| The dust jacket of Mr. Altaf Gauhar’s book Ayub Khan: Pakistan’s first military ruler gives the game away. The monochrome picture on the cover is of the subject of the book, Field Marshal Ayub Khan, looking directly into the eyes of the reader. The inside flap has one of the author, in colour, his bespectacled eyes averted off page, almost as if he wants to avoid eye-contact with his reader. The very placement of the two pictures, one behind the other, could not have been more revealing, for it seems to betray the real scheme of the book, that behind every public figure there is invariably someone else, a smaller person, wanting to be seen pulling the strings. |
| Mr. Gauhar’s life of Ayub Khan is in fact an account of the dictator’s specific years in power –from October 1958, when he commandeered power from his co-conspirator Iskander Mirza, until 25 March 1969, when reading the ‘abdication’ speech written for him by Mr. Gauhar, he called upon General Yahya Khan to fulfil his ‘legal and constitutional responsibility’ and to take over the country, rendering back to another Caesar that which rightly belonged to the people. [EXTRACT] |
Published in THE NATION 9 Dec. 1993, and reprinted in THE BARK OF A PEN (2001). |
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