ABSTRACT
The Prime Minister, Liquat Ali Khan, had antagonistic relations with the provincial politicians and army officers, but was fortunate in that many of the senior civil and military officers were fellow refugees from the United Provinces. The carefully nurtured plan of the civil-military bureaucracy to overthrow democratic institutions was obviously kept a secret. In public Ayub posed as an honest soldier doing his duty and started a barrage of propaganda both to discredit the political elites and to demonstrate that parliamentary democracy was unsuited to the conditions of Pakistan. The new regime’s close alliance with civil bureaucracy was also revealed by its attitude to corruption. The Divisional Council was composed on the same basis as the District Council except that its members were drawn from all the districts within the Division. The edifice which Ayub had so carefully built ostensibly worked well. In 1968 the regime could look back with satisfaction and celebrate its “decade of development”.
