The Pakistan Coup d'Etat of 1958

Abstract

P ARLIAMENTARY GOVERNMENT IN PAKISTAN was ended by a military coup d'etat on October 7, 1958. In its beginnings it appeared to be little more than a palace revolution. There were no spontaneous uprisings or conspiratorial groups dedicated to a new social order. The Chief Martial Law Administrator, General Mohammad Ayub Khan, said that object of military rule was to return country to sanity. One Western observer labeled regime a preventive autocracy.' The language was clearly that of Latin America, not of Bolshevik Russia or Revolutionary France. As in most palace revolutions, no blood was shed and within less than a month army was back in its barracks. Pakistan was following a course dramatized by General Charles De Gaulle in France, and pursued closer to home by generals in Thailand and Burma. The military establishment, in coalition with bureaucracy, organized a new government in support of modernization and against political confusion.2 Some observers3 accepted coup as inevitable, given Pakistan's weak political community and superior organization, training and leadership of military forces. The collective wisdom of published opinion seems to suggest that political system failed, and that representative government collapsed.4 The Economist noted sadly that Pakistan's politics, in months preceding martial law, had ranged between the grotesque and macabre.5 This argument is certainly a favorite theme of Cromwellians themselves. Major-General Iskander Mirza, in his presidential proclamation of martial law, pointed an outraged finger at the ruthless struggle for power, corruption, shameful exploitation of our simple, honest, patriotic and industrious masses, lack of decorum and prostitution of Islam for political ends.6 He charged that ruthless adventurers and exploiters were