Pakistan's Preventive Autocracy and Its Causes

Abstract

T 0 CLASSIFY President Mirza's abrogation of the Pakistan Constitution and General Ayub Khan's subsequent assumption of power as just another Eastern dictatorship would be an oversimplification. Their actions cannot be explained solely by the impact of events in other countries, by the exigencies of foreign policy, or by disillusionment with democracy, though it is true that each of these factors may have played a part. Military coups in Iraq, Burma and Thailand probably helped to remove some of the inhibitions of the Pakistan Army leaders which had kept them from disobedience to legitimate authority. At the same time they may have believed that the establishment of a preventive autocracy would lessen or remove the danger of Communist infiltration. Certainly the general disillusionment with democracy in Pakistan, produced by its economic failures and its inability to gain Kashmir, helped to make it possible for the revolutionaries to obtain the support (or at least the acquiescence) of the masses. Yet the real causes for the crisis of democracy in Pakistan are to be found in the existence of indigenous social and political forces that had long sought release. Its origins can be traced not only to the period before I947, when Pakistan and India became independent states, but beyond that to the years before World War II, to i919 and even earlier. It is the logical conclusion of a process that can only be understood by an historical analysis. In I935 the British Parliament passed the Government of India Act by which the regions which later were to form the nation of Pakistan were governed till I956 (when the country adopted its own constitution).' Two features of this Act should be recalled: in the first place, it conceded self-government to the Provinces which were to be ruled by ministers responsible to elected assemblies; in the second place, it introduced the federal system to the sub-continent. This was a great departure from previous British-Indian government of which the hallmarks had been unity and centralization. After World War I, however, communal and inter-provincial tensions had become so great that the Simon Commission Report and