I NEVER had the opportunity to meet Field Marshal Mohammad Ayub Khan in his years of office as president of Pakistan, though he was my neighbour. My family home in Rawalpindi was forcibly requisitioned by the government at 10 days’ notice in 1959 to make way for the interim presidential complex in Rawalpindi.

Islamabad was at the time a barren plateau. Notwithstanding the disturbance to my family, which naturally caused discontent against the military regime, over the years, I came to look upon Ayub Khan as a benign fatherly figure and a leader of the nation. I was shaken by the way he was treated by the nation in his decline and fall.

I first met him in the summer of 1969, some months after his retirement, in his Islamabad home. Thereafter I called on him at least once or twice a month. My last meeting with him was a few days before his death in 1974 when he presented me with an autographed photo of his profile.

I had earlier made several requests for an informal photo next to his much cherished avocado plant in his garden but that was never fulfilled. At our last meeting he thrust on me a formal photograph, as if to say now or never.

During our meetings, we often discussed past and current political events; his remarks were always objective, incisive and refreshing. Not once did I hear him criticise his detractors; perhaps, he regarded it as being beneath his dignity, and, whenever I criticised them, he would respond with a distant wistful look.

In retrospect, this haunting image, I now know, was of a deeply wounded person. Reading his memoirs, it is apparent that his grief was ingested. Those who stabbed him in the back have been punished by fate in horrible ways.

I am told that he was nearly clinically dead after his massive stroke in February 1968. He recovered but was much debilitated. In his last year as president, I gather, he would spend little time in office. In hindsight, had he retired after his serious illness, many of the miseries that were to be inflicted on him in the last year of his rule would have been avoided.

A ferocious jockeying for power began during his near fatal illness. Yahya Khan, the army chief, nearly staged a coup, thinking he would not survive the stroke. Yahya was the eminence grise in the later days of his rule.

On the one hand, he offered fealty and on the other was hand in glove with Ayub’s principal political detractor. Yahya’s coup was finally consummated in March 1969. It is often held against Ayub that he violated his own 1962 constitution by handing over power to the army chief and not to the speaker of the National Assembly as was the 1962 constitutional provision.

The fact is that Yahya Khan had manoeuvred to assume power on his own terms. He would have seized the presidency anyway had the speaker of the 1969 assembly been allowed to assume his lawful position.

The other person jockeying for power after the 1965 war was Z.A Bhutto. Historical records are likely to show that Ayub was not in favour of Operation Gibraltar, which led to the war; he had warned the cabinet against the possibility of an all-out war with India. This cautionary note was played up as pusillanity by the clique headed by Bhutto.

His populist hour arrived when he played to the gallery in opposing the ceasefire agreement with India following the war, claiming that given a few more days of war before the ceasefire, Pakistan would have emerged as victor, not victim.

Ever since the Rann of Kutch episode in early 1965, Bhutto was running a parallel jingoistic foreign policy as leader of a sort of forward group; his sullen behaviour at Tashkent is well known. Confrontation and jingoism fitted in with the populist mood at the time and Bhutto was all set to capture this constituency.

Taking advantage of Ayub’s political vulnerability, he spread a lie that the Tashkent declaration contained secret clauses along with the innuendo that Ayub had agreed to accept the Line of Control in Kashmir as the international boundary. According to Indira Gandhi and her principal aides, it was Bhutto who made such a verbal commitment at Shimla which led to the unequal treaty of 1972.

It so happened, that I was invited by the field marshal to have lunch with him on December 4, 1971 — the first day of the war with India — at his home in Islamabad. The date was purely coincidental. It was a cold day. Flying low over his hilltop house were military aircraft in exercise, which provided the atmospherics of war. Sitting opposite one another at the dining table, I asked him at what point of time, if any, he reached the conclusion that a break with East Pakistan was inevitable.

He replied, “I sent Kalabagh to Dhaka to divide the assets of the PIDC (between East and West Pakistan). On return he said, ‘they don’t want a division of the PIDC, they really want a division of Pakistan. It will surely happen but you must not be on the scene when this occurs’.” I asked him if he had considered a confederative structure for the two wings. He replied that we did not have the temperament of the Swiss, and with India in between, it would not work.

In retrospect, one cannot help pointing out that our military, bureaucratic and political hierarchy, largely Punjabi, has an attitudinal problem in regard to different cultures. By and large, all militaries, particularly in the Third World, are brought up on a monolithic culture. Consider an entry in Ayub Khan’s diary dated August 12, 1967, as an example:

“When thinking of the problems of East Pakistan, one cannot help feeling that their urge to isolate themselves from West Pakistan and revert to the Hindu language and culture is close to the fact that they have no culture and language of their own, nor have they been able to assimilate the culture of the Muslims of the subcontinent by turning their back on Urdu. Further, by doing so, they have forced two state languages on Pakistan. This has been a great tragedy for them and for the rest of Pakistan…”

Such is the attitudinal problem which in the end denied a Pakistani pluralism. The Bengali language is deeply routed in the Muslim culture of Bengal. Bangladesh nationalism is proudly based on its language and culture. By regarding Urdu as the sine qua non of Muslim nationalism in the subcontinent was an error then as now. Every great man has his Achilles’ heel, and this lack of cultural sensitivity was all-pervasive, then as now.

Ayub Khan was not a politician; he had no taste or time for intrigue or political back-biting. His self-perception was to be the second builder of Pakistan, after the Quaid. And in this he excelled.

The green revolution followed his land reforms. The intractable Indus Waters dispute was resolved through an international treaty.

Three western rivers came to the share of Pakistan. Major dams and inter-connecting canals were financed by the World Bank.

One doubts, if India, in the political environment after 1971, would ever have conceded what was conceded in the Indus Water Treaty. Water is Pakistan’s lifeline, with much of the country being desert-like, water was secured on a durable basis.

Just as the treaty gave Pakistan one security dimension, we had to search for a friend in an unfriendly environment dominated by India, the Soviet Union and their client state in Afghanistan. In China, Pakistan found a friend not a master. It was Ayub’s decision to settle the border with China and to cultivate a long-lasting friendship which endures till today. The China connection has proved vital for the well-being of Pakistan. This was Ayub’s second great achievement.

Never was Pakistan’s reputation higher internationally than in Ayub’s time — until at least 1965. The value of its currency was about 30 per cent per cent higher than that of the Indian currency. While Indian industry was suffocated by socialist dogma, a laissez-faire economy led to rapid industrialisation in Pakistan.

No doubt, a price was paid in terms of social imbalances but the rise in wealth was phenomenal. Sadly, the socialist dogmas which had failed in India, Russia and China were thrust on Pakistan by Bhutto in the 1970s with disastrous results.

Ayub had an abiding interest in agriculture and fruit farming. On the few occasions that we drove together, he would discuss the crop of a rural field with his batsman. He appeared to have much practical knowledge of plant genetics.

I am told that behind the “green revolution” was the introduction of the Mexican short-stemmed, high-yielding wheat variety which was one of Ayub’s highest priorities. The fact that we can grow 25 million tons of wheat today to sustain a population twice in size (including East Pakistan) than in the 1960s is largely the result of the agricultural revolution of the Ayub Khan years.

The Ayub Khan years were the apogee of our prestige and influence in the world. Perhaps one of the sharpest diplomatic observers in the Ayub Khan years was Sir Morrice James, the then British high commissioner.

This is his verdict on the Ayub Khan years:

“It sprang from Ayub’s own belief that ‘harsh and violent methods of dealing with individuals only establish harsh and violent precedents’. He says that he was determined to go about his work in a rational and moderate manner. The proof of this is that from the beginning to the end of Ayub’s revolution and his subsequent 10-year presidency, no cruelty of any kind — in the form of beatings, torture, executions or ‘disappearances’ — was inflicted.”

The writer is a National Assembly member.
Email: murbr@isb.paknet.com.pk