The Pakistani Revolution – VIII

The ‘Six Points‘

W B Bland

In February 1966 Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, the President of the Awami League (AL), put forward a six-point programme:

1) The Constitution of Pakistan must be federal, with a parliamentary form of government and a legislature directly elected on the basis of adult franchise.

2) Federal subjects to be limited to defence and foreign affairs only.

3) There should be: i) separate currencies for the two wings, freely convertible into each other, or, ii) in the alternative, one currency subject to statutory safeguards against flight of capital from the East to the West wing.

4) Power of taxation and revenue collection to be vested in the federating states (provinces – Ed.); the Centre to be financed by allocation of a share in the states’ taxes.

5) Separate foreign exchange accounts to be kept for East and West Pakistan: the requirements of the Federal government to be met by the two wings in equal proportions or on any other fixed basis as may be agreed upon.

6) Self-sufficiency for East Pakistan in defence matters: an ordnance factory and a military academy to be set up in the East wing, the federal naval headquarters to be located in East Pakistan.

The six-point programme crystallised the economic and political demands of the East Pakistan national capitalists. But as important as the programme itself was the method proposed to achieve it. Sheikh Mujibur Rehman suggested no repetition of the Combined Opposition Party (COP) farce of the 1965 ‘elections’ of seeking to bring about fundamental constitutional changes through the machinery of Basic Democracy (BD) controlled by the ‘Karachi’ clique’s military dictatorship. Instead he called upon the mass of the people in East Pakistan to build a “relentless, democratic mass movement” outside this machinery.

The six-point programme aroused the immediate attacks of the military dictatorship, which sought to represent its call for regional autonomy for East Pakistan as a call for secession. Speaking at Rajshahi in East Pakistan on March 16, 1966, President Ayub Khan attacked the programme as aimed at bringing about “…a sovereign Bengal” and added: “Fulfilment of this horrid dream would spell disaster for the country and turn the people of East Pakistan into slaves” (Dawn, Karachi, March 17, 1966). On March 20, 1966 at a session of the Council of the Conventionist Muslim League in Dacca, he put forward blatantly the course which the ‘Karachi’ clique would adopt in the event of serious danger of the six-point programme being put into effect: “We should be prepared to face even a civil war, if forced upon us to protect the sovereignty and integrity of the country” (i.e., to maintain the semi-colonial status of East Pakistan – Ed.) (Dawn, Karachi, March 21, 1966). In May 1966 Sheikh Mujibur Rehman was arrested, and in June an official ban was placed on any mention in the press of the six-point programme.

The Effect of the Sino-US Rapprochement

With the cultural revolution in China, a rapprochement began to develop between the Chinese rulers and the US imperialists. This ended the possibility of the Ayub regime being able any longer to use the threat of closer relations with China as a means of putting pressure upon Washington. Faced with the fact of the relative decline in the economic power of US imperialism in the 1960s, the US imperialists proceeded to take advantage of the above development, calculating that the dependence of the ‘Karachi’ clique could now be purchased more cheaply than hitherto.

In April 1967 the US State Department announced the cessation of military ‘aid’ to Pakistan, although restrictions on the sale of most types of US weapons to Pakistan were lifted. US President Nixon put this new attitude into international perspective when he said in Guam in July 1969: “As far as the problems of international security and military defence are concerned…the US has a right to expect that this problem will be increasingly handled by, and the responsibility for it assumed by, the Asian nations themselves.” In August 1969, as has been said, he visited Pakistan for talks with Ayub’s successor as President, General Yahya Khan.

Pakistan, in this new situation, continued to develop closer relations with China. In 1967 the $ 60 million loan granted to Pakistan by China in February 1965 was increased to nearly $ 67 million. In September 1968 a highway connecting the Chinese province of Sinkiang with West Pakistan was opened, followed by a second all-weather road, the Karakoram Highway, in February 1971. In December 1968 an agreement on economic and cultural cooperation between China and Pakistan was signed, providing for a further interest-free loan to Pakistan of Pounds 17.6 million. In November 1970 President Yahya Khan paid an official visit to China, during which an agreement between the two countries on economic and cultural cooperation was signed.

In the new situation of developing Sino-US rapprochement, there was now only one power in relation to which the threat of closer relations could be used by the Ayub regime as a means of pressure on Washington – the Soviet Union. In September/October 1967 President Ayub Khan paid an official visit to the USSR, and in April 1968 Soviet Prime Minister Kosygin paid an official visit to Pakistan. As a result of these exchanges, in May 1968 Pakistan Foreign Minister Arshad Hussain told the National Assembly that the Pakistan government had served notice on the US government to close its aerial espionage base at Peshawar (from which Gary Powers had taken off in his ill-fated U2 in May 1960). Following this gesture towards the Soviet government, a Pakistan military mission headed by General Yahya Khan, commander-in-chief of the army (and soon to replace Ayub as President), visited Moscow and signed an agreement for the supply of limited quantities of Soviet arms to Pakistan.

The Pakistan Democratic Movement

At the beginning of 1967 the disqualification from political activity imposed on many opposition politicians under the Elective Bodies (Disqualification) Ordinance (EBDO) expired. In May 1967 those opposition parties that stood for participation in the machinery of BD controlled by the military dictatorship combined to form a new united front to replace the now disintegrated COP of the 1965 ‘elections’. This was the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM), composed of the Council Muslim League, the Nizam-e-Islam Party, the Jamaat-i Islami Party and the remnants of the National Democratic Front. The process of formation of the PDM led, however, to a further split in the AL. While the main forces of the party stood firm on the six-point programme and the principle of extra-constitutional mass action put forward by Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, a minority, headed by Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan, favoured modifying the six-points to make them acceptable to the other opposition parties and joining with these in seeking to work within the framework of BD. This minority broke away from the AL proper to join the PDM. The main points in the PDM’s 8-point programme related to the restoration of parliamentary democracy, but it made some attempt to win support in East Pakistan away from the AL by calling for limited autonomy for the province and for parity between the wings in the civil service and armed forces. The National Awami Party (NAP), the ‘leftist’ front for the military dictatorship, attacked the PDM as “an organisation of feudalists and capitalists” (Pakistan Times, May 23, 1967).

The splits in the Communist and National Awami Party

The split within the international communist movement was reflected in December 1966 in a split in the underground Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP). A section of the CPP broke away to form a rival Communist Party that at first adhered to the on the whole Marxist-Leninist line put forward by the Communist Party of China in 1962-1966. The new CPP continued to follow the leadership of Peking. Communists continued to make the NAP a principal field of their activity. The split in the underground CPP therefore precipitated a split in the NAP, the grounds for which had been laid over some years by the dissatisfaction of its landlord members in the former North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Balochistan with the party’s support of the ‘Karachi’ clique’s military dictatorship and its pro-US imperialist foreign policy.

In the spring of 1967, therefore, a section of the NAP, headed by Khan Abdul Wali Khan (the son of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan), broke away to form a new party under the same name serving the interests specifically of the landlords of NWFP and Balochistan, who looked to dependence on the Soviet imperialists for their liberation from the dominant ‘Karachi’ clique. The revisionists, who looked to Moscow for their inspiration, naturally joined the breakaway NAP headed by Wali Khan, and ‘Communist’ Professor Muzaffar Ahmed became one of the leading figures in the ‘right’ NAP. The Maoists, on the other hand, remained within the original NAP machine, which continued to be led by Bhashani and to function as a ‘leftist’ instrument of the military dictatorship. As Tariq Ali says: “Owing to the Pakistani-Chinese rapport, the pro-Peking section of the NAP, headed by Maulana Bhashani, had virtually ceased opposing the government of President Ayub Khan both in East and West Pakistan” (Tariq Ali: Pakistan: Military Rule or People’s Power?, London, 1970, p.174). The role of the ‘left’ NAP was greatly assisted by the official propaganda from Peking where the leadership, headed by Mao Tse-tung, were now, as the cultural revolution developed, free to expand China’s previous diplomatic support for Pakistan at state level to open political support for the Ayub military dictatorship. Speaking at Lyallpur in October 1966, the leader of a Chinese labour delegation, Wang Chieh, was reported as saying: “Pakistan had made impressive progress during a short span of time, and its achievements in various fields of national economy promised a bright future for the people. He added that a strong and prosperous Pakistan would play an important role in stabilising peace in Asia. The Chinese trade union leader said that during his tour of Pakistan he noted that the workers were imbibed (sic) with a spirit of self-reliance and were determined to strengthen the economy of their country” (Pakistan Times, October 31, 1966). The leader of a Chinese trade delegation, Chia Shih, made similar remarks in the reply to an address of welcome at a lunch arranged by the Pakistan Chamber of Commerce and Industry in October 1967: “Under the inspiring leadership of President Ayub, Pakistan has made a remarkable progress in the industrial and agricultural sectors, and the day is not far off when Pakistan will achieve complete economic independence” (Pakistan Times, October 29, 1967). And while the military dictatorship was, in November 1968, shooting down demonstrating students in the streets of Rawalpindi, General Huang Yung-sheng, Chief of Staff of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, was saying at a banquet in honour of the visiting Commander-in-Chief of the Pakistan army, General Yahya Khan: “Friendship and cooperation between our two countries have been growing constantly over the last few years and there has been increasingly friendly contacts between the armed forces of our two countries…In recent years the Pakistani people, under the leadership of President Ayub Khan, have fought unremittingly to safeguard national independence” (Pakistan Times, November 10, 1968).

The Pakistan People’s Party

As has been said, the Tashkent Agreement of January 1966 had been followed by outspoken opposition and demonstrations against the regime in West Pakistan: “West Pakistan’s reaction to the Tashkent agreement was violently hostile” (The Economist, January 22, 1966, p. 296). This had convinced Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, Foreign Minister in the Ayub regime, that the national capitalists of West Pakistan, frustrated by the subservience of the ‘Karachi’ landlord /comprador bourgeois clique to US imperialism, were beginning to stir politically and that this was the class with which the political future of an ambitious politician lay. Accordingly, in June 1966, Bhutto (who had been a Minister in Ayub’s Cabinet continuously since the military coup of October 1958) had withdrawn from the Cabinet “for health reasons”. Soon Bhutto became an outspoken critic of the military dictatorship and of its “betrayal of the national interest” at Tashkent. After an extensive speaking tour of the country, he founded in November 1967 a new party, the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). This was a social-democratic party, claiming to stand for the restoration of “parliamentary democracy” (as the road to “Islamic socialism”), for nationalisation of foreign-owned and monopolistic enterprises, and for the breaking away from dependence on US imperialism to pursue an independent foreign policy. The PPP was thus a political party that objectively represented the interests of the West Pakistan national capitalists but which directed its appeal also towards the petty bourgeoisie and working class.

(To be continued)