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The emergence of Pakistan

Sir Gilbert Laithwaite
Published online: 15 Apr 2008.

To cite this article: Sir Gilbert Laithwaite (1970) The emergence of Pakistan,
The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs, 60:240,
595-602, DOI: 10.1080/00358537008452921

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 THE EMERGENCE OF PAKISTAN
FROM NATIONHOOD TO STATEHOOD
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SIR GILBERT LAITHWAITE

T HE emergence of Pakistan, with her population now over 110m. people,

as a separate and independent Commonwealth country has been one of
the most important Commonwealth developments since THE ROUND TABLE
was founded sixty years ago. The story is a long one and its course is outlined
below.
The unification of the Indian sub-continent into a single political whole
was the work of Britain. Twice before in history had Muslim dynasties
united India as from the Deccan Plateau, but never since the time of Asoka
had there been an indigenous unification. In the process of constitutional
development under Britain the necessity of increasing the share of its
inhabitants in its government became obvious, and as from the Morley-Minto
Reforms in 1908 onwards the prospect, however then distant, of extensive
delegation by the United Kingdom government, and of ultimate self-
government, grew, so tensions developed between the two principal
communities in the sub-continent—Hindu and Muslim, those tensions
reflecting, it has been suggested, the fundamental cultural and religious
differences between Hinduism and Islam. Those differences, which persist
after so many centuries of juxtaposition, had been of less political significance
so long as the certainty of continuing supervision, and the keeping of the
political balance by Britain was there. With the possibility of the withdrawal
of that outside authority they became progressively more important.

The Muslims Find a Separate Voice

HE principle of separate representation for Muslims dates back as far
T as the recognition secured for it by Syed Ahmad Khan in Lord Ripon's
Municipal Councils in 1882. In 1916, in deference to Jinnah the Congress
party at Lucknow temporarily agreed to separate electorates for Muslims—
an agreement later withdrawn, and never renewed. The specific Montagu-
Chelmsford declaration in 1917 that self-government was the ultimate goal
for India made the communal issue still more sensitive. The principle of
separate electorates was embodied in the Government of India Act of
October 1919, British policy throughout remaining the same, to ensure the
political unity of the geographical unit which was the sub-continent of India.
In 1920-2 Muslim uneasiness at the Treaty of Sevres for a time brought
 596 THE EMERGENCE OF PAKISTAN

the Muslim Khilafat element into partnership with Gandhi and his followers,
but this did not last, and communal riots became widespread.
Later in the decade there came in 1928 the Simon Commission of enquiry
into the constitutional future of India, and its recommendations, followed by
Hindu/Muslim failure to agree on any joint alternative.
The Round Table Conference of 1930-2, following on the Simon Report
and on the Communal Award of 1932, devised the constitutional system
embodied in the Government of India Act of 1935. Under this, with the
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ultimate objective of a Federation of India, all the provinces of British India

and the Indian princely States, were to form a single political whole with a
central legislature, while as a first stage individual provinces would have
legislatures and political governments of their own based on the principle of
provincial autonomy.
The Muslims generally had held aloof from Gandhi's civil disobedience
campaign in the 1930s, but after the introduction of the Government of India
Act of 1935 they showed increasing uneasiness as to how provincial autonomy
would work, and lest a central or federal government, when it came into being,
might become so strong as to put Muslims in India permanently at the
mercy of a Hindu majority. When in the spring of 1937 the moment
arrived to hold the first provincial elections under the Act of 1935, strains
at once developed between the two communities, and for the first time the
idea of a separate Pakistan—an idea advocated by Sir Mohammed Iqbal
at Allahabad in 1930—showed signs of consolidating.
The Congress Party represented the great majority of the population of
the sub-continent and after the elections of 1937 were able, unaided, to form
ministries in seven out of the eleven provinces. But of these seven, there
were special circumstances in the case of the North West Frontier Province.
In the North West Frontier Province, despite the fact that Muslims were in
an overwhelming majority, the character and influence of the Khan brothers,
and the dissatisfaction of the Pathans at being excluded altogether in the first
ten years from the 1919 reforms, enabled Congress for some years to obtain
the allegiance of the majority of the Muslim population, and made possible the
formation of a Congress/Muslim government. In the very important case of
the Punjab, where the Unionist Party, formed originally by Sir Fazl-i-Husain,
which transcended communal allegiance, enjoyed support among Muslims,
Hindus and Sikhs, Sikander Hayat was able to form a broad-based government
which held together until towards the end of the war, and Jinnah was able
to establish a strong Muslim League party, partly as a result of the
imminence of the Transfer of Power. The break-up of the Punjab coalition
was a prime factor in leading to the partition of India.
The North West Frontier Province and the Punjab were special cases.
But, encouraged by their sweeping victories in the provincial elections of
1937, Congress showed an indifference to Muslim feeling which aggravated
the existing tension between the communities. The issue became of critical
 THE EMERGENCE OF PAKISTAN 597

importance in the United Provinces, where Congress took the line-—the

significance of which was not lost on Muslims elsewhere in the sub-
continent—that Muslims would be acceptable in the provincial government
only if they became members of the Congress, and the Muslim League local
parliamentary boards were permanently dissolved. The Congress party
also at this time attempted a mass contact campaign amongst the Muslim
proletariat. Thereafter the impetus towards partition of the sub-continent
into Hindu and Muslim areas was much strengthened.
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In September 1939 India entered the war. For constitutional reasons

there was no prior consultation about this with the Indian political parties,
and, in protest, the Congress ministries, in October 1939, resigned, leaving
the provinces in which they had been in control to be administered by the
Governors under the emergency provisions of the Act. One result of this
was to strengthen the political importance of the Muslim League, for the
Muslim ministries remained in office.
The Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, succeeded in getting Gandhi and Jinnah
to meet, but no satisfactory solution emerged. In March 1940 there came the
formal Muslim League resolution in favour of Pakistan, that is to say, of
the partition of the sub-continent. Throughout the Congress party's
" individual civil disobedience " movement of 1940-41, and, after the failure
of the Cripps' Mission, their dangerous "open rebellion" of August 1942,
the Muslims stood aside, and in practice helped in the war effort.

The Problems of an Independence Settlement

f*\ ENERAL elections in 1945-46 resulted in sweeping victories for Jinnah
v j and the Muslim League in the Muslim provinces other than the North
West Frontier Province, where the Khan brothers, with their Congress/
Muslim affiliations were returned to power. Every Muslim seat in the
Central Assembly was won by a pro-partition candidate. Thereafter, the
British Government remained eager, as in the past, to maintain the unity of
India: the Hindus continued to insist on their one-nation theory and on joint
electorates, as opposed to Jinnah's claim that the League alone represented
the Muslims and must separate. Hindus and Muslims alike maintained
these positions firmly in 1946; the endeavours of a British Government
mission in that year to discuss the transfer of power and of successive
Viceroys—Lord Wavell and later Lord Mountbatten—to secure an accept-
able compromise, and a visit by political leaders to London, led to nothing,
though for a time in October 1946 the Muslim League entered an interim
government in which they stayed until Partition in 1947. It was a hotbed of
quarrels. Early in 1947 it was a hotbed of troubles, and, the disagreements
between the two main Indian political parties remaining totally unresolved, the
British government declared their intention to quit India not later than June
1948. Meanwhile, starting with the Calcutta riots of August 1946, intense
communal strife had developed over much of the sub-continent, and amounting
 598 THE EMERGENCE OF PAKISTAN

by March 1947 to something like civil war, and localized administrative

collapse. On 3 June 1947, consequent on this state of affairs, and in the
continued absence of any indication of agreement, came the announcement of
Britain's decision to quit India in August 1947, and of the sub-continent's
separation into India and Pakistan. Nehru's uncompromising utterances in
1946 had not helped. A by-product of the haste with which this decision had
to be taken was the failure to decide the future of the geographically crucial
princely State of Kashmir, an issue which has bedevilled relations to this day
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between fhe two new States. That separation resulted in the division of the
sub-continent into a majority Hindu area (containing today over 50m. Mus-
lims) and a Muslim area known as Pakistan of about one-third the size
divided into two wings—East and West Pakistan.
Pakistan started with disadvantages so great as to cause many to doubt
whether she could survive. Industrial concentration prior to partition had
been in what was now an independent, and at any rate temporarily hostile,
India, and much needed to be done to build up the industrial position in
Pakistan. The shortage of experienced administrative and military officers;
the severance of communications with India; the disruption of trade channels
and the loss of much of an experienced commercial community; the Sikh
problem in the Punjab; the fact that the two " wings" of Pakistan, still
united by the bond of religion, were separated by more than 1,000 miles;
that their inhabitants mostly spoke different languages; that the percentage
of Hindus was very small in West Pakistan, but as high as 25 per
cent in East Pakistan and in addition the divergences between them,
historical, ethnic, and cultural—divergences which still persist—were further
complications.
In the military field—the undivided Indian Army had at all times been of
the greatest importance in the sub-continent—it was necessary to reorganize
the elements, which passed to Pakistan in that Army, while the retention by
India of military supplies which, under the Partition Agreement, ought to
have come to Pakistan, did not ease matters.
In the political field there was the problem of devising a suitable con-
stitution for a unique new State. This has hitherto proved extremely difficult
and intractable. Substantially, the eight years between 1948 and 1957 were
characterized by a struggle about the form of the Constitution between the
traditionalists and the modernists—the Army in the end proving a distinct
and the decisive factor.

A State in Search of a Constitution

B UT had it not been that the death in September 1948 of Jinnah, who
was not only Pakistan's first Governor-General but President of her
Constituent Assembly (deriving from the All India arrangements proposed
in 1946 by the British government), and of the Muslim League, removed his
dynamic and dominating personality, it might have been possible to avoid
 THE EMERGENCE OF PAKISTAN 599

the long period of frustration and uncertainty that followed in the con-
stitutional field, and to fulfil the objective of quickly building Pakistan up
into a progressive Muslim democracy. The murder in 1951 of Prime
Minister Liaqat Ali Khan was a grave further setback.
Jinnah's own party, the Muslim League, gradually disintegrated after
Liaqat's death. In April 1954 it was overwhelmingly defeated in a provincial
election in East Pakistan, which correspondingly reduced the authority of the
East Pakistani representatives in the Constituent Assembly. A few months
later the provincial government in the East wing was removed on the orders
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of the Central Government, and General Iskander Mirza was appointed to

govern the province under the emergency provisions of the Government of
India Act of 1935. Later in the year the Governor-General dismissed the
Central Assembly and reconstructed the Central Cabinet
In October 1955 West Pakistan was reconstituted as a single unit, its four
provinces being combined, and a fresh Constituent Assembly, elected
indirectly from provincial legislatures (which had themselves been elected
since independence), was established. On March 23, 1956—nine years after
independence, the new Constituent Assembly passed Pakistan's first Con-
stitution. This established what was termed an Islamic Republic, specifying
that the President must be a Muslim; the Governor-Generalship lapsed; it
divided Pakistan into two provinces—West Pakistan and East Pakistan,
the former incorporating the Punjab, North West Frontier Province, Sind,
Baluchistan, the States of Bahawalpur and Khairpur, the tribal areas in
Baluchistan and the Punjab, and the States of Amb, Dir, Chitral, and Swat.
Urdu and Bengali were graded as equal languages; English was however to
be retained for a further twenty years.
But political manoeuvring, and the tensions between the two wings
continued. General deterioration soon became apparent and on October 7,
1958 the Army abruptly intervened. The Constitution was abrogated;
political parties were abolished; the Central and Provincial legislatures were
dissolved, and martial law was imposed. Field Marshal Ayub Khan, Com-
mander in Chief of the Pakistan Army, took charge as General Martial Law
Administrator, and on October 28, 1958 he also became the country's
President.
In October 1959 the President introduced the Basic Democracies Order.
Under this order the President and the National Assembly were to be elected
for five-year terms by an electoral college of Pakistan, which was to consist
of 80,000 members, each of them a " Basic Democrat" elected in his turn
by adult suffrage from constituencies of some 1,200 voters. In 1962 the
military regime brought in a revised Constitution, still based on the basic
democracies, with single chamber houses of 150 members, each, like the
President, to be chosen by the successful candidates returned in the basic
democracy constituencies, whose numbers would increase from 80,000 to
about 120,000. The country was to have in fact two Federal capitals, a
 600 THE EMERGENCE OF PAKISTA

political capital at Dacca where the National Assembly would meet, and an
administrative capital at Rawalpindi, in substitution for Karachi, and there-
after, on the President's initiative, in substitution for Rawalpindi, but close
to it, a new Federal capital at Islamabad in the Punjab.
This Constitution survived until 1969. The Ayub Government could
claim credit under it for important agrarian reforms, for rapid industrial
advance, for the resettlement of refugees, and for a marked improvement in
Pakistan's international prestige. But in that year, after a period of unrest
in both East and West Pakistan, marked by rioting and mass strikes in
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both "wings", President Ayub Khan on March 24, 1969 announced his
resignation and handed back control to the armed forces. The Commander
in Chief, General Yahya Khan, proclaimed martial law on March 25, and
appointed military governors in East and West Pakistan; the Constitution
was again abrogated; the provincial assemblies dissolved; and the provincial
governors dismissed. On March 31 General Yahya assumed the Presidency
and formed a Council of Administrators consisting of three martial law
administrators (the Deputy Army Commander; the Commander of the Navy;
and the Commander of the Air Force). Law and order were rapidly restored.
Later in the year he appointed a Council of eight ministers.
In the spring of 1970 the basic democracies of 1959 were replaced by a
system of local government, based on directly elected union and district
councils with twenty official nominees; the councils to be elected under pro-
vincial arrangements soon after elections of provincial assemblies. The Legal
Framework Order of March 30, 1970, in accordance with which a new
National Assembly was to be set up, provided for an assembly of 313
members with provincial representation in West Pakistan, the Punjab, Sind,
Baluchistan, the North West Frontier Province, and the centrally administered
tribal areas. Under the West Pakistan Dissolution Order of April 1970 the
integrated "one unit" of West Pakistan was dissolved, to be replaced by
the original four provinces—Karachi being merged with Sind, and the capital
territory of Islamabad and certain tribal areas falling directly under the
administration of the President. The Islamic ideology was to be preserved
and the Head of State to be Muslim. Democracy was to be ensured by free
periodical direct elections with adult suffrage on a population basis. The
provinces, West and East, were to be united in a federation which would
ensure their independence and territorial integrity, and Pakistan's national
solidarity. All this was to be subject to the central government retaining
adequate powers to discharge its external and internal responsibilities, and
to preserve the independence and integrity of Pakistan.
It remains to be seen how these new arrangements will work. Elections
to a new Constituent Assembly, which is also to be a Parliament-designate,
and which is required to reach a decision on the form of the new Constitution
within 120 days, were to be held in October 1970—a date now postponed,
owing to floods in East Pakistan, until December, 1970.
 THE EMERGENCE OF PAKISTAN 601

The Achievements of Independence

ROADLY speaking, looking back over the period since Pakistan became
B an independent country in 1949, she has been feeling for a satisfactory
permanent constitutional structure which has not at the time of writing been
attained. The twenty-three years since independence, and since Pakistan's
agreement in 1949 to become an independent Commonwealth country, can
be regarded as a series of constitutional experiments—a Constitution had to
be framed; a fully fledged administrative machinery had to be set up. The
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administrative machinery has in large part been satisfactorily established.

But the task of framing a Constitution has, as will have been seen, proved to
be far more difficult than was anticipated at the beginning. This, however,
when we consider the unique geographical and ideological issues involved, is
perhaps not wholly surprising.
The internal constitutional future of Pakistan is thus uncertain. In other
fields a problem of particular acuteness has been defence on a scale which
Pakistan has felt necessary to safeguard her borders against the adjoining
Commonwealth country of India. And though agreement has been reached
over certain major controversial issues between India and Pakistan, such as
in West Pakistan the apportionment of the Indus waters, and whilst dis-
cussion proceeds in East Pakistan over the Farruka barrage and the
apportionment of the waters of the Ganges, there have been occasions when
situations of great strain have developed, and in 1965, in the frontier areas,
the two countries were for several days in a state of undeclared war against
one another, because of the still unresolved problem of Kashmir.
In the economic field Pakistan has paid close attention to planning, and
to diversification of export earnings, and she can look back with satisfaction
on the results of her three five-year Economic Plans, which are being
succeeded by a fourth five-year Plan as from July 1, 1970. There has been
an astonishing industrial development over the twenty-three years since
Pakistan separated from India; added to this the facts that Pakistan contains
the world's principal jute producing area, and the discovery of natural gas,
have been of much importance.
The future is still in many respects unclear. Financial strains apart, the
problem presented by the increase of population, as in many other countries,
remains very formidable. But while the internal constitutional future of the
country is still unsettled, and while difficulties of major significance—more
particularly over Kashmir—remain with India, Pakistan, despite the 1,000
miles and the divergences of language and of culture that separate her two
" wings ", has established her position on the global stage of world affairs
as an independent Muslim State of world importance, with a settled Muslim
ideology, though with an important non-Muslim minority. Her external
relations are wide and substantial, and include a notable degree of cordiality
with China, a relationship significant in view of the Chinese confrontation with
India in the Himalayas, and a growing desire to gain sympathy in Russia.
 602 THE EMERGENCE OF PAKISTAN

She has established relations with Afghanistan (though in this case there
have been difficulties not yet finally resolved over Pakhtunistan and the
Pathan inhabitants of the North West Frontier), with Iran, with Russia, the
Middle East, Turkey, and other neighbouring countries, as well as with
the United States. In the broader Commonwealth field, relations between
Pakistan and other Commonwealth countries with the qualification just
indicated in the case of India have been, and remain, friendly, and Pakistan
has been represented at the various Commonwealth Conferences and Prime
Ministers' meetings which have taken place since she established herself in
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1949 as an independent Commonwealth country. All this shows her status

and progress, when account is taken of her very special difficulties, and
cannot but be regarded as a very substantial achievement.

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