The Autumn Cloudburst! The Uprising against Ayub Khan’s Rule

A cloudburst is an extreme amount of precipitation in a short period, sometimes accompanied by hail and thunder, which is capable of creating flood conditions. Cloudbursts can quickly dump large amounts of water, causing flash floods. What is the relevance of cloudburst to what happened in Pakistan in 1968? 

It was October 1968. Heavy Monsoon rains which started lashing Pakistan, as usual, grafually became weaker in July gradually became weaker, soon to peter out and give way to the mild morning chill, the first sign of winter. At Bara Bazaar, a small group of students from Rawalpindi’s Gordon College was stopped at the customs check post. 

Bara Bazaar is a seedy marketplace in the tribal belt of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (presently the KPK).  During the 1960s, as it is, even today, Bara Bazaar was a transit point for goods smuggled from Afghanistan to the bazaars in Rawalpindi, Lahore, and places as far away as Karachi.

 The students from Gordon College were traveling back to Rawalpindi after shopping for some smuggled hosiery, toiletry, and clothing items. Probably they had failed to bargain on the cuts the customs people demanded. The customs officials, after seizing the items, let the students go. 

On their return to Rawalpindi, the students staged a protest the next day against the customs authorities’ high-handedness. Soon the protests turned into agitation when students from other colleges started joining the Gordonians. The agitation spread to the educational institutions in Rawalpindi’s outskirts. A student from the Polytechnic Institute was killed when the police opened fire on the rioters. 

 The riots soon snowballed into a countrywide agitation which was joined by mobs from erstwhile East Pakistan -the unruly province that would ultimately revolt against the central government in Islamabad and emerge, three years later, as Bangladesh after a bloody civil war, abetted and militarily supported by India, Pakistan’s archenemy. 

It was the cloud burst uprising that removed Ayub Khan from office. Ayub Khan came to power in October 1958, a decade before he was ousted from office. He was the first military ruler of Pakistan. Ayub’s ascent to power was the culmination of more than a decade of musical chairs. Between August 1947 and October 1958, there were seven prime ministers in Pakistan. 

In October 1958, Iskander Mirza, Pakistan’s first civilian president, abrogated the constitution, declared martial law, and appointed Ayub Khan as the Chief Martial Law Administrator and Prime Minister, Some two weeks later, Ayub Khan dismissed Iskander Mirza and became the President. In 1962, Ayub lifted the martial law, gave the country a presidential constitution, and became a civilian president.

 During his almost eleven-year rule, Ayub Khan gave political stability to Pakistan, introduced agricultural reforms by reducing the size of landholdings, modernized the family laws, and ushered in an era of industrialization. 

People, both inside and outside Pakistan, criticize Ayub Khan for imposing dictatorship behind the façade of civilian rule. The major accusations against Ayub Khan are: 1) Replacing the parliamentary system of government with one based on presidential form in which the president was indirectly elected by an electoral college;2) Muzzling the press and throttling political dissent;3) Plunging the country into the hazardous 1965 war which created a sense of isolation and insecurity among the Bengalis, leading to the secession of East Pakistan.

How true are the critics of Ayub Khan in their insinuations? 

 Democracy is not a dollhouse, festooned to impress the onlookers. It is also not a mechanical toy that has a legislature, an executive branch, and a judiciary performing like mechanical parts. Democracy, on the other hand, is a form of governance that facilitates a better quality of life for its people, a quality of life that incorporates the provision of life’s basic necessities, safety, and security of all the inhabitants of the country. 

Presidential and parliamentary systems are the two forms of democracy. There also is a third form which is an amalgam of both the parliamentary and the presidential systems. French constitution is an apt example of the third form. The chief executive, i.e. the president or the prime minister, again, can be elected either directly or through an electoral college. The indirect system of elections is in vogue in the United States. 

  All the three systems of democracy are functioning well in the countries which have, throughout generations, cultivated democratic cultures. Why have we seen both the parliamentary system and the presidential system fail in Pakistan? 

 Democracy has floundered in countries like Pakistan which are still shackled by tribalism and feudalism. It is because, as I have exemplified above, our state institutions function as the parts of a mechanical toy. Our legislature, executive branch, and judiciary abuse the powers vested in them by the constitution. We come across the manifestation of this abuse in everyday life, so there is no need to go into the details. 

Muzzling the press, throttling political dissent, and abusing human rights are again due to a feudal and tribal mindset that permeates the deepest recesses of our society. A few observations about the muzzling of the press- In even the functional democracies like Britain and the United States, newspapers like the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Guardian submit their content to the government pre-censor. The same is true for the BBC. So it is not something free for all in the established democracies also.

We come to the 1965 War. It has now been established that Bhutto, Aziz Ahmed, and General Akhtar Hussain Malik deceived Ayub Khan into believing that sending infiltrators into the Indian Held Kashmir will not result in India attacking Pakistan across the International border. Ayub Khan allowed himself to be fooled by his foreign minister, foreign secretary, and GOC 12 Division.  He had to ultimately pay for his gullibility. 

  The world powers, particularly the United States, were angry with Ayub Khan for sending the infiltrators into IHK that triggered the 1965 War. The United States, in coordination with India, had decided to oust Ayub Khan and thereafter dismember Pakistan through a choreographed war with India. 

  The extent of the US strategic relationship with India can be gauged from the fact that a few weeks after the 1965 War, the CIA, and India’s IB joined hands in planting two nuclear-powered sensing devices atop mountain features along the Line of Actual Control between India and China. The sensing devices were aimed at spying on China’s missile tests at a missile testing site in Tibet. 

 Mujib gave the six points of his Awami League soon after the war. In October 1968 the Gordon College Students’ incident took place and soon the entire country was up in protests. Such agitation was not witnessed before. Gradually, the students were joined by the radio and television employees and those from the press. It was alleged that the Coca-Cola country head in Pakistan, ensconced in the residence of one of the faculty members at the Forman Christian College, Lahore, had his fingers in the agitation pie. 

  The 1971 War, we now have the concrete evidence, was choreographed by Bhutto, Air Marshall Rahim-the Air Chief, and Lieutenant General Gul Hasan, the Chief of the General Staff. The planning for Pakistan Army’s defeat was done in November 1971 when the three of them were sent by President Yahya to Beijing to solicit Chinese help for the war that was looming large on the horizon. Bhutto was heading the Pakistani delegation. 

Saleem Akhtar Malik 

August 10, 2021