THERE was an air of expectancy that something was about to happen.
When I was a student at the University of Southern California, I had spent a part of my summer vacation working as a farm-labourer picking apricots. The first phase consisted of choosing only the ones that were ripe for picking. The next was that of shaking the tree and the fruit dropped off and some leaves and branches as well. We had entered the political phase of shaking the tree. It seemed a singularly inappropriate time for an England cricket team to be touring Pakistan. It could have been argued that the Test matches would have diverted the attention of the people, but one felt that matters had gone beyond the quick-fix of diversions.
When I arrived in Dhaka to do the TV commentary and checked into the Intercontinental Hotel, the man at the reception desk asked me, somewhat nervously, whether there would be a match.
“I hope so,” I told him, “that’s why I’m here.”
But he had laid the seeds of doubt in my mind. I chanced upon Crawford White who was covering the tour for The Daily Express which flourished on gossip. Crawford White seemed flushed like someone with high fever and he told me that hotel’s doorman anticipated that there would be trouble at the match and that the England team was debating whether to play or not. The England team doubted the ability of the local administration to maintain law and order.
There was, in my mind, a throwback to the days of the British Raj and accusations we made that it was the British who were stirring the communal pot, the age-old practice of divide and rule. I told Crawford White that we resented this interference in our internal affairs. Cancellation of the Test match amounted to taking sides in the dispute. Rightly, he told me that I should take this up with Pakistan’s cricket authorities. He, after all, was only a reporter.
I knew he was right but knew, too, that the cricket authorities were helpless. I decided to go and see Shaikh Mujibur Rehman. I had first met him when Suhrawardy had brought him to our Friday Night at Air Cottage. Already, he had gotten a reputation as a fire-brand leader and a rabble rouser. We had had a ferocious argument with him, but he gave as good as he got it and Suhrawardy came to neither side’s help, preferring to flirt with some of the ladies present. But I had met Mujib on a few other occasions and we were not strangers to one another. With my public relations manager, Moinuddin Choudary, in tow, I went to see Mujib, to do my two-cents worth to save what looked like a doomed Test match.
He received me with great courtesy. He was sitting on a charpoy, dressed in a kurta and lungi and smoking a pipe. “I know why you have come,” he told me, not so much in a taunting but mischievous way. “But nobody has sent me,” I told him, letting some air out of his balloon. He said that he had nothing against the cricket team and said with a confidence that surprised me, “There will be no trouble at the cricket match.” And he advised that there should be no police at the ground.
I told him that I represented no one and it was the local administration that had to decide. But he was making a political point. He could turn his goons loose or he could hold them back. All through our discussion, visitors would arrive and he would get up from his charpoy and embrace them, in an automatic way, and each time he would turn round to me and say, “My people love me and I love my people.” Megalomania was in an advanced state.
There were no incidents at the ground, but I noticed that there were no policemen either. There was trouble, however, at the Karachi Test match and a mob invaded the field and the match was abandoned. I remember that Colin Milburn and Allan Knott were batting at the time, and Brian Johnson was our guest TV commentator. Along with the players, he, too, dashed for cover and for a moment or two the mike was unattended, and either Chisty Mujahid or I took over to say that we were returning “you back to the studio.”
It is hard to pinpoint the defining moment of an agitation. It could have been the decision of Asghar Khan to enter politics. There was no doubt that he was a formidable adversary and he had declared in a language that left no doubt where he stood and he stated his position. “The rejection of Ayub Khan is utter and complete. In his person, President Ayub Khan, rightly or wrongly, symbolizes in the eyes of the people of Pakistan all that is evil in our society,” he declared. This brought him and Bhutto on the same platform, but it was an unlikely alliance and one saw no long-term future in it. When he took to the hustings, Asghar Khan attracted huge crowds, almost as big as Bhutto was attracting, and though they had a common objective, one did not see them as allies in the long term.
There was a flurry of political activity, talks with the leaders of opponents in round table conferences, all destined to fail because they did not address the main demand which was the abdication of Ayub Khan. One also got the feeling that he was seen as a losing cause by his own constituency which was the armed forces.
Ayub’s health was a factor. In February 1968, he had suddenly fallen ill and although official bulletins described the illness as influenza, it was more serious. He had suffered an attack of pulmonary embolism. But he had gradually recovered and was back to work, but it is never the same as before. What was surprising was that Ayub Khan did not appear to have a strong enough team to counter his opponents, no party faithful who could mount a counter agitation. His Convention Muslim League was merely a front, a veneer to give a sheen of democracy to his one-man rule.
Ayub Khan had run a tight ship and there had been a lot of development, but the benefits of this development had not filtered down. Dr Mahbubul Haq, who had been the chief economist of the Planning Commission, was the first to bring this fact to public notice. He revealed in his book, The Poverty Curtain, that 22 families came to own 85 per cent of the country’s industry, banking and insurance. This could have been one reason that the ‘socialist’ message of Bhutto was received with so much enthusiasm.
Ayub Khan had not been a tyrant, though he had turned a blind eye to the strong-arm methods of such lieutenants as the Nawab of Kalabagh in West Pakistan and Monem Khan in East Pakistan. Though Pakistan’s foreign policy continued to have a pro-West bias, he had cemented relations with the People’s Republic of China. He was a modern man who brought in family laws and made no attempt to politicize religion. In that respect, Pakistan had become a tolerant society. I did not know him, though I had met him several times and he had been friendly and invariably inquired how the cricket team was doing.
On one occasion, he had asked me whether I was “still spinning yarns about PIA.” But he seemed to be out of touch with the realities on the ground. This happens when “cordon-saniaire” is allowed to be built around you and the press is muzzled, if not that, kept on a tight leash. Ayub should have resigned when he fell ill. He would have been spared the grief of an angry rejection.
On March 25, 1969, Ayub Khan resigned and formally asked General Yahya Khan to take over. Yahya Khan imposed martial law. After travelling so far and for so many years, we had arrived, yet again, at the beginning.
THERE was an air of expectancy that something was about to happen.
