home | 1946-21st century | India and Pakistan, to 2002

Ayub Khan

Democratic India

India's parliament worked through the creation of a constitution that became law on January 26, 1950. India was a federated nation and a union of states. Some 275 principalities had been  merged into five new states. The stated goal of the constitution was: "to secure for all" of India's citizens "social, economic and political" justice; to establish "liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship; to establish "equality of status and opportunity;" and to promote among all citizens a "fraternity assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity of the Nation."

The nation was to have a president, the first of whom was Dr. Rajendra Prasad, a Sanskrit scholar and longtime activist for independence and well being for the people of India. The nation's first prime minister was Nehru, a moderate or Fabian socialist, a progressive who had often denounced India's caste system and priest-ridden society. Nehru would tell a U.S. ambassador to India, John Kenneth Galbraith, that he, Nehru, would be "the last Englishman to rule India." The British had left behind in India some of its values in the organization that had been created to throw it out. India's constitution created a parliamentary system similar to that of the United Kingdom, but with nearly 4,000 representatives, elected by a society that in the 1940s was 80 percent illiterate.

In April 1951, India's first five year plan was inaugurated, which proposed an 11 percent rise in national income by 1956. It was a success. Production in general increased 25 percent. Power and irrigation projects were undertaken. Food production increased. But increases were diminished by a growth in population, and by 1959 the government was endorsing family planning.

A second five-year plan began in 1956, which put more emphasis on advancing industrial capacity and infrastructure. Coal production increased from 38 million tons to 54, and India's power capacity doubled. The second five-year plan involved three times the spending of the first plan, with money borrowed from abroad, much of it from the United States. From the U.S., India was also receiving assistance in the form of food, but with a rise in food production during the second five-year plan, India neared self-sufficiency and food aid from the U.S. diminished.

Meanwhile, India's government created a limit as to how big one's land holdings could be, and it transformed millions who had been tenant farmers into farmers owning their own land. And the government was making life better for women. The constitution had given women the right to vote and to rise to any position in the nation, including prime minister. People were free to marry people from different castes. In 1955, the government had raised the minimum age of marriage to fifteen. Also, Hindu women now had the right of divorce, including the right to sue for divorce if her husband had acquired other wives - while Muslim men were still allowed their four wives. But husbands who took more than one wife were not allowed to divorce a previous spouse. Attitudes toward women in India were changing, more among the middle and upper classes than among the rural poor  - rural folk in India, as in the rest of the world, being more conservative culturally.

A third five-year plan was begun in 1961. New steel factories were built, and India was on its way to being one of the seven most industrially advanced nations, accomplished by a combination of government initiative and private enterprise, despite a modicum of waste and individual corruption.

Foreign Affairs

India was the first country to recognize the People's Republic of China, which took power in December, 1949. India expressed sympathy with China's fears of U.S. military retaliation against the Chinese revolution.

Tibet had arisen as an issue between China and India. Tibetans had hoped that the transfer of British power to  India would give them an opportunity to regain the territory that, in their view, the British had taken from them a century before - Sikkim. and other mountainous places between Tibet and India. India ignored Tibet's claims. In 1950, India increased its influence in Nepal. It encouraged Tibetan separatism from Chinese authority and attempted to increase its influence in Tibet - traditional self-interest geopolitics. The United States was also interested in Tibet remaining independent of Chinese control, and in 1950 a load of American weaponry was shipped into Tibet through Calcutta.

But China was not stopped. In late 1950, as China was beginning to send troops into Korea, 40,000 Chinese troops took Tibet's provincial capital of Qamdo, from eight directions. The small Tibetan force, consisting of 8,000 troops and militia, were defeated and 4,000 Tibetan forces killed. India was upset. China spoke of the People's Liberation Army liberating all Chinese territories, including Tibet, and on September 9, 1951, 3,000 Chinese troops marched into Lhasa, soon followed by 20,000 more soldiers.

India's position in the Cold War was neutrality. It signed a treaty with China, recognizing that the Tibetan people were returned to the "big family of the Motherland," in other words, China. And, as a member of the United Nations, India, along with Norway and Sweden, was providing medical units for the United Nations forces fighting the Chinese and North Koreans in Korea.

In 1954, India signed a treaty of friendship with China, which included recognition of each others territorial integrity and sovereignty. A problem remained, however, over which territory belonged to whom. In June 1954, Zhou Enlai came to New Delhi where he received a grand welcome, but, in July, China was protesting the existence of Indian troops in mountainous Barahoti, which it called Wu-je and thought of as belonging to China.

In 1955, India took a lead in the meeting of representatives of twenty-nine African and Asian nations held at Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955. The aim of the conference was to promote economic and cultural cooperation and to oppose colonialism. Zhou Enlai also played a prominent part in the conference, while not invited to the conference were South Africa, Israel, Taiwan, South Korea, and North Korea.

The Soviet Union's Nikita Khrushchev visited India in 1959 and received a big welcome, and, to compete with the Russians, it was decided in Washington that Eisenhower should go to India too. Eisenhower was well received. He was showered with flowers, and millions of citizens gathered at New Delhi's fairgrounds to hear him speak. It was the first of India's televised live broadcasts.

By 1961, Prime Minister Nehru had been receiving criticism from Africans hostile to Portugal's wars in Africa, these Africans accusing Nehru of waiting for Portugal's Goa to fall into his lap after Portugal's defeat in Africa. Portugal's ruler, Antonio Salazar was in no mood to negotiate a peaceful transfer of Goa to India. On December 19, 1961, India sent land, sea and air forces against Goa. The people of Goa had not been warned, nor had President Kennedy. Portugal was a United States ally in the Cold War and a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and Kennedy was annoyed with Nehru for not having mentioned a word of his intentions to him. The United Nations was never to recognize the seizure of Goa, but in India the move was accepted as a rightful liberation of one more part of India from colonial rule.

In 1962, Nehru ran into trouble with Maoist China. Nehru had been criticized in China as a stooge for the capitalist imperialists. China viewed India's control of mountainous Arunachal as a continuation of British imperialism's theft of land that belonged to China. Failing to agree on the matter, China moved troops into Arunachal on October 20, 1962. By November 18, the Chinese had reached the outskirts of Tezpur. India asked the United States for support, and on November 21 the Chinese declared a unilateral cease-fire. Each side had lost around 500 men, and any  attempt by the Chinese to press farther into the plains of Assam would have exposed them to more difficult lines of supply and a more powerful resistance. The Chinese withdrew their troops from the area. India returned to administrative control over the area that had been occupied by China, and disagreement about whose land Arunachal actually belonged to continued for years to come.

The Islamic Republic of Pakistan

Legalities imposed by the British were a part of emerging Pakistan. Definitions of crimes, criminal proceedings, guidance as to what was and was not admissible evidence, and punishments, remained in place, except in places ruled by princes and in tribal areas, near the border with Afghanistan. In tribal areas, the judgments of elders were still relied upon, some of these judgments based on the Koran and some on traditions from before Islamic times.

Pakistan emerged with Lord Mountbatten, on August 14, 1947, swearing in Muhammad Ali Jinnah as Pakistan's Governor-General. Jinnah was also still president of the most powerful political body among Muslims:the Muslim League. And he was president of the Pakistan's Constituent Assembly - that body of select persons authorized to create a constitution. And Pakistan's Constituent Assembly named Jinnah the Quaid-e-Azam (Great Leader).

On September 30, 1947, Pakistan became a member of the United Nations. A year later, on September 11, 1948, the Great Leader, who was eighty-one and had been suffering from tuberculosis, died. With Jinnah's death the President of the Constituent Assembly passed Maulvi Tamizuddin. Khwaja Nazimudden became Governor General, and president of the Muslim League passed to Liaqat Ali Khan. Pakistan was far from unified politically. Influential persons who had moved from India to the western portion of Pakistan were resented by indigenous politicians. Opposing views existed between secular-oriented Pakistanis and those wanting an Islamic state. Those from urban areas with middleclass backgrounds tended to be secular-minded and believers in free enterprise. Rural Pakistanis tended to favor the establishment of an Islamic state and a state managed economy. The Muslim League was divided in outlook. Bitter conflict existed over who was to have power over the instruments of government, and wrangling continued over the creation of a constitution.

The president of the Muslim League, Liaquat Ali Khan, was among the secularists, and in 1951 he was assassinated, with suspicions lingering that his death had been plotted by factions within the government. After his death, Pakistan's civil service - the bureaucrats - dominated government authority. Pakistan still had no constitution. And riots occurred in Bengali (or eastern) Pakistan in 1952, when the government in Karachi attempted to make Urdu the official language of all Pakistan. The Bengalis were 54 percent of the population and also angry over being inadequately represented in Pakistan's capital - Karachi.

Economics and Cold War Politics

Pakistan inherited a rural economy, manufacturing in 1947 being only 6 percent of Pakistan's Gross National Product. Pakistan's population was predominantly rural, with four fifths of its population dependent upon agriculture. Those who had arrived from India had left behind much of their wealth and had to be accommodated economically. And India severing trade with Pakistan in 1949 was also an economic burden.

The Korean War, which began in 1950, brought wealth to Pakistani merchants who sold raw materials to the anti-Communist nations. They invested their profits in the manufacture of consumer goods for Pakistanis.- Pakistan's first industrial revolution, and created by the private sector. Pakistan's economy, measured as Gross National Product, began growing at a rate of 18 percent a year, the high percentage made possible by meagre beginnings. From 1954, Pakistan's government stepped in and established an elaborate system of exchange controls to protect the country's infant industry from outside competition and to supply the budding industrialists with more capital for technological growth. Cooperation on matters of creating wealth was more easily achieved than political harmony.

Also in 1954, Pakistan joined the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) created by the U.S. Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. Dulles disliked India's prime minister, Nehru, and described Nehru's neutrality as immoral. Dulles saw Pakistan as a front-rank ally against the spread of Communism. He told the American journalist, Walter Lippmann, that Pakistanis were "the only real fighting men in South Asia," and he added that "We could never get along without the Gurkas." When Lippman pointed out that the Gurkas were not Pakistanis but Indians. Dulles said, "They may not be Pakistanis but they're Muslims," to which Lippmann replied that they were Hindus. "No matter," said Dulles.

It was India that concerned Pakistan, rather than the Soviet Union or China. Pakistan asked Dulles to include, under the shield of his alliance, protection from aggression from all sides, not just from Communist states. But Dulles refused. Pakistan was pleased, however, as it benefited from loans and military equipment from the United States

A Constitution and Military Coup

Pakistanis, like everyone else, were concerned with international prestige and, with good reason, believed themselves to be as bright and capable as anyone. India had created its constitution in early 1950, and the Pakistanis finally established their constitution in 1956. The Islamists were accommodated, the preamble to the constitution speaking of Allah as having "sovereignty over the entire Universe." It spoke of authority exercised by the people of Pakistan as being within the limits "prescribed by Him is a sacred trust." The preamble spoke of all laws of Pakistan conforming to the Koran and the Sunnah.

Muslim scholars (Ulema) in Pakistan had been urging that all legislation be null and void that contravened, in letter or spirit, with Islamic law as laid down in the Koran. They had been urging that the powers of government be derived from, circumscribed by and exercised within the limits of the Islamic law (Sharia) alone. Political contitutions, nevertheless, had to deal with matters that Muhammad the Prophet had ignored: specifics in the distribution of power and succession. Pakistan's Constitution proclaimed that members of central and provincial legislatures were to be elected every five years, that parliament was to be ruled by a president, and that effective power was to be with a prime minister. Also, Pakistan, was to remain a member of the British Commonwealth - a secularist innovation.

Pakistan's 1956 constitution was followed by a political harmony no greater than Islam had experienced following the death of the Prophet. Regional politicians resented powers accorded to those from other regions - the most favored and resented region being the Punjab. A plan to merge some regions was resented. An important government minister was assassinated, and other violence and ethnic unrest was on the rise. The Pashtuns (in the northwest and next to Afghanistan) were seeking a separate homeland for themselves, and, in Baluchistan, the Khan of Kalat declared independence.

The Muslim League, the dominant political party of politicians at the time of independence, had by now lost most of its public support. The Muslim League tried to make a comeback by appealing to the Kashmir issue, declaring its support for Muslims in Kashmir. But it failed.

Pakistan was coming apart politically, and on October 7, 1958, Pakistan's president, Iskander Mirza, with support from the army and the civil service bureaucracy, suspended the constitution and imposed martial law. Elections scheduled for January 1959 were canceled. Then the head of the military, General Muhammad Ayub Khan had a parting of the ways with president Mirza, and, on October 27, General Khan assumed control of the government. 

Pakistan led by Ayub Khan

Muhammad Ayub Khan tried to curb excessive profits by industrialists, but found that matters economic did not obey his orders as did his subordinates in the army. But Ayub Khan was a man of breadth, including an education at England's military academy at Sandhurst, where he had earned scholarships, and he had served as a major and then a colonel on various fronts during World War II.

Muhammad Ayub Khan was an example of Pakistani potential. He wanted economic and social progress for Pakistan. In 1960, he launched Pakistan's second five-year plan. He continued Pakistan's ties with the United States, which brought more economic assistance.

Ayub Khan wanted to lift Pakistan from its high infant and child mortality and low education levels. Only 30 percent of Pakistan's children were attending primary school, compared to India's 61 percent. In Pakistan, only 16 percent of female children were attending primary school, compared to India's 40 percent. In Pakistan, 15 percent of the population was literate, in India 75 percent.

In 1961, Ayub Khan instituted the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance, seen by some Muslim scholars as an assault against Islam. The law included a provision in which a second marriage, to be valid, had to be approved by the state and by the man's first wife. And to marry, boys had to be eighteen and girls fourteen.

War and Kashmir

In 1962, martial law was replaced by a second constitution, with the preamble to the 1956 constitution remaining in place to appease the Islamists. 1962 was the year of war between India and China. Some fellow Pakistani suggested to Ayub Khan that he take advantage of the war by moving troops into Kashmir, but Ayub Khan knew war, disliked war, and was adamantly opposed to war with India.

It was after the four-week war between China and India that U.S. military supplies began arriving in India. The Kennedy Administration had promised that weapons given to India would never be used by India against Pakistan, but the Pakistanis were not convinced. And President Kennedy had promised Ayub Khan that Pakistan would be consulted before any military aid was extended to India. Kennedy had not done this. Ayub Khan was “deeply offended” and never forgave Kennedy. Pakistanis had hoped that in giving weapons to Pakistan, the U.S. would insist on reciprocation from India beneficial to Pakistan. Ayub Khan believed that it was a good time for the U.S. to put pressure on India for a settlement of the Kashmir issue, but the U.S. made no such move. And many in Pakistan viewed the United States as having betrayed a friend and ally.

Disappointed over its relations with the United States, Pakistan moved toward closer ties with China, and President Lyndon Johnson lectured Ayub Khan's foreign minister that if Pakistan continued to build its relations with China, there would be a "serious public relations problem."

In late February, 1964, Zhou Enlai announced China's support for the Muslim liberation of Kashmir. Nehru seemed on a path toward making an agreement over Kashmir. There was talk of giving the Kashmiris another chance to decide their own future and talk of the 1957 and 1962 elections in Kashmir as having been rigged. Then, in May, 1964, Nehru died. Ayub Khan ran for and won the presidency, defeating a challenge from Fatima Jinnah, the younger sister of the Great Leader, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Ayub Khan's opposition appealed to the new anti-Americanism in Pakistan. Ayub Khan's popularity had dropped because he was seen as having been too close to United States policy and because he had failed to join China against India in 1962. Somehow, however, the ballot counting favored Ayub Khan, giving him four more years in office.

Since Nehru's death, India had begun calling Kashmir an 'integral part' of the country, contrary to the UN resolutions and India's pledges regarding Kashmir. It appeared to Pakistan that the Kashmir issue could be settled only by a Pakistani move. In Pakistan a plan was laid to send thousands of  fighters - mujahideen - in civilian clothes into India-governed Kashmir to mix with the native population of Kashmir. It was believed that such a force would inspire a popular uprising among the Muslims of India-governed Kashmir and that a guerrilla war would win freedom for them within a few weeks. It was believed that if this did not happen at least the United Nations would be forced to intervene to create a cease fire and that a U.N. intervention might be favorable to the Pakistani position on Kashmir.

The Mujahideen crossed into India-ruled Kashmir on August 5, 1965. Skirmishes with Indian forces started as early as August 6 or 7. Local Muslims did not co-operate with the invading force to the degree that Pakistan had hoped, and, on September 6, soon after having learned of the movement of an infiltration of soldiers from Pakistan, India declared war. India's army penetrated Pakistan and quickly found stalemate, and in late September the fighting came to an end.

The war officially ended with an agreement signed in Tashkent (in the Soviet Union) on January 10,1966. There the Prime Minister of India, Lal Bahadur Shastri, and the President of Pakistan, Ayub Khan, declared their resolve to restore normal and peaceful relations between their two countries and to promote understanding and friendly relations between their peoples. They reaffirmed their obligation under the United Nation's Charter not to resort to force and to settle their disputes through peaceful means.

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