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Literary Review
One man's chronicle
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Feldman had no real credentials for the job he took up on himself: providing a record of his times in Pakistan. Yet, written at no man's bidding and promoting nobody's cause, it often reads like a powerful fable about the ways and limitations of military rulers, says SALMAN HAIDER.
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Ayub Khan (Centre) with Lal Bahadur Shastri (Left) and Alexei Kosygin (Extreme right) at the Tashkent Declaration.
HERBERT FELDMAN was an Englishman who made his home in Pakistan, having married there. He seems to have led an unremarkable life, with little to distinguish it from countless other lives in his adopted land. He was not a leader of industry, or a scholar, or a famous journalist, or even, so far as we know, a British spy. He did not hang about with the great men of the time and pick up scraps of privileged information to recycle elsewhere. He was not even much of a writer, with a bland and unremarkable style of putting pen to paper. In fact, he had no real credentials for the challenging job he took upon himself, that of providing a chronicle of his times. Yet he had the tenacity to stick to it, and, over more than two decades, he produced three volumes of commentary on Pakistan as it lurched its way through endemic crisis and military rule to the final separation of its two wings. These books have now been reissued by Oxford University Press, Karachi, in one omnibus volume.
For all his obvious limitations, Feldman also had his virtues; his is a one man's record, written at no man's bidding, promoting nobody's cause. He was closely engaged in what he described yet essentially non-partisan, a sort of Everyman who took an intelligent interest in the world around him. His judgment of events often fails to stand up well in the light of later developments, yet, for all that, he gives an unusually authentic picture of a past era.
The first volume is the weakest of three. It is insipid in tone and style. Ayub comes, Iskandar Mirza goes, everyone applauds — (no less joyful was the welcome for Musharaff). Edicts are issued, politicians play their games. Prices rise — Feldman keeps a watchful eye. A large cast of forgotten people flit across the scene. Only the aficionado of recent Pakistani history will be drawn to this narrative. The author has middle-of-the-road views, seems to find that everything turns out for the best in Pakistan, and treats the establishment with exaggerated sympathy. Nothing evokes any great passion, not even the mention of India. Ayub Khan emerges as something of a hero and his system of Basic Democracy receives uncommonly friendly mention. Feldman is greatly concerned to be fair and understanding to all, which makes for unexciting reading.
It is an altogether different matter when one moves to the second part of the trilogy. The scales seem to fall from Feldman's eyes and the former hero, Ayub, is seen in a much harsher light. His limitations as a leader and the trickery in his political dealings are compellingly exposed. Feldman's style remains mild but his judgment becomes unrelenting. He is no longer the polite foreigner making allowances for the goings-on in his adopted country. This transformation makes for a much more absorbing narrative, at times reading like a powerful moral fable about the ways and limitations of military rulers.
The portrait of Ayub Khan is the heart and the core of the book. In the earlier volume, he is shown as assuming power to oust discredited politicians. His amiable personality and bluff manner had an impact and he came across as the straightforward soldier, doing his best for the country. The people were with him, disgusted with the jobbery and corruption that had brought Pakistan low. Better the paternalism of Ayub than the devious wiles of the politicians. Martial law was no bad thing in the circumstances, and the army alone had the prestige to carry the country onward.
But all this was to change. As he chronicles the passing scene, Feldman notes how the small group of generals who seized power from Iskandar Mirza fell out among themselves. Their ambitions drew them apart, and before long Lt. Gen. Azam Khan, a powerful figure whose tenure as Governor of East Pakistan had endeared him to the Bengalis, found himself out in the cold. Ayub could brook no equals.
For a while, Ayub ruled through the army. But this was not something that could go on forever: international opinion demanded some form of representative rule, and within Pakistan, too, there were pressures for democratic governance. So Ayub began to mutate into a politician. The same politicians who had earlier been reviled were cautiously brought out of the shadows in order to give a semblance of civilian rule. Ayub aspired to be President, and it was not enough for the world that he should simply appoint himself to that position, in the same way as he had appointed himself Field Marshal. He needed popular endorsement, and to obtain that he had to win an election. Feldman describes the halting process whereby Ayub brought about constitutional changes, frequently chopping and changing and going back on his word. He tried to take command of the Muslim League, as he needed a party base, but the League was by then a shadow of its former self. His system of Basic Democracy created a select group beholden to him and these were to be the electors of the President — and even then the election had to be rigged. He surrounded himself with advisers who "were often lackadaisical in their thinking and much half-baked advice was given". His own intellectual limitations were obvious and Feldman contrasts the plodding soldier with his brilliant and widely read Foreign Minister, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. "Power, success and flattery spoiled him". One does not have to dig too deep to see how Ayub's tale foreshadows that of Pakistan's present general, Musharraf and his coterie could delve into Feldman with profit — indeed, one wonders if that is the real purpose of reissuing these volumes today.
The Ayub years, for all his political blundering, are often regarded as a period of encouragingly high economic growth. But Feldman denies him even this consolation. He accuses him of failure to make urgently needed structural changes and of permitting the further concentration of wealth in a few hands. The privileged may have been well satisfied but there was no improvement in ordinary lives. Moreover he did nothing to combat the spreading blight of corruption which was widely believed to have reached as far as his immediate family.
Feldman makes the interesting observation that "it is Pakistan's fear of absorption — political, intellectual and economic — by India which is probably the main cause of disharmony". He finds Ayub's policy towards India "over-simplified", for he identified only two issues that divided the countries, Kashmir and the Indus basin waters. Comparable over-simplification is often heard from Islamabad today.
In the period covered by the second volume, great strife took place in the sub-continent. India was at war first with China and then with Pakistan. Feldman casts his customary cool look at these events. He considers Ayub to have been ill advised in initiating moves in Kashmir that led to war in 1965, and then ill-prepared for the Indian reply that was bound to follow. The campaign itself is not discussed in any depth, though the adverse effect on Ayub's position, especially after the Tashkent meeting of January 1966, is carefully evaluated. This was the beginning of the end for him. He clung on for a couple of years more but his credibility was fatally impaired, and Bhutto was snapping unstoppably at his heels.
This leads into the third and final volume, Pakistan under another general, Yahya Khan, its problems more intense, events spinning out of control, eventually to lead to disintegration and the emergence of Bangladesh. Yahya came in to what must be regarded as the customary acclamation accorded to every new military incumbent. But his was a particularly dismal period of rule, and Feldman tells us enough about the man to show how far his failures of character compounded an already impossible situation. Yahya seemed to have had all the limitations of his predecessor while lacking even his public relations skills. Feldman has no great sympathy for the East Pakistanis and considers that the sundering of the two wings was the result of political mismanagement rather than a legitimate nationalist demand. His account offers few fresh insights and he appears almost bewildered by a stunning sequence of events that he could neither fully comprehend nor adequately describe.
But the limitations of the final volume should not be permitted to detract from Feldman's insightful account of the Ayub Khan years in Pakistan. OUP Karachi has done well to reissue his books, for they hold up a mirror to today's rulers. As prospects for the restoration of democracy in Pakistan become more problematical and constitutional innovations like the recent referendum are undertaken, a look at the previous failed efforts in this direction can be salutary.
Finally, should there be a reprint of this book, one can hope that OUP will take the trouble to weed out the endless proof reading errors that deface the present text.
The Herbert Feldman Omnibus comprising three volumes: Revolution in Pakistan, From Crisis to Crisis, The End and the Beginning, Herbert Feldman, Oxford University Press, Karachi, 2001, p.924, Rs. 895.
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