Athar Osama August 6th, 2007
In the last episode, we looked at the first four years of Ayub Khan Martial Law in Pakistan. This period, as the write up indicated, was marked with tremendous amount of progress, policy activism, and legislation on a number of different fronts. Philip E. Jones, in his doctoral dissertation titled “Pakistan People’s Party: Rise to Power”, notes that Ayub’s martial law regime evolved its policies around three main objectives:
- The first objective of the martial law regime was the expansion and rationalization of national authority whereby an attempt was made to “replace the negativism of self, group, and provincial interest with a positive programme of national development” (p. 27). Ayub and his fellow generals and technocrats believed that “prolonged effectiveness was sufficient to bring legitimacy to the institutions and the programs that he sponsored” (ibid).
- The second objective of the martial law regime focused on rapid economic development. This was achieved through expansion in state’s economic planning capacity and creation of institutions for central planning, policy innovation, and implementation. Ayub relied on experts and specialists—as against the generalist bureaucrats, as has been the case in the past decade—that formed the core of his policy-making apparatus. A number of new state organs were developed, e.g. Pakistan Industrial Development Corporation (PIDC) and Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA) to facilitate in this activity.
- The third and final objective of the martial law regime was the stabilization of the political process by “depoliticizing it through institutional innovation”. This was primarily achieved through the creation and implementation of his Basic Democracies Scheme to create a loyal cadre of people willing and able to indirectly participate in the political process and the usage of EBDO regulations to clean the political field of rival politicians. (Jones, 2003, p. 26-8)
General Mohammad Ayub Khan—by now a Self-Appointed Field Marshall—seemed a different kind of Chief Martial Law Administrator than the ones Pakistan has seen since, namely, Generals Yahya, Zia , and Musharraf.
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Athar Osama July 23rd, 2007
By: Athar Osama
The Reluctant General or the “President-in-Waiting”?
It is often claimed that Pakistan Army was an unwilling recipient of political power at the time when Ayub Khan took over the reigns of the country that it only stepped in when all political options had failed miserably and Pakistan was on a brink of becoming an irrelevant state. While there is some truth to the contention that myopic Pakistani politicians of the 1950s had failed miserably in achieving consensus on only a handful of important, albeit contentious, constitutional issues such as the relationship between Pakistani provinces, between provinces and the center, and the role of religion in the Pakistani state, and in doing so had lost the initiative completely, it would also be a incorrect to put the entire blame of this on the politicians alone.
Ever since its independence in 1947, with the minor exception of the first four years under Jinnah and Liaquat, Pakistan had been ruled by bureaucrats and bureaucrats-turned-politicians under the guise of a democratic dispensation. These bureaucrats were openly contemptuous of the politicians and did not let any opportunity go by to either
make them appear incompetent or remove them from power, if necessary. The story of the second part of the first decade of governance in Pakistan (1952-58) can hardly be termed as democracy in the same way as it is often conceived in the western world or even practiced at that very time in neighboring India.
While the Army was a silent spectator in this game of one-upmanship between the politicians and the bureaucrats for much of this time—during majority of which the bureaucrats ruled from behind the scenes—it was by no means a disinterested in spectator. The story of Pakistan Army’s involvement in the country’s politics—behind the scenes at first, much more flagrant later on—is the essentially the story of one man’s military professionalism and political aspirations.
General Mohammad Ayub Khan became the first Pakistani to have become the Commander-in-Chief of the Pakistan Army in 1951 (Wikipedia, 2007). Born in 1907 in NWFP as a son to a risaldar-major in the British Indian Army, Ayub Khan went to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst in 1926 and fought in Burma during the second world-war. At the time of the Partition, Ayub was a Brigadier in the Boundary Force established to quell violence in Punjab—and while the venture failed miserably, the experience would have a profound impact on his outlook in life and towards India. In these early days, as General Officer Commanding (GOC) of East Pakistan in 1948, Ayub also showed considerable political acumen and the ability to make compromises where necessary (Cloughley, 1999, p. 24).
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Athar Osama July 23rd, 2007
By: Athar Osama
Socio-Economic and Political Reforms of Ayub’s Era-I (1958-62)
With the power firmly in the hands of the Chief Martial Law Administrator, he set upon the task of creating country of his vision. Feldman (1967, p. 44) describes the state of the President’s mind in the following words:
“He knew that he was expected to collaborate unstintingly with a government confessedly authoritarian, claiming to derive its sanction from the necessities of a desperate situation and promising, unequivocally, to justify itself by a resolute purification of public life, by a program of indispensable reforms, and by adoption of a fresh constitution which would adequately and appropriately satisfy the citizen’s right to speak and participate in his country’s affairs”
Ayub Khan adopted an essentially technocratic mode of government depending upon a number of committees and commissions to help in policy formulation. In all, the Martial Law Administration, during its entire tenure, set up as many as 25 different commissions to deliberate on policy matters within a wide variety of domains. These included:
- Company Law Commission - Constitution Commission - Credit Inquiry Commission
- Education Reform Commission - Federal Capital Commission - Finance Commission
- Food & Agriculture Commission - Franchise Commission - Jute Inquiry Commission
- Land Reforms Commission - Land Revenue Commission - Manpower Commission
- Law Reform Commission - Maritime Commission - Medical Reforms Commission
- Pay & Services Commission - Police Commission - Press Commission
- Price Commission - Scientific Commission - Social Evils Commission
- Sport, Culture, Art, & Literature Com. – Sugar Commission - Taxation Inquiry Commission
- Textile Inquiry Commission
The sheer scope of the subjects that these commissions dealt with makes one wonder about the volume of policy work carried out in the early years of Ayub Khan’s era. It also makes one think as to how, without carrying out these necessary reforms in a whole variety of different areas, the country was being run in the preceding nine years of its existence. Clearly, not every one of the commissions formed during Ayub Khan’s regime undertook work of equal importance, nor did they achieve similar results, but the fact that the government was able to devote its attention to all these areas cannot escape one’s attention.
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- Ayub Khan , Foreign Policy , Kashmir , Martial Law , Economics , Society & Culture , Politics , 1958-1962 , Military , Education , History in a Nutshell
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