MJ Akbar
NEW DELHI:There may not be smoke without fire, but there can be fire without smoke. In the history of assassinations in Pakistan, no evidence is ever found of crime.
Fears about Imran Khan’s life are based on fact, not presumption. Every civilian Prime Minister of Pakistan has been killed, imprisoned, or exiled since its Army seized power in 1958.
Sudden death begins at the beginning. The first Prime Minister, Nawab Liaquat Ali Khan, a Westernised aristocrat from Uttar Pradesh, was stopped by a bullet while trying to frame a democratic constitution. Shuja Nawaz, a historian whose brother rose to become Pakistan Army Chief, writes in Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within that Liaquat was challenged by a coalition of Army officers, bureaucrats and Punjab landlords who labelled him a weak ‘outsider’, a muhajir (refugee from India) with no base in the Pakistani provinces. He was neither a Punjabi nor a ‘tough’ autocrat, of the kind that appealed to the military-bureaucrat-landlord phalanx which argued that democracy was too ‘soft’ for an incipient, fragile nation. In parenthesis, Islam as a glue of unity began to wither from inception.
Liaquat eliminated
On October 16, 1951 Liaquat Ali Khan landed in Rawalpindi in the state Viking aircraft to address a public meeting at Company Bagh. He had just begun the speech to his “Muslim brethren” when one of the brothers in the crowd fired two shots. Khan was rushed to hospital. He did not survive. Police caught Said Khan, a resident of Peshawar.
Instead of taking Said Khan to prison and trial, they killed him instantly. Said Khan was described as an Afghan militant, but no one bothered to explain what precisely this alleged militant was militant about. Scotland Yard was asked to help in the subsequent inquiry commission, but its full report was never published. The chief investigator, Nawab Aitzazuddin, was killed in an “aircraft accident” just a few days after a synthesised “public version” of the report was released. The Government said that all documents of the inquiry were destroyed in this air crash. As conspiracies go, this was written in capital letters, with fingerprints removed.
Huseyn Suhrawardy and Liaquat Ali Khan, both Anglicised aristocrats who enjoyed a drink, were the principal civilian leaders of Pakistan after the death of Muhammad Ali Jinnah. They disliked each other. In 1950 Khan described Suhrawardy as the “dog let loose by India”, according to Memoirs of Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy. Suhrawardy came from an elite family which had lived in Bengal for two centuries without speaking a word of Bengali. He learnt the local language only when he discovered that Bengali Muslims were as passionate about their language as they might be about their religion. He spoke Bengali with an accent that amused or bemused the peasantry.
Suhrawardy rise & fall Suhrawardy, a democrat, had no chance of finding a berth in the power structure fashioned by bureaucrats and Generals after the death of Liaquat. He was resurrected only when their amazingly arbitrary governments, infused with bitter antagonism, became chaotic. In October 1954, the civil servant Governor General Ghulam Mohammad abolished Parliament and created a ‘Ministry of Talents’ with Army Chief Ayub Khan as Defence Minister, Iskander Mirza as Mnister for Interior, and Suhrawardy as Law Minister. When this too imploded, Suhrawardy was asked to make sense of the shambles.
During his brief months as Prime Minister, Suhrawardy tried to empower Pakistan with a constitution and adopt a sensible foreign policy. He scorned the idea of a Muslim bloc, pointing out archly that no matter how many zeroes you added to zero the total would still be zero. The permanent state, not to mention the Islamist doctrinaires, quickly dispensed with a sensible democrat.
Iskander Mirza, who had appointed himself President, forced Suhrawardy to resign in October 1957. Students of Karachi University took out a full-page advertisement in the pre-eminent English daily Dawn inviting applications for the post of ‘temporary’ prime minister from applicants willing to get the boot without notice. That was prescient. Since Suhrawardy, all civilians who have reached the top have learnt that the boot is worn by the Army, and will kick at will.
On October 7, 1958, Mirza imposed martial law and named Ayub Khan Chief Martial Law Administrator. Exactly 20 days later, Mirza was ordered at pistol point to leave the country within 24 hours. He left hurriedly for London instead of an early grave. Suhrawardy was pushed out of Pakistan in 1962 on the charge of being anti-national when he was merely anti-Army rule. He died in a Beirut hospital.
