Dictators’ legacies in Pakistan and Bangladesh

General Hussein Muhammad Ershad should be a happy man these days, even if he has not given any signs of it. The reason is pretty obvious. The arbitrary manner in which he decided back in the 1980s and of course in his narrow political interest that the state of Bangladesh needed a religion, that Islam was that religion, has now assumed the shape of de jure permanence. The implications are clear. Much as we would like to rail, indeed have railed, against the illegitimacy of his near-decade dominance of the country and its ramifications, Ershad now has the satisfaction of seeing his legacy stamping itself on the history of Bangladesh.

That of course leads us to the very important question of what now happens to the secular principles which guided us in the War of Liberation. The ruling Awami League remains convinced, and would have us be convinced as well, that Bangladesh remains a secular country. That assertion does not quite tally with the realities around us. You must now deal with the critical issue of whether the People's Republic of Bangladesh is a secular state or has now discreetly turned into a Muslim state. And are we on our way to turning the country into an Islamic republic? While you ponder the issue, bear in mind the fact that there have been, indeed there are, foreign diplomats who have more than once been pleased to describe Bangladesh as a moderate Muslim state, whatever that means against the background of the country's historical legacy.

It has been a particular tragedy for the people of Bangladesh and Pakistan that for all their long, sustained struggles against military dictators, those dictators have somehow left behind their own legacies, however questionable, in the popular psyche. Often those legacies have assiduously been built upon by their civilian successors. Think here of Mohammad Ayub Khan, the army commander-in-chief who seized power in Pakistan in October 1958. He was not content to be a general and so once he had the state in his grip he promoted himself to field marshal. It was a bad tradition that would in future be emulated by other military rulers. Major General Ziaur Rahman, as he prepared to turn himself into Bangladesh's elected president in 1978 (he had in April 1977 turfed out Justice ASM Sayem from the presidency), first made sure that he promoted himself to lieutenant general. The Ayub legacy was thus in full play.

We do realize, of course, that not all dictatorial legacies have been enduring. But we do note that some of them have proved to be uncomfortable, a pain in the neck, for those rulers who came after them. Ayub Khan formulated the notorious idea, assisted of course by some very willing civilian politicians and bureaucrats, that the media needed to be put on a leash. The result was something in the nature of a press and publications ordinance, a measure that was to be the basis for similar laws to be enacted in both Pakistan and Bangladesh. And remember that such intimidating terms as Chief Martial Law Administrator are a particular legacy of Ayub Khan. Both Bangladesh and Pakistan have since the Ayub era had a surfeit of these CMLAs. Ironically, two civilians, Z.A. Bhutto and Justice ASM Sayem, have had the dubious distinction of serving as CMLAs in Islamabad and Dhaka. By the way, the unsavoury concept of a military-civilian bureaucracy dominating society through undermining democratic politics too has its roots in Ayub times. There was the army and there was the civil service. It was an entrenched affair.

One of the darker episodes in Ayub-ruled Pakistan was the promulgation of the Elective Bodies' Disqualification Ordinance (EBDO) by which political leaders unwilling to kowtow to illegitimate regimes were given short shrift. They could not seek election for specific periods decreed by the regime. The harassment of politicians, through such measures as ordering their arrests and clamping new charges on them once the courts had decreed bail for them in earlier cases, remains an Ayub invention. It is a story which is today being played out in Bangladesh as the ruling Awami League makes sure that the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party remains in a straitjacket, unable to conduct normal politics because its leading lights must fight sundry cases related to their alleged involvement in corruption and violence. General Ziaur Rahman, General Ziaul Haq and General Ershad have, in their own times, made good use of the lessons drawn from Ayub Khan in their attempts to keep their opponents at bay. The Pakistani Zia cheerfully sent his benefactor Bhutto to the gallows; the Bengali Zia made sure that no one challenged his authority and that those who did would be dispatched with alacrity, as in the matter of the hundreds of soldiers and airmen who tried to depose him eighteen times before he was felled on the nineteenth attempt. General Ershad – and this we do not forget – for almost the entirety of his rule persecuted Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia and their followers.

The greatest irony in this collective history of military rule in Pakistan and Bangladesh is the careful, certainly clever way in which some of the dictators have had a life after the fall from power. Ershad has been a great survivor, despite the vilification he has been subjected to by both the Awami League and the BNP at regular intervals of time. Both Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia have made good and opportunistic use of him. You cannot really blame him for the way in which he has survived. He has been an ally of Begum Zia. Today he is a special envoy, whatever that means, of Sheikh Hasina. General Pervez Musharraf, having overthrown the elected government of Nawaz Sharif in 1999 and then keeping Pakistan in his grip for nine years, is now in politics as the leader of his faction of the Muslim League. That again is a throwback to the times when Ayub Khan maneouvered a schism in the Muslim League in the early 1960s, eventually clawing away half of it for himself. His outfit was called the Convention Muslim League.

The Ayub innovation of crafting political parties through an employment of dictatorial fiat was devotedly followed by Zia and Ershad in Bangladesh. Both men were junior officers in the Pakistan army in the pre-1971 days and it is quite possible that, like so many others in the military at the time, they were enthused by Ayub Khan's political moves. It was but natural, then, that where Ayub had his Convention Muslim League, Zia forged his Bangladesh Nationalist Party and Ershad cheerfully shaped his Jatiyo Party. All three men misused and abused power in a furtherance of their political ambitions. Their countries have been paying the price for their motivated politics. The Convention Muslim League is now memory. The faction-ridden Jatiyo Party stumbles along, in a curious role of opposition-cum-government under the present Awami League dispensation. However, in defiance of conventional wisdom, the BNP remains a potent presence under Khaleda Zia, enough to be an endless headache for the ruling party.

Military dictators, all the way from Ayub to Ershad and Musharraf (with the exception of Yahya Khan) have systematically engineered political defections and the rise of political unknowns in national politics. Ayub Khan promoted such mediocre men as Fazlul Quader Chowdhury, Khan Abdus Sabur, Abdul Monem Khan, Malik Amir Mohammad Khan and Ahmed Saeed Kirmani in his time. Ziaul Haq patronized the rise to prominence of Nawaz Sharif who in turn promoted his clan in Pakistan's politics and business. Ziaur Rahman welcomed such turncoats in his party as Kazi Zafar Ahmed, Mohammadullah, KM Obaidur Rahman and Mashiur Rahman Jadu Mia besides roping in such anti-Bangladesh elements as Shah Azizur Rahman. Ershad had the pleasure of seeing Ataur Rahman Khan, Mizanur Rahman Chowdhury, Kazi Zafar, Korban Ali, Captain Abdul Halim Chowdhury and Shah Moazzem Hossain desert their parties and hitch their wagon to his star.

Ayub Khan imposed his own absurdity of a constitution on Pakistan in 1962, which was abrogated by his successor General Yahya Khan in March 1969. In Bangladesh, both Zia and Ershad tampered indiscriminately with the constitution, formulated and adopted in 1972, to a point where it was rendered unrecognizable from the original.

The damage done by dictators in Pakistan and Bangladesh is part of history and ought to be part of scholarly research. Ayub Khan's legacy was a promotion and perpetuation of economic and social disparity between East and West Pakistan. It was a wobbly Pakistan he left in the hands of Yahya Khan, who went on to exercise power as the last president of a united Pakistan before the state was repudiated and defeated by Bengalis in 1971. Ziaul Haq and Pervez Musharraf both committed the cardinal sin of overthrowing elected governments, thus pushing the clock back in Pakistan. In Bangladesh, Ziaur Rahman made the disastrous move of rehabilitating the Bengali quislings of the Pakistan occupation army and giving them a fresh lease of life in politics. Ershad carried the Zia legacy further, through including such Pakistani collaborators as Maulana Abdul Mannan in his government. Zia's widow did the ultimate when she had three notorious war criminals join her government.

Ayub Khan died in obscurity in April 1974. Yahya Khan, disgraced after December 1971, passed away in August 1980. Ziaur Rahman was murdered in an abortive coup in May 1981. Ziaul Haq was blown up in the skies over Bahawalpur in August 1988. Hussein Muhammad Ershad and Pervez Musharraf are yet around.