THE ARMY TAKES OVER PAKISTAN – Friday 04 April 1969 – Time Magazine
THE ARMY TAKES OVER PAKISTAN
Friday 04 April 1969
Time Magazine
MuktiJuddho e-Archive Collection
Authority forgets a dying king.
—Alfred Lord Tennyson
The Passing of Arthur
PAKISTAN’S President Mohammed Ayub Khan might well embrace that melancholy observation as his political epitaph. He had promised to renounce power on the expiration of his presidential term next year, and meanwhile to restore parliamentary democracy to his disturbed land. Far from calming the civil disorders racking Pakistan, his renunciation intensified the dissensions threatening to tear apart the fragile unity of East and West Pakistan, and led to still more bloody rioting. Last week, with the disruption beyond his control, Ayub abruptly departed, turning over to the army the world’s fifth most populous nation. His voice breaking with emotion, Ayub took to Radio Pakistan “for the last time” to explain why Pakistan had once again fallen under military rule. “I cannot,” he declared in a phrase with Churchillian echoes, “preside over the destruction of my country.”
Ayub added: “The country’s economic system is paralyzed. Every problem is now being solved in the streets. Mobs surround any place they like and force acceptance of whatever they like. There is nobody left to raise a righteous voice.” Accordingly, the President declared, there was no alternative but for the army’s chief of staff, General Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan, to assume all the powers of government.
Cats by the Tail. Why did Ayub step down? The President sounded particularly bitter toward his political opponents, whom he blamed for bringing on the nation’s paralysis. He had halfway acceded to their demands by agreeing to make way for a British-style parliamentary government to be elected by universal suffrage around the turn of the year. Having won that much, both East and West Pakistani politicians, though still as divided among themselves as when Ayub once dismissed them as “five cats tied by their tails,” were emboldened to press on. Not wanting to wait for the promised elections, they demanded satisfaction of other grievances immediately. So did the mobs in the streets: in East Pakistan, two weeks of vigilante murders, mostly of lower officials in the Ayub regime, cost more than 200 lives, and in the West hundreds of factories were strikebound by workers demanding better wages.
What forced Ayub to hasten his departure more than anything else was a challenge from East Pakistan’s popular Sheik Mujibur Rahman. The impatient “Mujib” threatened to carry to the National Assembly his demands for purbodesh, a kind of associate statehood, for East Pakistan’s Bengalis, which would seriously weaken the central government in Rawalpindi. If Mujib’s East Pakistanis had their way, Ayub feared, what would prevent similar demands in West Pakistan that the province be carved up into four separate states? Aware for the first time that he might lose control of his once rubber-stamp National Assembly, Ayub wrote a letter to Yahya inviting the army to move in.
Edge of the Abyss. General Yahya (pronounced Ya-hee-uh), a 52-year-old professional soldier, quickly promulgated martial decrees banning strikes and demonstrations under the pain of penalties ranging from 17 years’ imprisonment to death. Yahya judged the situation in much the same dire terms as did Ayub: “Strikes and industrial unrest have brought the nation to the edge of the abyss. I and the armed forces could not remain idle spectators of this new state of near anarchy.” The general promised to return politics to the politicians as soon as conditions existed for “a peaceful and constitutional transfer of power.” Few Pakistanis could see an early chance of that.
Like Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan* comes from the tough northwest stock that produced pre-partition India’s military elite. He was the President’s most loyal lieutenant, and was jumped over seven more senior generals in 1966 to the army’s top post. Again like Ayub, Yahya fought with the British army in World War II. He and an Indian officer were captured by the Germans in Italy. The two escaped from prisoner-of-war camp together; Yahya made it home, but the Indian was recaptured. He was Major P. P. Kumaramangalam, who is today the Indian army’s commander in chief. Yahya’s external policies are not expected to give India any cause for concern, if only because he will be too busy at home.
A Federal System. Martial law merely applies a khaki Band-Aid over Pakistan’s divisions—especially East Pakistan’s deepening resentment that, while West Pakistan has advanced economically, a neglectful government has allowed the more populous East (where 73 million of Pakistan’s 128 million people live) to sink deeper into poverty. There was a sense of relief in the streets —momentarily, at least—that five months of turmoil were over. In Karachi, Lahore and even the restive Eastern capital of Dacca, army shows of force met not a whiff of resistance. But presumably martial law will soon begin to chafe. The danger is that East Pakistanis will regard it as another instrument of Western oppression and thus change their present demand for autonomy to a clamor for outright secession. In Dacca, Sheik Mujibur Rahman turned newsmen aside, saying, “They may come for me at any time.” But as the reporters left, he shouted after them: “My people are with me! No one can suppress me!”
Pakistan was born in carnage as an Islamic republic, with a religious fervor that impelled its founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, to proclaim: “No power on earth can prevent Pakistan.” Yet as Columbia University Political Scientist Wayne Wilcox points out in Asian Survey, a generation of Pakistanis has now come to its majority “who never knew British India, did not participate in the Pakistan movement, and has grown up in a largely secular state for which Islam is more or less decorative rather than central.” For this generation, the task is to create a federal system loose enough to relieve regional resentments but strong enough to leave some reality in the concept of a united Pakistan.
* The honorary title that they share is an inherited mark of respect in the Moslem world.
