PAK 301 3rd Assignment Solution
By Sheri Khan
Question No 1 Solution:
After independence and especially the death of Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan was entangled in a web of chaos and confusion. The instability can be seen with having four Governor Generals, seven Prime Ministers and one President in eleven years. Not a single government was stable enough to think and work in the right direction.
General Iskander Mirza decided to abrogate the first constitution of Pakistan and invite General Ayub Khan to impose the first martial law in the country. The intentions of General Iskander Mirza were quite personal in inviting Ayub, as he considered democracy as a useless tool in a country like Pakistan where the literacy rate is low and there is lack of political awareness among the people. The plan which Iskander Mirza had in his mind failed when Ayub overthrew him after a few days of proclaiming the Martial law in October 1958, and sent him in exile.
By and large, the ten year rule of General Ayub Khan is seen as an era of progress and industrial development. Ayub promulgated mega projects like the construction of Mangla Dam, the Karachi Steel Mills, oil refineries and above all construction of a new capital at Islamabad. He introduced various reforms to improve the state of affairs, like the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance of 1961, imposing restrictions on polygamy and reinforcing inheritance rights of women. The Land Reforms initiated by him were a step to reduce the increasing power of the landed aristocracy. He signed a boundary agreement with China in March 1963, which proved to be the beginning of a long term friendship between the two countries.
The prominent feature of a Martial Law regime is the rapid growth of development, but in the long run the various measures taken by a martial dictator come in the lime light and create disruption among the society. In spite of all the positive steps and development marking General Ayub’s Era, the graph of his popularity began declining. The immediate cause was the elections of 1965 and the Tashkent Declaration.
If we minutely study the ten years of Ayub’s era we calculate a few things. Like every martial law administrator, Ayub liked to keep the power in his own hands. As soon as he came to power, one of the first steps he took was the passing of EBDO (Disqualification of politicians and political parties under Elective Bodies Disqualification Order), claiming to minimize corruption.
People wanted parliamentary form of government, but General Ayub. presented the nation with second constitution in 1962 which was presidential in nature.
By introducing the system of Basic Democracy (BD), the right of adult franchise was curtailed.
The control on media and press was observed.
The Land and Family Laws were very attractive but they were not fully implemented.
The concept of urbanization was encouraged, but facilities were not provided.
The whole of West Pakistan was made in one unit, with which the small provinces were not happy.
Rumours about his illness in the early 1968, about making Gohar Ayub his successor, withdrawal of military support added more to his unpopularity.
One more aspect which Ayub neglected from the beginning caused a major upheaval in his popularity graph was the case of East Pakistan. It is an atrocious truth that since independence all the governments including that of Ayub Khan had neglected East Pakistan. Like his predecessors, he did nothing to decrease the economic disparity between East and West Pakistan. He was aware of the acute grievances of the Bengalis, but he did not try to tackle it seriously. As Bengal was a densely populated and politicized province, it’s feeling of deprivation increased by the absence of democratic institutions in Ayub’s highly centralized regime. The East Pakistanis also considered Martial law as the rule of Punjabi dominated Army. The issue of provincial autonomy was also and issue which intensified with time and we see that in 1966 Sheikh Mujeeb ur Rahman presented his six points formula for provincial autonomy of East wing. Even then, no heed was paid to the growing discontentment.
Zufiqar Ali Bhutto exploited the Tashkent declaration to turn the public opinion against Ayub. The increasing popularity of Awami League under Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman in East Pakistan and Pakistan Peoples Party under Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in West Pakistan was alarming for the stability of General Ayub’s Regime. Then there was also Asghar Khan’s movement and few other political alliances which were creating hurdles for a stable Ayub’s government.
Finally, the movement against his government intensified towards the end of 1968 and in the beginning of 1969. The movement was launched by Urban middle class i.e. Students, lawyers, teachers, doctors, labourers, politicians etc.
It became quite difficult for General Ayub to face so much opposition from politicians as well as common people from all walks of life. He ultimately decided to resign in March 1969. In his last radio address to the nation on 25 March 1969, he said, “I cannot preside over the destruction of my country”.
This ended a rather stable and progressive era in the history of Pakistan.
Question No 2 Solution:
The failure of Pakistan to develop a political system, which best suited its policy can be safely rationalized as its most brilliant failure since its creation, nearly fifty-seven years ago. At its creation, Pakistan inherited the British legacy of a parliamentary system, even though it was ill equipped for it. Parliamentary democracy pre-supposes a population that is politically aware of the issues concerning it. The fact that Pakistan was born out of the crisis of the partition and it has lurched from one crisis to another, all of its own making, it never had the opportunity to develop a political system. In many ways, Pakistan had the wrong dream to cling to the notions of parliamentary democracy. It was, and is, this stubbornness to admit to the reality, that often determined the notions of Pakistan as an inchoate state. Pakistan is not suited for a parliamentary democracy, because its political experience suggests an administrative rule of law. Pakistan is, by all accounts, more of an administrative state and its historic experience suggests that it cannot be anything else.
Parliamentary democracy in Pakistan died a quiet death, unnoticed in the mayhem of partition, when Mohammad Ali Jinnah decided to assume the office of the Governor-General in Pakistan. By being the head of the new state and the head of its government, Jinnah concentrated all the powers under him and in doing so, effectively embarked Pakistan towards the ideal of a presidential system. Jinnah assumed the mantle of the viceregal powers in his own person and such, ushered in the cult of personalized rule in Pakistan, which would emerge as the greatest obstacle to parliamentary democracy in Pakistan. Liaquat Ali Khan, Jinnah’s prime minister, was over shadowed by the personality of Jinnah and thus, his office was rendered virtually ineffective and without any real political influence. By inheriting the powers of the viceroy, Jinnah established the presidential form of government for Pakistan.
The greatest challenge, which befell the newly created state of Pakistan, was to fashion a government, which could deal with the many problems facing it. Except for East Pakistan, which had an urban intelligentsia capable of mastering the complexities of governing a modern state, West Pakistan was totally ill prepared for such a task. The politicians of the West Pakistan were feudal landlords appointed by the British to govern their territories in the name of British Raj and the population of West Pakistan was mostly rural and it had no intelligentsia capable of taking over the political responsibility. The feudal landlords of West Pakistan had no experiencing in governing a modern state and they deeply resented the influx of the Muslim refugees from India, who were altering the timeless demographics of power in their jurisdictions. The Muslim intelligentsia, which came to Pakistan, from India, tended to settle in the cities and as they took on the responsibility of governing Pakistan, the feudal landlords saw them as a threat to their traditional power. The feudal landlords of Pakistan had wanted nothing to do with the idea of Pakistan and to them, the creation of Pakistan was a threat to their own power and they resisted the idea of Pakistan. Jinnah was aware of this acutely and the reason he opted to control all the reins of power in himself. One reason was that politicians, who formed the constituent government in West Pakistan, had no political constituencies of their own in the new nation, as most of them were newly arrived immigrants. The second reason was that Jinnah had to create a political constituency and to do this; he had to personally dominate the feudal landlords of West Pakistan into submission. There was no politician of the stature of Jinnah in Pakistan and Jinnah realized that only he was capable of dealing with the two-pronged threat, which challenged the establishment of a federal government in Pakistan, with centralized powers. Jinnah could not leave this task to Liaquat Ali Khan, because Liaquat had no political constituency in the new nation and was thus politically handicapped.
These problems were further compounded when Jinnah decided to establish the new administrative capital of Pakistan in Karachi. The problem was that Muslim politicians of a united India, who had struggled for Pakistan, had their roots in northern India and Bengal. This created resentment, when these Indian-Muslim émigrés started arriving in their new constituencies and started to assume power. The feudal landlords saw this as an infringement of their traditional sphere of power, which the British had guaranteed them. It must be remembered that after partition in 1947, political power was transferred to the Muslim League in Pakistan from the British and that Muslim League was traditionally based in East Pakistan, having originated in Bengal as the result of Lord Curzon’s decision to partition Bengal in 1905 and the real constituency of the Muslim League was in the east and not in the west.
Jinnah had solely concentrated power in one office, because he honestly believed that only he had the personality to bridge the divides, which confronted Pakistan. Jinnah was disposed to think in such a manner, because like the other politicians around him, he too was without a political constituency. Therefore, when Pakistan came into existence, it did so as presidential form of government even though it claimed to be a parliamentary democracy and, as all this power was concentrated in West Pakistan, which gave another reason to East Pakistan to claim that it was being denied an equal share of the powers in the new state. Hence the new government, which was created as a result of Jinnah amassing power in his person, was seen as a West Pakistani government and in doing so, Jinnah created the future seeds of political controversy which would endure, as a see-saw tussle, as Pakistan would periodically experiment between parliamentary and presidential politics. Pakistan was never destined to be a parliamentary democracy as much as it was destined to exist under the under administrative law of a presidential form of government. Having set the precedent for a presidential from of government and ruling Pakistan like a president, Jinnah died within a year of Pakistan’s independence. Upon his death, Liaquat Ali Khan aware of his own political non-importance sought to enlarge the power of the prime minister’s office and he tried to make the office of the governor-general into a ceremonial one. It was with this intention that Liaquat Ali Khan sponsored the Objectives Resolution and the constitution that Liaquat Ali Khan wanted was one that would make the office of the prime minister supreme and to ensure that his power was secured, Liaquat Ali Khan wanted to deprive the governor-general of his power to dismiss governments.
It was the political weakness of Liaquat Ali Khan and his lack of a political constituency, which was exploited by the feudal landlords to preserve their own power and in order to preserve their own power, they opted for a parliamentary form of government. The simple reason being since they would dominate such a government, they would be in a position to thwart any policies, which would seek to undermine their political influence. The parliamentary form of government suited the provincially minded interests of the feudal aristocracy, and it was due to this aim, that they would continually deny sharing power with East Pakistan. The early political struggle in Pakistan was fought to determine, which area of the nation would emerge as the strongest; the urbanized political centers of East Pakistan or the rural dominated feudal areas of West Pakistan.
This would become a haunting theme in Pakistani politics, because Pakistani politicians to offset their lack of a legitimate political constituency would periodically make bargains, which would end up hurting the interests of Pakistan. In this sense, it can be said that the history of Pakistani politics has been a story to seek political legitimacy and to create artificial constituencies to maintain power. The reason that Pakistan finally had constitution in 1956, nine years after independence, can attributed to this struggle to determine the power of the governor-general vis-à-vis the prime minister, which delayed the process of the constitution making. It was for this reason that Pakistan saw a flurry of governments being formed and dismissed; of prime ministers being appointed and being dismissed. Therefore, Pakistani politics from the death of Liaquat Ali Khan, in 1951, to time of military coup d’ état of Iskander Mirza and Ayub Khan in 1958 was a power struggle to see who ended up as the heir apparent to the viceregal traditions of Jinnah and the right to unlimited power.