President Yahya Khan, commander-in-chief of the Pakistan army which six months ago stepped in to hold the country together has sweepingly conceded the basic demands for regional autonomy. Yahya Khan’s predecessor, President Ayub, quit because his system had disintegrated under pressure of extreme demands for regional autonomy which if granted, promised to leave Pakistan with a loose federal structure under a very week Central Government.

The army was supposed to prevent this. But now Yahya Khan has, by fiat, recreated the several small provinces which, in the mid-1950s, were merged to form the single administrative and political unit of West Pakistan. He has also decreed that General Elections should be held on October 5, 1970, on the basis of one man, one vote.

Thus he has abolished the weightage whereby Pakistan’s West Wing has been politically dominant despite the East Wing’s larger population. The essential problem of Pakistan is the cultural scarp, invisible but immense, which separates the ambiance of the Middle East from that of South-East Asia, and which falls between Pakistan’s two divided wings. Except for the United Arab Republic, when that momentarily included Syria, history has not seen another State like the Pakistan with which, in 1947, the Muslims of British India emerged from the trauma of the British withdrawal.

The split is 1,000 miles wide

It is divided not only by 1,000 miles but by the interposition of an unfriendly power, India; not only by race but by language and culture. It is linked only by Islam and, while religion can be a divisive wedge of unequalled strength, as a tie it is a rope of sand. Long standing Bengali demands for autonomy, sharpened by the fact that the lion’s share of development is enjoyed by the West Wing, now amount to separatism. The six-point programme of the Awami League, the party which makes the running in East Pakistan, would leave the Central Government responsible only for defence and foreign affairs and dependent upon the provinces for revenue. It was the introduction of this demand in the negotiations between President Ayub and the politicians earlier this year that made him throw in his hand and pass the problem of governing Pakistan over to his commander-in-chief.
 
But now President Yahya Khan has gone far towards conceding the East Pakistani demand for separate economies; he said in his recent broadcast that the people of both wings should control their own resources and development “as long as it does not adversely affect working of the national government at the centre”. The task of evolving a constitutional balance that will meet the President’s prescription is to be left to the National Assembly to be elected in 1970 - and it is to be given just 120 days to complete the task. The politicians of Pakistan have long maintained that general elections and a parliamentary form of government would cure most of the country’s political ills. President Yahya Khan is now challenging them to show that their medicine works.

The president’s bold step promises to take him and the army out of an increasingly awkward predicament. They had imposed a martial law of the velvet glove type. But the velvet has begun to wear thin. Murderous riots in East Pakistan last month brought the army into collision with the strongest political force in the country - Bengali Nationalism. The military strength in the Eastern Province had been trebled to three divisions, probably enough to hold anything short of a general uprising. But the great bulk of these troops are Punjabis, the very people whom the Bengalis of the East Wing most resent as exploiters. The targets of the mobs this time were people who, as Muslims, had sought refuge in East Pakistan from riot and massacre at the hands of Hindus. Now they are victims again, but this time because of their language and origin, and the fact that they are Muslims does them no good.

The intervention of the troops against Bengali mobs in protection of non- Bengalis can only have hardened the feeling in East Pakistan that the martial law regime amounts to foreign rule. Such pressures and problems made it mandatory for President Yahya Khan to prove that he had meant it when he said that his only desire was to prepare for an early transfer of power to an elected government so that the soldiers could return to their barracks.
 

The demand is for franchise

The problem was much the same in the West Wing. There the politicians of the three former provinces of Sind, Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier had also been complaining about the domination and exploitation of the Punjab. The Punjabis, energetic, enterprising, likely to be better educated than most and as clannish as any, sit at the top of the totem pole in Pakistan, dominating the civil service as well as the army. Consequently, the first thrust of regional politics is to dislodge them.

The Baluch tribesmen have been in arms against the single unit system for years, involving the army in repeated suppressive and punitive campaigns; the Pathans of the North-West are equally determined to see the province that Curzon created once more separated from Punjab; and the Sindhis have not been far behind in the clamour for abolition of the single unit.

Thousands of acres of newly irrigated land in Sind have been allotted to retired army officers - in other words to Punjabis. Local farmers have been left, furious at the colonisation of their lands by outsiders and there were fears for the lives of these settlers before martial law was reimposed. The demands for regional autonomy focus on the universal demand for an immediate return to a parliamentary form of government with direct elections and universal franchise. “Give us elections and the people will learn how to work democracy”. - this faith is strong among politicians from Peshawar to Chittagong. To the politicians of Pakistan ideology is no more important than it is to their fellow professionals in the rest of the Subcontinent. These are the surf-riders of politics. For them the destination is not only unimportant, it is an anti-climax. Their idea of the perfect wave is a powerful cause which will sweep them along indefinitely.

The task of writing a constitution will be far more difficult now than it was when Pakistan’s first constitution was drawn up between 1947 and 1956.

The memory of those self-indulgent nine years doubtless made President Yahya Khan put his tight, 120-day deadline on the new constitution-makers. In the early 1950s Pakistan still felt the emotional and political momentum of the partition movement that had cut the state out of British India; now, with the party system atomised into regional and factional groupings, it is going to be extremely difficult to agree on more than the basic outline of a federal policy. The soldiers, it can be said, are highly sceptical of the ability of the politicians to produce a workable constitution, still more to make it work. Their highest real hope has been that the politicians will be able to put together a card house of compromise which will stand long enough for the army to step back for a moment, their hands clean, their commitment fulfilled. Then they should be ready to step in again, perhaps even by invitation, when the card house collapses or when the divisive pressuresjn the country are succeeding too well.

President Yahya Khan’s present concessions certainly go farther than many senior soldiers desired. The possibility that he will eventually be displaced by an officer readier with the iron fist cannot be ignored.

The East is nearing famine

The army in Pakistan seems to be on the same road as its military colleagues in Burma and it is not likely that it will ever leave the political stage. For as far ahead as can be seen - or until it fails - it will be involved in the political task of holding together a country that lacks natural cohesion and is torn by powerful nationalistic sentiments in the regions. The President’s concessions will take much of the strain out of the present situation but the acute problems of government continue. East Pakistan is on the verge of famine. Starry-eyed over the success of the “Green Revolution” in West Pakistan, the Central Government earlier this year declared, over protests from East Pakistan, that the country would need no grain supplies from the US this year. Now, faced with a shortfall in East Pakistan of 1.5 million tons, the Government is hard pressed to buy enough grain in the world market. The President said the shortfall was to be made up with shipment from the West Wing; but even if that can be managed, there will still be an enormous problem of distribution before the inching tide of famine that already threatens the poorest in the villages can be pushed back. If the food situation does get out of hand in East Pakistan, the martial law authorities will have to take the brunt, and that can only harden the Bengalis’ determination to become their own masters. All in all, the decade under the Ayub regime, which many Pakistanis felt was stifling and which plainly failed in the end, may look much better when it is compared with Pakistan’s next decade.