Pakistan under Bhutto, 1971–1977 PDF
Preview Pakistan under Bhutto, 1971–1977
PAKISTAN UNDER BHUTTO, 1971-1977 Also by ShahidJaved Burki A STUDY OF CHINESE COMMUNES PAKISTAN UNDER BHUTTO, 1971-1977 Shahid Javed Burki M © Shahid Javed Burn 1980 Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 1st edition 1980 978-0-333-25673-2 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission First published 1980 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke Associated companies in Delhi Dublin Hong Kong Johannesburg Lagos Melbourne New York Singapore Tokyo British Library CataloguiDg in Publication Data Burn, Shahid Javed Pakistan under Bhutto, 1971-1977 1. Pakistan - Politics and government - 1971- I. Tide 954.9'105 DS384 ISBN 978-1-349-04307-1 ISBN 978-1-349-04305-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-04305-7 This book is sold subject to the standard conditions of the Net Book Agreement Contents Preface ix 1 Introduction 1 PART I The Backdrop 2 Insiders and Outsiders 11 3 The Search for a New Constituency 36 4 Rise to Power 58 PART II The Regime in Power, 1971-7 5 Restructuring Institutions 79 6 Redirecting Economic Development: Management by the PPP Left 108 7 Economic Decision-making Without Constraints: 1974-7 142 PART III The Fall from Power 8 Preparing for Elections in 1977 171 9 The 1977 Elections 195 Notes 203 Selected Bibliography 224 Name Index 232 Subject Index 236 To Maryam, my mother and Jahanara, my wife Preface In 1970 Professor Samuel Huntington of Harvard University invited me to join a group of scholars who were studying the process of change in developing countries. This group of political scientists and economists represented a number of very different points of view about not only the nature and dynamics of the development process but also about the motivation behind it.! Within this group, my task was to study Pakistan. The only reason for studying Pakistan was that the Cambridge group was intrigued by an article that I was about to publish in Public Policy.2 In this article, I had analysed West Pakistan's massive public works programme not in terms of its economic results but in terms of the motivation of the decision-makers that had launched it. The main conclusion that I had drawn from this article was a simple one: even in those societies in which interaction between individu als and groups of individuals is not encouraged, the decision makers have only a limited range for manoeuvre; there are social, political and cultural boundaries that cannot easily be crossed. At least in theory, I could distinguish between three different types of reactions on the part of leadership groups to these societal con straints. Some leaders can be expected to respect these bound aries. Not always familiar with the nature and extent of the constraints imposed on them, it is possible for these leaders to take actions that would be resented by some powerful elements in the society. In that case, these leaders would respect the society's constraints and be quite content to draw back into the area of permitted discretion. But not all leaders and leadership groups behave so passively. Some will use charisma, moral suasion or political intrigue to expand this area of permitted discretion, to create a little more room in which they could move and man oeuvre. Others may refuse to be inhibited at all by societal constraints. This latter group is likely to use force to change the rules of the game, to demolish the boundaries that society erects against radical behaviour. x Pakistan under Bhutto, 1971-7 During my year at Harvard, I applied this analysis to under standing the dynamics of decision-making in Pakistan. As I reflected on the important decisions that had shaped Pakistan's history, I came to realise that group conflict and conflict between individuals is a novel-and in my opinion, better - perspective to understanding change in Pakistan. Politics in Pakistan had been dominated by a succession of powerful personalities. Some of these men had wielded power because of their exceptional ability and charisma. Some had gained power because of their ability to reconcile or manipulate group interests. Many had been excep tionally conservative in the choices they had made for the society. Only two - Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Mohammad Ayub Khan - had made any attempt to expand the area of discretion available to them. Not one of them had been a revolutionary. All of them had had a profound impact on making Pakistan's history. But, as I searched for the motivation behind the decisions and actions that had made Pakistan's history and as I began to understand their implications, I also came to realise how easy it was to exaggerate the role of strong men in Pakistan's history and how important it was to recognise the part played by social and economic groups. It was all too easy to identify Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the Quaid-i-Azam (the Great Leader) of Pakistan, with the movement that led to the creation of a separate homeland for the Muslim community of British India. But could the Quaid have succeeded without the help of the Muslim urban middle-classes who saw a better economic and social future in a nation whose destinies they would control rather than in a country in whose management they would have to be content with the role of a junior partner? Was the Industrial Policy of 1948 Prime Minister Liaqat Ali Khan's master stroke to gain economic independence from India or the product of pressure from a group of merchants who had migrated from India to Pakistan in search of new investment opportunities? Governor General Ghulam Moham mad's dismissal of the Constituent Assembly could be interpreted as the action of a strong man determined to preserve power in his hands. Or, it could be seen in terms of an attempt by Pakistan's indigenous leadership groups to recapture some of the power that they had lost to the refugee groups from India. And so on. There has been a tendency among economic and political historians of Pakistan to view the past as a series of unrelated events. My own approach to understanding events taught me not Preface Xl to treat them as isolated occurrences with little connection to the past or with little relevance for the future. As I searched for meaning in the events that had shaped Pakistan's history, I became convinced that this history was not made up of loosely connected periods, the Jinnah-Liaqat era, the Ayub era, the Yahya interregnum and the Bhutto period. It should be viewed, instead, in terms of the forces, social, economic and political, that made Jinnah, Liaqat, Ayub, Yahyaand Bhuttopossible. I was still engaged in this reinterpretation of Pakistan's history when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto fell from power. In the eyes of many in the West, the movement that led to Bhutto's fall was unexpected and undeserved. In the opinion of many in Pakistan, the Prime Minister deserved not only to be thrown out of power but also the treatment that he received once he was deposed. In both cases, Bhutto's fate was interpreted as that of a man with some excep tional qualities, good and bad. However, by now I knew that the political turmoil that resulted in the exit from power of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in July 1977 was not simply a reaction to some personal quirks or whims of leadership. It was a reaction from a number of social and economic groups who had been hurt by Bhutto's pursuit of Bhuttoism. I decided to attempt an explanation of Bhuttoism, the circumstances that had produced it and the consequences that followed from its application to Pakistan's polity, society and economy. This book is the result of that attempt. I was helped in this effort by a number of people, friends and colleagues. Shahid Yusuf and Paul Streeten - sometimes to help sustain my argument and sometimes to refute what I was saying introduced me to a body of literature from various disciplines that I was unlikely to have encountered without their help. Shuja Nawaz, Manfred Blobel and Robert LaPorte read a number of chapters of my draft and helped improve my presentation as well as my analysis. Josephina Valeriano diligently kept track of the sources I used and prepared the bibliography. Fely Favis typed and retyped - patiently deciphering foreign names from hand written drafts that became increasingly more illegible. Jahanara, my wife, read through all the drafts and discussed with me their content, never failing to point out when I slipped from analyses to assertions. To all these lowe many thanks. 10July 1979 SHAHID JAVED BURKI
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