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1969 During his recent visit to Pakistan, Tariq Ali made as thorough a study as circumstances permitted of the prevailing political situation. He visited some of the storm centres of the recent upsurge at the invitation of the militants who had spearheaded the struggle. He spoke to representatives of some of the political parties and spent just over three weeks in both West and East Pakistan. Unfortunately, his visit to Dacca was short, and he was unable to visit the countryside.
By the end of this period he had arrived a an understanding of the problems which faced the revolutionary movement in Pakistan, and had made an appreciation of its needs. He has drawn up for the Dwarf less of a specialised report than a general picture in order to demystify some of the ideas fostered by the British press.
By a strange coincidence I arrived in Pakistan on the morning of February 211969. That same evening Ayub was scheduled to broadcast to the nation. He had been unable to meet the needs of a mass movement which had been active since November 1968. He had offered too little too late and political activists waited anxiously for his broadcast. The atmosphere was reminiscent of Paris last June with students and workers waiting for de Gaulle to appear on the small screen. In the evening he announced his "irrevocable" decision to retire from politics. His voice was distraught. He spoke in simple Urdu of his deep love for Pakistan (cynics speculated as to which of his two favourite civil servants - Altaf Gauhar or Q. Shahab - could have written the speech. A few private bets were placed). Ayub is down, but is he out? Excitement ran high in the streets of the main cities. Crowds danced with pleasure. Few ponder about the future. The present is more important. The struggle has been victorious. The workers and students are aware of their strength. Yet few realise how close they were to a bloodbath on February 21. The original decision had been to impose Martial Law on February 21. Ayub had been consulting with the chiefs of the armed services and they had stated their willingness impose direct military rule. What changed Ayub's mind at the last minute was the situation in East Pakistan. There a bogus conspiracy case was in progress in which Mullibur Rahman, leader of the centrist Awami League, and several others were being tried for 'conspiring with India'. One of accused was an East Pakistani army Sergeant, Zahirul Haq. During the course of his imprisonment Zahirul Haq was shot dead by his Pakistani army guard 'while trying to escape. It was obvious that there had been no attempt at escape and that Sgt. Zahirul Haq had been murdered after a petty altercation. military curfew was imposed in Dacca where the authorities feared popular demonstrations.
curfew was defied by over 100,000 workers, and intellectuals. General commanding the Dacca Garrison had two alternatives: he could start shooting them down or he could accept defeat. He wisely chose the second alternative. The leaders of the demonstration there's the one in East •Whenever there's a cyclone in Pakistan thousands of peasants die. If you open fire it will be equivalent to four cyclones but we'll get you in the end.' The message was not lost on Ayub Khan. He realised that imposing Martial Law on February 21 would have meant virtual civil war in East Pakistan. So the Generals were asked to be patient. The orders which had been printed were, however, not put in cold storage. The army decided to wait a few weeks.
All the opposition leaders were invited to Rawalpindi to meet Ayub and discuss the constitutional future of the country. The conspiracy case was withdrawn and Muijibur Rehman arrived. Maulana Bhashani, the 86 year old peasant leader, refused to participate. When the oppressed sit at the same table as the oppressor, he told a British TV team, 'the oppressor usually wins." Mr Zulfiqar Bhutto and his People's Party refused instead collaborated with the progressive forces outside there would have been a united Left opposition to the right-wing politics of both Ayub and those who were talking to him about "constitutional procedures" neither of which offer any solution to the problems facing the country. It soon became obvious that Ayub's supporters, in collusion with the neo-fascists, were deliberately creating a situation where the only alternative visible to the frightened middle-class and big business and feudal interests was the army. An indication that the reports of "anarchy? etc. WCIC grossly exaggerated was provided by The Economist (April 5 1969) which maintained that reports of the losses in industrial production and exports caused by lockouts, strikes and gheraos have been grossly exaggerated.' The movement which swept across Pakistan embraced virtually every layer of society, except, significantly, the peasantry in West Pakistan who comprise 75% of the province's population. The struggle was sparked exclusively by the student community of West Pakistan; it was taken up by students in East Pakistan and there it rested for some months before workers and other layers came out in open support.
The role of the students in the upsurge has been of the utmost importance. They have acted as a conscious vanguard and their main demands have from the very beginning been political demands not really concerned with university reforms. The amazing thing is that the student revolt embraced parts of the country which had been considered completely non-political. Rawalpindi, the interim capital, has never had any militant tradition. If anything the city has been notorious for being politically dead and yet it was in Rawalpindi that students first took to the streets to inspire a struggle which was finally to overthrow Ayub. It was here that the first student was killed. In the past it has always been the East Pakistani students who have been in the forefront of the struggle and too often they have waited in vain for corresponding actions of solidarity from their West Pakistani comrades. This time it was West Pakistan which exploded. It was to take another month for the movement to grip East Pakistan as well. However there are basic differences between the student movement in East and West Pakistan. The students in the West were acting spontaneously; there was no single organisation to give the movement any coherent direction and no real efforts were made to set one up. Their main demand was the overthrow of Ayub that there was a vacuum. Of course there were isolated examples of left-wing student activists who were quite clear insofar they wanted a socialist Pakistan, but their umbers were limited and they were hampere v the lack of a province-wide organisatior a recognizable left-wing student organisation to set up fake organisations, which caused further confusion. This, coupled with the fact that the liberal and right-wing student leaders were more worried about their personal leadership' than with the need of building a viable organisation, led to the fragmentation of the West Pakistan student movement. Admittedly there were left organisations set in Multan, Lyallpur, Karachi etc., but they had not yet contacted each other.
In East Pakistan the students were united the result of years of experience. In Dacca, a Student Action Committee was virtually running the city for several weeks, and the had worked an manifestor which demanded regional autonomy. In order to emphasize that it did not want to replace West Pakistani capitalists with indigenous ones the manifesto contained two important points: nationalisation of the banks, insurance companies major industrial units; and an immediate withdrawal from CENTO and SEATO. The strength of the Students Action Committee was such that all the major political parties in statist hand pledged respective support students' demands. Not to have done so would have been tantamount political self-immolation. Some of the largest public meetings organised in Dacca were under the aegis of the students and no political gathering was complete unless the student representatives were present. Powerful the undoubtedly were but there were limits as to what they could do. In a period where the Government was deliberately fomenting chaos, the students on their own could not run the The workers were unfortunately not sufficiently organised to make dual power a living reality. To a certain extent, therefore, it was easy for government-hired hoodlums to operate freely. The Dacca police refused to act on the grounds that since the Student Action Committee controlled everything else could also solve murders and apprehend those who had committed them. The aim government was quite clearly to frighten the middle-classes in both East and West Pakistan and this they succeeded in doing. But it is necessary to stress that, weak though the structures of Ayub's regime were, the students on their own would not have been able to pull them down. For that they needed the help of the working class.
For some weeks the students of West Pakistan struggled on their own. They fought pitched battles with the police, defied the army and emerged bloody but unbowed. The workers. inspired by the student struggle, began support them in increasing numbers. Throughout the province workers in every industry came out on strike, and a steady escalation of: strikes and militant weakened a tottering government. In Lahore, 50,000 railway workers marched with red flags and chanted 'Smash capitalism' Keep religion Down with US Imperialism' out of politics.
Some days later puppet (govt-paid) trade-union leader was sent to provoke the railway workers. He went to address a meeting accompanied by two thuggish bodyguards armed with knives. His provocative anti-socialist remarks resulted in loud heckling whereupon one of his bodyguards stabbed one of the hecklers. The provocation was successful. The workers beat the offending bodyguard to death, fractured the arms and legs of the stooge trade-union leader and burnt his car. It was a costly provocation but had served its The news was widely reported and DUL DUSC publicised and helped to create the atmosphere which would convince the middle-classes of an army take-over in order to protect them from 'extremists In East Pakistan there was a similar situation and the workers 'gheraoed" many a factory to win wage increases. Here too the workers linked arms with the students and helped swell the already massive demonstrations. Unfortunately in both East and West Pakistan there was and is no coherent, disciplined workers organisation. If it had existed we would have seen dual powe being excersized in East Pakistani cities. The workers' successes emboldened certain other layers the strike movement. successive weeks we were to see postal workers, bank clerks, doctors, engineers, veterinary surgeons, coming out on strike. The ten year wage freeze imposed by the Ayub regime was over. What was lacking was an organisation, which could have co-ordinated the different strikes into powertul general strike throughout the country and impressed on the worker an understanding of his own strength.
In the industrial field, too, the government I instructed its own trade-union organisations and its paid hirelings to join the movement to sow confusion; in many industries workers were amazed to see their leaders' , who for years had acted as strike-breakers and police spies, now making lunatic demands. The stage was being well prepared. All that was needed in East Pakistan was to involve another powerful socia force - the peasantry The main weakness of the movement in West Pakistan was that it did not involve 75% of the population which did not live in the cities. The peasants remained unaffected except for isolated pockets in Multan, Sargodha and sections of the old North West Frontier. One reason was that most of the peasants were still under the control of the landlords, who because of their economic hold. could manipulate them politically almost at will.
Another reason was the fact that very little serious political work has been done among the peasantry. The left N.A.P. has done some work but by no means enough and mainly in isolated pockets. As a result the upsurge in the Western
province completely bypassed the peasantry which explains to certain extent the the black Dwart 1909 Fas