Inder Malhotra in the Indian Express:
While Ayub, with a map on his lap, was gleefully telling his confidant, biographer and alter ego, Altaf Gauhar, that Pakistani Patton tanks would soon be reaching Delhi, his military secretary burst into the room agitatedly to announce that the counter-offensive had foundered because the Indians had cut a nearby canal and inundated the battlefield. The village of Asal Uttar in the Khem Karan sector had become the graveyard of Pakistani tanks. What tormented the field marshal even more was that India’s obsolete Sherman and Centurion tanks of World War II vintage had got the better of Pakistan’s US-supplied, state-of- the-art Pattons. Yet it took him another 12 days of senseless fighting and avoidable casualties to accept the UN-sponsored cease-fire on which the Security Council was insisting every afternoon. Why?
Not only were Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and his hard-line cohorts totally opposed to a cease-fire (even though they knew that Pakistan was running out of ammunition as well as spare parts) but also Ayub’s loyalists – including Gauhar – were telling him that there could be no cease-fire unless it was accompanied by some mechanism to “solve” the Kashmir dispute. When the president testily asked his acolyte: “How do I achieve this”, Gauhar replied: “Sir, you have the China card. Please play it”.
Ayub promptly decided to do so. That night a plane carrying him flew to Beijing in even greater secrecy than that surrounding Henry Kissinger’s historic flight to China five years later. The pilot of Ayub’s aircraft was the recently retired first Pakistani air force chief, Air Marshal Asghar Khan. The journey to Beijing and back, after talks with Zhou Enlai, lasted only 24 hours but it was enough to bring home to the military ruler the limitations of the China card. More:
What does Pakistan mean? What kind of Islamic state should it be? Manan Ahmed on the real threat facing Pakistan today. From the National:
Pakistan, as constituted by the retreating British, was hardly a cohesive state. The two biggest provinces were themselves partitioned (Punjab and Bengal) and the fate of three princely states was undetermined – Swat, Baluchistan and Kashmir. The country itself was divided into two unequal halves separated by India. The communal horror of Partition, which saw the displacement and killing of millions, soon gave way to the mobilisation of the Army of this nascent state to redraw its borders. In fact, the actions taken then in Baluchistan and Kashmir quickly shifted the balance of power in Pakistan from the civil and the political to the military.
Still, Jinnah’s hopes for a democratic state were briefly glimpsed in the first constitution, which was signed in 1956. The constitution declared Pakistan an Islamic republic but reserved minority rights and enshrined laws in the hands of a secular judiciary. But this was a short-lived achievement, and in the next several decades, dictatorial leaders would steadily erode the unity of the state through their often brutal attempts to consolidate power in Islamabad – first under the guise of modernisation, and then Islamicisation and, more recently, anti-terrorism.
The first of these, Field Marshal Ayub Khan, with the Cold War support of the United States, suspended the constitution and embarked on a decade-long military dictatorship during which he systematically broke down all progressive and democratic voices in the nation. In order to cement his military rule, Ayub Khan preyed on exactly those ethnic divisions which Jinnah had hoped to eliminate. His West Pakistani military regime deliberately marginalised the East Pakistani Bangla population. Though there were populist resisters to Ayub – most notably the political campaign of Fatima Ali Jinnah in 1965 – the military dictators brokered no relief. The creation of Bangladesh in 1971 – after the Pakistani military failed to recognise a legitimate national election and embarked on a systematic killing of Bengalis – spelt the end of Iqbal and Jinnah’s notion that Muslims in India could form a cohesive political union. The fate of Pakistan, the state, in turn, hung in the balance. More:
In The Hinndu Literary Review, Sangeeta Barooah Pisharotya meets Arshad Sami Khan, Aide-de-Camp to three Pakistani Presidents — Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. He is also the author of the recently-published book, Three Presidents and an Aide:
Full of stories of shikar, Arshad Sami Khan, sitting in the lobby of a New Delhi hotel, recounts a particularly hilarious incident about one such venture of Joseph Tito along with his Pakistani host, Ayub Khan. It was an early morning duck shoot in the lake of Mirpur Sakro. It so happened that along with the dead duck, Tito too had to be helped out of the waters! Not just that, “Three of the police toughies who struggled to get him on board, fell too as their boat tilted and flipped over.” Khan, full of giggles, talks about “a burly Tito walking with water sloshing out of his boots and jacket pockets!”
He says one such venture of Ayub Khan led to the discovery of Pakistan’s legendary singer Reshma. “Ayub Khan used to be hosted by the vaderas (the landlords) during shikars. Day time would pass in the shoots and the evenings had music sessions by local artistes. The President would be present in those soirees only for a while. The evening that Reshma sang, he sat through it. He also asked me to note her details. On reaching Islamabad, he called his broadcasting minister to give Reshma a chance on Radio Pakistan,” relates Khan. “Also, he told him to give a copy of her recording. Later, he would do his work listening to her songs. Every time the tape would end he would call me to rewind.”
[Sami Khan is singer Adnan Sami's father]
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