India: A History. Revised and Updated (100 page)

As military coups go, that of 1958 was a well-planned, smoothly executed and, despite the indefinite postponement of elections, not unpopular exercise. Evidently Mirza and Ayub, the latter now prominent as chief martial law administrator, had been considering the move for months. They had not, though, reached agreement on its aftermath. Mirza announced an early return to civilian rule while Ayub made it clear that martial law must remain in force for as long as it took to restore stability, devise a new political system
and push through a programme of major reforms. One man was thinking days, the other years. The years won. After an abortive counter-coup, Mirza was persuaded to resign in favour of early retirement on a handsome pension in London. Ayub gathered round him a coterie of associates that included the young Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and assumed the presidency. Before boarding his plane Mirza reportedly wished the general ‘the best of luck’; it could have been a sporting gesture or just a sarcastic good-riddance.

Opinions of Ayub Khan’s personal rule over the next decade differ greatly. To all who cherish democratic freedoms, it remains the bleakest of interludes during which an authoritarian inheritance was so fostered and formalised as to provide both precedent and blueprint for all the military takeovers that followed. Zia-ur-Rahman and Mohamed Ershad in what became Bangladesh, no less than Zia-ul-Haq and Pervez Musharraf in what remained of Pakistan, would brazenly draw on this legacy. Intellectual life was stunted and the hopes of a young nation squandered. Political sycophancy became the norm. The prospects of responsible parliamentary rule ever thriving appeared to have been irretrievably blighted.

On the other hand, those who accord a high priority to economic development and national cohesion tend to be more indulgent. For all his sins, Ayub proved a surprisingly benign, even likeable, dictator. The purges conducted by his counterparts in China, Indonesia and Iraq were notably absent, as were the ideological and sectarian bigotries that informed them. His notions of stability and justice owed more to the rough-and-ready brand of paternalism associated with the Panjab’s British rulers. Thousands of venal politicians, corrupt bureaucrats and black-marketeers were immediately hauled before special tribunals where most were censured, some penalised, but few imprisoned. The object seems to have been to deter rather than to punish. Profiteering was outlawed, prices for essential foodstuffs fixed, probity and administrative efficiency applauded. An attempt to limit large landholdings and redistribute the surplus probably fared no better than in India; and like every government that Pakistan has ever known, the Ayub regime lavished funds on defence to the neglect of education, public health and other forms of social provision. But in Karachi, housing schemes were built for the refugees, while in rural parts of West Pakistan irrigation was extended and land reclaimed. Thanks to the availability of American technical support and investment, Pakistan was an early beneficiary of the ‘Green Revolution’ in the mid-to late 1960s. On both sides of the border agriculture also benefited from a solution to the vexed issue of water-sharing in the Panjab. An Indus Waters Agreement, unattainable so long as Karachi’s warring politicians had a say in the matter, was signed by Nehru and Ayub
in 1960 and owed as much to Ayub’s pragmatism as to the World Bank’s intercession. It removed a source of conflict second only to Kashmir and set a rare example of Indo-Pakistani co-operation. Through two more wars and countless crises the signatories would honour its terms and respect the Commission that still oversees them.

On a political stage hitherto monopolised by the subtle wits and rhetorical skills of the legal fraternity – Jinnah, Liaquat and Bhutto, like Gandhi, Nehru and Patel, were all barristers – the bluff statements and simplistic remedies offered by Ayub carried conviction. Not since Wavell had a military mind grappled with the problems of South Asian governance. But, as then, good intentions proved no guarantee of acceptable solutions. Islamabad, Ayub’s designated new capital, was meant to signify a brave new start, like Kemal Atatürk’s Ankara. Yet it was also a monumental extravagance wildly at variance with his own injunctions about simple living and personal economy. The lavish lifestyle of those families, supposedly twenty-two in number, who benefited most from the regime’s free-market economic policies rankled still more. Yet without channelling funds, credit facilities and licences to the entrepreneurial interests best able to exploit them, the long-sought lift-off would hardly have been possible. In 1960-5 manufacturing output grew by over 11 per cent annually and the economy by over 5 per cent annually. They were major achievements. But per-capita incomes increased by only around 3 per cent a year, and this mostly because the rich got richer. The poor just got more. Pakistan’s ‘golden decade’ showered its favours on a few entrepreneurial and landowning interests from the country’s west wing, but almost none from the east wing, while the rest of society benefited scarcely at all.

It was much the same with Ayub’s painfully elaborate system of ‘basic democracy’. His big idea was to enlist support for the regime and encourage a more inclusive
esprit
by giving the people, 80 per cent of whom were illiterate, a crash course in responsible decision-making prior to the reintroduction of some more conventional form of democracy. To this end there was ordained a five-tier pyramid of ‘basic democracy’ councils, each level of which had its administrative responsibilities. The pyramid reached from the grass-roots ‘union councils’, with half their members being locally elected on a universal franchise, to the topmost provincial-level councils, a few of whose members were indirectly elected from the tiers below. The elective element thus tailed off up the tiers, or ranks, of what was more like a chain of command. Conversely, the unelected element of official nominees and office-bearers became progressively more dominant towards the top – like officers in the army. A product of the parade ground, the system was
less ‘basic democracy’ than ‘basic training’ and, though heavily promoted, would be just as easily consigned to oblivion.

The promise of a more conventional exercise in democracy remained, as did the newly self-promoted Field Marshal Ayub’s appetite for national endorsement. Either way, a new constitution was required. With ample experience to draw on, a consultative body quickly cobbled together the necessary document, Ayub then blue-pencilled anything remotely offensive to his chances of controlling subsequent governments, and the constitution was duly promulgated in 1962. Martial law was lifted. National elections, of a sort, followed in 1964. Only the 120,000 ‘basic democrats’ (those who had secured election or appointment to one of the five tiers) could vote; but political parties now re-emerged and old faces – Nazimuddin’s and Suhrawardy’s among them – entered the fray. Joining the ranks of those he most despised, Ayub himself briefly relinquished the presidency to contest as the leader of a splinter group of the resuscitated Muslim League. He won comfortably, though not with the expected landslide and not without accusations of ballot-rigging. The election of a president followed in 1965. Again Ayub won, but this time only marginally. Clearly, to galvanise the nation in support of his reforms some new ingredient was needed.

In point of fact it had already been anticipated by his fiery young foreign minister, Z. A. Bhutto. The meteoric rise of Bhutto had owed much to Ayub’s infatuation with his acolyte’s personal brilliance but more to the latter’s uncompromising championship of the Kashmir issue. Bhutto’s coruscating attacks on the Indian government had won electoral support for the regime, especially among the young, while Ayub himself warmed to the old idea that Pakistan’s problems (and his own) stemmed from the fundamental betrayal of the two-nation theory that India’s retention of Kashmir constituted. There was also fury over Washington’s providing military aid to India in the wake of the Chinese incursion (it might be used to suppress Kashmiri dissent) and over Indian moves to reduce the special status of Kashmir to that of a constituent state within the Indian republic (so in effect annexing it).

In 1963 sectarian sentiment had erupted on both sides of the border when a relic of the Prophet had disappeared from a mosque in Kashmir, then miraculously reappeared. This ‘mysterious affair of the Prophet’s hair’ (it was a single hair, reputedly from His beard) provoked anti-Hindu violence even in East Pakistan, a province not normally very sympathetic to the supposed plight of the Kashmiris. As another Partition-style exodus of Bengali refugees streamed into India, the passion aroused by the affair was taken as proof of the potency of the Kashmir issue. Bhutto hastened to
resurrect it at the United Nations; Beijing voiced support; and in what appeared to be a weakening of Indian resolve Sheikh Abdullah arrived in Pakistan on the mission that was aborted by Nehru’s death.

Through the winter of 1964-5 Bhutto kept up the pressure over Kashmir by promising the Pakistani people ‘retaliatory steps’ against India and ‘better results in the very near future’. As the presidential vote loomed, these threats needed substantiating. Accordingly, in March 1965 Pakistani tanks rolled into a disputed border sector in the Rann of Kutch (between Indian Gujarat and Pakistani Sind). Uninhabited and seasonally submerged, the target was almost irrelevant. The exercise was intended purely as a show of force to impress the electorate, test Indian reaction and boost military confidence. It succeeded to the extent that Ayub had to restrain his own generals and that, as part of a ceasefire agreement, the Indian government accepted international arbitration of the border (this being precisely what it had refused in the case of Kashmir). The Pakistani nation hailed a victory and the press succumbed to an orgy of jingoism.

Three months later a plan to infiltrate guerrillas into Indian Kashmir was activated. This time Ayub, who may not even have authorised the Rann attack, gave his approval; but it was Bhutto, backed by the intelligence services, who insisted. He was confident that the oppressed Kashmiris would now greet such intruders as liberators and then fight alongside them to eject the Indian presence. He was wrong; no such thing happened. As in 1947-8, the Kashmiri response was negligible and the Indian reaction swift. The infiltrators were rounded up and Indian troops advanced to the edge of Pakistan’s Azad Kashmir.

In what was proving to be ‘Bhutto’s war’, this setback called for his intended
coup de grâce,
a full-scale invasion of Kashmir by the might of the Pakistan army. Again Ayub himself seems to have been a reluctant aggressor. The attack was launched on 30 August 1965; Indian forces struck back on 6 September; and two weeks later it was all over. A victim as much of his own rhetoric as of his military inexperience, Bhutto had downplayed the numerical superiority of the Indian forces and grossly underrated their fighting qualities. He had assumed that India’s British tanks and Soviet fighters were no match for Pakistan’s superior American weaponry and that any Indian army without its traditional backbone of martial Muslims would quickly crumble. As the saying went, one Pakistani
jawan
was worth seven Indian
jawans.
He had also assumed that New Delhi would restrict hostilities to Kashmir and not gamble on an all-out escalation along the border in the Panjab. Again he was comprehensively mistaken. The Pakistani thrust into Kashmir was quickly blunted, then outflanked by an Indian counter-strike
further south. In fact Indian tanks had reached the outer suburbs of Lahore when a ceasefire came into effect. Both sides had succumbed less to one another than to international censure, plus a desperate shortage of ammunition and weaponry occasioned by the inevitable Anglo-American arms embargo.

A new twist was now given to the contention that this 1965 conflict was peculiarly ‘Bhutto’s war’. He had contrived it and botched it; now he bedizened it and built on it. It was not he, the public were told, who had miscalculated; it was Ayub. Isolated among his unelected sycophants, the president had allowed himself to be betrayed by his American and British friends, then hoodwinked by the Indians and Russians into accepting humiliating terms at the Soviet-sponsored peace talks in Tashkent. But an even greater miscalculation had been Ayub’s earlier acceptance of the ceasefire. With the Chinese supposedly poised to resupply the Pakistan army and create a diversion on India’s eastern frontier, with the Indonesian navy steaming to the rescue and other Islamic states promising support, Ayub should have toughed it out. Instead, he had caved in to Anglo-American pressure and so betrayed both the army and the nation.

All of which, whether true or false, said much for Bhutto’s intellectual agility and spoke volumes for his political acuity. Frustration over the outcome of the war was already spilling onto the streets. Party leaders spoke out with near-unanimity about ‘unpardonable weakness’ and the ‘betrayal’ of Kashmir. Mujib-ur-Rahman and his Awami League in East Pakistan (Suhrawardy had died) even derived a certain satisfaction from what they saw as an essentially West Pakistani débâcle. In everyone’s eyes Ayub was fatally discredited. He would hang on for another three years but would never rid himself of the stigma of the war. Worst of all, the army, the nation’s premier institution, had suffered a major setback. In its hour of crisis, Pakistan badly needed a new narrative. Bhutto obliged, and not just once but twice.

PEOPLE POWER

By the mid-1960s the successor states in what was increasingly being called South Asia seemed set on quite contradictory paths: India’s was democratic, ‘secular’ and avowedly unaligned, Pakistan’s authoritarian, sectarian and mostly pro-West. Yet on closer acquaintance their respective policies showed much correspondence. Similar concerns and a shared environment were eliciting complementary responses. It was as if, moving in different directions,
they yet marched in step. For two decades and with varying degrees of success, both had concentrated on nation-building, on grappling with divisive issues like language and ethnicity, developing a domestic productive capacity, adjusting to a treacherous world order and, pre-eminently, seeking to promote and entrench central authority. These priorities would remain, but with the addition at roughly twenty-year intervals of other formidable concerns. In the 1980s and 1990s, for instance, all the states of South Asia would be confronted with a resurgence of religious supremacism, Hindu, Sikh and Islamic; and in the 2000s it would be the challenge, as much political as economic, of globalisation.