Observer (London)

One again, the unhappy people of Pakistan have failed to assert their sovereignty in their own land. And never before has it been so nearly within their grasp. By their winter rebellion they had compelled the retirement of President Ayub Khan and won from him the promise of a parliamentary democracy. But now, abruptly, the slow advance towards democratic freedom has been halted and power transferred, not to the people, but to General Yahya Khan, Commander-in-Chief of the Army, who at once imposed martial law for the third time in Pakistan’s short, sad history. Once more, the people find themselves totally subject to soldiers and officials, as their forefathers were for centuries under the British and the Mogul Emperors.

What has happened in Pakistan is, indeed, recognisably a colonial type of crisis. One has only to look at a map of the Indian subcontinent, and think about the bizarre origins of Pakistan, to be persuaded that a crisis of this kind was inevitable from the start and would still have occurred even if Ayub Khan had never seized power a decade ago. The country was created in 1947 - on the very eve of Britain's withdrawal from her Indian Empire - to provide a homeland for Indian Muslims. The plan was too vaguely conceived by Jinnah and his Muslim League, with the too-hurried concurrence of the British, then anxious to get home.

The the two regions of British India assigned to Pakistan were those in which Muslims were chiefly concentrated. These occurred in the West Punjab and in East Bengal, at the start and at the finish of imperial Mogul penetration eastwards across North India along the fertile line of the Gangetic plain. Even in their reasons for accepting the Muslim faith from their Mogul overlords. The two regions differed. West Punjab lay across the main lines of communication between India and the traditional Islamic world. The East Bengalis, on the other band, owed their conversion to a weird and total isolation.

Most of East Pakistan is a hot alluvial plain through which, in countless serpentine channels, the mightiest rivers of India - the Brahmaputra and the Ganges - find their way to the sea. From the air it looks like a giant jigsaw puzzle, set afloat on the surface of a lake and then shaken lightly apart. The channels are constantly shifting and so cannot readily be bridged. In this watery and inaccessible land, the people remained Buddhist, and therefore amiably vulnerable to the aggressiveness of the new faith of Islam, long after most other North Indians had evolved the tribal securities of Hinduism and were able to offer effective resistance.

As a result Pakistan is in two parts, ludicrously separated from each other by a thousand miles of hostile Indian territory. Nothing ever bound them together except a common faith and common fear of a raw deal in Hindu dominated India. There is good reasons to suppose that the original intention - if anything so firm as an intention ever existed - was that each of these regions should be a separate, independent Muslim State. But once the two were politically united, it became a certainty that West Pakistan would dominate East Pakistan. It was in 1947, and not in 1958 when General Ayub seized power with the help of his army, that the seeds of this winter's rebellion were sown.

The two wings of Pakistan differ from each other in ways which almost inevitably give the West the whip hand. The West is a solid and stable land of mountains, plains and desert; the East a land of shifting waters. The people of the West are stolid farmers and vigorous, even, blood-thirsty, frontiersmen. The Bengalis in the East are garrulous and sensitive, winging rapidly from elation to despondency, and owing chiefly to the scornful British a reputation for timidity not borne out by recent events.

Full of Horror

The birth of the West was traumatic, full of horror, open to despair. It caused a mass migration of peoples rarely seen in the world since prehistoric times, with Sikhs and Hindus in flight towards India and Muslim peasants in flight towards their promised land. Where the two waves met there were massacres in which uncounted thousands died. Overnight, the West lost all its economic leaders, who were exclusively Hindu. There was virtually no government. Yet in spite of these terrors and disabilities the West created a viable State of which they are entitled to be proud. The birth of the East, on the other hand, was relatively mild, even dismal. There, the effect of Partition was chiefly to separate East Bengal from its source of life - the industrial seaport of Calcutta. The region was left as a vast kitchen-g&rden of raw materials, massively overcrowded and poor, subject to huge natural disasters in the form of cyclones and floods. It became, in fact, a typical colony, virtually a backward province of the West. And it was chiefly to rescue itself from this condition that inspired by a passionate Bengali nationalism, its people rose in rebellion this winter.

This does not mean, of course, that the Ayub regime had nothing to do with the uprising. However benevolent the personal intentions of the President may have been, his regime became in practice increasingly intolerable to the Bengalis. It was headed by a Governor now most leniently described by his East Pakistani critics as ‘uncouth’. He is alleged to have kept a portrait of Ayub in his bedroom and allowed it to be known that in reaching all major decisions he was guided by ‘celestial light’ reaching him directly from the President’s House in Rawalpindi. It is said that he destroyed the image of Ayub for the Bengalis and had material support in this enterprise from officials who were often arrogant, cruel and expatriate.

It might simply the current crisis - without much reducing its threat to the survival of Pakistan - if we could say that West Pakistan was itself united as the dominant Power. But this is not so. In this colonial situation. West Pakistan is not at all a United Kingdom. The role of the English has been played by the industrious and unimaginative Punjabis, who have supported a glamorous Pathan elite. They are today surrounded by the rebellious regions of Baluchistan, North-West Frontier and Sind, who yearn for local freedom far more aggressively than their British counterparts - the Scots, the Welsh and the Cornish.

In such a context, General Yahya’s declared desire simply to restore ‘law and order’ , is bound to have an ominous ring. As we should know, since we wrote it, the phrase comes straight from the vocabulary of colonialism. And in spite of the admirable message it seeks convey to the outside world, it has too often meant in fact the forceful restoration of unjust laws and of a repressive order. It might be thought wrong to question so soon the good intention of General Yahya, who has been even more emphatic than General Ayub was in 1958 in promising an early return to constitutional ways. Unlike Ayub, he has not banned the political parties, though with martial law he has heavily fettered their critical powers and has forbidden political meetings. But there are factors in the new situation which seem less hopeful.

One is that the Pakistan Army can scarcely be regarded as immaculately impartial. It has been the backbone of the Ayub regime and has benefited materially from this arrangement. Its most effective units are themselves Punjabi and Pathan. It has now inevitably restored the authority of the regime’s chief officials. Another is that there are powerful forces still above ground in West Pakistan who do not wish to see the regime, or another one like it, discarded in favour of parliamentary democracy. President Ayub himself seems dispirited and disillusioned. He has evidently been bewildered by his recent discovery that most of his people detest his regime - a fact kept from him by an almost totally servile or intimidated Press and by one of the biggest and most bogus public relations operations the modern world has known.

The hell with it

In fact, history may show that by monstrously overreaching itself, this PR operation was the first cause of the Pakistan rebellion. Required to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Ayub’s regime, the PR boys naming this epoch the Decade of Development and Reform, began pouring out accounts of how splendid everything was in Pakistan. Extravagant tributes to the success of the regime came almost daily from Radio Pakistan and every third day there was a eulogistic supplement in all the Government controlled papers. Thousands of Pakistanis who were not conscious of drawing any benefit at all became increasingly restless. The climax came last October when Radio Pakistan did a broadcast on the splendour of the regime’s educational programme. This was the last straw. Deeply disgruntled students, jointly crying The hell with it!’ marched out of their shabby hostels in Karachi, attacked the radio building in the city - and the rebellion had begun.

Even so there are still officials of the Ayub regime who are far from willing to give up the ghost and lose the unique power they have enjoyed for so long. More over, there are learned divines in Pakistan who simply do not believe that the sovereignty of the people is possible in an Islamic State. For them the laws of life are completely and finally laid down in the Holy Koran and the Sunna. Any addition by way of a mundane Statute Book is in their view not only unnecessary but blasphemous. In East Pakistan the Islamic faith expresses itself as a simple piety, the chief comfort and reassurance of the poor. But in West Pakistan Islam is a mighty and, by democratic standards, reactionary political force, embodied in the Jamaat-I- Islami and given to provoking trouble in the interests of the faith.

To elements such as these, the imposition of martial law must seem a good thing. Even those who wish to see the people of Pakistan burst through into democratic freedom concede that some kind of restraint on popular turbulence had become necessary. But did it have to be martial law, with its harsh threats of flogging or death for those who oppose it? The original revolution, as made by the students, had been, though violent, a rational operation of its kind. But then the upheaval spread through the countryside of East Pakistan, where villagers imposed a dreadful retributive justice upon their local overlords. It spread also to the ill-paid workers of the cities, whose strikes threatened to halt the slow march towards democracy. It had become a kind of idiocy, understandable only to those who do not expect illiterate and impoverished people to take an educated view of their opportunities.

But this turbulence had little or nothing to do with the real cause of unrest - the determination of people of the ‘nations’ within Pakistan to win local freedom and to escape from domination by the fist. There is no reason to suppose that the purely aberrant troubles could not have been controlled by an interim Government of popular leaders. The politicians were already on the scene and were behaving sensibly and with restraint. There was no sign of angry dissatisfaction with their limited early achievements. Even in East Pakistan, where the people had demanded an immediate promise of full autonomy, there had been no outburst when their leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, had to return from Rawalpindi to Dacca and announce his present failure.

It seems that the people were reasonably content with the firm promise they had been given of a loosely federal future for Pakistan and were willing, at least for the time being, to leave the special ‘colonial’ problems of the East to be resolved by a sympathetic and properly elected Parliament. Even those politicians who had returned to the proximity of power from the wilderness to which Ayub had dismissed them did not seem the entirely disreputable lot we had been led to expect. Even the two mavericks do not look like wild men upon closer inspection. Mr. Z. A. Bhutto, the rich and sophisticated former Foreign Minister of the Ayub regime, had given an unlikely performance as a man of the people. But he had not overstepped the limits set upon this sort of thing in, say, the politics of the United States and was promoting a wholly rational alternative to parliamentary democracy. And in spite of his Old Testament ferocity and his patent links with Peking, even the ancient Maulana Bhashani has something endearing about him, as one who for more than 60 years has tried to arrange a peasant revolt without marked success.

But, until General Yahya stepped in, the crisis was being more and more hopefully, dominated by two reassuring figures. One was Sheikh Mujib, the new voice from the East. The other was Air Marshal Asghar Khan, the strength of whose virtues is palpable. He is a man of immense compassion, relaxed and modern in his outlook, and yet practising with contentment that simplicity of life dictated by Islam. He does not believe that Pakistan ought to be a theocracy, but would welcome its return to some of the Islamic idealism which inspired its creation. His desire to see sovereignty be stowed the people of Pakistan is genuine and is evidently not motivated by any strong conviction that this arrangement will necessarily bring him to the top.

His warnings

Nothing has done more to set the present intentions of the Army in a dubious light than Asghar Khan’s predictions. A week or more before General Yahya took over, the Air Marshal was offering agonised warnings to the people that their lawlessness was being engineered by enemies of democracy inside the old regime. He told them flatly that a chance was being sought to stop all progress towards democracy by imposing martial law. He listed the earlier occasions in Pakistan history when last-minute arbitrary intervention of this sort had dashed current hopes of popular liberty.

Now Asghar Khan alone among the political leaders, has openly challenged the authority of General Yahya and by implication, questioned his intentions. He has demanded the right to hold a convention of the new party he is trying to form - the Justice Party. The army has refused to allow this respectable gathering, even though it is difficult to see how such an event could possibly disturb the peace. If Asghar Khan persists, and speaks more sharply than he has done so far against the restraints now being imposed on democracy by martial law, he will run the risk of ten years’ rigorous imprisonment.

If General Yahya has nothing of the sort in mind, he could quite easily make his benevolent intentions clear. He could announce that the sole function of his Army in the present crisis is to hold the ring while the business of creating a democracy goes forward. But if instead the General arrests any of the popular leaders, even the wayward Maulana Bhashani, we will know at once that his aims are different. And we must fear that trouble on a massive scale will occur in Pakistan.