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Mullah Power in Pakistan 
On 20 February 1947, Prime Minister Clement Attlee finally declared the end of British resolve, removed the last imperialist, Lord Wavell, and announced that by June 1948 Lord Mountbatten would preside over the closing ceremonies. There was more than a year still left to the deadline: if anything, givers the complications, Lord Mountbatten might have feasibly asked for small extension. Instead, he got into a hurry which has still not been rationally explained. Lord Mountbatten's excuse has been that if he had not handed over power as quickly as he did, the price would have been much higher. But that is only an assumption. In any case it is difficult, to see how it could have been worse: not only was the country divided but partition cost hundreds of thousands of lives in a matter of weeks, and launched a series of wars which has not yet ended. It has been suggested that the British hurried the transfer of power because they were aware of something which no one else, apart from Jinnah, knew — that the ‘father' of Pakistan had terminal tuberculosis, and if he died before the plans for Pakistan could be announced the whole campaign for the separate country might collapse. There was reason behind such thinking. As we have seen, the Muslim voters had never supported the Muslim League, and the move for Pakistan acquired momentum only in the mid forties thanks to the fear psychosis which Jinnah so successfully unleashed.

Pakistan was not created by the Muslim masses: it owed its birth to a handful of ‘leaders’ who were not content with separate beliefs — they wanted separate electorates, separate languages, separate dress, separate identities and, finally, separate homes. The only time since its inception in 1906 that the Muslin, league has got some votes is in the 1946 elections; not before and indeed, not after. The League could not survive in the country it created! Even commentators sympathetic to Pakistan have noted the absence of mass support for the Muslin, League. Ian Stephens, for instance, who as the British editor of the very British newspaper The Statesman (which was also British-owned ) had, as it were, a ringside seat and an insider's view of events, and was warm enough to the new country to go and work for the Karachi government, says in Pakistan, Old Country/New Nation (Penguin Books, p. 90): In 1934 Mr Jinnah came hack to India from a spell of law practice in London, and he soon found himself the leader of the Muslim League. like the Indian Liberal Party but unlike the Congress, it had as yet scarcely attempted "mass contacts", and remained little more than a discussion society for upper—class persons interested in a particular brand of politics. The poet—philosopher Sir Muhammad Iqbal made the same point in a letter to Jinnah sent on 28 May 1937 (which Tariq Ali quoted in Can Pakistan Survive?). Said the poet to the politician: The League will finally have to decide whether it will remain a body representing the upper classes of Indian Muslims or the Muslim masses, who have so far, with good reason, taken no interest in it. Personally, I believe that a political organization which gives no promise of improving the lot of the average Muslim cannot attract our masses. So once again. we return to the basic question: in whose interest was Pakistan created? Certainly not that of the Muslim masses.

Jinnah was able to ‘represent’ the Indian Muslims thanks solely to the British. When the Second World War broke out in Europe, the Congress refused to support the British effort and asked all its provincial governments (elected in 1937) to resign. For Jinnah, who could not hope to come to power through elections, this was an Allah-sent opportunity. The Muslim League had decided that the only way it could get Pakistan was through the grace of the British, and so in the decade between 1937 and 1947 it played an active pro-British role. in those ten years it did not launch or participate in a single movement against the British, reserving all its anger only for the Congress, which continued to challenge the colonizers: Jinnah, on the other hand, time and again co-operated with the British, And so when the Congress ministries resigned, Jinnah announced that a ‘Deliverance Day’ would be celebrated on 22 November 1939. During the war, in a crucial province like Bengal, the Muslim League tasted the power it had been denied in 1937. Jinnah got the chance to use the state machinery to spread his propaganda. In 1937 the Muslim League had made 'danger to Islam’ from the 'Hindu Congress its campaign theme, only to be rejected by the Muslims. Now the British decided— most crucially — to grant this same Jinnah. defeated al. the polls. the right to be the sole voice of Indian Muslims. By early 1946. when a war-weary Britain began searching for an Indian solution, Jinnah was confident enough to threaten civil war in India if the subcontinent was not divided. On 16 August 1946. ‘Direct Action Day, the Muslim League government of Shahid Suhrawardy in Bengal showed what the League in power could do: Calcutta was plunged into terrifying riots as the League’s armed hoodlums began large-scale attacks on Hindus, who answered with equal brutality. This was the warning of civil war come true. Murder and arson raged. fear entered the heart: and only in this unnatural atmosphere could the Muslim league finally manage to increase its vote, in February 1947. freedom was announced. In March came Mountbatten. In early April, Mountbatten held six meetings with Jinnah. On 10 April, the British accepted partition. On May, the Congress surrendered, when its high command authorized Nehru to accept the freedom of a divided India. Gandhi pathetically tried to make some sense of what was happening all around him, and could not. lie even appealed to the Congress to let Jinnah assume power in a united India. But who would listen to the voice of understanding in the midst of butchery and mayhem that must rank among the most cruel ever seen?

Partition was formally ratified at a round-table conference on 2 June: Nehru, Sardar Patel, and Acharya Kripalani came from the Congress: Jinnah, Liaquat Ali Khan and Sardar Abdur Rab Nashtar came from the Muslim League: Mountbatten with Lord Ismay and Sir Eric Mieville represented the imperial interest. On 4 June Mountbatten held only the second press conference addressed by a viceroy of India. and announced that power would be transferred by 15 August. There were lust two months left, and the most difficult task had not even begun — the drawing of boundaries. The lawyer Sir Cyril Radcliffe was summoned from his chambers in London to run a scalpel through the heart of a subcontinent he had never seen. The mullahs had won their country.

Jinnah lived under the illusion that since be had made the 'impossible dream’ of 1933 come true, he could also give it an ideology. But Pakistan was not created to express the liberal principles Jinnah himself had held till an obsession conquered him. Jinnah was only the last and most effective weapon of the mullahs who had begun their task many decades before. History has now confirmed who really conceived Pakistan and who was going to rule this country built in the name of religion. In less than five years after 1947. Jinnah’s secularism was dead, with the assassination of Liaquat Ali Khan; in a decade Jinnah’s democracy had been buried, by Ayub Khan; and within twenty-five years Jinnah's Pakistan was destroyed. So what then did Jinnah prove on 14 August 1947 except that he never really understood what he had done in the last decade of his life? The mullah had to struggle for a while after 1947 to establish his dominance in Pakistan, but that was what finally happened. Flow long this phase will last, however, is another story.
Why does one presume that the mullah raj cannot last? Primarily because the subcontinental experience shows that religious extremism, with its oppressive economic ideas. may hold temporary sway in a climate of fear but cannot ever sustain the support of the majority. The mullahs in Pakistan want nothing more dearly than to get democratic legitimacy for their theocracy, but time and again, whenever the opportunity has been given in any way, major or minor, the religious parties have been drubbed in Pakistani elections. Why does that happen it as the army— bureaucracy—clergy elite in Pakistan insists, everyone in Pakistan is deeply committed to the creation of an Islamic state? The classic example of the clergy’s inherent unpopularity came in 1977, paradoxically at the very height of the anti-Bhutto movement. That was the moment, thanks to the arrogance and mistakes of Bhutto. when the right wing and the clergy were riding the crest of the highest wave generated in their favour. But when, after deposing Bhutto, General Zia offered elections and meant it, it was the clergy who persuaded him to postpone a vote since they were certain of being demolished at the polls. The only elections the clergy can win are those in which the secular, popular parties are debarred from contesting. Such false legitimacy can only be a temporary phase.

Currency is still given to the notion that if Jinnah had lived he would, by the sheer force of his personality, have set his nation oil the correct democratic path, and you might have had today the Pakistan of Ruttie Jinnah and not of Begum Zia. 'Dil ke behalane ke liye, Ghalib. khayal accha hai (a famous line from a great Urdu poet, which means, 'That is a good thought, Ghalib, to idle away the rime’). Jinnah died on 11 September 1948, when his lungs, two—thirds of one and a quarter of the other eaten by tuberculosis, finally gave up. Jinnah's doctor in Bombay, J. A. L. Patel, had diagnosed the problem in June 1946. say Collins and Lapierre in Freedom at Midnight, but this was perhaps the best—kept secret of partition. Jinnah gave no public indication of this reality, continuing to smoke his usual ration of cigarettes, and attributing his cough to bronchitis. Speaking to Ian Stephens as late as February 1948. Jinnah said. Yes, Mr Stephens. I am better. ‘They said I have been ill: I have not’: Stephens quotes him in Pakistan, Old Country: New Nation (p. 28 1). Certainly the British knew that Jinnah was ill. Lord Wavell has recorded in his diary that Jinnah was a sick man.

It is a very fragile country which can be distorted by the tuberculosis of one old man. An individual , by his presence and genius, may hasten the pace of progress or delay it, but there is nothing much he can do if the very foundation is built on an untenable ideology. Jinnah could have given Pakistan a different direction if he had, like Gandhi, authored a new ideology hot he had nothing to offer his country apart from what he had accepted from the clergy. The state was created in the name of the crescent and the Quran: there was no way now that Islam’s self-appointed cadre would allow a lawyer educated in England to experiment with fancy ideas.
There has been too much obsession with the idea of a personality making the vital difference between India and Pakistan. In this same vein, Jawaharlal Nehru’s survival has been called the reason for the success of democracy in India. Nehru played a great role, perhaps a unique one, in stabilizing his nation. but to say that he alone established democracy is patently untrue, It was such an attitude that sponsored the question which dominated reportage about India in the fifties: after Nehru, who? Well, after Nehru. the next person to be elected. In 1964 the question had to be answered. Nehru died, and a successor took office through the democratic system . That was what the book said would happen, and that was precisely what did happen. India may progress faster because of the brilliance of one. Prime Minister. or stagnate because of the indifferent quality of another. But the nation will collapse only if its fundamental ideology, its democratic secular base, is eroded —nothing else The most brilliant dictator will not be able to keep media together And the shoddiest democrat will find it difficult to break the country.

The only interest group which really knew its agenda for Pakistan was the clergy. the bureaucracy. children of English education, thought that they could ask Frankenstein to go back to the closet now that they had got their places in a Muslim government. They thought wrong. The clergy knew better than they where to attack and how to work towards the seizure of power. The crucial battle would, of course, be over the Constitution. Writes Ian Stephens (Pakistan. Old Country New Nation. pp. 286—7): We have on the one hand in Pakistan the typical product of the Aligarh movement, culturally very much a Muslim but lax in religious observance. English—speaking, an eager participant in the world of the present. On the other, there is the mullah, the theologian, steeped in Arabic and the past. brought up from boyhood at seminaries such as in Deoband near Saharanpur, or the Nadvat-ul-Ulema at Lucknow ... Incomprehension between the two types can be almost complete ... it was inevitable that spokesmen of the two types, nurtured almost in different worlds, should to their surprise and distress at times find themselves in total, blank disagreement about the form the country’s Constitution should take.’

Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, now burdened with greater responsibility after Jinnahs death, went about the business of preparing a Constitution with some diligence. A report of the Basic Principles Committee was submitted on 7 March 1949 to the Pakistan Constituent Assembly. It could not survive since the mullahs did not find any commitment in it to a theocratic state. Instead it promised democracy anti, worse, said that adequate provision sisal! be made for the minorities freely to profess and practise their religions and develop their cultures’. By November 1950, it was withdrawn. ft is obvious that even if Jinnah had submitted such a concept for the future of Pakistan. he too would have faced the wrath of the clergy: after all, their loyalty was to their version of Allah’s will’ and not to Jinnah. (Stephens, ever sympathetic to Pakistan, admits with a hint of embarrassment that the mullahs succeeded in scuttling the effort to create a democratic Constitution.)


On 16 October 1951, Liaquat Ali Khan. Jinnahs chosen heir, was assassinated by a gun man whose identity and motive still have not been officially established. The ruling elite has always dismissed it as the work of an individual, but the conspiracy theory has taken root in the popular mind, and this points the finger towards the clergy. Liaquat Ali Khan could, with the help of the bureaucracy, have created the structures for a responsible government. The chances diminished after his death - Now the political merry-go-round began to whirl crazily: cause, action, reaction, instigation, footless floundering, some craziness — all combined in the end to bring every institution down to its knees.

Liaquat Au Khan's place was taken by Khwaja Nazimuddin who stepped down from the ceremonial office of Governor-General to become Prime Minister. The pattern of totally arbitrary succession had begun. It is important to understand that the only time power has changed hands in Pakistan on the strength of popular will has been when the humiliated army handed over the government to Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in 1971 because Bhutto had won the majority of the seats in West Pakistan in the fateful elections of 1970 and had the people’s sentiment behind him at that nervous hour. Otherwise, every shift of authority has been a drawing- room decision made by whichever was the most powerful section of the ruling elite. Pakistan was run Just as Muslim league politics had been conducted before 1947: by a small coterie, always acting in the name of the manipulated mosses, without any reference to their true will. This is not surprising since it was the same elite. Such convenient habits die very. very hard; and they are still flourishing in Pakistan. There was no reason why Khwaja Nazimuddin should become Prime Minister, or why. out of the blue, the Finance Minister. Ghulam Mohammad, not very long ago just another Punjabi bureaucrat, should worm his way up the ladder to become the Governor-General of the country, except that a handful of persons sat In some drawing-room and decided that this should be so. There was no system or political ideology governing the acquisition, and therefore the exercise, of power. It was open house for schemers. The politics of the first decade, perhaps more than anything else, exposed Pakistan as a gift made out to an elite for services rendered — and showed how an elite with little Ideology and less morality could destroy a munificent inheritance.

The clergy decided to show very early who was going to be in charge of the new country. It first sabotaged the proposed Constitution, Then it began to demonstrate what It meant by Pakistan. the ‘land of the pure.' Not a trace of adulteration would be allowed. The Ahmadiyas. or the Qadianis, are one of the sects that have arisen out of the main body of Islam: they are a small, well-knit and highly able community (Professor Abdul Salam. the Nobel prizewinner for physics in 1979, belongs to this sect). The best-known Pakistani Ahmadlya in the forties and fifties was Sir ZafruIlah Khan. the Foreign Minister who argued the Pakistani case on Kashmir at the United Nations and became a minor hero. But In 1952 he In particular, and his community in general, were made the target of the wrath of the mullahs on the familiar charge of heresy, even while the Ahmadiyas bent over backwards to show that they were good Muslims. For nearly a year the clergy, led by the fanatical Maulana Maudoodi, head of the Jamaat-e-Islami, took to the streets to demand the expulsion of the Ahmadiyas from the land of the ‘pure’ Muslims. (This, incidentally. was happening less than five years after Jinnah dismissed the thought that Pakistan would become a theocratic state In the hands of the clergy.) The movement reached such a pitch that between 3 and 7 March 1953, mullah-led mobs took over Lahore, and Khwaja Nazimuddin, who had been afraid to move against the clergy so far, was forced to Introduce martial law, arrest the mullah leadership. Including Maudoodi. dismiss the provincial Punjab government of Daultana and replace him with Feroz Khan Noon. The anti—clergy forces tried to make full use of his chance to crush the mullahs. Maulanas Maudoodi and Niazi were not only led but were given death sentences for their murderous role in the riots. But who in Pakistan was going to hang a maulana? A Bhutto could be hanged but not a Maudoodi - The death sentences were quietly remitted and the maulanas released.

In the meanwhile, within the very first five years if its existence, the idea of Pakistan had begun wearing thin in the east of the country (Time and again we see how shallow the roots of Pakistan were in the peoples consciousness — and, conversely, how deep they were in the minds of the committed elite.) By early 1949, Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani had founded the Awami Muslim League at Narayanganj a East Pakistan, with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman as one of its three assistant general secretaries. A parallel gesture was visible at the other extreme of Pakistan, across the subcontinent, when a party with the same name was announced by Pir Manki Shariff in the North—West Frontier Province (the NWFP. it might be recalled, had always been a Congress stronghold, despite being fully Muslim, and to the west of Muslim Punjab). In February 1950. the two Awami Muslim leagues came together under the presidentship of Shahid Suhrawardy. As Herbert Feldman explains ( The End and the Beginning, of Oxford University Press): It is known that [only] after {communal] massacres in Bihar, in 1946. Jinnah took the view that Muslims must be masters in their own. house in all respects ... On the whole, it seems fair to say that the kind of Pakistan which emerged in 1947, notwithstanding all the many unanswered questions, was acceptable to the provinces astride the Indus. For East Bengal at that euphoric moment , acceptable likewise, but many people had doubts and reservations, it was also said that unpublished documents existed showing that Jinnah expressed readiness for East Bengal to form its own independent government but, not surprisingly, very little has ever been remarked on this. much less disclosed. What we do know for certain is that within three years of Pakistan’s emergence, signs of discontent in the Eastern wing were plain, and that within five years lives were being lost in the course of polite; controversy.'

The lives were lost thanks to a fellow Bengali, Khwaja Nazimuddin. Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan had made it clear that the Bengalis would have to learn the national language. Urdu. On 26 January I 952 (while India, after accepting its Constitution two years earlier, was conducting its first, and mammoth, general elections on the basis of complete aduIt franchise), the Basic Principles Committee of the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan announced, in its recommendations, that Urdu should be the only state language of Pakistan — a country in which Bengalis were a majority. By the end of February, serious strikes, demonstrations, and consequent police action had taken the lives of students and children. Eventually Bengali was given equal status, in the 1956 Constitution, but by that time the Martyrs’ Memorial had become a place of pilgrimage in Dhaka and the seeds of East Pakistan’s independence bad been fertilized.

On 17 April 1953, Pakistan again went through the drawing-room syndrome. That day Pakistan witnessed its first coup; it was also perhaps the first coup in history organized and executed solely by the bureaucracy. It was extraordinary both for its suddenness and for its complete absence of any of the values and norms that guide a system. Governor-General Ghulam Mohammad simply sacked the government of Khwaja Nazimuddin, without allowing the Prime Minister the option of facing the Legislature. At a stroke the balance of power changed: the legislator no longer had the decisive authority. The ceremonial head of state had used his technical rights to abrogate power: it was a coup from above.

The replacement for Prime Minister Khwaja Nazimuddin was another instance of completely arbitrary decision-making. An obscure ex-politician, Mohammad Ali of Bogra, who had been living the comparatively good life of an ambassador since 1948, was summoned to take over as Prime Minister. As simple as that. His only qualifications, to the extent that anyone could make them out, were two: first, he was considered too unknown to be anything but pliant: and second, he was from East Pakistan and therefore his appointment could be presented as a sop to those Bengalis who might feel that the dismissal of Khwaja Nazimuddin was another insult from the Punjabi to the Bengali. But hardly had Mohammad Ali of Bogra become Prime Minister than the politician in him came out. He began trying to create a power base to challenge his mentor.

The charge of Punjabi contempt for the Bengali was valid as early as this. Enough has been written about this relationship, in the aftermath of Bangladesh, and need riot be repeated here. Just one quotation will convey the flavour of what the Punjabi felt for the Bengali, It is from a fine book by Siddiq Salik, attached to the public relations department of the Pakistani army in Dhaka in 1971, and consequently a man who saw the war from the defeated side - In Witness to Surrender (Oxford University Press, Karachi, p. 94) Salik describes the methods that the Punjabi and Pathan army officers used to tackle the Bengalis before the 1971 War actually broke out: Instead of eradicating those germs of independence, the authorities thought it wise to perpetuate the reign of terror "to keep the Bingos under control".’ Bingos: a typical Sandhurst—Sialkot term of contempt for the Bengalis. The problem that the 'Bingos' of East Pakistan posed in terms of the Constitutional power equation was simply this: they outnumbered the non-Bingos of West Pakistan. And given the fact that the western side of Pakistan was divided into four competitive provinces, there was no way anyone could theoretically stop a Bengali from becoming the chief executive of the country in a one-man—one-vote election. Rather than surrender their control, the Punjabis preferred to allow the weeds of disintegration to flourish.
By 1953, the Bengalis were openly sceptical about the ideology that had created Pakistan. The Awami Muslim League deliberately dropped the word Muslim from its name. This was not a mere gesture. Despite the huge population transfers at the time of partition, a substantial portion of the 30 million Hindus who lived in pro-partition East Bengal had remained in East Pakistan. The Awami League now consciously began wooing this Hindu support. Meanwhile Fazlul Haq created his Krishak Sramik Party, or Peasants and Workers Party, in September 1953. These were deliberate efforts to provide an alternative to the clergy—feudal politics of the Muslim League. The people fully endorsed this in the East Pakistan provincial elections of 1954. The Muslim League (the pro-Pakistan party) got a foretaste of what was to come in 1970 when it managed to win just 10 seats in a House of 309, in March 1954. The United Front of the Awami league. the Krishak Sramik Party and smaller allies swept the polls.

But the Punjabi civilian dictator, Governor-General Ghulam Mohammad, was not going to allow a silly thing like the will of the people to come in the way of his plans. What he would not tolerate would not be. And he would not accept the United Front government of East Pakistan. Chief Minister Fazlul Haq visited Calcutta in May and made a few remarks which touched on his disillusionment with the Pakistan he had helped create. Ghulam Mohammad used that as the excuse to sack the Huq government. Once again, the message was that he was the boss. He decided to divide the United Front, and rule. The legislators soon became willing preys to Karachi’s machinations. Such were the depths which the degenerate factionalism reached that the Awami League conspired to get the Speaker declared insane. In retaliation, members of the Krishak Sramik Party threw pieces of furniture at their foe. the Deputy Speaker. Shahid Ali, and killed him. From insanity to death: that seems am appropriate Image not only for the Legislature but also for the country.

The collapse was becoming evident in the west too. On 24 October 1954. Ghulam Mohammed, once again acting arbitrarily, dismissed the entire Constituent Assembly, citing his 'regret that the Constitutional machinery’ had broken down. He authorized himself to announce the new Prime Minister and Cabinet, which was, to say the least, convenient. However, there were signs that the armed forces would soon have to step in. Field Marshal Ayub Khan told Pakistan In his first broadcast after he seized power in 1958, ‘You may not know, but I refused on many occasions Mr Ghulam Mohammed’s offer to take over the country.’ It seems certain that Ghulam Mohammed. now ill enough to be near death. preferred handing over power to the generals rather titan the politicians. He had begun grooming the army in the practice of civilian administration. General Ayub Khan was made Defence Minister in Ghulam Mohammed’s nominated Cabinet of 1954. Also Inducted was Major-General Iskander Mine, a bureaucrat who had left the army but been allowed to keep his military rank, as Minister of the interior. Another effort was now made to give Pakistan a Constitution. A second Constituent Assembly was fanned In April 1955. Before it met In July, the politicians of the two wings agreed on a compromise formula (the ‘Murree pact’): Bengalis surrendered the advantage of their numerical majority and got recognition of the Bengali language and a promise of autonomy in return.

In August 1955, a dying Ghulam Mohammad finally quit: Iskander Mirza took over and appointed a new Prime Minister, Chaudhury Mohammed Ali. It was largely through the latter’s efforts that the 1956 Constitution became law. Pakistan was formally named an Islamic nation in which only a Muslim could be the head or state. (General Zia, in an interview with the author in 1982, carried the idea a bit further by saying that since Islam did not make any provision for a woman to be the head of a Muslim state, no woman could become the head of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.) Neither of these two conditions existed in the basic principles of the first draft Constitution which the mullahs sabotaged, However, the Constitution of 1956 could go down In the Guinness Books of Records as the Constitution with the shortest life In the world. In less than two years it would be scrapped.

Mirza appointed three more prime ministers. Including Shahid Suhrawardy, but nothing worked. On 7 October 1958. be finally asked General Ayub (Oman to take over the government, abrogating the 1956 Constitution and dismissing he central and provincial cabinets. By 27 October President Iskander ’Mirza himself was eased out by a new blooded army. Ayub Khan using the poor excise (according to his memoirs) that Mirza's Wife would not allow him to stop conspiring. Like all generals on morrow of a coup Ayub Khan promised. Let me announce in equivocal terms that our ultimate aim is to restore democracy, but at of the type people can Understand. The people, of course . would never 'understand’. The army had not forsaken. democracy ,said Ayub. Actually. neither had democracy forsaken the army. It was simply that the two were never quite made for each other.

Army rule was inevitable. The army had one crucial thing in its favour. While every other institution was busy committing suicide in the very first decade of Pakistan’s existence, the army had been consolidating its strength, power and prestige. It is interesting that in India precisely the opposite was happening. While the judiciary the legislatures, and the other vital organs of a democratic society, such as the media, were learning the difficult lesson of how to manage the coexistence of freedom with responsibility, the Indian armed forces were neglected — as was all too evident during the China war of 1962. This neglect of lie Indian army may have been unintentional, but it was not accidental: it was simply due to the fact that the energies and the interests of the men who took charge of India were concentrated either on economic development or on the growth of democratic institutions. The task was not easy, and it required all the genius of a JawaharLal Nehru to protect the values enshrined in the Indian Constitution while trying to solve the enormous problems that stood in the way. India and Pakistan inherited many similar problems: refugees, regionalism. the threat inherent in a national Language unacceptable to large sections of the people, religious conflict (far more dangerous, now, in India than in Pakistan) and, worst of all, poverty and hunger. But the two nations went about trying to find answers in completely different ways. While Pakistan indulged in a harlequin era, India went through hardship with a belief in itself that has been only grudgingly recorded, when it has been mentioned at all. While India defied the worlds worst predictions, Pakistan had to experience the rule of generals (which was never on Jinnahs agenda) to find out about itself. And alter its first decade of army rule, now