ABSTRACT
This was an era of paradoxes and missed opportunities. During the Ayub years the political, economic and social conflict between West Pakistan and East Pakistan crystallized. Its origins lay in developments in the first phase of Pakistani history. Yet it was during the Ayub era that the internal East-West relationship continued to polarize on economic, linguistic, political and military issues. Between 1954 and 1971 the Bengali demand for provincial autonomy was neglected by West Pakistani civilian and military authorities. As a result of the neglect of East Pakistani interests, a movement for autonomy was transformed into a movement for secession involving armed struggle and Indian intervention. The paradox is that General Ayub Khan stood tall in the international East-West conflict on America’s side and on the side of world freedom and democracy, but he failed to manage the East-West conflict within Pakistan. He failed to develop a regime that accommodated the internal pressures for provincial autonomy and democracy in Pakistan’s affairs. Instead he sought to develop a corporate model with centralized controls and power in the hands of civilian and Army bureaucracies and twenty-two economic families.1 The Ayub era sought to develop a new political system called the ‘Basic Democrats’. Emphasis was placed on economic development that bred economic inequality.2 In political affairs the quest was to develop an Ayub-centric political system instead of power sharing among diverse Pakistani constituencies. These new approaches, however, did not significantly change the elitist approach to politics in Pakistan; nor did it dilute the nature of the Pakistani oligarchy I have described in Chapter 1. Instead, the Ayub system refined the civil-military power coalition that shaped Pakistani political processes from the early 1950s. The ideas and actions of the Ayub era enabled Pakistani bureaucratic and economic elites to advance their interests. But by failing to address systemic problems of Pakistan, the Ayub era also delayed the search for a stable regime based on a democracy and provincial autonomy. This was the missed opportunity.
