The Pakistan People's Party: Rise to Power 9780195799668, 0195799666

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THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE’S PARTY: RISE TO POWER

Philip E. Jones

OXFORD , U N IV B Ä S IT Y PRESS

OXFORD VNIVBM XTY P U S S

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford o x 2 6 d p Oxford University Press is a department o f the University o f Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective o f excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi S io Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto and an associated company in Berlin Oxford is a registered trade mark o f Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries

O Oxford University Press 2003 The moral rights o f the author have been asserted First published 2003 All rights reserved. No part o f this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing o f Oxford University Press. Enquiries concerning reproduction should be sent to Oxford University Press at the address below. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way o f trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form o f binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. ISBN 0 19 579966 6

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For Sara Louise Anderson Jones (1945- 1981)

CONTENTS pages

List o f Tables List o f Acronyms Preface

ix xi xiii

1. Introduction

1

Part - 1 2. The Ayub Era: Institutional Innovation and Social Change, 1958-1966 3. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto: The Making of a National Leader

23 62

4. F o u n d a tio n a n d S ocial O rig in s o f th e

Pakistan People’s Party 5. The Pakistan People’s Party and the Fall of the Ayub Regime

98 138

Part - II

6. The People’s Party: Some Aspects of Organization and Ideology 7. The Elections of 1970(1) 8. The Elections of 1970 (II) Epilogue: The Pakistan People’s Party—Some Problems of Form and Substance Appendices Selected Bibliography Index

201 256 312

422 467 501 527

LIST OF TABLES pages i. Landholding in Punjab before 1958 2. Land Resumed Under MLR 64 Punjab Districts 3. Distribution of Private Tubewell Owners in Four Punjab Districts, by size of Landholdings 4. Growth Rates for GNP and Major Sectors 5. Monthly Household Income Groups 6. Social Indicators of Development 7. Urbanization in Punjab 8. Assembly Interest Group Presentation Punjab/Bahawalpur Districts 9. Some Social Groups Indicating Early Interest in PPP 10. Index of Wholesale Prices, Pakistan 11. Group Involvement in the Anli-Ayub Movement, 1968-1969 (Punjab Cities) 12. PPP Leaders Detained (1970) 13. Political Notables Joining the Punjab People’s Party (Pre-election) 14. Respectables/Notables Entering the People’s Party, Lahore District 15. Social Bases of Organization PPP, Lahore City 16. General Returns: 1970 Elections 17. General Returns for Punjab NA Election, 1970 18. Postal Ballot Returns by District, Punjab NA Constituencies 19. Returns in Military Cantonment Areas NA Election, 1970 20. Aspects of Agriculture in Punjab 21. Heartland Cities: Population and Voting Data National Assembly Election, 1970 22. Punjab Heartland, NA Election, 1970 Returns for Secondary Urban Areas 23. Returns for Heartland Towns NA Election, 1970

31 32 36 42 44 45 46 52 119 144 170 265 280 290 290 313 318 320 324 328 330 349 350

X

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

LIST OF TABLES

Returns in NW-65 Lahore-VIII NA Election, 1970 Aggregate Rural Vote NA Election, 1970 Returns for Urban Areas Potwar and Awankari Rural Vote Breakdown in NW-34 Jhelum-III by Local Land-holding Tribe Vote Breakdown in NW-31 Campbellpore-II by Towns and Rural Qanungo Halquas Returns for Lyallpur City, by Social Type of Neighbourhood Returns for Urban Areas, the Canal Colonies PPP Vote in Punjab NA Constituencies with Canal Colony Segment Vote Breakdown in Two Lyallpur NA Constituencies Returns for Urban Areas, The South Western Plains Vote Breakdown in Vehari Tehsil (NW-84 Multan-IV) Returns for Urban Areas, Bahawalpur

351 360 373 379 386 393 394 398 400 408 411 416

LIST OF ACRONYMS MSF PODO MNA MPA NAP NSF PDM TDA APWA PPP in MLA APP BD EBDO PICIC IDBP P1DC JI CVML CML COP RWP WPCTA NPT CMB EAC WPLA DAC JLC WPFTU CMLA PAF

Muslim Students Federation Public Offices (Disqualification) Order Member of National Assembly Member of Provincial Assembly National Awami Party National Students Federation Pakistan Democratic Movement Thai Development Authority All Pakistan Women’s Association Pakistan People’s Party Islami Jamhoori Ittehad Member of Legislative Assembly Azad Pakistan Party Basic Democracies Elective Bodies Disqualification Order Pakistan Industrial Credit and Insurance Corporation Industrial Development Bank of Pakistan Pakistan Industrial Development Corporation Jama’at-i-lslami Convention Muslim League Council Muslim League Combined Opposition Parties Renal Works Programme West Pakistan College Teachers’ Association National Press Trust Central Medical Body Engineer’s Action Committee West Pakistan Lecturer’s Association Democratic Action Committee Joint Labour Council West Pakistan Federation of Trade Unions Chief Martial Law Administration Pakistan Air Force

Xll

RTC LDBA JUI PSO DYF PIAC PFUJ WPKC PKC LFO BSO PNA LMC PDP WPSIC BMM PLP

U ST OF ACRONYMS

Round Table Conference Lahore District Bar Association Jamiat-ul-Ulema-i-Islam Principal Staff Officer Democratic Youth Force Pakistan Int’l Airlines Corp Pakistan Federated Union of Journalists West Pakistan Kisan Committee Pakistan Kisan Committee Legal Framework Order Balochistan Students* Organization Pakistan National Alliance Lahore Municipal Corporation Pakistan Democratic Party West Pakistan Small Industries Corporation Bahawalpur Mutahada Mahaz Pakistan Labour Party

PREFACE Over the years, a number of scholars and men and women in public affairs, both in Pakistan and the United States, have urged me to publish my doctoral thesis on the origins of the Pakistan People's Party. Supported by a Shell International Research Fellowship from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, the thesis was researched in Pakistan between 1972 and 1975 while 1 was also teaching at Forman Christian College, Lahore. Although several American scholars had written on Pakistan by the time 1 appeared on the scene, I believe this is the first thesis on Pakistani politics researched in the field by an American scholar. It was completed in 1978, while I was teaching at Washington and Jefferson College, Pennsylvania and defended at the Fletcher School in March 1979. Despite not being published, the thesis has had some influence on Pakistan scholarship. Copies found their way to the universities of London and Islamabad and have been cited in the works of later scholars. Nonetheless, Sayyid Fakhr Imam, former Speaker of the National Assembly, surely was right when he chided me in 1998 for having failed in my moral and intellectual duty by not publishing this work. Chastened, I have dusted it off and am most grateful that Oxford University Press, Karachi, has taken on the chore of getting it into print Needless to say, perhaps, much water has flowed under the bridge of Pakistani politics since this thesis was written; nevertheless this book is offered in the hope there remains herein something of value for scholars, historians, political leaders, and the reading public. This volume necessarily is a shortened version of my too lengthy thesis. Much of the theorizing about political parties in developing countries seems dated and has been dropped. Aspects of the political and social history of Punjab have been dealt with more generally. The book really begins with Pakistan’s independence, at about the time the young Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, later styled the Quaid-i-Awam, made his first overtly political act by writing a letter to the Quaid-i-Azam, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Scholars and other readers who wish for more of the earlier detail in the work, may refer to ‘The Pakistan People’s

xiv

PREFACE

Party: Social Group Response and Party Development in an Era of Mass Participation,’ (Ph.D. Thesis, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, 1979). Although the years have lengthened since this research, I always will remember how marvellous it was to meet so many citizens of Pakistan during field research, all of whom were unfailing in their generosity, warmth and curiosity, and who always insisted 1 share a portion of their often meagre daily sustenance. 1 am deeply indebted to them. Of those who assisted me more directly, I note the following, aware there were many others whom time and space prohibits mention: Mian Nizam Din, then Head Librarian at the Progressive Papers, Ltd.; Mr. Justice Sajjad Ahmad Jan, then Chief Election Commissioner of Pakistan; Dr. Anwar A. Barkat, then Principal of Forman Christian College; Shahid Javed Burki, late of the World Bank; Professor William L. Richter of Kansas State University; and Professor Allan B. Cole, Emeritus, of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. For those above who have slipped this mortal coil, I honour them in memory. And honoured in memory also I must mention Sara Louise Anderson Jones, my beloved helpmeet and friend of so many in Pakistan, who departed this life on 6 November 1981. She always said her three years in Pakistan were the best in her life. In addition, I wish to thank Oxford University Press, Karachi, for their interest in this work, and most specifically Daleara JamasjiHirjikaka, Senior Editor, who has borne with wonderful patience all the procrastinations and diversions I have gotten myself into. Finally, as much as I cannot claim responsibility for all that may be good in this study, any errors of fact or interpretation are mine alone. Philip E. Jones, Ph.D. Associate Professor Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Prescott, Arizona

INTRODUCTION Of all the major post-colonial states in Asia, perhaps none has struggled so much and for so long with political incoherence and an inability to find a workable framework of governance as has Pakistan. The first major post-war state to undergo a successful territorial secession, Pakistan often has been its own worst enemy, precipitated into periodic crises by both blundering generals and over reaching politicians. Although its society has produced many people of integrity and vision, few of these have risen to national power. Despite the holding of elections and the presence of a national parliament and provincial assemblies, no close observer of Pakistan believes these, or the cabinets that spring from them, are the country's key policy making bodies. When a Prime Minister (Benazir Bhutto) asks the US Central Intelligence Agency for a briefing on her country's nuclear programme, or another Prime Minister (Nawaz Sharif during the Kargil crisis of 1999) apparently is unaware his military is mobilizing its nuclear strike force, it is clear these leaders are out of the loop on the most critical decisions affecting the future of their people.1 Indeed, for most of its fifty-five year history, Pakistan effectively has been governed by a military-bureaucratic oligarchy.2 For more than half of this period, military governments have ruled directly and at other times as thinly veiled guardians of centrally directed civilian regimes. Military-civilian supremacy has been challenged by rising middle class politicians and urban party leaders, which have ‘come to power' through elections. Nonetheless, the military has always intervened to oust elected governments when these have become excessively corrupt or unpopular, have defied the perceived interests of the oligarchy, or have gotten the country into a political crisis which the politicians appear incapable of resolving. Where necessary, of course, they have done this without regard to the Constitution.

2

THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE’S PARTY

The best chance during this half century for a political leader to permanently curb the power of the military-bureaucratic oligarchy occurred in December 1971, when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was named President and Chief Martial Law Administrator. Two unprecedented developments of enormous consequence had occurred in Pakistan. First, in the 1970 elections, Bhutto had led his Pakistan People's Party to victory in the country’s key province, Punjab, by galvanizing the common man behind his programme of Islamic Socialism and promise of roti, kapra, makan (‘bread, clothing, housing'). Never before had the rural peasant or urban worker so broken with his customary leadership, the rural landlord and the urban union godfather, to assert his independent political rights as he did in 1970. Second, in having lost East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, and a war with India, the military was completely discredited. In the end, of course, Bhutto failed to finally curb the power of the military-bureaucratic oligarchy, a failure which cost him his own life at the hands of a General. Bhutto's failure resulted in part from the decisions he m ade, his perso n ality , and his d rift tow ard authoritarianism, but it was also inherent in the constraints he confronted, most especially in the dangerous international situation Pakistan continued to face. For, like all leaders before and after him, Bhutto knew the country needed the army. His refusal to release the 'Report of the Hamoodur Rehman Commission,' in part because it was severely critical of the generals in the East Pakistan crisis, let the army off the hook. The Pakistan Army High Command was never made to account for its actions in East Pakistan that led to the ‘second partition' in the subcontinent. Undoubtedly, Bhutto's intransigence, rhetoric, and conniving with the generals had something to do with the descent into civil war and national tragedy in March 1971. But he was by no means the main player. The orders that pushed the country off the cliff were not his, although he probably welcomed them and clearly sought to benefit politically from them.

O lig ar ch y

and th e

P ro cess

of

S ta te F o rm ation

The larger dilemma that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto faced was rooted in the foundation and formation of the Pakistani state, in its social origins and its political culture, and, most critically, in the permanent external

INTRODUCTION

3

threat Pakistanis have always perceived from India, the historic enemy. From the beginning of the state in 1947, two alternative models of how the state should be organized and governed have animated Pakistan's politics. Each model had its roots in developments starting in the early years of the twentieth century in the British Indian Empire, each was then promoted by a different permutation of social and institutional groups, and each sought to fill the political vacuum left by the departing colonial power in 1947. In a very real sense, politics in Pakistan can be seen as a process of conflict between these two permutations, one dominant and well-organized, one struggling to assert its claims, yet less coherent and more fractured. The first of these groupings and the dominant one we may call the ‘post-colonial institutions.’ It consists of the high civil bureaucracy and the military officer corps. It was, at independence, a ‘rising force’ in the sense that the elite colonial institutions had been opened to accelerated ‘Indianization’ during the later decades of British rule. Originally constructed to manage and protect the Indian Empire, these coherent and well-rooted institutions survived the non-revolutionary transfer of power intact and remained, in essence, the decision-making and policy-forming power in the new state. After independence, the officer corps of the Pakistan Army, the Civil Service of Pakistan, and the provincial civil services all expanded through elite recruitment and training, operating largely within the ‘vice-regal traditions’ inherited from the British. In the early decades of the country’s existence, these institutions took in ‘the best and the brightest’ of Pakistan’s youth. The crisis of founding the new state amid all the chaos of Partition and then the first war with India over Kashmir (1947-1948) put the administrative institutions into command from the very beginning. Despite his declared preference for a parliamentary system, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Quaid-i-Azam and founder of Pakistan, showed where political power really lay when he decided to become Pakistan's first Governor-General rather than its first Prime Minister. From the beginning, the requisites of simply maintaining the state were the highest priority for all social and institutional groups. This meant organizing the central government departments and the armed forces, dealing with the human catastrophe of Partition, holding elections and setting up assemblies, including the Constituent Assembly, responding to the division of the two great river systems in Punjab and Bengal, initiating industrial development to replace critical facilities lost to India, and finding arms and ammunition to replace the stocks promised

4

THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE’S PARTY

but never delivered in the division of the British Indian Anny. Fortunately for Pakistan, provincial institutions remained largely intact, although part of the staffs were Hindu or Sikh and migrated to India. Nonetheless, the ‘steel frame institutions* of the British Raj not only survived, but thrived in Pakistan, absent their British masters, of course. Unlike in India, with its Congress Party, there was no political force in Pakistan strong enough to bring the successors of the Indian Civil Service and the Army to heel and put political leaders—party politicians—into control of the state. The multiple crises of Partition were all critical challenges requiring strong central control. In time, Pakistan organized itself as a state, a remarkable achievement by any standard, dealt with the resettlement of the muhajirs (refugees), and even had a mild economic boom during the Korean War. What it failed to resolve was the on-going military crisis with India, prompted by the denial of Kashmir, which Pakistan had to confront from the beginning. Perhaps no other factor has been as pervasive in forming and maintaining the architecture of power relations within the Pakistani establishment than the long-nmning, so far permanent, military crisis with India and the dangerous international situation it engenders for Pakistan. Initially the junior partner in the military-burcaucratic oligarchy, the Pakistan Army, aided by infusions of military assistance from the United States, emerged in the coup d'état of 1958 as the dominant partner in the institutional alliance. The broad political consensus that the survival of the state was in question and must come before all else enabled the military to embed itself as the institution of last resort in the new state. The Pakistan Army has always seen itself as the ultimate guarantor of the territorial integrity of the state and has harnessed a substantial portion of the country’s resources to that end. Later, under General Ziaul Haq, it aspired to be the guardian of the ‘ideological frontiers* as well. Neither the generals nor the senior bureaucrats have trusted the politicians or indeed understood the political process, with the notable exception of Ziaul Haq. A few flirted with true greatness perhaps, Muhammad Ayub Khan on the military side and Ghulam Ishaq Khan on the civil, others with corruption and failure. Most have been unusually competent as officers and civil servants. Nonetheless, since the early death of Jinnah in 1948, the country has lacked great men of vision and political wisdom. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto aspired to be a second Jinnah, and he might have been, had his personal flaws and his

INTRODUCTION

5

politics not overwhelmed his undeniable brilliance and brought him down. The second permutation of interests in Pakistan's political history consists of political parties and their leaders, who represented broader social and economic interests in Pakistani society. For the most part, the political parties have, in one way or another, posited an alternative source o f political legitimacy and also aspired to the governance of the state. In the early years of Pakistan, the dominant alternative model was that of parliamentary democracy, pushed by rural landlords and urban lawyers, two groups schooled to admire British parliamentary traditions, rather than the vice-regal system, and bound to benefit from electoral politics. The leaders of this grouping were men like the Quaid-i-Azam, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who had been educated in Great Britain or one of the elite schools in the subcontinent, who understood the law and British parliamentary tradition, and who looked to both as a source of legitimacy for their own political aspirations. Indeed, in the latter decades of their rule, the British, under pressure from rising nationalist forces, had begun to introduce the forms and minimal powers of a ‘tutelary democracy’: legislative assemblies and councils elected by limited franchise and operated by fairly robust political parties. The record of the Unionist Party in Punjab quickly comes to mind. In social terms, the line between these two groupings was not distinct. The civil and military institutions were staffed by recruitment from the same elites that controlled the land and urban professions. Moreover, considerable interdependence and symbiosis existed between these groupings, particularly over land rights, particularly as these were protected through the courts (the landlord-lawyer nexus), rural administration, and army recruitment. Nonetheless, while an overlap was there, both groupings had, in the end, differing agendas as to who should lead the new country and how policy should be fonned. Hence, the British left behind two traditions that competed to control the new state: an entrenched policy-making bureaucracy that mostly ignored the politicians; and a band of politician landlords and lawyers in the Muslim League, whose early efforts at control foundered on their own divisiveness. Early on, the military sided with the civil service elites, before emerging—in the coup d’état of 1958—as the dominant partner in the military-bureaucratic oligarchy. The political elites were far less coherent and organized than the military-bureaucratic oligarchy. In the early years, political parties were

6

THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE’S PARTY

little more than congeries of traditional lineage networks (biraderi), rural landlords using a mix of patronage and strong arm tactics (rassagiri), the municipal and district bar associations, and a thin class of urban businessmen and professionals. The middle class of the cities and district towns was still in the early stages of social formation and lacked either the resources or the vote banks needed to assert controlling authority in party organizations. Politics was still a faceto-face business, marked by traditional patron-clientism and factional infighting over pelf and patronage. Given these circumstances, the political parties had no chance o f acquiring real political power against a determined effort to deny this by the civil service and military leaders. Yet, if these two permutations of interests each held strong presumptions about what the Pakistani state should look like—postcolonial/centralized/rule-making versus parliamentary/federal/lawmaking—they were not the only models in actual or potential contention for how Pakistan should be governed. The third model was that of the ulama, the scholar-legists of the orthodox Sunni tradition. Pushed into the background after the Great Rebellion of 1857, they began to assert themselves in the Khilafat Movement (1919) and thereafter in a number of lesser, more local struggles. These were shaped by a quite different world than the westernized elites, that of the bazaar, the masjid (mosque), and the madrassah (religious school or Quranic School). The ulama largely remained on the margins of political developments in Pakistan for a quarter century. Nonetheless, their fingerprints were evident—belatedly and only partially—in the urban support patterns for the Punjab Muslim League in 1946, the constitutional debates over the Objectives Resolution in the early 1950s, and the Anti-Ahmadiyya Movement (1953). Their boldest assertion of political power came in the opposition of the Pakistan National Alliance to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s manipulation of the 1977 elections. Since then, in an evolving alliance with modem Islamists, the ulama have pressed for Pakistan to become a fully Islamic state, as they see it, with the restoration of the Shariah (Islamic Law) and other Islamic institutions. But, as it has evolved, this demand for the assertion of Islamic forms goes well beyond a kind of modernized Sultanate model, to an unprecedented assertion of the ulama’s sole right to rule. With the examples of rule by the mujtahids of Shi’a Iran and the Taliban in Afghanistan before them, the Pakistani ulama-politicians too dream of rising to control of the state.

INTRODUCTION

P a r t ie s , P o litic s

and t h e

7

P a r t ic ipa n t S o ciety

During the first two decades of independence, political parties were episodic, unstable and intermittent conjunctions of social and interest groups, much open to outside manipulation by the bureaucracy. The hold of the post-colonial elites on the political life of the state reached unprecedented proportions in the later years of rule by President and Field Marshal Muhammad Ayub Khan. Yet, even as the Ayub Regime celebrated its first decade in power (1958-1968), pressure for major change was accumulating in various parts o f Pakistan, most significantly in Punjab, East Pakistan, and the urban areas of Sindh and the North-West Frontier. These pressures exploded in the five month long movement against Ayub Khan and the military-bureaucratic oligarchy, and led to profound political changes in Pakistan, some of these—the civil war in East Pakistan—originally unintended. A central element in the Anti-Ayub Movement, and the chief beneficiary of it in West Pakistan, was the newly founded Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), led by the then former Foreign Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Like Jinnah’s Muslim League in the 1946 Punjab Legislative Assembly elections, the PPP in the 1970 elections became the political centre around which a diverse collection of social and political interests coalesced in a massive effort to dismount the post­ colonial establishment from power, open the political arena to new social groups, and achieve major structural change in Pakistani society. Yet, if there were broad systemic similarities between the 1946 League and the PPP, there were also significant differences in their social bases. Whereas the League had been essentially an elite organization which activated mass support in the cities, the PPP, while not without its elite component, drew much of its organized support from new social and interest groups formed in the vortices of post-independence development, activated the rural as well as the urban masses, and projected them into the electoral arena. The doctoral thesis upon which this volume is based was researched in the Punjab Province between 1972 and 1975. The thesis argued the People’s Party was a transitional political organization, in that it reflected both the passing age of elite politics and the new age of mass politics. The movement against Ayub Khan, and the election victory of the PPP in Punjab, Pakistan’s most important province, represented

8

THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE’S PARTY

the breakthrough of the mass public into the political sphere and signaled a fundamental and irreversible alteration in the relationship between rulers and ruled. As detailed below in this volume, the strongest trend in the 1970 election was the dominance of broad horizontal voting patterns keyed to party identification, rather than the more typical vertical patterns, based on parochial loyalties. In short, the events of 1968-1970 forced open the Punjab political system to the entry of mass-based political parties.3 In the end, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto failed to hold back the inevitable resurgence of the military-bureaucratic oligarchy, the result in part of his unwillingness to transform his political movement into a wellorganized political party. The establishment built its return on the back of Bhutto's failures, but it would never be able to operate without regard to public opinion as in the previous period. The politicization of the common man could not be reversed and mass-based political parties were here to stay. These were, of course, bent to the underlying culture, ideological appeals giving way to patronage politics, parochial loyalties and attempts to confect winning coalitions at the constituency level of lineage brotherhoods (biraderi) in later elections. Nonetheless, the oligarchs and their conservative allies in the countryside, the big zamindars (landowners), could no longer take the people for granted. Politics was now a two-way street and voters expected something in return for their electoral support. Increasingly, military governments no longer created political parties from above, like the Convention Muslim League or later the Islami Jamhoori Ittehad (UI), but co-opted leaders and parties into hybrid military-political regimes. By the 1990s, military interventions occurred only after political crises deadlocked the political system, but each of these interventions eventually led back to elected governments. Two relatively coherent political parties, with stable core vote banks, traded control over the government through elections: the Pakistan People's Party and the Pakistan Muslim League. Despite the sense that Pakistan has been unfortunate in the quality and character of its recent political leaders, there remains in Pakistan considerable popular support for a parliamentary system. How much these political party governments actually made policy during their tenures remains debatable. Many have seen the governments of the 1990s as part of a tri-archy: the military, headed by the Chief of the Army Staff, and in control of key foreign and nuclear policy; the bureaucracy, headed by the President, and in control of economic policy and the administrative framework

INTRODUCTION

9

down to the Tehsil (district); and the political government, headed by the Prime Minister, and actually in charge of little more than local development but also asserting at least junior partnership of key foreign and domestic policy. The military-oligarchy still dominates, of course. The last Prime Minister of Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif, was overthrown when he directly challenged the Army, two years after leading the Parliament to abrogate the Eighth Amendment. The thesis also argued that, in terms of political change, the rise of the PPP should be seen contextually in the emergence o f the ‘participant society* in Punjab. The growth of cities, rural to urban migration, rural population growth and economic stress in the traditional village, the spread of literacy, the growing complexity of society and the economy, the emergence of new social and economic interest groups, the impact of the September War with India in 1965 were all forces that affected political and social identities, undermined parochial ties, and forged new loyalties to a political party, namely the PPP. The Pakistan People's Party greatly benefited from these fundamental social and economic changes. The social groups first galvanized in the initial party organization and, more importantly, in the anti-Ayub movement, strongly reflected these new forces. But the PPP was also an agent of change, mobilizing these groups and driving a sense of political rights deep into Punjabi society, both rural and urban. For millions of Punjabis, the PPP gave them their first taste of active politics, their initial political identity, and loyalties that continue to activate the PPP vote banks in the province.

P o l it ic a l P a r t ie s : H isto ric al B ac k g r o u n d

Political parties emerged in Punjab in the aftermath of the MontagueChelmsford Reforms of 1919, when the Punjab Legislative Assembly replaced the appointive Legislative Council, established in 1897. The Legislative Assembly had 94 members, 23 nominated by the Lieutenant Governor and 71 elected by an extremely lim ited franchise encompassing only 3.4 percent o f the population. This was raised to 8.6 percent during the reforms under the Government of India Act of 1936. From the beginning, rural interests dominated the Punjab Legislative Assembly, shortly coalescing into the Unionist Party. The Unionist Party represented the landed elites of the province: Muslim, Sikh and Hindu, a conservative feudal constituency that had

10

THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE’S PARTY

always been a bulwark of British power in the Punjab, and one that long remained resistant to rising nationalist forces. For the century they ruled Punjab, the British always regarded the province as the strategic keystone in the arc of the Indian Empire’s northwestern defenses. The province became laced with military installations, including at Rawalpindi, which served as the main operational headquarters of the Army in its almost annual small wars with the tribes of the Indo-Afghan borderland. After the Great Rebellion of 1857, the province became the primary recruiting ground for the Indian Army. As a 1936 official report noted, some 60 percent of the combatant troops of the Army were from Punjab. Approximately half of these were Punjabi Muslims and half Sikhs. Another 6 percent were from the North-West Frontier Province. British strategic interests in Punjab were consciously paired with a paternalist colonial administration, the so-called Punjab School, that looked out for the economic welfare of the Punjabi peasant, established proprietary land tenure and protections against indebtedness, developed the largest gravity canal irrigation system in the world, brought hundreds of thousands of acres to the plow under the canal colonies scheme, and made Punjab the bread basket of India.4 Starting in 1847, British officials began to take administrative control of Punjab from the increasingly unstable Sikh Kingdom of Lahore. The British century established an era o f peace and development after a century of invasion, insurgency, and the predations of the Sikh misls (freebooters) and, later, armed Sikh revenue collecting forays. Colonial administration in Punjab was founded in part on co­ opting 1the natural leaders' of the people, including many of the Sikh Sardars who had fought against the British in the Second Anglo-Sikh War (1847-1848). The success of this policy was pre-eminently demonstrated in 1857, when a largely Punjabi army of Muslims and Sikhs, led by a remarkable band of British officers, recovered Delhi from the mutinous troops of the Company's army. Right up until partition and independence, and for at least two decades thereafter, the portion of the old Punjab that went to Pakistan was overwhelmingly rural. Here, the key to the colonial administration was in an unwritten political contract between the civil service and the local landed notables, whose loyalty and customary authority enabled the British to rule central and western Punjab with remarkably little indigenous opposition. The British depended on the class o f landed

INTRODUCTION

11

notables to help maintain law and order in the countryside, turn in criminals and rebels, aid in land settlement operations, assist with army recruitment, and support development projects. All this was in return for the government's recognition o f their customary authority, proprietary estates, access to canal colony land, influence peddling, and inclusion in a formal system of imperial rewards and titles. British policy made the landed notables an essential element in the district administration, both before and after independence, and created a power base from which most of these families have yet to be excluded. In essence, then, the Punjab system reinforced the traditional authority of landed notables and their families, many of which were rooted in the 'little tradition of local rulership' by powerful clans and families that had emerged most recently during the time when the Mughals had lost control over their outlying provinces, the subahs of Lahore and Multan. In the eastern districts of what is now Pakistan's Punjab, the British dealt with the leading families of the corporative Jat clans, the chaudhuris, who had functioned as village chiefs and revenue collectors under the Sikhs. In the centre and west, the tacit political contract was with the ashrafi (noble) families, a collection of powerful clan chiefs, variously identified with Rajput, Baloch, Pathan, and Awan origins, and networks of sacerdotal lineages—the great Pirs of Punjab (Gardezi Sayyids, Shuhrawardi Qureshis, Gilani Sayyids, Bukhari Sayyids). The 'Punjab Chiefs,' as the British called them, became the privileged anchor of the rural administration. In the later part of the nineteenth century, with the establishment of the Punjab Chiefs College—later Aitcheson College—the British sought to mould the chiefly families into a landed gentry and carriers of the kind of noblesse oblige characteristic of the British rural squirearchy. Having patronized these groups, the British were more than happy to see these loyal families elected into the Legislative Assemblies of 1920 and 1937 and to fill out the ranks of the diligent and trustworthy Unionist Party. In part, the induction of the ashrafi zamindariat (landed gentry) into the Assembly was in response to growing politicization in the cities and the need to prevent radical politics from invading the countryside. Of course, once it became clear the British would leave India, the loyalties of a second generation of Muslim landed notables would shift to the Muslim League and add crucial weight in Punjab to the Pakistan Movement. This enabled the landed notables to control how 'modern politics' penetrated the countryside and to maintain their authority unchallenged in the early years of the

12

THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE’S PARTY

new country. In every election since 1920, with the partial exception of 1970, the landed classes and tribal sardars (chiefs), the zamindariat, have dominated the national and provincial assemblies in Pakistan, including the national and provincial (rural) constituencies in Punjab. In Punjab, in the assemblies of the 1990s, one will find the grandsons and great-grandsons of the men who first sat in the 1920 Punjab Legislative Assembly. While the British co-opted a pre-existing notable class, the impact of economic and social developments in the middle decades of the British century led to the formation of a nascent Muslim middle class in the cities. This was a middle class in the sense that it emerged in the social interstices between the old notable class (ashrafiya) and the mass of Muslims. It was 'modern* because it formed around occupations and skills that did not exist in the same way in traditional society—the law, medicine, disciplined civil service, education, engineering, and commerce. During the British century, Punjab’s cities acquired modem institutions: newspapers, colleges, bar and welfare associations, hospitals, banks, insurance companies, agro­ industries, trading corporations, and communications networks. This not only changed the physical-spatial character of the cities, but introduced education and professional roles to the ashrafi groups and routes of upward mobility for gifted men of lesser social origins. Although the Punjabi Muslims always remained well behind the Hindus in taking to these new professions, there was the steady growth of an urban Muslim gentry in the first half of the twentieth century.5 From the beginning, Muslim political consciousness in urban Punjab was cast in religious terms. This perhaps was inevitable in an historical context where social and religious categories were inseparable, and where, in the modernizing context, the competition for economic and social advancement seemed to pit late-developing Muslims against more advanced Hindus. In Punjab, the latter already dominated the departments open to indigenous recruitment, the professions, and the commercial and financial institutions of the province. But if the urban Muslim political response was essentially communal, it was not to begin with a single or unified response. Although rising urban leaders, like Mian Muhammad Shafi, were attracted early on to the All-India Muslim League (1902), and brought Muslim League politics to the province in 1906, it would be another thirty five years before the League displaced the Unionist Party and

INTRODUCTION

13

drew a broad coalition of social and political groups into the Pakistan Movement. In the meantime, the strongest Muslim political impulse in the cities arose not from the middle class, but from the bazaar. The defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War and fear for the future of the Islamic Khilafat galvanized the Indian ulama into the Khilafat Movement. In Punjab, the movement aroused the passions of the students, bazaaris, government clerks, small-town maulvis (clerics), and urban artisans. Although the movement declined it was Ataturk who overthrew the Khilafat along with the Ottoman Sultanate—the Khilafatists ended up establishing a claim to political influence in the Muslim community, and in the call for an Hakum at-i-Illahia (Government of God), proposing an alternative political model for the future. In essence, the movement renewed the political linkage lost in the Great Rebellion of 1857 between the ulama, the lower middle class of pre-industrial Muslim society, and a radical politics that was at once both religious and social. In time, the Khilafat Movement in Punjab broke up and spun off a number of religious parties and sectarian organizations, two of which—the Ittehad-i-Millat and the Majlis-iAhrar—had greater electoral success in the 1937 elections (urban constituencies) than the Muslim League. The Ittehad and the Ahraris each won two seats in the 'Muhammadan towns constituencies,' the Muslim League one. The League was entirely shut out of the rural constituencies by the Unionists.

T he P a k ista n M ovem ent

The 1937 elections showed that the Muslim middle class of Punjab was altogether too weak in numbers and resources to carry along the nationalist movement. Increasingly involved in Punjabi politics, the Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah, sought to broaden the social base of the provincial League by bringing the landed notables into the party through the Jinnah-Sikander Pact of 1937. This pact enabled the unionists to join the League without altering the name or structure of the Unionist Party in the Punjab Legislative Assembly. The rural notables saw the pact in part as a device to hold off the growing threat of communal politics, but also, to give themselves a footing in the AllIndia Muslim League. In the end, however, the pact was a Trojan horse for the Unionists. Jinnah and the League made use both of rising pro-

14

THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE’S PARTY

Pakistan sentiment among Punjabi Muslims and the emergence of a new generation of ashrafi leaders. These were men like Mian Mumtaz Khan Daultana, Sardar Shaukat Hayat Khan, and Nawab Iftikhar Hussain of Mamdot, who saw their political futures in terms of a new Muslim nation, not in a declining empire, and whose progressive opinions aligned them with urban youth, students, and professionals. These ‘young turk’ landholders formed the opening wedge for the rural notables to enter the League. In the 1946 elections, many of the Unionist MLAs (Members of Legislative Assembly) from the heartland and canal colony districts stood on League tickets, while others—many of them sons of the central and western chiefs and pirs—acquired League tickets to challenge and defeat the Unionist diehards. In 1946, the party that had gained only one seat in 1937, won 73 to the Unionist’s 11, and, in most cases, did so by winning from 62.0 to 97.5 percent of the vote in the constituencies. Thus, by 1946, the League had come to represent the landed interests of Punjab. In thus embedding themselves in the nationalist movement, the rural notables not only secured for themselves a central place in the post­ independence structure of power, but kept the League from moving to arouse the rural peasantry. Increasingly the arbiter of Muslim Pui^jab politics. Jinnah’s genius for building broad coalitions perhaps showed itself best in this province. An outsider, he was able to persuade disparate interests to submerge their differences in the wider Muslim nationalist struggle. By 1947, the League held in uneasy suspension most of the diverse social groups in Muslim Punjab: the rural ashrafiya with their wider tribal and personal alliances, the urban gentry and their biraderi associations, radical young lawyers and students, nascent commercial and professional associations, the bazaar, and the artisans. The latter two groups had deserted the ulama and their religious parties, which had wavered badly in deciding whether to support the Pakistan Movement. Jinnah’s authority thus overrode factional and parochial cleavages in Punjab politics, but it did not fuse them, or change old identities and interests. The technique of stringing together vertically structured patron-client and kinship networks and urban associations by bringing their leaders together on League Working Committees made for unstable, fluid and highly personalized party organization. For Jinnah, the coalitional strategy worked. Through it, he got the Punjab, the most indispensable province, into the Pakistan Movement.

INTRODUCTION

15

Until then, when Sindh and Punjab went for the League at about the same time, the All-India Muslim League had no real claim to represent Muslim majority areas. Almost certainly, the Muslim League victory in the 1946 Punjab election finally persuaded the British that a united India could be retained only at the cost of civil war. This recognition gave Jinnah the larger victory he sought of a new nation for India’s Muslims. In many respects, the formation of Pakistan was the personal achievement the Quaid-i-Azam. With his passing in 1948, however, there was no one with sufficient stature to enforce discipline in either the politics of the new State or the League organization. Political power in the new state began to descend into the hands of lesser and lesser men.

P arty P olitics in P unjab , 1 9 4 7 -1 9 5 8 6

The unity of the Punjab Muslim League did not much outlast the founding of Pakistan. Within a year factional infighting had begun to characterize the League, running along parochial cleavages inherited from the Unionists. Given the overwhelming dominance of the rural areas, secured through territorial-plurality (‘first past the post’) constituencies, the rural notables early on took control of the provincial League organization. (In 1951, only 7 percent of the Punjab population lived in towns or cities of more than 20,000.) Bred to a life of display, to the indulgence o f feudal perquisites, to the suppression of any opposition from below, the landed ashrafi-gentry classes of the Indus Plain were not ones to operate parliamentary institutions in a manner responsible to a citizen electorate. Although there were always important exceptions, too many of the notables acted as if the law, and its agencies (the local thanadar, police station head), were tools to be used against one’s opponents, but bypassed to help oneself and one’s clients. In these circumstances, League organizations in rural Punjab were simply extensions o f the influence networks of the locally dominant zamindars. Party membership rolls carried the names of their henchmen, biraderi members, tenants, and of enough fictitious enrollees to better the next big man’s claim to precedence. Control over

16

THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE’S PARTY

a large block of votes was deemed essential as a base from which to bargain for party office, patronage, a ticket in the next elections, or for inserting oneself into the entourage of a powerful minister. For their part, the party leaders could hardly ignore those who controlled the vote bank of an area. Political rivalry there was aplenty, but it occurred between competing factions and notables who claimed dominance in the same or overlapping areas. The first formal split in the Punjab Muslim League occurred in November 1949 with the formation of the Azad Pakistan Party (APP). The party was led by Mian Iftikharuddin, a mildly socialist lawyer who led the progressive bloc within the League. Scion of a rising network of urban lawyers and gentry rentiers (the Baghbanpura Mians, a leading Lahori Arain clan), Iftikharuddin had overseen the remarkably populist 1946 Punjab Muslim League Manifesto, which had called for land reform, and served in the first post-independence Punjab cabinet as Minister for Refugees and Rehabilitation. In addition, as an Arain gentleman, Iftikharuddin became a spokesman for Punjabi Muslims migrating into Punjab from what became India’s states of Punjab, and later Himachal Pradesh and Haryana. These Punjabi muhajir (migrant) groups largely were from the lesser cultivating lineages (biraderi) in hinterland East Punjab (Arains, Kambohs, etc.) or urban bazaari groups (Sheikhs, Kashmiris, Kakkezais, etc.). East of the partition line, the Jats were mostly Sikhs and the Rajput clans mostly Hindu. As Minister for Refugees, Iftikharuddin was able to influence how evacuee properties were transferred, including millions of acres of irrigated land left behind by mostly Sikh cultivators in the canal colony tracts. Iftikharuddin also proposed breaking up the larger estates on the Pakistan side for distribution among the muhajirs. Not surprisingly, the urban progressives around Iftikharuddin were made to feel increasingly unwelcome in the Punjab Muslim League. The Azad Pakistan Party never amounted to much in an electoral sense, but did hold within it the antecedents of both the National Awami Party and the left wing of the Pakistan People’s Party. The second split in the Punjab Muslim League occurred prior to the 1951 Punjab Assembly elections. This split was an outgrowth of the long factional rivalry between Nawab Iftikhar Hussain of Mamdot and Mian Mumtaz Khan Daultana, respectively the first and second Chief Ministers of post-partition Punjab. In a replay of the factional alignments of the Unionist period, Mamdot led a coalition of the smaller rural tribes (Pathans, Khattars, Arains, Gujars), both local and

INTRODUCTION

17

muhajir, and much of the urban gentry (Arains, Kashmiris, Kakkezais) and bazaans (Sheikhs). He also gained important support itom the old split between the Shahpur Maliks (Rajput Tiwanas and Noons) and the old Rajput-Jat alliance led by Daultana’s father. In the end, Daultana was able to firm up the old dominant alliance between Rajputs and Jats and detatch important elements from Mamdot’s coalition (Shahpur Qureshis and Pirachas, Gilani Sayyids of Multan and Attock, etc.). As so often happens in Punjabi politics, the demonstration of power leads to the accretion of more power, as additional zamindars attached themselves to the group they thought had the best chance of winning. Damaged by the withdrawal of the urban progressives and more so by the losses to Daultana, the core Mamdot group redefined itself as the Jinnah Awami Muslim League five months before the March, 1951 Punjab elections. With 197 seats at stake, the Daultana-led Punjab Muslim League won 143 seats and an overall percentage of 52.0. The Jinnah Awami Muslim League took 31 seats, with 18.3 percent of the vote. The forlorn Azad Pakistan Party ran 30 candidates, but gained only one seat and 2.0 percent of the vote. In addition, one candidate from the Jama'at-i-lslami, five from minority constituencies, and 13 independents were elected. Amid charges the election had not been fair, 10 MLAs switched to the Punjab Muslim League, two from the Jinnah League and eight independents. Daultana served as Chief Minister for two years after the elections, to be followed by Feroze Khan Noon (March 1953 to June 1955) and Abdul Hamid Dasti from June 1955 until the enforcement of One Unit. Punjab politics remained faction-ridden and less than coherent. Increasingly, the central political leaders and senior civil servants, mostly Urdu-speaking muhajirs, saw themselves at odds with the Punjab— and Sindh—zamindariat. For the most part, the civil services—central and provincial—ran the state, so that the manoeuvrings of the landed notables had little affect on policy or the higher administration. At the district and divisional level, however, the landlords increasingly were seen as a nuisance. This, plus a growing body of opinion in the central bureaucracy that Pakistan needed to pursue land reform in order to develop—land reform in Indian Punjab had sparked high yields and other economic growth—helped to create differing agendas between the civil service elites and the landed notables. This left the bureaucratic oligarchs looking for a way to bring the zamindars to heel.

18

THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE’S PARTY

There were, of course, many other reasons why those who ruled Pakistan at the centre pressed for One Unit, that is the submersion of the West Pakistan provinces into a single province. Clearly, it was a way to deal with the population majority in East Pakistan in any constitutional order that mandated adult franchise elections. It was also seen as a way to centralize the ‘executive state* in the hands of the senior civil service, and its still hidden partner in the militarybureaucratic oligarchy. The 1956 Constitution did not, however, reduce the problem of party factionalism and political manoeuvring in either of the provincial assemblies, or indeed in the national parliament. According to those who organized and led it, this kind of political instability was the chief explanation for the coup d'état of October 1958.

NOTES 1. This chapter replaces Chapters 1 through 4 o f my doctoral dissertation. It summarizes only a small part o f that material. See: Philip E. Jones, "The Pakistan People’s Party: Social Group Response and Party Development in an Era o f Mass Participation,' Ph.D. Dissertation, The Fletcher School o f Law and Diplomacy, Tufts U niversity, A pril 1979. H enceforth, references to the thesis will be footnoted supra, the page number indicated referring to the page number in the thesis. 2. Those who know it will recognize the influence o f Brian M. Downing, The M ilitary Revolution and P olitical Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 3. The theoretical portion o f the thesis was influenced mainly by the works o f M yron W einer, Lucian Pye, Samuel Huntington, and Daniel Leraer. See: Lucian W. Pye, ‘Party Systems and National Development in A sia,’ in Political Parties and Political Development, eds. Joseph LaPalombara and Myron W einer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966); Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968); and Daniel Lem er, The Passing o f Traditional Society (New York: The Free Press, 1958). The thesis argued that Pakistan in 1968-1970 could be defined as a 'low institutionalization, high politicization m odel,’ the ideal situation for a charismatic leader like Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to ride to power on the basis o f mass mobilization politics. 4. See: Jones, ‘People’s Party,* Chapter II, pp. 34 to 86. This chapter develops the historical and social foundations o f the Punjab political system, the tradition o f local centers o f power, the impact o f the Sikh

INTRODUCTION

19

period, and the way in which British land policy shaped social and political power in the province. 5. Ibid., Chapter III, pp. 87-121. This chapter discusses the Muslim political response in twentieth century Punjab, the emergence o f the Muslim League and the U nionist Party, the K hilafat M ovem ent, the 1937 elections, the emergence o f Muhammad Ali Jinnah as the main mediator in Punjabi politics, and the Pakistan Movement. Data for the 1937 and 1946 elections is presented. The chapter also analyses tribal and biraderi patterns in Unionist factional politics. 6. A fuller discussion is available in Ibid, Chapter IV, Parties and Political Change, 1947-1958, pp. 122-179. Data for the 1951 Punjab elections are presented. The chapter also looks at parochial identities in the factional alignm ents o f the Punjab Muslim League, the formation o f provincial cabinets, and electoral alliances in 1951. This is useful as a background to understanding the role o f parochial loyalties in the 1970 elections.

PART - 1

2 THE AYUB ERA: INSTITUTIONAL INNOVATION AND SOCIAL CHANGE, 1958-1966 Much like the Muslim League, the Pakistan People’s Party had its genesis as a political movement within the administrative State. As both a political movement and a political party, the PPP would display continuities and discontinuities with the past. These continuities were organizational and political tendencies that paralleled those of the preAyub Muslim League, while the discontinuities resulted from basic structural change in Punjabi society and the consequent politicization of horizontal social cleavages. Some of this structural change—e.g., urbanization—was cumulative and the result of underlying trends, but much of it resulted from, or was enhanced by, the political and developmental policies pursued by the Ayub Government The Pakistan People’s Party was an unplanned child in the Ayub Era in the sense that it rode to power on social forces that were consolidated and politicized in the processes of change set off by Ayub’s efforts to remodel and rehabilitate Pakistan’s society. Because the PPP promised radically new directions for Pakistan, this inner contextual relationship was somewhat obscured by the discordance of political conflict. But as time has lengthened our distance from these events, the generational aspect, particularly as represented in the career or Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, seems more visible. As the framework for the emergence of the PPP, the Ayub Era assumes major importance for this study. For our purposes, the Ayub Era can be divided into three periods. The first, marked by Martial Law, lasted from 1958 to 1962. It opened with a vigourous effort to purge the public and private sectors of years of accumulated corruption, maladministration and tax avoidance. In this period the military elite consolidated its hold on the State organs and embarked on a programme of modernization and institutional

24

THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE’S PARTY

innovation. The second period lasted from 1962 to 1965. It began with the promulgation of a Constitution that sanctioned the Basic Democracies system as the foundation for an indirectly-elected Presidential order. This was a period of remarkable economic growth; it also saw the return of political parties and political activity, a testament to the failure of Ayub’s original policy of depoliticization. The September War with India in 1965 marked the beginning of the slow decline of the Ayubian system. The political and economic consequences of this war were massive. The Tashkent Declaration, which formally marked the end of hostilities, brought Ayub Khan and his Foreign Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, to a political parting of the ways. This period ended with the resignation of Ayub Khan from the Presidency in March 1969 after long months of bloody turmoil in which Bhutto played a prominent role.

M a r t i a l L a w a n d R e fo r m

1 9 5 8 -1 9 6 2

The military coup d’état of October 1958 was in part what Janowitz has termed ‘reactive militarism,*1 and in part what we can call a ‘renovationist intervention.* The reactive dimension in Ayub’s militarism is clear enough. The Army, as the ultimate guarantor of the viceregal system, stepped in to halt what it perceived to be political and social trends leading to the disintegration of the State. The coup was aimed squarely at those groups the Army saw as responsible for Pakistan’s adverse state of affairs. In his broadcast to the nation on the day after the take-over, Ayub Khan implicitly justified the Army's action by decrying the record of the politicians: Ever since the death o f the Quaid-i-Azam and M r Liaquat Ali Khan, politicians started a free-for-all type o f fighting in which no holds were baned. They waged a ceaseless and bitter w ar against each other regardless o f the ill effects on their country, ju st to whet their appetites and satisfy their base motives. There has been no limit to the depth o f their baseness, chicanery, deceit, and degradation. Having nothing constructive to offer, they used provincial feelings, sectarian, religious, and racial differences to set a Pakistani against a Pakistani. They could see no good in anybody else. All that mattered was self-interest. In this mad rush for power and acquisition, the country and people could go to the dogs as far as they were concerned.3

THE AYUBERA

25

Clearly, the October coup was aimed directly at the country's political elites—the central League politicians concentrated in the capital, the landed notable classes of the Indus Plains and the rising ‘vernacular elite* of East Pakistan.3 None of these groups had the confidence of the Army leadership. O f particular concern was the rise of the vernacular elite in the East Pakistani Awami League, which the military chiefs regarded as a ‘disruptive force.*4 Almost certainly, the possibility of this elite, in coalition with like-minded provincial elites in West Pakistan, coming to power at the Centre after the elections, formed a significant element in the decision to move against the political establishment. The displacement of the political elites worked to reinforce the ‘steel frame* institutions o f the old viceregal system, the Army and the civil service, and turned Pakistan back toward a purer form of the administrative State. Adjustments in the relations between the viceregal elites was a necessary early consequence of the coup. For the first time the Army had assumed the political direction of the State. Tensions inevitably appeared between the military leaders and the civil establishment, particularly after the latter lost the protection of Iskandar Mirza. As Ayub*s autobiography intimates, some of the top echelon civil officers were initially less than enthusiastic about the primacy of the Army leadership.9 This may have resulted in part from their apprehension that the Martial Law Regime would call the civil elite to account for corruption in the services and for its manipulatory role in aiding the decline o f political order. The Army did move against corruption and inefficiency in the bureaucracy, but the total numbers adversely affected by these investigations—2.5 per cent of Class I officers and 1.5 per cent of clerical grade personnel (Class III)6—was remarkably small in view of general allegations that the services were shot through with corruption. The new regime also intervened in the internal affairs of the bureaucracy to bring into relevant policy-making positions members of the technical and specialist departments, a move long resisted by the older generation of CSP generalists. Perhaps because of its indispensability in a time of crisis, the Army did not order an immediate overhaul of the administration. Instead, it appointed a Pay and Services Commission to scrutinize the organization, powers and role of the bureaucracy and to recommend reforms. The report of this Commission was not made until 1962, but by then the political situation in the country had altered and the CSP had managed

26

THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE’S PARTY

sufficiently to reinsure itself with the Ayub Regime to ward off the drastic transformations proposed by the Pay and Services Commission. The renovationist impulse in the military intervention was as significant as the reactive dimension. It was evident from the beginning that this would not be a transitory, caretaker government, but one that would seek permanent stability for the State by remodeling its institutions. The political system legitimated under the Constitution of 1956—Ayub called it a ‘document of despair’7—and the bankrupt politicians who turned it to their own ends, had failed in the crucial tasks of modernization and State-building. Perhaps the real innovation of the Ayub Regime was its genuine commitment to modernization, a goal the military and specialist elites appreciated far more than did the zamindar-politicians, or even the generalist CSP cadre. The new rulers would therefore move against both the human and systemic ills afflicting the State, but they would do so within a modernizing context Despite Ayub’s fondness for the term, Pakistan’s new leaders were not ‘revolutionaries,’ but rather conservative modernizers. Ayub was not a Nasserite figure, bent on arousing powerful mass emotions in a ‘revolutionary repudiation' of the old order. He had a distaste for the maddening arenas of politics and for those who operated in them, and in no sense did his policies aim at the destruction of any social class. His effort was to shore up and enliven the viceregal institutions in ways that would enable them to manage national development Ayub, and the group of officers around him, had fully absorbed the pragmatism inherent in the planning and operational models of British military practice and, further, believed these principles could be applied, mutatis mutandis, in the civilian sphere. In pursuit of these ends, he preferred to believe, as Professor Ziring has it, that ‘government meant administration and that politics was to be eliminated rather than understood.'* In a general sense, this would be perhaps his most costly misperception. In one sense, then, the October coup can be seen as an effort to gain control over the directions of development, to bring order and management to processes of change that had heretofore been essentially uncontrolled. The civil and military elites acted to ensure both that development occurred, and that it occurred on their own terms. With modernization a central priority, the new Regime evolved its policies around three main objectives. The first of these was the expansion and rationalization of national authority. The post-independence political leadership, the urban intelligentsia, the ulama, and the civil service

THE AYUB ERA

27

professionals had all proven incapable of transforming Muslim nationalism into a moral and political framework around which an integrated national order could be built. Now, a decade after independence, with provincialism and separatism remaining persistent problems, Pakistan was ‘still concerned with proving the fact of Muslim nationhood.*9 Ayub*s response was less ideological than pragmatic and exhortative. He worked to replace the negativism of self, group, and provincial interest with a positive programme of national development: ‘What the country needed was a positive effort to move forward, to build itself and the economy into a dynamic and progressive force.*10Reforms were needed to separate the ‘good things* from the weaknesses and evils inherited from the past. Although Ayub had a strong belief in the innate integrity of the Pakistani people, he also recognized the ‘basic necessity for...a revolution in attitudes,* so that ‘passivity and non-cooperation; indiscipline and non-acceptance of public authority; placing of self before the community; and the disruptive forces of regionalism and provincialism...would give way to a spirit of individual initiative, personal integrity, pride in accomplishment, trust in one’s fellow men...and a private sense of public duty.’" A pious Muslim, Ayub was nevertheless too much a rationalist to permit an emotional reconstruction of Muslim nationalism to serve as an ideological base for his regime or as a means of arousing mass support. He would rely less on arousing than on persuading the people to support his Regime, for behind his ‘schoolmasterish* paternalism was the belief that prolonged effectiveness was sufficient to bring legitimacy to the institutions and programmes he sponsored. The expansion and rationalization of national authority welded well with the Regime’s second basic objective: rapid economic develop­ ment. Both required enlarging the capacity of the State planning and executive institutions for policy innovation and implementation. The expansion of power at the Centre resulting from the military intervention had to be consolidated and concentrated in centralized institutions that could act in the wider national interest against the demands of private concentrations of wealth and influence. Ayub was not a total centralizer. Even as his Constitution would retain the ‘One Unit* and parity principles of the 1956 Constitution,12his organizational plan for development permitted some decentralization to the provincial level. This was especially true of the public corporations, the bodies of specialists through which the Ayub Regime channeled much of its development effort. The Water and Power Development Authority

28

THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE’S PARTY

(WAPDA) and the Pakistan Industrial Development Corporation (PIDC), for example, were divided into separate provincial agencies. The overall allocation of resources and personnel for these and other specialist agencies was, however, kept under the Centre. The third basic objective of the Ayub Regime was to stabilize the political process by ‘depoliticizing’ it through institutional innovation. The rationalization of national authority required the screening of the decisional and distributive mechanisms from outside political pressures. Political groups organized outside the purview o f government institutions had to be either severely curtailed or co-opted. Beyond this, Ayub sought the kinds of institutional change that would enable his Government to manage the staged socialization of the mass citizenry to an indirect-participant political order. It was from this impulse that the Basic Democracies (BD) system was apparently derived. From our perspective the BD system had two important political purposes: (1) to concentrate, i.e., to contain, popular political activity at the level of local government, and (2) to provide a system of controlled access to the upper levels of government. Promulgated a year after the coup, the Basic Democracies Order provided for a multi-tiered, ‘interlocking and interdependent arrangement of institutions that [focused] on the primary objectives of national integration and development.’13At the base of the BD pyramid were the local bodies: Union Councils in rural areas, Town Committees in the non-corporation towns, and Union Committees in the larger cities. The local bodies tended to be composed of from ten to fifteen members called Basic Democrats, all elected by universal adult suffrage, and each representing from 1,000 to 1,500 persons. The 80,000 (later 120,000) Basic Democrats in Pakistan collectively constituted the electoral college for the President and, with the promulgation of the Constitution of 1962, the National and Provincial Assemblies as well. In December 1959, the first crop of Basic Democrats was elected, and in February of the next year, these voted in a plebiscite wherein 95.6 per cent registered their confidence in Ayub’s leadership and elected him President. The BD system also had important developmental and judicial functions. The latter function was focused at the Union Council level, wherein conciliation courts were established to settle minor civil and criminal cases as well as family problems. The development function was to operate at all levels of the BD pyramid—Union, Tehsil, District and Divisional Councils,—but most importantly at the District level.

THE AYUB ERA

29

Membership in the councils above the local bodies was shared by Basic Democrats, elected by their peers from below, and civil and specialist bureaucrats, who were statutory members. This blending of elected and official representation, a feature of British period elective institutions now applied to local government, was designed to make the bureaucracy more responsive to local needs while bringing responsible local leaders into the decision-making process. Apart from a modicum of authority for the elected representatives at the local level, however, real authority in the BD system remained with the official representatives. The BD system was destined to become less a means of local representation than an arm of the bureaucracy.

M a r t ia l L a w

and

R ural I nterests

As perhaps no one was more aware than he, Ayub’s basic objectives— the rationalization of national authority, economic development and depoliticization—necessarily required a shift in the distribution of power among social and interest groups at both the national and provincial levels. Nowhere else in the process of redistribution did so many themes of the Martial Law Regime coalesce as in its policies toward the landed ashrafi-gentry families in the Indus Plains. This, as we have already noted, was the dominant social element in the political establishment displaced by the military coup. Control of the provincial Assemblies and influence with local officialdom, including the police, together with the customary sources of their authority, made these families a ‘vast and sometimes inert agglomeration of power.*14 True, they rose from a feudal base that had been maintained by the British, but the latter had sought even more vigourously to protect the peasant proprietary classes in the countryside. Concomitantly with the post1947 ascendency of the rural notables, the position of the small holders, and of the tenantry and rural field labour, deteriorated. Through extensive cultivation, and by influencing the distribution of irrigation water, the notable class, as Shahid Javed Burki has demonstrated, prospered during a decade when agriculture as a whole stagnated. In the Punjab scheme of things, as elsewhere in West Pakistan, these were the means to political as well as economic maximization for the large landholder 'The more land he could bring under his control, the larger was his constituency and the greater his political power.*15 Since independence, then, the rural notables had further strengthened their

30

THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE’S PARTY

traditional bases of power, had continued to represent a factor of dispersed authority, and had maintained a common front against any meaningful reform. The Martial Law Regime moved early to diminish the influence of the zamindar-politicians. This was evident from the impact on this class of the Elective Bodies Disqualification Order (EBDO), the Martial Law Regulation No. 64 on land reform, and the implementation of the Basic Democracies Order. The political implications of these moves were more important than their actual economic impact. Nothing in Ayub’s policies indicates an intention to destroy the rural notables as a class. In retrospect, his policies seem more explicable when seen as an effort to gain (or regain) leverage by the central government over the dominant class in rural West Pakistan. The Elective Bodies Disqualification Order of 1959 prohibited anyone from holding public office who had used his political position for personal advantage, or to the detriment of the State. The ban remained in effect until 31 December 1966. Most of the approximately 6,000 persons who were ‘EBDOed’ opted for the prohibition rather than face intensive scrutiny by the authorities.16 According to Burki, of the 108 members of the ‘landed aristrocracy* who had held ministerial appointments at the Centre or in West Wing provincial governments, ‘at least 42 or 38.9 per cent were charged under EBDO.’ Moreover, ‘of those so charged, 33 or 78.6 per cent were found to have used their official powers' for manipulating the distribution of canal water in their own interest.17 In Punjab, EBDO most affected the politicians of the post-independence League Governments—Mamdot, Daultana, Col. Abid Hussain, etc.,—but had little impact on the old Unionists, a grouping that soon moved to support Ayub under the leadership of the Khan of Kalabagh. One lasting result of EBDO was that it opened the way for a new generation of political figures to establish themselves, among these being men such as Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Ghulam Mustafa Khar. Nonetheless, the ultimate effect of EBDO on the old political interests was moderate, since it neither crushed them, nor prohibited them from indirect forms of political activity while under the ban, nor closed off their eventual return to elective politics after it was lifted.11 Often cited as a major accomplishment of the Martial Law reforms, land reform under MLR 64 was directed almost exclusively at [those] some 6,000 individuals who held more than 500 acres in West Pakistan. As TABLE 1 shows, patterns of landholding in Punjab had not

THE AYUB ERA

31

fundamentally altered since Calvert made his study in the 1920s,19 although a comparison of the 1925 and 1958 data suggests both an increased fragmentation of holdings among the smallest holders and a slightly greater concentration of land in the hands of the notable families. In West Pakistan as a whole this latter category encompassed 0.1 per cent of all landholders, their holdings constituting some

TABLE 1 LANDHOLDING IN PUNJAB BEFORE 1958* (figures in per cent) Punjab

Area owned 5 acres or less 5 to 25 acres 25 to 100 acres 100 to 500 acres 500 and over

Bahawalpur

owners

land owned

owners

land owned

6 74 28.2 3.8 0.5 0.1

16.5 39.1 21.4 13.3 9.7

36.9 49.1 12.3 1.5 0.2

5.3 38.0 27.9 17.6 11.2

•Source: Report o f the Land Reforms Commission for West Pakistan, Akhter Hussain, Chairman (Lahore: Superintendent of Government Printing, West Pakistan, 19S9), Appendix I.

15.4 per cent of all land. In Punjab, the average holding of individuals who owned 500 or more acres was 1,490 acres, though most of the chiefly holders owned anywhere from 4,800 acres (Gurmani) to more than 20,000 (Kalabagh).20 The important feature of MLR 64 was its ceiling of landholdings. This was expressed in a measure of land productivity called produce index units (piu). The basic ceiling on individual ownership was put at 36,000 piu, which worked out to approximately 500 acres of irrigated land and 1,000 of unirrigated land.21 Under certain circumstances additional acreages could be retained: 150 acres in orchards, 18,000 piu to give to heirs, as well as all land used for stud and livestock farming. Jagirs were converted to the more secure proprietary tenure, with the same ceilings then applying. Historic intermediate rights, such as malikan *a/a,22 were abolished, but land used for religious and charitable purposes was exempted from any resumption. Beyond this, the reform extended the provisions o f the Punjab Tenancy (Amendment) Act on the ejection of tenants to the whole of West

32

THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE’S PARTY

Pakistan and also contained provisions aimed at reducing the fragmentation of holdings. Under MLR 64 some 2.2 million acres were resumed by the Government in West Pakistan, of which less than half, or 1.0 million, were taken from Punjab (including Bahawalpur).23 Since landholders could specify which of their holdings they would retain, most of the land given up was of inferior quality. In Punjab only 26.5 per cent of resumed land was under regular cultivation, 45.2 per cent was cultivable waste—i.e., productive if water could be brought to it—and the remaining 23.0 per cent was unfit for cultivation. An important aspect of MLR 64 was the strikingly uneven impact it had on Punjab districts. As TABLE 2 demonstrates, 56.0 per cent of all resumed land was taken from residents of a single of Punjab's nineteen districts. The greater number of large holdings in Dera Ghazi Khan District can be traced to the dominance of powerful Baloch tribes, compactly organized within the tumandari system, and to vast holdings established as grazing lands in the period before tribesmen turned to agriculture. Of the remaining resumed land, the dry, undeveloped western districts contributed 41.1 per cent, while the heartland, canal

TABLE 2 LAND RESUMED UNDER MLR 64 PUNJAB DISTRICTS* District

Acres % of Resumed* Resumed Land

D.G. Khan 584,989 Mianwali 119,323 Campbell pur 84,312 Jhang 54,499 Multan 47,370 Sargodha 43,082 Muzaffargarh 26,269 Rahim yar Khan 26,168 Bahawalnagar 23,234 Sahiwal 13,622

56.0 11.4 8.1 5.2 4.5 4.1 2.5 2.5 2.4 1.3

District Lahore Bahawalpur Lyallpur Jhelum Sheikhupura Gujranwala Gujrat Rawalpindi SiaUcot

Acres % of Resumed* Resumed Land 7,857 7,581 1,575 1,549 686 633 -

0.8 0.7 0.2 0.1 0.07 0.06 -

-

-

-

-

•Source: Government of West Pakistan, Land Reforms in West Pakistan, Vol. Ill (Lahore: Superintendent of Government Printing, West Pakistan, 1967), pp. 280-283. ‘Include* some resumed land situated in districts other than the district of residence.

THE AYUBERA

33

colony (excluding Sargodha), and eastern Potwar districts were barely touched by the reform. Mandated from above, and occurring with most effect in the backward districts, land reform had a more deleterious impact on the zamindar’s sense of security, and on his national political position, than on his local bases of support. Where the tribal or pirimwridi bonds remained strong, as they usually did in these areas, the loss of land did not immediately demolish the traditional strengths of the notable class. The following note in the official literature on land reform speaks volumes on this matter: It came to the notice o f the C hief Land Commissioner that certain tenant* purchasers, who had purchased resumed land under the Sale Scheme, continued to pay Batai (to the previous owners and considered themselves as their vassals, despite the fact that they had become virtually proprietors o f such land and were paying instalments to the Commission.24

The land reforms of 1959 handled the rural notables somewhat more gently than had been expected. The ceilings came nowhere near the 150 acre limit urged by the Punjab Muslim League in its 1946 election manifesto or its 1949 report on agrarian problems. Moreover, those losing land were compensated with four per cent government bonds. This put a principal of Rs 89.2 million and an annual interest of Rs 3.3 million into the hands of the 902 individuals who gave up land under MLR 64. A close perusal of official land reform literature reveals many mitigating factors in MLR 64, in subsequent executive notifications by the Land Reforms Commission, and in legal and extralegal devices used by individuals to keep control of extensive estates. In some cases vast acreages were either retained as stud and livestock farms or leased out for this purpose to prominent families.25 The reforms released little land to salve the land hunger most prevalent in heartland districts, nor did the Government show any enthusiasm for using the Land Reform Commission to redistribute land to the landless. Granted, MLR 64 specified that resumed tenanted land be first offered, in subsistence lots of 12.5 acres per tenant, for sale to the sitting tenants. But few tenants had the financial resources to meet the schedule of payments to the Commission without going to their erstwhile landlords for loans, thus mortgaging their land back to the former landholder in benami transactions.26 Very little resumed land went permanently into the possession of tenants. By 1968, of 537,457 acres of cultivated tenanted land resumed in West Pakistan, only 37,274 acres were still in the hands of tenants.27 The bulk of resumed

34

THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE’S PARTY

land was either sold in upgrading schemes to small landholders, many of whom were acting as proxies in benami transactions for notables, or on the open market to middling landholders, auctioned off to w ealth y busin ess interests, or reserv ed on easy term s fo r retired m ilitary

officers and influential members of the CSP and high Judiciary.21 This latter reservation, which created a new class of zamindars, tells much about the meaning of land ownership in Pakistan and about the use of governmental authority by dominant social groups to acquire possession of land. In the final analysis, then, Ayub’s land reforms were clearly designed less to break the rural notables as a social class, than to diminish their role as a national political force. The reforms certainly had psychological and political force. For S.J. Burki the political significance of MLR 64 lay in the fact that there was a government which considered itse lf powerful enough to undertake land reform at all.... Unfettered individual ownership o f land was a sacred privilege, recognized by the powerful British raj. This right was the basis o f the enormous political and economic power o f West Pakistan’s landed aristocracy. By introducing a constraint on this right, the new government demonstrated in unequivocal terms that the political reins were now held by hands that did not belong to the landed gentry.39

Looking to the long term outcome of the land reform, most of the notables we interviewed for this study were consistent in seeing MLR 64 as the beginning of the end of feudal privilege in Pakistan. As one notable somewhat exaggeratedly made the point: The feudal class was really finished by Ayub K han.... He came in at night and overnight made harsh land reform s.... The people saw that malkiat (ownership) could be ended.30

It was not long in becoming apparent, however, that the feudal order would not succumb overnight and that, in fact, it would display a remarkable tenacity in protecting its interests. The land reform momentarily stunned the ashrafi-gentry elite, but it was not quite the complete disaster it had at first seemed. Indeed, the reform may have been beneficial to the notables in the sense that compensation and the need to reorganize their farms for greater output encouraged investment in tractors, groundwater resources and, when it became available, the seed-fertilizer package of the ‘Green Revolution.*

THE AYUB ERA

35

The shift to a more efficient agriculture by the notables was, at least in Burki’s view, one factor in the higher yields in the agricultural sector during the early Ayub period.31 The political effects were p e rh a p s m o re p o rte n to u s. L and re fo rm sig n a lle d th e e n d o f th e ir

political monopoly in the countryside and forced them henceforth to bargain in political matters with lesser gentry and middle landholder groups. This was not so much a shift in the forms of political behaviour—vertical recruitment into neighbourhood factions remained the typical political dynamic of the Punjab countryside—as it was a widening of the arena in which political influence was mobilized and negotiated. The widening of the local political arena, as a policy of the Martial Law Regime, was given concrete effect in the operation of the Basic Democracies system. In the rural areas the scheme was used to give more tangible reinforcement to the psychological and political effects of the land reform.32 The election of Basic Democrats from small constituencies broke up the ‘pocket boroughs* of the notable families, while the principle of indirect elections to the Assemblies was intended to screen these institutions from direct access via controlled, albeit one-man-one-vote constituencies. In this manner, and by bureaucratic influence in the BD nominating procedure, the Ayub Regime sought to activate a new political class in the countryside which would be less susceptible to chiefly influence and which would provide a stable social base for the Regime. In the BD elections of 1959, from which the notables generally held aloof, the middling landholder groups (50 to 150 acres) emerged as the dominant element. It was no coincidence that this group was also heavily represented in the military officer corps. Having aided its emergence, the bureaucracy now aligned itself with this new political grouping and promoted its access to the resources of technology and capital being concentrated in the Regime’s development programmes. The middle zamindars, as Burki*s studies show, proved to be energetic entrepreneurs. The primary constraint on agriculture in the Indus Basin has always been the scarcity of water, and it became no less so later in the decade when the high yieldfertilizer package of the Green Revolution arrived with its increased water requirement. Early in the Ayub period a relatively inexpensive tubewell technology became available to exploit the vast groundwater resources in Punjab and Sindh. With credit available from the cooperative societies and the new Agricultural Development Bank

36

THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE’S PARTY

TABLE 3 DISTRIBUTION OF PRIVATE TUBEWELL OWNERS IN FOUR PUNJAB DISTRICTS, BY SIZE OF LANDHOLDINGS' (p ercen tag es in p a re n th ese s) Size Categories No. o f Holdings Per cent No. o f Tubewells put in o f Holdings in Size Category o f Area Operation, 1960-1965 Joint (acres) 1960 Owned Single Ownership Ownership 1960 Lahore 0 to under 12.5 12.5 to under 25 25 to under 50 50 to under 150 150 and over

128,006 (84.6) 18,235 (12.1) 4,501 (2.9) 532 (0.4) 47 (0.03)

(51.4) (30.0) (14.1) (3.6) (0.9)

Gujranwala 0 to under 12.5 12.5 to under 25 25 to under 50 50 to under 150 150 and over

97,131 (76.9) 21,431 (16.9) 6,391 (5.1) 1*260 (1.0) 76 (0.06)

(38.1) (33.3) (18.9) (8.0) (1.7)

257 (8.0) 466 (14.5) 1,265 (39.3) 1,146 (35.6) 82 (2.6)

357 (25.6) 485 (34.7) 428 (30.7) 126 (9.0) — —

121 171 315 385 72

(1 1 4 ) (16.0) (29.6) (36.2) (6.8)

83 93 87 39 4

(27.1) (30.4) (28.4) (12.7) (1.3)

Sahiwal 0 to under 12.5 12.5 to under 25 25 to under 50 50 to under 150 150 and over

166,203 (74.7) 41,539 (18.7) 12,556 (5.6) 1,792 (0.8) 330 (0.2)

(36.6) (33.7) (18.3) (6.0) (5.4)

204 (5.4) 428 (11.2) 1,150 (30.2) 1,684 (44.2) 345 (9.1)

375 522 583 280 7

(21.2) (29.5) (33.0) (15.8) (0.4)

Multan 0 to under 12.5 12.5 to under 25 25 to under 50 50 to under 150 150 and over

179,100 (69.6) 50,660 (19.7) 21,533 (8.5) 5,612 (2.2) 259 (0.1)

(29.8) (30.0) (24.5) (13.3) (2.4)

140 (3.3) 311 (7.3) 1,039 (24.3) 2,073 (48.5) 715 (16.7)

369 506 711 376 22

(18.6) (25.5) (35.8) (19.0) (1.1)

‘Source: Mohammed Ghaffar, Amir Mohammed and Edwin H. Clark, ü.. Size o f Holdings o f Private Tubewell Owners, Research Report No. 69 (Karachi: Pakistan Institute of Development Economics, 1968); and GOP, Agriculture Census Organization, Pakistan Census o f Agriculture. I960, Vol. II, West Pakistan Report I (Karachi: Ministry of Agriculture and Works, 1963), Table No. 3.

THE AYUBERA

37

(ADB); subsidized seed, fertilizers and tubewell machinery; and the expansion by WAPDA o f the power grid to meet agricultural needs, the middle zamindars led the way to what Build has called ‘West Pakistan’s agricultural revolution.*33 According to TABLE 3, the large landholders were not excluded from these technological improvements, but it also seems clear that the real carrier of the new prosperity was the middle landholder and, to a lesser but nonetheless significant degree, the ‘rich peasant* group (25 to 50 acres). In his 1969 survey of twenty-seven villages, Burki found not only that the middle zamindar and rich peasant groups had the highest per acre productivity, but that ‘of the total land held by farmers owning between 50 and 100 acres, as much as 19.2 per cent was acquired through purchase in the 10 preceding years.*34 Most of this land became available from both extremes of the landholding spectrum. On the one hand, excessive fragmentation pushed many of the smallest holders out of farming and into the unskilled job markets of the major cities, while on the other, the need for capital, the desire not to be caught in a future land reform, and the operations of the Land Reform Commission*s sale scheme, transferred land from the notable class to the middle zamindar. This newfound prosperity, the BD system and the opportunity to influence the policy-makers in the bureaucracy, gave the middle zamindar a degree of leverage with the old notable class in the rural power equation. In its effort to diminish the influence of the ashrafi-gentry powerholders, the Martial Law Regime had in fact fashioned a new political class and through it had pressed the political process deeper into the social fabric of the countryside.

M artial L aw

and

U rban I nterests

The decision to found the social base of the Regime on the middle zamindars had much of a ruralist emphasis, but made political sense to a post-colonial elite in a country where agriculture involved such a preponderance of the population and at a time when a rising, entreprenurial class of zamindars was available to challenge the ancient customary authority of the ashrafi-gentry notables. The thrust of this rural policy found a complementary echo in the mandi (market) and district towns of Punjab,35 where the 1959 Basic Democracies election brought into the Union Councils and Town Committees small and middling business entrepreneurs—grain commission agents (

4 9 13 50 (PLA)

5 11 14 73«

5 15 16 66 (NA Y 62 (PAY

1931* Population (millions): Urbanization (per cent): Cities over 20,000 Cities over 100,000 Literacy (per cent): Voting (pet. eligibles):

The 1931 urbanization figure is for the area now in Pakistan’s Punjab; otherwise 1931 figures relate to Muslims in pre-partition Punjab. *1937 Provincial election—under restricted suffrage. All other elections cites are by universal suffrage. 'West Pakistan Union Council elections, 19S9. *1970 elections.

The landholder migrants, as Burki’s data for twenty-seven villages in Punjab shows, tended to migrate to the towns, while the tenant and landless labour migrants tended to favour the major urban centres.51 These developments all pointed to the growing complexity of Punjabi society. The growing concentration of population in the urban

THE AYUBERA

47

centres, the diffusion of technology, the shift in landholding patterns, th e rural-to-urban migrations, the establishment of large-scale industries in cities like Lyallpur,59 the spread of media sources, all accelerated the profound uncertainties already evident in the traditional societies where they impacted. Our data in TABLES 6 and 7 seem to support Lemer’s thesis, based on ‘high pairwise correlations between urbanization-literacy and literacy-media participation/ that ‘the secular evolution of a participant society appears to involve a regular sequence o f three phases*—urbanization, literacy and media participation.60 In developing societies urbanization provides the industrial conditions and engenders the social stimuli needed for ‘take-off toward widespread participation. Literacy is a crucial element of the urban, industrial, consumer matrix: ‘Its higher function is to train the skilled labour force with which cities develop the industrial complex that produces commodities for cash customers, including newspapers and radios and movies for media consumers.*61 High media participation results when industrial development and literacy levels are sufficiently advanced to support the production of newspapers, radio networks and motion pictures on a massive scale. It means, in a social context, that the new urbanites have sufficiently adjusted to the uncertainties of urban existence to seek some form of integration. The transition from village to city is, to a large degree, the transition from a society of known kinship parameters and routinized lifeways to one of almost daily uncertainty about one’s livelihood, relations with neighbours, and political and social happenings in the urban arena. Media participation is a means of dealing with uncertainty and of anticipating the future, but it is also only a step away from acting to influence the future in one’s own interest. Hence, ‘rising media participation tends to raise participation in all sectors of the social system;’62 and one can expect to see significantly higher rates of participation in socio-political form s o f b e h a v io u r su ch as v o tin g and in d u strial actions.

Apart from the already noted case of the print media, the trends in urbanization, literacy and media participation in the two tables above do not depart fundamentally from Lemer’s scenario. In his survey of fifty-four countries, Leraer found that ‘about 10% of the population must be urbanized before ‘take-off occurs.*63 Interestingly, this occurred for major urban areas in Punjab about the time of the 19571958 election campaign, a period of intense political activity that led up to the military coup. The literacy curve would have shown a somewhat steeper rise for 1951-1961 had the 1961 literacy criteria

48

THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE’S PARTY

been as loose as that used in 1951, while the figures for 1972 show that, despite the accelerated spending for education during the Ayub era, literacy barely kept ahead of the mushrooming population growth. A more relevant figure for our purposes would be to note that in 1961, 47.6 per cent of urban males were literate. Consumption figures for the print media follow the rise of urbanization until the coup, then show a decline during the Ayub period, while the consumption figures for the electronic media show a consistent rise. It is worth noting that the Ayub Regime found the electronic media a more suitable instrument for its purposes—particularly as a means to reach the largely illiterate rural classes with propaganda and technical information. Concomitantly with urban and industrial development, the Ayub period also witnessed a rapid growth both in the number of trade unions and in trade union membership. Though much of this growth came in the established areas of unionism—railways, textiles and shipping,—a significant amount came from the unionization of new skill and semi-professional groups associated with consumer industries, chemicals, services, construction and electricity. By 1968, in West Pakistan (excluding Karachi), 39.9 per cent of trade unions and 34.3 per cent of trade union membership came from economic sectors that had not been unionized prior to 1961.64 Finally, the 73 per cent participation figure for the 1959 Union Council elections in West Pakistan is a high figure for a population that was still largely rural. Familiarity with the old District Board elections and the relevance of local issues undoubtedly encouraged this high participation, but perhaps more important was the opening of local government to new social strata and interest groups, as well as the perception of new economic opportunities associated with land reform and the promise of rural development. It was certainly an important signal of extensive politicization early in the Ayub period.

S o c ia l G ro ups

and

P o litical C hange

The lifting of Martial Law in 1962 opened the way for the ‘repoliticization* of Pakistan’s political life. Though the military government had brought a large measure of calm and stability to Pakistan’s politics, opposition to Ayub’s aims and methods had always existed under the restraining mantle of Martial Law. This opposition involved not only the urban intelligentsia and ulama, hut reached into

THE AYUB ERA

49

the pre-1958 political, civil and judicial establishments. The clear divergence between the military authorities on one hand, and the Constitution and Franchise Commissions on the other, marked a cleavage between those who favoured a new Presidential system and those who believed Pakistan would be better served by the reform of specific abuses in the old Parliamentary system* After the promulgation of the new Constitution, the Regime faced open agitation from the students of the Universities Ordinance and from the journalistic community on the Press and Publications Ordinance. The Supreme Court disagreed with the Government on the non-justiciability of fundamental rights and pressed President Ayub to adhere to his own Constitution in the matter of Cabinet representation in the Assemblies. To these and other signs of political reawakening, Ayub reacted variously: suppression for the students, compromise with the journalists, and technical compliance with the Supreme Court.63Ayub’s political actions in this period were often inconsistent with his earlier declarations and seemed to reveal a leader somewhat confused by the less than total acceptance in Pakistan of his reforms and his leadership. The passage of four drastic Amendments to the Constitution within two and a half years of its promulgation "led to the popular belief.. .that the Constitution over which Ayub Khan had meditated for so long was simply a plastic instrument in his hands, to be shaped and moulded by him as circumstances and convenience might dictate.’66The President’s issuance of the Political Organizations (Prohibition of Unregulated Activity) Ordinance just a month before the end of Martial Law pointed to a degree of insecurity on the part of the Regime. It also meant that ‘the arbitrary and coercive aspects of the Ayub regime were too visible, and few could detect any significant differences between the new system and the martial law which had preceded it.*67 Perhaps the most embarrassing denial of Ayub Khan’s expressed aims was the almost immediate organization of the members of the new National Assembly into party formations, thus virtually forcing Ayub to accede to the legalization of political parties. The Political Parties Act of 1962, the key provision of which attempted to introduce a measure of stability by making the loss of one’s Assembly seat mandatory for any MNA who changed his party affiliation, authorized the resumption of party activity.61 The first parties to reappear were single-leader parties like Chaudhri Muhammad Ali’s Nizam-i-Islam, or well-organized ideological parties like the Jama’at-i-Islami (JI), this latter having remained intact underground during the Martial Law

50

THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE’S PARTY

period. A few months later, efforts to revive the Muslim League resulted in the formation of two political parties. The first of these, the Convention Muslim League (CVML), was promoted by Ministers in the Ayub Cabinet (for the sole purpose of providing a party backing to [a] Government that was otherwise partyless.*69 The CVML consistently supported the Government in the National Assembly and in the Spring of 1963 was joined by President Ayub Khan. More representative of the old League was the Council Muslim League (CML), organized at Dhaka with Khwaja Nazimuddin as its President. The CML opposed the Ayub Regime and called for the ‘democratization of the Constitution through the restoration of full powers to the National Assembly, introduction of adult franchise and justiciability of fundamental rights.*70 The CML would become one of the main elements in the Combined Opposition Parties (COP), the coalition that would run Mohtannah Fatima Jinnah, sister of the Quaidi-Azam, against Ayub Khan in the Presidential Election of 1965. The existence of opposition, both tacit during Martial Law and explicit thereafter, and the resumption of party activity, prompted President Ayub to expand the social base of his Regime by bringing into Government elements of the ashrafi landed elite and by seeking more durable links with the industrialists and a new generation of very able bureaucrats. This move to politicize the Regime can be traced back at least to the appointment of Malik Amir Muhammad Khan, Nawab of Kalabagh, to the Governorship of West Pakistan in April 1960. Long a figure in the old Unionist grouping, and holder of one of the largest and most tightly-held feudal estates in Punjab, Kalabagh had been brought in to help press the land reforms against his own class and to fix on the west wing a law and order administration that relied liberally on police power.71 Along with Kalabagh came the prePartition landed elite, anxious to salvage its political and proprietary interests from the debacle of land reform and a decade of League politics and to gamer at least a portion of the industrial cake. The latter half of the Ayub decade did see a number of factories set up by landed families.72 The advent of Kalabagh in 1960 and of the CVML in 1962, enabled landed notables of both the Unionist and League periods gradually to shift their support to the Regime. Though their influence would not recover its dominance of earlier periods, and though a significant section would never forgive the humiliation of EBDO, the old landed class would assume a place of partnership with

THE AYUB ERA

51

the civil-military bureaucracy and the grand industrialists as a social bulwark of the Regime. Like the landed notables, the industrial houses had not begun the Ayub decade on the best of terms with the military rulers. Specific abuses, like income tax fraud and the peddling of permits, had been charged against them. Ayub expressed his distaste for the machinations of politicians and industrialists: ...p o litician s found that they could collect mobs w ith the help o f industrialists and businessmen and bring all kinds o f pressures to bear on the government...Constant contact with businessmen had a corrupting influence on government servants....73

Nonetheless, as we have noted above, the Ayub decade was anything but injurious to the economic interests o f the great family conglomerates. The political possibilities were soon evident even to the Ayub Regime. In the words of Professor Papanek: In the 1960’s the relationship between government and business had begun to change subtly but unm istakably . B usinessm en, and esp ecially industrialists, had become wealthier, more powerful, and sophisticated. Now that they owned newspapers and financed political groups, their support was increasingly valuable in political life.... Leading industrial families began to inter-marry with families important in the civil service, the military, and in the landed aristocracy. Some o f the bright young men no longer tried, almost automatically, for the elite civil service, but sought employment in industry. Some o f the leading civil service, military, and political families began to invest in industry.74

These trends reached even into the family of the President. A marital connection was formed with the Habibullah Khan chiefly (Khattak Pakhtuns), military and industrial family. Captain Gohar Ayub Khan, Ayub’s son, left the Army and rapidly acquired substantial industrial holdings in various enterprises which he helped to found and manage.75 During the elections of 1965, Captain Gohar Ayub organized strong business support for the CVML and his father’s candidacy. The Civil Service of Pakistan was another group that had begun the Ayub decade uncertain of its prospects, but which grew ‘enormously in both power and prestige’ as the decade progressed.76 The appoint­ ment of several hundred military officers to oversee or administer government departments or agencies seemed to demonstrate the

52

THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE’S PARTY

dispensability of the CSP. The creation of the Economic Pool and the appointment of the Pay and Services Commission severely threatened the place of the elite service in the national and provincial administrations. The CSP was, however, able to bounce back, as Burki observes, by readily accepting military rule, by agreeing to accept into its ranks young military officers, by training its young members to be experts in new and important disciplines, and by assuming the leadership of the local government institutions set up under the system of Basic Democracies....77 Burki, a CSP officer, also notes that the central and provincial branches of the Civil Service Association were reactivated in September 1959, and that in the *26 months following the appointment of the Commission, the Central and Provincial Civil Service Associations met 17 times and prepared 5 documents for circulation amongst the

TABLE 8 ASSEMBLY INTEREST GROUP PRESENTATION PUNJAB/BAHAWALPUR DISTRICTS (percentage) Interest* Landholders (Ashrafi-Pirs) (Ashrafi-Other) (Gentry) (Middle) Industry/Business Lawyers Ulema Military (Rtd.) Public Service Professions, Other

National Assembly 1955 1962 1965 66.7 (14.3) (42.9) (9.5) 4.8 14.3 -

14.3 -

66.0 57.4 (6.4) (8.5) (14.9) (19.1) (31.9) (21.3) (12.8) (8.5) 10.6 14.9 8.5 8.5 2.1 6.4 2.1 4.3 8.5 10.6 -

W. Pak. Assembly 1956 1962 1965 57.8 54.2 43.1 (116) (8.3) (11.1) (20.4) (8.3) (13.9) (17.7) (23.6) (13.9) (8.2) (13.9) (4.2) 12.9 18.1 22.2 13.6 12.5 12.5 5.4 1.4 1.4 1.4 2.8 3.4 9.7 4.2 5.4 9.7 8.3 -

•Several legislators htd multiple interests. One MNA, for example, was a gentry landholder, an LLB., and the majority partner in a transport and an insurance company. For this table, we have tried to identify the primary interest of each legislator. Where Urn was nut possible, we catcgoriicd the legislator according to his must ‘modem’ interest Thus, the gentry landholder who was also a transporter was put under Industry/ Business.

THE AYUB ERA

53

members of the new regime.'71 In this manner the CSP moved as an internal pressure group to safeguard its established prerogatives. Its success was assured when the Government not only shelved the Report of the Pay and Services Commission, but also ‘accepted the CSP contention that a radical change in the administrative structure would only serve to slow down the pace of economic development.*79 In some measure, the shifting of the Regime’s social base was evident in the representation various interest groups had in the National and West Pakistan Assemblies during the Ayub decade. (See: TABLE 8) The 1962 elections were held without party labels and with electioneering carefully monitored and circumscribed by officialdom. The electorate for this election was, of course, the crop of Basic Democrats elected in 1959, only 12.5 per cent of which had had previous political affiliations. The 1959 Basic Democrats were, in the main, ‘new* men who had been activated politically to counter the pervasive local authority of the traditional rural elites,10 but who now were becoming caught between the Regime's original policy of depoliticizing the system and its more recent need to begin mending fences with the traditional powerholders. The social composition of the 1962 Assemblies seems to reflect the ambivalence of this mid-course correction. In the National Assembly (NA), and to a lesser extent in the West Pakistan Assembly (WPA), landholders, as a group maintained their dominance among Punjab/Bahawalpur legislators, but the social composition of these interests changed significantly, as gentry and middle landholders made dramatic gains in representation. Ashrafi representation was not eliminated, through it might have been had the election been held in 1959 and had Kalabagh not been the Governor of West Pakistan. As it was, the old zamindar-politicians were gone from the new NA, except for a few stalwarts, like Mian Abdul Bari and Chaudhry Muhammad Hussain Chatha, who had not been tarnished by EBDO, and who were two of the four 1955 National-cum-Constitution Assembly incumbents in the 1962 NA. Businessmen (industrialists, contractors, transporters) and professionals (teachers, social workers, etc.) were the two other groups making gains in 1962. All of this does not mean the bulk of new legislators were novices. Some 59.6 per cent of the MNAs and some 34.9 per cent of MPAs had had previous legislative experience, nearly all of it at the provincial level.11 By 1965, the course of the Regime was clearer. The 1964 Union Council elections had marked the return of the landed notables to

54

THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE’S PARTY

influence in local Government, and hence to a share in the development effort provided by the Rural Works Programme (RWP). This had been launched in 1963 with PL-480 funds for the political purpose of activating the local bodies. In the beginning, RWP projects had centred on programmes that had a community emphasis (social welfare, education, health), but after the 1964 Basic Democrats took over the local bodies, ‘There was a significant reduction in the community development content,**2 and an increase in the kinds of projects (rural link roads, stock breeding centres, tractor workshops, etc.) that went to benefit the more well-to-do section of the rural populace.43 These developments pointed to an emerging alliance of mutual interests— notable, contractor, transporter, bureaucrat (DCs were RWP Project Directors)—in the countryside. It was, [if you will] a provincial version of the coalescence of civil service, military, industrial and notable interests at the national level, and, like the latter, it showed up in Assembly interest group representation. In the 1965 Assemblies the ashrafi groups staged a partial comeback. At the same time, the high tide of gentry and middle landholder representation subsided somewhat, through it did not disappear. The return of the ashrafi notables was not to a place of dominance, but to one of partnership with the better organized military, civil, and industrial elites. The 1965 Assemblies thus reflected the political reorientation of the Ayub Regime. One result was a fairly significant turnover in legislators for a Regime that maintained itself through two elections. Some 53.2 per cent of MNAs and 68.4 per cent of MPAs in the 1965 Assemblies were not incumbents from 1962. In some respects, the Provincial Assembly more faithfully represented the Regime's support trends in Punjab/Bahawalpur. With smaller constituencies of Basic Democrats, the PA elections were perhaps more sensitive to social trends and economic pressures. Of particular note was the consistent improvement of industry/business and ex-service representation, the stability of professional representation and the erosion in the positions of lawyers and the ulema.

A N ote

in

C o nclusion

The decade of Ayub Khan would give way to Pakistan's second Martial Law administration on 26 March 1969 after a period of violent agitation. Though there were reasons for this which we have yet to

THE AYUBERA

55

note, w e suggest here that one of the more fundamental ones was Ayub’s failure to appreciate both the degree to which his own policies set o ff political demands, and the inadequacy of the representative institutions he provided to cope with the burgeoning pressures for participation. All of Ayub’s basic objectives—the rationalization of national authority with its bureaucratic penetration, economic develop­ ment with its social consequences, and depoliticization with its Basic Democracies system—worked, in one way or another, to intensify the political aspirations of Pakistanis and pressed political consciousness deep into the social fabric of the nation. In the resultant atmosphere of rising political uncertainty, Ayub and the military elite did not move to strengthen further the social groups which they had brought into the system, but sought the security of the established power groups—the civil, landed and industrial elites. This reversal of the original political direction of the Regime furthered the concentration of power, wealth and privilege in a small elite stratum that began to formalize its mutual interests through inter-marriage, joint ventures and inter-locking partnerships. The coalescence of a nascent ruling class visibly increased the disparity of wealth in Pakistan and heightened the frustrations of those groups that had been kept out of the power system, but which had not been denied a taste of the rising national prosperity—the small landholders, peasant cultivators, the urban intelligentsia and middle class, the ulema and the working class. At the same time, however, these groups did not find available any institution through which to redress their demands. In the BD system, the Regime had not provided an institution that could easily cope with broad participatory demands, but one which had been designed to contain such demands. From its inception, the BD system had been open to bureaucratic manipulation, and it would soon prove a means by which elite interest groups could monopolize rural development finding. As an electoral instrument, the BD system was little better, since it took the process of elections out of the hands of the people and out of public view, and put it behind the scenes where what mattered was ‘who offered what for the [BD’s] vote and who got what in the elections.’14This was especially evident in the 1965 Presidential and Assembly elections, where the resources of the bureaucracy, the industrialists, and the landed notables were mobilized to contain the first serious challenge to the Ayub Regime.

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THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE’S PARTY

NOTES 1. Morris Janowitz, The Military in the development of New Nations (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1964). 2. Muhammad Ayub Khan, Speeches and Statements, 1958-1964, 1 (8 Vols.; Karachi: Ferozcsons, n.d.), p. 2. 3. The term is that o f Rounaq Jahan, P akistan: F ailure in N ational Integration (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972). 4. Ibid., p. 54. 5. Muhammad Ayub Khan, Friends N ot M asters: A Political Autobiography (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 72. 6. Herbert Feldman, Revolution in Pakistan: A Study o f the M artial Law A d m in istra tio n (K arachi: O xford U niversity Press, 1967), p. 77. According to Feldman, some 6,600 officials o f the Central and Provincial Government were ‘adversely affected in some measure* by the ML Regime’s Public Offices (disqualification) Order (PODO). This meant either outright dismissal, forced retirement, or demotion. Among. Class I personnel o f the Central Services (CSP, Foreign Service, Police Service o f Pakistan, W ater and Power Development Authority, etc.), where opportunities for corruption were greatest, 359 individuals were found guilty o f corruption, or o f a reputation for corruption. This included 138 officers o f the top grades, among whom were 12 members o f the CSP and three o f the Foreign Service. 7. Ayub Khan, Friends Not M asters, p. 54. 8. Lawrence Ziring, The Ayub Khan Era: Politics in Pakistan, 1958-1969 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1971), p. 1. 9. Keith Callard, Pakistan: A P olitical Study (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1957), p. 15. 10. Ayub Khan, Friends Not M asters, p. 72. 11. Report o f the Commission on N ational Education (Karachi: GOP, 1960), pp. 5-6, quoted in Ayub Khan, Friends N ot M asters, p. 99. 12. The parity principle meant that the provinces o f East and West Pakistan would have equal representation in the National Assembly, even though East Pakistan had the larger population (54 per cent to 46 per cent in the Census o f 1961). 13. L aw rence Z irin g , 'T h e A d m in istratio n o f B asic D em ocracies,* A dm inistrative Problem s in P akistan, ed. by G uthrie S. Birkhead, (Syracuse University Press, 1966), pp. 36-7. See also: Salma Omer, ‘Basic Democracies and Effective Leadership,’ Reader in Basic D em ocracies, ed. by S.N. Rizvi, (Peshawar: Academy for Rural Development, 1961), pp. 27-38. 14. Feldman, Revolution, p. 60. 15. Shahid Javed Burki, ‘Social Groups and Development: A Case Study of Pakistan* (unpublished manuscript. Centre for International Affairs,

THE AYUB ERA

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

57

Harvard U niversity, 1971), p. 32 o f Chapter 6. Though yet to be published, this is perhaps the best study to appear o f the Ayub Era. Feldman, Revolution, p. 81. Burki, ‘Social Groups,* p. 33 o f Chapter 6. Feldman, Revolution, p. 83. See TABLE 3, supra, p. 78. A partial list o f pre-1958 individual holdings can be found in A.R. Shibli, Pakistan he D iha Khuda (‘Pakistan's Rural Lords*) (Lahore: People’s Publishers, 1973), pp. 57-67. The standard piu used for irrigated land, then, was 72 per acre, and for uninigated land, 36 per acre. In most parts o f Punjab the piu classification had earlier been developed for revenue purposes and had been set for each assessment circle, a sub-Tehsil revenue unit. Few assessment circles had perennially irrigated land that came up to the 76 piu/acre standard, though there were areas that were classified considerably higher. For example, irrigated land in the Hithar Circle o f Kasur Tehsil was put at 108 piu/acre, hence an individual could hold only 333 acres o f this land under MLR 64. The irrigated bar lands o f Lyallpur, Jaranwala and Pakpattan Tehsils were at the 72 piu standard, but in Toba Tek Singh Tehsil (excluding the New Extension Area), irrigated land had a piu o f 60, so an individual could hold up to 600 acres o f this land under the reforms. See: Produce Indices fo r D istricts o f West Pakistan Published U nder the A uthority o f W est P akistan Land C om m ission (Lahore: Superintendent o f Government Printing, West Pakistan, 1959). See: Supra, p. 67. Various figures have been given for the total amount o f resumed land in West Pakistan. Burki gives a figure o f 2.6 million, Feldman one o f 2.5 million. Data given here and below is taken from: Government o f Pakistan, Land Reforms in West Pakistan, Vol. Ill (Lahore: Superintendent o f Government Printing, 1967), pp. 276-300. Ibid., p. 52. Kalabagh and his sons, for example, were leased 18,619 acres. Details on recipients and acreages can be found in: Land Reform s, III, pp. 188-98. 'The system o f putting property benami, i.e., in the name o f a person other than the true owner has been a recognized custom in Pakistan and has received both judicial and legislative recognition. The system is resorted to for many reasons, sometimes for benefiting the person in whose nam e the conveyance is taken; som etim es for secrecy and sometimes to make family provision in perpetuity by purchasing property in the name o f idols or making fictitious dedication to religious or charitable endowments, and often for defeating the claims o f creditors.' Thus does B adr-ul H assan Khan begin his: The Law o f Benam i Transaction in Pakistan (Lahore: Khyber Law Publishers, 1970). The law o f benami is as complex and convoluted as are the purposes to which

58

27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE’S PARTY it is directed. It has been used, for example, by government servants (including police officials) to hide property, whether legally or illegally gained, that has been gotten in contravention o f their service rules. The use o f mortgages in benami transactions was an ideal method o f keeping hidden control on land ‘resumed* under MLR 64. Shibli, Diha Khuda, p. 68. This figure was given to the West Pakistan Provincial Assembly, during its 1968 Budget Session, by Malik Khuda Bakhsh Bucha, M inister for Agriculture. A partial list o f Judges and civil servants who acquired land is given in Ibid., pp. 75-7. Burki, ‘Social Groups,* p. 13 o f Ch. 4. Ali Raza Shah (Pir Mahal Bukhari Sayyids), private interview held at Toba Tek Singh, 9 September 1975. Shahid Javed Burki, "Interest Group Involvement in West Pakistan’s Rural Works Programme,’ Public Policy, XIX (Winter, 1971), pp. 187-8. Burki, ‘Social G roups,’ p. 14 o f Chapter 4. Ibid., p. 40 o f Chapter 6. Papanek notes: ‘Tubewells turned out to be a strategic innovation. Cultivators with access to reliable tubewell water could adopt other improved practices, especially chemical fertilizers, with less risk that water shortage would mean losses from these practices.* Gustav F. Papanek, P akistan‘s Development: Social G oals and Private Incentives (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 170. For the effect o f tubewell water inputs into the yield equation, see: Walter P. Falcon and C arl H . G otsch, ‘R elative Price R esponse, Econom ic Efficiency, and Technological Change: A Study o f Punjab Agriculture,* Development Policy II— The Pakistan Experience, ed. by W alter P. Falcon and Gustav F. Papanek, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 177-85. Tubewell technology also enabled Pakistan, w ith massive aid from USAID and the World Bank, to get a grip on the growing problem o f waterlogging and salinity. The great canal system had been constructed with little real appreciation for the future problem o f drainage. Blocked and inadequate drainage led to rising water tables that brought with it the deposit o f destructive salts on the soil surface by capillary action. Another reason for salinity w as many years under irrigation, which left salts in the root zone. See: Government o f the United States, Report on Land and W ater Developm ent in the Indus Plain (Washington, D.C.: The White House, 1964); and Falcon and Gotsch, ‘Punjab Agriculture,’ p. 176. In the Salinity Control and Reclamation Projects (SCARP) tubewells have been used both to lower water tables and to flush salts out o f the topsoil. Shahid Javed Burki, ‘Agriculture’s New Entrepreneurs,’ The Pakistan Times, 24 June 1972. Market towns have been o f growing importance in the economic and political dynamics o f Punjab. Although there are no studies o f m andi towns in Pakistan, a similar process in India’s Punjab has been looked at

THE AYUBERA

36.

37.

38.

39. 40.

41.

59

from an economic point o f view. See: Barbara H arm s, ‘The Role o f Punjab Wheat Markets as Growth Centres,’ The G eographical Journal, 140. (February 1974), pp. 52-71. See the biographical data given in: B iographical Encyclopedia o f P a kistan, ed. by Khan Tahaw ar Ali Khan, (Lahore: International Publishers, 1971), pp. 531-622. Combining figures given by Ashford— in: Douglas E. Ashford, N ational D evelopm ent and L ocal Reform : P olitical Participation in M orocco, Tunisia, and Pakistan (Princeton: Princeton U niversity Press, 1967), p. 128— w ith data turned up incidentally in our own field research, we can roughly estimate the social b ack g ro u n d s o f the 1959 B asic D em o crats fo r W est P ak istan . Approximately 12.5 per cent had previous political affiliations. This w ould include rural notables and their agents as well as town/city businessmen, many o f the latter being original Muslim Leaguers now returning to politics after a period o f landlord domination. Some 7 per cent were small landholders, about 40 per cent ‘rich peasants’ and middle landholders, and 13 per cent small to middle business entrepreneurs. A final 27.5 per cent were professionals— lawyers, teachers, service retirees, etc. In the main, the final settlements trimmed the earlier acquisitions o f the Central League politicians, that is, the U.P.-Haryana muhajir elite, thus releasing more urban and rural property for the East Punjab muhajirs. For details, see: Mazhar Ali Khan, ‘Ayub’s Attack on Progressive Papers,' Forum (Dhaka), 1 February 1970, pp. 8-9. Mazhar Ali Khan was editor o f The Pakistan Times at the time o f the take over. See supra, pp. I l l , 141 and 143. Many members o f this grouping saw Ayub Khan behind the PPL affairs. His interest was thought to extend from the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case (1951), which occurred when Ayub was Army C-in-C. Faiz Ahmad Faiz, a participant in the conspiracy meetings with the disaffected military officers, was then the editor o f The Pakistan Times. According to Mazhar Ali Khan in Ibid., p. 8, he was told by the Minister (Zulfikar Ali Bhutto) in charge o f the 'operation,’ that 'the Government’s only purpose was to oust M ian Iftikharuddin and to change the management.’ PPL papers had won international recognition for their high standards o f journalism, but their editorial policy in pre-Censorship times had tended to promote progressive domestic and ‘anti-West’ foreign policies. The search warrants, issued under the freshly-amended Security Act, authorized the police to seize ‘any material or documents reasonably believed to relate to receipt o f funds from foreign sources, or to news, reports or information, likely to endanger the security o f Pakistan.’ Quoted in ibid., p. 8. Though no foreign links were ever publicly proved, the majority shares in PPL were sold at auction later in 1959. See: Feldman, Revolution, pp. 226-30. The Pakistan Times and Im roze eventually became

60

42. 43.

44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE’S PARTY part o f the National Press Trust (1964). Apart from a few who managed to hang on, the PPL group o f journalists was pushed out into a difficult struggle for personal economic survival and would not re-emerge as an active force in journalism until after the fall o f Ayub Khan in March 1969. Ayub Khan, Friends N ot M asters, p. 104. GOP, Ministry o f Law, The R eport o f the Law Reform Commission, 1958-59, Mr. Justice S.A. Rahman, chairman (Karachi: M anager o f Publications, 1959). Richard S. Wheeler, The Politics o f Pakistan: A C onstitutional Quest (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), pp. 134-44. Wheeler notes: ‘The intention o f this provision was to prevent socially desirable legislation from being thwarted by vested interests and to safeguard the...reform measures o f the martial-law regime...* (p. 140). Stephen R. Lewis, Jr., Pakistan: Industrialization and Trade Policies (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 161. Ibid., p. 165. Ibid., p. 161. Ibid., p. 161. R ashid A m jad, In d u stria l C oncentration and E conom ic P ow er in Pakistan: A Prelim inary Report (Lahore: South Asia Institute, University o f the Punjab, 1974). Rashid Amjad, ‘Role o f Industrial Houses in Pakistan’s Power Structure,’ Pakistan Adm inistrative S ta ff College Journal, XII (June 1974). The term is Professor Papanek’s in: Pakistan 's Developm ent, pp. 27-55. H erbert Feldm an, From Crisis to Crisis: Pakistan. 1962-1969 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 47. Pakistan O bserver (Dhaka), May 2, 1968. Amjad, ‘Industrial Houses,’ PASCJ, p. 40. ‘The Twenty-Two Families: An Interview with Dr. Mahbub-ul H aq,’ The Sun (Karachi), 5 February 1972. Shahid Javed Burki, ‘Development o f Towns: The Pakistan Experience,’ Asian Survey, XTV (August 1974), pp. 751-62. Ibid., p. 757. Ibid., p. 759. Renamed ‘Shah Faisalabad’ in 1977. Daniel Lem er, The Passing o f Traditional Society: M odernizing the M iddle E ast (New York: Free Press, 1958), p. 60. Ibid., p. 61. Ibid., p. 62. Ibid., p. 63. Calculated from Table 3.29 in: GOP, Central Statistical Office, 25 Years o f Pakistan in Statistics, 1947-1972 (Karachi: Manager o f Publications, 1972), pp. 73-ff.

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61

65. For details, see: Feldman, C risis, pp. 24-33, and Ziring, Ayub Era, pp. 23-9. 66. Feldman, Crisis, p. 33. 6 7 .. Ziring, Ayub Era, p. 29. 68. The text o f this Act is available in: Muhammad Rafi Anwar, Presidential G overnment in Pakistan (3rd. ed., Lahore: Caravan Book House, 1967), pp. 332-5. 69. Mushtaq Ahmad, Government and Politics in Pakistan (3rd. ed., Karachi: Space Publishers, 1970), p. 257. 70. Ibid., p. 258. 71. Kalabagh was one o f the notables who avoided the consequences o f MLR 64 by leasing back from the Government some 18,619 acres. The connection between Ayub and Kalabagh went back to an old friendship between their fathers. It is also noteworthy that the Kalabagh Nawab is one o f the chiefs o f the Awan Tribe, which is perhaps the most heavily recruited tribe for the Pakistan Army. 72. Amjad, ‘Industrial House,* p. 30. 73. Ayub Khan, Friends N ot M asters, p. 96. 74. Papanek, Pakistan 's D evelopm ent, pp. 140-41. 75. For a listing o f the wealth acquired by Capt. Gohar Ayub Khan, see: Feldman, C risis, Appendix B., pp. 305-6. 76. Shahid Javed Burki, ‘Twenty Years o f the Civil Service o f Pakistan: A Réévaluation,’ Asian Survey, IX (April 1969), p. 239. 77. Ibid., p. 250. 78. Ibid., p. 250. 79. Ibid., p. 252. 80. See supra, p. 201, footnote 36. 81. This would be in the Punjab Legislative Assemblies o f 1946 and 1951, the Bahawalpur Legislative Assemblies o f 1948 and 1951 and the West Pakistan Assembly (Interim) o f 1956. 82. Burki, ‘Rural Works Programme,’ p. 191. 83. Ibid., pp. 190-91. 84. Ahmad, G overnment and Politics, p. 265.

3 ZULFIKAR ALI BHUTTO: THE MAKING OF A NATIONAL LEADER Politics in Pakistan has been much the politics of personalities. In one sense, this does not distinguish Pakistan from other nations, since all societies, representing every stage of development, have looked to men of ‘marked and enterprising vitality* for their political leadership.1 Figures like Churchill, Roosevelt, De Gaulle, Gandhi, Mao Tse-tung, Tito, Nasser, immediately come to mind. These are men of heroic proportions and the mentioning of them raises the larger question of the heroic personality and his effect on history. We do not propose here to become entangled in this ageless and multi-faceted controversy, although it cannot be entirely avoided. This is so because, at the apogee of his popularity immediately after the 1970 elections, wide sections of Punjabi society saw Bhutto as a hero, a ‘redeemer* of Pakistan’s national destiny, and, as expressed in the honorific title of Quaid-i-Awam, (Leader of the People), a fitting successor to the Quaidi-Azam, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. This image of Bhutto will concern us more directly when we look at the elections of 1970. The other sense in which the politics of personalities interests us does distinguish Pakistan, as well as most other developing countries, from the developed world. In modern political systems leaders must operate within a highly defined arena of permanent institutions, organized interests and established forms of civic behaviour. This is less the case in developing systems, where modem political institutions are in a rudimentary stage of development. Here the presence of a dominating figure is often more penetrating and stabilizing, while the absence of such leads to the scramble of ‘sell-out politics*—the result of a condition wherein institutional constraints and loyalties are minimal.

ZULF1KAR ALI BHUTTO: THE MAKING OF A NATIONAL LEADER

63

Certainly, this is the case for Pakistan, where secular political leadership substantively partakes of feudal, tribal and post-colonial paternalism, and where political stability has been associated with the unquestioned dominance of a single individual. Two very different men, who represented polar opposites in terms of their core constituencies, have dominated Pakistani politics in such a manner Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who put together the nationalist coalition of political forces, and Muhammad Ayub Khan, whose political base was in the vice-regal institutions. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was among the young, rising leaders who sought to emulate either or both of these men. Both men had a formative influence on Bhutto’s political career: Jinnah from afar, because his nationalism left an indelible imprint on the young Zulfikar; Ayub much more concretely, because he gave Bhutto his first political footing and enabled him to rise to national prominence. This was a prominence from which Bhutto would turn to challenge Ayub on the issue of Tashkent, and go on to found his own national leadership on a revival of Jinnah’s coalition of nationalists and radical social elements.

Z. A. Bhutto: Preludes to Leadership Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was bom on 5 January 1929 a^Larkana, the district seat of the old Chanduka Pargana, one of the richest agricultural districts in Sindh.2 The second son of Sir Shah Nawaz Khan Bhutto, C.I.E., O.B.E., the young Bhutto grew up in a clan of wealthy Sindhi zamindars who were long conversant with the ways of political power in both the local and provincial arenas. The Bhuttos appear to be of Rajput Hindu origin and,3 though not part of the jagirdar elite of the Talpur era, were a notable family at the time of the British conquest of Sindh (1844). They were a far-sighted and energetic clan and extended their landholdings to take advantage of the canal systems rebuilt under the British administration. This effort paid enormous dividends after the Sukkur Barrage brought perennial irrigation to Upper Sindh (1932). According to one writer, at one time the Larkana Bhuttos owned some 250,000 acres of land in the three districts of Larkana, Jacobabad and Sukkur.4 Even more so than in Punjab, the British in Sindh maintained virtually unaltered the feudal perquisites of those of the small jagirdar/ zamindar elite who submitted to their rule. Like their Punjabi

64

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Counterparts, the locally-dominant zamindars were essential to the functioning of the rural administration. The were the social element which ‘...transacted all business with Government of behalf of the community.'5 Being members of the class of prominent zamindars, the Bhuttos naturally had access to the district administration. By the beginning of the present century, education, entry into the legal profession and their expanding landed wealth and influence, gave the Bhutto Sardars access to the higher echelons of the colonial establishment and ensured they would be consulted on the crucial issues affecting Sindh. In this situation it was to be expected that leaders of the Bhutto clan (Sardar Wahid Bakhsh Khan Bhutto, Pir Bakhsh Bhutto, and Sir Shah Nawaz Khan Bhutto) would be elected to represent the interests of the Sindhi zamindars in the tutelary Councils, both provincial and central, set up by the Raj under the Montague-Chelmsford Reforms (1919). Sir Shah Nawaz Bhutto stood out as a political figure during this era in the Bombay Presidency. He served on the Bombay cabinet and reached the pinnacle of his political career at the London Round Table Conferences (1931-1932), where he had a leading part in achieving the separation of Sindh from Bombay. Subsequent years found him in influential positions: Chief Advisor to the Governor of Sindh, Member of the Joint (Bombay/Sindh) Public Service Commission, etc., though his political career seems to have lost some of its momentum. In the 1937 elections to the new Sindh Legislative Assembly, he lost the Larkana seat to his old district rival, Muhammad Ayub Khuhro. Shortly before Partition, Sir Shah Nawaz accepted his last, and in many ways his most unhappy, public appointment, that of Dewan (Prime Minister) of the princely state of Junagadh in Kathiawar. A state with an unenlightened Muslim ruler and a Hindu majority population, the latter already deeply infected with pro-Congress sentiments (Gandhi was from the contiguous state of Porbandar), the new Dewan was soon caught in the violent cross-currents of Partition. He advised the ruler, Sir Mahabatkhan Rasulkhanji, to accede to Pakistan and, after some delay, an Instrument of Accession was exchanged between Pakistan and Junagadh. Neither the Indian Government nor the local populace, however, were willing to see Junagadh become part of Pakistan and, in the face of unrest in the state and an imminent invasion by an Indian force, Sir Shah Nawaz asked the Government of India to take control of Junagadh to avoid disorder and chaos. This action by the Dewan, taken without reference to the Government of Pakistan, was

ZULFUCAR ALI BHUTTO: THE MAKING OF A NATIONAL LEADER

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severely criticized in Pakistan. Though events had been clearly beyond his control, Sir Shah Nawaz Khan Bhutto never lost the stigma in the popular mind of having negotiated Junagadh away to India.6 He retired to his estates at Larkana and died in November 1957.

Z. A. Bhutto, The Early Years Zulfikar Ali Bhutto grew u_p_in_an atmosphere of landed wealth, of feuiial privilege-Hrthe^mdhi mouidTantt'ofthe drawing"room politics of metropolitan centres like Karachi and Bombay. With his father, ‘an eccentric and colourful character,’7 the young Zulfikar seems to have had a comfortable, if somewhat subservient, relationship. In an interview with Altaf Husain Qureshi, Bhutto remembered with fondness that ‘during my holidays he would take me on tours and talk to me about political issues.* In the same interview, he recalled his father's advice on politics: ...w hen I was ten or eleven he called me and said that the road o f politics is that o f untold difficulties, but if you follow some principles then politics can give you pleasure as it is the best means o f knowing man. He told me, ‘Son, I see in you the potential o f a good leader, so 1 would like to give you three important principles of politics. First, always maintain a balanced personality. Be a lover o f realities. In life greed deceives you at every step, success intoxicates and staggers you, and failure depresses and frustrates you. Remember, life has both o f these in it, so do not be too cautious. Second, always have confidence in the people. Be aware o f their desires and aspirations. Always remember that opposition to the popular wishes cannot last for long. And third, always be above family and circumstantial prejudices. Islam is a philosophy o f universal brotherhood and we should stay above such prejudices.1

There is little doubt, particularly as his elder son (Sikandar Ali Khan Bhutto) proved to be a disappointment, that Sir Shah Nawaz came to rest his hopes for a revival of Bhutto political fortunes in his only other son, Zulfikar Ali. Yet, the old gentleman also believed his son’s entry into politics should be properly timed, hence he kept a firm grip on a restless Zulfikar’s political ambitions.9 As would be expected in a Muslim household, Bhutto*s mother, Begum Khurshid Bhutto, was a more obscure figure. Some unsavoury speculation persists in elite circlcs about her social circumstances and

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the form of marriage undertaken to Sir Shah Nawaz.10 She was evidently from a Bombay Hindu family of little means, though the marriage to Sir Shah Nawaz was a regular (nikah) one and seems to have been durable enough as she gave her husband two daughters as well as a son.11 Her origins, and her station as a junior wife, appear to have placed Begum Khurshid Bhutto at a disadvantage in the zenana (women's apartments) politics of the Bhutto clan, as well as in the elite social circles in which the Bhuttos moved. Some of those who have known the Bhutto family suggest that the resultant insecurity of his mother's position, having communicated itself to the young Zulfikar in his formative years, accounts for the rather major sense of insecurity which seems to underlie the darker side of Bhutto's political leadership. However this may be, it is clear that the young Bhutto grew up in the most comfortable surroundings. His schooling, though begun somewhat late, was among the best to be found in India and abroad. He attended the Cathedral and John Connon School at Bombay, divided his undergraduate college years equally between the University of Southern California and the University of California at Berkeley, took his-JiiastepVitt^urisprudence fr°m Oxford, and was admitted to the Bar from Lincoln's info-His pre-college scholastic record showed little evidence of hislater brilliance. Having begun formal schooling at the age of nine, the young Zulfikar was ‘always trying to make up for lost time...and always trailing slightly behind in his classes.'12 His precollege years were also partly spent in pursuit of the ‘princely pleasures,'13 a style of life that often attracted the sons of wealthy Muslim landholders in cities like Bombay, Lahore and Lucknow. This is not to say the more serious aspects of life passed the young Zulfikar by. The momentous events taking shape in India could not fail to engage a so highly political family as the Bhuttos. Like much of the rest of the Bombay Muslim community, they placed themselves squarely behind Jinnah's Muslim League and the demand for Pakistan. In these years of major turning points in history, the young Bhutto came to regard Muhammad Ali Jinnah as an heroic figure. Among his own friends, Zulfikar became a ‘great advocate for the two-nation theory'.,4 It is certainly significant that Bhutto’s political consciousness was formed in the intensely nationalistic atmosphere of the Pakistan Movement. This had a permanent effect on his perceptions, for an emotional Pakistani nationalism would come to be the touchstone of his political career.

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The move to California was undoubtedly a maturing experience for th e young Bhutto. His political senses, already galvanized by the creation of Pakistan, and his mind stimulated by the challenge of a new environment far from the paternal dictates of home, the California years unlocked the intellectual brilliance and studied flamboyance that have since become characteristic of the man. At Berkeley, Bhutto received the strong grounding in international law from Professor Hans Kelsen which would stand him in good stead when he later represented^ Pakistan before the United Nations.15 Bhutto's academic performance / at Berkeley was almost perfect and he graduated summa cum laude.L Yet, he also had time to become the first Asian elected to the Student Union Council and to engage in a number of political and socialactivities. He volunteered in the 1950 Senate campaign of Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, who ran against a Richard Milhous Nixon fresh from his triumphs on the House Un-American Activities Committee. He also acted as a publicist for the new state of Pakistan, organized an association of Pakistani students and wrote several pamphlets supporting the cause of Palestine and that of the Vietnamese against the French. During this period, Bhutto also displayed an interest in socialism, seeing in it the best means of pulling the emerging nations of Asia and Africa out of their deep poverty. Evidently, his mother’s influence— ‘She taught me to love the poor and made me aware of their difficulties,*16—and the abysmal poverty he had encountered in rural Sindh as a youth, made a lasting impression on him and led to an early interest in socialism. In discussions with Piloo Mody at Bombay, the young Bhutto often expressed an admiration for Jawaharlal Nehru's socialism,17 and later, at the University of Southern California, he gave a lecture on ‘The Islamic Heritage* in which he spoke need for socialism in Muslim countries.18At both Bcdcelcyjuid-Qxiordt Bhutto came under the influence of Harold Laski and, at Oxford, made the acquaintance of Bertrand Russell, who long remained a supporter of Z. A. Bhutto in the years to come. At Oxford, too, Bhutto was greatly impressed by Verrier Elwin, a humanist scholar with a deep knowledge of the hill tribes of northeastern India and an ex-ICS officer who had been Nehm*s constitutional adviser on the status of ethnic minorities. It was Elwin, Bhutto later wrote, ‘who first made me realize the meaning of poverty.*19 Yet, for all of this, Bhutto*s socialism never lost its quality of abstract Fabianism, nor did it ever compete with his far stronger tendency to emotional nationalism, even

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when the latter required methods of realpolitik which excluded socialism. Bhutto is one of those leaders who has loved ‘The People’ in the abstract. There is no evidence, outside his political life, that he ever involved himself in activities or organizations dedicated to ameliorating the sufferings of actual individuals. A number of other lasting traits were visible in Bhutto during these years abroad. One of these was the meticulous care he took in his personal appearance. Others were his occasional ‘exuberant showmanship' and his tendency to ‘revel in language and concentrate on effects and when necessary...exaggerate or overstate a proposition'20 nor was Bhutto always an easy person to be with. Though generally charming, he could be vehement in argument and, at times, showed an arrogant disdain for those he did not respect—an attribute he later perceived, and criticized, in Nehru.21 How much he took to heart the lessons of history and polities learned in the academy, or indeed how he perceived those lessons, was something of an enigma to his teachers and friends. Even his close friend Piloo Mody would write of Bhutto: ‘Only time can tell whether Zulfi's reading of history and constitutional law will overcome the temptation of succumbing to arbitrariness and expediency.'22 In November 1953 Zulfikar Ali Bhutto returned to his native Sindh and ‘felt as if my thirst for years had been quenched.'23 In 1951 he married Nusrat (nee Ispahani), the daughter of a Poona (now Karachi) commercial family that traced its recent past to Kermanshah in Iran. Begum Nusrat Bhutto would prove an invaluable aid in helping her husband launch his political career, and would later ably lead the Pakistan People’s party during the two periods Z. A. Bhutto found himself in prison (1968-1969 and 1977-1979). Of the four children of this marriage, two daughters and two sons, the eldest, Benazir Bhutto, showed the greatest inclination for politics. After her education at Radcliffe and Oxford, and an internship with the Foreign Ministry, she found herself deeply involved in attempting to reverse the political disaster that overtook her father after the coup d’état of July 1977.

Search for a Political Role On his return to Pakistan, Bhutto took over the management of the family estates from his ailing father, introduced mechanization and other improvements, and replaced the old Larkana house with a more

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modem structure. He also began a law practice before the Sindh High Court and lectured intermittently on Constitutional Law at the Sindh Muslim College. Both these latter concerns, however, were tangential to his primary concern of entering upon the political role he had always projected for himself.24 His first stab at politics came in the agitation against the One Unit Scheme. A vocal and energetic participant, the young Bhutto was soon elected President of the Sindh Youth Front, authored a pamphlet—Pakistan, A Federal or a Unitary State, made a name for himself as a public speaker, and missed being arrested only out of consideration for the influence of his family. The agitation failed to prevent One Unit and thereafter declined. It had also failed to set Bhutto's political career into sustained motion, although H. S. Suhrawardy was impressed enough to seek Bhutto's membership in the Awami League—a proposal Sir Shah Nawaz refused to countenance. Elite politics rather than popular politics would be Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's first route to political position. The relevant connection in this regard was the old friendship between the Bhutto and Mirza families. Begun when a member of both families was in the Bombay Government, this relationship was renewed in the winter hunting trips which President Iskandar Mirza made to the Bhutto hunting preserves at Larkana. Mirza was impressed by the young Bhutto, particularly by his argument that Pakistan had unnecessarily restricted its foreign policy by tying itself too exclusively to the Anglo-American alliance. He thus helped Bhutto achieve one of his earliest ambitions: a place on the Pakistan delegation to the United Nations.25 In 1957, at the age of twenty-nine, Z. A. Bhutto was named to the Pakistan U.N. delegation. In the following spring, he represented Pakistan at the U.N. Conference on the Law of the Sea. In both arenas, Bhutto made outstanding contributions. Having proven himself at the U.N., dramatic events were soon to occur in Pakistan that would advance Bhutto's political career even more rapidly than he might have foreseen. By 1958, the chronic instability of Pakistan’s domestic political institutions had become something of a farce, and President Mirza was increasingly disposed to drastic measures. The Army High Command was also watching the deteriorating situation. Though Sir Shah Nawaz Bhutto had died in November 1957, the Bhuttos maintained their social connections with the Mirzas and it was during one of the shoots at Larkana, also attended by the Army Commander-in-Chief, General Muhammad Ayub Khan,

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that some of the planning for the coup d'état of 7 October 1958 is said to have occurred. Bhutto's role in planning the coup is obscure, but was probably at most only peripheral. A glimmer of Bhutto's later policy of ‘bilateralism* is perhaps visible in the President’s Proclamation where it is said: ‘We desire to have friendly relations with all nations, but political adventurers try their best to create bad blood and misunderstandings between us and countries like the U.S.S.R., and the U.A.R. and the People's Republic of China.*24 Bhutto’s ‘big break came when he was included in the Cabinet constituted by President Mirza and sworn in on 27 October. The same evening Mirza was pressed to resign the Office of President to Ayub Khan, the man against who he had begun to conspire and who was the real power behind the coup. Thus, at the early age of thirty, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto took his place as a Minister in the Government of Pakistan and, at the same time, survived the first political crisis of the new Regime, which saw his mentor packed off to exile in London. He had played his cards extremely well.

Rise to National Prominence: Bhutto in the Ayub Regime Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was included in the first four of the five cabinets put together by Ayub Khan during his tenure as President of Pakistan. The record of Bhutto in the Ayub years is that of a relatively obscure Minister rising to national prominence by hard work, obvious ability and a sharply-focused personality. Ayub was impressed by Bhutto’s diligence, intellectual breadth and ability to grasp complex problems. Evidently, as Herbert Feldman observed, ‘Ayub Khan had need of some highly literate person who could fill the gaps in his own knowledge and reading.*27 Uçtil his break^iihuAyub^ver the Taskhent Declaration in 1966, Bhutto fiîled'tfiïs need more than adequately. The complex reliftidnship between Ayub and Bhutto had other aspects to it Ayub was a strong paternal figure for the younger man, whose public attitude was one of loyalty and deference. Later, when Bhutto*s extra-curricular activities became an open scandal in elite circles, it was Ayub, urged on by both Begum Ayub Khan and Begum Nusrat Bhutto, who suggested to Bhutto that he pursue his private pleasures in a more discreet fashion. This paternal relationship had strong symbolic overtones in Pakistan’s age-conscious society. For a time it seemed to mark Bhutto as the heir apparent in the Regime. After the

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parting of the ways, the relationship took on an element of high melodrama, played upon by a section of the vernacular press (women’s and movie magazines), in which the familial metaphor was used to represent to the popular mind the more subliminal struggle between generations, power groups and ideologies. Whether Bhutto was being groomed to succeed Ayub Khan is not clear. What is clear is that he acquired increasingly important responsibilities at the cabinet level. He begaaJiiS-Service as Minister of Commerce (1958-1960). In early 1960 he took up^he^porfffcttos of MifiorityAftairs ancTof National Reconstruction and Information, the latter including Basic Democracies, and in the same year took on the added burdens of Fuel, Power and Natural Resources and Kashmir Affairs. These portfolios gave Bhutto a working familiarity with some of the critical problems facing Pakistan and closely associated him with several of the Regime’s most important policy and institutional innovations. Among these were: the Export Bonus Scheme, Basic Democracies, National Press Trust, Constitution of 1962, and the Rural Works Programme.21

Bhutto and the Foreign Policy of Pakistan As much as Bhutto was involved in domestic policy early in the Ayub years, foreign policy remained his first interest and the Foreign Ministry the focus of his driving ambition for a future cabinet appointment. Bhutto was not inactive in foreign matters during these years. He led the Pakistani delegation to several sessions of the United Nations and represented his nation abroad on a number of important missions.29 His holding of the Kashmir portfolio, regarded as a stepping-stone to the Foreign Ministership, put him in the centre of the most crucial issue where Pakistan’s domestic and foreign policies coincide. There is little question that Bhutto had a part in the inner foreign policy deliberations of the Pakistan Government long before he took over the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the death of Muhammad Ali Bogra in January 1963.30 As he has written: On my return from the famous General Assembly Session o f 1960 which was attended by Premier Khruschev, Presidents Nasser and Sukarno, Mr Macmillan, Pandit Nehru, Scnor Fidel Castro, and many other eminent statesmen, I was convinced that the time had arrived for the Government

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THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE’S PARTY o f Pakistan to review and revise its foreign policy. I accordingly offered suggestions to my Government, all o f which were finally accepted.11

What these specific suggestions were we can only surmise from Bhutto's speeches and lateT writings on foreign policy. Fitted under the broader notion of a historic struggle for equality,32 Bhutto’s foreign policy prescriptions begin from the assertion that the achievement of independence by post-colonial nation-states is only a half-way house to the more untrammelled state of sovereign equality. As he wrote in The M yth o f In d e p e n d e n c e : Twenty years o f independence have revealed to the people o f Pakistan and India the sharp difference that really exists between independence and sovereign equality. The struggle to attain sovereign equality continues u n d im inished. F oreign dom ination had been rep laced by foreign intervention, and the power to make decisions radically affecting the lives o f our peoples had been curtailed by the cannons o f neo-colonialism.M

In an age when conflicts between ‘Global Powers* set the conditions for world politics, the basic question for smaller nations like Pakistan was 'how they should conduct their affairs in such a manner as to safeg u ard th e ir b a sic interests; to retain th e ir territo rial in teg rity an d to

continue to exercise independence in the relationship with the Global Powers as well as with the smaller nations.* Bhutto was a realist in that he recognized that states have no permanent enemies, only permanent interests. The Global Powers, he noted, are not activated in their foreign policies by the ‘rightness’ or ‘virtue’ of a cause, but only by their own ‘cold self-interest.’ Further, because relations between the Global Power and smaller nation are on an ‘unequal footing,’ it is the self-interest of the former that has a better chance of prevailing in ‘an endless and unequal confrontation’ between them. In the long run, ‘a Global Power is not likely to be outwitted.’* In response to this situation, Bhutto advised the ‘small nation to take a realistic attitude and evolve both policy and strategy on rational rather than subjective lines.’35 This emphatically does not mean giving in to the dictates of Global Powers in return for some material gain, but rather the implementing of ‘preventive diplomacy to avoid Global Power interventions which subject the weaker nations to suffer from punitive diplomacy.’ The cnix of this notion of preventive diplomacy is that it is inexpedient, even dangerous, for the smaller nation to identify itself ‘completely with the total interests of one Global Power

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to the exclusion of the others.’ Granted, ‘common interest and the pattern of events may make it necessary for a small nation to be more closely associated with one Global Power than with another, but, even so, it is not impossible for it to maintain normal relations with the others on the basis of honourable bilateral relations' (Italics mine.) Conflicts between small states and Global Powers should be isolated and dealt with separately from the issues on which there can be cooperative and friendly relations. Thus, ‘a workable equilibrium should be sought independent of the point on which vital interests differ, provided, of course, that the segregation of conflicts is not only possible but is scrupulously reciprocal.*36 Implicit in Bhutto’s argument was the notion that preventive diplomacy can only work outside multilateral relationships. Bhutto also advised that small powers should avoid, as much as possible, taking stands on conflicts between Global Powers, should unequivocally resist direct pressure from any Global Power, and should not be afraid to utilize the application o f indirect pressure exerted by the collective voice and solidarity o f the smaller nations o f Asia, Africa, and Latin America (now known as ‘the Third W orld’), together with diplomatic pressures from those Global Powers and quisi-Global Powers whose interests are in accord. By combining the support of such Powers as can give it with the support o f the underdeveloped nations, the state concerned can bring about situations which make it imperative for the Global Power in question to modify its position in its own independent interest.37

Given these perspectives and the actual condkhyns^of Pakistan’s foreign policy, it is not surprising to find that Bhutto bfiUeved- ms nation, as a consequence of the United States-Pakistan Mutual Defense Agreement (1954) and Pakistan’s adherence to the Manila Treaty (1954) and the Baghdad Pact (1955), had tied its.interests-tee-ekttety J to tllQ§e of the I JnitedStatesjmd its alliesTThis had brought^Pakistan / unduly under American perspectives on world issues, had closed off / potentially beneficial relations with other Global Powers, and had/ alienated important Third World states, such as Egypt, that otherwise'might have supported Pakistan on crucial issues like Kashmir. Those on the Pakistan side who had negotiated Pakistan’s adherence to the Western Bloc no doubt had done so because ‘those alliances offered a prospect of advancing her own standing and interests.’ Nor had the Western connection been unfruitful in bringing Pakistan badly-needed military and economic aid or allies who ‘reaffirmed Pakistan’s western

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frontier along the Durand Line and urged ‘an early settlement of the Kashmir question’.’31 Thus, Bhutto may not have counselled a dissolution of the Western connection as much as its down-grading as the centrepiece of Pakistan’s foreign policy. Having spent some time at the United Nations, he was not unaware of major changes in world politics—of the ending of the coldest phase of the Cold War and the potential for super-power detente, of the growing assertion of the Third World Bloc, and the rise of China, symbolically at least, as a world power. Certainly, then, Bhutto pressed for an opening up of more positive relations between Pakistan on the one hand, and China, the Soviet Union and Third World states on the other. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was not the only supporter of these views. The alliance had never been accepted by important sections of opinion in Pakistan—the left ulama of the Jamiat-i-Ulema-i-Islam and much of the urban intelligentsia. Indeed, in the period preceding the coup, a reappraisal of Pakistan’s foreign policy was underway in government and conservative political circles.39 The military leadership, however, was not immediately inclined to re-orient the nation’s foreign policy. ‘As one of the chief architects of friendship with America’ Ayub’s first effort was to ‘mend that deteriorating alliance.’40 Thus, in 1959 the U.S. Pakistan Mutual Defense Agreement was renewed and CENTO erected on the ruins of the Baghdad Pact, while the decision to vote with the U.S. on the China question in the U.N. (1959), and U-2 incident (1960) carried Pakistan’s relations with the communist powers to their lowest ebb. There is little question Ayub Khan would have preferred that Pakistan remain, as he told the U.S. Congress in 1961, ‘the most allied ally,’ and appeared somewhat bemused at the Kennedy Administration’s adoption of India as the pivotal nation of Asia. It was perhaps more out of necessity than inclination that Ayub, disturbed at the ‘uneven course’ of US-Pakistani relations,41 agreed to explore the possibilities of more positive relations with two of the three major Asian states proximate to, or touching, her borders.42 Tentative efforts in this direction were begun as early as 1959, when, late in that year, Pakistan offered to begin negotiations to demarcate the Sinkiang-Azad Kashmir boundary; and a few months later opened talks with the Soviet Union on a joint oil exploration agreement. After the U-2 interlude, these talks, led on the Pakistan side by Z. A. Bhutto (Minister for Fuel, Power and Natural Resources), resulted in the Pakistan-Soviet Agreement of 4 March 1961.

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Pakistan’s reappraisal of its foreign policy gained much impetus from the growing conflict between China and India, played out against a background of shifting relationships between the great powers.43 As is well known, Sino-Indian relations, after reaching a euphoric high during Chou En-lai’s post-Bandung visit to India, slowly began to founder on territorial and political issues associated with their common boundary along the Himalaya Mountains and in the high plateaus of Ladakh. After several years of sterile negotiations and increasingly serious border clashes, this dispute flared into a crossborder war in October 1962. The Sino-Indian border war fundamentally altered international power relationships in South Asia as the Anglo-American powers moved to concert with India in what amounted to a tacit military alliance against China. Having correctly perceived the limited nature of China’s objectives in the border fighting and having noted the continued stationing of the bulk of India’s armed forces along her own borders, Pakistan vigourously protested the decision by her own allies to aid India with massive infusions of arms. In an emergency session in the national Assembly of Pakistan, Foreign Minister Muhammad Ali Bogra called the arms aid ‘a hostile act;’44 and Z. A. Bhutto, Acting Foreign Minister at Bogra’s death, shortly thereafter declared: The real purpose o f India build up an army for two and to face Pakistan...the serious threat to the entire

wanting to augment its forces recklessly is to fronts, to face the People’s Republic o f China arms aid to India must inevitably pose a very subcontinent.45

The linking of China and Pakistan as the objects of India’s hostility by Bhutto was no mistake and a portent of things to come. Not wishing to lose Pakistan, the Anglo-American powers pressed for a joint defence of the subcontinent. Aware that only movement on the Kashmir issue would make possible Pakistan’s adherence to such a plan, the SandysHarriman mission persuaded Nehru to open direct talks with Pakistan, which deadlocked almost immediately and remained so during six rounds in late 1962 and early 1963. In these circumstances, it is not surprising that Pakistan’s China demarche prospered. Negotiations on the Sinkiang-Kashmir boundary were underway even before the Sino-Indian border war, and the agreement on the provisional boundary was signed by Foreign Minister Bhutto in Peking on 2 March 1963. After this important negotiation, a

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series of significant agreements followed on air, land and electronic communications, and on trade, aid and cultural exchange. By the middle of 1963, Sino-Pakistan relations had advanced to such a degree that speculation on the existence of a secret Sino-Pakistan alliance began to circulate. Bhutto did nothing to dispel these rumours when he told the National Assembly on 17 July 1963: ...if India were in her frustration to turn her guns against Pakistan, the international situation is such today that Pakistan would not be alone in that conflict A conflict does not involve Pakistan alone. Attack from India on Pakistan today is no longer confined to the security and territorial integrity o f Pakistan. An attack by India on Pakistan involves the territorial integrity and security o f the largest state in Asia.44

The emergence of Z. A. Bhutto as the spokesman for the China policy, his elevation to the Foreign Ministership, together with the interplay of events in South Asia, all combined to propel the young Sindhi into national prominence as the most visible advocate of an essentially nationalist and progressive foreign policy. Energetic, articulate, and able to mix the right proportions of fervour and anti-India nationalism, Bhutto gave voice to the sentiments of a new and assertive generation of Pakistanis. Inevitably, he began to acquire a political following of his own among students, lawyers, civil servants and intellectuals. Conscious of future political prospects, Bhutto nurtured these support groups and patronized their informal and formal associations, among the latter being the Pakistan Institute of International Affairs, the AfroAsian Society and the Pakistan Thinkers* Forum. Bhutto represented the cutting edge of Pakistan’s emerging policy of bilateralism, often speaking out in criticism of the Western allies when it would have been impolitic for Ayub, still intent on keeping up the aid and military relationship with the United States, to have done so. Beyond his roles as spokesman and lighting rod for the Ayub Regime, Bhutto was pressing for a more active confrontationist policy towards India. He was Pakistan's angry young man in a hurry, and on no issue was he in more of a hurry than on Kashmir.

The September W ar and the Tashkent Declaration Kashmir lies at the heart of the long and bitter conflict between India and Pakistan. Both nations have invested immense stakes in this

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territory, the last unsolved problem of the partition of India.47 For Pakistan, the denial of self-determination to Muslims in a Muslimmajority region contiguous to West Punjab cut at the root of the ‘twonation theory.*41 The absence of Kashmir in the Pakistan dominions was a constant reminder to Pakistanis that their nation was still incomplete. To accede to the absorption of Kashmir into India would, for Pakistan, cast ‘doubt upon the legitimacy and permanence of the national homeland.* For India, apart from the enormous strategic and economic value of the province, ‘to concede the validity of the twonation theory would be a denial of the secular basis of the Congress Movement and a threat to the Muslim minority remaining in India/49 India has thus asserted the finality of her sovereignty in Kashmir, gained by the accession of a Hindu Maharaja. Despite Nehru's original commitment to self-determination for Kashmir, India has backed away from a plebiscite which, as Krishna Menon admitted, ‘we would lose...’50 Pakistani diplomacy has kept the dispute alive before the U.N. and other international forums, so much so that perhaps only India really believes the problem is finally settled. In 1962 and 1964 Pakistan mounted major diplomatic offensives in the U.N. Security Council on the Kashmir problem, the latter personally led by Z. A. Bhutto, but in neither case were any gains made in moving the dispute away from a stalemate. It is difficult to exaggerate the intensity of Pakistan's sense of grievance on Kashmir, its belief in the justice of its cause, or its frustration at the failure of diplomatic methods to secure self-determination for Kashmir. Pakistan had, in the past, considered and employed other than diplomatic methods in the Kashmir dispute, but these efforts had either been choked off by India's effective intelligence network in Kashmir,51 or fallen afoul of the internal political situation in that province. The idea of supporting an insurrection in the Valley of Kashmir had been urged as early as 1949 by Major-General Akbar Khan, the commander of Pakistani forces in the 1948 hostilities in Kashmir.52 In the early 1960s a number of factors began to converge that renewed the attractiveness of promoting an insurrection in and around the city of Srinagar. The first of these factors was the growth of civil unrest there and the resulting perception in Pakistan that the social and political conditions 'might now be ripe for a violent uprising. This unrest, having found a negative focus in the October 1963 announcement of constitutional moves to integrate Kashmir more fully into the Indian Union, exploded into major rioting when a relic of the

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Prophet Muhammad was reported stolen from the Hazratbal Shrine near Srinagar in late 1963. Demands for a plebiscite and union with Pakistan were openly voiced during these disturbances. The release of Sheikh Abdullah, the ‘Lion of Kashmir,* and his dispatch by Nehru to negotiate a settlement of the Kashmir question with Ayub contained the unrest for a time. But these negotiations were hardly underway when they were cut off by the death of Nehru in May 1964. Kashmir suffered another period of disturbances and police firings in January 1965, after the post-Nehru leadership went ahead with the constitutional change. The second factor in Pakistani calculations was the blossoming China-Pakistan relationship. During Chou En-lai *s visit to Pakistan in February 1964, China, heretofore neutral on Kashmir, openly sided with the Pakistan position. We do not know what other, if any, agreements or understandings might have been arrived at on this occasion or later during Ayub Khan’s trip to Peking in May 1965. China, it seems clear, stood to make important strategic gains if Pakistan held Kashmir, particularly in the vital Aksai Chin area, where it might be assumed Pakistan would not contest China's claim. For its part, Pakistan might well have believed that, should it gain physical control of the Valley of Kashmir by some combination of internal insurrection and military action, China would not permit any future Indian attempt to reverse such a fait accompli. The third aspect that must have concerned Pakistan’s leaders was the situation in India. Again, from Pakistan’s point of view, the indications were favourable. India, at the death o f Nehru, appeared to be on the verge of serious regional and linguistic strains, prompting some to speculate on the future ‘balkanization’ of India. One of the latter was Z. A. Bhutto, who, about this time, asked: ‘How long will the memory of a dead Nehru, inspire his countrymen to keep alive a polyglot [sic] India, that vast land of mysterious and frightening contradictions, darned together by the finest threads?’53The post-Nehru leadership was seen as weak, divided by party factionalism and facing severe economic problems. Prime Minister Lai Bahadur Shastri, lacking the immense authority and political acumen of his illustrious predecessor, impressed Ayub as a small, ‘inconsequential fellow who could not be expected to meet the challenge of a crisis.’54 Fourthly, in Pakistan the 1965 elections had ‘illuminated many of the mistakes and venalities of Ayub Khan’s government,’ and ‘greatly undermined, if not wholly discredited,’ him as a national leader.

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Though he won the election—with considerable help from the police and administration—Ayub ‘needed a spectacular success of some sort, and events in Kashmir in 1965 suggested that he might be able to gain it by reopening the issue through a localized military operation.'55 Finally, there were the military considerations. By the early 1960s, having been reorganized, rearmed and retrained along Korean War models, the Pakistani armed forces stood at the peak of their combat strength. In contrast, the Indian Army was still essentially a World War Two force, having yet to complete the extensive reorganization and major buildup begun after the debacle of 1962. The fact that Pakistan’s armoured forces were believed quantitatively equal and qualitatively superior to India’s, gave Pakistani officers the sense that they possessed the decisive breakthrough punch in a war with India* But, this was a temporary advantage for Pakistan and would disappear as India absorbed her new weaponry and completed training several new mountain divisions, which could be used in Kashmir as well along the Sino-Indian boundary. Optimistic Pakistani assessments of the relative military capabilities of India and Pakistan seemed to be confirmed in the Rann of Kutch hostilities in the spring of 1965.57 Begun in clashes between border police over disputed territory in February, the fighting escalated to brigade-sized actions between regular army units in April. Pakistani forces clearly bested their Indian counterparts in most of the actions and by late April Pakistan’s Eighth Division, under Major-General Tikka Khan, was poised to defeat a comparable Indian force in the northern Rann. At this point, Prime Minister Shastri, under the most intense domestic pressure, told the Lok Sahba that India would open hostilities on a battlefield more advantageous to itself, should Pakistan persist in its advance in the Rann. At this time, also, India’s divisions in Punjab were gathered into offensive formations and her armoured division was ordered from its peace-time base at Jhansi to Jullundur. In the Rann, much against the urgings of his Foreign Minister, Ayub halted the Pakistani advance and, after a lull, permitted the dispute to go to negotiation and eventually to international arbitration. In light of the September War, both sides looked back at the Rann hostilities as a probing action to test the other’s military and political reactions, and as a kind of proxy war for Kashmir. Inside the Government of Pakistan, Bhutto led a confrontationist group that pressed for a clear victory in the Rann in the belief that such a defeat

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would limit India’s military responses in the coming Kashmir conflict. As he later argued: ...th e restraint exercised in not pressing th ese m ilitary advantages encouraged the Indians to believe that Pakistan w ould refrain from military action in retaliation to India’s plans to annex Jammu and Kashmir. At the same time, realizing that there would come an end to Pakistan’s restraint..., India took the precaution o f simultaneously attacking Lahore to foreclose the Kashmir issue by the use o f fo rce...if Pakistan had taken advantage o f its military successes in the Rann o f K utch...Indian would have regained her senses and not precipitated another conflict only five months later.5*

To any neutral observer, however, these were not the lessons of the Rann hostilities. India always made clear its intention of attacking across the Punjab border if Pakistan made any military move against her vulnerable supply line (the Jammu-Srinagar-Leh Road) into Kashmir. Pakistani planners, among whom Bhutto had a pivotal role, evidently discounted such warnings and concluded India would not risk an attack across a settled international boundary in response to conflict in a disputed region. On 6 September 1965, when India opened the Lahore front in reaction to Pakistan’s armoured thrust toward Chhamb in Jammu, Lahore was virtually undefended and managed to avoid capture largely because the Indian commander, fearing a trap, failed to follow up his initial success. The other lesson of the Rann was that the weak Shastri Government was vulnerable to jingoistic public opinion and, even against its better judgment, might be forced to respond with massive force in the event an anticipated defeat in Kashmir or elsewhere. Shastri had expended virtually all of his political capital in trying to keep the Rann conflict limited and localized. When fighting erupted in Kashmir several months later, he had no option, military or political, but to seek a wider war. Bhutto’s comments on the Rann hostilities, made when he was in the political wilderness, are shrewdly designed to bolster his own activist role in the September War and to separate himself, as early as possible in the sequence of events, from the overly cautious decisions that ended at Tashkent. There is little question that Z. A. Bhutto had the leading part in planning Pakistan’s ‘forward policy* in Kashmir,59 indeed some have maintained it was he who revived Akbar Khan’s idea for an insurrection in the Valley of Kashmir. This policy envisioned the use of ‘controlled military power to produce political changes’ in India’s position on Kashmir, since all diplomatic methods

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had failed.60 Central to the forward policy group’s plans was the internal insurrection, to be set off by para-military forces trained and armed by Pakistan and given political direction by a radio station purporting to be broadcasting from liberated territory inside Indianheld Kashmir. Azad Kashmir and regular Pakistan forces would stand by to assist the insurrectionists, either by diversionary attacks along the cease-fire line (of 1948) or by moves against strategic points, and be prepared to exploit any major opportunities that developed. Certainly, the forward policy planners were prepared to accept the risk of a wider war with India because, even then, Pakistan’s minimal objective of getting serious negotiations underway on a plebiscite could still, it was calculated, be forced by international pressure and by Pakistan’s projected battlefield successes. For the most part, however, the forward policy group believed India would confine its military response to Kashmir. In such an event, should all else go well for Pakistan, Kashmir could possibly be physically wrested from India. In the spring of 1964, reportedly after Chou En-Lai’s visit, the forward policy planning was begun. This was kept within a small group of political (Bhutto), civil and military officials. Decisions were made without the customary practice of war gaming by adversary groups of staff officers, a lapse Ayub Khan would later deeply regret.61 The first para-military units were formed in the fall of that year, with a projected two-year training period for complete readiness. The disturbances in Kashmir of January 1965 encouraged the planners, Bhutto in the main, to advance the operational timetable by a full year, much to the dismay of the general officer in charge of para-military training, who believed his men were yet too few and inadequately prepared. In early August, the first para-military mujahids (freedom fighters) were sent to Kashmir—often, as it turned out, into the hands of Indian intelligence units. Serious political disturbances were reported from Srinagar in August, and later in October, but these evidently did not ‘take ofT into the Algerian type of sustained insurrection so crucial to the forward policy.62 Clashes along the cease-fire line increased in numbers and intensity throughout August as Pakistan and India competed for advantageous positions along the infiltration routes. In September:, the conflict escalated rapidly. An armoured thrust by Pakistan toward Chhamb and Akhnur threatened the vital supply lines to Punch and Srinagar and was opposed by Indian aircraft. On 6 September, India generalized the conflict by attacking towards Lahore and Sialkot. India’s main armoured thrust was broken in the

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Battle of Chawinda, while Pakistan’s vaunted armour, slowed on ground flooded by breached canals, was mauled near Khem Karan by prepared anti-tank defenses. Thereafter, with neither side holding any hope of forcing the other to capitulate, the conflict settled into a war of skirmishing and limited assaults to gain territorial advantage. The generalized hostilities lasted seventeen days and all but exhausted the arsenals of both nations. Both sides made exaggerated claims, but most neutral observers agree the war was a draw. On the diplomatic front, Pakistani diplomacy all but succeeded in isolating India. Turkey, Iran and Indonesia provided substantial diplomatic and some logistical aid. Among the major powers, however, it was not the United States, Pakistan’s ally, that came to her aid, but China. On 8 September while the U.S. was declaring its neutrality and cutting off all military supplies to both belligerents, China was obliquely injecting itself into the dispute by formally protesting ‘successive violations of China's territory and sovereignty by Indian troops,’63 and by linking this ‘aggression’ with that against Pakistan. Bhutto would later tell Pakistan’s National Assembly that China’s veiled threat to take action on the Sikkim border near East Pakistan kept the eastern province free from Indian attack.64 On 17 September China turned its protest into a three-day ultimatum, demanding the dismantling of Indian military structures on the Chinese side of the China-Sikkim border. The threat of Chinese military intervention, though interpreted as a ploy by India, invigorated U.S. and Soviet efforts to get a standstill cease-fire resolution in the Security Council. This was accomplished on 20 September. In the diplomatic manoeuvring to end the fighting, ‘Pakistan could win nothing from the war...unless she could attach the strongest possible political qualifications to a ceasefire.*65 In mid-September, President Ayub ‘represented that a ‘purposeful cease-fire’ must provide for a self-executing arrangement for the final settlement of the Kashmir dispute which was the ‘root cause* of the Indo-Pakistani conflict.*66 India, on the other hand, had the advantage in the manoeuvring in that ‘its minimum requirement was an unconditional, nonpolitical cease­ fire which restored the status-quo ante.*67 U.N. efforts tended to coincide with India’s requirements and Pakistan was extremely disappointed that none of the U.N. resolutions on the conflict ‘contained any promise that an effort would be made to solve the Kashmir problem in terms of the past resolutions of the United Nations.’6* In the end, much to the surprise of its supporters, Pakistan

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accepted a standstill cease-fire, based on the resolution of 20 September which gave no promise of any real settlement of the Kashmir question. Bhutto arrived in New York to convey Pakistan's acceptance on 22 September. It was by no means a satisfied Bhutto who reached the U.N. later wrote, ‘Serious differences arose between me and the President during and after the 1965 war and subsequently at Tashkent.*69 The forward policy group, along with a group of younger army officers, had opposed the cease-fire and sought to continue the war with the Chinese material aid proffered during Ayub’s secret wartime trip to Peking. China's renewal of the ultimatum to India on 19 September appears designed to bolster the Bhutto group within the counsels of the Pakistan Government. Ayub, however, still very much the master of the internal situation (though there were some rumours of a possible coup attempt), was under intense Anglo-American pressure to agree to the cease-fire. He was also well aware that the resolution of 20 September could be ‘read as a joint U.S.-U.S.S.R. warning to China not to widen the war by joining Pakistan.'70 Moreover, the Ayub Regime, with its narrow political base, could not afford a drawn-out war and the mass politicization it would inevitably bring. For the Bhutto group, these considerations were not crucial. They viewed mass politicization not only as inevitable, but as a future political opportunity. They were particularly angered by Ayyh!s-d*cisjon to accep^cease-ffe^ithout^aeconditions oirKaslimir, believing that thcTeby~~Pa3cTsTafriiad thrown away ite-strcmgret card. They argued against accepting the offer of Soviet mediation and were bitterly critical of the Tashkent Declaration, which effectively restored the status-quo ante and meant that Pakistan had gained nothing from the war. With this result the forward policy was in a shambles and a discouraged Bhutto ‘offered my resignation three times, once before the signing of the Declaration and twice after it, but was told that my leaving office would amount to desertion at a time when Pakistan was in the throes of a serious crisis and foreign troops were on our soil, and that solidarity was essential in the hour of crisis.'71 The events of 1965 effectively ended the bond of trust between Ayub Khan and his Foreign Minister. Ayub believed he had been ‘greatly misled' by the forward policy group and the Foreign Ministery came under severe criticism for its ‘grand miscalculation.'72 Bhutto and Aziz Ahmad, then Foreign Secretary and later Foreign Minister in the Bhutto Regime, it was felt, would have to be removed once the

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situation stabilized. Bhutto’s removal was supported by the CSP moguls, Ayub’s ‘in-house’ intellectuals, and his circle in the army. Prominent in this grouping was Altai Gauhar, CSP, who would replace Bhutto in Ayub’s inner circle and who was thought to have ambitions to be Ayub’s successor.73 According to one account,74 Ayub conveyed this decision to his Foreign Minister at Larkana in Febniary 1966, after which Bhutto, supported by sections in the army, made several unsuccessful attempts to have Ayub change his mind. For his part, a disillusioned Bhutto felt there had been no ‘grand miscalculation,’ but an excessive ‘timidity* on the part of Ayub in not pressing the conflict over Kashmir to a point of clear advantage for Pakistan. At Tashkent, moreover, Ayub had ‘unnecessarily capitulated’ national interests to international pressure. The President, as Bhutto observed to this writer, was a master o f half measures. He didn't follow through on policies. He would start something at breakfast and change his mind at dinner. In internal affairs this was all right, but its consequences were too severe in our foreign affairs.75

Bhutto’s political position after Tashkent became extremely delicate, particularly after his opposition to the Declaration became public knowledge. Supremely conscious of the fact that he stood out as a politician in cabinets of technocrats,76 Bhutto was determined not to lose politically from the war. As early as the spring of 1965, he had intimated to a political confidant of the events shaping up in Kashmir and seemed to feel he could not lose from the situation: ‘If my policy wins in Kashmir, I will be respected more than Ayub Khan; if we lose, Ayub Khan and the army will be disgraced and I will emerge as the next man.’77 Things did not turn out in exactly this fashion. The prestige of the armed forces was greatly enhanced by the war, which the public believed Pakistan had won. The war was the beginning of the end for Ayub Khan, though it would take several years for the political and economic consequences of the conflict, and the loss of the army’s confidence, to build up into his overthow. For Bhutto, if the war did not bring him to power as the ‘next man,’ it did give him an important base of support in the army, as well as the issue, Tashkent, which he would use to build a credible opposition. During the month after Tashkent, Bhutto entered a period of political manoeuvre, both within and without the Government. He understood the depth of public shock and disillusionment with the

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diplomatic outcome of the war. Disbelief and riots had greeted both the cease-fire and the Tashkent Declaration in Lahore and Karachi. Unlike most of his colleagues, Bhutto had always maintained some friendly contacts with opposition leaders and appears to have had a hand, from behind the scenes, in encouraging them to form an antiTashkent front of opposition parties. According to Malik Ghulam Jilani, then President of the West Pakistan Awami League, Bhutto contacted him, told him the cease-fire had been unnecessary—the army had been advancing and help was coming from China,—and that Tashkent had been a sellout to India. At this time, also, ‘he confided that there were secret clauses signed at Tashkent, and we believed him.’ Jilani is also adamant that he had Bhutto’s promise to join a front of opposition parties: ‘You arrange it and I’ll tender my resignation and join you.’71 Jilani was a key figure in organizing a national conference of4opposition parties, which met in Lahore on 5 and 6 February 1966 in an effort to organize an anti-Tashkent front.79 Along with the Council Muslim League, the West Pakistan Awami League proposed the launching of a civil disobedience campaign to gain the abrogation of the Tashkent Declaration, but these proposals were rejected by the more conservative Islamic parties. After a feeble resolution on Tashkent, the conference broke up over the ‘Six Points’ demand of the East Pakistan Awami League, put, for the first time in a national forum, by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Not surprisingly, Bhutto made no appearance. On the question of his leaving the cabinet, Bhutto appears to have been somewhat ambivalent. Few politicians in Pakistan have willingly given up political position, for, to do so puts one outside the system of privilege and protection, results in pressure to join opposition forces, and usually thereby brings one into an antagonistic relationship with the state organs. Bhutto had not always agreed with the President’s decisions in the past—on his handling o f the 1962 student demonstrations and on the concentration of industrial wealth in a few families. On these issues, out of ‘good faith’ and as a ‘responsible cabinet member’, he put his views to President Ayub. Of his service in the Ayub Government, Bhutto noted: At this tim e there was no political process outside the governm ent system ...U nder the Basic D em ocracies system there w ere no other productive political avenues to which one could mm. I thought I could do better by being in the Government. I was successful to some extent.10

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Nonetheless, after the September War, his differences with the President ‘assumed a different complexion* and he began to ‘actively oppose’ Ayub’s foreign policy decisions inside the Government.11 As early as the 22 September 1965 Security Council meeting, he was aware that this opposition, and the expected public reaction to the cease-fire, might require him to leave the cabinet.12 In the first weeks after the Taskhent Declaration of 10 January 1966, Bhutto was close to forcing his resignation, but Ayub, who was not about to give the students the one leader who could impart momentum to the antiTashkent disturbances, was adamant that Bhutto stay on. It is unlikely that the President was unaware, through the domestic intelligence services, of Bhutto’s contacts at this time with the opposition. It was in late January that the shooting incident occurred outside the home of Malik Ghulam Jilani in Gulberg (Lahore), in which a prominent journalist, Zamir Qureshi, was killed while standing in the dust beside two vocal opponents of the Regime, Mir Baqi Baloch and the aforementioned Jilani. Though this murder was never ‘solved,’ it was carried out much in the Kalabagh style and was interpreted by Jilani, among others, as the kind of message Bhutto would understand Insofar as his public behaviour was concerned, Bhutto retired to Larkana immediately after Tashkent. Here, he issued two press statements which ostensibly supported the Tashkent Declaration, but which contained enough ambiguous language to be seen as a form of subtle criticism of Ayub’s policies.*3 The second of these statements, coming after the suppression of the disturbances and the failure of the opposition conference, was critical of the opposition leaders and stressed the need for a non-partisan foreign policy. Some have seen this as an indication that Bhutto now saw the wisdom of remaining in the cabinet and of working to reinsure himself with Ayub Khan. Even if this is the case, Bhutto was still not happy with Tashkent. On 16 March 1966, when he spoke in support of Tashkent in the National Assembly, he began by pointedly noting the Declaration was ‘a declaration of intent’ to settle outstanding Indo-Pakistan disputes, including Kashmir, not ‘a contractual obligation’ to do these things.*4 Whether or not Bhutto made efforts to keep his post, Ayub Khan, still very much in charge of his government, was determined upon his eventual removal. The first public sign that Bhutto had fallen from favour came in April when he was removed as Secretary-General of the Convention Muslim League.*3 This occurred after Bhutto had advocated a policy of debate and negotiations with the Six Points

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Movement in East Pakistan in direct opposition to Ayub’s hardline approach. This clash, which took place at the CVML meetings in Dhaka, further strained relations between the two men. Ayub’s policy had wider ramifications. His threat to ‘use the language of weapons' in East Pakistan was widely interpreted as an attempt to distract West Pakistan from Tashkent. Another element in Bhutto's removal as Secretary-General was the re-organization of the CVML, just getting started under a new party constitution. Many of those around the President had no desire to see Bhutto retained in a position from which he could turn the government party into his own power base. Some dispute has arisen in Pakistani political circles over the circumstances of Bhutto’s departure from the Ayub cabinet. His detractors have stressed that he was dropped even as he sought to cling to power, his supporters assert that he left the government on an issue of principle. This is a conflict of emphasis, rather than of fact, as there is truth in both views. According to Bhutto’s version of events, he and Ayub had their last meeting on 16 June.16 After declining the blandishments of an ambassadorship and an industrial permit, Bhutto claims he was told to keep out of politics and warned by Ayub ‘that if I incurred his enmity, he would “follow me to the grave.*” On his refusal to be intimidated—‘my decision to take part in politics would be influenced by national interest and not by threats’—Bhutto maintains the meeting ended almost amicably and Ayub suggested a further discussion when Bhutto returned from his forthcoming private trip to Mecca and Europe.*7 We do not have Ayub’s version of this meeting, though he did later deny ever having threatened Bhutto." On 18 June 1966, the public was informed that the Foreign Minister had been granted a two months leave ‘for reasons of health’ and that the President was assuming the Foreign Affairs portfolio. With this announcement, which came after several weeks of rumours about Bhutto’s impending resignation, few had any doubts that Bhutto and Ayub had come to a final parting of the ways. Motivations in political disputes can often be complex. There is little question that Ayub and Bhutto had come to hold fundamentally opposite views on the course of Pakistan’s foreign policy and that in the normal course of things Bhutto should have resigned, perhaps earlier than he did. It is possible that more than foreign policy matters were involved, that Bhutto had come to doubt the fulfilment of his ultimate political ambitions if he stayed in the Regime. For some years he had been regarded as the most obvious successor to Ayub

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Khan, but in the aftermath of the war and Tashkent, his influence in the Cabinet and at the President’s House had ebbed rapidly. Speaking at Khairpur (Sindh) on 19 May 1970, Bhutto is reported to have said that he^esfgned-wijen he learned that President Ayub had decided to bring ^sow ns^n-ifl as the next President of Pakistan.19 This report, which does not seem to have been publicly denied by Bhutto, puts another angle on Bhutto’s resignation. It suggests that the Foreign Minister left the Regime when he saw his own inside track to the Presidency being blocked. This does not really surprise one, nor does it necessarily conflict with other reasons, such as the conflict over policy. What is does do is to weaken the claims of Bhutto partisans that the Foreign Minister resigned purely on matters of principle, but then, in politics, one always had to be sceptical of claims to purity.

Conclusion We have delved into Pakistan’s foreign affairs during the Ayub period because foreign and domestic affairs have never been far apart in the perceptions of most Pakistanis, including Bhutto. Indeed, the degree to which educated Pakistanis begin with international power politics in order to explain domestic politics takes the foreign observer by some surprise. Though this kind of approach is more prevalent on the left, it does indicate how much developing nations feel the pressures of international politics and the dominance of the super powers. What prior tendencies in this direction may have existed were enormously enhanced by the September War and its diplomatic outcome, in which, most Pakistanis fervently believe, great power intervention deprived them of the diplomatic fruits of their legitimate military victory. Among the educated and the common man, the prestige of both the Soviet Union and the United States sank out of sight, while that of China, the only major power to aid Pakistan in any way, rose to dizzying heights. The Soviet Union was able to recoup some of its influence—it had never been very great in Pakistan—through limited arms aid in 1967 and 1968. Relations between the United States and Pakistan improved during the last two years of Ayub’s administration and, at the official level, warmed considerably after President Yahya Khan served as an intermediary between the United States and China, to help set up Kissinger’s breakthrough trip to Peking on 9 June 1971. But for more than a decade after the September War, the United States was the particular villain of the post-Taskhent generation in Pakistan.

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Writers and spokesmen on the left skillfully used the Vietnam War and the impact of US aid policies on Pakistan's domestic social and political structures to interweave anti-American themes almost indelibly into the consciousness of the newly politicized generation. Bhutto was, of course, the national spokesman for this new generation and the Pakistan People’s Party would be its first political home. It is important to note that Bhutto came to domestic politics by way of foreign affairs. His experiences in the international arena deeply affected his perceptions of Pakistan’s domestic politics. It is certainly of interest that both the Chairman and the first Secretary-General of the Pakistan People's Party (Z. A. Bhutto and J. A. Rahim) were men whose careers thus far had been spent in foreign affairs. Bhutto’s concept of limited or partial sovereignty was not confined only to the sphere of power politics, but included the area of international trade and aid relationships. Here, Bhutto early defined himself as an economic nationalist and proponent of ‘third world perspectives.’90 He was sceptical of the value of foreign aid, particularly on the terms given by the western powers, asking the National Assembly in late 1962: ‘What is the good of economic or any other aid if Pakistan’s sovereignty is to be bartered away in the bargain?’91 Once he was out of the Government, Bhutto’s criticism of foreign aid became more radical and he began to insist that the Aid-to-Pakistan Consortium be dismantled and the Government negotiate bilateral aid and trade agreements. He also began to note the domestic impact of aid—it was a tool to build up an indigenous capitalist class in Pakistan that would be subservient to outside interests and it burdened—indeed, enslaved— the nation with huge debts. These perspectives linked Bhutto with important domestic constituencies and social groups, including elements in the bureaucracy, that had begun to question the whole system of aid at a time when aid inputs had begun to decline and the problem of debt servicing assume major proportions. One project that aroused major criticism on the left was that of the huge Mangla Dam Project, a multi-purpose facility (flood control, irrigation, and hydro-electricity) built between 1962 and 1967 at a cost of about Rs 400 crores on the Jhelum River in Punjab. It was largely financed through foreign loans and built by foreign contractors, who employed hundreds of foreign technicians and engineers. This required the creation of a small, temporary foreign enclave at Mangla with the overflow of foreign residents from this and other projects being absorbed by major cities

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like Rawalpindi and Lahore. Foreign residents became a significant and highly visible element in Lahore. Their numbers put pressure on the availability of housing and, more importantly, their demands were said to have had a distinct impact on food prices. It is not difficult to see how resentment would build up over these issues, particularly when many in the university and media communities pointed out that Pakistanis were really paying for the high salaries and expensive life styles of foreign experts. The critics of this project asked why Pakistan could not follow labour-intensive rather than capital-intensive planning models. Mangla Dam, they insisted, could have been built for a quarter of the cost by using the Chinese method of mass labour, rather than expensive earth-moving machinery, and by employing more Pakistani engineers, among whom there was a serious problem of unemployment. At the very least, this would have put wages into the pockets of many Pakistanis, rather than a few foreigners. They also insisted that the benefits of the Dam had been oversold to the Pakistani people, that the promised industrial development had not occurred and that Pakistan would be repaying the Mangla Dam loans for the next forty years, rather than the ten years originally estimated. Certainly, Bhutto agreed with most of these suppositions. It is interesting that engineers would organize as an interest group in the anti-Ayub Movement of November 1968 to March 1969, and that they would be an early entrant group in the Pakistan People’s Party. One of the most important founder-members of the PPP would be Mubashar Hasan, a civil engineer with a Ph.D. from Iowa State University.92 He was a strong voice for third world perspectives in the party and later in the PPP Government, where he served as Central Finance Minister. He supported Bhutto's efforts to make Pakistan a leading nation in the Group of 77 and, at one point, delivered a widely acclaimed speech at the United Nations which demanded a total restructuring of world trade and aid relationships. Bat, before jumping too far ahead, perhaps it would be well to look at the founding of the Pakistan People’s Party.

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NOTES 1. Jose Ortega Gasset, The M odern Them e , trans. by James Cleugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1961), p. 14. 2. For a description of this area at the time of the British conquest, see parts of the report of Lieutenant James in: H. T. Sorley, Shah A bdul L a tif o f Bhit, H is Poetry, Life and Times (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 115-117. 3. See Supra , Appendix E, A Note on Bhutto Origins. 4. Dilip Mukeijee, Zulfiqar A li Bhutto: Q uest fo r Power (Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1972), p. 24. 5. H. T. Sorley, The Form er Province o f Sindh, Gazetteer of West Pakistan (Lahore: Government of West Pakistan, 1968), p. 371. 6. The Government of Pakistan has not recognized the validity of India’s action, nor accepted the results of the plebiscite held by India after its take over. Pakistan’s position is that ‘since Junagadh had duly acceded to Pakistan, the Dewan had no authority to negotiate a settlement with India, and that India’s action was a clear violation of Pakistan’s territory and a breach of international law.’ Chaudhri Muhammad Ali, The Emergence o f Pakistan (Lahore: University of the Panjab, 1973), p. 278. The Junagadh case is still before the U.N. Security Council. 7. Piloo Mody, Zulfi. M y Friend (Delhi: Hind Pocket Books, 1973), p. 15. Mody was a close companion of Bhutto during their school and college years, and his book is an invaluable source on these years. 8. Altai Husain Qureshi, M uqabil hai A 'ina, Panch Ahamm Intrviu (‘The Mirror Confronts: Five Important Interviews’) (Lahore: Maktaba Urdu Digest, 1969), p. 40. 9. Mody, Zulfi, p. 53. 10. Among Shia Muslims a form of temporary (m u t'a ) marriage is occasionally practised. 11. Mukerjee, Zulfiqar A li Bhutto , p. 27. 12. Mody, Zulfi, p. 47. 13. Mukeijee, Zulfiqar A li Bhutto, p. 28. 14. Mody, Zulfi, p. 34. Sec also Bhutto's letter of 26 April 1945 in: Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Aw am i Adalat Men (‘In the Court of the People*) (Lahore: Pakistan People’s party, 1969), pp. 67-68. His letter to Jinnah contained a clear statement of fundamental Hindu-Muslim incompatibility. 15. Hans Kelsen, a leader of the ‘Vienna School’ of jurisprudence, attempted to construct a ‘Pure Theory of Law.’ As a ‘radical monist,’ Kelsen excluded all moral, psychological, sociological and political data from his enquiry and sought to show ‘in strictly juridical terms the immanent logical relations of legal norms.’ Arthur Nussbaum, A Concise H istory o f the Law o f N ations (rev. ed.; New York: MacMillan, 1954), p. 280. Kelsen’s influence on Bhutto, though by no means total, is evident in a

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16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE’S PARTY number o f places. Bhutto’s speech on aggression to the Sixth Committee o f the U.N. General Assembly on 25 October 1957, quotes Kelsen at length. See: Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, A Compendium o f Speeches and Press Statem ents (Karachi: M a’aref, 1966), pp. 13-24. Further, some influence o f Kelsen's attempt to disprove the sovereignty o f the state may be found in Bhutto’s longest work: The M yth o f Independence (Karachi: Oxford University Press* 1969). Also interesting are the points at which Bhutto diverged from Kelsen: for example in B hutto’s insistence that the development o f law cannot be detached from socio-political influences. Qureshi, M uqabil, p. 42. Bhutto would always hold an element o f admiration for Nehru, though this would inevitably become overlain with the bitterness growing out o f the Kashmir dispute. Certainly one o f the most revealing articles written by Bhutto is his: ‘Nehru— An Appraisal,’ in: Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, The Q uest fo r Peace (Karachi: The Pakistan Institute o f International Affairs, 1966), pp. 61-75. Mody, Z ulfi, p. 49. Bhutto, ‘Aid—Art Thou Charity?’ in Q uest fo r P e a c e\ p. 59. Mody, Zulfi, pp. 44 and 48. Ibid., p. 35; and Bhutto, Q uest fo r Peace, p. 59. Mody, Zulfi, p. 45. Qureshi, M uqabil, p. 41. Mian Manzar Bashir, private interview, Lahore, 27 February 1974. Bashir had met Bhutto several times between 1950 and 1954. M irza’s efforts were not immediately successful. In 1955, Prime Minister Chaudhri Muhammad Ali rejected Bhutto as a delegate— he was too young and and argued over Pakistan’s foreign policies. A year later Prime Minister Suhrawardy objected, perhaps piqued at B hutto's refusal to join the Awami League. ‘Proclamation,’ made by the President o f Pakistan, 7 October text is available in: Herbert Feldman, Revolution in Pakistan: A Study o f the M artial law Adm inistration (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp, 213-215, Herbert Feldman, From Crisis to Crisis, Pakistan 1962-1969 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 304. Bhutto was one o f two Ministers who directed the Ayub Regim e's take­ over o f the Progressive Papers, Ltd. A list o f these delegations may be found in: Bhutto, Speeches and Press Statem ents, pp. 4-6. Differing claims, usually politically motivated, have been made about the significance o f Bhutto’s foreign policy role during the early Ayub years. A yub’s own memoir— Muhammad Ayub Khan, Friends N ot M asters: A p o litic a l Autobiography (London: Oxford University Press, 1967)— does not even mention Bhutto. This is perhaps to be expected since the

1

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book was written in the year after the Ayub-Bhutto break and was reportedly ghosted by Altaf Gauhar, the man who replaced Bhutto in Ayub’s inner circle. Certainly, as head o f Government, Ayub could reasonably assume credit for new foreign policy initiatives taken under his direction. Yet, given the closeness o f Bhutto to the seat o f power in these years, his intellectual influence on Ayub Khan, and the fact that he was known to desire the re-orientations in foreign policy that did occur, it is not unreasonable to suggest that much o f the pressure for these changes came from Bhutto and the circle around him. Perhaps because it was so successful w ith domestic public opinion, the China policy particularly produced a number o f claims to paternity. Bhutto is adamant in asserting his own. As he wrote in the Preface to his major work on foreign relations, ‘it is worth emphasizing that the policy o f close relations with China, which I form ulated and p u t into operation, is indispensable to P a k is ta n ...' (Italics m ine.) Z u lfik ar A li B hutto, The M yth o f Independence (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. viii. 31. Bhutto, M yth o f Independence, p. vii. 32. For Bhutto, the history o f civilization is the history o f 'greed urging domination and colliding with the struggle for equality.' In essence, then, ‘Behind the development o f culture and science lies the human urge expressed by means o f the state, to improve the conditions o f life within the collective unit. The conflicts that arise between groups, each seeking its own interest, are the ingredients o f history. The organized group in its highest form, the nation-state, is the most predatory, as it is the most exacting towards the individuals that compose it. The conflicts within such groups and the conflicts between them create a form o f protest, which is the struggle for equality. This began with the dawn o f civilization.’

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

40.

Ibid., p. 4-5. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., pp. 12 and 14. Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., p. 13. Ibid., p. 15. Keith Callard, Pakistan, A Political Study (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1957) (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1957), p. 322. The quote in Callard is from a SEATO document: C ollective D efense in South E ast Asia (1956), p. 194. S. M. Burke, P akistan's Foreign Policy, A H istorical Analysis (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 212. This is the best available overview o f Pakistan’s foreign policy. Ibid., p. 221.

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41. The phrase is Burke’s in Ibid., p. 212. 42. The border of China’s Sinkiang Province marches contiguously with that of Pakistan-held Azad (Free) Kashmir for about 200 miles. Soviet territory (the Tadzhik S.S.R.) is separated from Pakistan’s border along the Hindu Kush (Chitral District) by a thin wedge of Afghanistan (the Wakhan Corridor) that is less than twelve miles wide at its most narrow point. 43. I have discussed these issues in detail in: Philip E. Jones, 'Peking and 'Pindi: A Study of Relations Between China and Pakistan, 1958-1969* (unpublished M.A.L.D. paper, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, 1969). 44. Dawn (Karachi), 23 November 1963. 45. Z. A. Bhutto, Foreign P olicy o f Pakistan (Karachi: Pakistan Institute of International Affairs, 1964), p. 66. 46. Bhutto, Speeches and Statem ents, p. 433. In September, President Ayub told Selig Harrison that Pakistan had no security pact with China, and in October, responding to a question about whether China had assured Pakistan of help in the event of an Indian attack, Bhutto said: ’There is no agreement between China and Pakistan on this matter...but there is a strong assumption.' The W ashington Post. 12 September 1963 and the M orning News (Dhaka), 9 October 1973. 47. Pakistan maintains its claim to Junagadh, etc., largely because of its legal relevance to the Kashmir dispute. 48. According to the Census o f India. 1941 , 77.4 per cent of the population of Jammu and Kashmir was Muslim. 49. Keith Callard, Pakistan 's Foreign P olicy (New York: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1957), p. 6. 50. A. B. Tourtellot, ‘Kashmir: Dilemma of a People Adrift,* Saturday Review, 6 March 1965. Quoted in Burke, P a kista n ’s Foreign P olicy, p. 384. 51. ‘The India Network,’ O utlook , 17 March 1973,. pp. 10-15. This article quotes extensively from B.N. Mullik, M y Years With N ehru (New Delhi, 1971). 52. Akbar Khan, Raiders in K ashm ir (Karachi: Pak Publishers, 1970), p. 158. 53. Bhutto, Q uest fo r Peacet p. 61. 54. Mukherjee, Zulfìkar A li Bhutto , p. 46. 55. Wayne Wilcox, The E m erg en ce o f B a n g la d esh : P ro b lem s a nd O p p o rtu n itie s fo r a R e d e fin e d A m erica n P o lic y in S o u th A sia

(Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1973), p. 9. 56. Ayub Khan is reported to have told Nehru that in a war with India, Pakistani tanks would be in New Delhi within forty-eight hours. 57. I have discussed this situation in: Philip E. Jones, ‘Hostilities in the Rann of Kutch: A Case Study in the Problem of Controlling Small Wars’

ZULFIKAR ALI BHUTTO: THE MAKING OF A NATIONAL LEADER

58. 59.

60.

61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

95

(unpublished M.A.L.D. paper, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, 1970). Bhutto, M yth o f Independence , p. 75. Mian Manzar Bashir, private interview, 27 February 1974. See also: G. W. Choudhury, The Last D ays o f U nited Pakistan (London: C. Hurst and Company, 1974), pp. 20-21 and S. M. Zafar, Through the Crisis (Lahore: Book Centre, 1970), pp. 67-68. Russell Brines, The Indo-Pakistan C onflict (London: Pall Mall Press, 1968), p. 4. With contacts in both the Pakistani and Indian Army officer corps, Brines has the best information on the actual battles between the two armies. Choudhury, Last D ays, p. 20. Bhutto would probably not agree with this assessment. In his speech to the U.N. Security Council of 25 October 1965, he catalogued a series of foreign news reports from Kashmir detailing ‘student demonstrations, riots, police firing, use of tear gas, throwing of grenades, closing of schools and colleges.* Some reports referred to atrocities committed by Indian security forces in response to classical guerrilla acts by villagers, such as ‘sniping at soldiers passing by, blowing up bridges.’ Indian suppression of the pro-Pakistan plebiscite movement was undoubtedly severe and bloody. See: Bhutto, Speeches and Statem ents , pp. 306 and 308-ff. NCNA , Peking, 8 September 1965. The U.S. decision damaged Pakistan far more than India, as the former was almost totally dependent on U.S. supplies to keep its army and air force functioning. Bhutto, Speeches and Statem ent, p. 589. Brines, Indo-Pakistan C onflict, p. 566. Burke, P akistan's Foreign P olicy , p. 339. Brines, Indo-Pakistan C onflict, p. 367. Burke, P akistan’s Foreign P olicy , p. 339. Z. A. Bhutto, 'Affidavit in Support of Writ Petition No. 1794 of 1968,’ in the High Court of West Pakistan, Lahore. Burke, P akistan’s Foreign P olicy , p. 340. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, ‘Mr. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s Rejoinder to Mr. Musa,’ Lahore, 1968, p. 10. (Mimeographed.) A shortened Urdu translation is available in: Bhutto, Awam i Adalat M en , pp. 54-65. Choudhury, Last D ays, pp. 20-21. This may explain the rough treatment Gauhar received at the hands of the Bhutto Regime in 1972 and 1973. S. Shabbir Hussain, Lengthening Shadows (Rawalpindi: Ferozeson, 1970), p. 107. Hussain is a journalist. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, private interview at the Prime Minister's Office in Rawalpindi, 17 July 1974. Ibid.

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77. Malik Ghulam Jilani, Secretary-General o f the Tehrik-i-Istiqlal, private interview at Lahore, 25 June 1974. Jilani and Bhutto became friends at the National Assembly, where Jilani was in the opposition. They worked together politically for a time after Bhutto’s removal from the Ayub Government. 78. Ibid. Other opposition politicians w e interviewed reported approaches from Bhutto about this time. Among these was: Mian Mahmud Ali Kasuri, private interview at Lahore, 19 November 1974. 79. See: Ziring, The Ayub Khan E ra, pp. 67-85. 80. Bhutto, interview, 17 July 1974. 81. Ibid. 82. See: S. M. Zafar, Through the C risis, p. 69. 83. Bhutto, Speeches and Statem ents, pp. 683-690. 84. Ibid., p. 590. 85. Zafar, Through the C risis, pp. 55-56. 86. The final showdown was touched off by an interview which Bhutto gave to A ltaf Hussain Qureshi o f the monthly Urdu D igest, picked up by the daily Jang (Karachi) and brought to the attention o f President Ayub by A ltaf Gauhar. W e have already quoted from this interview, quite in opposition to the official position, Bhutto said that Pakistan would again have to go onto the battlefield to fight for the preservation o f the Kashmiri people. He said that if the people o f Pakistan learned self-reliance, ‘we will become as solid as a rock.' The interview went on: Qureshi: W ho infuses self-confidence in a nation? Bhutto: It is obvious that this is the work o f the leader. Qureshi: Do you think our present leaders have this capability? Bhutto: Please find the answer to this question yourself. Jang noted the Foreign M inister’s unwillingness to express confidence in Ayub and speculated on the differences that were widely rumoured to exist within the Regime. According to A ltaf Hussain Qureshi, Bhutto had called him about 15 June to say that after seeing the interview, Ayub had asked for his resignation. Ijaz Hasan Qureshi, private interview at the Offices o f the Urdu D igest, 25 May 1973. in his famous speech at Hyderabad on 21 September 1968, Bhutto described his break with Ayub and referred to the role o f the Urdu D igest interview. See: Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Awam i Adalat M en (Lahore: Al-Bayan, 1969), p. 17. 87. Bhutto, ‘Affidavit,’ 1968. 88. M uham m ad A yub Khan, P resid en t o f Pakistan, letter to Sayyid Sharifuddin Pirzada, Attorney General o f Pakistan, 5 February 1969. This letter was submitted to the High Court o f West Pakistan during the hearing on the writ petition o f Begum Nusrat Bhutto challenging the detention o f Z. A. Bhutto. Text available in: Muhammad H anif Ramay, G riftari Se Qatlana Hamle Tak (‘From Imprisonment to the Murderous Attack’) (Lahore: Albayan, 1969), p. 153.

ZULFIKAR AU BHUTTO: THE MAKING OF A NATIONAL LEADER

89. 90. 91. 92.

97

Dawn. 20 May 1970: Bhutto, Speeches and Statements, p. 355. Ibid., p. 382. Mubashar Hasan is a member of a richly-talented family from Panipat in East Punjab. He served for a time in the Punjab Irrigation Department before taking a M. S. degree from Columbia University and a Ph.D. from Iowa State University. He returned to Pakistan to be Head of the Department of Civil Engineering at the Engineering University in Lahore, where he was also President of the University Teaching Staff Association. In 1962, his services at the University were terminated by a Martial Law Order, which resulted in a student strike and the removal of the ViceChancellor.

4 FOUNDATION AND SOCIAL ORIGINS OF THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE’S PARTY ‘The Pakistan People’s Party is Zulfikar Ali Bhutto,’1was an assertion frequently heard during the years of the People's Party government in Pakistan. Certainly, it is difficult to conceive of the PPP without its founding Chairman. Without too much exaggeration, it can be said that the dominance of this one individual is the crucial factor determining the organizational and political directions taken by the party. Perhaps it would be worthwhile to distinguish here between an ‘organizational-base,’ or Bolshevik, type of party that stresses the discipline, ideology, and objectives of the organization, and a singleleader, or ‘fuhrerist,’ type in which organization and ideology are subordinated to the particular proclivities and vision of the supreme leader. Though both are mass movement phenomena, the Bolshevik party model is the more thoroughly revolutionary in that it aims to rebuild the state structure from the ground up. The ‘fuhrerist’ party model aims to capture the pre-existing state institutions and to bend them to its own ideological and political goals. ‘Fuhrerist’ parties thus tend to downgrade their own organization in favour of becoming part of the state apparatus. Clearly, aside from party-state relations, these two models have very different outcomes in terms of leadership styles, organizational strategies, recruitment policies and ideological emphases. During its early years, those when it was in opposition, the People’s Party was not completely a ‘fuhrerist* party, though the tendency toward single-leader dominance was visible to anyone who looked closely enough. These were the years of the ascendancy o f the ‘ideological* wing of the party. The PPP adopted the outward symbols of the Bolshevik model in its provision for a Chairman and a Central Committee and in

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its grass roots organizational strategy. Yet, in the cultural and political conditions prevailing in Pakistan, it was perhaps only a matter of time before the PPP would transform itself visibly into a ‘fuhrerist’ party. Though this process was well underway before the 1970 elections, it became more and more obvious during the years of power. The long internal struggle between the ‘ideologic&ls’ and the ‘politicals’ emphasized the nature of the People's Party as a transitional structure that reflected both the passing age of elite politics and the emergent age of mass politics. What held the party together in these circumstances was the remarkable ability of Z.A. Bhutto to stand above this internal cleavage in the party and to operate in the old elite order while concurrently galvanizing mass sectors by the force of his image and his demand for major social change. Like the men he most admired—Ataturk, Jinnah, Sukarno, and Nasser—Bhutto dominated the lesser men that surrounded him, a situation that fitted well with his personality and political style.

B hutto P ursuit

P o litical W il d e r n e ss : A lternate S trategies

in the of

The period between his departure from the cabinet and the founding of the Pakistan People’s Party was, for Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, one of calculated manoeuvre to keep his political prospects afloat, to gauge the intentions of an increasingly hostile government, to understand the directions of public opinion, and to test the strengths and weaknesses of the various opposition parties and their leaders. During this period Bhutto canvassed a number of alternative strategies in his search for a credible central role in national politics. The first of these strategies we may call an ‘internal strategy,' since it was predicated on expanding a pre-existing political base inside the Regime. The remaining alternatives were all forms of an ‘external strategy.* This meant building a political base outside the Regime by consolidating the antiTashkent consistency and employing it either (1) to create a bloc of opposition parties led by the pre-Ayub elites, (2) to bargain for entry into the leadership echelon of an established opposition party, or (3) to organize his own political party and seek power through ‘socialist politics.* Though political circumstances would gradually move Bhutto away from the internal strategy toward that of creating his own party, it is

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part of the measure of the man, and a mark of his remarkable political agility, that he did not pursue all these alternatives consecutively, but concurrently. This technique of negotiating concurrently in multiple arenas inevitably resulted in a host of misunderstandings, loose ends and bruised egos, but it was, and would remain, characteristic of Bhutto's political style. As Piloo Mody has written, ‘Zulfi has always been fond of saying that consistency is the hallmark of mediocrity, and has then...set out to prove his own greatness.'2 One Punjabi politician, who had been left hanging by one of Bhutto's unkept assurances during this period, described this technique as the ‘calculated use of unpredictability.'3 Others have seen it as a Machiavellian deviousness, a view which found a later echo in Khan Abdul Wali Khan's exasperated statement to the Guardian (London), that ‘Bhutto is not the sort of person you can do business with.'4 Clearly, this was a period of convoluted negotiations for the former Foreign Minister. Without tediously tracing all o f his perambulations, political and geographical, around Pakistan, let us touch briefly on Bhutto’s pursuit of each of these alternatives.

I nternal S trategy

'

The “internal strategy' was a potential alternative for two reasons. First, Bhutto already had pockets of support in the army, among younger and lower grade civil servants and in the Convention Muslim League and its affiliated student organization, the Muslim Students Federation (MSF). Secondly, the Regime was apparently not happy at the prospect of Bhutto moving decisively into the opposition. According to Bhutto, for more than a year after his break with Ayub he was contacted at various times and places by emissaries of the President—ambassadors, police and intelligence officers, a central cabinet minister, Governor Musa, and members of Ayub's family— with offers of reconciliation and a possible appointment as an ‘unofficial' adviser on foreign affairs. The thrust of these efforts was, in Bhutto's words, to allow him to ‘remain in active politics provided I avoided one or two sensitive subjects and gave a categorical undertaking that I would not personally contest the Presidential election of 1970.'5 Though Bhutto would not be reconciled with Ayub Khan on these terms, he was not above trying to see if something could be made of

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all this. On his first visit to Lahore after returning from Europe in early October 1966, he headquartered himself at Falettis Hotel and received a series of delegations composed of lawyers, students and various political figures. Among the student delegations was that of the MSF. It had adopted Bhutto as its national patron in 1965 and it now declared it would follow him wherever he decided to go politically, thus becoming the first organization to back the future Prime Minister.6 More significantly, perhaps, Bhutto also met with what we may call the ‘Islamic Socialism Group* of writers, professors, and journalists who had gathered around the magazine Nusrat, a monthly of high literary quality. In 1965 and 1966, Nusrat had become the vehicle for a group of thinkers, among them Hanif Ramay, Safdar Mir (Zeno), Professor Muhammad Usman, and Maulana Ghulam Rasul Mehr, who sought to develop Islamic Socialism as an intellectual movement that would enable Pakistan, fully in consonance with its religious foundations, to find a route to modernity between atheistic materialism on the left and wholesale westernization and religious obscurantism on the right. The entire September and October 1966 editions of Nusrat had been combined and devoted exclusively to Islamic Socialism. This was the most extensive treatment the subject had received in Pakistani literature and it would eventually become, as Hanif Ramay put it, the ‘Bible of the people’s movement.’ The Ramay group had its connections with the Convention Muslim League, Hanif Ramay being the most active in this regard. He was not only the founder and editor of Nusrat, but Propaganda Secretary for the West Pakistan CVML and a patron of the MSF. Like his student protégés— he was thirty-five at the time—Ramay had been disillusioned by Tashkent and was now, with his fellow intellectuals, prepared to put the case to Bhutto that ‘if Pakistan’s political life is to be revitalized, it can best be done on the lines of Islamic Socialism.’7 A document to this effect was prepared and presented to Bhutto at this meeting. It is noteworthy that Bhutto first publicly used the concept on 23 November 1966 when he observed that Pakistan’s problems could not be solved until it became a ‘true Islamic socialist state.’1This observation was made at the famous meeting at the Lahore YMCA Hall, organized by the MSF, at which Bhutto spoke on A fro-Asian issues to an overflow crowd—it was his first public appearance in West Pakistan after leaving the Government. Subsequent to his October discussions in Lahore, Bhutto began to promote the idea of a ‘Forward Bloc* of progressive forces inside the

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CVML. First reported in the national press two days before Bhutto’s ‘Islamic Socialism* statement at the YMCA, this idea was vigourously resisted by the CVML high command, who remembered Daultana*s classic use of the old League's organization to gain the Punjab Chief Ministership from Mamdot in 1951, and by the Presidential circle, who rightly saw it as an attack on Ayub’s policies. Indeed, after his October discussions, Bhutto found himself excluded from the inner councils of the CVML. He received no credentials for the meetings of either its Working Committee or the Council held at Dhaka in November 1966, though he was a member of both bodies. On 10 December 1966, the President of the West Pakistan CVML, Malik Khuda Bakhsh Bucha, a bureaucrat turned politician, ruled out the possibility of ‘any “forward” or “backward” bloc in the Muslim League,* and suggested that Bhutto either accept the view that the government party was to function as an aid to economic and social development, not as an instrument for the discontented to gain power, or quit the party altogether.9 Though Bucha*s statement seemed to shut off the Forward Bloc alternative, Bhutto neither executed a hasty departure from the League, nor discontinued his contacts with sympathetic elements in the Regime. As late as 8 February 1967, he was honoured at Lahore by a group of civil officers. Bhutto did not resign from the Convention League until April 1967.

E xternal S tr a t eg y : C o ntacts

w ith

O pposition G roups

Concomitantly with these negotiations, the former Foreign Minister 'w as exploring the possibilities of an external strategy. He had strong support among urban groups: lawyers, the literary and educational intelligentsia, but particularly among the wider student community in West Pakistan. No other group had been more deeply affected by the war, Tashkent and the pro-China euphoria that followed. Apart from the well-organized groups associated with the conservative Jama’at-iIslami, Bhutto had captured this constituency long before he had been removed from the Government. The most constant refrain in our interviews and discussions all over Punjab with students and student leaders of this period was their unprompted singling out of the electrifying impact that Bhutto’s speeches of 22 September and 25 October 1965 in the Security Council had on them. In contrast to .Ayub’s perceived knuckling under to foreign pressure, Bhutto was

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seen as the true champion of Pakistan’s national interests. He was 'a great patriot* and a ‘great national hero.’ Ample evidence of this support was demonstrated in the huge crowds that assembled to greet Bhutto in Rawalpindi, Lahore and Karachi after the announcement of his ‘leave of absence* from the Cabinet.10 The decision to travel by train from Rawalpindi to Karachi before proceeding abroad was a calculated one,11 and the receptions at numerous stations along the way were organized by student groups, but the response nevertheless was massive and enthusiastic. The fact that Bhutto remained silent and visibly moved during this journey charged these proceedings with added significance and poignancy. The inference behind the pro-China and anti-US slogans of the students, and their beseeching of him not to go abroad, was a demand that the Foreign Minister come out and lead an anti-Ayub movement. Yet, at this time, and indeed throughout his political career, Bhutto was sceptical of the stability and permanence of student support. He was aware of the rapid turnover of student generations and suspected that student support Could be dangerously volatile and episodic. He was prepared to use these characteristics when the time was ripe, but he was not prepared to depend on them alone for his political future. Bhutto would have felt more comfortable with a decision for early open opposition had the established opposition parties closed ranks with him in a united front strategy reminiscent of that which produced the Combined Opposition Parties of the 1964-1965 elections. That he sought and failed to secure such an option is clear. Even before leaving Rawalpindi, he had had a long meeting with Nurul Amin, leader of the opposition in the National Assembly, and reportedly discussed just such a possibility. During his October 1966 discussions in Lahore, Bhutto met with lawyers and political workers whose previous allegiance had been to COP. Although an ex-COP group, vaguely led by Mian Faqir Muhammad, Supreme Court Advocate and President of the Pak-China Cultural Association, aligned with Bhutto at this time, the united front idea failed to attract the necessary support of such key figures as Mohtarmah Fatima Jinnah, COP Presidential candidate in 1964-1965, and Mian Mumtaz Khan Daultana, the central figure in the post-EBDO Council Muslim League (CML). The united front alternative was not the only variant of the external strategy pursued by Bhutto during this period. By all accounts, he was also active in contacts with individual political parties. Of these

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contacts, about which there is some controversy, Bhutto told this writer: Yes, there were general discussions with other parties, but there were no tergiversations on my part. This was done mainly to see how the land lay and how the other parties and their leaders were thinking. These parties tried to get me into their ranks and made great efforts. Daultana tried, Nawabzada Nasrullah tried, the NAP tried. I had long discussions with these people and when they asked me to join them I couldn’t refuse outright. Instead, I gave polite and evasive answers. But, I never promised and I never planned to join another party.12

This contradicts what others perceived about Bhutto's efforts during this period. Malik Ghulam Jilani: ‘He wanted the Presidentship of the Council Muslim League and asked me to talk to Daultana about it.*1J Mairaj Muhammad Khan: ‘At one point...Bhutto was considering joining the NAP, if the Bhashani and Wali Khan groups could rejoin, or the Awami League, if they would change their programme.'14 Mian Mahmud Ali Kasuri: ‘After he left the Ayub Khan cabinet, Bhutto asked me on several occasions if he could join the NAP.*'5 Bhutto was most interested in either the Council Muslim League or the National Awami Party and, though he joined neither, his discussions went farthest with the leftist, progressive NAP. In some ways this was understandable. Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani, the dominant NAP leader, had strongly supported the pro-China policy of the Bhutto-Ayub years. Moreover, after meetings with Mao Tsetung and Chou En-lai in October 1963, in which the former had asked Bhashani to ‘give us a chance to deepen our friendship with your government...,*16 the Bengali peasant leader had moved to a tacit rapprochement with the Ayub Regime. Further, in accordance with a ‘strategem...engineered* by Bhutto, Bhashani had sat out the 1965 elections, a factor which many believe enabled Ayub Khan to win in East Pakistan.17 Bhutto met Bhashani in Dhaka in November 1966 and later in that year and in early 1967 met with the West Pakistan NAP leaders at the Lahore residence of M.A. Kasuri, who was the strongest supporter on the NAP side of a bid for Bhutto’s membership. Superficially at least, the negotiations broke down over Bhutto’s demand for an assured position in the NAP and the latter’s requirement that he come in as an ordinary member and prove himself before rising to a position of leadership. The Punjab NAP leadership—C.R.

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Aslam, A.H. Manto, Major Ishaq, Shaukat Ali, Mian Arif Iftikhar and Mirza Ibrahim—were not persuaded that Bhutto’s ideological protestations were genuine and suspected that his opposition to Ayub arose largely out of his dismissal from the cabinet. These were not unimportant issues for men who valued their ideological commitments and who had struggled and suffered for them in the labour and peasant movements. Another important concern must have been the attractiveness of Bhutto’s personality in an organization that, for all its Marxist pretensions, was still essentially a collection of parallel leaderfollower groups held together at the top by a collective leadership committee. As one old communist noted, ‘the pits of the left’ were afraid Bhutto would steal their followers. This is, in fact, what happened, but it happened from the outside when the new Pakistan People’s Party later co-opted most of the lower echelon NAP-Bhashani Group workers. Beyond these ideological and organizational issues were political concerns. These had much to do with the fact that the NAP, along with its allied student group, the National Students Federation (NSF), was then in the process of breaking into two groups after years of internal strain, now exacerbated by the increasingly tempestuous SinoSoviet rift. The result of thi%was the emergence o f two discrete groups in the NAP: the pro-Moscow, provincialist NAP-Wali Khan Group (NAP-W), with its bases of support in the minority provinces of West Pakistan, and the pro-Peking, anti-feudalist NAP-Bhashani Group (NAP-B), with its strength in Punjab, East Pakistan and Karachi. The growing dis-organization of the NAP was evident to Bhutto in his contacts with the Punjab NAP leaders. It was an aspect on which he attempted to play in his negotiations, but it also added weight to the argument, increasingly heard in leftist circles in Punjab and Karachi, that the NAP was on the decline and the time was ripe for a new progressive party in West Pakistan. Certainly the NAP had been damaged by its association, albeit tacit, with the Ayub Regime. This was the case in January 1967, when the NAP-B identified itself with the government’s position on the successful railway workers strike. This strike was carried out to protest the rapid post-war inflation, despite the opposition to it of both the government sponsored ‘official’ union and the more popular ‘unofficial* union, headed by Mirza Ibrahim and associated with the NAP-B. Evidently, the Regime was able to persuade Ibrahim that the CIA was behind the strike and, in solidarity with the ‘anti-imperialist’

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and pro-China Regime, the NAP-B opposed the strike, only to find its union leaders bypassed by more militant grass roots leaders among the workers.11 This strike, which halted all mainline rail service in West Pakistan for two days and left at least three strikers dead, shook the established left in West Pakistan, for it showed that the NAP-B had not only lost touch with its most important constituency, but also with the powerful under-currents of anti-government opinion in the province. It also suggested that labour crises could produce new leaders that might not be constrained by prior political affiliations. It is certainly of note that most of these new leaders, as well as NAP-B union organizers who broke with the party line on the strike, would be among the first trade unionists to join the Pakistan People’s Party.19 Despite their non-success, Bhutto's talks with the opposition parties were an important indication of the direction in which he wanted to move. The fact that he made his most concerted efforts with the Council Muslim League and the National Awami Party is particularly significant,20 for it suggests that Bhutto had come to envision the recreation of Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s broad nationalist coalition as the most effective means of countering, even overthrowing, the grip of the vice-regal institutions on the state. Both parties were products of the Pakistan Movement, the CML having the most direct organizational connection, the Punjab NAP tracing its political lineage through the Azad Pakistan Party to the Progressive Group in the pre-1947 Punjab Muslim League. As we noted earlier in this study, both groupings, as social elements in the pre-independence League, were crucial to the success of the Pakistan Movement in Punjab—the Daultana connection, because it had brought the dominant social force in the province—the zamindariat—decisively into the Movement, and the Progressive Group, because it had united key urban social groups (lawyers, students, workers, artisans, part of the progressive ulema) behind the League’s radical manifesto of 1946. Yet, in his contacts with these two parties, it soon became evident that, though both were remnants of the original nationalist coalition, the intervening years had affected both so unfavourably that neither was suitable for carrying out the strategy envisioned by Bhutto. The CML had been deeply damaged by its political failings during the pre­ coup years. Moreover, the EBDO having expired on 31 December 1966, it was now an elite deeply divided between those who wanted to concert with the Ayub Regime in return for the perquisities of power, and those who were adamant in opposition. For Bhutto, who was

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aware that a reconstruction of the Quaid-i-Azam’s nationalist coalition—albeit on an expanded social base—required the broad polarization of political forces against bureaucratic forces, the vacillation by the CML was unacceptable. The NAP posed more serious problems for Bhutto. He saw its internal alliance of provincial autonomists and anti-feudal revolutionaries as a potential threat to the survival of the Pakistani State. In Pakistan, where the national movement had preceded the now anticipated anti-feudal revolution, the ethnic-linguistic autonomists were seen as a threat to the supremacy of Muslim nationalism. In like manner, the anti-feudal revolutionaries were a threat to the key social element in the original state-forming coalition. Should these groups come to power together in a mass movement, or conjoin with the Bengali nationalists of the Awami League, the result might well be the break up of the State or the emergence of an even purer form of Bonapartism. It is not that Bhutto was opposed to the anti-feudal revolution. Its advent was, in one form or another, a historical necessity. Rather, it was a concern that the form it would take would have major long-term consequences both for the social and institutional structure of power and for the stability of the State. For Bhutto, then, Pakistan’s most basic interests would best be protected if the anti-feudal revolution could be submerged within a strong recrudescence o f a wider Pakistani nationalism. Though Bhutto would later be pushed farther to the left by the exigencies of the People’s Movement than he would otherwise have been inclined to go, he never lost sight of his original conception. It would later be visible in many ways—in his attempts to persuade Mian Manzar Bashir to organize the PPP in West Pakistan,21 in this quiet, but persistent, courting of the old League zamindariat in the 1970 elections, and in the fact that it was the People’s Party in 1972 that finally put the Punjab Muslim League manifesto of 1946 into law.

T he N ew P arty S trategy

Though the logic of these perceptions increasingly pressed him to consider the idea of a new political party, the original impetus for such a strategy came less from Z.A. Bhutto than from J.A. Rahim. Once again in his political career, an older man stepped forward to give Bhutto a new political direction. An ex-ICS officer, a man of high intellectual discipline and an avowed Marxist, Jalaluddin Akbar

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Rahim was the rarest of men in Pakistan. The son of a High Court judge, Rahim had his early education in Madras and Calcutta (St. Xavier’s), took higher degrees from Cambridge and Munich, and joined the ICS in 1931. His service in the ICS is best remembered for his authorship of the Haj Report, which led to better health and travel facilities for Indian Muslims who made the pilgrimage to Mecca. In 1946, J.A. Rahim was seconded to Egypt as a Commissioner of Roads. When Pakistan came into being the next year, Rahim secured early Egyptian diplomatic recognition for the new state and set up the first Pakistani mission in Cairo. He later helped to organize the Foreign Ministry and the Pakistan Foreign Service and rose to be the Foreign Secretary, the highest non-political appointment in the Foreign Ministry. Thereafter, until his retirement in 1966, he served in various capitals as his country’s ambassador.22 Retirement freed J.A. Rahim to involve himself in progressive political circles both at home and in Europe, where he travelled in 1966 and 1967, and to follow up on the idea of a “genuinely socialist party for Pakistan.” Rahim was a socialist much in the British tradition. His contacts during this period were with Lord Bertrand Russell— “who had a great admiration and affection for Bhutto,”—the North Vietnamese in Paris, the left wing of the British Labour Party, and leftist Pakistani expatriate circles in Britain. The latter included Tariq Ali, a central figure in the Cambridge student movement of 1968, and the Pakistan Socialist Society (PSS), a London based group of students, young lawyers, and expatriate labour leaders with ties to British trade union circles.23 One of the founding members of the PSS was Taj Muhammad Khan Langah, a young advocate from Lodhran Tehsil who was then a Legal Adviser in the Ministry of Housing under Richard Crossman. Access to the world press had given these expatriate groups a sober evaluation of the September War and, contrary to their compatriots at home, few believed Pakistan was the clear battlefield victor. Pakistan’s military and diplomatic weaknesses, they believed, stemmed from the structure of Pakistani society—the hold of the military-bureaucratic elite, its intimate ties to feudal landlords and “comprador capitalists,” and its subservience to the “neo-colonialist powers,” by way of exploitative trade, aid, military and intelligence relationships.24 Their prescription was for a massive, systemic restructuring of Pakistani society along socialist lines. These were not new prescriptions, but the war had intensified and given them focus. “Our inability to win against India was humiliating,” one

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“UK-returned” PPP lawyer later recalled, “and we saw how a strong defence inevitably rested on an economically and politically strong society.”25 Under the broad demand for systemic change there were many and various specific demands, one of the more common being the demand for the development of heavy industry in Pakistan as a base for military self-sufficiency. Clearly, however, the crucial requisite for achieving the kind of fundamental changes envisioned by the left was the acquisition of political power. In the particular political and social circumstances in Pakistan, where the “Nasserite element” had been cleaned out of the armed forces in 1951, the only real route to power was seen as that through a new political party which would appeal to the masses on the basis of a socialist programme. Here, of course, their prescriptions coincided with those of J.A. Rahim. Further, as might be expected in a social order that was still largely paternalistic, they cast around for a central figure, a dominating personality, around which such a party could be organized. Like Rahim, who had had his eye on him from their days in the Foreign Ministry, they saw Z.A. Bhutto as the most obvious person to fill this role. As the “only outstanding leader in the Ayub cabinet,” and the creator of “a progressive foreign policy,” Bhutto had acquired enormous merit in the eyes of the left-inclined expatriates: He was responsible for the first trade agreement with Russia. He guided and influenced the pro-China policy and made contact with such progressive third world leaders as Nasser, Sukarno and Ben Bella. He gave a welcome touch o f progressivism to Pakistani politics. His anti-India stand was very influential.26

The idea of a^ew political partp'was urged to Bhutto by Rahim in ^Paris and j r ^ a number of expatriate groups in London. After his u l October 1966 spceel^at Conway Hall, London, to several thousand Pakistanis, he met with the PSS organizers of this meeting. Here he was pressed to form a j^ e w left party,” based on genuine organization rather than- personai cliques, with a socialist programme taken down to the people rather than simply slogans, and with a professional cadre, who would hold national above personal interests, rather than the Basic Democrat functionary, who was typically subservient to the bureaucracy and very often also corrupt.27

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Whatever Bhutto may have thought of these specific attributes of a socialist party, he was not unsympathetic to the general argument, nor was he unaware that expatriate groups had access to substantial funds, organizational skills and the international media. Indeed, to look ahead for the moment, the sizeable funds received by the Pakistan People’s Party prior to the November Movement of 1968 were said, by PPP sources, to have come from expatriate groups in Britain, as well as from the left wing of the British Labour Party. According to Ghulam Mustafa Khar, who had been part of Bhutto’s inner circle in the National Assembly, on his return from Europe in 1966, Bhutto had mentioned the discussions in Paris with Rahim and confided that he had decided to form a new political party.21 Rahim, however, aware that Bhutto “was still talking all around,” was not confident of the latter’s commitment to a new party until the two men met again in Geneva during the summer of 1967.29 Until and unless Z.A. Bhutto writes his memoirs, we may not know precisely when he decided to form the PPP. It is likely that the decision was a cumulative one, emerging out of his experiences and perceptions in the period after his return from Europe in late 1966 and early 1967. The non-success of his talks with the NAP and CML during this period did not mean the abandonment of his primary strategy. Only that he would have to pick up the loose ends of the nationalist movement outside the body of established parties and weave them into a coherent organizational and programmatic whole. This is the real significance of Bhutto’s early relationship with J.A. Rahim, for in this partnership were the essential elements of a “Jinnahist” coalition of nationalist and radical social elements. Rahim touched on this aspect, as well as on Bhutto’s deeper concerns for the security of Pakistan, when he told this student: Bhutto’s own leaning was always very nationalistic. He always emphasized the nationalistic side, while I inclined the other way and emphasized internal social change, believing that we could take the nation, and its existence in the framework o f the State, for granted.30

Certainly, from the beginning of his post-cabinet period, there were groups and individuals in Punjab that urged Bhutto to form a new political party.31 This was particularly the response of the new social groups that were, without strong prior political commitments, pushing into the political arena. For these groups, the established parties of

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b o th th e g o v ern m en t and o p p o sitio n w ere ‘c o u n terfe it coins* w hich h a d b etray ed th e national in terest. In th e p o st-T a sh k en t atm o sp h ere o f p o litical ferm en t in P u n jab , B hutto w as so u g h t o u t by a n u m b er o f ‘ p r o g r e s s i v e ’ g ro u p s th a t a lik e b e lie v e d t h e n o rm a l p o litic a l d e v elo p m en t o f the n atio n had b eco m e u n tra c k ed a fte r th e co u p o f 1958. T h e se w ere form al o rg a n iz atio n s, like th e b a r a sso ciatio n s and stu d en t fed eratio n s, as w ell as inform al p o litic a l d iscu ssio n groups. T h e latter, w hich are c o m m o n ly know n as ha lq a s (circles), w ere groups o f p o litically -o rien ted citizen s w h o m et reg u larly to d eb ate and d iscu ss th e issues o f the d a y .32 A s n etw o rk s o f in fo rm atio n th at ty p ically had a n u m b e r o f so u rc es o u tsid e th e c o n tro lle d m e d ia , th e h a lq as w ere im p o rtan t tra n sm itte rs o f in fo rm atio n an d o p in io n am o n g th e urban in tellig en tsia. O ne o f th e m o st sig n ifican t h a lq as o f th is p erio d w as, fo r o u r p u rp o ses, the one w h ich g ath ered in L a h o re on S u n d ay s at the G u lb erg h o m e o f Dr. M u b ash ar H asan. T h e m e m b e rs o f th is d iv erse g ro u p w ere: M u b ash ar H asan (e n g in e erin g p ro fesso r), H a n if R am ay (literary in tellectu al and leading light o f th e Isla m ic S o cialism G ro u p ), R aja M u n aw ar A hm ad (g e n try la n d h o ld er an d b u sin essm an ), L a tif M irza (civil serv an t), and H am id S arfraz (fo rm e r stu d en t activ ist and y o u n g law yer). T his group, th re e o f w h o m w o u ld rise to high p arty a n d /o r g o v ern m en t p o sitio n s u n d e r th e PPP R eg im e, w as o n e o f the first halqas to see in B h u tto the one m an w ho c o u ld lead P ak istan back to its n a tio n a list destiny. B y F eb ru ary 1967, B hutto had w o rk ed th ro u g h th e v ario u s o p tio n s a v a ila b le to him a n d , p a rtly in re sp o n se to th e p re ssu re s o f th e a m o rp h o u s co n stitu en cy th at w as b eg in n in g to c o n g ea l aro u n d him , w as p re p a red to ta k e a m o re o p en stan d in o p p o sitio n to th e A yub R egim e. H is earlier speeches— at C on w ay H all, th e Y M C A and Islam ia C o llege— had dw elt on fo reig n affairs an d w ere o n ly o b liq u ely critical o f A y u b ’s p o licies, th ough th ey d id p ro m ise ‘c e rta in re v e la tio n s’ for the future. On 24 February 1967, h o w ev er, sp ea k in g to th e In ter­ collegiate Students Body at Lahore, B h u tto in d ic a te d his o p p o sitio n to i the Regime,-' and two days later, in sp eech es at th re e m eetin g s in L a h o re , w a s -m o re e m p h a tic , d e n o u n c in g th e A y u b R eg im e as a dictatorship and calling for a d em o cratic g o v e rn m e n t b ased on the universal rights of a free people.* In a text c irc u lated the next day, but not printed by the media, he d em an d ed ‘a v e rd ic t o f th e p e o p le on all national issu e s,’ and posed a series o f rhetorical q u estio n s w h ich appear d esig n ed to appeal to v ario u s sectio n s o f th e d iv e rse opp o sitio n :

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Is the future o f the people o f Pakistan to be based on economic exploitation and inequality or is it to rest on socialist principles o f equality and egalitarianism ? Is the ideological basis and state sovereignty to be strengthened or is it to become a victim o f international power politics? Is the rule o f law and the freedom o f the individual to be the criteria o f the progress o f the society or is suppression to be its inherent composition? Is the future to be based on the universal participation o f the people or is the order o f the day to...be governed by the monopoly o f power.”

On 27 February, Bhutto was scheduled to address the Lyallpur (now Shah Faisalabad) Bar Association and drove down with Ghulam Mustafa Khar, who was henceforth to become his constant companion and general factotum. Much to his surprise, Bhutto was greeted by enthusiastic demonstrations of peasants and townsmen all along the fifty-odd miles between Sheikhupura and Lyallpur. Several miles out of Lyallpur his car was stopped by a mammoth, apparently unplanned demonstration, variously estimated to contain from one to several hundred thousand people. To the noise of their slogans— *Ayub kutta h a ï h a 'ï (‘Ayub is a dog, hey hey...*) and ‘Bhutto zindabad* (‘Long live Bhutto’)—this crowd escorted the car to the home of Bhutto’s host and refused to disperse until the ex-Foreign Minister had made a speech—which he did from the roof of the bungalow and without a loudspeaker. In a country where one is suspicious of all ‘spontaneous demonstrations,* this event does seem to have been just that—planned ‘spontaneous demonstrations* usually have more substantive slogans. One Lyallpur lawyer, noting that more than one hundred buses a day run from Lahore to Lyallpur, suggested that Bhutto *s speeches of the previous day, together with the news that he was coming to Lyallpur, had spread very rapidly along the road and throughout the city. He compared this word-of-mouth communication to that of the Great Rebellion of 1857, when chapatis (indigenous bread) were circulated as a symbol of revolt. It should also be remembered that Lyallpur— the ‘Manchester of Pakistan*—is a burgeoning industrial city, which quadrupled its population between 1951 and 1972, and which is surrounded by canal colony villages, whose inhabitants have usually been more politically conscious than the peasantry of the old settled areas. The Lahore and Lyallpur meetings indicated that major under­ currents of opposition existed in Punjab at virtually all social levels, and that something of a political awakening was stirring the lower social orders. His move into open opposition at a time when other

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opposition leaders were silent, served to establish Bhutto’s image as an opposition figure and to allay the suspicions of some—but by no means all—who remembered his recent intimacy with Ayub Khan. He also began to feel the hard pressures of being in the opposition. On the one hand, there were the demands of his constituency for greater militancy—he was confronted at Lyallpur about his continued membership in the CVML and obliged prematurely to separate himself, publicly at least, from the government party.36 On the other hand, the government began to threaten and harass Bhutto and his followers and to give audience to his old political enemies in Larkana District. It also began to clamp Section 144 CCP on any city or town where he went to speak, thereby hoping to ensure that nothing remotely comparable to the scale of events at Lyallpur would reoccur.37 In June 1967, in the heightened atmosphere produced by the Arab-Israeli ‘Six Day' War, Bhutto agreed to speak on the implications of the war to a mass rally in Lahore’s Gol (now Nasser) Bagh. This meeting, which was organized by the militant National Students Federation (NSF) in defiance of Section 144 CCP, signalled Bhutto’s willingness to step up his opposition from verbal criticism to a confrontation in the streets. The administration responded by flooding the grounds and introducing live wires and by sending in a squad of ghundas (goons) to disrupt the meeting and rough up Bhutto—all of which succeeded in throwing the rally irretrievably into pandemonium at the outset of Bhutto’s speech. It also put the onus on the administration for acting to break up a ‘proArab* rally.

T he F o unding

of the

P akistan P e o pl e ’s P arty

Neither the violent disruption of the Gol Bagh meeting, nor the government’s attempts to discredit him,3* deflected Bhutto from his political course, nor dissuaded his closest followers from their support. He returned from his second summer trip to Europe convinced that the time for a new party had arrived. Along with J A Jtahim, he announced the decision for a new party from the Hyderabad^residence of Mir Rasul Bakhsh Talput on 16 September 1967._lL.w}ould be a ‘national progressive oqjanization havingTls rooti deepln the masses equally jy£ JBastjmd .West Pakistan.’39.Ih c next ten weeks were a period of intense activity for Bhutto in both wings of the country. By late October he was sufficiently confident to schedule the founding

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convention of the new party for 30 November-1 December 1967, and to recruit Malik Aslam Hayat, the respected President of the Lahore District Bar Association, to be its Convener.40 The choice of Lahore to be the convention site was to be expected, if only because it contained the largest grouping of pro-Bhutto elements. But Lahore was also appropriate because of its profound historical and symbolic significance. For Pakistanis, its Mughal monuments linked the present back to the golden age of Indo-Muslim civilization and imperial rulership, which, with its more recent past as host to the ‘Pakistan Resolution’ AIML convention of 1940, gave Lahore the historic distinction of being the city from which the Pakistan Movement began. Further, as the new nation’s premier educational and cultural centre, and as the provincial capital of ‘One Unit’ West Pakistan, Lahore was regarded by conventional wisdom as the barometer of public opinion in the west wing and the cockpit of future political trends. In reality, of course, cities like Karachi, Hyderabad, Quetta, Bahawalpur and Peshawar incubated their own secondary political traditions and often represented, better than did Lahore, the political trends in their own hinterlands. Nonetheless, given the dominating influence of Punjab in the military, administrative, economic and cultural life of West Pakistan, and its population predominance of 57.6 per cent (1972), Lahore was a crucial arena, both politically and symbolically. A degree of urgency was imparted to Bhutto’s party-building effort by the earlier formation of the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) on 1 May 1967. The PDM comprised most of the political parties in the old COP, with the important exception of the NAP.41Now, as the hot season gave way to a new ‘political season,’ it was essential for Bhutto not to allow the pre-existing parties to gain sole possession of the anti-Ayub opposition. He was not unwilling to cooperate with the PDM on such basic issues as the restoration of ‘complete democracy,’ the ‘grant of fundamental rights,’ and adult suffrage,42 but he was also concerned about the increasing necessity to have his own organizational base. Something of Bhutto’s thinking during this period, as well as his conception of a new party, is evident in the ‘Foundation Meeting Documents* circulated at the founding convention and written earlier in the autumn by Bhutto and J.A. Rahim at Larkana.43 The document which immediately concerns us, entitled ‘Why a New Party?*, characterized the PDM as the ‘partial crystallization of the “conservative” Parties of Pakistan,’ and welcomed this as a ‘positive

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development.’44 The ‘next obvious step in the march of events would be for the “progressive” parties to form a combination among themselves similar to that of the PDM.’ Once this had been accomplished, ‘it would be simpler to arrive at an agreement between all opposition parties at the apex...in order to launch a constitutional struggle for the restoration of democracy.’ But why a new political party? According to this Bhutto-Rahim summation, only an entirely new party would be able to both unite all progressive forces, and then go on to ‘cement the unity of all the existing opposition parties.* Two reasons were given for this latter assertion. First, the ‘historical dichotomies..., preconceived prejudices and personal vendettas’ of the PDM parties and the internal conflicts in the progressive parties, made it impossible either for the latter to polarize the ‘progressive forces’ or any of the former to serve as a rallying point around which a broad anti-Ayub coalition could gather.45 The second reason postulated that A growing and a powerful body o f the people, spear-headed by the younger generation, firmly believes that the old ways and the traditional methods are not sufficient to surmount the colossal problems o f Pakistan. Each epoch has its own political significance, its own seismic pattern. This epoch, which is both so exciting and full o f challenge, requires a new party with a new face and vitality to build the new society...The people are not prepared to return to the past...They want a new system based on justice and attached to the essential interests o f the toiling millions. Only a new party can discharge this responsibility.44

This is the clearest statement of Bhutto’s concept of the new party he was about to found. It would be essentially nationalist, ‘the basic guide to all problems’ being ‘the teachings of the Quaid-i-Azam,’47 it would appeal directly to the masses, it would represent a new generation, a new epoch and a fresh and scientific approach to the nation’s economic and social problems. It would serve first as a polarizing centre for the progressive forces, and then as a catalyst around which multiple interests and classes could unite to restore democracy. Once this was accomplished, both the progressive and conservative forces could go on to present their programmes to the people ‘on the basis of principles, in refreshing contrast to the negative and whimsical affiliation to personalities.*41 Here, then, is Bhutto’s larger scenario, clearly designed to appeal to the widest possible section of opposition groups. While the actual course of events would only

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fleetingly resemble this scenario, it does reveal Bhutto's attachment to a revival of Jinnah’s coalition of nationalist and radical social forces. Though he attempted to play down his own prospective role, commenting in apparent reference to Ayub Khan: (It is not for individuals to arbitrarily determine the life of the nation,’49 we can be confident that he would not be satisfied to be left outside the centre of ---events. Not surprisingly, the government acted to restrict Bhutto’s impact and his organizational efforts. The National Press Trust newspapers soon began to suggest Bhutto was an extremist, who could only damage the Islamic foundations of the nation. In answer to these charges, the ex-Foreign Minister attempted to clarify the kind of socialism he was proposing for Pakistan. This would be a ‘republican democratic socialism.* The new party would serve and protect the ideology of Islam and Pakistan.30 There was no thought or possibility of bringing the communist form of socialism to a Muslim people with an ancient culture. Yet, precisely because there was no credible threat to religion or culture, economic policies could be pursued without entangling them in religious controversy.31 The NPT papers also raised the question of One Unit,32 thereby hoping to divide Bhutto’s supporters between those from the former Punjab, where One Unit was popular, and the progressive groups in the old minority provinces, who wanted the reconstitution of the pre-One Unit provinces. But Bhutto would not be cornered on this issue and remained evasive, saying it was an issue for the people to decide. The founding convention of the Pakistan People’s Party was not, as Bhutto admitted, a ‘spectacular success.’33 According to PPP sources, the Ayub Government had gone to considerable lengths to ensure that this would be so. It had threatened prospective delegates from the district towns,54 it had prevented the convention organizers from renting a suitable hall in Lahore, and it had bought up all the seats on PIA flights from Dhaka to Lahore on the day before the convention.33 In the end, the founding convention was held at the home of Dr. Mubashar Hasan out in the elite suburb of Gulberg, some five miles away from the volatile inner city and the complex of educational institutions around Gol Bagh. According to Dawn* some 300 delegates attended the convention, while the most optimistic PPP figures put the number at 500, or about half the number expected.37 There were no delegates from East Pakistan, a fact which allowed the NPT papers to dismiss Bhutto as a ‘national leader,’ but which also ominously presaged future

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events, since it was an original deficit from which the PPP would never recover. Apart from the news reports, the NPT papers printed commentaries that were sarcastic of the convention. The Pakistan Times called it a ‘faceless gathering of political romantics, runaway students, and ideological oddballs,* not to mention the ‘briefless lawyers and crypto-communists’ who were also present.51 Dawn thought the ‘gathering looked more like a teenagers’ jamboree than a solemn political conclave,’ and opined that, ‘with the country already plagued by innumerable political parties, the addition of still another could hardly be expected to kindle popular enthusiasm.*59 The district administration was concerned, if not unduly alarmed, and went so far as to impose Section 144 CCP on the city and to refuse the new party permission to hold its first public meeting, which was scheduled for 3 December at Mochi Darwaza.60 In spite of the smaller than expected turn out, the mood at the convention was positive. Z.A. Bhutto, who was elected Chairman of the convention on the first day, noted that the ‘beginnings of great movements were often modest and small.*61 Indeed, there were those who found it surprising, given the hostility of the government, that the convention was even held. In any case, meeting under these adverse conditions gave the participants a sense of community and of mission. We need not belabour the procedural details of the convention. In summary we may note that it passed through four sessions in two days. The first was given over to a long speech by Bhutto, and the second to presentations by self-appointed ‘representatives of the peasantry, lawyers, businessmen, engineers and youth leaders...,* which ‘demonstrated how extensive the appeal of the party was to politically conscious people.*62 In the third session, the delegates debated the ‘Foundation Meeting Documents* and the resolutions drawn up overnight by the convention*s Resolutions Committee. During the fourth session, the new party was founded. The ‘Foundation Documents' and convention resolutions were adopted, the party decided to call itself the Pakistan People’s Party, and the delegates chose a tricolored party flag, the latter item being the one which caused the most disci)ssion.u The convention also adopted the Interim Constitution and, when asked to elect a party Chairman in accordance with Article 4, ‘the delegates with one voice shouted the name of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.’64 The procedural events of the convention are less important than the substantive ideological and organizational aspects that grew out of it.

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These, and the directions they took, will more usefully form the subject of a later chapter. Here, let us look at the social and political arenas from which the party drew its early leadership and support.

P P P : E arly S ocial A renas

It is clear, both from news reports and my own interviews, that the largest social groups at the convention were students and lawyers, but these were not the only social groups represented. Two sets of data enable us to expand, in a qualified way, our notion of the social areas from which the PPP first attracted interest and support. Neither of these sets of data represents a perfect universe, since both are extracted from later research, but they do have some value. The first set of data is based on the correspondence file of Malik Aslam Hayat, the Convener of the founding convention. It contained 88 letters from 102 individuals—some letters had multiple signatures, —which typically expressed admiration and support for Z.A. Bhutto and requested information about the forthcoming founding convention. Obviously, this represents only a fragment of those interested in the new party. The majority of student, labour, lawyers, and political groupings, most of which had already been in touch with Bhutto, contacted Malik Aslam Hayat directly. To a significant degree, Bhutto orchestrated these contacts, either personally while in Lahore, by mail from Karachi, or through emissaries like G.M. Khar. What this fragment probably best represents are specific individuals and small groups that were outside the networks that had already contacted Bhutto. Of the 102 inquirers, 52.9 per cent came from persons living in major urban areas (over 100,000 population according to the Census o f 1961), 21.6 per cent came from small cities (30,000 to 100,000 population), 13.7 from towns (5,000 to 30,000), and 11.8 per cent from rural areas. Interestingly Rawalpindi, the city that was to set off the November Movement a year later, provided the largest number of inquiries from any major urban area—twice as many, for example, as came from Lyallpur. Ninety of the 102 inquirers indentified their occupations, and these we have summarized in Table 9. This shows how much the PPP drew its early support from the urban areas, though we would perhaps be too hasty if we dismissed the political potential of the rural areas on the basis of these figures alone. These letters, it should be noted, were responding to a single advertisement placed in

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FOUNDATION AND SOCIAL ORIGINS

Nawa 'e Waqt, the popular Lahore newspaper that was allowed somewhat greater freedom than were the NPT papers. Since Nawa’e Waqt is not distributed in rural areas, and given the fact that rural literacy is less than half that of urban literacy, an 11.8 per cent rural response need not be regarded as insignificant. Certainly there were those who believed the rural areas would respond to Bhutto and a new progressive party. As one zamindar from Toba Tek Singh Tehsil wrote to Malik Aslam Hayat: ‘I must assure you that if you and Mr. Bhutto visit the countryside [sic], you will be astonished to see how well the ground is prepared...*“

TABLE 9 SOME SOCIAL GROUPS INDICATING EARLY INTEREST IN PPP* Primary Identity Zamindars Business/Small Industry M inor Business Lawyers (Advocates) Journalists Writers I llama Teachers Students Women Old Political Workers Basic Democrats Ex-Government Servant Ex-Military Officer a

b c d e

Inquirers by Letter“ Pet. N=90 4 12 8 10 6 5 1 2 22 -

10 8b -

2

4.4 13.3 8.9 11.1 6.7 5.6 1.1 2.2 24.2 -

11.1 8.9 —

2.2

Pre-Conv. Committees* Pet. N=28 1 3 -

8 1 2 -

3 4 -

1 3b 2 -

3.6 10.7 -

28.6 3.6 7.1 -

10.7 14.3 -

3.6 10.7 7.1 -

Convention Committees' Pet. N -32 11 3 -

6 1 1 -

2 4

34.4e 9.4 -

18.8“ 3.1 3.1 -

6.2 12.5e

-

-

-

-

-

3 -

-

9.4 -

Sources: Lists are from Malik Aslam Hayat, Private Papers, Hayat House, Krishenagar, Lahore and PPP, Foundation and Policy, pp. 9-10. Social identities of more obscure members o f the pre-Convention and Convention Committees given by Malik Aslam Hayat and confirmed by two other early members of the PPP. Includes two businessmen, Includes five experienced politicians, Includes five old political workers, Includes two ex-student leaders with labour connections.

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THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE’S PARTY

The second set of occupational data concerns two groups of committees set up prior to and during the founding convention, the making of which saw considerable political manoeuvring.66 We have kept the data for these two groups separate in Table 9. The first group of committees was set up in Lahore by Malik Aslam Hayat to oversee the organizing of the founding convention.67 As might be expected in an urban setting, with a Convener who had been four times elected President of the Lahore District Bar Association, lawyers were well represented on the pre-convention committees, as were other urban social groups—some of whom were the nominees of Dr. Mubashar Hasan. The second group of committees, the convention committees,6* were set up under the direction of Z.A. Bhutto and show the influence of the strong delegation from Sindh, a large number of whom were zamindars, as well as a distrust of Basic Democrats and the obscure type .of political broker who usually characterized himself as an ‘old political work Businessm îd a comparatively strong early interest in the People’s Party, ootn during the founding convention period and later when the first town and city party units began to organize. Though not represented on the early committees, minor businessmen—bazar shopkeepers, cigarette merchants, tea shop proprietors, etc.,—were strong early entrants into the PPP. Middling businessmen gained positions on the early committees. This group included several contractors, the proprietors of medi_çaLshoçs—one of the most common occupational identities' all through Punjab People’s Party infrastructure,—and the owners_of_sm actories, such as a metal works, an electric works and a biscuit factory. This was a class that resented the complete monopolization of international trade and largescale industry by a few family conglomerates. They helped to finance the convention, the deficit being made up from a registration fee paid by the delegates. In terms of their social origins, the businessmen at the convention appear to fall into two groups, the first of these being that of the traditional urban business communities (Sheikhs and Kashmiris). But, a second, and newer, group appeared at the convention. These were businessmenjy ith riiral hmrifgwinnfUl who were part of the educated "middle landholder class that had developed opportunities spurred by the Ayubian ‘agricultural revolution,’ and which had been strongly represented in the first crop of Basic Democrats.69

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The convention committees brought into focus much of the PPP’s early leadership. This was a diverse collection of individuals, with widely varying social backgrounds, of different former political affiliations and with potentially conflicting notions about the aims and purposes of their new party. Of the minority provinces, only Sindh was well represented in the PPP of this period. Apart from the Party Chairman the most important figure from Sindh was Mir Rasul Bakhsh Talpur, a descendant of the pre>British ruling house of Sindh. He had unavoidable feudal ties to the jagirdar class of the province, but, being a man of populist leanings, had been associated with progressive elements in Sindhi politics (Sindh Awami Mahaz, Sindh Hari Committee). For its part, the Bhutto family also had old political and social relationships with the Sindhi landed classes, while Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in addition, had strong personal ties with a new generation of ashrafi-gentry landholders, who had come into electoral politics in 1962 along with the middle zamindars of Punjab. Some of them, like Bhuno, were following family traditions of political activism. This was a group of Convention League MNAs who gathered around Bhutto in the National Assembly, and who were all either from Sindh or the Multan Division of Punjab.70 Three of them would later rise to high party and government positions under Bhutto, but for the moment they remained in the CVML, both in order to retain their seats under the Political Parties Act and to give the PPP a sub rosa representation in the National Assembly. Indeed, this group would use the 1968 budget session as an opportunity to criticize the policies of the Regime and promote the platform of the PPP. One of the members of this group was Ghulam Mustafa Khar of Kot Addu Tehsil (Muzaffargarh District). He helped to organize the founding convention, but could play no formal role, hence it was his younger brother, Ghulam Murtaza Khar, who was appointed to a convention committee. Though many PPP figures discounted the significance of his organizing activities at this time, all agreed that Khar's position as 'doorkeeper* to the presence of Z.A. Bhutto, made him an important figure from the start of the PPP. Balochistan, where tribal unrest after 1962 had finally erupted in 1967 into the Bugti Revolt, was in political turmoil and only minimally represented at the PPP founding convention by the presence of a member of the Jamali Tribe of Quetta-Pishin. Bhutto, however, had good personal relations with several of the more powerful Sardars and hoped to bring them into the PPP at a later time. From the northern

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THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE’S PARTY

districts of the North-West Frontier came another figure destined to rise high in PPP politics. He was the young Muhammad Hayat Khan Sherpao, a past Secretary-General of the CML and a rising Khan of the powerful Muhammadzai Tribe of Peshawar District.71 As such, he was a potential counterweight to the influential Khans of Charsadda. The southern districts of the Frontier were represented at the convention by Haq Nawaz Gandapur of Dera Ismail Khan. His tribal associations linked him with Bannu and Tank, as well as with the ‘Multani Pathans’—chiefly the Babars—of the western districts of Punjab. Punjab produced a diverse group of early PPP leaders. Certainly the most venerable of these was Begum Abad Ahmad Khan, whose political activities went back to the Khilafat period. She was an early associate of Mohtarmah Fatima Jinnah on the distaff side of the Pakistan Movement, and she later supported Miss Jinnah in her factional struggle with Begum Raana Liaquat Ali Khan over the founding of the All-Pakistan Women’s Association (APWA). Her political—and tribal—affiliations were with the Mamdot faction in Punjab politics. Hence, Begum Abad Ahmad joined the Jinnah Awami Muslim League, moved on to the Suhrawardy Awami League, and supported the campaign of Mader-i-Millut (Miss Jinnah, ‘Mother of the Nation’) in 1964-1965. Her early support of the PPP, along with that of Sahibzada Ahmad Raza Khan Qasuri (Kot Fateh Din Khan branch of the Kasuri Pathans), marked the potential re-emergence of the ‘Punjabi Pathan’ grouping as a parochial factor in Punjab politics. Malik Aslam Hayat was a constitutional pluralist. His political origins, like those of the establishment bar and middling business groups he represented, were in the pre-Partition League. The slogan of this grouping—which was considerably broader than the fragment of it that went into the early PPP—was ‘parliamentary democracy.’ They believed in the rule of law and the right to basic freedoms, a faith that had been implanted along with their absorption of British legal traditions and by the Quaid-i-Azam’s endorsement of the parliamentary model for Pakistan. As we noted earlier in this study,72 this grouping had been damaged economically by Ayub’s attempt to reorganize the nation’s judicial system and by bureaucratic domination of economic and interest associations. Constitutional pluralists tended to be reformists, were not adverse to a mixed economy that would end private monopolies, and had made common cause with provincialist groups who also opposed the centralization imposed by the vice-regal

FOUNDATION AND SOCIAL ORIGINS

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institutions. (This combination is one reason why opposition politics in Pakistan has so often seemed to be regionalist politics.) This grouping also had its generational division, as younger lawyers like Malik Hamid Sarfraz, Malik Navaid Ahmad,73and Ahmad Raza Qasuri moved to assert their influence in political and bar association circles. This generation typically had gotten its start in student politics and in the Mader-i-Millat election campaign of 1964-1965. Another political tradition which emerged in the People's Party from the beginning was that of the more ideologically oriented anti­ feudalists. This group had its political origins in the Progressive Group of the Punjab Muslim League and was represented at the convention by Sheikh Muhammad Rashid, Advocate of the Supreme Court. He was from a family of peasant smallholders in Sheikhupura District, had done well in his studies and in political organization, and, having made the problems of peasantry his abiding interest, was an early land reform radical. In 1950 he participated in organizing the Azad Pakistan Party, where he remained until 1954. His departure in that year, when he led thirty-one out of seventy-two party council members out of the APP, badly damaged that party. The Sheikh Rashid group left on the pretext that the APP ‘was being controlled by the Communist, undemocratic elements whereas they stood for democracy, nationalism and socialism.’74 According to M.A. Kasuri, the split actually developed out of a disagreement between Mian Iftikharuddin and Sheikh Rashid over the party’s land policy, with Rashid taking a hard line on the abolition of landlordism and compulsory collective farming. The Sheikh Rashid group formed itself into the Awami Jamhuri Party (‘People’s Democratic Party’), with the object of organizing the rural tenantry and small peasant holders of Punjab. This party was the main force behind the kisan morcha (‘peasant entrenchment*) of July 1956 at Lahore. The morcha was a sit-down demonstration of some 2,000 tenant cultivators and it succeeded in gaining a few formal concessions from the Government.75 Despite the fact that this event united the Lahore left (intellectuals, lawyers and workers) behind the cultivators’ demands, the Awami Jamhuri party seems thereafter to have faded from view, evidently unable to compete with the new NAP for the support of progressive circles. Sheikh Rashid was next associated with the NAP, but he never got over his suspicion that the progressive programme of the provincialist landlords was only temporary and would be abandoned once they got what they really wanted—their own sphere of influence. In 1962, he revived his Kisan Committee,76

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THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE’S PARTY

and in 1966 returned to party politics with an entity called the Azad Socialist Party. This party foundered from the very beginning on the issue of whether large landholders and capitalists should be given party membership. Sheikh Rashid refused because he believed moneyed groups would use their wealth to take over and manipulate the party for their own purposes. Opposed to this argument was much of the Organizing Committee—some of whom were political workers who depended on party activities to supplement their incomes,—who argued that large landholders and capitalists should be allowed to join, but without the right to hold party offices. In November 1966, Rashid met Bhutto and discussed the idea of a new party, and in mid-1967 he came into open support of Z. A. Bhutto.77 Sheikh Rashid would become the dominant figure in the PPP left wing in Punjab, the political home for much of the new generation of ideologically oriented student, labour, peasant and urban professional interests. He would also attract the support of young socialist politicials like Taj Muhammad Khan Langah, one of several ‘foreign returned* figures who would get their political start in the Pakistan People’s Party. Significantly, the disputes that marked his earlier party associations would become important issues in the internal factional politics of the People's Party. Khurshid Hasan Meer was another early PPP figure of note whose political origins began in the progressive wing of the AIML. He was Secretary of the Aligarh Student Union and moved from there into the Pakistan Movement in 1946. He fought in the 1947-1948 Kashmir War as an officer with the Azad Kashmir Forces and in 1953 began to practise law at Rawalpindi. In the same year he joined the APP and moved on with the mainline progressive group in Punjab to the Pakistan National Party (1956) and then to the NAP (1957), serving the latter as Secretary of its Rawalpindi branch. During the 1964-1965 Presidential campaign, Meer was Secretary o f the Combined Opposition Parties.78 After Tashkent, he was among the first to urge Foreign Minister Bhutto to come out of the Government and lead an anti-Tashkent Movement. Less an intellectual than an able organizer, Meer was perhaps the most widely connected of the early Punjab PPP leaders. His residence in the contiguous military and political capitals of Pakistan enabled Meer to build up contacts and sources of information in political, bureaucratic and military circles. His Secretaryship of COP gave him access to most of the opposition party leaders. He was also an important connecting link between leftist circles and the young Islamic Socialist group around Hanif Ramay.

FOUNDATION AND SOCIAL ORIGINS

125

The latter had strong supporting groups at Government College, Campbellpore (Professor Muhammad Usman), Government College, Rawalpindi (Malik Fateh Muhammad), and Government College for Women, Rawalpindi (Begum K.H. Meer and Dr. Kaniz Fatima, the latter having earlier been a teaching colleague of Begum Shaheen Hanif Ramay at Quetta). Further, like other important early PPP figures—Malik Aslam Hayat, Begum Abad Ahmad Khan, Mubashar Hasan, Mairaj Muhammad Khan—Meer was a Partition muhajir. More significantly, he was a Kashmiri from Jammu City, an identity he shared with his Aligarh classmate, Professor Muhammad Usman. Nor surprisingly, the Kashmiris of Punjab were the first parochial community to give Bhutto broad support for his stands on Kashmir, the September War and Tashkent. It was in recognition of these wide ranging contacts, and his organizational experience, that K.H. Meer was made first Deputy Secretary-General of the People’s Party. This made him third in the formal party chain of command behind Chairman Bhutto and J.A. Rahim, the first Secretary-General. Apart from K.H. Meer and Begum Hanif Ramay, the core elements in the Islamic Socialism Group were not well represented at the founding convention. Although they were personally supportive of the new party, most of them, being government servants of one form or another, were technically barred from political activities. This was the case for Muhammad Hanif Ramay, who had recently secured a coveted position on the Urdu Development Board. In early 1968, however, Ramay lost this position for political reasons and came openly into the People’s Party. He recast the literary monthly, Nusrat, into a weekly magazine of political opinion. This was the People’s Party’s first media organ, and it published its first edition under the new format on 8 March 1968. Ramay was a very important addition to the PPP. Not only did he provide it with most of its Urdu literature, but he helped to orient it toward Islamic Socialism, an ideological middle ground far more compatible with the strong religious feelings of most Pakistanis than the abstract socialism of Rahim’s Foundation Documents. Having been bom and brought up inside the old city of Lahore, Ramay was well suited to understand the aspirations of the urban lower and lower middle classes. He was in the third urban generation of an Arain clan of peasant landholders from Sheikhupura District that had migrated to Lahore during the Depression and put themselves under the patronage of the influential Kardar family of Bhatti Darwaza.79The second urban generation had broken through the Hindu

126

THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE’S PARTY

monopoly of the vernacular publishing business when Ramay’s uncle, Chaudhury Barkat Ali left government service and founded the Punjab Book House. Thereafter, the Ramay clan subsisted on the fringes of the Lahore literary world. Ramay’s three older brothers founded the publishing firms of Naya Adalat (‘New Opinion’) and Maktaba Jadid (‘Modem Library’), which published the works of the Progressive Writers Movement and brought Urdu translations of modem western literature to the Urdu-reading public. Hanif Ramay participated in these efforts as a student and also edited the innovative literary magazine, Savayra. He attended Government College and took an M.A. in Economics from Punjab University, but failed the civil service examination. Undismayed, he went on to make a name for himself in the worlds of journalism, art (he is regarded as a fine painter), and political thought. We shall deal more closely with the latter when we discuss Islamic Socialism. Finally we should be remiss if we did not emphasize the major role played by student leaders in the foundation of the People’s Party and look at some background aspects of this social group. Student politics in Pakistan have been for the most part organizationally fragmented and unstable, but we can identify three general student groupings at the convention. These were (1) the students leaders of the old COP coalition, (2) the NSF-Karachi group, and (3) the new ‘Tashkent generation’ of student radicals. The first of these groups was represented by figures like Malik Hamid Sarfraz and Sahibzada Ahmad Raza Khan Qasuri, both of whom had just become lawyers, and who were part of the less radical and reformist thrust of the student generation. Hamid Sarfraz was one of the more effective operators at the convention, being the only individual other than J.A. Rahim to be appointed to three of the convention’s four committees. Raza Qasuri had strong personal tics with Bhutto during this period and was able to gain a place in the Party’s inner councils, despite the opposition of established lawyers like Malik Aslam Hayat. The second group was informally represented at the convention by Mairaj Muhammad Khan, a recent President of the NSF. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, the NSF had partially rectified the fragmented condition of the student left by promoting a degree of central direction and national-to-district levels of organization for ‘progressive students—nationalist, socialist, communist.’,0 It is certainly of import that the period of the NSF’s greatest strength coincided with the early years of the Ayub Regime. The resultant

FOUNDATION AND SOCIAL ORIGINS

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clash between these forces produced a series of violent confrontations, so much so that Ayub’s relations with the student community were the m ost bitter of any Pakistani leader.11 This resulted in part from the Regim e's attempts to control and manipulate student politics by bureaucratic penetration of the university system. The University ordinances (1962), imposed during the Martial Law period and continued after it was lifted, were especially despised. They provided for the forfeiture of degrees for untoward political activity and put political controls on faculty salaries, promotions, foreign academic contacts and trips abroad. Another innovation was the Student Affairs Department. According to student sources, this operated at Punjab University as a campus branch of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) — the police intelligence service. For ‘politically reliable* students there were scholarships given by the Student Affairs Department, but for the ‘politically unreliable’ there were the ubiquitous classroom CID informants, the threat of expulsion from the university, extemment from the city, a visit to the Chuna Mandi Police Station, or perhaps to the dreaded Lahore Fort. The student communities at Dhaka, Karachi and Lahore rioted against the Sharif Report,c the University Ordinances, as well as against events abroad, such as the French role in Algeria and the alleged complicity of the United States in the assassination of Lumumba. In all of these student actions there were strong anti-Regime undercurrents. Mairaj Muhammad Khan rose through the ranks to become President of the NSF in time to preside over the splitting of that organization in the aftermath of the Sino-Soviet polemic and the consequences of the India-China War of 1962.*3 On the whole, however, the NSF participated in the anti-Tashkent agitation and welcomed the departure of Bhutto from the Ayub Regime. J.A. Rahim was the first to contact Mairaj in the search for support for Bhutto in 1966 and soon thereafter Mairaj and Bhutto became political confidants. The NSF (Mairaj Group) appreciated the progressive directions of Bhutto’s foreign policy. They saw Bhutto ‘as a nationalist and a democrat,’ and their purpose ‘was to support him against the dictatorship and the foreign domination that we were suffering under.’84 The NSF would remain a strong sub-group in the PPP and would bring a number of new trade union leaders (Tufail Abbas) and NAP-B activists (Dr. Shamim Zainuddin) into the party. It would also be the first group into the streets to protest the celebration of Ayub’s ‘Decade

128

THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE’S PARTY

of Reforms,’ though its efforts would be obscured by the more spectacular outbreak of student violence at RawaipmHiT^ It was the new Tashkent generation of student lea*J«vwho, initially at least, had the most to do with the student violence at Rawalpindi in November 1968. These were leaders like Raja Anwar at Rawalpindi and Amanullah Khan at Lahore who, while they had participated in earlier student actions, came to the forefront in the anti-Tashkent demonstrations of 1966.Si On Tashkent, for the first time, the students went into the streets on a major issue of national policy. This was the first indication that the student community had begun to see itself as the main centre of organized opposition to the authoritarian Regime and its police controls. Despite this growing realization, the postTashkent students were characteristically fragmented in their organizational response. This was enhanced by the fact that the politicization of the student community went far deeper during this period than at any time in the past, except perhaps for the Pakistan Movement period, when the student community was quantitatively and proportionately much smaller. (There were important demographic factors at work here.) After Tashkent, in virtually every college and university in Punjab, and in most high schools, multiple new student groups of varying ideological emphases were organized; most of these were pro-Bhutto.** The People’s Party refused to support any specific student organization or leader, maintaining they all had Bhutto’s support. The PPP preferred to keep the student movement unstructured and generally united on a pro-Bhutto, anti-Ayub platform. Bhutto was not willing to split the student community by selecting a single group for direct support, a policy that also kept his party from being drawn into the highly unstable arena of student politics.87 Another aspect of the post-Tashkent generation was their indulgence in pro-China romanticism. In 1966 and 1967, Pakistan was flooded with literature from and about China, all of which helped to fuel the pro-China euphoria set off by the September War.88 Students, professors and intellectuals were, in the words of Mairaj Muhammad Khan, literally swept off their feet by the works o f Mao and charged out blindly to implement the Chinese experience in Pakistan. They went all out for the peasant line. Some o f them...[were] too dogmatic and doctrinaire and unwilling to see that the objective conditions in Pakistan today are different from those in China during the 1930s and 1940s.w

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The debate on ‘Chinaism* among Pakistani leftists was an intense one, but it was not something in which most students involved themselves. If the visible hallmarks of their new political consciousness were antiAmericanism, a Marxist rhetoric and a pro-China tendency, the underlying reality was the far stronger current of Pakistani nationalism. Most of the pro-Bhutto students were neither Marxists nor revolution­ aries, but ardent nationalists, who were committed to the kinds of basic structural change that would set the nation on the road to economic and military self-sufficiency. The anti-Tashkent demonstrations had been put down with severity. The methods used included police firings and the beating up of students—and a faculty member in Lyallpur—in their dormitories and coffee shops. The Nawab of Kalabagh, Governor of West Pakistan from April 1960 to September 1966, had ruled the province, the cities in particular, with an iron fist. The urban opposition and poorer citizenry alike were terrorized by the threat of false cases, police violence and protected gangs of pro-Govemment ghundahs. The postTashkent student leadership did gain a victory of sorts in May 1966 when it led a successful movement against ghundahgardi in Lahore.90 Kalabagh was forced to crack-down on urban thugs and the police made one of their periodic roundups of all persons registered under the Goonda Act. The student leaders who were in the forefront of this movement, the brothers Ehsanullah and Amanullah Khan, would become important student leaders in the People’s Party.

A C oncluding N ote

\

The men and women who gathered to found the Pakistan People’s Party were indeed a diverse group in terms of their social identities, previous political affiliations, ideological proclivities and generational characteristics. They held varying notions about the ultimate aims of [ the PPP, and about the role of Bhutto in it. Some of them, friends from better days and protective of future opportunities, formed the beginnings of an inner circle around Bhutto. Others saw him as the polar opposite to Ayub Khan and a leader who could unify the political forces against the military-bureaucratic forces and bring parliamentary democracy back to Pakistan. Still others—students and anti­ feudalists—regarded Bhutto as a genuine progressive who would, with the aid of a highly organized political party, seek a socialist

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THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE’S PARTY

reconstruction of the economy and society of Pakistan. What held them tog eth er^« ilielr ileep opposition to the Ayub Regime, as well as the ability of their Chairman to straddle the internal cleavages and incipient factionalism in the new party. Apart from the student leaders, perhaps none of the founding members at the convention could yet ‘deliver* the support of the social and political groups they represented. Time and the events of the anti-Ayub movement, however, would turn the majority who were still relatively obscure figures into the leaders of important social groups. Bhutto's concept was not so much of a party as it was of a political movement, where groups and leaders and fragments of groups were held together segmentally, with vertical lines of authority leading to the Chairman. This meant, of course, that neither ideology nor organization could be too rigid or refined. The founding convention dealt substantively with both the ideology and organization of the People’s Party. But, as both aspects were greatly influenced by later events, it would perhaps be better to give them separate treatment after we have looked at the fall of the Ayub Regime.

NOTES 1. First asserted to this student by Rafi Raza, Special Assistant to the then President B hutto, private interview at the P resid en t's Secretariat, Rawalpindi, 2 November 1972. 2. Mody, Zulfi, p. 141. 3. Mian Manzar Bashir, private interview, 27 February 1974. 4. Quoted in Mukeijee, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, p. 33. 5. Bhutto, ‘Affidavit.* 6. Mian Javed Zeeshan, private interview at Lahore, 9 July 1973. Zeeshan was Vice-President o f the MSF during this period (1965-1967). 7. Muhammad H anif Ramay, private interview at the Punjab Assembly Chambers, Lahore, 4 July 1973. 8. Khalid Kashmiri, A warn ka Sadr (‘People's President’) (Lahore: Manib Publishers, 1972), p. 18. Bhutto’s activities and statements in this period were normally blacked out by the press. Many o f his early statements were saved by sympathetic reporters who held on to their notes and later published them in street pamphlets like the above. For other details on Bhutto's movements and statements during this period, see the more substantial work: Adib, Quaid-i-Awam, pp. 71-105. This work is useful if the facts it gives can be filtered out from the passages o f unrestrained worship for the author’s idol.

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9. Dawn, 12 December 1966. 10. Evidence o f this support was visible earlier when Bhutto hosted the President and Foreign Minister o f China around the country on their official visit in late March 1966. Liu Shao-ch’i and Chen Yi were welcomed by unprecedentedly large and enthusiastic crowds and it was noted that much adulation was also directed at Bhutto. 11. Such a train trip was discussed with Malik Ghulam Jilani as early as January 1966, when Bhutto was thinking o f coming into opposition on an anti-Tashkent platform. Jilani, interview, 25 June 1974. 12. Bhutto, interview, 17 July 1974. 13. Jilani, interview, 25 June 1974. 14. Mairaj Muhammad Khan, private interview at Karachi, 10 January 1974. 15. M.A. Kasuri, interview, 21 May 1973. 16. Bhashani recounted this conversation to Tariq Ali in June 1969. See: Tariq Ali, Pakistan: Military Rule or P eople’s Power (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1970), pp. 140-141. 17. Feldman, Crisis to Crisis, pp. 71-72. 18. Tariq Ali, Military Rule, pp. 145-146. 19. Ziauddin Butt, private interview at Lahore, 29 March 1974. 20. Hayat Ahmad Khan, private interview at Lahore, 28 September 1973. 21. Manzar Bashir's father, Mian Bashir Ahmad, had reorganized the MSF in 1943 into the vanguard o f the Pakistan Movement in Punjab and had been one o f Jinnah’s closest advisers in the province. His son was regarded as something o f an expert on party organization. 22. Biographical details are from: J.A. Rahim, private interview at the WPIDC Rest House, Lahore, 12 October 1973. 23. Ibid. 24. This view is best reflected in Tariq Ali, Military Rule. The “Preface” o f this books begins: ‘T h is book is an unabashed and straightforward polemic against the feudal and capitalist class o f Pakistan which has ruled the country since 1947 in varying guises.” Also important in developing this thesis was the Pakistan Left Review (London). 25. Taj Muhammad Khan Langah, private interview at Lahore, 7 June 1973. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Nazar Naji, “Mustafa Khar se Intarviu,” Shihab (Lahore), 8 April 1971, p. 6. 30. Ibid. 31. H.A. Khan, interview, 28 September 1973. 32. Halqas typically had a number o f diverse origins. Without any systematic approach to the subject, this student found halqas based on single families which had expanded through marital alliances and business or professional acquaintances, on webs o f tribal and familial relationships that had in

132

33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

38.

THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE’S PARTY common a pre-partition identity with a specific place in East Punjab, on past political associations, and, simply, on fortuitous connections o f likeminded people. The most renowned halqa, o f course, was that which met at the YMCA Hall on Sundays. It was a ‘general assembly’ o f the tea house circles o f intellectuals, writers and journalists that met on weekdays in various establishments along the Mall around the old campus o f Punjab University. This halqa had a venerable history, had long been associated with leftist causes, and occasionally produced papers and discussions of high ideological sophistication. The halqas, which are most common among the urban middle classes— there are also politically conservative halqas— are a class o f social phenom enon that w ould bear further research. M orning News (Dhaka), 25 February 1967. These meetings were those o f the Hamid Nizami Day observances, the Law College Students Union and a general meeting o f Lahore citizens. The Pakistan Times, 27 February 1967, mentioned the first o f these meetings, but reported only the part o f B hutto's speech that urged the ‘de-EBDOed’ and other opposition leaders to unite. Reprinted in: Kashmiri, A warn ka Sadr, pp. 21-22. Nazir Naji, “Mustafa Khar se Intarviu, Shihab, 29 April 1971, p. 14. Section 144 o f The Code o f Crim inal Procedure (CCP) enables a Magistrate to “direct any person to abstain from a certain act...if...such direction is likely to prevent...a disturbance o f the public tranquility, or a riot or an affray.’ The most frequently used weapon in the legal arsenal o f governm ents from British tim es to the present, this Section is com m only used to ban gatherings in public places as a m eans o f supp ressin g opposition d em o n stratio n s or fo r q u ellin g p o litical disturbances. In May 1967, the NPT papers imputed some sinister design in a visit Bhutto made to the Indian High Commissioner in Karachi. See: Dawn, 12 May 1967. This charge was revived by Governor Musa in September 1968, after which Bhutto replied that he had gone openly to the High Commissioner’s residence in response to a request by the latter ‘who had sought an interview for discussing with me, as a former Foreign Minister, Indo-Pakistan relations and whether a goodwill mission o f non-officials led by Mr. Khaliquzzaman would promote a better understanding between the two countries.’ Bhutto, 'Rejoinder to M usa.’ The second charge was levelled in the National Assembly on 30 June 1967, where it caused a stir. This was the accusation that Bhutto had maintained Indian nationality long after 1947. It had first been raised by India as a propaganda point during the Septem ber W ar and w as, at that tim e, brushed o ff as meaningless by the Pakistan Government. The accusation arose out o f Bhutto's formal retention o f Indian nationality in order to recover some Rs. 140,000 which had been in the custody o f an Indian court since 1947.

FOUNDATION AND SOCIAL ORIGINS

39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

133

M ukeijee, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, pp. 28-30, has fuller details. Bhutto withdrew his case from the Indian courts after he became a Minister in 1958. All o f this led IChwaja Shahabuddin, C entral M inister for Information, to inform the National Assembly that ‘till 1958 Mr. Bhutto was claiming in Pakistan citizenship o f Pakistan and in India he was claiming citizenship of India.’ The Pakistan Times, 1 July 1967. Though something o f a minor embarrassment to Bhutto, this was the kind o f legal tangle many refugees from India, and locals who had had property there, found themselves in. It failed as an issue designed to blunt Bhutto’s claim to be the foremost anti-India spokesman in Pakistan and was generally seen as somewhat maladroit on the part o f the government. The Pakistan Times. 17 September 1967. N awa'e Waqt (Lahore), 28 October 1967. The PDM comprised the National Democratic Front o f East Pakistan, the Council Muslim League, the Jam a’at-i-Islami, a section o f the Awami League and the Nizam-i-Islam Party. In the CML elections o f early 1967, the anti-Ayub faction had taken over the party offices. The Pakistan Times, 6 November 1967. Rahim, interview, 12 October 1973. T h e P ak istan P eo p le’s P arty , F o u n d a tio n a n d P o licy (L ahore: Dr. Mubashar Hasan, n.d.), pp. 23-28. This is the second edition o f the pamphlet originally circulated at the founding convention. It expands that pamphlet to include the proceedings and resolutions o f the convention and the Interim Constitution o f the PPP. Ibid., p. 26. Ibid., p. 27. Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., p. 26. Ibid., p. 28. The Pakistan Times, 6 November 1967. Yunus Adib, Chairman Bhutto ke Siyasi Afkar (Lahore: Awami Adbiat, n.d.), p. 12. See: A bdul M ajid, ‘T est for Mr. B h u tto ,’ The P akistan Tim es, 23 November 1967. Dawn, 1 December 1967. One PPP leader later recalled that he had put together a delegation of some twenty-odd persons to attend the convention from Sargodha. When the ‘delegation’ left for Lahore on the early morning railcar, there were only two others, both students, besides himself. When he had gone to rouse the others, they were either ‘ill’ or ‘out.* He later learned that the District Superintendent o f Police (DSP) had already visited some o f them the evening before. Clearly, few were willing to openly antagonize a Regime that most believed would be in pow er for years to come.

134

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE'S PARTY Chaudhry Mumtaz Ahmad Kahloan, private interview at Pipals House, Lahore, 27 June 1974. These and other difficulties are detailed in Naji, 'K har se Intarviu,’ pp. 15-16, and Adib, Quaid-i-Awam, pp. 106-113. Dawn, 1 December 1967. Malik Aslam Hayat, private interview art Hayat House, Krishennagar, Lahore, 20 September 1973. Political C orrespondent, ‘Ideological Oddballs Get Together,’ The Pakistan Times, 2 December 1967. ‘A Damp Squib,’ Dawn, Editorial, 4 December 1967. Mochi Darwaza (‘Cobbler Gate’) is to Lahore politically, what Lahore is to Punjab. For decades politicians have gone »o Mochi Darwaza to prove their popular appeal— Mian Muhammad Shafi, Fazl-i-Hussain, Maulana Zafar Ali Khan, Maulana Ataullah Shah Bukhari, M.A. Jinnah, Liaquat Ali Khan, the Nawab o f Mamdot, Mumtaz Daultana, even Ayub Khan, have all had their moments at Mochi Darwaza. The name o f a longvanished gateway into the old city, Mochi Darwaza described an open space along Circular Road which is surrounded by the most densely populated wards o f Lahore. To the north and west is the old city, with its veritable warren o f alleys, narrow passages and cul-de-sacs, and to the east and south are the teeming wards o f Gawalmandi, Ramgali and Qila Gujjar Singh. Movements o f even modest appeal have always been able to get good crowds at Mochi Darwaza. Dawn, 1 December 1967. PPP, Foundation and Policy, p. 11. This was not as frivolous as it may seem, since the flag was an important symbol o f political affiliation for great numbers o f people who had no other way o f publicly expressing their opinions. PPP, Foundation and Policy, p. 12. Malik Aslam Hayat, Private Papers. Malik Aslam Hayat, Private interview. These com m ittees were: Finance, R eception, Publicity, Site and Organizing. These committees were: Steering, Constitution, Resolutions, and Draft Declarations. The occupational pattern o f this group is exemplified in the career o f Chaudhry Mumtaz Ahmad Kahloan. His father was a Jat from Zafarwal (Sialkot) who took up a horse-breeding grant in the Sargodha Colony. He later became a figure o f note in the Colony Association and Jat Mahaz Subah. Chaudhry Mumtaz was well educated, gaining an LLB from Punjab University, but he did not make the law his career, preferring rather to take up a tractor and motorcycle franchise in Sargodha City with two partners. He ran in the 1964 BD elections as a member o f the CML-COP.

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70. Most prominent in this group were: Mum taz Ali Bhutto, Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi, Pir Ghulam Rasul Shah, Sayyid Hamid Raza Gilani and Ghulam Mustafa Khar. 71. An element o f the old Durrani alliance, the Muhammadzais have produced notable figures in the politics o f Afghanistan and Pakistan. A branch of the Muhammadzais ruled Afghanistan from 1826 to 1978, when it was overthrown in the recent coup d ’état against Sardar Daud. In Pakistan, the Charsadda Khans—Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (the ‘Frontier Gandhi’), Dr. Khan Sahib, and Khan Abdul Wali Khan—are Muhammadzais, as is Maj. Gen. (Ex.) Akbar Khan o f RCC fame. Ghaffar Khan has been the prime mover behind the Pakhtunistan demand. His son, Wali Khan, was the dominant leader of the provincialist faction in the National Awami Party. 72. Supra, p. 190 73. He was an associate o f Mian Faqir Muhammad, who was in Kuwait at the time o f the PPP founding convention. 74. Pobre, ‘Political Parties,’ p. 237. 75. Gankovsky and Polonskaya, History o f Pakistan, pp. 265-266. 76. This should not be confused with the more influential West Pakistan Kisan Committee, headquartered at Toba Tek Singh and affiliated with the NAP. 77. Biographical information on Sheikh Rashid is from: Sher Muhammad Bhatti, private interview at the Canal Rest House, Lahore, 21 July 1973 and Sheikh Muhammad Rashid, private interview at the Ministry o f Health, Islamabad, 12 September 1973. 78. Biographical details from Khurshid Hasan Meer, private interview at Rawalpindi, 4 November 1972. 79. An old Lahori Arain family that went back to Sikh times. 80. Mairaj Muhammad Khan, private interview at his Karachi residence, 9 and 10 January 1974. 81. Though a number o f students died in these clashes, the NSF had its martyr in Hasan Nasir, a communist youth leader who is thought to have died under torture in the Lahore Fort Police Station in December 1960. The CID claimed Nasir committed suicide, but the decomposed corpse they provided—after a celebrated case in the High Court—was rejected by Hasan N asir’s mother as much too tall to be that o f her son. See: Tariq Ali, M ilitary Rule, pp. 104*105. Abdullah Malik has a long panegyric on Hasan N asir in his Dastan-i-Dar-o-Rasn (Lahore: Kausar Publishers, 1973), pp. 117-166. 82. Government o f Pakistan, Ministry o f Education, Report o f the Commission on National Education (Karachi: GOP Press, 1961). 83. Mairaj Muhammad Khan was born at Kaimganj in Farrukkabad District, U.P., the fourth generation o f a family o f Afridi Pakhtun (Zakha Khel) settlers from the Khyber Area. His father was an hakim (doctor o f

136

84. 85.

86.

87. 88.

89. 90.

THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE’S PARTY traditional medicine), who continued the family tradition o f annual visits back to the ancestral village. Mairaj was brought up in the highly politicized atmosphere of World W ar Two India and was influenced by his older brothers who were associated with the Communist Party o f India. He spent two years at the Jamia Millia in Delhi, the nationalist Muslim (pro-Congress) answer to Aligarh. (Dr. Zakir Hussain, its founder, and later President o f India from 1962 to 1969, was also from Kaimganj). Mairaj completed his matric (high school) at Quetta, his parents having migrated to Pakistan in 1947, and went on to Karachi University. There he made a name for himself as a speaker and was recruited into the NSF. Most o f his education at the University was a product o f the Marxist cells and study groups o f students and teachers in the campus community. According to Mairaj, after the appointment o f Dr. I.H. Qureshi as ViceChancellor o f Karachi University, a systematic effort was made to wreck the NSF and build up the Jamiat-ul-Tulaba, the student wing o f the conservative Jam a’at-i-Islami. Mairaj was ‘extem ed’ from Karachi in 1961 and 1962, the second time after the NSF took over the podium at the CVM L’s founding convention. Later, along with his associates in the NSF and the Baloch Student's Organization (BSO), and with the ’aid and advice o f our senior advisers in the NAP,* Mairaj began to work in the labour movement. Biographical details from: Mairaj Muhammad Khan, interview, 10 January 1974. Ibid. Other student leaders from Lahore were: Rana Zafrullah, Zafar Yar Samar Khan, Ehsanullah Khan, Javaid Chaudhury, Parveen Abdul Latif, and Khalid Mahmud (‘Ladu Sahib’) One student leader traced his organizational affiliations between Tashkent and the founding o f the PPP as follows: We left the Muslim Student’s Federation and formed the International Student’s Federation. After this, we made the Pakistan Student Party. Then, my friends went into the Army and I came into full time politics with the PPP. Ehsanullah Khan, private interview at the office o f the Bhatta Mazdoor Mahaz, Lahore, 24 July 1973. (Translated from Urdu). Bhutto, interview, 17 July 1974. Hanif Ramay, for example, published and widely distributed in booklet form the study o f a commune in China by Felix Green: Felix Green, C hini K om yun, translated by M uham m ad H asan R abah (Lahore: Al-Bayan, 1968). Mairaj Muhammad Khan, interview, 10 January 1974. This movement began when a funeral procession containing only four persons was transformed into a mass march o f citizens on Government House. The funeral was that o f a man murdered by the goon whom he had agreed to testify against in another murder case. The murderer in

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both incidents was one o f the city’s most notorious ghundahs. He was known as Achha Shukarwala (loosely: The 'yes, thank you man’) and as Kalabagh ka paltu ghundah ('K alabagh’s pet bully’). Like others o f his kind, Shukarwala ran gambling dens, protection rackets, preyed upon the poor rural-to-urban migrants, and supported any government that came along. He had been most useful to the administration in helping to put down the anti-Tashkent demonstrations. Student leaders took over the funeral procession at Regal Chowk— it had attracted notice because a funeral procession o f only four men was simply unheard o f in normal circumstances— turned it into a mass meeting and then a march up the Mall before the police could get organized.

5 THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE’S PARTY AND THE FALL OF THE AYUB REGIME The movement to end the Regime of President Muhammad Ayub Khan occupied some 138 days between 7 November 1968 and 25 March 1969. It began when a protest march by students of Gordon College in Rawalpindi touched off spreading demonstrations and police violence; and it ended when President Ayub ‘handed over power’ to the Army Commander-in-Chief, General Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan. By then the ‘November Movement’ had become the longest sustained political movement in recent South Asian history. It had activated social groups deep in the urban fabric of both East and West Pakistan; it left approximately 250 citizens dead from police firings and mob violence,1 and it opened up a period of major internal negotiation in Pakistan that led to the country’s first general election by universal adult suffrage. In Punjab, where the authoritarian institutions, the Convention Muslim League and the Basic Democrats were all swept aside by the tide of protest, the November Movement represented Punjab’s late political ‘coming of age.’ It was the breakthrough of the mass public into the political sphere, and it signalled a fundamental and ultimately irreversible alteration in the relationship between rulers and ruled. It meant the expansion of the political community to incorporate the organized social and economic consequences of Punjab’s movement into the early stages of the ‘participant society.’ The events of 1968-69, and the reinforcing impact of the 1970 election campaign, forced the Punjab political system open to the entry of mass-based political parties. Though the November Movement was not set off by any specific action by the Pakistan People’s Party, and though the movement activated a far broader social spectrum than that which identified itself with the PPP, the latter was

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a central actor in the movement. It had the most to do with creating the atmosphere and articulating the issues for the movement and, in West Pakistan, it would benefit the most from it in terms of gaining popular support. Two broad pressures for structural change intersected in the November Movement. The point of their intersection was, of course, the wider demand for the reinstitution of parliamentary democracy. This provided a platform on which all opposition groups could combine in opposition to the praetorian structures of the Ayub Regime. Yet, differences between various opposition groups would persist and would lead to a dangerous regional polarization after the 1970 elections. The first and perhaps more basic of the pressures for change was the demand for participatory access to the policy-making functions of government. This required the opening up and alteration of the existing authoritative structures and a downward redistribution of power. In the political arena this was to be mediated by political parties through direct elections. The second category of pressures resulted from the past denial to provincial elites of such access and added to the participatory demand that of the restructuring of the integrative institutions and principles of the State. In essence, the requirement here was for the downward redistribution of power to be routed outward through the provincial elites. In Punjab and Sindh, the participatory demand, which was best articulated in the class-oriented programme of the PPP, was dominant among opposition groups. In East Pakistan, where the ‘Six Points’ Awami League increasingly represented the aspirations of a rising Bengali middle class, and in the trans-Indus minority provinces, the combined participation-intégration crisis was explicit in the thrust of the opposition groups. This was the more violent and the more threatening to the State. To fail to solve it would erode the fundamental consensus of Muslim nationalism on which Pakistan was founded and lead to a profound crisis of legitimacy.

T he D ecline

of

A yub K han

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto left the cabinet at a time of burgeoning political consciousness in Pakistani society and of subterranean shifts in the support base of the Ayub Regime. The September War had been a deeply politicizing experience which not only imparted a degree of

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fluidity to the political support patterns of established social groups, but served to focus the perceptions and demands of a whole new generation of politically oriented interest groups. This, and the bitter disillusionment of Tashkent, had lasting political and economic ramifications which reverberated through West Pakistani society until the fall of Ayub Khan and in East Pakistani society until the emergence of Bangladesh. For Ayub Khan, then, the failure to achieve a military breakthrough in 1965, or gain any negotiated concessions in 1966, marked the beginning of his slow decline as a political force in Pakistan. The growing disenchantment with Ayub proceeded at all levels of society, including that of the ruling elites. Bhutto was active at the elite as well as the mass level and, to a significant degree, the timing of his efforts in the mass sector were related to his contacts in the elite sector.

E lite D isenchantm ent

After Tashkent, Ayub attempted to shore up his Regime by pulling back to consolidate his support with its core institutions the military and the bureaucracy. Of these the military, as the ultimate arbiter of power, was the more important and it was here, significantly, that Ayub faced a potential challenge to his leadership. Ayub had always kept in close touch with the military. He routinely involved himself in the provision of patronage to retiring officers,2 in the selection and promotion of officers, and in the ceremonial events of the various divisions.3The September War and Tashkent had set off some disquiet in the armed forces. This was particularly the case among younger officers, many of whom would have continued the war with Chinese material aid and most of whom believed the battlefield sacrifices and successes of their men had not been properly factored into the decision for a ceasefire. President Ayub kept control through the senior commanders and, in conditions of post-war scarcity, shunted resources to the armed forces by ‘cutting all “social overhead” capital investments,' thus ensuring that ‘public health, welfare, education and social facilities would have to wait on the needs of the garrison.'4 He also brought the military somewhat more visibly into the political affairs of the regime. General Muhammad Musa, the retiring Army Commander-in-Chief and a close confidant of Ayub, replaced the Nawab of Kalabagh as Governor of West Pakistan. Ayub relinquished

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the Defense portfolio to Vice Admiral A. R. Khan, while General Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan, regarded as a nonpolitical general, was advanced over the heads of several more senior officers to be the new Commander-in-Chief. These changes were all made in the fall of 1966. In February 1968, President Ayub Khan fell ill with viral pneumonia and the disquiet which had continued to resonate in the armed forces came into sharper focus. Though he was temporarily incapacitated, Ayub ignored the constitutional provision for the Speaker of the National Assembly to be made Acting President in such an event and attempted to keep control of the government by acting through a small group of top bureaucrats. When the pneumonia deepened into a pulmonary embolism and it appeared that Ayub might die, the unease that had originally greeted Ayub’s illness in elite circles became a ‘battle for succession within the military junta,* wherein ‘the generals, air marshals and admirals were “jockeying and jostling1’ each other to take the President’s place...’5 Even politicians outside ruling circles were aware that Yahya and the army would step in if Ayub should die.6 The President, though physically weakened, recovered sufficiently to pick up the reins of government, but he was unable to resume his former dominance. The manoeuvring to succeed Ayub continued, albeit at a less feverish pace, and reached out from the praetorian elites to involve politicians. One of these, Malik Ghulam Jilani, recalled that in June 1968 he was taken to meet Yahya by the letter’s son, Ali. According to Jilani, during this meeting the Army Commander criticized the wealth acquired by Captain Gohar Ayub and ‘mooted the idea that perhaps Ayub should go by way of a coup.’7 Ayub’s illness emphasized how much the constitutional edifice he had built depended on one man, how much it had failed to gain acceptance even among the ruling elites, and how much the armed forces had been politicized since the 1958 coup. The subtle shifting in military support patterns inevitably reinforced the influence of the other praetorian institution, the civil service. To an unprecedented degree, Ayub increasingly relied on high echelon bureaucrats like Sayyid Fida Hasan, N. A. Faruque and Qudrutullah Shahab at the centre, and Malik Khuda Bakhsh Buch in West Pakistan. Of particular influence was the Information Ministry, headed on the political side by Khwaja Shahabuddin and on the administrative by Altaf Gauhar. This ministry co-ordinated the year-long celebration of Ayub’s ‘Decade of Reforms and Development,* which, while it

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promoted the personality cult of Ayub and praised the genuine industrial and cultural progress of the decade, had the unintended effect of making the general public aware of how little of the ‘new wealth* had percolated down to them. By these moves to strengthen the bureaucracy, and by the dropping of political figures like Kalabagh and Bhutto, Ayub re-emphasized the essentially praetorian character of his Regime. The departure of Kalabagh was, in some ways, as significant as that of Bhutto. Representative of the old landed ashrafi class, Kalabagh *s political leanings were as conservative as Bhutto’s were radical. He was the kind of ‘feudal lord’ who viewed Punjab as the ‘Prussia of Pakistan,* and who pronounced favourably on the fact that not a single school had been built on his vast estates. Though he was never accused of using his official position for personal profit, he was believed to live by the old feudal code of vegeance in personal and political matters and not a few murders were laid, by public opinion at least, at his door.8 Kalabagh*s relations with Ayub cooled after the Karachi byelection of June 1966. Perhaps because of historic animosities between the Houses of Kalabagh and Kohat,9 the former was reported to have ensured the defeat of Lt.-Gen. (Rtd.) Habibullah Khan, the industrialist who was also related to Ayub by marriage.10 Kalabagh had always been active in the factional politics o f the Regime, competing with Bhutto, for whom he had a personal and political disregard, for the support of central and provincial legislators.11 To some these efforts suggested higher political ambitions on the part of Kalabagh, ambitions that were given added credence after the 1965 war. As the most influential chief in the Punjabi Awan Tribe, the largest parochial element in the armed forces, Kalabagh was in a position to exercise influence in the internal politics of the military. Moreover, like Bhutto, he was not unaware of the political potentialities in the fact that the army was largely Punjabi in composition, that the September War had been fought mostly in and around Punjab, and that, having been the most affected by the war, Punjab was also the most dissatisfied by its diplomatic outcome. Unlike Bhutto, however, Kalabagh would not live to benefit from these potentialities. In November 1967, he was the victim of patricide in an unsavoury family quarrel. The departure of Kalabagh and Bhutto did not mean Ayub lost all support among the ashrafi landed class. Certainly, big Conventionist zamindars from the former minority provinces—like Nawabzada Abdul Gaffar Khan of Hoti-Mardan who moved into the Central Cabinet in

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August 1966—welcomed the departure of a Punjabi chauvinist like Kalabagh.12 Another source of new support was that of the pre-1958 politicians. In January 1967, a section of the CML* including several ‘de-EBDOed’ figures (e.g., Abu Saeed Kirmani), joined the CVML. Among the old Leaguers who joined at this time was Qazi Fazlullah. An old political opponent of the Bhuttos, he had been defeated by Z. A. Bhutto in the 1965 National Assembly elections. Fazlullah was made West Pakistan Home Minister and given the task of bringing Bhutto to heel by investigations, intimidation and involvement in false cases.

M a ss L evel D isenchantm ent

The Ayub Government could not be completely confident of its popular mandate after the elections of 1964-65. Granted, Ayub had won 63.3 per cent of the Basic Democrats voting as an electoral college. In West Pakistan his victory was even greater at 73.6 per cent of the votes. Only in Karachi, with its large muhajir community and where Mohtarmah Fatima Jinnah took 55.5 per cent, did Ayub lose.13Yet, in terms of public opinion, this election victory was costly. Great pressure and many inducements had been brought on BDs to build up the magnitude of a victory all but conceded beforehand by the COP. In the elections for the National and Provincial Assemblies, the bureaucracy and police were used even more openly to secure large CVML majorities. There were many instances of COP candidates being kept under temporary restraint by the police and o f COP processions being violently disrupted.14 Dissent, as we noted in the last chapter, persisted, breaking into the open again after Tashkent. By then, acting under Article 30 of the Constitution, the Government of Pakistan had imposed the wartime emergency Defense of Pakistan Rules (DPR). Under rule No. 32 of the DPR the Regime had virtually unimpeded power to detain any person ‘...acting in a manner prejudicial to...the maintenance of public order,...the maintenance of peaceful conditions in any part of Pakistan,...15This was the rule under which opposition political leaders were arrested in November 1968. The Emergency was not lifted after Tashkent. The reason for this, it was generally supposed, had more to do with the need to stifle domestic political opposition than with any

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international threat. The Emergency and the DPR would become primary issues in the opposition campaign for fundamental rights. The September War had several economic consequences for Pakistan. Not only were scarce resources transferred to rebuild the armed forces, but the expenditure of major resources on hostilities by two of the world’s poorest nations encouraged anti-aid sentiment in the Consortium countries and among other donor states. Total foreign aid to Pakistan thus declined after 1965, though the nation still had major debt-servicing obligations. Added to these woes, and the inevitable inflation they fuelled, was the drought of 1964-1967, which affected agricultural production and spread economic malaise to the towns and countryside. As TABLE 10 shows, the wholesale price index shot up after 1965, bringing considerable economic pressure to urban

TABLE 10 INDEX OF WHOLESALE PRICES, PAKISTAN' (July 1962/June 1963=100) Year

General Index

1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967

91 91 90 95 98 101 100 100 107 112 128

Food

Raw Materials

Energy

Manu­ factures

89 88 89 95 96 102 100 99 107 112 133

98 98 88 95 113 102 100 100 116 119 119

97 100 102 101 100 100 100 106 106 no 119

95 97 92 95 96 97 100 101 102 108 ill

•Source: UN, Statistical Yearbook fo r Asia and the Pacific, 1968 (Bangkok: Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, 1969), p. 232.

households all across the nation. It is not surprising that one of the most common slogans of the November Movement was mahanga ’i khatam karo (‘end expensiveness,* i.e., ‘stop inflation*). Coming after hopes were aroused by several years of marginal betterment for the common man, these economic strains were especially embittering. They focused attention on the widening gulf between the great destitute

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commonality and the enormous wealth flowing into the hands of the family conglomerates and their allies in the ruling elite.16 It will be remembered that it was in April 1968 that Dr Mahbub-ul Haq revealed how highly industrial ownership was concentrated in twenty-two families.17 Thus, most Pakistanis reacted to the celebration of the ‘Decade of Development* with cynicism. These celebrations ended on 28 October 1968, fittingly, as some people saw it, along with the introduction of sugar rationing and only ten days before the outbreak at Rawalpindi. The result of government mismanagement, the imposition of sugar rationing symbolized much that was perceived as being wrong with the Ayub Regime. Particular bitterness was directed at the Hoti-Mardan family. They had become ‘sugar barons* upon the disinvestment of the WPIDC mills at Mardan and were widely thought to have manipulated sugar supplies and prices to line their own pockets. It was also pointed out that the old abuses of the marketplace— smuggling, blackmarketeering, hoarding and the adulteration of foodstuffs—were back in full swing. In response to its intrusive and expanding role, the bureaucracy increasingly became the object of criticism. Its upper echelons were attacked for their ‘unresponsiveness* and ‘high handedness,* for their place in a system of elite privilege, and their direct promotion of a ‘robber baron’s* approach to industrial development. Its lower echelons were disliked for their petty corruption, harassment, inefficiency and arrogance. The political role of the police had been expanded markedly under Ayub and Kalabagh. The petty tyranny of the SHO and the thanadar and the political uses of ghundas were inseparable from the myriad forms of petty corruption that also linked the underpaid government clerk and the local Union Council Chairman in a web of mutual interest. One result of all this was the tendency of the police to get out of control. The latter Ayub years saw an increase in police excesses, the outrage at Kharian being the most publicized of many incidents.*g Though intensified, official corruption and police violence had not originated with the Ayub Regime. This was not true of the Basic Democracies system, and it was against this system, so closely identified with Ayub Khan, that much of the public anger was directed. As an experiment in tutelary democracy and as a mechanism of associating a new local leadership with development, the BD system was perceived as a failure. It had become a network of patronage and corruption, increasingly subservient in political matters to the

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bureaucracy. ‘Oppressive/ ‘tyrannical/ ‘grasping,* and ‘stifling* were the terms consistently used to describe the BD system during our own travels over Punjab. As the key strata in the CVML, the BDs brought the government party into disrepute and kept Ayub, had he wished it, from any real contact with the populace. This was particularly the case in the countryside and small towns—places where Ayub might have expected to retain solid support. Having originally politicized many of these arenas, the BD system was rapidly losing the support of the very groups it had brought into politics. Nothing seems quite so universal in politics as the disregard for those who misuse official position for personal aggrandizement or the accumulation of wealth. Although Basic Democrats came from a cross section of society, the fact that many of the more unscrupulous were (or had been) small shopkeepers, petty traders, labour brokers, merchant-moneylenders, and grain agents was particularly galling to their own class fellows. What was acceptable behaviour for bureaucrats and policemen imposed from above was not acceptable for local figures raised to influence by the votes of their fellow townsmen. As one Marxist and ex-PPP leader described the situation in Multan: The BD system had brought a new parallel bureaucracy to Pakistan. The Union Council Chairman and the Basic Democrats became petty local tyrants. There was a lot o f corruption and nepotism in the BD system. Many o f the BDs were themselves petty-bourgeois, but they were a hated, privileged, small minority among the petty-bourgeois. The BD Chairman used to oppress and suppress the others o f their class outside the political system. This, apart from the economic factors, also set the petty-bourgeois against the Ayub Khan Regime.1’

The social arena wherein anti-BD sentiment seems to have been especially noticeable during this period was that of the towns. In his excellent study on urbanization and migration, S. J. Burki suggests that the towns were politically more restive than the cities in the years immediately prior to the fall of Ayub. On the basis of data for political arrests, Burki asserts that the anti-Ayub movement really began from the towns in the second quarter of 1967.20 We shall dispute neither Burki*s data for 1967-1968 nor the fact that political unrest existed in the towns (10,000 to 100,000 pop.), but only point out that his assertion ignores the earlier anti-Tashkent and anti-ghundagardi movements in Lahore, both of which turned explicitly against Ayub Khan. It seems to us that unrest existed in both the cities and towns, that in both

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environments it flared into periodic civil disturbances that were, in terms of issues and social constituents, rehearsals for the November Movement, but that in neither case did any kind o f ‘take ofT occur until the student outbreak at Rawalpindi. In our own research in six Punjab towns (Kot Radha Kishen, Toba Tek Singh, Pindi Gheb, Wazirabad, Leiah, and Rahim Yar Khan) we found that significant disturbances had occurred in four towns (excluding Pindi Gheb and Rahim Yar Khan) as early as February 1967. These began in conjunction with the railway workers strike and in each case were organized by students, lawyers and old political workers associated with the National Awami party. In each case, too, we found that local student leaders had been college students in Lahore and had participated in the anti-Tashkent demonstrations {e.g., A. R. Tahir at Kot Radha Kishen) or were local students in close touch with student and left political circles in Lahore (e.g., Zafar Zaidi at Leiah). Along with the NAP elements, it was found that these disturbances early picked up the support of marginal social groups (medical compounders, country ‘doctors' and ‘dentists,* educated unemployed) and marginal personalities, that is, men who did not fit accepted social patterns and who were often referred to as social deviants, eccentrics and crackpots. It is clearly significant that the original People’s Party units in the towns we studied would be organized by these same NAP and marginal elements.21 Another common element in the town-based disturbances was the widening of this movement in March and April to include a broader opposition. The key leadership element in this second phase was the small town maulvi. Along with his emergence the movement passed from leafletting, processions and bazaar hartals (closures, strikes) to occasional outbreaks of violence, which appear to have been directed at mainly at the Family Planning Programme. Its billboards were tom down, its offices and workers attacked and its vehicles stoned. According to our interviews, it was in response to this violence that most of the arrests occurred.

U lam a

in

O pposition

The shift of the town-based movement against the Family Planning Programme was not simply a coincidence. Ayub Khan had initiated and (supported by U.S. and U.N. agencies) strongly encouraged this programme, with the result that it was one of the most visible elements

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THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE’S PARTY

of the Ayub Regime at the town level. The Programme had from its inception stirred the opposition of the religious classes because it offended orthodox Islamic notions of pre-determinism. It would become again a focus for mullah agitation during the November Movement and serious incidents of violence—the burning of offices and vehicles—were reported from towns in the Sindh interior and the Divisions of Bahawalpur and Multan. Apart from the Family Planning Programme, the ulama had numerous other grievances against the Ayub Regime and had been one of the groups most consistently hostile to its reforms.22 These reforms had worked to erode the status and economic base of the ulama, while attempting to improve their intellectual and moral qualities through national institutions like the Islamic Academy at Quetta. The Regime had ensured that ‘modernist’ scholars rather than orthodox maulanas dominate constitutionally-mandated bodies like the Islamic Research Institute and the Advisory Council of Islamic Ideology. The ulama had particularly resisted both the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance (1961) and the creation of the Department of Auqafs (1960). The first of these had placed the restrictions long sought by women’s groups on polygamy, but in so doing had contravened the Quranic interpretations of the orthodox ulama.23 It had also placed the historic juridicial role of the qazi (judge of religious law) in mattere of marriage and divorce with an Arbitration Council chaired by the local Union Council Chairman. Headed by a succession of CSPs, the Auqaf Department attempted to bring under government administration the religious endowments, trusts and charities, which supported the physical structure of Islam, its mosques, shrines and religious schools. The ulama strongly resisted the take over of their establishments and by 1968 only some 450 of many thousands of liable institutions had passed under bureaucratic control. Many of these were buildings of historic importance, such as the shrines at the Multan Fort and the Shahi Masjid at Chiniot. The smaller establishments tended to remain free of the bureaucracy. For the most part, these were supported by annual donations (Zakat, or alms-giving) and were less susceptible to government control. In the aggregate, religious contributions represented considerable wealth. The 1967-1968 Budget Report estimated the annual intake of religious establishments at 600 million rupees, or about double the revenue receipts o f the Central Government.24 Zakat was thus a major resource mechanism in

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Pakistan’s economy and the ulama could be expected to resist vigourously any attempt to limit their control of it. Ulama opposition was publicly demonstrated in the Ruet-i-Hilal controversies of 1961 and 1967. Ruet-i-Hilal refers to the first appearance of the new moon which ends the lunar month of Ramzan (also: Ramadan), the month of fasting and marks the beginning of the great festival of Eid-ul-Fitr. Bodies of ulama traditionally comprised the Ruet-i-Hilal committees for the towns and cities of Pakistan, their function being to announce the sighting of the new moon. The Ayub government, in order to ensure uniformity and end the controversies between religious schools that often marked this event, decided this task should be given to the Government Meteorological Department. In 1961, the Karachi ulama disputed the observations of the Meteorological Department and announced Eid for the following day, thereby bringing confusion to the most festive of religious occasions in Islam. In succeeding years the Government compromised and appointed its own Ruet-i-Hilal committee of ulama, but in January 1967, the opposition ulama rejected the finding of the official committee and again fixed Eid for the day following that announced by the official committee. The majority of Pakistanis eschewed the 'government moon* and celebrated Eid with the opposition ulama was taken, as it was meant to be, as a rough measurement of anti-govern­ ment sentiment.25 Heartened by this success, the ulama began to agitate more openly against the Government. They delivered blistering sermons to the captive audiences at the congregational prayers on Fridays and promoted a campaign of rumour and innuendo against the person of Ayub and his family. The small town maulvis became especially active in this growing agitation which, as we have noted, would combine with the railway strike groups to set off the town-based disturbances o f the spring of 1967. The agitational activity of the ulama continued somewhat erratically through 1967 and 1968. It broke into national prominence in September 1968 when cities like Sahiwal, Jhang and Sargodha experienced mass demonstrations against Dr Fazlur Rahman and his book Islam. A noted scholar, Dr Rahman was Director of the Islamic Research Institute and a member of the Advisory Committee of Islamic ideology. His book was denounced violently for its alleged denial of basic tenants of Islam.26

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THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE’S PARTY

T he P e o pl e ’s P a r ty : T ow ard P olitical C onfrontation

Bhutto understood better than most opposition leaders the depth of unrest in the body politic and the meaning of the subtle shifts within the ruling elite. He was determined to activate this incipient extraparliamentary opposition, to direct it and to ride it to power. Insofar as the ruling elite is concerned, he understood its internal cleavages and its weaknesses, and he was not above attempting to manipulate both of these. Ayub’s illness in early 1968 brought about a degree of mutuality to Bhutto’s efforts in each of these arenas, the elite and the mass. Apart from Ayub’s illness and the growing unrest in the country, two other factors aided the quickening pace of political activity in 1968. These were the Agartala Conspiracy Case and the approach of the 1969-1970 elections.

B hutto

and

E lite P olitics

The President’s illness, as Bhutto wrote shortly thereafter, ‘has brought about a qualitative and quantitative change in the situation.*27 Having his own sources in the military, CSP and the ruling party, Bhutto was well informed about the struggle for succession within the Regime. His chief contact in the GHQ was Major-General S. G. M. M. Peerzada, a confidant of General Yahya Khan and, according to Professor Choudhury, a man of inordinate ambition.28 Again, according to Professor G. W. Choudhury, who served in both the Ayub and Yahya Regimes and who had excellent sources of information in the Inter-Services Intelligence Department, Bhutto and Peerzada had a common grievance in that they both had been pushed out of the inner circle around Ayub and had formed a political friendship on that basis.29 Peerzada had made a partial comeback when Yahya was made Army Commander-in-Chief and is regarded as the eminence grise behind Yahya’s suddenly revealed political ambitions. Evidently, it was during Ayub’s illness, or shortly thereafter, that a deal was struck between Bhutto and Peerzada to initiate a movement against Ayub...Peerzada assured ‘Zulfi’ (as he used to call Zulfikar Ali B hutto) that arm y support for A yub w ould be lacking in a m ass confrontation, and Bhutto was ready to start the movement on the popular theme o f Ayub’s alleged sacrifice o f ‘national honour,* preserved at the

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cost o f the brave jaw ans (soldiers) in the battlefield, at the conference table at T ashkent30

Bhutto’s connection with Peerzada also included meetings with Yahya's son, Ali, one of which occurred just prior to Bhutto’s near explosive tour of the North-West Frontier in October and November 1968. The People’s Party Chairman held these contacts very closely and consulted only his personal circle. After Bhutto was arrested, G. M. Khar and an obscure family confidant from Larkana took over contacts with the Peerzada-Yahya group and relayed messages to and from Bhutto in prison. According to Malik Ghulam Jilani, who was one of the best connected politicians during this period, Bhutto also maintained contacts with Air Marshal Rahim Khan and General Gul Hasan. This was accomplished through a family that had members both in big business and the top bureaucratic echelons of the Defense Ministry.31 The Bhutto-Peerzada axis was a delicate game of high intrigue, based on a marriage of convenience and without a common vision of a future political structure for Pakistan. Each man aimed to use the other to advance his own purposes. For Bhutto, the game had its hazards. He certainly must have known that other elements in the GHQ had feelers out to political leaders like Mumtaz Daultana, Khan Abdul Qayyum Khan and the leadership of the conservative religious party, the Jama’t-i-Islami. This situation gave no assurance that, in the event of a coup d’état, the new military leadership would turn to Bhutto, whatever Peerzada might promise. Thus, while he was willing to deal with Peerzada and Yahya, Bhutto understood that his own political future really rested on the magnitude of the proposed mass movement and on his place in it. Peerzada and Yahya saw the mass movement as a means of de-stabilizing the Ayub Regime. Bhutto looked beyond to a massive popular awakening, to unavoidable demands for systemic change, and to his own emergence as a Pakistani leader in the populist mould of a Sukarno or a Nasser. This would give him the leverage to pressure the military back to its proper role of defending the country and give the nation’s political leadership to the people’s representatives. Bhutto had little love for the political generals. As he confided to more than one person at this time: ‘We must destroy the army as a political force.’32 In view of this, it is of interest to note that Bhutto wrote in April 1968 that the growing crisis

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cannot be solved by internal readjustments. The power nucleus within the Government will have to seek an alternative outside the present structure in order to begin the task o f reconstruction. There is...n o democratic procedure within the system that can be utilized to overcome the crisis. The proper answ er...lies in a democratic solution outside the system as it stands.33

To those who cautioned that a mass movement leading to a military coup would only replace one dictator with another, Bhutto replied that if a dictator were removed by a ‘people’s movement* another dictator could hardly take his place. This conveniently ignored the historical reality that ‘people’s movements’ have often produced ‘people’s dictators’ of one kind or another. A popular movement, noted Bhutto, would put both the government and the old political elites into a quandary. Any of the latter who sought to deal with the ‘power nucleus,’ without first obtaining ‘a democratic quid pro quo,...would immediately fall from the people’s favour.’ But, if ‘some of the opposition leaders join the Government on obtaining democratic concessions, power will pass out of the hands of the regime. Despite this apparent optimism, Bhutto showed an uneasiness about the intra-elite succession struggle and an ambivalence about a possible military coup. He warned against any effort by the bureaucracy and their industrialist allies to seek to maintain the present regime with the help of devices and subterfuges that would preserve their power intact behind a facade of constitutional government. On the possibility of a military take over, Bhutto was constrained to point out: A coup d ’état is a very different thing from a revolution, for a revolution has the motor o f ideals in it and the self-sacrificing adherence o f a good section o f the population. At the moment when a coup is made it will give the appearance that a Gordian knot o f political problems has been cut. In fact, however, it will solve no problems, unless it comes with the purpose o f restoring the people's rights. Otherwise, the putschists might be tempted to indulge in massacres o f the kind committed in Indonesia, which will hasten the breakup o f Pakistan.35 (Italics mine.)

On the other hand, he worried that to follow through to the BD elections would be to keep in authority ‘the top-ranking government officials...[who would] try to avoid the hazards of such changes as might follow from the exercise of voting rights by the people.* Bhutto thus could only weakly propose that the most feasible

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course* is to steer through a transition period with the definite objective of establishing a popular government* which would immediately restore fundamental rights.36But how, and by what agency or agencies, this transition period might be initiated Bhutto did not specifically say, though it would not be unreasonable to suggest he had indicated his acquiescence to a limited coup d’état.

B h utto

an d

E a st P akistan

On 7 January 1968, after weeks o f rumours and arrests, me Government of Pakistan announced the uncovering of a conspiracy to make East Pakistan an independent state. According to the Government, the conspirators, among them ex-defense forces personnel, serving officers, and two members of the CSP, had met under Indian auspices at Agartala in Tripura. Subsequently, it was announced that Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, jailed since April 1966 under DPR for his advocacy of the 'Six Points’, was also involved and would be charged in what came to be known as the Argartala Conspiracy Case. Although more recent revelations, including one by Sheikh Mujib to David Frost,37 have given substance to these allegations, at the time the Bengali intelligentsia was disbelieving and outraged. They saw the case as another instalment in Ayub’s 'language of weapons’ policy toward political dissent in the eastern wing. Sheikh Mujib, who had languished in prison with little public protest, was turned almost overnight into an heroic Bengali martyr and the long gathering tide of Bengali nationalism began to sweep in. We shall not recatalogue here the long list of Bengali grievances against the ‘colonial’ rule by West Pakistan over the eastern province.3* Suffice it to say, the disparities and inequalities in all fields, especially in Bengali participation in the administrative, military and economic development functions of the state, were obvious and, to a large degree, traceable to the policies of successive Pakistani Governments. The military-bureaucratic elite was essentially a West Pakistani elite and the distribution of power after the 1958 coup equally one-sided. From the beginning of his rule, Ayub had recognized the growing inter­ wing disparity and had made the closing of the gap a constitutionally mandated national priority—and also an open national political issue. Ayub’s policies had the effect of raising investment in East Pakistan and of strengthening the Bengali middle class, but did not include a

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concomitant grant of political power. The September War had isolated East Pakistan and led to a feeling there that the armed forces were either unable to defend East Pakistan or were more concerned abut Kashmir. If Pakistan had had to rely on Chinese pressure to keep East Pakistan unmolested, as Foreign Minister Bhutto claimed in the National Assembly, then it would be better for the eastern wing to make its own security provisions. The Argartala Case served to focus all of East Pakistan’s grievances in one long public trial. It is not surprising that the Awami League was taken over by the ‘Six Points’ faction and that it increasingly became the political home of the Bengali intelligentsia, the middle class and the thrust of Bengali Nationalism. From theflwment of their appearance in 1966, Bhutto and-xqected the Six Points.39 Once in opposition, the political realities of mS Situation led him to modify his posturing on the issue, but not his basic positions. One of the Bhutto-Rahim documents circulated at the PPP’s founding convention was entitled: ‘The Six Points Answered.* A critical review of the Six Points, this document rejected all but the last point. Thus, the demand for an East Pakistani militia or para­ military force, was accepted with the suggestion that it be extended to ‘all the regions of West Pakistan as well.’40 Points two, four, five and part of three were described as proposals for ‘an alliance between virtually sovereign states,’ whose economies were disassociated and for whom a ‘Federal Legislature was superfluous.’41 Points one and the latter portion of point three (conditions for a single currency) could be negotiated, though in this document and in future statements Bhutto’s concept of a federal centre was far stronger than that envisioned in the Six Points. The point argued in this document and maintained thereafter in PPP literature was that the ‘economic and political problems facing Pakistan are basically the same for both wings,* and that the people of West Pakistan, no less than the people of East Pakistan, had been exploited by a flawed form of capitalism.42 People’s Party literature, though without the sophistication of Awami League writings, admitted that the West Pakistani-conrolled bureaucracy and banking structure had concentrated industrial development in West Pakistan and put the industrialization of East Pakistan into private West Pakistani hands. Nonetheless, the solution to this problem did not lie in the grant of extreme autonomy at the provincial level. ItJay_aLthe national level, where a systematic change that encompassed the nationalization of all

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industry, large-scale public investment in heavy industry, and proper distributiwrniechanisma foc-East-Pakistan would end-the exploitation of the consuming aM working masses of both East and West Pakistan. Bhutto pointedly noted that under the Six Points there was no guarantee that the people of East Pakistan, having rid themselves of-West Pakistan’s colonial yoke, would not continue to be exploited by a new class of home-grown industrialist and bureaucratic exploiters.43 Perhaps hoping to attract student support in Eastern Pakistan, the Bhutto-Rahim document also stressed that the comparative bacjt^ardness of East Pakistan arose in part from the ‘callous neglect of education in East Pakistan.’ It noted that the greater expenditure for education in West Pakistan had enabled the ‘sons of the newly rich class Treated by the government’s policy...to go abroad for higher education,’ and then return to join the civil service or take up positions in the ‘quick profit’ consumer industries which were being disinvested on extremely favourable terms to the government’s main supporters. The decline of educational standards in East Pakistan was one of the most visible elements in the general economic and social decline of that province after Partition.44 A second foundation document involving East Pakistan was a more curious one entitled: ‘The Need for Pakistan to Have Special Relations with Assam.' This document listed Pakistan’s grievances on Kashmir and the Radcliffe boundary awards and then raised the whole question of Assam, asserting that ‘the interests of the indigenous tribes and the considerations of geography should have linked Assam with Pakistan.’45 The argument here was that since both Hindus and Muslims each constituted one-third of the population of Assam (1941 Census), there were no inherent reasons why Assam should have been given to India. Bhutto, of course, saw the culprit in British strategic and economic (tea industry) interests. Rather, since the Tibeto-Burman hill tribes had no historical or cultural ties with Hinduism and little love for the Hindu lowlanders, they would have found—asserted the PPP document—a more congenial existence in a Muslim state. Although Naga and Mizo insurgents sought and acquired sanctuary and secret arms aid from Pakistan during the Foreign Ministership of Bhutto, there is little reason to suppose the hill tribes, in the long run, would be any more comfortable with Muslim than with Hindu lowlanders. The raising of this issue, it appears, was an attempt to arouse some sort of East Pakistani irredentism in a contiguous region of India to parallel West Pakistani irredentism in Kashmir. The

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international implications were also important, given China's large territorial claims in what was then called India’s North-East Frontier Agency. There is no evidence that Bhutto was one of those who believed East Pakistan had become an economic liability to West Pakistan, or that Bengali nationalism was an ineluctable force. Though some would later charge that Bhutto had already given up on a united Pakistan, this assertion is difficult to square with his essential nationalism, his efforts to establish his People’s Party in East Pakistan, and his pursuit of a united front agreement with the National Awami Party and, later, the Awami League. Bhutto made a number of trips to East Pakistan and each time Nusrat reported on the massive and enthusiastic demonstrations in support of him, thereby hoping to bolster the PPP Chairman as a national figure.46 Most other newspapers and journals, however, seemed to feel that Bhutto had only minimal support in East Pakistan.47 Malik Hamid Sarfraz, who accompanied Bhutto to East Pakistan in March-April 1968, told a press conference that steps had been taken to set up district level branches of the East Pakistan PPP, and that attendances by hundreds of thousands at Bhutto meetings proved he was as popular in East as in West Pakistan. Sarfraz, who had been a lieutenant of Suhrawardy, maintained that for the first time since Suhrawardy’s united front movement in 1962, the literate classes and rural folk had found a national political leader in Z. A. Bhutto.41 Bhutto had off and on talks with East Pakistani political leaders, the most important of these being with Maulana Bhashani. Though considerable suspicion of the PPP continued to exist among NAP leaders in West Pakistan both the PPP and NAP-B were moving toward a degree of cooperation. The NAP had finally split at its March 1968 meetings in Dhaka, leaving the anti-feudalists in a relatively discrete grouping. Further, as the Ayub Regime began to warm up its ties to the western alliance while keeping the China option static, Bhashani felt less beholden to his earlier tacit support of the Regime. For its part, the PPP needed some means of entry into Bengali politics in order to broaden its support beyond the migrant communities in the eastern wing (West Pakistani residents and Bihari Partition muhajirs). It was perhaps conceivable to the PPP leadership, though not very likely, that the People’s Party would be able to co-opt the lower echelon NAP-B workers in East Pakistan in much the same fashion as it was doing in West Pakistan. The stakes were potentially high. Even under the indirectly elected Presidency, it was doubtful that any West

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Pakistan politician could come to power without at least some East Pakistani support. This would be a far greater concern if ‘one man, one vote’ parliaments were re-introduced, for here the Bengalis would have a majority of seats and West Pakistani politicians would participate in power only by joining a coalition with East Pakistani elements or by being part of a broad national party that straddled the regional dichotomy. The Bhutto-Bhashani talks in March 1968 produced a joint statement pledging mutual cooperation in a united struggle to bring democracy and socialism to Pakistan. This was seen as a first step toward a united front. Bhutto returned to East Pakistan in early September 1968. By this time it was clear that public opinion there had shifted dramatically toward the Awami League (AL) and Bhutto became concerned that the Argartala Case was starting a ‘prairie fire’ of Bengali nationalism. He sounded out the possibility of forming a PPP-NAP-AL united front with the common denominators of ‘autonomy, democracy, and socialism.* He also offered his services as a Defence Counsel to Sh. Mujibur Rahman and made an appearance in court on his behalf.49

‘D em ocracy

is our

P o lity ’

Of the official slogans adopted in the Interim Constitution of the People's Party, ‘Democracy is our Polity’ most appropriately fits the objectives, statements and strategies of the PPP during the period up to the fall of Ayub Khan.50 This does not mean the PPP played down its socialist programme—both Bhutto and Nusrat were fond of saying that ‘democracy is not enough,'51—only that the party leadership recognized its first priority must be the removal of Ayub Khan and that the most effective early step to this end would be the creation of an opposition front on the widely-acceptable platform o f ‘democracy.* The PPP emphasized the restoration of fundamental rights as the first step back to democracy and called on ‘all Opposition Parties to cooperate together' for this purpose.52 The party recognized that all the fundamental freedoms would have to be restored if any of them were to be effective, but itjju t its primary emphasis on the right to voter- which "*Tfiust be exercisable, unhindered and not limite