Understanding Pakistan Project

Understanding Pakistan Project Team July 23rd, 2007

Guest Column* By Aqil Sajjad

Six decades after independence, Pakistan continues to struggle with basic issues relating to democracy and constitutionalism. The country has yet to see a smooth change of government through elections. The rot started at the very outset as the political leadership found it difficult to reconcile the various interests competing with each other to produce a widely acceptable constitution. The purpose of this article is to discuss some of the prominent interest groups that were involved and how their differences contributed to the constitutional delay and the political instability that marked the years leading up to the military take over in 1958.

Broadly speaking, there were three distinct groups that joined Pakistan. These were East Pakistanis, those who migrated from Hindu majority areas to West Pakistan, and the indigenous people of West Pakistan.
 
East Pakistan was geographically, culturally and ethnically distinct from West Pakistan. Among its features were a large population, low level of education, absence of feudalism, and a greater propensity for political activism among the masses.

The people of West Pakistan were also generally less educated, but the political scene in this wing was dominated by the landed aristocracy. Moreover, unlike the mostly homogeneous population of East Pakistan, the people of West Pakistan had considerable ethnic and cultural diversity. This along with the larger geographical area often resulted in sharp divergence of interests between the four units in this wing.  

The third group of Pakistanis comprised those who had come from the Hindu majority areas. Their influx and the exodus of Hindus who migrated to India had a huge demographic impact and thus played an important role in shaping the political landscape of Pakistan.

The middle class in the areas that constituted West Pakistan comprised mainly of Hindus before partition. Due to their better level of education, they were more prominent in the bureaucracy. As a majority of this middle class Hindu population left for India, a sudden vacuum was created in the administrative machinery. This gap was partially filled by the Muslim immigrants coming from the Hindu majority areas since they were now the most dynamic and educated group in Pakistan.

Apart from the bureaucracy, Pakistan’s first generation of industrialists and big businessmen also belonged largely to the immigrants who had come from India. Realizing that Pakistan would need to have a vibrant economy, Jinnah had persuaded several rich Muslim business families like the Adamjees, Habibs and Ispahanis to move to Pakistan and set up businesses in vital sectors of the economy. They played a vital role in the country’s first thrust towards industrialization in the 1950s, which naturally gave them substantial clout with the government.

The indigenous people of both east and West Pakistan on the other hand were less socio-economically developed and therefore fell well behind the Mohajir community. Much of the 1950s and 1960s were marked by the struggle for greater control between the elites belonging to these various groups.

It is also important to note that of these three groups, the indigenous people of West Pakistan had been least active in creating Pakistan. The leading proponents for Pakistan had been the Muslims living in Hindu majority areas and Bengal. However, during partition, the immigrants from India had left their political constituencies behind in India. This naturally reduced the enthusiasm for democracy among the elites from this group. They could not relate to the political class in East Pakistan or the mostly feudal and parochial leadership that dominated West Pakistan.

At the same time, the bureaucracy, due to its colonial past, was more inclined towards centralization. The civil servants, as they were called, were generally more educated than the rest of the population and considered themselves superior. They were also not very appreciative of ethnic diversity, which was again, partly due to their more educated outlook where ethnicity counted for less, and partly due to the fact that the bureaucracy was not broad enough in its ethnic representation to reflect the diversity in the country.

To add to this, the bureaucracy in Pakistan assumed a much more important role in Pakistan than its Indian counterpart. Two factors contributed to this. The first was that the British carried out partition and left in indecent haste without doing the necessary ground work for a smooth transfer of control to the government of Pakistan. While India inherited the well established capital in Delhi, Pakistan had to start from scratch by creating its own administrative and financial center. This challenge was further aggravated by India’s unwillingness in giving Pakistan its due share of assets and the problem of settling millions of refugees. The second factor was the absence of strong political institutions. The Muslim league was a much less developed party than Congress and this was further accentuated by the leadership vacuum created by the demise of Jinnah in 1948 and the assassination of Liaqat Ali Khan in 1951. This weakness was all the more pronounced in West Pakistan where the party lacked a strong base, and its prominent leaders who had come from the Hindu majority areas were relatively bourgeois in their outlook and hence often unable to relate to the sentiments of the mostly rural population of West Pakistan.

In addition to the bureaucracy, the military gained a lot of importance due to the threat perception from India. The failure of the congress to address the concerns of Muslims about their rights in a united India had already created enough mistrust to lead to partition. Still, the two newly independent countries could have developed good neighbourly ties. Jinnah had in fact even expressed his wish that Pakistan and India should be like Canada and the US to each other in their relations. Unfortunately, that was not to be due to the hostility shown by the Indian leadership at the very outset.

India initially refused to give Pakistan its due share of assets. It annexed Kashmir by military force and avoided resolving the dispute on the basis of self-determination, first by using delaying tactics and later by an open refusal. In April 1948, India stopped the flow of river water to Pakistan through the two head-works under her control. Its leaders also made hawkish statements about the non-viability of Pakistan and expressed the hope that Pakistan would soon fail and return to India.

A less widely known but historically very important unfriendly gesture by India was its move to cut trade ties with Pakistan in 1949. This happened when Britain devalued the pound and India followed suit by devaluing its currency. Pakistan, for economic reasons, decided not to devalue the Pakistani rupee. Taking offence at the thought of paying 144 Indian rupees for 100 Pakistani rupees, India decided to end all trade with Pakistan. Until then, the two countries had fairly open borders and commodities were traded freely. Since Pakistan did not have any industrial base of its own, it was dependent on trade with India for basic consumer goods. The embargo thus left Pakistani consumers without many basic products. Ironically, this turned out to be a blessing in disguise since it forced Pakistan to take the first concrete steps towards industrialization, thus ending its economic dependence on India which would have otherwise continued for the foreseeable future. In its response to the situation created by the Indian sanctions, the government of Pakistan looked mainly towards the merchant houses in Karachi due to their significantly greater entrepreneurial dynamism. As a result, the Mohajir dominated business community developed much greater political influence than its limited constituencies might have otherwise allowed.

The overt hostility from India, along with the fact that the bureaucracy in the early years was largely dominated by the immigrants who had suffered the most during the violence at the time of partition also played an important role in how the notions of Pakistani nationalism and national security came to be defined often at variance with the sentiments of the more nationalistic people of the smaller provinces of West Pakistan.

Apart from the external threat, there were also times when the military was called to assist the civilian authorities in various parts of the country. These including using the military for law and order in the districts near the border with India, managing the camps of the refugees who had come from India, rescue and relief operations during floods, preventing the smuggling of jute, food and medicines to India and managing the food supply during the 1956 grain shortage in East Pakistan, and even anti-locust drives and killing wild boars to protect crops on a few occasions. Most of such operations would have normally been carried out by civilian authorities, but since the nascent country did not have a well developed state machinery capable of dealing with such problems, the military was involved due to its ability to handle large scale logistics. Naturally, it added to the prestige and importance of the institution.

In this situation, progress on a democratic trajectory required strong political leadership that could ensure that opportunistic elements in the disproportionately powerful civil-military bureaucracy did not get any chance to highjack the political system. Unfortunately, after Liaqat Ali Khan, the country did not have such leadership. To make matters worse, Ghulam Muhammad, who had come from the bureaucracy, was elected governor general. He started acting like a dictator. As the constitution was delayed more and more, the establishment grew increasingly powerful by exploiting the differences within the political leadership.

The interplay between the three groups mentioned earlier played a vital role in the delaying of the constitution. Differences between East and West Pakistan emerged even during Jinnah’s period over the language issue. However, while accepting Bengali as a national language was practically easier once it was eventually realized how strongly the people of East Pakistan felt about it, a trickier problem related to the distribution of seats between the two wings. Numerically, East Pakistan had a small majority, which would give it slightly more representation in the lower house. But since there were four provinces in West Pakistan, equal representation for all units in the upper house would mean only 20% seats for East Pakistan in that house. This was neither fair nor acceptable to Bengalis. At the same time, there was also reluctance in West Pakistan to accept the numerical majority of East Pakistan. All this made it rather difficult to develop a formula enjoying widespread acceptance in both wings.

When the Basic Principles Committee gave its first report in 1950 suggesting a bicameral legislature with the upper house giving equal representation to all five units, equal powers for both houses of the parliament, Urdu as the national language and a strong president in the centre, it was totally out of touch with the sentiments in East Pakistan. That such recommendations were even laid on the table and thought to have a realistic chance of being accepted in East Pakistan only shows the dominance of the Mohajirs and certain segments belonging to the indigenous elites of West Pakistan. As the second report of the Basic Principles Committee, which suggested equal representation for the two wings in both houses, was rejected in West Pakistan on the erroneous grounds that it would establish Bengali domination, the process of constitution making came to a deadlock.

The Bogra formula offered a creative solution by suggesting that the lower house should have 300 seats divided on the basis of population and the upper house should have 50 seats divided equally between the five units. The two houses would thus have a total of 350 seats divided equally between the two wings. This gained widespread acceptance in both wings and the country was close to having a constitution on the basis of this formula in 1954 when governor general Ghulam Muhammad, with the full support of Ayub Khan and Iskandar Mirza, dissolved the constituent assembly to block a bill that prevented him from acting except on the advice of his ministers.

Based on the centralization oriented outlook of the establishment, the Bogra formula was soon shelved and all the units of West Pakistan were combined into a single unit in 1955 so that both wings of the country could have the status of single provinces.

One unit was not very popular in the small provinces of West Pakistan due to the ethnic differences between the four units. However, it found plenty of support in the political elites of Punjab and East Pakistan. The principle of parity denied the small numerical majority of East Pakistan and was therefore favoured by those who were reluctant to let Bengalis get a larger share in seats in accordance with their population. For East Pakistanis however, the merger of the West Pakistani provinces into one meant a substantial dilution of the overwhelming majority that West Pakistan would have otherwise enjoyed in the upper house. For this reason, it was not a lose-lose situation for East Pakistan either.

It was clear that any elected government needed to have considerable support in both wings in order to survive due to their nearly equal size. The aspirations of Bengalis could simply not be ignored in any democratic set up. It was due to this reason that constitutional proposals very unpopular in East Pakistan could not easily be bulldozed through. However, within West Pakistan, since Punjab was much larger, the smaller provinces could easily be ignored by forging alliances between Punjabis and East Pakistanis. This is exactly what happened in case of One Unit.

To take care of the procedural niceties, the opposition in Sindh, NWFP and Baluchistan, was temporarily neutralized by co-opting leaders from these parts of the country through various carrots such as promises of important positions in the government in return for their endorsement of One Unit.

The first constitution was thus based on One Unit and a unicameral legislature with equal seats for both wings. However, the promulgation of the constitution did not end the political fragmentation that had allowed Ghulam Muhammad, Iskandar Mirza and Ayub Khan to dominate the system in collusion with the bureaucracy. Soon, there was a growing movement in West Pakistan against One Unit and in September 1957, the provincial assembly of this wing passed a resolution demanding its dissolution. Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, an East Pakistani who had replaced Chaudhri Muhammad Ali as PM, was supporting One Unit and also trying to address the economic disparity between the two wings. In October 1957, he was forced to resign by Iskandar Mirza. Some say this was done under the influence of the business interests in Karachi which were not pleased by his moves to divert more funds towards East Pakistan. His successor, I. I. Chundrigar also lasted only for about two months before being forced to quit.

The next PM, Malik Feroz Khan Noon, belonged to a feudal family from Sargodha district, and his rise to power thus represented the ascendancy of the indigenous elites in Punjab. He was able to provide a relatively stable government by forging an alliance with Suhrawardy’s Awami League which was rapidly gaining strength in East Pakistan.

However, it turned out that this came too late. As demands for elections grew louder, it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep on delaying them under one pretext or another. Iskandar Mirza, who wanted to avoid elections and remain in power, felt alarmed by the situation, and finally imposed martial law through Ayub Khan in October 1958. Three weeks later, Ayub forced Iskandar Mirza out and took over as Pakistan’s first military dictator.

From the above analysis of the developments in the 1950s, it is clear that there were sharp divergences of interests between the various groups that joined Pakistan. Reconciling these interests to develop a widely acceptable constitution was demanding in itself, but the absence of strong leadership and well established political parties made it even more difficult. The serious differences between politicians, the initial challenge of making Pakistan viable by establishing its basic administrative and financial infrastructure in the presence of major constraints, and the hostility of India towards Pakistan made the civil-military bureaucracy overly powerful. It took about seven years after independence before the politicians finally managed to resolve the serious differences between the two wings in a way that could also satisfy the smaller provinces of West Pakistan under the Bogra formula. But by that time, Ghulam Muhammad, Iskandar Mirza and Ayub Khan were well entrenched and unwilling to let the political system function smoothly.

It must be said that despite the various problems and differences, the system was evolving, albeit slowly, and the politicians did demonstrate the ability to strike bargains satisfying a broader array of interest groups than our military governments have been willing to accommodate. The process was not very smooth, but it did finally lead to a constitutional formula enjoying widespread support in both wings of the country, if only the establishment would give it a chance. It can be argued that with a bit more unity among politicians against the establishment, and with a greater sense of urgency for making the constitution, things might have turned out differently. But then, it is possible that the politicians might not have realized how their differences would be exploited by the civil-military bureaucracy to such an extent that the country would be completely derailed from the democratic path.

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References and Comments

1. Pakistan: Fifty Years of Nationhood, Shahid Javed Burki, Westview Press, 1999

2. Articles by Shahid Javed Burki in Dawn

In the above book and some of his newspaper articles, Burki explains the demographic changes occurring during partition, the presence of the three different groups that joined Pakistan, how the trade embargo by India in 1949 forced the government of Pakistan to pay sudden attention to industrialization with the leading role taken up by the private sector dominated by the enterprising businessmen in the Mohajir community. His above book is a very interesting reading on the economic history of Pakistan and strongly recommended for anyone interested in Pakistan’s political economy.

3. A presentation by Professor Asim Khwaja (Harvard University) and Professor Atif Mian (University of Chicago) in which they explained the demographic changes due to the mass migrations at the time of partition and how the gap left by the exodus of Hindus was filled by the Muslim immigrants from the Hindu majority areas.

4. The story of Pakistan
http://www.storyofpakistan.com/

A useful on-line reference on the history of Pakistan.

5. Military, State and Society in Pakistan, Hasan-Askari Rizvi, Macmillan, 2000.

An interesting book on civil-military relations in Pakistan. It mentions the 1950s in some detail and discusses why and how the military became increasingly powerful. The chapter outlining the 1947-58 period gives some details of the frictions between the politicians as well as various operations for which the military was employed to assist civilian authorities.

6. BANGLAPEDIA: Basic Principles Committee
http://www.a-bangladesh.com/banglapedia/HT/B_0335.htm

A useful on-line reference that discusses the Basic Principles Committee, its reports in 1950 and 1952, the reaction to them in the two wings, the Bogra formula, and the dismissal of the constituent assembly by Ghulam Muhammad.

7. Ghulam Muhammad - Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghulam_Muhammad

8. Iskander Mirza - Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iskander_Mirza

9. Ayub Khan - Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayub_Khan#Early_years

10. Khawaja Nazimuddin - Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khawaja_Nazimuddin

11. Muhammad Ali Bogra - Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Ali_Bogra

12. Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy - Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huseyn_Shaheed_Suhrawardy#Political_life_in_East_Pakistan

13. Feroz Khan Noon - Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feroz_Khan_Noon

14. Constitutional Coup - Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_Coup

A wikipedia article discussing the dismissal of Khawaja Nazimuddin’s government and the dissolution of the constituent assembly by Ghulam Muhammad.

15. House of Habib - Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Habib

This is an interesting reading, especially the mention of the blank check given by Mohammad Ali Habib to Jinnah when Pakistan was in desperate need of funds when India had refused to give Pakistan its share of assets.

16. Memon personalities and their achievements:
http://www.memon.com/HTML/Personalities/PersonalitiesA.htm

This resource discusses many prominent Memon personalities including Adamjee and Hussain Kassim Dada who came to Pakistan and played an important role in the country’s early industrialization.

17. Mirza Ahmad Ispahani - Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirza_Ahmad_Ispahani

Among other interesting things, this article mentions M.A. Ispahani’s role in the creation of PIA. He established an airline (Orient airways) at the request of Jinnah in 1946. After partition, the airline’s base was shifted to Pakistan. Later the government of Pakistan created a state owned airline and invited Orient airways to merge with it. This merger created PIA.

• Center-Province Relations , Inter-Provincial Relations , 1955-1958 , 1951-1954 , GuestColumns