Uprising in Pakistan: How to Bring Down a Dictatorship

UPRISING IN PAKISTAN

By the same author

NON-FICTION

Pakistan: Military Rule or People’s Power (1970)

1968 and After: Inside the Revolution (1978)

Can Pakistan Survive? (1982)

Revolution from Above: Where Is the Soviet Union Going? (1988)

The Clash of Fundamentalisms (2002)

The Nehrus and the Gandhis (new edition 2005)

The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad (2010)

The Dilemmas of Lenin: Terrorism, War, Empire, Love, Revolution (2017)

The Extreme Centre: A Second Warning (2018)

FICTION

The Islam Quintet

Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree (1992)

The Book of Saladin (1998)

The Stone Woman (1999)

The Sultan of Palermo (2005)

Night of the Golden Butterfly (2010)

The Fall-of-Communism Trilogy

Redemption (1991)

Fear of Mirrors (1998)

UPRISING IN PAKISTAN

HOW TO BRING DOWN

A DICTATORSHIP

Tariq Ali

First published by Verso 2018

The chapters of this book first appeared in Pakistan: Military Rule or

People’s Power? by Tariq Ali, published by Jonathan Cape 1970

© Tariq Ali 2018

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-537-2

ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-539-6 (US EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-538-9 (UK EBK)

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Typeset in Garamond Pro by MJ&N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall

Printed in the UK by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

Contents

Preface

A Necessary Introduction

Maps

1. The Beginning of the End

2. The Revolt Spreads

3. The Fall of the House of Ayub

4. Pakistan and the Permanent Revolution

Appendix I. Chronology of the Uprising: 7 November 1968–26 March 1969

Appendix II. On Pakistan and National Unity

Appendix III. Resolution on Economic Policy

Appendix IV. East Pakistan Students All-Party Committee of Action Eleven-Point Demands

Notes

Index

Preface

When Pakistan arose out of the tumult of Independence and Partition in 1947, it was a creature bearing two vast geographical wings – East Pakistan and West Pakistan – separated by a thousand miles of Indian territory, and one much weightier than the other. The majority of the population (60 per cent) lived in the East, but the bulk of the army and the civil service – a colonial inheritance – were in the West. From the very beginning it was the civil service that dominated the country. It quickly became apparent that this big misshapen bird was a dodo and would never fly. The reason for this lies largely with the western elite, which treated the eastern wing as a semi-colony.

Might a shared language allow the two wings to work together? To that end, it was decided, less than a year after Independence, that Urdu would be the mother tongue of all future Pakistanis. At the time, Urdu was the language of the literary elite and the Muslim refugees from India. In West Pakistan, it had sat alongside four other indigenous languages: Punjabi, Pashto, Sindhi and Balochi. Henceforth, it was decreed, the Punjabis and the Bengalis would speak Urdu.

Nobody asked why or pointed out that the supreme leader who had created this strange bird, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, barely knew a word of Urdu himself. English was his favoured tongue. At best, he managed a little pidgin Urdu. Quite a few British civil servants and officers spoke it better than he did. Nonetheless Urdu was imposed without any opposition in the Punjabi heartland of the West wing.

In contrast, East Pakistan consisted largely of Bengalis, who were proud of their own refined language, known locally as Bangla, and a literature that was over a thousand years old. It was foolish of the Western overlords to announce that Bangla would take second place to Urdu. When the frail supreme leader arrived in Dhaka in 1948, he was given a reception that shook him to the core: tens of thousands of angry demonstrators, spearheaded by students, hurling stones at the motorcade and chanting anti-Jinnah slogans, made it clear that nobody could rob them of their language. The police opened fire, and some students were killed, later to be commemorated with a ‘language martyrs’ memorial’.

Pakistan had yet to celebrate its first anniversary. Jinnah did not stay too long in Dhaka, poor man. The massacres that accompanied Partition in 1947 had taken a heavy toll on him. After visiting a refugee camp with Mian Iftikharuddin, the Minister for the Rehabilitation of Refugees in the Punjab, a shaken Jinnah confessed, ‘I had no idea it would be like this.’ What he had really wanted was a smaller version of India with Muslims as the dominant community, a utopia that was never to be, though a sizeable section of Bengali Hindus stayed on in East Pakistan. A few did so in Sind as well. But these were exceptions. The Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province had been through a brutal process of ethnic cleansing.

The 1948 ruling lasted five years, after which time Bangla and Urdu were granted equal status with Urdu as state languages. What had happened was a clear warning to the powers in West Pakistan. Long-term coexistence between the two wings could only happen on the basis of complete equality. Power sharing and economic development had to go hand in hand.

Needless to say, the very opposite happened. Economically, East Pakistan was treated like a colony with most of the foreign currency earned from jute being used for investment projects and lining pockets in the West. Politically, the provincial elections of 1954 led to the formation of a radical United Front in the Eastern wing committed to serious land reform and withdrawal from the defence and security pacts signed with the United States. This development caused panic in Washington. The US feared that a general election in the country as a whole might lead to a government willing to embrace non-alignment on the Indian model.

This Cold War fear triggered the first of many military coups in Pakistan, this one with the explicit aim of preventing the first general election, scheduled for April 1959. In October 1958 the army seized power. ‘As far as we are concerned,’ General Ayub Khan told his first cabinet meeting, ‘there is only one embassy in our country. That is the American Embassy.’

Khan ruled for ten years, during which the disparities between the two wings grew. Twenty-two families dominated the economy, all of them from West Pakistan. I have narrated this history in Pakistan: Military Rule or People’s Power?, which I wrote in 1969 after participating in the latest phase of the uprising.¹ The chapters describing what happened have been edited and reproduced here with only minor proofreading changes. I have left them largely untouched to preserve both authenticity and tone.

The 1968 uprising was an eruption of hope for the entire country. For the first time ever, East and West Pakistan were united from below in a common struggle against a military dictatorship. The spark that lit the fire came from the most politically ‘backward’ section of the country, not from its intellectual capitals, Dhaka and Karachi. The chronology and the maps published in this book highlight how the fire spread.

From the outset, religious groups and their student appendages found themselves marginalized. In contrast, two political currents came to the aid of the dictatorship in both wings: the Jamaat-i-Islami and the major Maoist groups. The former saw the leaders of the uprising as a collection of radicals, socialists and communists hostile to politically organized religion, which was true. The Maoists, on the other hand, followed the Beijing line: Chinese state interests required that Field Marshal Ayub maintain a stable regime, one characterized by China as ‘anti-imperialist’, a description that made Ayub’s senior advisers roar with laughter.

Once fighting began, the Maoists refrained from physically assaulting the students and their allies who were battling it out on the streets. The Islamists were not so restrained but always met with physical and political defeat.

In both parts of Pakistan, the revolutionary upsurge lasted from October 1968 to March 1969 and it resulted in the overthrow of the dictator Ayub, marking a turning point in the history of the Indo-Pak subcontinent. It shows quite clearly that despite the siege mentality of Pakistani politics (the fear of communist ‘invasion’ in the Cold War years, the threat posed by India, and so on) the masses had succeeded in breaking through the ideological straitjacket in which they had been confined since the coup of October 1958.

What began initially as a student revolt, which for the first two months was sustained solely by the heroism and determination of the Pakistani student movement, later enveloped the lower strata of the petty bourgeoisie and finally brought into play on a nationwide level the growing strength of the urban proletariat.

The upsurge was spontaneous, and although there had been a foretaste of this unpremeditated working-class militancy during the 1966 railway workers’ strike, the wildness with which the protests burst onto the Pakistani political scene took the established ‘left’ parties completely by surprise. For the first few weeks they refused to intervene and dismissed the revolt as just another student struggle that would be crushed with ease by the dictatorship. The ruling class, too, laboured under the same misapprehension. It was only after the December Incidents, when a student call for a general strike in some urban centres met with an immediate and unambiguous response from the workers, that the students themselves began to realize the real strength of the movement they had created.

The upsurge engulfed every urban centre in Pakistan. In West Pakistan many small towns formerly thought politically insignificant showed their mettle for the first time as the urban masses battled with the police and attacked private property. Nonetheless, the joint student–worker front engaging with the army and police, the factory occupations, the gheraos, the winning of unbelievably high wage demands, and the possibility of dual power in some cities were not enough to pave the way for a seizure of state power or to make dual power a reality. The struggle lacked a revolutionary vanguard party or even the small revolutionary groups typical of France in May 1968, of Mexico in October 1968, or of Argentina at the beginning of 1969.

It was an absence apparent during the week the structure of authority in Dhaka, the capital city of East Pakistan, completely collapsed. In that brief window of time, the initiative lay in the hands of the Student Action Committee (SAC). But instead of mobilizing the masses and implementing some of its eleven-point demands or at least posing the question of their implementation, instead of declaring Dhaka a liberated city, the SAC took over the role of the bourgeois state. In the end the biggest success of the revolutionary moment was to prevent the disruption of the test match between Pakistan and the Marylebone Cricket Club.

What opportunities were missed? No effort was made by any grouping to set up a people’s council to govern the city with representatives from the SAC, the peasant associations and the factories. This was clearly a possibility, as many militants admitted in private discussions afterwards. And if steps had been taken in that direction it would have transformed the situation overnight. It would have meant that when the bourgeois parties united under the framework of the DAC (Democratic Action Committee) started to negotiate with Ayub, a people’s council would have been a real alternative.

Despite the absence of revolutionary parties, there can be no doubt that the five-month upsurge represented a major step forward for the toiling masses. It produced a growing feeling of self-confidence among them and a realization of their own strength. This leap of consciousness enabled ordinary Pakistanis, in particular the industrial working class, to continue their struggle for better working conditions and higher wages after the upsurge had been halted by the imposition of martial law and the take-over of power by the army commander-in-chief, General Yahya Khan.

Despite stringent military regulations banning strikes, there was a continuation of the strike wave in both parts of the country after March 1969. The most startling aspect of this action was its spontaneity: the trade union movement in Pakistan was extremely weak, and the bulk of the official trade union ‘leaders’ were in the pay of either the government or the bosses, and sometimes both. This led to great impromptu militancy at factory level. Despite the fact that workers had been shot dead by the police during lockouts and that their leaders had been imprisoned and whipped, the government was unable to halt the strike wave. And it was precisely in order to restrain the mass movement that the military government was forced to offer concessions such as the promised general election of October 1970 (which was postponed to December ‘because of the floods in East Pakistan’) on the basis of adult franchise.

There can be no doubt that the election campaigns of the bourgeois and reformist parties succeeded in diverting this militancy, but the ruling class was mistaken to imagine that a liberal-democratic regime would be able to contain the movement.

Disintegration, when it came, was not gradual. The general election of 1970 gave an overall majority to the nationalist Awami League, which drew its power from the eastern side of the country. In the west, the newly created Pakistan People’s Party led by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto defeated all the traditional parties. Peasants disregarded their landlords and voted for the PPP en masse. Had Bhutto done a deal with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman of the Awami League and accepted a federal structure for the country as a whole with equal rights on every level, a new Pakistan could have been built.

Instead Bhutto, the most popular leader in the western wing, ganged up with the Pakistan army, refused to accept the majority vote, and gave the green light for the army to crush the aspirations of the Bengali people. The rest is a history that I have written about elsewhere. An uprising that began by uniting Pakistan was commandeered by politicians and generals. Blaming India for taking advantage during the civil war that ensued doesn’t absolve Bhutto and the generals. It was a disgrace.

Neither East Pakistan – Bangladesh as it became in 1971 – nor West Pakistan remained stable for very long. In Bangladesh a group of young officers supported by Pakistan and US collaborators assassinated Sheikh Mujibur Rahman