The Rawalpindi Conspiracy: The history and legacy of Pakistan’s first coup attempt

In more than a few ways, General Akbar Khan’s adventure of 1951 has cast a long shadow on Pakistani politics

Ibrahim Moiz | February 04, 2021

This month marks the 70^th anniversary of the first military coup plot in Pakistan’s history: the so-called “Rawalpindi Conspiracy” against Liaquat Ali Khan’s cabinet in February 1951. Comprising a curious cast of characters led by the distinguished ground forces commander General Akbar Khan, the 1951 coup plot differed from its many successors in Pakistani history in that it was the only such military plot to receive support from the political far-Left. Nonetheless, it set a pattern that has repeated itself in Pakistani history, where officers frustrated with various real and imagined shortcomings of the civilian leadership decide to seize power.

Left out? The Pakistani Left and Liaquat Ali Khan

The broad popularity of Pakistan’s first prime minister has never been shared by the Left. This is hardly surprising given that Liaquat Ali Khan’s government, like many other newly independent post-colonial governments, banned the country’s communist party. Mutual mistrust of communism was widespread among Pakistan’s founders – Muhammad Ali Jinnah blamed his hostile reception at Dhaka in 1948 partly on the agitation of “a few communists” – and it rested on two factors: first, that like most postcolonial leaders the Muslim League founders came from a background unlikely to view communism with any warmth; and second, that various communists in the Global South at this early stage of the Cold War made no secret of their aspirational links to the Soviet Union.

The regional communists’ own view of the Pakistan Movement had been decidedly unenthusiastic – viewing it as both reflective of bourgeois Muslim interests and inordinately influenced by religious politics. Sajjad Zaheer, the West Pakistan communist secretary-general, had initially supported, then opposed the idea of Pakistan in the 1940s, and eventually accepted it as a fait-accompli; his stance was openly transactional. Unlike other early sceptics of the Pakistan Movement – such as Islamist ideologue Abulala Maududi’s Jamaat party, which had initially criticized Pakistan as insufficiently authentic to Islam, but which quickly supported the new country once it had been founded – the communists lacked any political common ground on which to repair their relations with the fledgling Pakistani state.

Sold out? The Kashmir campaign and Liaquat Ali Khan

If Liaquat Ali Khan’s aristocratic background and largely conservative politics condemned him to the Pakistani Left, some officers viewed the prime minister with misgivings for an entirely different reason. They saw the government’s agreement to a ceasefire with India over Kashmir in 1949 as premature and overly cautious; in retrospect, it may be added that their scepticism about the United Nations-mediated plebiscite stipulated by the ceasefire proved justified, given that no such plebiscite has ever taken place. The fledgling Pakistani government in 1949 had justifiable doubts about its ability to wage a protracted war with India, but perhaps understandably the result – a divided Kashmir whose capital and east remained in Indian hands – embittered many veterans of the war.

Foremost among them was “General Tariq” Akbar Khan, the first ground commander of the Pakistani army. Restless and ambitious, he had played a major role in mobilising, planning, and leading the Kashmir campaign; thus he resented both British restraints on Pakistan and the government’s capitulation to such pressures. Other military dissidents included Mohammad Janjua, the senior-most air force officer at independence and another key planner; General Akbar’s former commander Nazir Ahmed, now retired; and General Akbar’s former lieutenant, Mohammad Abdul-Latif, who now served as Quetta commandant. Most such officers did not belong to the Left but shared, for different reasons, its dissatisfaction with Liaquat Ali Khan.

Connecting these circles was the famous leftist poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, a former soldier who had fought under General Akbar in Kashmir. General Akbar’s wife Nasim Shahnawaz helped arrange meetings where Akbar promised the communists that he would rescind their ban in return for their levying support among the working class for a military government. The communists’ own motivation can be summed up by Zaheer’s statement that the path to socialism required “a jump at any adventure” – better to be within the loop than without. Unfortunately for them, several plotters soon regretted the venture and leaked the plot to army commander Ayub Khan, the only officer above Akbar in the hierarchy and one who would prove a strident anti-communist. Ayub thereby imprisoned the plotters who were put on trial.

General Akbar’s personal popularity as well as the resonance of the Kashmir angle lent the plotters considerable public sympathy, even within the elite. Huseyn Suhrawardy, the former Bengal premier who would later become Pakistani prime minister, took on General Akbar’s defence as a personal project. Both of the plotters received relatively light sentences; indeed, General Akbar would be excavated by Zulfikar Bhutto as a security advisor in the 1970s – at a point, not unironically, where Bhutto was cracking down on eftist insurgents in Balochistan.

Conclusion: A long shadow

In the short term, the Rawalpindi Conspiracy proved more titillating for Western diplomats – who, in these early years of the Cold War, saw signs of communist “world government” in much less – than it impacted events. The much-maligned Liaquat Ali Khan was assassinated later that same year, but it had nothing to do with the conspirators; meanwhile, Pakistan’s political instability of the 1950s helped Ayub, an arch-rightist officer, seize power in 1958. During his decade in power the Left was systemically repressed – as it was, after a brief early flirtation, by Bhutto, before Mohammad Ziaul Haq delivered the coup de grace in the 1980s. The truth was that the Left was never as popular across the Pakistani public as it liked to imagine itself. Today, Pakistan’s Marxists have either retired into comfortable sinecures at business universities or else reinvented themselves as neoliberal democrats. The perfect storm of a popular figurehead in General Akbar and a popular cause in Kashmir was the closest they have ever come to taking power.

More relevant is the role of the army in politics. General Akbar led the first of what were to be many coup attempts in Pakistani history; ironically Ayub, who thwarted his attempt, established the first military dictatorship. Even when the aim has not been a military regime, activist officers have played a role; for instance, in December 1971 it took a mutiny by Furrukh Ali to end Yahya Khan’s junta and install Bhutto, while Ziaul Haq survived at least two coup attempts over his regime. Along with condemnations of civilian ineptitude, the Kashmir cause has similarly often catalyzed such interventions – most notably when Pervez Musharraf seized power after accusing former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of having sold out the 1999 campaign in Kashmir. In more than a few ways, therefore, General Akbar’s adventure of 1951 has cast a long shadow on Pakistani politics.

https://tribune.com.pk/article/97280/the-rawalpindi-conspiracy-the-history-and-legacy-of-pakistans-first-coup-attempt

Political assassinations part of US foreign policy: Ex-US Senate candidate

Sat Apr 18, 2015 10:38PM

A former US Senate candidate and political commentator says the 1951 assassination of Pakistan’s first prime minister, Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan,  is a part of the conduct of the US foreign policy, which is driven by its financial and banking system.

Mark Dankof, a broadcaster and pastor in San Antonio, Texas, made the remarks in an interview on Saturday while commenting on a Pakistan Today report which revealed on Friday that Khan was murdered by the US because of his refusal to use his office for securing oil contracts in neighboring Iran for US corporations.

“The Pakistan Today story, citing released American State Department documents, confirms the role of [former US President Harry S.] Truman and the CIA in the assassination of PM Khan in Pakistan in 1951, just as the released CIA-MI6 documents on the coup against [Prime Minister Mohammad] Mosaddegh in Iran in 1953, confirm the details of ‘Operation Ajax’ authorized by [former US President Dwight D.] Eisenhower and carried out by Kermit Roosevelt,” Dankof said, referring to the CIA officer who coordinated the “Operation Ajax” — the 1953 joint CIA-MI6-sponsored coup d’état against Mosaddegh.

Mosaddegh’s overthrow led to the return of Iran’s former monarch, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whose regime turned increasingly oppressive until it was toppled by the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

W. Averell Harriman (left), former US President Harry S. Truman’s personal foreign policy adviser, conferring with former Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh in 1951. An interpreter sits between them. (AP file photo)

“All of this is a part of the conduct of the foreign policy of the American Empire in the 20th and 21st centuries, which is nothing more than the continuation of the foreign policy of its predecessor, the British Empire, a foreign policy driven by the House of Rothschild financial and banking dynasty,” he added.

Dankof said, “In the case of the United States, every move made in the foreign policy arena since the establishment of the Federal Reserve Board in 1913 is driven by the following considerations:

1) The Balfour Declaration; 2) the Sikes-Picot Treaty; 3) the 1944 Bretton Woods financial conference which replaced the British pound sterling with the American dollar as the reserve currency of the world; 4) the Nixon-Kissinger agreement with Saudi Arabia in August of 1971 that the continuation of the American dollar as the reserve currency of the globe would peg that dollar to all international oil transactions instead of the gold standard agreed to at Bretton Woods; 5) the establishment of a world central banking system under the aegis of the Bretton Woods system and such entities as the Federal Reserve Board, the World Bank, the IMF, the Import-Export Bank, et. al.; and 6) the employment of the American military, the CIA, NATO, and the like to insure cheap access to the raw materials of countries through the world, especially in the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, and Africa.”

Quoting the declassified State Department documents, Pakistan Todayreported on Friday that the Pakistani prime minister said he would neither use his friendship with officials in Tehran for dishonest purposes nor interfere in personal affairs of Iran.

In addition, Khan also called on Washington to vacate air bases in Pakistan which the United States was using against the Soviet Union, upon which Truman threatened the PM with dire consequences.

Former US President Harry S. Truman

“No methodology is deemed too evil to employ in the ongoing development of this world system, including assassination, coup d’etat, economic and cultural subversion, and overt employment of military force,” Dankof said.

“This is the context in which we should understand the Khan assassination among many others, including the murder of John Kennedy in this country in November of 1963.

“Central Banking, Zionism, the Petrodollar, and the looting of raw materials throughout the globe are always the culprits in this scenario, as they are at present in the coup d’etat facilitated by the American, European, and Israeli elites in the Ukraine in February of 2014, and the continued reckless encirclement of Putin’s Russia by NATO and its military assets.

“This leads us finally, to the consideration of Harry Truman himself.  The late father of the Strategic Air Command (SAC), General Curtis LeMay, confirmed for history that the atomic bombings of Japan had nothing to do with the surrender of that country to end World War II.

“Truman dropped those weapons to send the Soviet Union a message about American power in the Pacific and throughout the world, and our willingness to employ the atomic monopoly whenever necessary to secure that power.

“What does this say about Truman?  That essentially the same man who ordered these horrific war crimes could and did easily approve the assassination of Khan in Pakistan in 1951, as his modern counterparts of the last 15 years continue to commit crimes for the usual agenda, while wrapping that agenda in the public spin of ‘democracy.’”

GJH/GJH

http://www.presstv.com/Detail/2015/04/18/406951/Assassinations-part-of-US-foreign-policy-

The man Jinnah called his right hand

The Pakistan of 2017 is in many ways Liaquat’s creation as he established most of the policies Pakistan follows today.

ROGER D. LONG

Published a day ago

Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan often smiled as he faced the camera. He is seen here seated in the centre during a Muslim League Council Meeting in Bombay in the early 1940s. From extreme left are Sher-e-Bengal A.K. Fazlul Huq and Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah. On Liaquat’s left are Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan, Sardar Aurangzeb Khan, and Amir Ahmed Khan, the famed Raja Sahib Mehmoodabad (extreme right). | Photo: Dawn / White Star Archives

LIAQUAT Ali Khan, one of the heroes of the Pakistan Movement, was the builder of the nation in its nascent years. The Pakistan of 2017 — on the 70th anniversary of its independence — is in many ways Liaquat’s creation as he established most of the policies Pakistan follows today.

Liaquat had been a devoted follower of the Quaid-i-Azam, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, since 1928, and was appointed general secretary of the All-India Muslim League by his leader in 1936. Over the subsequent 12 years, Jinnah and Liaquat developed a close working relationship, with Jinnah calling Liaquat “my right hand” in 1943, and appointing him prime minister in 1947. He held the position with great skill and distinction until he was assassinated on October 16, 1951.

Liaquat was a reserved, outwardly calm person. Although he was not a demonstrative figure who craved attention and an audience, he was a skilled politician whom his political opponents often underestimated, as did the Congress Party, to their own cost. Besides, he worked in the shadow of the Quaid, who did not allow others to be the public spokesman for the League after 1936, or for Pakistan between August 14, 1947, and his death.

Liaquat greatly admired Jinnah for his devotion to the cause of the Muslims. It was a devotion Liaquat shared and respected. He was always deferential to Jinnah in part because Jinnah always demanded deference from his followers, and in part because Liaquat always respected the almost 20-year difference in age between them. But Jinnah truly depended on Liaquat, who was at the centre of all the League’s activities before partition and as prime minister.

Liaquat was an Urdu-speaking Punjabi, the second son of the Nawab of Karnal. He was educated in law at Syed Ahmed Khan’s Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, which later became the Aligarh University, and he remained devoted all his life to the modernist ideals and the integration of Western and Islamic learning he acquired there. He was a very good student and became a well-educated, well-travelled person who could, and did, conduct himself well during conversations of intellectual and ethical nature, as Viceroy Lord Wavell recorded in his journal.

Liaquat was married to his first cousin in 1915 and had a son, Wilayat, born in 1919, the year after his father died leaving him an independently wealthy man. Liaquat then studied law at Exeter College, Oxford, and the Inner Temple, London. He was called to the Bar and returned to India in 1922 after touring Europe as a well-educated, cosmopolitan man, who could recite Iqbal’s Jawab-i-Shikwa by heart, was fond of entertaining and music, and whose passion was politics.

He was also passionate about education and, among other things, he became the president and benefactor of the Anglo-Islamic School in Muzaffarnagar, United Provinces; president of the Anglo-Arabic College, Delhi (now Zakir Husain Delhi College); and he maintained a connection with Aligarh until 1947. As prime minister he continued his strong interest in education and spoke of its importance frequently.

He registered to practise law in Lahore after his return from England, but devoted his life to education and politics. In 1923 he ran for election to the Legislative Assembly of India from the Punjab, but was defeated. It was, thus, an accident of history that left him associated with the United Provinces and not the Punjab to which he belonged. According to Dr. Shaista Suhrawardy Ikramullah, a Bengali who knew him well and whose husband served as Liaquat’s foreign secretary, he was “very much a Punjabi”.

Liaquat was elected to the Legislative Council in the United Provinces in 1926 and for 20 years represented the province; first at Lucknow and then, from 1941, in Delhi, where he joined Jinnah in the Legislative Assembly of India. Jinnah appointed him the Muslim League deputy leader.

He had always been interested in economic affairs, spoke frequently on the subject in the United Provinces’ legislatures and in the Legislative Assembly of India in New Delhi, served as one of the Indo-British trade negotiators in 1937, and was the first Indian Finance Member of British India in the interim government between September 1946 and partition.

Liaquat had a legalistic bent of mind and he was a detail-oriented person capable of long hours of work. Temperamentally he was ideally suited to be the general secretary of the League, and all its committees — such as the Working Committee and the Committee of Action — revolved around him. He was also responsible for the provincial League parties, maintained voluminous correspondence, and frequently travelled throughout the subcontinent for the League. It was remarkable that the League became a well-organised, national political party just in the space of a few years due to Jinnah’s leadership and Liaquat’s organisational ability.

Of critical value was Liaquat’s role in the creation of Dawn as a weekly newspaper in 1941 and as a daily, the following year. Dawn played a major role in publicising and popularising the demand for Pakistan, and in the elevation of Jinnah as a national and even international figure.

Carrying the newspaper became a sign that one was a follower of Jinnah and a supporter of the demand for Pakistan. Indeed, Dawn was a catalyst for the creation of Pakistan.

The founding of Pakistan in 1947 was the great achievement of the Quaid-a-Azam, but he could not have done it without the help of a number of leading supporters, of whom Liaquat was the most important. But Liaquat also had another great achievement in his life, and that was the establishment of Pakistan as a working state entity and the development of its policies, most of which have been followed since 1947.

In the history of world leaders, Liaquat must be ranked with Clement Attlee, who created the welfare state in Britain, and Harry Truman in the United States, who formulated the US foreign policy which has been followed to this day. Liaquat had a much more difficult task than Attlee or Truman, as Britain could receive loans from the United States and the British Commonwealth countries, and the US had come out of the Second World War in a very strong economic and political position. On the contrary, Liaquat assumed the leadership of a completely new and untested polity, with very little international support.

In 1947 both British and Indian leaders were talking about the possibility of Pakistan soon collapsing “like a tent”, openly discussing how many weeks or months Pakistan would last. It was Liaquat’s historical achievement that by the end of his prime ministership in October 1951 no one was talking about Pakistan’s imminent collapse.

In 1947, Pakistan needed to create a state apparatus from scratch while absorbing millions of refugees, and fighting with India over Kashmir. In addition to ensuring Pakistan’s survival and the creation of government institutions, such as the civil service and the military, Liaquat was responsible for creating Pakistan’s national policies and 70 years later they have mostly remained intact.

The cornerstone of these policies was the stabilisation of the economy along sound fiscal lines while aligning it with capitalist trends in the West rather than with the communist bloc dominated by the erstwhile Soviet Union. Pakistan had little choice at the time though. Turning to the Soviet Union for assistance was not much of an option as its economy had all but been destroyed during the War and its preoccupation with Cold War issues was not much of a help either. While the West in the end provided little economic support, Pakistan’s industrial development in the 1950s and ’60s was actually a result of Liaquat’s early policies.

In addition to the economic policy, Liaquat also established Pakistan’s foreign policy, which the country has largely followed ever since. The first feature of this policy was in regard to India and the conflict over Kashmir. Liaquat never agreed to accept the Vale of Kashmir as part of India, a policy that has characterised Pakistan’s stance to date. Liaquat made a huge effort in India, England, and in Pakistan, trying to force India to agree to binding international arbitration over Kashmir. Even though he was not successful, his views on Kashmir have been propounded by all who have followed him since.

Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan and Begum Rana Liaquat wave to the crowds as they are about to board the flight for the United States on state visit in May 1950. | Photo: Dawn / White Star Archives

The same has been the case with the policy of alliance with the West. As with the orientation of its economy, Pakistan had little choice in the matter. In 1947, the Soviet Union was busy draining its East European allies of their assets to build up its own industries. Allying with a state based on godless communism was also unacceptable, and had Pakistan done so it would have been isolated diplomatically by the West at a time when it desperately needed its support. As a member of the Baghdad Pact between 1955 and 1979, as a frontline state in the war in Afghanistan after 1979, and, again, as an ally in the war on terror in the post-9/11 world, Pakistan has followed the alignment set by Liaquat. It is only recently that Pakistan has started trying to develop meaningful ties with China.

The third main feature of Pakistan’s foreign policy is its relationship with its Muslim confreres in the Middle East. Before partition, Jinnah had declared that Pakistan would be a friend of the West but oriented toward the Muslim Middle East. Liaquat sought good relations with all the Muslim countries, including Iran, which was the first country in the world to recognise the new state, and he welcomed the Shah of Iran to Pakistan in March 1950; the first head of state to visit the country. In the 1970s and ’80s Pakistan emphasised its Middle Eastern connections; in 2017 the country looks increasingly for assistance from the Middle East and seeks to play a significant role in military affairs in the region.

Finally, with regard to its form of government, Pakistan continues to follow the path set for it by Liaquat. He had always been committed to a democratic political system and sought to create Pakistan as a parliamentary democracy in line with the Westminster model. But this had to be done while recognising and honouring Muslim feelings. These included the recognition that Islam is central to Pakistani life and its political system. Liaquat did this in the Objectives Resolution of March 12, 1949, when he started the process of creating a constitution which set up a parliamentary system but one that respected the sensibilities of the religiously-inspired. The Resolution, although amended, is part of the Pakistan Constitution under Article 2(A).

Liaquat was a son of Aligarh and a devoted follower of its founder, Syed Ahmed Khan, and that explains his modernist philosophy of integrating Western and modernist Islamic learning toward creating an advanced society based on both. Socially liberal, he fully supported women’s education and the activities of his second wife, the dynamic and remarkable Rana Liaquat Ali Khan, who founded the All-Pakistan Women’s Association in 1949.

From the creation of a modern military, a diplomatic service, foreign policy and diplomatic relationships, to the establishment of an educational system, a civil service, a state bank, and an entire economy, Liaquat was at the centre of all these activities and the inspiration for many of them. He believed he would have the time to write and promulgate a constitution, and convert the Muslim League into a well-organised and vibrant party as he had done for its All-India version in the years before 1947. Besides, he was also keen on establishing respect for all sects and creeds and viewpoints. When he was assassinated, he was only 56. Had he been the prime minister for another, say, 10 years or so, Pakistan would have developed more along the principles of the ideal liberal Muslim democracy envisioned by the Quaid-i-Azam and by his “right hand”, Liaquat Ali Khan.

---

The writer is Professor of History, Eastern Michigan University.

https://www.dawn.com/news/1364184/the-man-jinnah-called-his-right-hand

Special report: The legendary Liaquat 1895-1951

Liaquat was as pivotal to the consolidation of Pakistan as the Quaid-i-Azam was central to the creation of Pakistan.

The much misunderstood Premier

By Dr. Muhammad Reza Kazimi

In addition to being an influential politician and everything else that he was, Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan loved gadgets of all kinds and was an avid photographer. Here he is seen getting ready to take a snap of his beloved wife, Begum Rana Liaquat Ali Khan, during his state visit to the United States of America in May 1950. | Photo: Dawn / White Star Archives

LIAQUAT Ali Khan was as pivotal to the consolidation of Pakistan as the Quaid-i-Azam, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, was central to the creation of Pakistan. He became the country’s first prime minister not simply because he was a trusted lieutenant of Jinnah, but by virtue of his proven leadership skills in having led the Muslim League bloc in the interim government before partition. Liaquat, having left all his property in India, refused to file a claim to which he was entitled as a ‘refugee’. The Nawabzada reduced his standard of life and set about building institutions in the new country. Such was the stuff the man was made of.

Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Miss Fatima Jinnah (left) arriving in December 1946 at the Gul-e-Rana residence of Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan and Begum Rana Liaquat Ali Khan (right) in New Delhi to attend a reception given in honour of Mr Jinnah. | Photo: The Press Information Department, Ministry of Information, Broadcasting & National Heritage, Islamabad.

Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan with Begum Rana Liaquat and their two sons Ashraf (left) and Akbar (right). | Photo: Dawn / White Star Archives

The course of Pakistan’s journey can be seen meandering its way from a prime minister proverbial for his probity and down to his successors who every now and then faced investigations related to their wealth. It is no wonder, then, that after Pakistan had turned the corner in terms of consolidation, questions began to be raised regarding the constituency of Liaquat in Pakistan.

His tenure as prime minister is seen by certain quarters as having set a controversial path for the nation to follow. There have been two basic contentions. The first one relates to his decision to move away from what used to be the Soviet Union. The decision also had its reverberations in the Rawalpindi Conspiracy case.

Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan signing his assent after having been sworn in as Pakistan’s first Prime Minister on August 15, 1947, in the presence of Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah (right) on the grounds of the Governor General House in Karachi. | Photo: Dawn / White Star Archives

The first step in this direction was taken on May 3, 1948, when it was announced that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and Pakistan were to exchange ambassadors. On the occasion, Liaquat stated: “It has been the desire of Pakistan to have friendly relations with all the nations of the world, and the decision to exchange ambassadors with Russia is in consequence of that policy.”

The invitation for Liaquat to visit Moscow came a year later, on June 2, 1949, through the Soviet ambassador to Iran. Russia thereafter insisted that ambassadors be exchanged prior to Liaquat’s visit. Although on June 9, Sir Zafrullah Khan tried to stall the move, Liaquat proceeded regardless. The Pakistani ambassador was appointed on December 31, 1949, while the Soviet ambassador was appointed on March 22, 1950.

In June 1949, the USSR ‘advanced’ the date of the invitation, from August 20 to August 14. Liaquat could not agree to the date as it happened to be the first Independence Day of Pakistan after the Quaid-i-Azam’s demise. Subsequently came an invitation from the US and Liaquat proceeded there in May 1950.

Liaquat mentioned the Soviet invitation when leaving for the US, while he was on the US soil, and on his return home. A year later, Liaquat, while addressing a press conference in Karachi, explained the position thus: “I cannot go [to Moscow]until those people who invited me fix a date and ask me to go on such date … The invitation came. Later on, they suggested August 14, 1949. I replied that this is our Independence Day. I can come on any day after that; after that they have not replied”.

I am not the first to challenge the ‘myth’ of the Moscow invitation. Others, including Irtiza Husain, Mansur Alam and Shahid Amin, have preceded me. Syed Ashfaque Husain Naqvi, a diplomat based in Tehran at the time, rejected the allegation that Liaquat had cadged an invitation.

And this is what Dr. Samiullah Koreshi, who was posted at Moscow, related in his book ‘Diplomats and Diplomacy’: “Mr. Shuaib Qureshi was the first ambassador to USSR [in 1949] … He called on Andre Gromyko, then deputy foreign minister, to tell him that the prime minister had dispatched him post haste so that he could make all arrangements for his visit to Moscow in response to their invitation. [Gromyko replied] ‘Our invitation to your prime minister? Oh, you mean your proposal that he come here’.” Thereafter, the Soviet government did not revert to the subject.

The point is that the change of date having been made by the Soviets and Liaquat having conveyed his reservations clearly, Pakistan cannot be accused of having tried to pit one world power against the other, or of having picked up any of the two. He simply went ahead with the invitation that was valid and cannot be charged with failure to make use of the one that was not there on the table.

The other controversy regarding Liaquat’s tenure relates to the Objectives Resolution which is blamed for having opened the door for the subsequent Islamisation of General Ziaul Haq. Regardless of whether or not Pakistan was to be an Islamic state, the Pakistan movement clearly shows that it was not meant to be a territory with an ideology, but an ideology with a territory. Securing human rights and survival for a community suffering from religious discrimination is of ideological, and not of territorial, import.

The man that Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan was. No one ever doubted that the resolve behind the smile was ironclad. | Photo: Dawn / White Star Archives

The Objectives Resolution moved by Liaquat is denounced as a regressive document by which he allegedly sought to nullify the secular vision of the Quaid-i-Azam. To determine the veracity of the charge, we need to see three documents.

The first is the draft by the religious parties’ alliance. It read: “The Sovereignty of Pakistan belongs to Allah alone, and the Government of Pakistan has no right other than to enforce the will of Allah. The basic law of Pakistan is the Shariah of Islam. All those laws repugnant to Islam are to be revoked, and, in future, no such laws can be passed. The Government of Pakistan shall exercise its authority within the limits prescribed by Islamic Shariah.”

Now compare this draft with the one presented by Liaquat. It read: “Whereas the sovereignty over the entire universe belongs to Almighty Allah alone, and the authority which He has delegated to the State of Pakistan through its people for being exercised within the limits prescribed by Him is a sacred trust. This Constituent Assembly representing the people of Pakistan, resolves to frame a constitution of the sovereign independent state of Pakistan wherein the state shall exercise its power and authority through the chosen representatives of the people.”

What is the difference between the two drafts? The one presented by the ulema negates democracy, while Liaquat’s draft asserts it. Without democracy, even a minority sect can rule over a majority sect; a situation that has thrown the whole of the Middle East into confusion today.

The third document is the speech of Liaquat in the Constituent Assembly that he delivered on March 7, 1949, on the subject. “I assure the minorities that we are fully conscious of the fact that if the minorities are able to make a contribution to the sum total of human knowledge and thought, it will redound to the credit of Pakistan and will enrich the life of the nation. Therefore the minorities may look forward, not only to a period of the fullest freedom, but also to an understanding and appreciation on the part of the majority …

“Sir, there are a large number of interests for which the minorities desire protection. This protection this Resolution seeks to provide. We are fully conscious of the fact that they do not find themselves in their present plight for any fault of their own. It is also true that we are not responsible by any means for their present position. But now that they are our citizens, it will be our special effort to bring them up to the level of other citizens so that they may bear the responsibilities imposed by their being citizens of a free and progressive State …”

It is true that members of the Pakistan National Congress had raised objections to the Resolution, but, among many others, it had the support of Sir Zafrullah Khan and Mian Ifthikharuddin who represented two divergent schools of thought and became part of religious and political minority in later years. And this in itself is a proof of Liaquat’s sincere intentions in moving the Objectives Resolution and of the tinkering that the Resolution suffered afterwards.

Besides, Liaquat had held out the assurance that the Objectives Resolution would not become a substantive part of the Constitution. This, and other linguistic jugglery, was done much later by General Ziaul Haq. Therefore, it is unjustifiable to blame Liaquat for the excesses caused by the dictator that opened the door for even more abuse than he himself probably thought of.

Whatever the critics might say, Liaquat was what he was. It was a real achievement on his part that he could set Pakistan on the course to industrialisation. Western countries, seeking to ensure Pakistan’s demise, refused to supply even on payment, machinery and parts. They wanted Pakistan to be subservient to India. Liaquat nevertheless was able to procure the necessary equipment from East European countries in return for hard cash. Sishir Chandra Chattopadhaya had stated on the floor of the Constituent Assembly that the link between East Bengal and Calcutta could not be broken. Liaquat broke the link.

He refused to devalue currency when Britain and India did so. In the face of the Indian threat not to lift jute at the new price, Liaquat went to the growers, directly pleading with them not to sell at the old rate. If need be, the government of Pakistan would lift the entire stock, he assured the growers. The jute mills of Calcutta could not run without jute from East Bengal and, ultimately, the owners purchased at the new rate. This single decision enabled Liaquat to derive full benefit from the boom created by the Korean War, and the country, which had been written off as unviable, became more than solvent.

The British, since 1857, had imposed certain standards for the recruitment of soldiers. Liaquat removed them and started the induction of Bengalis in Pakistan Army. Similarly, there was only one ICS officer from East Pakistan, Nurun-Nabi Choudhry. Liaquat immediately fixed a 50 per cent quota for East Bengal civil servants to generate parity.

Begum Rana Liaquat Ali Khan (extreme right) sitting in mourning as the body of the slain Prime Minister, Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan, lay in state before the burial. He was assassinated on October 16, 1951, during a public rally at Rawalpindi’s Company Bagh which was later renamed Liaquat Bagh. | Photo: Dawn / White Star Archives

The critics of Liaquat survived, but Liaquat did not. And he died in circumstances that have never allowed anyone to pinpoint the actual killer … or killers. Liaquat’s life and actions generated controversies when there should have been none, and his death remains a controversy that failed to generate much interest where it mattered. Liaquat definitely deserved better.

---

The writer is a historian and biographer of Liaquat Ali Khan.

https://www.dawn.com/news/1362909/special-report-the-legendary-liaquat-1895-1951

 

 

Special report: Parliament in Chaos 1951-1958

Enter the invisible oligarchy

By Dr Syed Jaffar Ahmed

---

Khawaja Nazimuddin, the country’s second Governor General who also was the second Prime Minister, seated here in an impressive room of Ahsan Manzil, the ancestral home of his cousin, the Nawab of Dhaka, Khawaja Habibullah Bahadur, who stands on the left with wife Ayesha Begum. Behind the Nawab is Allene Talmey Plaut, associate editor and columnist for Vogue. On the extreme right is Begum Najma Nooruddin, the sister-in-law of Khawaja Nazimuddin. This photograph was taken by Irving Penn in 1947 and was first published in Vogue. At the time, Khawaja Nazimuddin, who had been the Premier of Bengal in British India, was the Chief Minister of East Bengal. — The Nawab of Dhaka Archives, Karachi

FACILITATED by the circumstances of partition and the laying down of the structures of governance under the Government of India Act 1935, which was adopted as the interim constitution, civil servants acquired a strong foothold in the new country. Here they positioned themselves to become the centre of the power structure. The development was further strengthened due to the Muslim League’s inherent weaknesses, and its failure to engage the vernacular sociopolitical elite, who had not joined the Pakistan movement yet had significant backing in their respective regions. So within a couple of years after independence, it was evident who would call the shots.

In 1951, with the appointment of the first native Pakistani as the commander-in-chief of the Army, the military top brass joined the power structure and a civil-military oligarchy positioned itself to decide the direction of the state and lay down the parameters of the political institutions. Liaquat Ali Khan’s assassination paved the way for the type of political engineering that was now in the offing. In complete disregard of parliamentary practices, the cabinet was made to elevate the finance minister, Ghulam Mohammad, to the post of governor general. The incumbent, Khawaja Nazimuddin, was persuaded to step down and become the prime minister. Another bureaucrat, Chaudhri Mohammad Ali, became the new finance minister.

In the following years, several rounds of differences and tussles between the governors general and the prime ministers gradually unfurled the relative strength of the former office vis-à-vis the latter.

Governors General and Prime Ministers of Pakistan 1951-1958 — Illustration by Osamah Mahmood

That the federal legislature, which till 1956 also served as the constituent assembly, remained a docile body only confirms the fact that the political dispensation was more of a parliamentary façade or pseudo-parliamentary arrangement that existed alongside a powerful extra-political decision-making state apparatus. Renowned social scientist Hamza Alavi aptly said that Pakistan in the first decade had two governments; one, the visible one that comprised the political class and the parliament with unstable political regimes, and the other the invisible government of the civil-military bureaucracy that had amassed all important powers in its hands.

The objectives of a national security state and a political economy of martial rule propelled Pakistan into the Western military alliances. Economically, it was made to become a part of peripheral capitalism, with the advanced capitalist countries, particularly the United States, as its centre.

The 15 months of Ghulam Mohammad-Nazimuddin uneasy cohabitation ended with the removal of the latter in April 1953. The pliable and unassertive prime minister was charged with the failure of law and order and an economic crisis caused due to food scarcity. The law and order situation had erupted in the wake of the anti-Ahmadi movement which became violent to the extent that martial law had to be imposed in Lahore. However, the prime minister had nothing to do with that as it was a provincial matter.

More astonishing was the later revelation by the court of inquiry that looked into the causes of a situation that had led to the imposition of martial law in the capital of the Punjab province. The court revealed that the anti-Ahmadi movement was masterminded and financed by none but the Punjab government itself, whose head Mumtaz Daultana thought that the resulting law and order crisis in the country would destabilise Nazimuddin’s government and pave the way for his own political ambitions to be realised. To his disappointment, the movement did not take off in other provinces, and his own province became its focus.

Prime Minister Mohammad Ali Bogra as he donned a Native American head dress (top) and possibly a cowboy hat (bottom), during a lighter mood in Karachi. — The Dr Ghulam Nabi Kazi Archives, USA

The power-holders attained a number of objectives by removing Nazimuddin. He was replaced as the premier by Mohammad Ali Bogra, hitherto Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington. His Bengali ethnicity suggested that Nazimuddin was not removed because of being a Bengali. Bogra could also be useful in cajoling the US to befriend Pakistan, whose rulers were desperate to get Western approbation for themselves and their country. Bogra’s appointment followed the end of the US embargo on food aid to Pakistan, and he later succeeded in seeking a place for his country in the Western military pacts.

All the while, Bogra was also under pressure to take the process of constitution-making ahead. Six precious years had been lost while no breakthrough was in sight for resolving the East-West representation issue that had almost stalled the constitution-making exercise.

Eventually by the end of 1953, prime minister Bogra succeeded in finally devising a formula. Popularly known as the ‘Bogra Formula’, it suggested representation on the basis of population in the lower house and equal representation for five provinces in the upper house. Seats allocated to each province in the lower house were such that when it joined the upper house with equal seats for all provinces, the joint session of parliament could have equal representation for both the wings of the country. The difficult Gordian knot had been disentangled and the making of the constitution was now a matter of days.

Meanwhile, the Bengali legislators along with some of those coming from the smaller provinces in the western part of the country compelled Bogra to assert his and the Assembly’s position. The prime minister thus had a series of legislation passed reducing the powers of the governor general. The latter was now prohibited from appointing and dismissing a prime minister at will. Also, to form the government, he was to call upon a person who was a member of the assembly, and who could be removed only by a vote of no-confidence. This and other restrictions on the power of the Ghulam Mohammad apparently took the wind out of the governor general’s sails. Having done this, the prime minister left for the US. The governor general returned to Karachi and decided to outsmart the prime minister as well as the recalcitrant assembly.

A special plane was sent to London and when prime minister Bogra reached there after completing his visit to the US, he was forced to return to Pakistan rather than spending some time in the UK as planned. Commander-in-chief Ayub Khan and Iskander Mirza, former defence secretary and at that point of time the governor of East Bengal, accompanied the prime minister from London to Karachi. It was an escort of sorts — or perhaps a kidnap.

Upon reaching the governor general’s house, the PM was literally abused by Ghulam Mohammad, who forced Bogra’s removal and dissolved the federal assembly. Rubbing salt on the PM’s wounds, he was now asked to lead a new cabinet that was decided and made then and there in the room where the governor general lay in bed recuperating from an illness. The combination designated as ‘the Cabinet of all Talents’ comprised, among others, the sitting commander-in-chief who was also made the defence minister, Iskander Mirza, and Chaudhri Mohammad Ali.

The cabinet lost no time in devising the merger of all the provinces and states in the western wing of the country, thus creating the province of West Pakistan. This was done to neutralise the numerical majority of East Bengal. The engineering of the situation in this manner could enable the argument that since the country had now only two provinces, East and West Pakistan, they should therefore have equal representation. The term ‘parity’ thus entered Pakistan’s political lexicon.

Ghulam Mohammad’s decision of Oct 24, 1954, to dissolve the assembly was declared illegal by the Sindh High Court, which held that the governor general had the right to dissolve the legislative assembly under the interim constitution, but the assembly dissolved by him also served as the constituent assembly, whose dissolution was not within his competence. However, the historic decision was overruled by the federal court which observed that the constituent assembly, by not being able to furnish the constitution in seven years, had lost its legitimacy. Pakistan’s judiciary, therefore, derailed the country’s constitutional and democratic journey with this decision. Subsequently, the Federal Court and, later the Supreme Court, followed the tradition of un-seating the civilian regimes. But it all started in 1954.

In June 1955, a new assembly was elected through the electoral college of the provincial assemblies. By then, the provincial assembly in East Bengal had been re-elected, and in the provincial elections, held in early 1954, the United Front had defeated, rather routed, the Muslim League. This change was reflected in the elections to the new National Assembly in which the Muslim League lost its majority though it was still the single largest party. It formed the next government in coalition with the United Front. With the Bengali component of the Muslim League parliamentary party having shrunk, the Bengali prime minister, Mr Bogra, was replaced with Chaudhri Mohammad Ali.

Pakistan became a Republic on March 23, 1956 under Prime Minister Chaudhri Mohammad Ali (extreme left). Seen from right to left are Yusuf Haroon (secretary, Muslim League), I.I. Chundrigar (the law minister and future prime minister), Sher-e-Bengal A.K. Fazlul Huq (former interior minister and United Front leader who was instrumental in helping Prime Minister Chaudhri Mohammad Ali in steering the bill through the assembly) and the Speaker Abdul Wahab Khan. — The Press Information Department, Ministry of Information, Broadcasting & National Heritage, Islamabad

The main achievement of Mohammad Ali’s government was the approval of the 1956 constitution which brought to an end the dominion status of Pakistan and made it a republic. Notwithstanding this achievement, the constitution was infested with numerous weaknesses. It was not drafted by any constitutional body; rather it was drafted by the staff of the law ministry and was later put before the constituent assembly. It was a compromise among different factions represented in the assembly but it was an unnatural compromise for it was made under unusual compulsions and duress. The most prominent was the adoption of parity between East and West Pakistan, on which the Bengali leadership’s compromise could not last long as the subsequent months proved.

Similarly, the constitution remained silent on the question of the form of representation — separate electorate or joint electorate. The parliamentary system itself was subdued by giving extraordinary powers to the president. This was done only because the last governor general, Iskander Mirza, had to become the first president after the adoption of the constitution.

Chaudhri Mohammad Ali lost his premiership when he was compelled to support president Mirza in creating the Republican Party, which had to be given the responsibility of governing the newly-formed province of West Pakistan. It was a pretty unusual situation where the prime minister who belonged to the Muslim League was supporting the Republican Party in the West Pakistan assembly where the League itself was serving as the opposition. This annoyed the newly-elected League president, Sardar Abdur Rab Nishtar, who asked the League ministers to resign from the federal cabinet thus pulling the carpet from under the prime minister’s feet.

A manipulator of the highest order, Mirza lost no time in asking Mohammad Ali to resign. Now Hussain Shaheed Suhrawardy was invited to form the government. The Awami League leader managed to form a coalition, but within 13 months he was shown the door once he failed in keeping the coalition together. Mirza then looked towards Muslim League leader I.I. Chundrigar, who could survive less than two months, losing his office on the electorate issue. Then came Feroz Khan Noon of the Republican Party who managed a coalition with the Awami League that lasted 10 months until Mirza imposed martial law in collaboration with Gen Ayub Khan.

Mirza also abrogated the constitution. His motive behind this, as recorded in history, was to introduce a new constitution through which the existing system could have been removed and the presidential form of government introduced. But his collaborator had his own designs. Within 20 days, Ayub turned the tables on Mirza. Four of Ayub’s generals went to President House and forcibly acquired his resignation. Mirza was sent to Quetta and deported a week later to London where he lived the rest of his life in oblivion. Pakistan, at this point, entered the first phase of its long night of military rule.

The writer is Adjunct Professor at Pakistan Study Centre, University of Karachi.

---

This story is part of a series of 16 special reports under the banner of ‘70 years of Pakistan and Dawn’. Read the complete first report, or visit the archive for more.

https://www.dawn.com/news/1353861

The foreign policy of Liaquat Ali Khan

From InpaperMagazine

October 17, 2010

IAQUAT Ali Khan, the first prime minister of Pakistan, served for a period of four years and two months until his tragic death on October 16, 1951. During this brief period, he set nearly all the parameters and main planks of Pakistan’s foreign policy. It is unfortunate that his immense contribution in making the foreign policy of the new-born country has not received due recognition.

His achievements include securing of UN resolutions calling for a plebiscite in Kashmir; championing the Palestinian and Arab cause at the UN; recognition of Communist China and establishing diplomatic relations with it; an overture to the Soviet Union and sending of an ambassador to Moscow; establishing close ties with the USA; lobbying for an Islamic bloc; and opposing colonialism. Over and above this, Liaquat’s outstanding contribution in foreign policy was the safeguarding of national security in the face of the most serious threats by India. At the same time, he sought to improve relations with India and signed a historic pact with India for the protection of minorities.

Three days after the creation of Pakistan, Liaquat said in an interview with the New York Times that Pakistan would not take sides in the conflict of ideologies between the two world blocs. This was a clear statement of a policy of non-alignment that Pakistan continued to follow during his lifetime and even afterwards, until 1954. He followed up this initial statement by reaching out at the same time to the USA, the Soviet Union and Communist China.

Relations with India perforce had to be given the highest priority by Liaquat. India adopted a hostile attitude towards Pakistan from the very start. The Indian leadership had only reluctantly accepted the division of India, more as a tactical decision, since it was convinced that Pakistan was an artificial creation and could not last. To make sure that Pakistan collapsed soon after its birth, India created a host of problems, which included withholding of Pakistan’s share of financial assets, unfair boundary award, genocide in East Punjab, pushing of more than ten million refugees in Pakistan, and stoppage of canal waters. But the most serious issue that brought the two countries close to war was the Indian military occupation of the princely state of Jammu & Kashmir. The partition formula was that contiguous Muslim majority areas would go to Pakistan. On that basis, Kashmir should have acceded to Pakistan. But India conspired with the Hindu ruler of the state to secure its accession to India. Pakistan protested strongly and Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had to assure Liaquat that the Kashmiri people would be given the opportunity to decide freely whether they wanted to join India or Pakistan.

At the same time, India accused Pakistan of sending tribal infiltrators into Kashmir and lodged a complaint at the UN Security Council alleging aggression by Pakistan. The UN Security Council did not accept the Indian accusation of Pakistani aggression.

Instead, it adopted several resolutions that the future of Kashmir should be decided by the people of Kashmir through a plebiscite. Foreign Minister Zafrulla Khan played a key role at the UN in the adoption of the resolutions on Kashmir. Though India had to accept this decision, but after Liaquat’s death, it reneged on its commitment. However, the Kashmir issue remains alive as neither Pakistan nor the Kashmiri people have acquiesced in India’s unlawful occupation. The legal basis for Pakistan’s stance remains the same UN resolutions on Kashmir that were passed during Liaquat’s tenure.

During the first four years of its existence, India threatened to invade Pakistan several times. Though Pakistan was militarily weak, Liaquat galvanised the nation and held firm in the face of Indian threats. His clenched fist (“mukka”) became the symbol of the nation’s defiance, and Nehru had to back down, claiming that India never had any war-like intentions. He offered to sign a No War Pact with Pakistan. However, Liaquat said that such a pact must also include an agreed formula ensuring fair settlement of disputes between the two countries. This has ever since remained Pakistan’s stance on the issue.

Pakistan took the initiative in April 1948 to establish diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. The Soviet agreement was announced a month later. In May 1949, the US extended an invitation to Nehru to visit Washington, but no such invitation came to Pakistan. Liaquat felt the need to make an opening to Moscow by saying that “Pakistan cannot afford to wait. She must take her friends where she finds them.” He talked with the Soviet Ambassador, while on a visit to Tehran, and Moscow promptly extended an invitation to him to visit the Soviet Union. The dates suggested for this visit clashed with Pakistan’s Independence Day and hence Karachi asked for a slight change of dates. For reasons that have remained obscure, there was no reply from Moscow. However, the first Pakistani Ambassador arrived in Moscow in December 1949, followed by the arrival in Pakistan a few months later of the first Soviet Ambassador.

It is unfortunate that a myth later developed in Pakistan, fed by some leftists as also anti-Liaquat circles, that Pakistan’s subsequent difficulties in relations with Moscow stemmed from Liaquat’s inability to visit the Soviet Union. The fact is that there were no discernable strains in bilateral relations till well after Liaquat’s death. It was Pakistan’s membership of military pacts in 1954 that aroused Soviet hostility. The Soviet veto on Kashmir was not applied until 1957. The Soviets themselves have never put the blame for unfriendly relations on the inability of Liaquat to visit the Soviet Union. It also needs to be noted that it is common in diplomatic practice to issue invitations to dignitaries of other states. Inability to respond to such an invitation has hardly ever become a cause of long term strains in relations.

In December 1949, Liaquat received an invitation from President Truman to visit the USA. This was readily accepted and the visit took place in May 1950. While on US soil, Liaquat confirmed that he intended to visit the Soviet Union. Liaquat’s visit to USA brought the two countries closer. This was shown by Pakistan’s support for the use of force by the UN in June 1950 against North Korea to secure its withdrawal from South Korea, as also support for the peace treaty negotiations with Japan in 1951. The Soviet Union opposed both of these developments.

In October 1949, the Communists came to power in China. The US strongly opposed this development and refused to recognise the Communist regime. It continued to recognise the ousted Kuomintang regime of Gen. Chiang Kai-shek as the legitimate government of China. The US also managed to prevent most countries in the world from recognising Communist China which was thus kept out of the UN as well. However, Liaquat decided to extend recognition to Communist China in January 1950. The Chinese Ambassador arrived in Karachi in September 1951, a month before Liaquat’s death, and the first Pakistani Ambassador presented credentials in Beijing in November 1951.

Pakistan thus became the first Muslim country, and one of the few countries in the world, to establish diplomatic relations with Communist China. This wise decision laid the foundation for strong relations with China that have since become a pillar of Pakistan’s foreign policy. Liaquat’s logic probably was that Pakistan already had adverse relations with one neighbour (India) and could not afford to antagonise another powerful neighbour who would be having veto power in the UN Security Council.

Moreover, Pakistan needed to have trade with China, particularly because India had snapped commercial ties with Pakistan in 1949. Pakistan could also have calculated that friendly relations with China might be helpful at some stage against its traditional rival India. This is what actually happened. In pursuit of this policy of wooing China, Pakistan avoided any criticism of China when it annexed Tibet early in 1950 or in the context of the Korean War that broke out in June 1950.

Another plank of Pakistan’s foreign policy from the very outset was to establish close relations with the Muslim world.

Pan-Islamism was part of Pakistan’s ideological moorings. Even before independence, Indian Muslims took a leading part in supporting Turkey during the Khilafat Movement of 1918-24.

The Muslim League was highly critical of the British policy in Palestine during the 1930s and 1940s. Soon after its creation, Pakistan strongly opposed the proposal in the UN for the partition of Palestine and the creation of a Jewish state. Foreign Minister Zafrulla Khan was a leading voice at the UN, as early as November 1947, in opposing the creation of Israel. Pakistan refused to recognise the state of Israel when it was set up in May 1948. Support for the Palestinian and Arab cause has ever since remained a plank of Pakistan’s foreign policy.

From the beginning, Pakistan actively pursued a policy of establishing close ties with the Islamic world. The possibility of an Islamic bloc was explored by Pakistan in its formative years, though this made little headway because of the disparate nature of the Islamic world and Egypt’s suspicion that Pakistan was seeking to become leader of the Islamic world. In this context, Pakistan hosted an International Islamic Economic Conference at Karachi in 1949.

It is worth recalling that a Soviet magazine New Times criticised this conference by observing that its purpose was to prepare the ground for a “Muslim military and political bloc.” In February 1951, there was a meeting of the Motamar-al-Alam-al-Islami in Karachi. Addressing this gathering, Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan said that Pakistan came into being as a result of the urge of the Muslims of the sub-continent to secure territory where Islamic ideology could be practised and demonstrated to the world and, since a cardinal feature of this ideology was to make Muslim brotherhood a reality, it was a part of Pakistan’s mission to do everything in its power to promote fellowship and cooperation between Muslim countries.

Pakistan supported Indonesia’s fight for independence when the Dutch used force against its former colony in December 1948.

Zafrulla Khan called it “an affront to the soul of Asia.” When Indonesia became independent in August 1949, Pakistan celebrated this event by declaring a public holiday. Pakistan played a leading role at the UN in securing independence of Muslim countries, including Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Somalia and Eritrea. From the very beginning, Pakistan’s stance on anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism was that “whenever there is a question of liberty and independence from imperialism or of opposing colonialism, of pushing forward a people’s march towards freedom, Pakistan is always to the fore and second to none.”

From the foregoing, it is clear that Liaquat laid the foundations of the main elements of Pakistan’s foreign policy. He believed in an independent foreign policy with emphasis on Islamic unity.

The writer is a former ambassador.

https://www.dawn.com/news/573082

 

Special report: The founding fathers 1947-1951

The season of light…

By Dr Syed Jaffar Ahmed

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness … We were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…

THESE lines were written by Charles Dickens in the background of the French Revolution. These hold true in a very different historical setting in which Pakistan was created and started its journey. It was a journey which began amidst conflicting rays of hope and despair, and belief and incredulity.

Pakistan emerged on the map of the world as the solution of the communal question that had declined to be addressed within a wider united Indian framework that had made partition inevitable.

The founding fathers had cultivated a very promising image of Pakistan, a country that would be a social welfare and modern democratic state, radiating all the virtues a common Muslim believes to be found in what was believed to be an Islamic state. The reality of Pakistan, however, unfortunately proved to be the nemesis of what had been cultivated.

Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan addresses members of the All-India Muslim League at a meeting in April 1943, in Delhi, as Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah looks on. —​ Dawn/White Star Archives

A lot of Pakistan’s saga has to do with its leadership.

Historians generally enter the historical theatre by first identifying the characters in a given drama whose more deep-seated urges and social context unfold only later. That is why the historians undertaking the social and political history projects are also compelled to give due place to the historical figures playing some crucial role.

Pakistan’s hopes and despair after independence had also much to do with its leaders, the founding fathers. But who could be counted among them?

Our freedom is known for its being the work of just one individual, the Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah.

Leonard Mosley called the creation of Pakistan a “one-man achievement”. More comprehensive was Stanley Wolpert’s depiction of Jinnah’s role in the creation of Pakistan: “… few individuals significantly alter the course of history. Fewer still modify the map of the world. Hardly anyone can be credited with creating a nation-state. Jinnah did all three.”

However, while Jinnah’s unusual role makes him a unique figure, it also represents a weakness of our freedom movement which did not create a wider section of big leaders. Those who accompanied Jinnah were mostly not even his pale shadows.

This weakness came to be exposed when Jinnah died 13 months after independence. Beverly Nichols had foreseen the danger: “If Gandhi goes, there is always Nehru, or Rajgopalachari, or Patel or a dozen others. But if Jinnah goes, who is there?”

And really when Jinnah went, there was no one there.

Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah speaks at a civic reception held in his honour by the Karachi Municipal Corporation (KMC) at the KMC headquarters on August 25, 1947. Mayor Hakeem Muhammad Ahsan is seen on the right, while Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan and Sir Ghulam Hussain Hidayatullah are on the left. —​ Dawn/White Star Archives

Liaquat Ali Khan did come of age and certainly his stature increased but there was no question of him filling the space left by Jinnah. Despite having been a trusted lieutenant, Liaquat did not command the level of authority that Jinnah did. One can only say that after Jinnah’s death, he naturally came under more political limelight. Pakistan, as such, began with a very limited political resource.

Unfortunately, the League had during the freedom movement remained a platform giving voice to Muslim political separatism; it was more of an umbrella under which Muslims of all shades could assemble. At best it was a movement. But a political party it was not. No widespread structures; no committed and trained cadres.

Soon after independence, it was proposed in the League’s Council to liquidate the party and allow diverse elements within it to form more natural organisations built around various ideological preferences and political programmes. This was not approved and in the later years, short-sightedness of certain leaders even compelled them to argue that League and League alone had the right to rule the country.

Most of the prominent Leaguers had not emerged above the provincial politics and even in the provincial arenas most of them had been pitted against each other. With such inherent weaknesses League could not withstand the pressures of the civil and military institutions which had lost no time in adjusting themselves to govern the state.

A major failure of League leadership in those formative years was its total neglect of the fact that a major segment of the effective political leadership in the regions which comprised Pakistan could be a great help in building the country.

The leaders one is referring to either did not go along Muslim League during the Pakistan movement, and some of them had their reservations also about the new country, yet once Pakistan came into being, their relevance had not diminished but had in fact increased given the fact that they were the sons of the soil, had their strong social and political bases and were looked upon with respect by sizeable followers.

This marginalised elite included the likes of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Abdul Samad Achakzai, G.M. Syed, and Ghous Baksh Bizenjo. Engaging this elite could not only have been helpful but was perhaps essential for realising the project promised by the League.

If Pakistan had to be made a genuine federal state, for which Jinnah had fostered the most convincing arguments, it was this stuff of politicians which was needed to be brought in to make it a reality. That they did not support the Pakistan movement is not of much significance because we all know that after independence the state lost no time in courting the support of those religo-political organisations and even sectarian outfits that had opposed the Pakistan idea more vocally and with stronger arguments. Had it happened otherwise, the size and worth of the real critical mass Pakistan would have found in its political domain would have been radically different.

Ghaffar Khan, on partition, openly announced his loyalty to the new country. At one point Jinnah even offered his brother, Dr Khan Sahab, the governorship of the province, but these moves were frustrated.

G.M. Syed was certainly on the other side of the political fence, yet he was someone who had once described himself as a soldier of Jinnah, and had described the latter as his general. His differences with the League emerged only on the eve of partition and that was also confined to the narrow provincial politics of electioneering. He could be brought to the negotiation table but the League preferred to let such political elites be marginalised.

Even leaders within the League who stood for provincial rights or advocated civil liberties and social reforms were also gradually shown the door. Thus, some of the earlier opposition parties came out of the League fold. Suhrawardy, Fazlul Haq, Maulana Bhashani, Pir Sahab Manki Sharif, Iftikhar Hussain Mamdot, Mian Iftikharuddin, and several others were all once part of the League, where their space kept shrinking.

An already weakened political class thus became weaker and the emerging civil-military power found it ever easier to establish its dominance.

The civil servants had the experience of administering the colonial state. They employed their experience to restore a state apparatus that characteristically was not any different from the colonial model.

With the induction of the first Pakistani commander-in-chief of the army, General Ayub Khan, a civil-military alliance emerged which soon became more of an oligarchy. Within a couple of years of independence, the initial signs of the policies and the perceptions the state had to pursue started coming to the fore.

The mismanagement of the partition by the colonial rulers, the leaving of a number of matters unsettled, and particularly the issue of Jammu and Kashmir, created in the very beginning animosity between Pakistan and India. A war was fought between the two over Kashmir in October 1947. Though a ceasefire was enforced 14 months later, the matter has not been resolved even in 70 years and even after fighting three wars. The relationship between the two countries stands frozen in 1947.

Dilip Hiro has rightly titled his recent book on the subject as The Longest August.

The adverse relationship between the two countries provided to our rulers and the ruling institutions the pretext to develop Pakistan as a national security state with a political economy of defence as its founding philosophy. The priorities of the state were designed to support what the state had accepted for itself. Things that define a modern social welfare, democratic state became insignificant.

The precarious condition in which Pakistan found itself after independence enabled the civil services to take the initiative in their own hands. Keith Callard writes that “the circumstances of partition and its aftermath demanded strong central action to establish government control over the new state”.

Pakistan, as opposed to India was a new, seceding state, while India was a successor state which had inherited the entire state apparatus that existed before partition.

Thus, the lines were drawn from the very beginning regarding who was to be the actual power-holder and the decision-maker for the state and who had to play a secondary role simply to provide a political democratic colour to this peculiar form of statecraft.

This dichotomy has been fairly visible since the beginning. Liaquat was its first victim. He was made to go to the United States to build what he, upon putting his first step on American soil, described as “a spiritual bridge between his country and the US”.

Towards the end of 1951, he had started cultivating the idea of pursuing a policy deviating from the earlier appeasement of the US. His assassination in October that year cleared the way for enhanced efforts to court the American support.

Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan attend a press conference in Cairo in December 1946. They appeal to the leaders of the Muslim World to support India’s Muslims in their struggle for independence. —​ Dawn/White Star Archives

That Liaquat had begun to be isolated within a couple of years is apparent from what was designated as the Rawalpindi conspiracy case.

The outgoing commander-in-chief, General Gracey, had already informed the incoming C-in-C Ayub Khan about a group of young Turks within the armed forces. Defence Secretary Iskander Mirza had also made a comment to the British Defence Attaché in Karachi with respect to the nationalistic aspirations among young officers.

The prime minister was kept uninformed and subsequently came to know of this remark through the civilian channel of the police. Ayub and Mirza thus kept the prime minister in the dark. The conspiracy behind the conspiracy tells its own story.

In this photograph taken by Khatir Ghaznavi, Saadat Hasan Manto is deep in composition, as he holds a cigarette in his left hand at his residence, Laxmi Mansion, in Lahore in January 1948. — Manto Family Archives in the possession of Nusrat Jalal, Lahore

Pakistan’s drift towards authoritarianism from its very inception was detected gradually by historians and there has been a great deal of political literature on it since. But it’s a fact of history that the first who noted it were also the first who had to bear the ramifications of authoritarianism.

These were our working classes, our intelligentsia, writers and poets.

Who can forget the writings of Manto and Qasmi and the poetry of Faiz and Noon Meem Rashid articulating the trials of their times. Shouldn’t they too be counted among the founding fathers of our country?

The writer is Adjunct Professor at Pakistan Study Centre, University of Karachi.

https://www.dawn.com/news/1352119/special-report-the-founding-fathers-1947-1951

 

 

‘Nehru was as much to blame as Jinnah for Partition’

Last updated on: January 28, 2016 10:50 IST

‘Nehru had multiple chances to make compromises, that would have preserved a united India, and he chose not to…’

‘There was a particular mutual dislike between Nehru and Jinnah. Probably their personalities were so different… They were very similar in some ways. They were complete opposites in many other ways.’

Nisid Hajari, who wrote Midnight’s Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition — which won the 2016 William E Colby Award January 27, 2016 — speaks to Vaihayasi Pande Daniel/Rediff.com

IMAGE: The conference in New Delhi where Lord Louis Mountbatten disclosed Britain’s plan for the Partition of India. Left to Right: Jawaharlal Nehru, Lord Ismay, adviser to Mountbatten, Lord Mountbatten, and Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images.

Nisid Hajari spent a decade overseeing Newsweek‘s coverage of post 9/11 Afghanistan.

In the course of supervising that reportage, as the foreign editor — and since he had subcontinental roots — he was often asked to interpret Pakistan’s role in the crisis.

“I kept getting a lot of interest from people. And questions. ‘Why does Pakistan do this? Why? And I kept saying there is this story (of Partition) you don’t know,” recalls Nisid, who is currently based in Singapore, whose Gujarati Hindu parents grew up in Mumbai.

Those perplexing riddles seeded the idea of doing a book on Partition. “It grew out of the work I was doing.”

Hajari felt there was a direct connect between a string of incidents in Pakistan’s often murky present and its blood-soaked, tumultuous birth in the monsoon of 1947. That cause and effect was something the world now might be rather interested in since it was no longer just a regional tale for Indian and Pakistani school textbooks.

It was the 70-year-old chapter of history, he believed, that was responsible for the build up of an explosive situation that has the potential to rewrite world events, quite comparable to Gavrilo Princip shooting Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his duchess in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, or the never ending, bitter Palestine-Israel conflict, or Kim Jong-un building a rogue empire.

When Newsweek changed ownership in 2013, Hajari was looking for a change. He decided to take two years off from nine-to-five journalism (if there is such a thing) to write a book on Partition.

He spent the next 18 months hopping between the cavernous archives, on three continents, digging up as many key documents, accounts and records of the turning points that led to Partition.

Those crucial footnotes of history — letters, diaries, telegrams and memoirs — were gleaned to construct, and flesh out, new profiles of the main players of Partition, and bring them back to life.

Over, finally what turned out to be three years, he constructed, what he felt was, a fresh perspective on Partition, taking time to re-evaluate historical roles, snipping and weeding out redundant biases. In the bargain, offering coverage befitting of what he considers to be a landmark happening in the history of the 20th century.

Midnight’s Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in June.

History ought to be examined, and re-examined, threadbare, before nations have the capacity to move on, is Hajari’s contention. Only then maybe Partition and its overstaying ghosts can be laid to rest, eventually maybe, optimistically, leading to better relations between India and Pakistan.

“The only persons this current situation serves is the Pakistani army and Indian television channels,” says Hajari, who now works with Bloomberg in Singapore. In his previous stint at Newsweek, he spent 10 years in New York. He has also lived in Seattle, Hong Kong, New Delhi and London.

Hajari has been surprised by the praise Midnight’s Furies received from Indian intellectuals, who picked up his book, not thinking they would be reading anything new and told him they ended up learning a lot.

He received some criticism too — on Twitter of a different kind from people who had clearly never read his book and believed him to be Muslim — for what they felt was his going easy on the British over their role in Partition.

Nisid Hajari was in India for a rapid two-city book tour in July and spoke to Vaihayasi Pande Daniel/Rediff.com about Midnight’s Furies and Partition.

In your book, you came up with a lot to incriminate Jinnah. And plenty to blame Nehru for too. You seemed to have found Jinnah a troubling, polarising, egotistic character, known for his vindictiveness and his negligence of the human cost. That leads to the most important question those of us in India have: Who would you apportion the blame, chiefly, for the perilous path the subcontinent took in 1947?

It would be hard to assign a number or figure, percentage wise. I thought Nehru and the Congress leaders were equally to blame. Actually, I feel, and I hope it comes across, that I had a bit more sympathy for Jinnah then most Indian accounts of Partition generally have.

IMAGE: On the occasion of becoming prime minister of the new Union of India, Nehru asked members of the Constituent Assembly to take a pledge of loyalty to the new nation. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images

But through your book, Nehru sounds much more charming, giving us insight into the Peter Pan side of the statesman that Jinnah often spoke bitterly about saying, ‘Peter Pan who never learns or unlearns anything.’

Personality-wise, Nehru was more charming than Jinnah; even Jinnah’s friends would admit that.

But in terms of who is responsible for the mistakes — and ruining the chance of political compromise — I think, in that case Nehru was at least as much to blame as Jinnah.

Jinnah was arguing the case like the lawyer he was. Nehru had multiple chances to make compromises, that would have preserved a united India, and he chose not to.

He may have been more charming personally. Personally, he might have been the person you wanted to have dinner with! He was a flighty, impractical, emotional politician, who was operating at some level of high principle, that was not very pragmatic.

I think Jinnah had very good reasons not to trust Nehru and the Congress and that is Nehru’s fault.

IMAGE: Refugees from West Punjab at the Wavell Canteen in Delhi taking their meals before leaving for various refugee camps, September 1947. Photograph: Photo Division, Government of India

Nevertheless, do you think that Jinnah was aware that his politics was akin to riding a tiger, which he would eventually not be able to get off?

I am not sure any of them were. They were all doing it. Gandhi and Nehru, as well.

There was as much vicious anti-Muslim behaviour going on, as the opposite. And these people were followers of the Congress. Gandhi didn’t realise it. There was (for instance) that scene of Noakhali (the riots in October-November 1946, in Chittagong district in un-partitioned Bengal in which 5,000 Hindus were killed) in the book.

Gandhi did not understand that some of the things he was saying there were inciting Hindus to go kill Muslims.

In Bihar?

Exactly, in Bihar (riots broke out in Chhapra and Saran districts in late October 1946, as a reprisal for the Noakhali riots, killing anywhere upwards of 5,000 Muslims; the death toll figures varied widely).

At the very, very top level, all these people — Nehru, Jinnah and Gandhi — were so distant from their followers. They were in Delhi. They were just in drawing rooms, with each other, negotiating and they were so used to the kind of rhetoric you would use in a courtroom.

The things they would say, the things they would write in the press. I don’t think they quite realised the impact those words would have at the ground level. In that case, I would hold all of them guilty.

So they were all guilty of riding that tiger?

They all didn’t understand that the negotiations they were doing — the kind of brinksmanship, the hard line positions they were taking, all part of negotiations — were happening against the backdrop of these increasing tensions all around the country.

They were too focused on what was happening in their little room and didn’t understand this was having an impact elsewhere.

You describe that Nehru admitted, when discussing the Partition of Punjab, for instance, that they had not gone into any great detail about how it would actually happen.

So Nehru’s wrong doing was not just alienating his rival Jinnah but also not understanding the nitty-gritty of how Partition would unfold? They were all, perhaps, guilty of being vague about the details?

Impractical.

About the ground realities?

Yes, yes. About the mechanics. None of them were administrators. None of them had ever held executive positions. They were all trained as lawyers and had become politicians.

So if you asked Nehru: ‘Okay you want to split the Punjab — how are you going to divide the education part of that?’ he would have had no idea. (Or about) the police force, the administration. All stuff that the British had handled till that point… They again didn’t understand the reality of the impact of the things they were doing.

So in your view, would you equally apportion the blame? You wouldn’t say perhaps Jinnah was more to blame? And also do you think if the Congress knew about Jinnah’s poor health, the formation of Pakistan could have been avoided?

This has come up all the time. His illness (Jinnah was suffering from tuberculosis since the 1930s). He wasn’t hiding anything. He had been a sick man for many years. And in 1946-1947 he wasn’t any more sick than any other time. He didn’t get really sick until 1948.

But he had tuberculosis?

He had had it for years. In 1947 he had to take a whole month off, and recuperate in some village outside Karachi. The year before, he had done something similar.

But wouldn’t it have made a difference if people knew?

Impossible to say. Let’s say he had died in 1947. Who is to say that whoever came after him, in the Muslim League, wouldn’t have been more radical? How do you know, somehow, that this would have been better for India?

IMAGE: Mountbatten addresses the Independence Day session of the Constituent Assembly, August 15, 1947.

Let me give another analogy. Supposing you are having a child and you know you are not going to be around, some time after the child is born. You are frail. You would definitely think a little more about how things would happen in your absence? Pakistan, in a sense, was Jinnah’s child.

I have come across nothing to suggest that he thought he was about to die.

I think he thought he was going to live for a long time and continue to lead Pakistan.

Even in the pictures taken on Pakistan’s Independence Day he looked very frail.

Oh yes, he was a sickly man. But a lot of sickly people think that they are healthy.

As described in your account, in the days after Independence, as Nehru and Patel grappled with controlling the rioting, one might feel that Patel understood the reality better. He seemed to have his finger on the pulse, even if he was a hardliner.

Yet at the same time, one had to admire Nehru’s dashing spirit in trying to go out there and discipline mobs single-handedly, in a sort of romantic Lochinvar style. Or was it more for show? Has your research shown he was really that kind of man?

That was his genuine personality. I don’;t think he was showing off for anyone.

That captures both what’s admirable and frustrating about him. It is admirable, that in a cinematic sense, he would risk his life.

It was also exactly the wrong thing for a leader to do. A leader, in order to effectively control the riots, should delegate and order the army to go there.

This is what frustrated Jinnah no end. He is sitting in Karachi, while these riots are happening. He’s getting biased reports, but he is (still) getting reports of what is happening.

Jinnah is sitting and thinking: Why cannot Nehru and Patel — they have this powerful army, police, a government in place — why can’t they control this? It is because instead of trying to control it Nehru was running around…

Looking for his father’s pistol to fight the rioters with?

Exactly.

But those sort of vignettes you don’t have about Jinnah?

Right, right. He was a different kind of man.

What did you like best about Jinnah?

The way people have treated Jinnah in modern Indian accounts is just to demonise him. The inherent assumption is that demanding Pakistan was the wrong thing to do.

I tried to come at the subject with an open mind. Maybe partitioning was the wrong thing to do, maybe it was right, but Jinnah at least had legitimate support for his demands. He’d just had to prove that democratically, through provincial elections. And it was a demand, that up until the very last minute, he was willing to negotiate.

Until the spring of 1946 he was still willing to accept a united India, under the right political conditions.

If you just look at that, then there is no reason to demonise him. He was a leader, leading his people. He happened to do it in a way that a lot of people found abrasive, and Nehru in particular loathed.

You are a lawyer arguing a case. You should be able to do it in whatever way that is appropriate.

Jinnah was on the political scene, first, before Gandhi. Nehru came along later and both sort of stole Jinnah’s position. Was Nehru’s primacy in the Congress under Gandhi responsible for making Jinnah more bitter that his ambitions had been thwarted?

He (Nehru) had a great deal to do with it. Jinnah was also frustrated by Gandhi, Patel and all the Congress leaders.

But there was a particular mutual dislike between Nehru and Jinnah. Probably their personalities were so different. I don’t think they could really understand each other and what (each was) trying to do. They were very similar in some ways. They were complete opposites in many other ways.

Of the three leaders you portray — Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah — Pakistan’s future Quaid e Azam is the most fascinating, in that what could have made an alcohol-drinking, (reportedly) pork-eating man take the right turn that he did?

Well, he definitely kept drinking. I don’t know if he kept eating pork or not.

In his personal life I don’t think he changed that much. He became more of an Islamic, Muslim figure. He did this on purpose to broaden out his appeal.

A fascinating man?

Definitely fascinating. Extremely frustrating to research. Unlike Gandhi and Nehru — who wrote everything down and it has all been collected; there are letters and diaries, a ton of material to work with — with Jinnah that just wasn’t what he did.

He just didn’t write. His letters are all very formal, business like. He kept no diaries. He kept people away from him. There was nobody close to him who could write a memoir and say this is what Jinnah was like when no one else was around.

Even his sister (Fatima Jinnah), her book (My Brother) about him is written… everything written about him is such a hagiography, that no real picture of the man comes out. I did the best I could, but it was very hard as a researcher…

So you are saying there was a lot more to the man, but not enough material one can lay one’s hands on to construct a kinder or more fascinating view?

Yes. He is clearly a complex figure. Getting at the heart of that complexity is difficult.

In one of the reviews of your book I read that it remained unclear how much Jinnah really wanted Partition. Or whether he pursued the idea more as a tactic to increase Muslim clout within a larger India? Also in your view, what could have been done to avoid Partition?

This is the famous debate — whether Jinnah was demanding Pakistan merely as a bargaining chip, or not. The honest truth is that no one knows.

My best guess is that it started out as a bargaining chip, and at some point, probably very late in the process, probably as late as 1946, it became something more.

During the course of the war, the demand for Pakistan became more widely popular than maybe even Jinnah might have imagined it would. After the war, he was both pushing the demand and was also being carried along by it.

IMAGE: After working for Newsweek in New York for a decade, Nisid Hajari now works with Bloomberg in Singapore. Midnight’s Furies is his first book.

Up until the spring of 1946, a political compromise that would have preserved a united India, was still possible. The Congress — Nehru in particular — would have had to grant the Muslim areas that (eventually) became Pakistan more autonomy than he was willing to grant, and have had to accept a weaker Central government than he wanted.

Abandoning that compromise was the fatal mistake.

You (Nehru) couldn’t just dismiss this demand as illegitimate and say you weren’t going to deal with it. You had to accommodate it somehow. And as the larger, more powerful party it was their responsibility to accommodate it. You don’t ask the weaker party to make the concessions. You have to be generous.

Nehru for his own reasons chose not to.

I think that was the last real chance to avoid Partition. Maybe it could have still happened later, no one knows, but at that point it was really possible to preserve a united India.

http://www.rediff.com/news/interview/nehru-was-as-much-to-blame-as-jinnah-for-partition/20150813.htm

Search for the real villain of Partition divides India again

The bloody birth of Pakistan has always been blamed on its first leader Jinnah. No longer, reports Andrew Buncombe

• Monday 17 August 2009 23:00 BST

In Pakistan he is known as Quaid-e-Azam or “Great leader”. But in India, and beyond, there are those who have considered Mohammad Ali Jinnah as little more than a criminal, a man whose unyielding insistence on a separate country for Muslims led to the brutal division of a nation and the subsequent deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

Now, however, 62 years after the partition of India, Jinnah’s legacy is receiving an overhaul from an unlikely quarter. A controversial new book by a senior politician from India’s Hindu nationalist party suggests that Mr Jinnah, a secular man who drank and smoked but rarely visited the mosque, has too long been demonised by Indian society. Furthermore, it argues that he only raised the prospect of a separate Pakistan with independence leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi as a bargaining tool and that it was the inflexibility of Jawaharlal Nehru, the man who became independent India’s first prime minister, that ultimately led to the division of the sub-continent.

“I think we have misunderstood him because we needed to create a demon,” the book’s author, Jaswant Singh, a veteran politician, told the CNN-IBN television channel. “We needed a demon because, in the 20th century, the most telling event in the sub-continent was the partition of the country.”

The partition of India in August 1947, when both Pakistan and an independent India won independence from Britain, resulted in one of the largest forced migrations of people in history. As millions of Hindus travelled east into the new India and millions of Muslims travelled West into the new country of Pakistan – there were perhaps 15 million refugees in total – there was also terrible violence. Some estimates suggest that up to one million people may have lost their lives in sectarian killings.

Though the struggle for the independence of India had taken place over decades, the British authorities’ decision to grant sovereignty and ultimately to divide the country was rushed through in a matter of months. A British lawyer, Cyril Radcliffe, headed a committee that had the unenviable task of hurriedly deciding which territories should go to the new Pakistan and which should form part of India. The eventual border – the Radcliffe Line – split communities and divided families, the ramifications of which are still strongly felt today. The urbane and cultivated Jinnah, leader of the Muslim League, has most often been cast as the villain of the process, unyielding in his demand that the Muslims of the sub-continent required a separate country. Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of the British Indian empire, whose task was to oversee the granting of independence and whose wife is widely believed to have had a long-running affair with Nehru, once remarked: “I tried every trick I could play to shake Jinnah’s resolve. Nothing would move him from his consuming determination to realise the dream of Pakistan.”

But the 71-year-old Mr Singh, a former foreign minister, says that the claim is “paralysing in its insensitivity and… [for] the sheer horror of Mountbatten’s casual untruthfulness”. He argues that far from being set on a separate Pakistan, Jinnah’s overwhelming concern was the well-being of his fellow Muslims, who were in a minority. He wanted to ensure they would have “space in a reassuring system”.

He said Jinnah envisaged that some areas of the new country would have Muslim majority areas and some Hindu majority areas and believed a federal system that kept the country as one was desirable. Nehru, by contrast, demanded a system that was centralised. “Nehru believed in a highly centralised policy. That’s what he wanted India to be,” Mr Singh went on. “Jinnah wanted a federal polity. That, even Gandhi accepted. Nehru didn’t. Consistently he stood in the way of a federal India until 1947 when it became a partitioned India.”

Mr Singh went on to say that the tragedy of Partition is still evident today in the experience of India’s Muslim population of around 160 million. “Look into the eyes of the Muslims that live in India and you truly see the pain with which they live. We treat them as aliens. Without doubt Muslims have paid the price of Partition. They could have been significantly stronger in a united India.”

Mr Singh, a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP who represents the north-east Indian district of Darjeeling, is not the first writer to have produced a revisionist history of Jinnah. Ayesha Jalal, a Pakistani-American historian, for instance, has previously argued that he had no desire to split India and that partition was, in truth, a vast error. She too, says Jinnah was merely trying to strengthen his hand.

But in India, whose relationship with the “breakaway” nation of Pakistan remains fraught, the questioning of received truths by such a leading figure has sparked a degree of controversy. In 2005, the BJP leader Lal Krishna Advani was forced to stand down as party chief after he wrote in the visitors’ book at Jinnah’s tomb in Karachi that Pakistan’s founder was “an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity”. Mr Singh says he has not written his book, Jinnah: India-Partition-Independence, the product of five years research, on behalf of the BJP and is prepared for any controversy it creates. Yesterday, however, it was the Congress Party of Jawaharlal Nehru and his descendants who appeared most angry. A party spokesman told local newspapers that the BJP ought to be known as the Bharatiya Jinnah Party because of its repeated praise of the Pakistani leader.

In Pakistan, where Jinnah died from the effects of tuberculosis barely a year after the country secured independence, news of this reassessment of the country’s founder has been gladly seized upon. Mr Singh’s book has become front page news and the subject of television talk shows and opinion columns. The book’s publisher, Delhi-based Rupa and Co, said an initial order of books from Pakistan had already been tripled prior to publication.

Birth of two nations: The great carve-up

*The notion of dividing the Indian subcontinent into Hindu-majority and Muslim-majority areas, the brainchild of Jinnah’s Muslim League, went through various stages of evolution. At one stage, more than a half- dozen federated Muslim statelets were proposed, taking account of the fact that Muslims were scattered right across the country.

*Until late in negotiations Jinnah demanded a corridor linking West Pakistan (today’s Pakistan) with East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Jinnah complained bitterly that the final settlement agreed with the Viceroy, Mountbatten, and Nehru was “moth-eaten”, and his decision to sign it remains a mystery.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/search-for-the-real-villain-of-partition-divides-india-again-1773486.html

The foreign policy of Liaquat Ali Khan

FROM INPAPERMAGAZINE — PUBLISHED OCT 17, 2010 05:56AM

IAQUAT Ali Khan, the first prime minister of Pakistan, served for a period of four years and two months until his tragic death on October 16, 1951. During this brief period, he set nearly all the parameters and main planks of Pakistan’s foreign policy. It is unfortunate that his immense contribution in making the foreign policy of the new-born country has not received due recognition.

His achievements include securing of UN resolutions calling for a plebiscite in Kashmir; championing the Palestinian and Arab cause at the UN; recognition of Communist China and establishing diplomatic relations with it; an overture to the Soviet Union and sending of an ambassador to Moscow; establishing close ties with the USA; lobbying for an Islamic bloc; and opposing colonialism. Over and above this, Liaquat’s outstanding contribution in foreign policy was the safeguarding of national security in the face of the most serious threats by India. At the same time, he sought to improve relations with India and signed a historic pact with India for the protection of minorities.

Three days after the creation of Pakistan, Liaquat said in an interview with the New York Times that Pakistan would not take sides in the conflict of ideologies between the two world blocs. This was a clear statement of a policy of non-alignment that Pakistan continued to follow during his lifetime and even afterwards, until 1954. He followed up this initial statement by reaching out at the same time to the USA, the Soviet Union and Communist China.

Relations with India perforce had to be given the highest priority by Liaquat. India adopted a hostile attitude towards Pakistan from the very start. The Indian leadership had only reluctantly accepted the division of India, more as a tactical decision, since it was convinced that Pakistan was an artificial creation and could not last. To make sure that Pakistan collapsed soon after its birth, India created a host of problems, which included withholding of Pakistan’s share of financial assets, unfair boundary award, genocide in East Punjab, pushing of more than ten million refugees in Pakistan, and stoppage of canal waters. But the most serious issue that brought the two countries close to war was the Indian military occupation of the princely state of Jammu & Kashmir. The partition formula was that contiguous Muslim majority areas would go to Pakistan. On that basis, Kashmir should have acceded to Pakistan. But India conspired with the Hindu ruler of the state to secure its accession to India. Pakistan protested strongly and Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had to assure Liaquat that the Kashmiri people would be given the opportunity to decide freely whether they wanted to join India or Pakistan.

At the same time, India accused Pakistan of sending tribal infiltrators into Kashmir and lodged a complaint at the UN Security Council alleging aggression by Pakistan. The UN Security Council did not accept the Indian accusation of Pakistani aggression.

Instead, it adopted several resolutions that the future of Kashmir should be decided by the people of Kashmir through a plebiscite. Foreign Minister Zafrulla Khan played a key role at the UN in the adoption of the resolutions on Kashmir. Though India had to accept this decision, but after Liaquat’s death, it reneged on its commitment. However, the Kashmir issue remains alive as neither Pakistan nor the Kashmiri people have acquiesced in India’s unlawful occupation. The legal basis for Pakistan’s stance remains the same UN resolutions on Kashmir that were passed during Liaquat’s tenure.

During the first four years of its existence, India threatened to invade Pakistan several times. Though Pakistan was militarily weak, Liaquat galvanised the nation and held firm in the face of Indian threats. His clenched fist (“mukka”) became the symbol of the nation’s defiance, and Nehru had to back down, claiming that India never had any war-like intentions. He offered to sign a No War Pact with Pakistan. However, Liaquat said that such a pact must also include an agreed formula ensuring fair settlement of disputes between the two countries. This has ever since remained Pakistan’s stance on the issue.

Pakistan took the initiative in April 1948 to establish diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. The Soviet agreement was announced a month later. In May 1949, the US extended an invitation to Nehru to visit Washington, but no such invitation came to Pakistan. Liaquat felt the need to make an opening to Moscow by saying that “Pakistan cannot afford to wait. She must take her friends where she finds them.” He talked with the Soviet Ambassador, while on a visit to Tehran, and Moscow promptly extended an invitation to him to visit the Soviet Union. The dates suggested for this visit clashed with Pakistan’s Independence Day and hence Karachi asked for a slight change of dates. For reasons that have remained obscure, there was no reply from Moscow. However, the first Pakistani Ambassador arrived in Moscow in December 1949, followed by the arrival in Pakistan a few months later of the first Soviet Ambassador.

It is unfortunate that a myth later developed in Pakistan, fed by some leftists as also anti-Liaquat circles, that Pakistan’s subsequent difficulties in relations with Moscow stemmed from Liaquat’s inability to visit the Soviet Union. The fact is that there were no discernable strains in bilateral relations till well after Liaquat’s death. It was Pakistan’s membership of military pacts in 1954 that aroused Soviet hostility. The Soviet veto on Kashmir was not applied until 1957. The Soviets themselves have never put the blame for unfriendly relations on the inability of Liaquat to visit the Soviet Union. It also needs to be noted that it is common in diplomatic practice to issue invitations to dignitaries of other states. Inability to respond to such an invitation has hardly ever become a cause of long term strains in relations.

In December 1949, Liaquat received an invitation from President Truman to visit the USA. This was readily accepted and the visit took place in May 1950. While on US soil, Liaquat confirmed that he intended to visit the Soviet Union. Liaquat’s visit to USA brought the two countries closer. This was shown by Pakistan’s support for the use of force by the UN in June 1950 against North Korea to secure its withdrawal from South Korea, as also support for the peace treaty negotiations with Japan in 1951. The Soviet Union opposed both of these developments.

In October 1949, the Communists came to power in China. The US strongly opposed this development and refused to recognise the Communist regime. It continued to recognise the ousted Kuomintang regime of Gen. Chiang Kai-shek as the legitimate government of China. The US also managed to prevent most countries in the world from recognising Communist China which was thus kept out of the UN as well. However, Liaquat decided to extend recognition to Communist China in January 1950. The Chinese Ambassador arrived in Karachi in September 1951, a month before Liaquat’s death, and the first Pakistani Ambassador presented credentials in Beijing in November 1951.

Pakistan thus became the first Muslim country, and one of the few countries in the world, to establish diplomatic relations with Communist China. This wise decision laid the foundation for strong relations with China that have since become a pillar of Pakistan’s foreign policy. Liaquat’s logic probably was that Pakistan already had adverse relations with one neighbour (India) and could not afford to antagonise another powerful neighbour who would be having veto power in the UN Security Council.

Moreover, Pakistan needed to have trade with China, particularly because India had snapped commercial ties with Pakistan in 1949. Pakistan could also have calculated that friendly relations with China might be helpful at some stage against its traditional rival India. This is what actually happened. In pursuit of this policy of wooing China, Pakistan avoided any criticism of China when it annexed Tibet early in 1950 or in the context of the Korean War that broke out in June 1950.

Another plank of Pakistan’s foreign policy from the very outset was to establish close relations with the Muslim world.

Pan-Islamism was part of Pakistan’s ideological moorings. Even before independence, Indian Muslims took a leading part in supporting Turkey during the Khilafat Movement of 1918-24.

The Muslim League was highly critical of the British policy in Palestine during the 1930s and 1940s. Soon after its creation, Pakistan strongly opposed the proposal in the UN for the partition of Palestine and the creation of a Jewish state. Foreign Minister Zafrulla Khan was a leading voice at the UN, as early as November 1947, in opposing the creation of Israel. Pakistan refused to recognise the state of Israel when it was set up in May 1948. Support for the Palestinian and Arab cause has ever since remained a plank of Pakistan’s foreign policy.

From the beginning, Pakistan actively pursued a policy of establishing close ties with the Islamic world. The possibility of an Islamic bloc was explored by Pakistan in its formative years, though this made little headway because of the disparate nature of the Islamic world and Egypt’s suspicion that Pakistan was seeking to become leader of the Islamic world. In this context, Pakistan hosted an International Islamic Economic Conference at Karachi in 1949.

It is worth recalling that a Soviet magazine New Times criticised this conference by observing that its purpose was to prepare the ground for a “Muslim military and political bloc.” In February 1951, there was a meeting of the Motamar-al-Alam-al-Islami in Karachi. Addressing this gathering, Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan said that Pakistan came into being as a result of the urge of the Muslims of the sub-continent to secure territory where Islamic ideology could be practised and demonstrated to the world and, since a cardinal feature of this ideology was to make Muslim brotherhood a reality, it was a part of Pakistan’s mission to do everything in its power to promote fellowship and cooperation between Muslim countries.

Pakistan supported Indonesia’s fight for independence when the Dutch used force against its former colony in December 1948.

Zafrulla Khan called it “an affront to the soul of Asia.” When Indonesia became independent in August 1949, Pakistan celebrated this event by declaring a public holiday. Pakistan played a leading role at the UN in securing independence of Muslim countries, including Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Somalia and Eritrea. From the very beginning, Pakistan’s stance on anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism was that “whenever there is a question of liberty and independence from imperialism or of opposing colonialism, of pushing forward a people’s march towards freedom, Pakistan is always to the fore and second to none.”

From the foregoing, it is clear that Liaquat laid the foundations of the main elements of Pakistan’s foreign policy. He believed in an independent foreign policy with emphasis on Islamic unity.

The writer is a former ambassador.

http://www.dawn.com/news/573082/the-foreign-policy-of-liaquat-ali-khan-2

Liaquat Ali Khan`s visit to US

— PUBLISHED NOV 28, 2008 12:00AM

I could not agree more with Mr Hamid Ali Qureshi’s letter, published in your esteemed daily on Nov 23 pertaining to Liaquat Ali Khan’s visit to the United States in May, 1950.

Ironically, a lot of mud slinging has gone on over the years by a select group of “intelligentsia” against the first Prime Minister of Pakistan that by ignoring the USSR government’s invitation and opting for the US instead, Liaquat Ali is chiefly responsible for throwing Pakistan into the US camp.

I would like to quote from a number of books about the real situation. Ex-Ambassador Shahid Amin has rightly pointed out in his worthwhile book ‘Pakistan’s Foreign Policy A Reappraisal’ (published by Oxford University Press in 2000) that “It should be noted that in international diplomacy, invitations are often extended but not always availed. Failure to visit a country in response to its invitation has hardly ever become the cause of long-term estrangement” (p42, chapter 2).

Author Muhammad Reza Kazmi has dealt with this subject in admirable detail in his lucid work titled Liaquat Ali Khan His Life and Work (Second impression published by OUP in 2004). Chapter 10 of the mentioned work researches this episode in immaculate detail. To quote from the book “During his first press conference in America, when he was questioned about his proposed visit to the USSR, Liaquat replied ‘No date for my visit has yet been fixed. As soon as it is, I shall certainly not fail to inform the United States Press…During a press conference on 23 August 1950, the following exchange took place

Q. Is the Moscow invitation also under your active consideration?

A. I cannot go until those people who invited me fix a date and ask me to go on such a date.

Q. They look to your convenience?

A. Evidently not. They look to their own convenience. The invitation came. Later on, they suggested 14 August 1949. I replied that this is our Independence Day. I can come on any date after that. After that they have not replied.”

This in Liaquat’s own words was the story of the Soviet invitation.

Considering this scenario I would like to point out that relationships between countries have their ups and downs during course of time and any one incident cannot be blamed for continued animosity between countries. Jawaharlal Nehru visited the US in 1949, nearly six years before making his first trip to the Soviet Union.

Pakistan and China have had the best of relationships over the years. The two states established diplomatic relations in 1949, but the first summit level visits were exchanged between Suhurwardy and Chou-En-Lai in 1956. The boundary and aviation agreements were signed in 1963. People who accuse one of our founding fathers for this “diplomatic blunder” must remember that the Soviet Union did not display any feeling of bitterness towards Pakistan at any international forum from 1947 to 1953.

The relationship came under cloud only after Pakistan’s joining of SEATO and CENTO in 1954 and 1955 respectively.

Still the ice started melting after President Ayub Khan’s landmark visit to Moscow in 1965. The relations improved to such an extent that USSR not only sponsored the Tashkent Agreement between India and Pakistan, but also helped finance the founding of our largest industrial complex i.e. Pakistan Steel.

The ties then understandably deteriorated after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

UMAR M. MAKHDUMI

Karachi

http://www.dawn.com/news/1003958/liaquat-ali-khan-s-visit-to-us