Quaid-e-Azam M. A. Jinnah gave Muslims a country; Field Marshal Ayub Khan gave the Pakistan Army a state.
Invisible traces of Prussia existed in the professional DNA of Ayub Khan. Born in 1907, when the Kaiser Wilhelm II was still the aggressively militant emperor of Germany, Ayub Khan spent his twenties being disciplined at Sandhurst, became the first local C-in-C of the Pakistan Army at the age of 44, President of his country soon after he turned 50, and had appointed himself Field Marshal before he reached the age of 60. It was a steep career trajectory – one worthy of a Potohari Bonaparte.
Like many an incipient dictator, Ayub Khan spent his apprenticeship either outside the rabble, or above it. He observed with detachment the political infighting that followed the death of the Quaid in 1948 and the assassination of PM Liaquat Ali Khan and which led to a collapse of the democratic order envisaged by both. Opportunism replaced idealism in civil society. It all too soon infected the military. ‘It was a curious phenomenon,’ Ayub Khan recalled in his memoirsFriends Not Masters (1967). ‘Perfectly sensible people, Brigadiers and Generals, would go about bemoaning their lot. Each one of them was a Bonaparte’.
Before the decade was out, Ayub Khan had joined their ranks. The justification stared everyone in the face: ‘The army could not remain unaffected by the conditions around it [:] the political chicanery, intrigue, corruption, and inefficiency manifest in every sphere of life.’
Ayub Khan supported president Iskander Mirza when on 4 October 1958, Iskander Mirza abrogated the 1956 Constitution, dismissed the National and Provincial Assemblies, promulgated Martial Law and appointed Ayub Khan as the Chief Martial Law Administrator. Ayub Khan, finding himself within stabbing distance of an enfeebled Caesar, soon ousted Iskander Mirza and appointed himself president, thus setting into motion a pattern of military interventions in Pakistani politics that, like Winston Churchill’s famous dictum about second marriages, became recurring examples of the triumph of hope over experience.
Embedded in Ayub Khan’s memoirs is a paragraph that subsequent military usurpers have understandably overlooked: ‘Another worry I had was how, if the army once got drawn into political life […] it could withdraw itself from the situation.’ He foresaw the possibilities well enough: ‘A well-organized, trained, and disciplined army would find it extremely distasteful to be turned into an instrument for securing political power.’ Yet he succumbed to that very temptation in October 1958, condemning thereby his country to being alternately ruled by the sword and governed by the pen.
It is the credo of every military dictator to believe that ‘the army alone could act as a corrective force and restore normalcy’. It is his conviction that he alone is the nation’s saviour. Ayub Khan saw his intervention in 1958 as a personal mission to stabilise Pakistan, to put it on the path to modernity. He declared at his first press conference within two days of assuming power that his three immediate tasks were ‘land reforms, refugee resettlement, and educational reforms.’ The ills of a feudal past, the impact of an upheaval present, and needs of the future he thought were covered. Interestingly, the cancer that caused his intervention – i.e. political instability - went untreated.
Until 1962, Ayub Khan could do no wrong. He used his singular authority to drag Pakistan into the 20th century. He constituted a platoon of National Commissions to inquire into every aspect of Pakistan’s governance. Twenty-three separate bodies were mandated to examine Company Law, the Constitution, Finance, Food and Agriculture, Land Reforms, Manpower, Maritime, Medical Reforms, Pay and Services, Police, Social Evils, Sports, Culture, Art & Literature, and the Textile Industry. The list appeared exhaustive because the problems were endless.
With president Ayub Khan at its epicentre, Pakistan’s progress expanded radially. Internally, land reforms jolted the feudal classes out of their complacency; an amnesty flushed out ill-gotten untaxed wealth; an Export Bonus Scheme was introduced to stimulate exports; the civil service was pruned of inefficient or corrupt officers; the Second Five Year Plan became the blueprint of growth and the Planning Commission its governing architect; Family Laws were tempered to align religious dictates with justice; the capital was to be relocated from Karachi to Islamabad, closer to GHQ in Rawalpindi; and of course the battered plant of democracy had to be re-potted.
An apologist in Ayub Khan’s government explained that his 1958 ‘Revolution was not directed against Democracy [.] It was in fact meant to preserve and promote Democracy – by making it take roots.’ Those roots were to be seeded in a system known as Basic Democracy, by which local communities could elect local representatives whom ‘they knew and who could be trusted to look after the problems of the country.’ What could be more fortuitous than that they should also directly elect the president?
During the same period of national reconstruction and industrial growth, Ayub Khan asserted Pakistan’s presence in the international community. Commitments such as the Indus Waters Treaty with India in 1960 demonstrated Pakistan’s willingness to work with its neighbours. Relations with the United States reached new heights of understanding, cooperation and personal bon homie between Ayub Khan and the Kennedys and later Lyndon Johnson. Pakistan moved steps closer to the People’s Republic of China even though it did not relinquish membership of the CENTO. Pakistan’s outreach to Iran and Turkey resulted in the RCD – Regional Cooperation for Development. Gradually Ayub Khan became a significant, recognizable player on the global stage.
For dictators, timing is everything. They know when to strike, when to ‘seize the moment’. But being fallible, it is when their sense of timing becomes blunted by hubris that they are most vulnerable.
If before 1962, Ayub Khan could do no wrong, after 1962, his footsteps began to falter. In June 1962, he lifted Martial Law, releasing the vapours of public opinion and press criticism. Achievements such as the mega projects of Mangla and Tarbela Dam reinforced Ayub Khan’s reputation as a far-sighted ‘doer’. Controversies closer to his home unmasked nepotism and greed among his ministers, one of them being branded ‘Cheeni chor’ or ‘Sugar thief’. More damagingly, the business exploits of his elder son Gohar Ayub tainted his proclaimed uprightness. ‘On one occasion,’ Ayub Khan revealed in his selective memoirs, ‘I had to tell one of my own brothers, who was a Major in the army and had committed a serious irregularity, that he must either resign or face a court martial. He resigned.’ Ayub Khan found it impossible to apply the same standard of probity to his son.
By the end of 1964, Ayub Khan felt secure enough to test the bridge he had fabricated from benevolent dictatorship to the far side of guided democracy. He called for presidential elections. To his consternation, Ms Fatima Jinnah – the sister of the Quaid – stood against him as a candidate of the Combined Opposition Parties (COP, or the Cult for Power as Ayub Khan called it). On her side, she had pedigree, an unblemished reputation, and a commanding popularity; on his, demonstrable experience, the exercised muscle of an incumbent’s authority, and the reins of power securely in his hands.
When the final results were declared in January 1965, as predicted, Ms Fatima Jinnah won the popular vote and Ayub Khan a majority from his obedient Electoral College. Acknowledging her ‘prodigious energy’ (‘no mean achievement for a septuagenarian’, he admitted grudgingly), he over-simplified his success and her failure as a contest between ‘prejudice and reality’, with reality gaining the edge.
Ms Jinnah could not do more than dent Ayub Khan’s armour. It was left to Ayub Khan’s protégé Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to break his lance.
Had Ayub Khan, at the first Cabinet meeting he called on 27 October 1958, foreseen that the young Sindhi political novice he had just inducted as a Minister would one day be his nemesis, he might have airbrushed him out of his consciousness. Over the years of their association, Bhutto insinuated himself with such subtlety that when Ayub Khan did discover Bhutto’s darker talents, it was too late. Bhutto as Foreign Minister in 1965 instigated Operation Gibraltar – a plan to send infiltrators into Indian held Jammu & Kashmir. It was poorly conceived, incompetently executed, and had the same disastrous denouement that the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba held for President John F. Kennedy four years earlier.
After the Gibraltar debacle and the humiliating Tashkent Agreement that Ayub Khan signed and Bhutto disowned, Bhutto took advantage of Ayub Khan’s political and physical weakness (he had suffered a heart attack in 1966). He began a campaign. Beleaguered and dispirited, Ayub Khan lost the will to retain his presidency. In the face of unquenchable public agitation and implacable opposition, Ayub Khan did what any self-respecting unformed democrat would have done. On 25 March 1969, he called upon his successor as C-in-C General Yahya Khan to take over the country.
Ayub Khan faded into comfortable obscurity until his death on 19 April 1974. Soon after he took over in 1958, Ayub Khan was asked: “After you, who?”
“Simple,” he replied, “After me another general, and then another general, and then another.” With democracy sandwiched somewhere in between.
© F. S. AIJAZUDDIN
[Published under the title: The dictator who set about saving a nation, The Herald, August 2017.]
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