Earlier this week, people who study the history of the Indian sub-continent recalled the coup d’etat by President Iskandar Mirza and General Mohammad Ayub Khan in Pakistan on October 7, 1958. It was an act that snuffed out the tentative moves for democracy that had been going on in the country, especially in light of the constitution adopted in 1956.
Twenty days after the coup, on October 27, Ayub Khan took over, as both president and chief martial law administrator, through forcing Mirza to relinquish the presidency at gunpoint. Mirza was bundled off into exile in Britain.
Iskandar Mirza died in London in November 1969. His family was not permitted by General Yahya Khan, then in power as Pakistan’s second military ruler, to bury Mirza in Pakistan. It was then that Ardeshir Zahedi, at the time Iran’s foreign minister (and a relative of the Shah), arranged for Mirza’s body to be flown to Tehran and buried there. The fact that Mirza’s second wife Naheed was an Iranian helped.
Ayub Khan remained in power for slightly over 10 years, until he was forced out in March 1969. There are all the stories that historians and researchers have known and studied about the nature of the regime that Ayub led, indeed personified in the decade his minions referred to as a decade of reforms. It was anything but, which again is a fact of history.
Beyond and above the period in which Ayub presided over Pakistan is the legacy, a terrible one at that, which he inaugurated and which was to be emulated by other ambitious military officers in both Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Men who seize power at the point of a gun in the end leave entire societies devastated beyond measure. That is what Ayub Khan did, to a point where at the moment of his resignation from the presidency he did not transfer power to Abdul Jabbar Khan, the speaker of the national assembly elected under the very constitution he had cobbled in June 1962.
Power passed into the hands of General Yahya Khan, whose record, a miserable and murderous one, has obliterated him from history. Of course, Yahya Khan began well, through promising, and actually delivering on the promise, Pakistan’s first general elections in December 1970. But he and his fellow generals as well as West Pakistan’s reactionary political classes had not anticipated the sweeping electoral triumph Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and the Awami League would achieve on an all-Pakistan basis.
In the end, Yahya Khan destroyed himself by repudiating the results of the elections, through ordering a bloodbath of Bengalis, through presiding over Pakistan’s gigantic defeat in war in December 1971.
Under Yahya Khan, the Pakistan state slid down the slope of statehood a good many notches, for all the proper reasons. But, then, it was the Ayub autocracy which had prepared the grounds for the disaster. Neither man was ready to acknowledge legitimate Bengali demands. Nor were they ready to understand that times were changing, that people were getting increasingly conscious about their fundamental rights as citizens. It was a failure that would spawn other failures, under other soldiers of ambition in later times. We have had the Ayub legacy extending itself, in all its dark reach, in Bangladesh.
The violent coup which dislodged Bangabandhu’s government in August 1975 was but a throwback to the ugly lessons taught by Ayub Khan and Yahya Khan. The only difference -- and it was a big difference -- is that when Bangladesh went through all those convulsive coups between August and November 1975, murder and mayhem came into play. The Father of the Nation and almost his entire family were gunned down; the leading figures of the 1971 Mujibnagar government were murdered in prison; senior and mid-ranking officers of the army were killed by mutinous soldiers. General Ziaur Rahman rode to power through striding across a path splattered with the blood of Khaled Musharraf and other soldiers.
In the five years he held sway in Bangladesh, Zia emulated Ayub Khan in the politics he foisted on the country. Where Ayub had taken away a chunk of the Muslim League and called it his own, Zia formed his own political outfit in the shape of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party. The stress on a Muslim identity that Ayub Khan had propagated in Pakistan was the same, in the garb of “Bangladeshi nationalism,” that Zia had his sycophants disseminate in Bangladesh.
It was a tent in which a bizarre mix of drawing-room leftists, communalist right-wingers, and active collaborators of the Pakistan occupation army of 1971 came together in cheerful union.
The point ought not to be missed. All dictators spend their time in power promoting the business of self-adulation. In the process, they throw new ideas around, ideas which only stifle the growth of democracy and therefore leave the future a mess, which elected civilian leaders will be expected to clean up. General Ziaul Huq’s terrible legacy is one from which Pakistan yet suffers.
In league with the Reagan administration in Washington, he armed the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, the consequence being a flood of Afghan refugees into Pakistan. Worse, in the political sense, he turned Pakistan into a hotbed of Islamist radicalism. The civilian politicians who have come after him have found themselves in a straitjacket built around his shady legacy. As if that were not enough, General Pervez Musharraf literally came down from the skies in October 1999 to put Nawaz Sharif’s elected government out to pasture.
The struggle for democracy in Bangladesh was a good deal stymied by the coup d’etat General Hussein Muhammad Ershad launched against the elected President Abdus Sattar in March 1982. Once again, in the shadows, it was the ghost of Ayub Khan that lurked in all its sinister glee. As Ayub did in his time, Ershad constructed around him a civil-military bureaucratic complex that effectively blocked all avenues to democratic pluralism. And just as Ziaul Huq turned Pakistan into an Islamist theocracy, Ershad declared in Bangladesh, a state conceived in secular ideals, a state religion.
Dictators tend to place themselves on perches higher than the state. Through a ruthless exercise of power, they overturn the very nature of the state in the belief that their convoluted ideas are indeed philosophies that future generations will build upon. The truth about future generations is that they turn their backs on dictators.
Ayub Khan was an aberration as were the Pakistani and Bangladeshi dictators who followed in his footsteps. But the aberrations have played havoc with the lives of millions, with their aspirations, and with history. These aberrations can be consigned to the woods, of course, in the way Chile’s people have just repudiated, loudly, Augusto Pinochet Ugarte. They have voted overwhelmingly in favour of a new constitution free of the putrefaction of martial rule.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist and biographer.