Political Conspiracies in Pakistan

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BOOK NAME:  Political Conspiracies in Pakistan

AUTHOR: Jamna Das Akhtar

PUBLISHER: Asia Publishing House - Delhi

DATE OF PUBLICATION: 1969

The following excerpt has been taken from Pages: 123 — 126

PARITY BETWEEN EAST  WEST PAKISTAN

“Z. A. Suleri, who was editor of the Evening News of Karachi at that time, writes in his book ‘Pakistan Lost Years’:

“ ‘Mr. Liaquat Ali Khan amended the constitution of the Muslim League in 1950 and became its President. This made Mr. Liaquat Ali's personal rule complete. Whatever he decided was accepted by the League. The Constituent Assembly became more or less a rubber stamping body. The authority of the Parliament and the Muslim League was dwindling. No other train of political thinking was allowed to be set into motion. Any attempt at political organization was condemned as treasonable. The suppressed political process found its outlet in factionalism in the Muslim League. Demands of East Pakistan on the centre had increased because Liaquat Ali had been elected from that province. Forty-four out of 76 members of the Central Legislature belonged to East Pakistan. Chief Ministers of E. Pakistan and the NWFP Mr. Noor-ul-Amin and Mr. Abdul Qayyum had joined together with the result that the opposition in the NWFP had been crushed.

“ ‘Another failure on the part of Liaquat Ali Khan was that he did not lay the foundations of a constitution.’

“Liaquat Ali Khan found enormous difficulties in framing the Constitution. These difficulties were the natural product of country's geographical position and its cultural and religious background. Before the establishment of Pakistan, it was easy to make people ignore the realities of the situation by raising the slogan of Islamic unity. Then the only question was to fight the opponents of the demand. The leaders, however, failed to silence critics by repeating this slogan now that Pakistan had come into being. The foremost problem now was giving representation in Parliament to the various provinces. The question of giving due share to the two wings in the field of services and industrialization had also to be solved. Then there was the question of the national language. Islam's place in the new-born State was another intricate problem.

“Before the integration of all the provinces, States and other areas in West Pakistan into one unit in 1955, there were in all four provinces in Pakistan. In the eastern region, there was East Bengal. In the west, there were West Punjab, the NWFP and Sind. In addition to this, there were States like Baluchistan, Kalat, Khairpur, Bahawalpur, Chitral and Amb. Then there were tribal areas in the NWFP and Baluchistan. These areas together with the capital city of Karachi were under the jurisdiction of the Central Government. The population of East Bengal in 1951 was 41.9 million and that of West Pakistan 33.7 million.

“The leaders of East Bengal demanded majority in Parliament on the basis of population. They also demanded their due share in allotment of grants for economic development and industrialization. They complained that the Central Government was according them a step-motherly treatment. The services were dominated by the Punjabis. The Army was dominated by the Punjabis and the Pathans. All this was true against the background of the British authorities never trusting Bengalis and hence never encouraging recruitment of Bengalis in the Army. The British had now gone theoretically but their policies continued. The leaders of East Bengal were furious that the Central Government was thrusting Punjabi officers on them. The new Chief Secretary of the East Bengal Government together with several other senior officers was selected from the Punjab cadre. Punjabis were preferred in the matter of allotment of centrally granted industrial licenses. ‘In accordance with its policy of developing first and foremost the western parts of the country, the Central Government continued to discriminate in economic and financial matters against East Bengal. Again as a result of the export of agricultural raw material produced by the local peasants, the province, despite its backwardness and poverty, was able to show continuously a large favourable foreign trade balance but this surplus was used to offset the chronically unfavourable trade balance of West Pakistan. The foreign currency which the export of East Pakistan's raw materials brought in was expended on the industrial development of West Pakistan. At least Rs.300 million were, according to the calculations of Pakistan's economists, annually extracted from East Pakistan and used to develop the Western regions’. In its commodity exchange with West Pakistan, East Pakistan had a permanently unfavourable balance. The Central Government was thus accused of using both foreign and regional trade as a means of switching a considerable part of the national income of East Bengal to the development of the western areas of the country.

“The preference given to West Pakistan was also reflected in the allocation of funds for agricultural development. Leaders of East Bengal complained that their province had thus become a source of raw material and foreign currency for the western regions of the country and a market where the industrial commodities produced in Karachi and the industrial centers of the Punjab were sold. Discrimination against the Bengali language was another cause of resentment against the central Government.

“Feroze Khan Noon, the newly appointed Punjabi Governor of East Bengal told the press at Dacca that ‘Urdu and only Urdu could become the official language of the States as well as the Central Government’. This statement was greeted by the Urdu Press in West Punjab but the Bengali leaders protested sharply. The Punjabi leaders, who knew practically nothing about Bengal during the pre-partition period, never imagined that Bengali could be one of the richest languages of the country, and in Pakistan, Bengali knowing people were in majority. During the Muslim Leagues agitation for Pakistan, the leaders had succeeded in inciting the Urdu speaking Muslims in North against Hindi. Urdu was not the mother tongue of any section of the Muslims living in the western parts of undivided India. Punjabis spoke Punjabi, Sindis Sindi and the Muslims living in the NWFP and Baluchistan spoke Pashtu or Bluchi. But the antagonism of them all towards Hindi, which they were told, was the religious language of the Hindus, made them own the Urdu language. Urdu never, however, got status of a mother tongue or official language. When the West Pakistan came to realize that Bengalis commanded majority in the population of Pakistan, they became nervous. Speaking in the pre-partition tone they hurled abuses on the protagonists of Bengali. Fanatical Maulvis issued 'Fatwas' against the supporters of Bengali and denounced them as infidels or agents of Hindus. The total result was resentment among the Bengali population which was already suffering under what they called Punjabi domination. Now they apprehended a serious danger to their language and culture. A Bengali deputy (a member of the Assembly), Ataur Rahman Khan said in the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan, ‘The leaders of the Muslim League thought that we were a subject race and they belonged to the race of conquerors.’

“In the third week of November 1950, thirteen Bengali members of the Muslim League Assembly party issued a joint statement demanding internal autonomy for East Bengal. They demanded that Bengali should be declared the official language. They also emphasized that the Central Government was unable to administer their State from a distance of more than one thousand miles.

“On October 6, 1950 the Secretary of East Bengal Muslim League, Azizul-Haq denounced the committee's report and said that Liaquat Ali was conspiring to establish his own dictatorship in the garb of the proposed federation. He said that Liaquat Ali had conspired to crush people's basic rights.

“Leaders of the Muslim League in West Pakistan failed to understand the hard realities of the situation. It had by now become a habit with them that whoever expressed unplatable opinions was accused to be the 'enemy of the country' and 'enemy of Islam'. Liaquat Ali Khan completely failed to understand the problem and to solve it.”

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