Volume 7, No. 1, January 2025
Editor: Rashed Rahman
There were significant differences in the class structure of West and East Pakistan. In West Pakistan (according to the Census of Agriculture, 1963-4), 63,300 landlords (representing 1.25 percent of landholders) owned more than 100 acres of land, owning between them 15.2 million acres (31.2 percent of the privately owned land). Of these, 6,100 of the biggest landlords (representing 0.1 percent of landholders) owned 11.5 percent of privately owned land. The economic position of the landlords in the West was strengthened by the fact that, before Partition, many of the rural money lenders were Hindus and Sikhs; when these departed, their function was taken over by the landlords. In the East, on the other hand, most of the biggest landowners themselves were Hindus, who moved into India at Partition. Taking advantage of religious prejudices, the rich peasants were able in 1950 to secure the passing by the East Pakistan provincial government of the East Pakistan Acquisition and Tenancy Act, which limited the size of landholdings; as a result of this measure, most of the remaining Hindu landlords left the country and the excess and vacated land was redistributed, much of it falling into the hands of the rich peasants. Although many of the Bengali landlords managed to evade the effect of the Act by gifting part of their land to nominees before the Act came into effect, the economic power of the landlord class in East Pakistan was relatively much weaker than in the West. A further significant difference in the class structure of West and East Pakistan had been brought about by the more rapid development of capitalist industry in the West. Of the 1,414 industrial enterprises that Pakistan inherited, only 314 (22 percent) were situated in the East, and this picture continued. The fact that this industrial development was largely financed by foreign capital quickly led to the formation in the West of a new comprador industrial capitalist class, largely recruited at first from businessmen who had emigrated from India. A section of the landlord class in the West fused both with this new comprador industrial bourgeoisie and with the old commercial/financial comprador bourgeoisie to create a new comprador ruling class, which after a period of internal struggle, gained control of the state apparatus of coercion.
The military dictatorship of Ayub Khan was the instrument of this ruling class, which made use of the state machine to advance to the position of a powerful state monopoly capitalist class – the notorious ‘Twenty Families’ who, according to Dr Mahbubul Huq, chief economist of the Planning Commission and M Raschid, Governor of the State Bank, in 1968 owned 66 percent of industry, 79 percent of insurance and 80 percent of banking.
The Semi-Colonial Position of East Pakistan
The control of the state machine by a ruling class having its base in West Pakistan was assisted by the fact that, under British rule, military officers and higher civil servants had been drawn principally from landed families in the West. This process was continued after independence. Goodnow, in his study of the Pakistani civil service, says: “The situation was aggravated by the fact that the central bureaucrats had been overwhelmingly drawn from West Pakistan” (M F Goodnow: The Civil Service in Pakistan, New Haven, 1964, p.43). Colonel Mohammed Ahmed, the biographer of Ayub Khan, agrees: “Most of the senior officials had come from West Pakistan, feeling too unhappy to be discreet. They would complain in bitter terms even in the presence of East Pakistanis, whom they blamed for all the misery and inconvenience. A thousand-mile gulf already existed geographically between the people of the two provinces. Temerity and impudence of the West Pakistanis was widening it emotionally much further” (M Ahmed: My Chief, Lahore,1960, p.7-8).
In his report in the Sunday Times of June 13, 1971, Anthony Mascarenhas had declared that this situation had been greatly accentuated since the full military occupation of East Pakistan: “East Bengal can only be kept in Pakistan by the heavy hand of the army. And the army is dominated by the Punjabis, who traditionally despise and dislike the Bengalis…The Government’s policy for East Bengal was spelled out to me in the Eastern Command headquarters at Dacca. It has three elements:
1) the Bengalis have proved themselves ‘unreliable’ and must be ruled by West Pakistanis;
2) the Bengalis will have to be re-educated along proper Islamic lines. The “Islamisation of the masses” – this is the official jargon – is intended to eliminate secessionist tendencies and provide a strong religious bond with West Pakistan;
3) when the Hindus have been eliminated by death and flight, their property will be used as a golden carrot to win over the underprivileged Muslim middle-class.
Because of the mutiny, it has been officially decreed that there will not for the present be any further recruitment of Bengalis in the defence forces…Bengali fighter pilots, among them some of the aces of the Air Force, had the humiliation of being grounded and moved to non-flying duties. Even PIA (Pakistan International Airways) air crews operating between the two wings of the country have been strained clean of Bengalis. The East Pakistan Rifles, once almost exclusively a Bengali paramilitary force, has ceased to exist since the mutiny. A new force, the Civil Defence Force, has been raised by recruiting Biharis and volunteers from West Pakistan. Biharis, instead of Bengalis, are also being used as the basic material for the police. They are supervised by officers sent out from West Pakistan and by secondment from the army…Hundreds of West Pakistani government civil servants, doctors, and technicians for the radio, TV, telegraph and telephone services have already been sent out to East Pakistan. More are being encouraged to go with the promise of one- and two-step promotions…I was told that all the Commissioners of East Bengal and the district Deputy Commissioners will in future be either Biharis or civil officers from West Pakistan…The Government has also come down hard on the universities and colleges of East Bengal. They were considered the hot beds of conspiracy and they are being ‘sorted out’. Many professors have fled. Some have been shot. They will be replaced by fresh recruitment from West Pakistan…Bengali officers are also being weeded out of sensitive positions in the Civil and Foreign Services.”
As a result of the control of the state machine by a ruling class based in West Pakistan, state funds were used to develop the economy of the West to a far greater extent than that of the East. While the jute exports of East Pakistan provided the principal source of the country’s foreign exchange, West Pakistan received, on average, 70 percent of the country’s imports. By 1956 economists had calculated that West Pakistan was receiving an annual tribute from the East of more than Rs 300 million (Pakistan Times, February 8, 1957). Furthermore, a considerable part of the industry that developed in East Pakistan was controlled or financed by West Pakistani capital. Since the foundation of Pakistan, East Pakistan became a market for the manufactured goods produced in the industrial centres of the West, while its raw materials were used primarily to develop Karachi and Punjab. In other words, East Pakistan had been in the position of a semi-colony to the dominant West, as a speaker in the Constituent Assembly expressed it as early as 1948: “A feeling is growing among the Eastern Pakistanis that Eastern Pakistan is being neglected and treated merely as a ‘colony’ of West Pakistan” (Constituent Assembly of Pakistan Debates, Volume 2, No. l: February 1948; p.6-7).
The Neo-Colonial Position of Pakistan
While, since the foundation of Pakistan, East Pakistan had been in the position of a semi-colony of West Pakistan, Pakistan as a whole had been in the position of a neo-colony of foreign imperialism. In the early years of its existence, until 1953, the country was dominated politically by a landlord-comprador bourgeois class coalition dependent upon British imperialism, represented politically by the Muslim League (ML). During these years Pakistan’s economy was dominated by British monopoly capital: 90 percent of the banking capital was in the hands of British banks, and British firms controlled more than 80 percent of Pakistan’s imports. The insurance business was also dominated by British capital. Pakistan’s holdings of sterling in London and the organisation of currency control within the sterling area, of which Pakistan was a member, restricted the country’s opportunities of developing economic relations with states outside the orbit of British imperialism. The aim of British imperialism – an aim which was faithfully carried out by the ML government – was to hold back the industrial development of the country so that it might continue to be a market for British manufactured goods and a source of raw materials and super-profits for the British imperialists. In May 1948 the government of the new Dominion issued a long statement of its economic programme. It emphasised that this programme would be based upon private enterprise and foreign capital. It declared that initial emphasis must be laid on the development of agriculture and of industries based on agriculture, as well as on the promotion of handicrafts.
In February 1950 a British industrial mission headed by Lord Burghley, director of the National Provincial Bank and the British Overseas Airways Corporation, toured Pakistan with the declared aim of exploring the possibility of trade expansion and of assistance by British firms to Pakistan’s ‘economic development’. The mission’s report, issued in August of the same year, recommended that the basic needs of power, water and transport should come before any intensive industrial growth, stating that of these needs the expansion of water-power was “vitally urgent” and one that would require the assistance of British consulting engineers. It recommended that Pakistani technicians should be trained in Britain, and that British technicians should assist in the operation of Pakistani industry. Its final recommendations were that continued publicity should be carried out making clear the government’s stated policy that no further industries would be nationalised, so encouraging investment from abroad, that company taxation would be reduced and the price of Pakistan’s exports lowered. The first indication that a section of Pakistan’s ruling class was beginning to look beyond London for its inspiration came when Chowdhury Nazir Ahmed Khan, Pakistan’s Minister of Industries, denounced the mission’s report as “unrealistic”, and declared: “It would be too much for any country to expect that Pakistan would formulate its industrial policy to suit that country’s interests or requirements.”
Although officially designated as a measure “to combat Communism”, the “Colombo Plan for Co-operative Economic Development in South and South-East Asia”, announced in November 1950, was evolved by the British imperialists primarily to compete with the “Point Four” programme of ‘aid’ to underdeveloped countries being brought into being by the US imperialists. The plan was a programme for the ‘economic development’ of Pakistan, India, Ceylon, Malaya and British Borneo, costing Pounds Sterling (PS) 1,868 million over six years. Of this sum, PS 840 million was to be provided directly by the countries being ‘assisted’, PS 246 million from their sterling balances held in London, PS 700 million from ‘external sources’ (mostly, it was hoped, from the US) and only PS 60 million from Britain. Eventually, in fact, the US imperialists did ‘assist’ the Colombo Plan by incorporating it in their own ‘aid’ programme. By the fourth meeting of the Colombo Plan countries at Ottawa in October 1954, the original seven participating countries had increased to seventeen by the addition of the US, Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Burma, Nepal, South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Even the meagre ‘aid’ programme embodied in the Colombo Plan had proved beyond the enfeebled capacity of British imperialism.
The Formation of National-Democratic Parties
The policy of the neo-colonial ML regime proved extremely frustrating to Pakistan’s national capitalists in both East and West, but particularly in the former. From 1950 on, parties representing the interests of these national capitalists began to appear, parties making their appeal to the peasants, to the urban petty bourgeoisie and to the working class. In March 1950 there was formed in East Pakistan the Awami (People’s) Muslim League, led by Husain Shahid Suhrawardy, Sheikh Mujibur Rehman and peasant leader Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani. Shortly afterwards the Azad (Free) Pakistan Party appeared in West Pakistan under the leadership of Mian Iftikharuddin, owner of Progressive Papers Ltd., which controlled a chain of newspapers and journals, including the leading English language newspaper Pakistan Times. In January 1953 the formation of the Ganatantri Dal (Democratic Party) in the East was followed, also in the East, by the revival of the Krishak Sramik (Peasant/Worker) Party, headed by Fazlul Huq, in September of the same year. Also in September 1953, the Awami Muslim League dropped the religious adjective from its name to become the Awami League.
In 1948 the Communist Party of India had split itself into the Communist Party of India and the Communist Party of Pakistan, with Sajjad Zaheer as the latter’s first General Secretary. It represented at this time the interests of the working class. In West Pakistan it was forced to go underground after the Rawalpindi ‘Conspiracy’ case in 1951; in East Pakistan it was underground from the foundation of Pakistan until November 1953, when it was able to hold its first public meeting. It correctly combined this underground activity with open fractional work within the national-democratic parties, mainly the Awami League and Ganatantri Dal in the East, and the Azad Pakistan Party in the West.
Centralisation and Repression
Faced with the potential threat of national-democratic opposition, the government took steps both to centralise economic control and to arm itself with repressive powers. In July 1948 a State Bank was set up to coordinate financial control of the economy, and in the same month Governor-General Jinnah granted himself special powers by which he could instruct the Governor of a province to take direct control of the provincial administration “in case of emergency”. It is interesting to note that this latter step was carried out under Section 92 of the Government of India Act passed in 1935 by the British Conservative Government. In September 1948 the government set up a Central Engineering Authority to coordinate public works activities in the provinces, particularly the development of electric power. In December 1948 the right to grant oil and mineral concessions was transferred from the provincial governments to the central government. In November 1950 it was announced that an Industrial Development Corporation would be set up with a capital of Rs 40 million for the development of the jute, paper, engineering and chemical industry. The Minister of Industries, in making this announcement, emphasised that foreign capital and foreign ‘aid’ would be welcomed.
In January 1949 the Constituent Assembly passed the Public and Representative Offices Disqualification Act (PRODA), retrospectively to 1947, empowering the Governor-General to debar from public life for up to ten years anyone found guilty by a court or tribunal of any abuse of his official position. As Keith Callard points out: “The main sufferers under PRODA were politicians who had incurred the displeasure of the central government” (K Callard: Pakistan: A Political Study, London, 1957; p.103). In October 1949 the government promulgated the Public Safety Ordinance, giving itself wide powers of detention without trial, restriction of movement, censorship of newspapers and periodicals, and control of “subversive bodies”.
In March 1951 Prime Minister (PM) Liaquat Ali Khan announced that a ‘communist conspiracy’ had been uncovered in the army. A number of army officers, headed by Major-General Akbar Khan (Chief of the General Staff), Faiz Ahmed Faiz (Editor of Pakistan Times) and Saijad Zaheer (General Secretary of the Communist Party), were arrested, tried secretly by special tribunals, and sentenced to terms of imprisonment.
Political Struggle within the Ruling Class
As early as mid-1948 the British intelligence service was reporting to London that an influential section of the landlord and comprador-bourgeois classes in West Pakistan was beginning to look for support away from Britain, with its declining economic and military strength, towards the US, which had emerged from the Second World War as by far the strongest imperialist power in the world. Accordingly, the British imperialists turned their special attention towards the weaker Bengali landlords as a social base for their continued domination of Pakistan. The Bengali landlords were headed by Cambridge-educated Khwaja Nazimuddin, knighted for his services to the British Raj.
In September 1948 Jinnah died, and the Bengali landlords, backed by British imperialism, succeeded in elevating Khwaja Nazimuddin to the vacant post of Governor-General. The new Governor-General, in his turn, nominated another Bengali landlord, Nurul Amin, to succeed him as Chief Minister of East Pakistan. In September 1950 – in which month Major-General Mohammad Ayub Khan was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Pakistan army in succession to General Sir Douglas Gracey – the Basic Principles Committee (appointed in March 1949 to prepare the basis of a Constitution for Pakistan) presented its interim report. Dominated by the ‘Karachi’ landlord/comprador bourgeois clique, the Committee proposed that the country should have a parliamentary system of government with two Houses, each having equal powers: the lower “House of the People” would be directly elected on the basis of population, while the upper “House of Units” would be elected indirectly by provincial legislatures on the basis of an equal number of members from each province.
With West Pakistan divided into a number of provinces, and the East made up of a single province, a Constitution on this basis would have rendered the pro-British Bengali landlord clique virtually impotent. The Committee’s recommendation that Urdu (one of the languages of West Pakistan spoken, according to the 1951 Census, by only 3.3 percent of the population of the country) should be the official language of Pakistan caused particular indignation in East Bengal.
In March 1950 the ML in Punjab – dominated by the powerful Punjabi landlords headed by Mian Mumtaz Daultana – gained a sweeping victory in the Punjab provincial elections, winning 143 seats out of 194. The ‘Punjabi’ clique, as it came to be known, thus assumed an influential role in the ruling party, and it too was turning towards US imperialism.
Thus, by 1950 three rival groups had come into being within the ruling class of Pakistan:
1) the pro-British ‘Bengali’ clique of Eastern landlords and comprador bourgeoisie;
2) the pro-US ‘Punjabi’ clique of Western landlords, and
3) the pro-US ‘Karachi’ clique of Western landlords and financial/ commercial /industrial comprador bourgeoisie.
In October 1951, PM Liaquat Ali Khan was assassinated. In his hands the office of the PM had, since the death of Jinnah, acquired particular influence, and on the following day Governor-General Khwaja Nazimuddin appointed himself PM and then resigned as Governor-General. The ‘Karachi’ clique successfully replied to this move by securing the appointment of its nominee, Ghulam Mohammad, to the vacant post of Governor-General.
To strengthen its position against the constitutional proposals put forward by the Basic Principles Committee, the ‘Bengali’ clique sought and won the support of the orthodox mullahs (the Muslim priesthood) to assist it by organising a campaign to the effect that the proposals were “insufficiently Islamic” in content.
In October 1952 the Council of the ML met in Dacca. Here the ‘Bengali’ clique were successful in securing the adoption of an amendment to the constitution of the ML, by which East and West Pakistan would in future have parity of seats on the Council. With West Pakistan divided into several provinces, this effectively enabled the ‘Bengali’ clique to dominate the ML for the time being. In December 1952 a revised report on the basic principles of the State Constitution was presented to the Constituent Assembly by PM Khwaja Nazimuddin. It pandered to the conservative mullahs who had assisted in the fight against the 1950 report by declaring that the Head of State must be a Muslim, who would appoint a board of persons versed in Islamic law to advise on legislation. But its most important proposal was to introduce into the State Constitution the principle that had been incorporated in the constitution of the ML three months earlier, namely, that both the upper and lower Houses would have parity of representation between East and West Pakistan. To weaken the position of the Western cliques still more, it was proposed that West Pakistan should be further sub-divided. Although the decision on an official language was left to the Constituent Assembly, this report represented a significant victory for the pro-British ‘Bengali’ clique.
Both the ‘Punjabi’ and the ‘Karachi’ cliques naturally found these constitutional proposals unacceptable, and sought to use against them the same weapon that the ‘Bengali’ clique had used against the 1950 report – that of religious fanaticism. They secured the support of the influential organisation of the orthodox mullahs, the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Islam, to stir up the backward masses against both the report and the government that had presented them, claiming that the new proposals were still “insufficiently Islamic” in content. In the Punjab, violent pogroms were organised against a minority sect, the Ahmadyas, and in March 1953 the Governor-General imposed Martial Law on the province.
By April the ‘Karachi’ clique judged that the position of the Khwaja Nazimuddin government had been sufficiently weakened, and on April 17, 1953, Governor-General Ghulam Mohammad arbitrarily dismissed it from office.
(To be continued)