Pakistan

ATLANTIC

July 1954

on the World today

EARLY this spring there wasn’t a cockier capital anywhere in the world than Karachi. Its spirit was a direct reflection of the buoyant self-confidence of Pakistan’s top leadership. In his first year in office 45-year-old Prime Minister Mohammed Ali had pulled off coup after coup. He had solved his country’s 1653 trade crisis. He had arranged for the gift of military aid from the United States, to the discomfiture of Pakistan’s unloved neighbor, India, He had improved the nation’s international status by forming a military alliance with Turkey. The future looked bright.

Since then the at mosphere in Karachi has changed completely. Despite Mohammed Ali’striumphs, the official government party, the Muslim League, suffered a catastrophic loss in the important state election in East Bengal. It was the League that originally brought about the founding of Pakistan. Since then the League has governed its creation, almost without opposition. This was its first defeat, and it was a crusher. Practically every official in Karachi, civil service or political, is a Leaguer. It’s easy to understand why doubt and sullen gloom have replaced the earlier optimism of the capital.

Most Pakistani are convineed that high-ranking Indians, including Pandit Nehru himself, resent their continued existence as illogical. Among the opposition leaders as well as in the ranks of the League, there seem to be a common feeling that the country is lighting against odds and a common determination to make a go of the nation.

When partition came, India got about 1.2 million square miles against Pakistan’s 364,000. India got 356 million people against Pakistan’s 75 million. India ended up with more than its proportional share of some of the major assets of the subcontinent, including almost all the large cities and almost all the industry. Even more important, the overwhelming majority of the educated and trained men — engineers, doctors, lawyers, civil servants, scientists, business executives, newspapermen, and writers — were Hindus. Naturally they stayed with India.

Drastically split from the point of view of geography, ethnology, and language, Pakistan has had to depend on the Muslim religion to provide its one rallying point of unity. In secular terms this unity has been expressed through the Muslim League. The League has never had any distinct planks in its platform except the defense of the nation and the protection of the special status of Islam. The Constituent Assembly, which doubles in brass as a national legislature, is composed of Muslim Leaguers elected from the Muslim constituencies of the old undivided India. There has been no national clection since 1947.

Frenzied election

The state of East Bengal takes up the whole of East Pakistan and includes more than half the population of the country. In the provincial election last March the Muslim League was defeated catastrophically by a coalition of miscellaneous opponents calling themselves the United Front.

The League fought a frenzied campaign. Top government officials accused the United Front of wanting to tear Pakistan in two and hand the chunks to India. The government tossed some hundreds (no one is sure just how many) of opposition election workers into jail without the right of habeas corpus, on the ground that they were violating the security of the state. After all this effort, the League won only 10 out of the 309 seats in the legislature. Already government spokesmen in Karachi are trying to explain away the defeat as “a question of personality clashes.” It was far more than that. It was a revolt against the League’s monopoly rule.

A popular theory in India has held that the League lost because American military aid was unpopular in East Bengal, This doesn’t seem to be borne out by the facts of t he campaign. The American aid was never questioned bv any members of the United Front except the few Communists. The pact itself seems to be generally popular everywhere in t he country.

A factor easily identifiable as having been directly involved in the defeat was Bengali resentment against two trends: the increasing indifference of local League leaders to the needs or desires of the people of the state, and a steady preferential treatment given by the central government to West over East Pakistan when it came to handing out funds for development.

Communists in Pakistan

In the East Bengal election, for the first time, Communists emerged as a factor to be reckoned with in Pakistan. Until this spring, in comparison with those in India and most of the other Asian countries, Communists in Pakistan have been conspicuous by their absence.

Part of the reason, of course, has been the strength of the Muslim religion. Still more important has been the lack of intellectuals, especially of the unemployed intelligentsia that forms the backbone of the Communist Party in India. The East Bengal election gave the Communists a chance to rise to prominence as civil liberties martyrs.

Although Communist candidates met with little success at the polls (4 out of 25 were elected to the new legislature), there has been a marked increase in Communist activities since the election. The Soviet propaganda drive has been stepped up, and Soviet-sponsored literary and dramatic gatherings have emphasized the “similarity of the Soviet and Muslim ways of life.”

Rioting at jute and paper mills resulted in more than 500 deaths in the first two months of the new provincial government. At the end of May, the central government sent some 10,000 troops to East Pakistan to restore order, and Prime Minister Ali dismissed Faslul Huq, Chief Minister of East Pakistan, and his entire Cabinet of fourteen men and imposed martial law. He attributed the rioting to “disruptive forces and enemy agents.”

Too much jute

The economic status of Pakistan lies somewhere between bad and moderate. Pakistan came out of partition with two strong economic assets: the raw jute of East Bengal and the wheat of the Punjab. The jute proved to be a problem in marketing. Although Pakistan held a virtual monopoly on growing jute, all the mills in undivided India which had spun it into burlap were in Calcutta.

During the communal slaughter among Hindus and Muslims in 1948, trade between the two countries came to a halt. East Bengal lost its chief market. The Pakistani government had to develop its own port, Chittagong, so that it could ship its raw jute directly to European and American mills. Then it began building its own expensive factories to compete with Calcutta. In the meantime, India began taking lands in West Bengal out of rice production and putting them into jute to compete with Pakistan. More than half of the raw fiber milled in Calcutta last year was grown in India.

When the Korean War started, the prices of all raw materials went sky-high. For two years Pakistan enjoyed a boom, mostly on the basis of jute exports. In 1952, as happened in all the other exporter countries of Asia, the bottom dropped out. Pakistan lacked-and still lacks trained financial experts. The government failed to lake even the simplest measures to prevenl a bust.

It wasn’t until the government crisis of a year ago that a new crew took over the treasury. The new prime minister, Mohammed Ali, and his confusingly named finance minister, Choudhry Mohammed Ali, slapped on import restrictions and brought, the dizzy drop in the nation’s reserves to an end. Jute prices have now grown firmer, but there are long-range troubles ahead. The shortages and high prices of the Korean boom days forced many American firms to shift from burlap to competitive forms of packing materials, such as multilayer paper bags. It is doubtful that the jute market will ever completely regain its prosperity.

Not enough wheat

The Punjab is a broad and fertile plain north of Delhi, now divided between India and Pakistan. The Pakistan Punjab used to supply a regular surplus of 150,000 tons of wheat a year to the rest of the country. Out of the last four years, however, three have been exceptionally lean. In 1950 there were floods, and in 1952 and 1953 there was drought. Last year Punjabi production of grain was down from the normal by a million tons. Only the American gift of a million tons of wheat saved the country from famine. This year the rains have been better than normal in the region, and farmers are harvesting a bumper crop.

Vital water supply

An important factor in the food situation in the Punjab is the water suppk for the great irrigation canals built by the British. In the partition, India ended up with the most important of the dams that control Pakistan’s water. Without irrigation the Punjab plain, fertile though it is, would revert to desert.

An example of India’s power occurred in the 1948 crisis between the two countrie’s. Simply by turning a few valves, Indian engineers completely cut off Lahore, a city of more than a million inhabitants, from its water supply for several days. Not only do Pakistan’s planning experts worry about how to expand the irrigation system with an uncertain source of water, but military leaders openly conjecture what Pakistan could do to fight an enemy with the power of imposing starvation and thirst on the country.

This spring the World Bank proposed a solution: dividing the six fixers of the Punjab evenly between the two countries. The proposal has been met with something less than enthusiasm both in Karachi and in New Delhi.

Like all the countries of Asia, Pakistan faces increasing difficulties in meeting the Communist menace inside and out, in developing industries to balance its economy, in educating its children, and in finding new sources of food for its expanding population.

In one sense, perhaps the shortage of trained leaders will stand Pakistan in good stead. The country has already had to turn to young men, who look for new solutions to the new problems. Most of the ministers of the Mohammed Ali cabinet are in their forties. If the Muslim League breaks up, they should be able to adjust to any new situation.