[Islam-Online- Politics]

The period 1958-69 is known as the Ayub era, after Pakistan's first military ruler Ayub Khan. This era ended the initial postindependence experience with parliamentary democracy and marked the beginning of the pattern of successive military takeovers of the government. Ayub Khan and his associates engaged, relatively speaking, in the most open attempt to govern the country on secular principles and devise a constitution on modernist lines. The eventual result of his decade-long rule is instructive for a Muslim society, such as Pakistan, where the longing of the populace for democracy cannot be separated easily from an equally strong longing for a sociopolitical order that fits its conception of Islam as ultimately a divinely ordained and just system of rule.
The military "revolution" of October 1958 that brought General Ayub Khan to power as Pakistan's first military ruler was a peaceful affair. Civilian politicians, including the last governor-general, Iskander Mirza, had become discredited across the country. For ten years politicians had schemed and maneuvered to hold on to power without calling an election as they became increasingly unrepresentative.41 The sense of alienation between the two halves of Pakistan, present since independence, increased with the constitution of 1956. East Pakistan viewed this document as a permanent arrangement to deny Bengalis their majority in the national parliament. It was a feeling that could not be countered.
Moreover, the political arrangement within the country continued to disclose the fact that effective power was in the hands of the civil-military bureaucracy. The failure of the ML to institutionalize its popular power base across the country, to commit itself to a clearly enunciated objective of establishing a democratic system of government based upon the popular will of the people, and to reform the economy as the Indian National Congress had committed itself to in independent India, meant the inherited and undemocratic viceregal system continued to impede the development of representative democracy. It also meant that the new state would not have a political party with national support across the physically divided country.
The failure of ML in both constitution making and institution building was not accidental. As a political party of Indian Muslims, especially of the landed class, its primary focus during the period leading to the partition of India was to protect Muslim interests from the electoral power of the Hindu majority. It achieved this by creating Muslim-majority Pakistan, where Muslims from the Hindu-majority provinces of undivided India could move permanently. Yet in the new situation, the ML continued to be the party of the dominant class, the landed aristocracy, and the civil-military bureaucracy, working to preserve their power and status in the center against popular representation in the provinces, especially that of East Pakistan. The pattern was set by Jinnah's dismissal of the NWFP's provincial government under Khan Sahib soon after independence and was repeated later on when he dismissed M. A. Khuhro, chief minister of Sindh. As Omar Noman observed, "The leaders from the Muslim minority provinces of India were thus back to square one. Before Partition they had sought constitutional safeguards against Hindu majority rule. Now they sought protection from a group of Bengali Muslims.42 The 1956 constitution made the two halves of Pakistan, despite their imbalance in population, equal in terms of representation in the national assembly. Yet there was fear within the civil-military bureaucracy that the Bengalis could win a majority in the general election that was planned for early 1959. The military preempted any possibility of such development by seizing power and ending the decade-long effort in the uncertainties of parliamentary democracy and the politics of center versus provinces within a federal structure.43 The main character of the new arrangement under Ayub Khan for the next decade was a strong central government dominating the two halves of the country under a strong executive authority. It was a throwback to the nature of executive government in British India resting on the steel frame of the civil service and the armed forces.
After more than a quarter century since Ayub Khan was forced from office by popular demonstrations in 1969, there is an increasingly favorable reassessment of his rule within Pakistan. As Altaf Gauhar notes in his recent biography of Ayub Khan, Pakistan's first military ruler was relatively benign, and his attempt to establish a strong executive and centralized system of government was reminiscent of much of Muslim history, in which the opinion that tyranny is preferable to anarchy became part of common political wisdom.44 Ayub Khan's priorities were to bring about the modernization of the economy, assist in the development of industry and commerce, invest in infrastructural development, create a middle class that would withstand the divisiveness of parliamentary politics, and ensure that the country could move forward into the modern industrial age from a largely feudal economy. He was skeptical about the people's ability to achieve the goals of modernization given the hostile external and internal conditions faced by a society burdened by poverty, superstition, and illiteracy. As a Sandhurst-trained officer in British India, Ayub Khan imbibed the professional culture of keeping the army separate from politics and viewing politicians with distaste, while believing that the military was the ultimate guarantor of the country's independence and honor.
There was a palpable sense of relief in the country, and no serious protest, when Ayub Khan took control of the central administration and abrogated the 1956 constitution.45 He began his decade-long rule with wide support domestically and internationally. His government became one of the first among the developing countries to test the validity of the World Bank's growth model based on the "trickle-down" theory of creating wealth at the top that would eventually find its way to the bottom. In retrospect, Ayub Khan had considerable success in bringing about a top-down economic development. His was the first government in Pakistan that brought rural electrification, built roads and railways, constructed power grids and hydroelectric facilities, and saw growth in real income. But critics of his policies, those in his government and those who watched from outside, point to the unequal distribution of income, the increasing concentration of industrial and commercial wealth among a few families, the preoccupation with aggregate economic indices at the expense of investment in human resources through a greater allocation of funds for education and health-all of which eventually undermined the gains of his economic policies.46

But the fatal flaw of his regime was in the constitutional scheme he designed: A concentration of executive power resting on a narrow base of an electoral college of eighty thousand basic democrats. Sayeed called the Ayub system of government a constitutional autocracy, a viceregal system behind a facade of limited democracy.47 Since Ayub Khan viewed parliamentary democracy as inimical to Pakistan's unity, he sought political legitimacy through a controlled and limited political system. In his scheme, democracy was indirect, as the people elected members at the local village and town level (basic democrats) who would in turn elect members to the national and provincial assemblies and the president. In Ayub's view, limited or guided democracy was necessitated by the extent of poverty and illiteracy. Guided democracy would provide for a stable and united government, a strong leadership at the center, and an efficient and competent national administration that could bring about the country's modernization.
The 1962 constitution was designed for a presidential system more akin to de Gaulle's Fifth Republic than the American system of checks and balances. As Ayub Khan stated in his memoir, "The President should be made the final custodian of power on the country's behalf and should be able to put things right both in the provinces and the centre should they go wrong. Laws should be operative only if certified by the President except in cases where they are passed by three-fourths majority. No change in constitution should be made unless agreed to by the President.48 The Islamic provisions in the constitution were minimum. Pakistan was declared to be a republic when the constitution was enacted on 1 March 1962 under presidential authority; it was later amended to define Pakistan as an "Islamic Republic" in order to accommodate the sentiment of the people. The major Islamic provision remained, as in the previous constitution of 1956, to ensure that no legislation "repugnant to Islam" be passed. The only other, and largely cosmetic, provision was the creation of the Advisory Council of Islamic Ideology.
This council was somewhat similar to, though more broadly representative than, the Board of Ulema of the pre-1954 constitutional discussions. The council's role was of a limited nature: To advise the government in the legislative process on the "repugnancy" clause, to reconcile existing laws with the principles of Islam, and to engage in rethinking the teachings of Islam in keeping with the thrust of modern science and philosophy. The aspect of rethinking and reinterpreting Islam remains the modernist position to which Ayub Khan subscribed, and for that purpose the martial law administration set up an Institute of Islamic Research in Karachi in Sep-tember 1959. Both the council and the institute were expected to provide a modern rational approach to Islam, in contrast to the traditionalist one of the ulema. Ayub Khan appointed as council members49 not only those persons who possessed a knowledge of Islam but also those who understood the economic, political, legal, and administrative problems of the country so that the requirements of Islam and the requirements of the time and circumstances could be harmonized. But given his broadly secular approach to government-mostly concerned with economic development-the council and the institute remained marginal and their deliberations outside public view so as not to provide ammunition to the religious opposition.
It is a moot question whether the 1962 constitution could have survived the author if he had chosen to step aside as president without seeking re-election when his term expired in March 1965. The main aspects of the 1962 constitution were the presidential system and the method of limited or guided democracy. These ideas won Ayub Khan some important support among a small group of such modernist thinkers as Ghulam Ahmad Parwez, author of several books on Islam; former notables who had served Jinnah, such as the Ahmadiya leader, Sir Muhammad Zafarullah Khan; and members of the business class and the civil service. In the West, Ayub Khan was viewed as a modernizing soldier-statesman of great appeal and wisdom. Huntington wrote that more "than any political leader in a modernizing country after World War II, Ayub Khan came close to filling the role of a Solon.50
However, the religious and secular opposition in West Pakistan and the secular opposition in East Pakistan remained alienated.51 The regime came to be identified with one man, and Ayub Khan, as would happen with the Shah of Iran some years later, was required to take responsibility for political discontent since he took credit for economic developments he had initiated. By repressing parliamentary democracy he exacerbated ethnic tensions. As Hamza Alavi observed, "ethnic movements in Pakistan take the form, primarily, of subnational movements, directed against the central power, demanding regional autonomy.52 The demand for regional autonomy in East Pakistan, led by the AL representing the subnational sentiments of the Bengali majority, together with the multigroup opposition of religious parties, student movements, trade unionists, and old-line politicians in West Pakistan demanding greater political participation, forced Ayub Khan into retirement.
Ayub Khan handed power to the military in March 1969. Martial law was reimposed after another failed constitutional experiment. A new national election was promised and held. This set the stage for a renewed struggle to define constitutionally the nature of the country. In the election of December 1970, the AL, with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman as its leader, emerged as the largest political party and won 151 seats out of 300. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's People's Party (PPP) won 81 seats and emerged as the second largest party in the country. But neither the AL nor the PPP could win national representation with members elected from both halves of the country. Election results showed that Pakistan was effectively divided along party and ethnic lines and could only be kept together through a loose federal arrangement. This is what the AL sought, although it went against the views of the military-civil authorities. General Yahya Khan, military successor to Ayub Khan, was unwilling to accept the result and so postponed the meeting of the constituent assembly, an act that plunged the country into civil war.53 At the end of the resulting political and military carnage, which dealt a mortal blow to the "two nation theory," Pakistan was broken into two and the new nation-state of Bangladesh emerged in South Asia.

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