Ayub Khan: Rise & Fall

(1958-1969)
Lecture 7
Instructor: Ammar Yasir
Ayub Khan’s Regime (1958-1969)
• IN the first Pakistan, the one that existed before it lost its eastern wing
in 1971, President General (later self-elevated to field marshal)
Muhammad Ayub Khan’s decade from 1958 to 1969 was foundational
in numerous critical ways and set the direction for Pakistan for years
to come.
• It gave rise to models of military dictatorship, US dependence,
regional imbalances, and the over-centralization of government.
• Often known as the ‘Decade of Development’, as ‘Pakistan’s Golden
Years’ of a ‘Socially Liberal Military Dictatorship’, Pakistan’s first
military dictator laid the foundations of a capitalist economy under
military rule.
• This resulted in numerous economic and social contradictions, which
played themselves out, not just in the 1960s, but beyond, where Ayub
Khan’s rule created the social and economic conditions leading to the
separation of East Pakistan, and to the rise of Zulfikar Ali
Bhutto’s awami inqilab.
• As governments continuously changed hands, both in East and in West
Pakistan, it was clear that despite the constituent assembly framing a
constitution in 1956 finally promising the possibility of elections, the
military stepped in to take power in October 1958 declaring martial
law.
• his point is important and is often overlooked, but the 1950s and 1960s
in what we now call the global south, were a time of modernisation,
economic growth without regard to inclusiveness, and, with few
exceptions, often under the guidance of ruthless military dictators.
•There is a very long list of social and economic reforms
undertaken by the Ayub regime, which are striking, resulting
in extensive social engineering. All military governments
since, ruling with an iron fist lasting a decade or a little less,
have done the same.
•Ayub’s achievements are numerous and some specific ones
are worth citing. Since ‘democracy had to be taught’ in
accordance with the ‘genius of the people’, what better way
to start than at the grass roots, at the local panchayat level.
•Hence, the system of Basic Democracies — elected
representatives in constituencies were given the task of local
development.
• The Muslim Family Laws Ordinance of 1961, still considered one of
the most progressive sets of family laws compared to many Muslim
countries even 56 years on, gave, at least on paper, some protection to
women allowing them far greater rights, raising the marriageable age,
requiring greater documentation to file for divorce, or for men to seek
permission from their existing wife if they wanted a second marriage.
• Pakistan’s family planning laws under Ayub were the most advanced
for their times and such interventions drew a great deal of criticism
from religious groups who considered them unIslamic.
• To show how different times were then compared to how they have
changed since 1977, Ayub was even able to drop the name ‘Islamic’
from the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, albeit eventually having to give
in to pressure from the ulema and religious political leaders,
particularly Maulana Maudoodi.
• Economic growth in Pakistan during much of the 1960s was stellar,
and on Jan 18, 1965, the New York Times wrote that “Pakistan may
be on its way towards an economic milestone that so far has been
reached by only one other populous country, the United States”, a
view which was endorsed by the Times from London a year later,
stating that “the survival and development of Pakistan is one of the
most remarkable examples of state and nation-building in the
post-War period”.
• Clearly, high growth rates, but exclusively in Punjab and in Karachi,
and not in East Pakistan, gave rise to such praise. Distributive issues
were unimportant in the economic policies advocated by the Harvard
Advisory Group which ran Pakistan’s meticulous Planning
Commission.
• Following large-scale land reforms undertaken in 1959, the Green
Revolution in agriculture in central Punjab changed the social and
economic relations of production permanently. Growth rates, both for
agriculture and for industry, were often in double digits.
• Ample US aid and assistance helped build dams, roads and other
infrastructure. Pakistan was on the road to economic progress.
• Politically, of course, this was, not surprisingly, a repressive regime.
Political leaders were imprisoned, political parties were banned,
dissent was not tolerated, newspapers were censored and taken over,
and Ayub’s regime continued to be opposed by nationalists from West
and East Pakistan, as well as by Maulana Maudoodi’s Jamaat-i-Islami.
• Yet, Ayub sought some form of public legitimacy as all military
dictators have been forced to, lifting martial law in 1962 following the
implementation of a presidential-form constitution.
• The year 1965 was also, of course, the year when Ayub Khan’s
downward slide began. The war with India in September, on which
much has been written in recent years by historians, has raised
questions on strategy, intention, and tactics, and whether Pakistan
actually ‘won’ the war.
• The role of Pakistan’s foreign minister, a young, charismatic, and
ambitious Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, has also been scrutinized by historians,
suggesting that Bhutto led Ayub into a military disaster, and was to
gain political mileage after the Tashkent Declaration, parting ways
with Ayub to become his main opponent.
• There is little doubt that Ayub Khan’s Decade of Development, which
his government was celebrating in 1968 at a time when opposition to
his regime was mounting, changed Pakistan’s social and economic
structures unambiguously.
• There is little doubt that there was economic growth, but given the
ideological drivers of this growth, regional and income inequalities
grew very sharply, giving rise to a political category of the super rich,
called the ‘Twenty-two Families’, a metaphor for accumulation and
corruption.
• The growth model followed by Ayub gave rise to manufacturing and
industrialisation, the growth of a working class, agricultural wealth
created by the Green Revolution in the Punjab, and the emergence of
what were later to become Pakistan’s middle classes.
• It was many of these disenfranchised social groups under Ayub that
gave Bhutto the support to create his Peoples Party and bring about a
social revolution, while in East Pakistan, these same contradictions
gave impetus to Sheikh Mujib’s Awami League.
• It was not only inequality amongst individuals which increased, but on
account of the Green Revolution, and due to capitalism’s own
locational logic, central Punjab and Karachi developed far more than
other parts of the country, particularly East Pakistan, which had
always felt deprived and exploited.
• With the Punjabi-Mohajir bureaucracy and a Punjabi military
dominating politics and economics in an overly centralized state, East
Pakistan’s politicians and population felt completely marginalized.
• The policies of the Ayub era, both economic and political, led in 1966
to Mujib asking for more rights, including the right to universal
franchise for all Pakistanis.
• A centralised military government, now located in its new capital
Islamabad, failed to pay heed to calls for inclusion and participation.
Signs of what was to come were evident.
• All this was done with complete support from the US until the 1965
war when American policy was rethought about South Asia.
• Most importantly, Ayub’s decade of military dictatorship brought the
military into politics and created a pattern replicated, albeit with
different ideological underpinnings, in very different eras and global
and regional circumstances, in 1977 and 1999.
• In East Pakistan, Shiekh Mujeebur Rehman’s Awami League (AL),
upped the ante against the regime and accused it of leaving East
Pakistan open to an Indian attack during the 1965 war.
• As the Bengali nationalist movement led by AL and by various
militant/Maoist Bengali nationalist groups in East Pakistan gathered
pace, in West Pakistan, Ayub was suddenly faced by a spontaneous
students’ movement when in October 1968, a large contingent from
the NSF gate-crashed a ceremony being held by the government at
Lahore’s Fortress Stadium (to celebrate the government’s ‘Decade of
Progress’).
• The students began to chant anti-Ayub slogans and clashed with the
police. They accused the regime of enriching a handful of cronies and
letting everyone else suffer unemployment and economic hardship.
Then in November 1968, police opened fire on a left-wing student
rally in Rawalpindi, killing three protesters.
• In response, students formed a Students Action Committee and announced
that students across Pakistan would begin a concentrated protest movement
against the regime.
• As the students began their campaign (with most of the student groups
demanding a socialist system and parliamentary democracy), Bhutto’s PPP
joined the fray along with NAP and their entry brought with it the
participation in the movement of the radical trade and labour unions that
were associated with these parties.
• By late 1968 the movement had spread beyond Karachi, Lahore, Rawalpindi
and Peshawar and reached the smaller cities and towns of Punjab and Sindh.
Meanwhile in East Pakistan, AL and other Bengali nationalist groups began
to demand complete provincial autonomy for East Pakistan.
• Schools, colleges and universities stopped functioning; workers went on
strike and closed down several factories, and white-collar professionals
refused to attend office, further crippling an already deteriorating political
and economic order.
• After failing to quell the protests (through police action and wide-scale
arrests), Ayub invited opposition parties to hold a dialogue with the
government. But the PPP and NAP boycotted the negotiations that
were largely attended by religious parties and some moderate
right-wing parties. However, Mujeeb’s AL did participate, but the
talks ultimately broke down.
• By early 1969 the movement had also been joined by peasant
committees and organizations in the country’s rural areas. In March
1969 a group of senior military men advised Ayub to step down,
fearing the eruption of a full-scale civil war in East Pakistan and
political and social anarchy in the country’s west wing.
• A weakened and tired Ayub finally decided to throw-in the towel and
resign, handing over power to General Yahya Khan who immediately
imposed the country’s second martial law.
• He promised to hold the country’s first general election based on adult
franchise and to relinquish power after introducing parliamentary
democracy in Pakistan. With this announcement, the movement came
to a halt.
• Elections were held in 1970. In East Pakistan the AL won 98 per cent
of the allotted national and provincial assembly seats, whereas in West
Pakistan, the PPP swept the polls in the region’s two largest provinces,
Punjab and Sindh. NAP performed well in the former NWFP and
Balochistan. Most of the ‘status quo parties’ (such as the many
Muslim League factions) and most religious outfits (except Jamiat
Ulema Islam) were decimated.
• However, a three-way deadlock between AL, PPP and the Yahya
regime (over a power-sharing formula) regime triggered a crisis that
finally saw the feared eruption of a civil war in East Pakistan and then
India’s entry into the conflict.
• After that disastrous conflict, a group of military officers (most of
them Bhutto sympathizers), forced Yahya to resign and then invited
Bhutto and his party to form the country’s first parliamentary
government.
• Ayub, who had gone into seclusion, died in 1974.