ABSTRACT

This chapter begins with the civil-military partnership in Pakistan, which lasted for more than five years before the creation in October 1958 of the martial-law regime. For more than a decade after independence, the Pakistani political elite seemed bent on finding a viable political system. To judge from the deliberations of the two Constituent Assemblies and from the kind of regime that emerged in form and, less perfectly, in practice, the consensus of articulate political opinion favored parliamentary democracy. This seemed wholly natural, since such institutions were precisely the ones that the British rulers had tried to implant. The Muslim rebels of Algeria had overturned the colonial government, and turned it out altogether. The civil-military coalition that seized power in the Muslim community acquired formal title through the device of a carefully screened single list of candidates to the Constituent Assembly, thus offering the voters no choice but endorsement or protest.