Pakistan

SINCE the night of October 7, Pakistan has been ruled by what is called a martial law administration, headed by President Mohammad Ayub Khan, the Sandhurst-trained, bristly mustached former commander in chief of the Army. The constitution has been abrogated, legislative assemblies have been dissolved, political parties banned, strikes outlawed, and criticism either by the public or by newspapers has been forbidden under threat of heavy fine or jail sentence.

By definition, the form of government is military dictatorship, but there are no massive military parades or carefully staged spontaneous demonstrations in the streets. Traveling in the country and talking to government officials, newspaper editors, students, and shopkeepers, an observer realizes that dictatorship is too harsh a word. Except for known Communists and a few politicians whose previous hobnobbing with the Communists made them suspect, no one has been sent to jail without a fair trial.

Certainly there is a sterile sameness about the press; the news columns are full of the doings and decrees of the martial law administration while the editorial columns reflect either praise or neutrality. But the editors themselves, in personal conversation, seem to speak freely enough, and like most Pakistanis they feel that General Ayub’s government is doing well.

General Ayub has appointed only three generals to his eleven-man cabinet. Even Indian newspapers, which are always quick to see the worst of what happens in Pakistan, admit that the civilians in the cabinet represent a selection of some of the most talented nonpolitical administrators available. About a dozen other generals supervise the work of the provincial governments, but for all practical purposes the government of Pakistan remains in civilian hands.

Exit the politicians

What is missing is the politicians. They have been banished from public life, and their very name is anathema. Even politics in the abstract has disappeared. People no longer seem interested in debating socialism versus free enterprise or Left versus Right. It is as if these controversies, like the forms of parliamentary democracy, were merely something that was inherited willy-nilly from the West and can now be dispensed with.

Pakistan had little training for parliamentary democracy. Unlike India, where the Congress Party had a tradition dating back to the end of the last century, Pakistan had the Muslim League, which did not even attempt to build up a mass following until 1937. India also had Gandhi and Nehru and thousands of lesser leaders who spent a lifetime in political activity. Pakistan had only Mohammad All Jinnah, whose fanatic determination was largely responsible for the creation of the nation. When Jinnah died in 1948, the Muslim League lost what little contact it had with the people, and at least fifteen other parties sprang up to contest the spoils.

The wild scenes leading to the killing of the speaker of the East Pakistan assembly were only the most flagrant of many excesses. Politicians called one another “mad dog,” “scoundrel,” and “traitor,” and tried to gather popular support by appealing to the most extreme regional or linguistic sentiments. In a nation such as Pakistan, where the halves of the country are like two separate nations divided by 1100 miles of Indian territory, each having a different culture and outlook on life, and where West Pakistan is further divided into six language groups, any appeal to extremist sentiments was at the cost of national unity.

For example, a network of canals was dug in the Sind region of West Pakistan to irrigate more than a million acres of desert. Yet for years the land has remained unsettled because, although Sind itself is short of population, the Sindhi politicians claimed that the peasants of Sind would oppose the immigration of landless farmers from the adjacent Punjab region. President Ayub has now ruled that all undistributed irrigated land must be settled within three months. A newspaper reporter in Hyderabad, the chief city of Sind, was asked whether the order would lead to conflict. He replied, “Why should it? We are all Pakistanis, and there is plenty of land here. The more farmers we have, the more food we will have, and we will all be richer.” When he was asked why the settlement did not take place earlier, he said, “Oh, the politicians didn’t want it to happen. They were afraid the Punjabis would vote for somebody else.”

Actually, no one got much of a chance to vote for anybody. National elections were constantly promised but never held, although there was a succession of eight prime ministers. Coalitions changed so often that out of eighty members in the Assembly, fifty-two had been ministers or deputy ministers in the central or provincial governments.

A ministership was the key to riches. A minister could get jobs for his relatives and import licenses for himself and his friends. A woman deputy minister of the West Pakistan Assembly who is now facing corruption charges is revealed to have received a series of licenses to import industrial machinery, although she never owned a factory. The routine was to sell the licenses to someone else who, in turn, might sell the imported goods to a legitimate factory owner or trader, by which time the price would be inflated 200 or 300 per cent.

The newspapers were full of reports of interparty intrigues and the imminent overthrow of some ministry, but the feudal landlords remained entrenched, politicians and government officials kept building bigger houses, and food prices kept going up. The Karachi cost-ofliving index rose 22 per cent over a period of three years.

In the past year or so, even law and order began to disappear. A village clerk near Hyderabad says: “The peasants welcome the change in government because they have peace. We were all afraid to move about at night. We stayed in our houses, but even then we trembled. The police knew who the goondas [hoodlums] were, but what good did it do to arrest them? Some politician would telephone the inspector that the man was a good party worker and must be released.”

A fair deal for the underdog

Perhaps the best description of the aims of the new government has come from East Pakistan’s Governor Zakir Husain, who is a civilian. He has said, “It shall be our constant endeavor to make this country safe for the common man — the underdog — who has not had a fair deal in the past.”

Already the underdog in Pakistan is grateful. In a poor country like Pakistan, where the per capita annual income is only about fifty dollars, the success of any government is judged by the price of wheat and rice, which form the bulk of the diet of an overwhelming majority of the people. In Multan, which is the center of a well-irrigated region of West Pakistan, the retail price of wheat has dropped from four cents a pound to three cents, while the price of best quality rice has dropped from ten cents a pound to five cents.

Military courts were set up to punish smugglers, hoarders, black marketeers, profiteers, and a host of petty offenders, such as jaywalkers and milkmen who added water to their milk. Petty cases got summary judgment, but for the more serious crimes the accused were allowed the normal guarantees of a defense lawyer and cross-examination of witnesses. The only difference between the military courts and the normal courts was that the judges were no longer susceptible to political pressure or open to bribery, and the defense was no longer permitted a constant recourse to adjournments and similar legal tricks.

The martial law regulations allowed the death penalty for a number of crimes, but in all cases the military courts limited punishment to jail sentences ranging up to fourteen years and fines which in one case amounted to $42,000. Most of the military courts have now been disbanded, although some are still dealing with smuggling cases.

General Ayub has promised that there will be no witch hunts. So far, only one leading politician — former Defense Minister M. A. Khuhro — and a few minor ones have been arrested on corruption charges. About a dozen others have been detained as politically dangerous. The rest are free to do as they please as long as they remain politically dormant.

Except for a judge of the High Court who has been suspended pending investigation of unspecified charges against him, no important civil service official has been arrested, although there is a feeling among the public that some of the top civil servants were as corrupt as some of the politicians. Twenty screening committees have been set up with orders to “identify cases of glaring inefficiency or corruption with a view to awarding deterrent punishment.”

Growing more food

There can be little stability, either political or economic, until food production is increased. West Pakistan is about the size of Texas and Oklahoma, but vast stretches are desert. Only about 30 million acres are under cultivation, and this must support a population currently estimated at 39 million. East Pakistan is about the size of Louisiana, with a population of about 47 million or more than a quarter of the entire population of the United States. Much of East Pakistan is rivers and marshes, so that only about 25 million acres are cultivable — about half an acre per person.

While the population is increasing by about 1.2 million persons a year, food production over the past ten years has remained static at about 13 million tons of wheat and rice a year. Some new areas of West Pakistan have been opened to irrigation, but at the same time vast stretches are being lost because of salinity and waterlogging. In West Pakistan 2.3 million acres have actually gone out of cultivation, while another 70,000 to 80,000 are being lost every year. Pakistan, in the year ending June, 1956, received 800,000 tons of wheat and rice as part of American aid, but it still had to spend its own scarce foreign exchange to import an additional 465,000 tons.

The industrial index has almost quadrupled since 1950. As evidence of this, you can see two huge industrial areas near Karachi. However, Pakistan has no important natural resources to feed its factories, and now that much of the foreign exchange earned by the export of jute, tea, and cotton is being spent to import food, the factories in the Karachi area are running at about 35 per cent capacity because they cannot import raw materials and spare parts.

President Ayub’s directive that undistributed irrigated land in West Pakistan be settled within three months is evidence of a change of emphasis from industrial to agricultural production. Ayub has also ordered that all cultivable fallow land in East Pakistan must be brought under the plow within a similar period. But it will be years, even with the greatest will, before any startling increase in food production can be expected. There must be long and patient efforts to eliminate crop pests, which according to modest estimates destroy $400 million worth of crops every year, and to teach the illiterate and conservative farmers to use better seeds and farming methods.

Land reform

General Ayub must also get rid of absentee landlords, whose holdings are so large that they do not worry about low yields; their income is already enormous. In the former princely state of Bahalwalpur in West Pakistan, 214 persons own one fourth of the agricultural land. In the former Frontier province, 677 persons own a million acres while there are 175,000 landless tenants. In Sind, one per cent of the landowners have 30 per cent of the available agricultural land, and there are 800,000 landless tenants.

It is believed that a land reform commission appointed by the new regime will recommend ceilings of about 500 acres, which is still a large holding by Asian standards. But even this would make about 10 per cent of the cultivable land available for distribution and would present enough administration problems to tax the government’s abilities to the utmost. It would, at the same time, destroy the source of strength for the feudal landlords, who have always dominated economic and political life in West Pakistan.

Another major problem is settlement of refugees. For the past eleven years a half million displaced persons from India have eked out a miserable existence in Karachi, living in mud and straw huts without sanitary facilities, drinking water, or electricity. Lieutenant General Mohammad Azam Khan, who has been appointed rehabilitation minister, has drawn up a $25 million program to provide housing for these refugees.

An equally energetic officer, Lieutenant General W. A. Burki, has been named health minister. Soon after taking over, he ordered that no person in need of treatment may henceforth be turned away from a hospital. Within twenty-four hours after the order was issued, 250 beds were set up in the corridors and verandas of Karachi’s large Civil Hospital.

The question of re-establishing some new democratic framework has been pushed far into the background. President Ayub says problems like “the resettlement of refugees, land reform and modification of the educational and legal systems" must be solved first, and only then will he “consult the best brains and ascertain the feelings of the people in order to draw up a constitution best suited to the needs of our country.”

Many of the newly independent countries in Asia and Africa have tried to copy the British parliamentary system. The experiment has failed in the Sudan, Pakistan, and Burma, while the system is under great strain in India and Ceylon. The Pakistan experiment will be watched in Asia and Africa with keen interest.