in Washington, Pakistani armoured vehicles advanced across the Rann of Kutch, the tidal expanse of salt flats where West Pakistan’s long Indian border uncertainly dips its toe in the Indian Ocean. It was about as far from Kashmir as could be, but it was poorly defended and a good place for tanks.
More a skirmish over debatable frontier markers than a battle, the Rann of Kutch affair was hailed as a triumph in Pakistan. It might actually have become so had Ayub not intervened. Returning from Washington, the President restrained his gung-ho commanders, alerted his Foreign Minister to the danger of a counter-strike ‘at a time and place of India’s choosing’, as Shastri put it, and accepted a ceasefire pending negotiations. If the negotiations failed, India agreed to international arbitration – something it steadfastly rejected in the case of Kashmir. Ayub felt that a point had been made. His opponents felt that an opportunity had been wasted. In ’62 he had refrained from intervention in Kashmir when India was reeling under the Chinese assault; now he refused to move when Indian tanks were smouldering in the Rann of Kutch.
Undeterred, through the summer of 1965 Bhutto kept up the pressure. Lending credence to reports of widespread unrest in Kashmir itself, he informed the Cabinet that, as in 1947, tribal volunteers were being recruited as ‘freedom fighters’ to liberate Kashmir, and that he had hatched a plan with the army to support them by infiltrating regular troops. He had no doubt both the troops and the irregulars would be welcomed by Kashmir’s restless masses. He was also convinced that, after its mauling in the Himalayas and the Rann, India would not dare to escalate the conflict by deploying troops outside Kashmir. On all counts he was wrong; but, recognising the popular demand for action, Ayub gave the go-ahead. Thereupon the infiltrators were quickly captured, the Kashmiris proved indifferent, and in answer to a Pakistani incursion into Jammu, Indian motorised units cruised across the frontier in the Punjab and threatened Lahore. Far from scaring off the Indian tiger, tweaking its tail in Kashmir had merely led to its sinking its claws into Pakistan’s vitals.
The ’65 war lasted only seventeen days, by the end of which India had lost slightly more men and Pakistan slightly more tanks. Aircraft losses were about equal but the territorial advantage lay with India. Both sides were short of munitions, spare parts and fuel, the US having imposed an instant embargo; and both were under enormous international pressure to desist, Moscow being as adamant as Washington. Bhutto canvassed allies elsewhere, most notably Indonesia; but it was Beijing’s response that was crucial. Its offer of ‘unconditional support’ had delighted Bhutto and had possibly deterred India from attacking Pakistan’s almost undefended eastern wing. But the Chinese offer was in fact far from unconditional; for Pakistan must first commit itself to a Vietcong-type ‘people’s war of resistance’ in which ‘cities like Lahore might be lost’. Rightly concluding that the nation would split, if not fragment, in such a struggle, Ayub opted for the UN’s ceasefire and an offer of talks with Shastri to be chaired by the Soviets. Held in Tashkent in early 1966, they restored the pre-war status quo.
The difficulty now was persuading Pakistanis to accept the outcome. The relentlessly upbeat news coverage provided by the government had led the nation to believe the war was being won and that the ceasefire was India’s way of signalling a climbdown, at least in respect of Kashmir’s status. Hence, when nothing of the sort emerged in the final declaration, indeed Kashmir was not even mentioned, riots broke out in Lahore and politicians united in decrying the ‘sell-out’. The President brazened it out; but ‘the Tashkent Declaration dealt a mortal blow to Ayub’s reputation’.19 Like Nehru after India’s China war, he lingered on, his health declining, until forced to resign in 1969.
Meanwhile Bhutto completed his political somersault. Disclaiming responsibility not for the war but for its untimely conclusion, he dissociated himself from Ayub, blamed him for the Tashkent sell-out (though he had himself been party to the talks), and six months later resigned. By joining the agitation against Ayub’s personal rule and forming his own Pakistan People’s Party (PPP)
, he showed a nice awareness of the times. China was now convulsed by the Cultural Revolution, Paris was brought to a standstill by the événements de ’68 and Washington was besieged by anti-Vietnam War demonstrations. Popular protest was all the rage. Bhutto, as much demagogue as democrat, endorsed even the strident demands for autonomy emanating from East Pakistan. Promising to outlaw dictatorship, reclaim Kashmir and bring the economy into public ownership, he positioned himself for Pakistan’s next flirtation with electoral democracy. But if the intent was to redeem the nation, the effect would be to rend it.
6
Power to the People
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan was not the only one advocating a populist agenda that would prove divisive. By the early 1970s a Nehru-less India was also confusing politics with personality, principle with slogans. Hunched on a wooden chest, Raj Narain leant towards me and thumped the hut’s floor of hard-packed mud with his stick.
‘Madam is breaking the rules,’ he said as he surveyed the makeshift hustings outside. ‘These jeeps and pandals [electioneering platforms] are being paid for by the state. She has no right.’
His stick jerked up and down in time with his words. Though he could barely walk without it, it was less a cane than a cudgel. Stout and steel-tipped, it was identical to the police lathi which had lamed him in the first place, he said. But that was long ago, and in another cause; during a lifetime of obstreperous protest Raj Narain would claim to have been arrested over eighty times. Now, in January 1971, he was standing for the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian Parliament, as the Socialist Party’s candidate for Rae Bareilly. A rural constituency in UP, Rae Bareilly conformed well to the description given by V.S. Naipaul of his own ancestral homeland elsewhere in the Gangetic plain: ‘Wherever you looked there was a village, low, dust-blurred, part of the earth and barely rising out of it.’1