The Duel (11 page)

The resulting redistribution was at the expense of the peasantry, but few cared. The U.S. economic advisers echoed Papanek’s view that “great inequalities were necessary in order to create industry and industrialists,” and that the growth generated in this fashion would lead to a “real improvement for the lower income groups.” This is what later, in the era of globalization, became known as the trickle-down effect. It did not work then as it does not work now. The upper-income groups in the towns paid no taxes and illegally moved their money abroad. Little was invested in the productive nonagricultural sector. Even the official planning commission set up by the government bewailed the bad habits of the city elite in West Pakistan. Keith B. Griffin, an Oxford economist well versed in the economic problems confronting the country, produced a report showing that between 63 percent and 83 percent of savings transferred from agriculture were wasted in nonproductive extravagances, i.e., the sumptuous style cultivated by the nouveaux riches. Griffin went on to point out that in West Pakistan “the potential surplus of these savings units was used to consume more, to buy more ornaments, jewellery and consumer durables and to bid up the prices of real estate and farm lands, helping their owners to disinvest. Often such surplus was devoted to luxury house construction or to open up one more retail store in the already crowded streets and bazaars.”
^†

The greater inequalities accepted by the Neanderthal Harvard Group were creating new divisions in the country as a whole. In the West wing of the country the elite flaunted its new wealth without shame. There was no shortage of critical comment, but few of the critics
took the imbalance this was creating with the East wing very seriously. The Bengalis, naturally, were not pleased with this state of affairs. In addition to being punished politically simply because they were a majority, they now saw moneys accrued by jute production in their region, the export of which had provided a balance of payments surplus during the boom created by the Korean War, disappearing into the coffers of West Pakistan. The stark contrast between the West and East wings of the country created the basis of the national movement in Bengal. The demands of the nationalist Awami League were a local version of “no taxation without representation.”

As the tenth anniversary of the field marshal’s reign approached, a sycophantic intelligentsia and a myopic bureaucracy began to prepare the celebrations, known as the Decade of Development. The Ministry of Information decided on a trumpet call in the shape of a book. It was thought that Pakistan’s soldier-statesman would be further legitimized on the world stage by the publication of his memoirs. Ayub Khan’s
Friends Not Masters: A Political Autobiography
was published by Oxford University Press in 1967 to great acclaim in the Western press and nothing short of sycophantic hysteria in the government-controlled media at home.
*

The biography’s publication was linked to the dictator’s growing unpopularity. A military adventure against India in 1965 had ended in disaster. Ayub, always cautious in these matters, was reluctant to authorize a strike against India. Bhutto and a number of senior generals convinced him that a preemptive strike would take the Indians by surprise and that Operation Grand Slam would liberate Kashmir, the disputed and divided province claimed by both sides after 1947. Ayub finally
agreed. India was taken by surprise and Pakistani forces came close to achieving their strategic objectives, but serious operational and organizational failures halted the advance, giving India time to move its troops forward and push Pakistan back, but only after the largest tank battle since the Second World War. Sixty Pakistani tanks were captured intact after the Indian victory.

Ayub was forced to travel to Tashkent, where the Soviet prime minister, Aleksey Kosygin, brokered a cease-fire deal between the two countries. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, by this time a mercurial foreign minister, resigned soon afterward, alleging that secret protocols attached to the Tashkent Treaty amounted to a betrayal of the Kashmiri people’s right to self-determination. This turned out not to have been the case, but it had become a useful weapon at mass meetings. When, a year later, I asked Bhutto why he had pushed Ayub to wage an unwinnable war, his reply took me aback: “It was the only way to weaken the bloody dictatorship. The regime will crack wide open fairly soon.” Bhutto had by this time decided to organize his own political grouping, and the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) was founded in 1966.
*
From the beginning the party line was to destroy the Ayub regime. In 1967, Bhutto began to address a series of large meetings throughout the country and was arrested. His confidence was high. Knowing full well that his cell was bugged, he would, during meetings with his lawyer, Mahmud Ali Kasuri, provoke the military. “General Musa’s days as governor of West Pakistan are numbered. We’ll dress him in a skirt and make him dance on the streets like a monkey,” was one of the few insults that were printable.

In response to the growing opposition in the country the regime decided that a distraction was needed. In October 1968 lavish celebrations to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the dictatorship were in progress. The Karachi daily
Dawn
competed with the government press by publishing sixty-nine photographs of the field marshal in a single issue. The citizens were triumphantly informed that in Karachi, a city with only three bottled-milk outlets, the consumer could choose
among Bubble Up, Canada Dry, Citra Cola, Coca-Cola, Double Cola, Kola Kola, Pepsi-Cola, Perri Cola, Fanta, Hoffman’s Mission, and 7UP. In Lahore a reporter from the government newspaper
Pakistan Times
slobbered over a fashion show:

The mannequins received a big hand from the elegant crowd as they moved up and down the brightly lit catwalk modelling the dresses. Some of the creations which the audience warmly applauded were “Romantica,” “Raja’s Ransom,” “Sea Nymph” and “Hello Officer.” . . . The Eleganza ’69 look was defined as a blend of the soft and the severe.

But the bread and circuses became a public relations disaster. On November 7, 1968, students in Rawalpindi and Dhaka surprised the government and themselves by marching out onto the streets. They demanded freedom and the restoration of democracy, recalling the words of the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire:

It was an evening in November . . .
And suddenly shouts lit up the silence;
We had attacked, we the slaves; we, the
Dung-underfoot, we the animals with patient hooves...

Soon student action committees were springing up across both parts of the country. This was the “unfashionable” 1968, far removed from the glamour of Europe and the United States. It was also different in character. The gap between the actions of the Pakistani students and workers and the actual conquest of state power was much narrower than in France or Italy, let alone the United States or Britain. No democratic institutions existed in Pakistan. Political parties were relatively weak. The movement was stronger than them.

The scale of the uprising was breathtaking: during five months of continuous struggles that began on November 7, 1968, and ended on March 26, 1969, some 10–15 million people had participated in the struggle across East and West Pakistan. The state responded with its customary brutality. There were mass arrests and the dictatorship ordered
the police to “kill rioters” on sight. Several students died during the first few weeks. In the two months that followed, workers, lawyers, small shopkeepers, prostitutes, and government clerks joined the protests. Stray dogs with
Ayub
painted on their back became a special target for armed police.

But here too the two halves of the country saw a marked disparity in the degree of repression. A few hundred died in West Pakistan. Nearly two thousand perished in Bengal. More than in the Punjab, Sind, North-West Frontier, and Baluchistan put together. One of the most moving aspects of this insurrection was the unity it imposed from below. When students died in the West, barefoot women students of Dhaka in the East marched in silence in a show of respect and solidarity. These six months were the only period in the history of united Pakistan where ordinary people on both sides of the country genuinely felt close to each other. I know this from personal experience. For three months, from March to May 1969, I traveled extensively in both parts of Pakistan, addressing meetings large and small and talking to student leaders and antidictatorship politicians, poets, and trade union leaders. The mood was joyous. The country had never been so full of hope before or since.

In those few months, the Pakistani people spoke freely. All that they had kept repressed since 1947 poured out. And the movement was not without humor. For hundreds of years the Punjabi word
chamcha
(spoon) has been used to denote a stooge. The origins of this are obscure. Some argue that it goes back to the arrival of the British. Local potentates who had hitherto subscribed to the art of eating delicately with their fingers had abandoned tradition and begun to use spoons and forks. Whatever the truth, the demonstrators started greeting pro-regime civil servants and politicians with spoons, the size depending on the self-importance that the dignitary attached to himself and popular estimates (usually accurate) of the degree of his sucking up to power at home or in Washington. When Ayub or his ministers arrived, they were greeted by gigantic homemade spoons as well as hundreds of the normal variety bought in the bazaar and used as cymbals to enliven proceedings.

The meetings I attended in East Bengal were particularly heated. I
could see before my eyes the large gulf that separated the two wings of Pakistan. I argued that a voluntary socialist and democratic federation was the only thing that could save the country. This view sounds utopian today, but in those heady days everything seemed possible.

On a hot and humid afternoon in April 1969 I was taken to address the students of Dhaka University under the
amtala
tree on the campus. Many a political movement had been born in this symbolic space. Here, the students had, after a spate of fiery speeches, decided to fight the dictatorship. They would not let me speak in Urdu and voted, by an overwhelming majority (which included Nicholas Tomalin of the
Sunday Times
), that I speak in English, suggesting wryly that I learn Bengali for the next time. It is a beautiful language and I promised I would, even though I half knew that there never would be a next time. Every political instinct told me that Bengali national aspirations were about to be crushed by the army, that it would rather destroy Pakistan than permit any meaningful autonomy, let alone accept a confederation. I made this point forcefully to the students that day. This being the case, I told them, why not go for complete independence? Take over your country. Done quickly, it might avoid the bloodshed to come. There was a hush. The audience looked at me in amazement. Someone from the other side, a Punjabi to boot, had mentioned the word
independence
. Then they cheered and chanted slogans, before carrying me on their shoulders back to my car.

The “Lal salaams” (red salutes) were still ringing in my ears when I was taken that same day to meet Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the leader of the nationalist, but still staunchly parliamentarian, Awami League. In March 1965, the Awami League, in the person of the sheikh, had dropped a bombshell with what became the famous Six Point plan for regional autonomy (discussed in the following chapter). The opposition West Pakistani leaders were so shocked that they accused the Ayub regime’s most Machiavellian civil servant, Altaf Gauhar, of having drafted the plan to split the anti-Ayub opposition.

This marked the beginning of the gulf between Bengali nationalism and the West Pakistani opposition parties. The abyss widened over the years, and the united struggle against the dictatorship was just a passing phase. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman knew my own sympathies
were on the left and that I was closer to the Bengali peasant leader Maulana Bhashani, who had taken me on a tour of the villages and small towns of the Eastern province a few weeks previously. Bhashani had told me then of his meetings in China with Chou En-lai, who had pleaded with him not to weaken Ayub Khan since he was a friend of China’s. The majority of Pakistani Maoists had loyally followed this advice, but Bhashani had realized that to support Ayub meant political suicide. He had joined the movement, but it was already too late.

Sheikh Mujib now reminded me that I had recently referred to him as “Chiang Kai-Sheikh” and muttered something about Mao backing Ayub Khan. Nonetheless he greeted me warmly and came straight to the point.

“Is it true that you said what they told me you said today?”

I nodded.

“You are sure they will use force. How sure?”

I explained that my certainty did not come from any hard information from those in power or even through understanding their psychology, but from one hard fact. The primary export commodities of East Bengal were vital to the economy of West Pakistan. Autonomy would mean the loss of financial control for the West. Sheikh Mujib listened attentively, but did not seem fully convinced. Perhaps he thought he could maneuver his way to power via a deal with the military chiefs. His party was pro-West and had, only recently, stressed its closeness to Washington and security pacts. He may have believed that Washington would compel the Pakistani military to play ball. Later when Nixon and Kissinger “tilted toward” Islamabad, it was a bitter cup for him to swallow. Mujib felt he had been badly betrayed.

The movement in 1968 was overwhelmingly secular, nationalist, and anti-imperialist. The student wing of the Jamaat-e-Islami would sometimes try to disrupt meetings, including two of mine in Rawalpindi and Multan, occasionally by force, but were swept aside by waves of students chanting various versions of “Socialism is on its way” and “Death to Maududi,” the latter a reference to the leader and principal theologian of the Islamists, patronized by the Saudi royal family and a committed supporter of the United States.