Air Marshall (Retd) M. Asghar Khan, who passed away on January 5 at the age of 96 was a true Pakistani icon. Not only is he credited, as the first native chief, with making the Pakistan Air Force a disciplined fighting force, he was widely respected for his moral uprightness as a soldier — opposing illegal orders while in service — and his incorruptibility in politics. But as someone who had interacted with Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah as well as almost all future leaders of the country, he also had a ringside seat to the history of Pakistan as it played out. And his observations deserve a wider audience. The following excerpt detailing the events from the 1950s — and strangely prescient even today — is from his book We’ve Learnt Nothing From History published in 2005. It is excerpted with permission from the book’s publisher Oxford University Press.

This is what happened in Pakistan. It lost its founding father and guiding figure, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, barely a year after its creation. Three years later, when it had hardly overcome the pangs of birth and was still in the throes of a host of problems, including the absence of a consensus on a constitutional framework, it lost its first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, through the bullet of an assassin.

The history of political engineering by the military in Pakistan goes back to the 1950s

This development brought to an abrupt end the little supremacy that the political leadership had over the bureaucracy and the army. This situation thus paved the way for a painfully long series of traumatic developments that left their scars on the body politic of the country, unleashing the forces of adventurism and palace intrigues.

However, Pakistan had a few special features that further complicated the picture. The armed forces, or about 85 percent of them, belonged to one province of West Pakistan, the Punjab, whereas the majority of the population was in East Pakistan and had virtually no representation in the armed forces. The situation vis-a-vis the bureaucracy was about the same. Whereas the army takeover, when it first happened, was generally accepted by the Punjab, it was resented in East Pakistan. To the various anti-democratic decisions taken by the rulers sitting in Karachi and later in Islamabad, the reaction of East Pakistan was different from that of the western wing for a number of reasons. Apart from the lack of geographical contiguity of the two wings, there was the fact that the people of the eastern wing were politically more conscious than those living in West Pakistan, who were suffering under the age-old domination of feudal lords and the serfdom imposed by tribal chiefs.

Linguistic, racial and social differences aggravated this situation and the military rulers could not ignore for long the feelings of the people of the more populous part of the country. The restraint that East Pakistan exercised on unbridled dictatorship was a factor which led those who supported these regimes to feel that they would be better off without the eastern half of the country. For such people, East Pakistan was an encumbrance. The ruling class of West Pakistan, therefore, conditioned itself to believe that Pakistan would do better without its eastern wing.

The involvement of the army in active politics goes back to the mid-1950s. The martial law of 1953 in the Punjab gave the army its first taste of power and it discovered that it could control seemingly unruly mobs with the power of the gun. Ayub Khan’s ambition, which was the normal response of a general in a classic situation, received encouragement from Ghulam Mohammad, the governor-general. A bureaucrat to the hilt, Ghulam Mohammad neither believed in democracy nor in equal treatment for East Pakistan. He dismissed Khawaja Nazimuddin, the prime minister, in April 1953, when Nazimuddin commanded a majority in the Constituent Assembly which had just passed the annual budget. This was the first major blow to democracy and it could not have been struck without the tacit support of Ayub Khan, the commander-in-chief of the army.

Chaudhary Mohammad Ali, the federal finance minister, and Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani supported Ghulam Mohammad in this move and six of the nine members of Nazimuddin’s cabinet, led by Chaudhary Mohammad Ali, joined the new government of Mohammad Ali Bogra, who was brought in from the USA where he was Pakistan’s ambassador. Another federal minister, Sardar Abdur Rab Nishtar, who refused to be a party to this ignoble and unconstitutional act, shared the fate of Nazimuddin.

The civilian governor of East Pakistan, Chaudhary Khaliquzzaman, who could not agree to the dismissal of the United Front ministry of A.K. Fazlul Haq in Dhaka, was removed and replaced by General Iskander Mirza. The governor’s rule was clamped down over the province.

Encouraged by his arbitrary actions against the central and provincial governments, which remained unchallenged, Ghulam Mohammad chose in October 1954 to dissolve the Constituent Assembly which had just prepared a draft constitution restricting the governor-general’s powers. The constitution contained a clause which provided that the governor-general could not dismiss a ministry as long as it commanded a majority in the House. Ghulam Mohammad, who by then had suffered a series of strokes, was very ill but not too ill to destroy any remaining semblance of democratic propriety in the running of the country’s affairs.

Maulvi Tamizuddin Khan, the president of the Constituent Assembly, challenged the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in the Sindh High Court, which gave a verdict in his favour and against the action of the governor-general. However, the appeal of the governor-general against the decision of the High Court was upheld by a majority judgment of the Supreme Court delivered by Chief Justice Mohammad Munir.

In the new cabinet that was formed, Iskander Mirza became the interior minister and Ayub Khan the defence minister. The fact that Ayub Khan insisted on retaining at the same time the post of the commander-in-chief of the army and was allowed to do so, speaks for itself. The bureaucracy-military collaboration was thus total and complementary. Despite their rivalries, both needed each other; the bureaucracy wanted the military to lend it support while the latter sought the skilled and adroit assistance of the former in elbowing out the professional politicians who were relegated to the status of junior partners. It was, therefore, not surprising that a half-dumb, half-paralysed Ghulam Mohammad ruled the country for more than a year.

That the generals deemed it necessary to mould the national politics to suit their whims and interests is evident from a significant development of those days.

Soon after the unification of the provinces of West Pakistan into a single administrative unit, Dr Khan Sahib, a non-Muslim Leaguer and a close friend of General Iskander Mirza, was made its first chief minister. Realising that the Muslim Leaguers, who were in an absolute majority in the assembly, were in no mood to cooperate with Dr Khan Sahib, Governor-General Iskander Mirza, in active collaboration with Governor Gurmani — also a one-time bureaucrat — tore the Muslim League asunder and founded the Republican Party. This was a motley crowd of office seekers and it failed to be resurrected as a political organisation in 1962 when political parties were restored by President Ayub Khan.

A large number of politicians, most of whom claimed to have worked for the freedom movement, allowed themselves to be used as puppets by the bureaucracy-military clique only to share power as junior partners. In the eastern wing, the United Front was dismembered by arraying A.K. FazIuI Haq, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy and Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani against one another and by trying every conceivable move in the intrigue-ridden game of formation and dismissal of ministries.

AYUB KHAN TAKES OVER

Having been elevated to positions of greater power and authority, Iskander Mirza and Ayub Khan could have assumed complete control of the country’s affairs well before 1958 but they bided their time. It must have been a period of considerable strain for them both and they showed remarkable patience. Iskander Mirza became president in March 1956 on the promulgation of the constitution, but the role assigned to him under the constitution was not to his liking. He, therefore, chose to make an excessive and arbitrary use of his powers.

The involvement of the army in active politics goes back to the mid-1950s. The martial law of 1953 in the Punjab gave the army its first taste of power and it discovered that it could control seemingly unruly mobs with the power of the gun.

During the 30 months of his presidential office he manipulated party positions, trying every permutation and combination to create situations under which as many as four ministries fell one after the other, the most short-lived being the one headed by I.I. Chundrigar which lasted barely seven weeks. He was conscious of the fact that he had annoyed the political forces of the day, particularly the Muslim League led by Qayyum Khan and the Awami League headed by Suhrawardy. He knew that in the event of general elections, scheduled for the spring of 1959, party positions in the next parliament would change in such a manner that he could not hope to be re-elected as president. He, therefore, decided to abrogate the constitution, dissolve the ministries and assemblies, abolish political parties and impose martial law. This was done on the evening of October 7, 1958 when Ayub Khan became the prime minister.

I was at that time the commander-in-chief of the Pakistan Air Force, a post to which I had been appointed in 1957 by Prime Minister Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, who also held the portfolio of defence minister. I was summoned by the president at about 9pm on October 7. When I arrived at the President’s House, I found Ayub Khan and a number of other army officers, amongst them Brigadier Yahya Khan, present there. I was told by Iskander Mirza that he had decided to abrogate the constitution; martial law had been declared and the army was moving in to take over the government. I had no prior knowledge of such a plan and was told that I should stay there for the next couple of hours, presumably until all moves had been completed.

The following day I attended a meeting presided over by Iskander Mirza at which Ayub Khan, the chief justice of Pakistan and the newly appointed members of Ayub Khan’s cabinet were present. At this meeting, Chief Justice Mohammad Munir was asked by Ayub Khan as to how he should go about getting a new constitution approved by the people. Justice Munir’s reply was both original and astonishing. He said that this was a simple matter. In olden times in the Greek states, he said, constitutions were approved by ‘public acclaim’ and this could be done in Pakistan as well.

Ayub Khan asked as to what was meant by ‘public acclaim’ to which Justice Munir replied that a draft of the constitution, when prepared, should be published in the national newspapers. This should be followed by Ayub Khan addressing public meetings at Nishtar Park in Karachi, Paltan Maidan in Dhaka, Mochi Gate in Lahore and Chowk Yadgar in Peshawar at which he should hold up the draft of the constitution that had been published in the newspapers a few days earlier and seek the public’s approval. The answer, the chief justice said, would definitely be in the affirmative. This, he said, was approval by ‘public acclaim’.

Most of those present laughed and Ayub Khan laughed the loudest. Although this advice was not followed by Ayub Khan for the approval of his constitution, this is what the chief justice of Pakistan had suggested in all seriousness. No wonder that Pakistan has found it difficult to shake off martial law ever since.

Published in Dawn, EOS, January 21st, 2018