Parties and Politics in East Pakistan 1947–71

Preliminaries

Parties and Politics in East Pakistan: The Political Inheritances of Bangladesh—an absorbing and innovative narrative—appears at a time when the erstwhile East Pakistan (EP) has indeed faded in contemporary Bangladeshi consciousness. Wishing the book would augment historical interests among those who are still the “strangers” to their own legacies! An exceptional product of decades-long research, this volume blends books and articles, key informant interviews, and direct observations, as well as the reminiscences of the mass movements in the strategic swath of South Asia. The chronicle is both discouraging as well as inspirational; it has a glut of institutional hindrances as well as the resilience of the parties in former EP and Bangladesh. The political parties and their cohorts, in former EP as well as in contemporary Bangladesh, survived against authoritarianism and the triumphalist assaults on their survival. This volume defies the thrifty narratives of the bygone crafted since former EP became Bangladesh after a bloody war in 1971—the most stirring moment of its history.

This recount slogs through varied regimes, motley parties and their proliferating factions, tumultuous protests and the vocal critics, sidelined opposition, and the post-independent charismatic leaders as well as their dynastic entitlements to power. The intermingled events conveyed their respective pertinence. They are still germane to the democratic institution-building in Bangladesh—this volume adds to the diverse and systematic knowledge about parties in their historical and contemporary contexts. The multi-layered narrative here carries random allusions toward their colonial Bengal roots and their unabashed dynastic proclivities in independent Bangladesh. The book’s closure ironically coincided with Bangladesh stuck in the deep fissures between Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wazed’s (Hasina) ruling Awami League (AL) and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP)-led opposition alliance demanding free and fair elections and unimpeded civil rights to legitimately compete for power. This is a vibrant recall of what was politics in EP before it became Bangladesh. Furthermore, the narrative unveils itself from the colonial Bengal’s origins, while the 1971-armed struggle for independence is still the staple of fiction and non-fiction books on Bangladesh. Both the contemporary AL and the old Muslim League (ML) legitimized their claims to power with citations of their past glories. In addition to its credentials as the first sustainable EP opposition party since 1949, the AL ventured their entitlement to power over others because of its spectacular victory in the 1970 election and finally for successfully leading the armed struggle for independence in 1971. Conversely, once the ML also listed a plethora of memories of its accomplishments of Muslim empowerment in British India that ended in Pakistan, a separate Muslim state curved out of united India. Historically, both the ML and the AL had hegemonic proclivities subject to their duration and intensity.

Looking back, the East Pakistan Muslim League (EPML) was the provincial slice of the leading All-Pakistan Muslim League (APML), the inheritor of the All-India Muslim League (AIML), originally founded in Dhaka in 1906. EP politicians mostly switched from the pre-1947 united Bengal, where a provincial parliamentary government plodded through heterogeneous parties since the 1937 election under the Government of India Act, 1935. In the 1946 general election, the powerful Bengal Provincial Muslim League clenched the largest number of Muslim seats—an irrefutable feat for Muslim inspiration and the swelling Pakistan movement of that time. After the 1947 partition and freedom from the British Raj, the EPML, the successor of the old Bengal Muslim League (BML), became the powerful ruling party in the new province. However, it faced unprecedented administrative challenges in the aftermath of the momentous division of Bengal in 1947. Those distinctive legacies bind the political institutions of past EP and independent Bangladesh. Together, this chronicle offers new dimensions for comprehending the earlier EP parties and politics, which evolved into Bangladesh since 1971. However, this volume’s intimate narrative and breaking analysis focus on one-time EP, the eastern wing of Pakistan.

Essentially, the EP parties evolved through the following intervals from 1947 to 1971: (a) from 1947 to 1954, the EPML enjoyed the single-party ascendancy habitually reluctant to expand its base and hostile to the rising critics of the government; (b) once M. A. Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan passed away, EP was no longer under the charismatic sway of any particular leader, although the APML still inhibited the EPML; (c) the outstanding Bengali Muslim leaders like A. K. Fazlul Huq, H. S. Suhrawardy, and Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani (Bhashani) were not at the epicenter of power in Pakistan’s initial years—intermittently; however, they cooperated as well as fought with each other along with their personal and factional tiffs; (d) the EPML’s early supremacy was offset by the rise of the Awami (Muslim) League (AML/AL), born in 1949, the earliest visible opposition party that mobilized the United Front (UF), which toppled the reigning ML in 1954—the beginning of the province’s unstable parties up to the 1958 military takeover; (e) the raging language movement of 1950s—a new line of political deployment—upended EP’s conventional politics with long term history-churning consequences; (f) the dissimilar coalitions/alliances of parties popularly known as Jukto Front (United Front)became the familiar spectacle in EP that eventually stirred Bangladesh; and (g) the major Pakistani parties wrestled the military-led authoritarianism from 1958 to 1971 whilst EP swung toward a separatist paradigm and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (Mujib) became the crusader of his six-point agenda since 1966. General Ayub Khan (Ayub) despised politicians and outlawed parties at the dawn of his regime. Even when he grudgingly restored them after he introduced the 1962 constitution, the EP parties and politicians failed to regain their earlier institutional prestige and public esteem.

This volume is a riveting tale around the Jukto Front (alliances) of parties under which the smaller entities congregated since the 1954 election—they added resilience to partisan politics, often thanks to their intriguing mentors. However, the EP political episodes are now mostly missing in collective memories except in anecdotal references! Then, the narrative wades through Pakistan’s sidelined parties and their aging politicians daring Ayub’s dictatorial rule. EP’s Governor Abdul Monem Khan managed the ML rump that supported the Ayub rule. Then again, the pro-Ayub ML remnants did not have a large popular appeal. On the other end, Nurul Amin, once EP’s controversial chief minister, led the mainstream ML against Ayub Khan’s military-blessed administration. He further bonded with the larger battle for reinstating the banished parliamentary democracy. In the interim, EP’s Bengali party politics rolled more toward maximum regional autonomy with a sharper trajectory compared to Pakistan’s earlier phase of politics. EP witnessed immense protests from 1968 to 1969 that brought down the Ayub regime; the six-point demands weaponized the known disparity claims of the AL and its accomplices. Bengali political confidence, already inaugurated in the language movement of the 1950s, added new crescendos to the battle against regional disparities that finally went into EP’s separation from Pakistan.

Poor development of the former EP /Pakistani parties was not a surprise among the big challenges of democratic institution building in the postcolonial countries. The fissiparousness of the EP parties paused when the new Bangladesh authorities put severe restrictions on those legislators who would leave their own parties and join their rivals. But the post-1971 institutionalization of Bangladeshi parties was even more disappointing with populist authoritarianism and dynastic grips on power. Bangladeshi parties’ seismic swaps threatened democratic institution-building from 1972 to 1975. During the 1971-armed struggle, the AL-controlled government-in-exile established an exclusionary hold by refusing to share power with other parties, leaders, and cohorts who enthusiastically participated in the independence campaign.

After the AL’s forbidding postures in the preliminary years of Bangladesh, the AL and the emerging parties went through conflicting challenges. They were gloomier than what the EPML did to its opponents in Pakistan’s opening years. Those stories highlight Chapter 1 of this work. The bitter memories of 1971 brutalities blurred the institutional landscapes, and a revulsion toward Pakistan defined the new Bangladeshi patriotism. And the changing party patterns are summarized here at their thematic junctures: (i) as a party, the AL fell under Mujib’s charismatic spell as well as the imposing one-party [the Bangladesh Krishak Sramik Awami League (BKSAL)] state that was ousted in a bloody coup later in 1975 that killed him and his family and evicted the regime (1972–1975); (ii) an executive-dominated presidential form of government appeared in the wake of the 1975 coup and countercoups, which slowly restored multi-party politics that was still dominated by their founders or mentors; (iii) the parliamentary government returned in 1991 when President General H. M. Ershad stepped down; (iv) since that event, Bangladesh had, for a while, two major parties—the AL and the BNP—alternating power between them with a bit of space to their respective supporting groups—the best but brief stretch for bipartisan politics in Bangladesh; and (v) after 2009, the AL leader Prime Minister Shiekh Hasina launched an effectively one-party state with allegations of enormous election fraud, unbridled civil rights violations and a seething relegation of the opposition parties that amounted to a “hybrid regime.”¹

Over 50 years since its independence, Bangladesh is still a deeply divided country where parties dubiously split themselves along factional, personal, ideological, and dynastic alignments. Such dynamics have adversely impacted the nation’s democratic process. Notwithstanding their different circumstances, the parallels of EP and Bangladeshi parties are worthy of their scholarly comparisons and analyses. This yarn itemized the province’s earlier institutional disappointments to resolve the schisms that eventually ended up in its violent severance from Pakistan after a great loss of human lives and breakdown of most political institutions. The EP reel of politics in the 1950s and 1960s still merits a retelling—even now, the Bangladeshi institutions carried their earlier bequests adapted to the new contingencies. Obviously, the 1971 upheaval was not a constitutional wrangle. Thus, the anguish of a penetrating civil war changed the traditional party alignments that prefer a peaceful democratic process. The divisive impact of the 1971-armed conflict still divides Bangladesh. Earlier, the 1970 election offered the AL an undeniable path to power when the party had won a stunning victory in that poll. But the AL rolled itself more toward the regional discrepancy-conscious EP constituents. However, South Asia is yet to develop steady parties who could compete on an “even playing field.” As of this writing, the unbending Bangladeshi political deadlock echoed the opposition parties’ existential struggle that surely attracted international scrutiny and an extraordinary stalemate. Between its earlier EP encounters and its five decades of post-independent status, Bangladesh is still in the “unstable decades” of its parties’ institutional historiography. On multiple occasions, political parties became the instruments of perpetuating personality cults or dynastic rules. This narrative, however, did not deeply go beyond the previous EP parties and politics from 1947 to 1971. Comparable to Pakistan, Bangladesh too had its turns of martial law and military-led civilian governments—not the gracious grounds for the rise of political parties.

The best part of this volume’s primary research and writings whirled in the late 1960s in Dhaka, and then it continued in the early 1970s at the Southern Asian Institute, Columbia University, New York. Two articles were parts of this peripatetic research—they are in this book’s appendices. The rest of the work obviously had a long itinerant rewriting, but this profile still ties with the Bangladeshi encounters with democratic institution-building. Beginning with the ML’s single-dominant party rule (1947–1954), the volume’s core intermingles with the abiding Bengali language drive in the 1950s, the chasm between the non-Bengali immigrants and the local Bengali population, occasional stereotypes demeaning the Bengali Muslims, the uppity of the senior non-Bengali bureaucrats in EP, and the escalating provincial autonomy demands, which brought the explosive inter-wing disputes to the fore. An immense amalgamation of history-making events with the kaleidoscopic parties, this book dares those who are on the verge of truncating the EP component of the Bangladeshi political history. It retrieves what belongs to Bangladesh!

The charismatic leaders and a modicum of their hereditary claimants of power were still short-lived in former EP. On the contrary, they became, in multiple stages, the bullying juggernauts in Bangladesh politics since the beginning of the 1970s. Nevertheless, they were unlike the West Pakistani feudal implants. After the 1975 violent overthrow of the BKSAL one-party autocracy, the Bangladeshi military-led regime, on the other end, steadily restored the variety of parties. After the reinstatement of parliamentary government since 1991, Bangladesh was under the grasp of the BNP and the AL, the two largest parties in contemporary Bangladesh. Their respective mentors—indeed, two powerful female leaders, Sheikh Hasina Wazed (Hasina) of the AL and Begum Khaleda Zia (Khaleda), the BNP chief, ruled from the early 1990s. Whenever the AL or the BNP did not enjoy an absolute majority, the minor parties and the independent legislators, with or without their alliances, got a little share of power and patronage. To a degree, it was reminiscent of EP politics from 1954 to 1958, when even the smallest groups jostled for power. Of the two main parties, the AL had a long agitational past, assisted by their cadre-supporters, including their student enthusiasts, since 1949. In the sphere of independent Bangladesh, the political and intellectual establishments virtually ignored the contributions of A. K. Fazlul Huq, H. S. Suhrawardy, and Maulana Bhashani in what was EP since 1947 and before in colonial Bengal. They also discounted who got what in EP from 1947 to 1971.

Mujib’s post-1971 populist fame dwarfed both the Prime Minister’s office that he initially held and the legislative body under the constitution, but the professed Mujibism accorded an ideological twist and a “leadership worshipping aura” to the single-party hegemony at the birth of Bangladesh. Unlike what EP experienced in its yore, the intrusion of personal charismatic power into politics was a dangerous omen for democratic institution building in Bangladesh. The EPML was hugely powerful in EP’s primary years—notwithstanding the severe language controversies over the ML regime. And yet, neither Khawaja Nazimuddin nor Nurul Amin—EP’s former chief ministers—matched Mujib’s popular ascendancy in Bangladesh.

Parties were the vehicles for power during the parliamentary form of government in Pakistan’s first decade; then again, the cabinets depended on the strength of the parties or alliances of the parties and groups in the parliament. While the EPML had an absolute majority from 1947 to 1954, it did not need any partnership with other parties to stay in power. But later, the floor crossings of the party members were nightmares to those leaders who were shaky in power. Chapter 2 contains an exhaustive recount of the swapping governments from 1954 to 1958. The only exception to this tenet was the governor’s rule, under special emergency powers, when the provincial administration came directly under the bureaucrats. But with the beginning of the 1958 martial law, the parties lost their old accolade even after Ayub Khan added a new lease of life to politics under his executive-dominated system. Ayub’s scorn for parties was a great blow to the development of parties in Pakistan. Go along with Ayub’s 1962 constitution, the provincial government was under the governor’s grip—his cabinet, an amalgamation of politicians and non-political professionals, was only responsible to the governor who, in his turn, lurched under the president’s authority. There was no need for a legislative majority to sustain the governor’s administration in Pakistan’s provinces under Ayub Khan. The elected legislators were not in power during the emergency rules in the province. Political parties were not the sources of the governor’s special powers throughout such predicaments. Then again, while the military-supported presidential government continued in Bangladesh from 1975 to 1991, a partisan majority was not necessary for bolstering the government. The post-1975 Bangladeshi governance was closer to the earlier Ayub regime in Pakistan until 1991, when General H. M. Ershad stepped down.

Whether it was still in former EP or post-1971 Bangladesh, the old menace of personality collisions and factional competitions never vanished. Chapters 1 and 2 elaborated such quarrels in EP’s commencing years. Chapters 7 and 8 hold the sharp personality challenges during the 1971 liberation war. The worst of the reigning AL’s bickering between Mujib and Tajuddin resulted in the latter losing his cabinet position as the Bangladesh Finance Minister, further elaborated later in the book. When the 1975 violent coup ousted his imperious BKSAL government, Mujib’s prominent allies surprisingly joined the new military-sponsored government and readily cursed their deceased leader. One appraisal of the ML’s internal factionalism in EP and the AL in Bangladesh was not far to seek. The ML’s serious split between those who supported the cause of Bengali as one of the state languages and those who opposed or hesitated on the issue simmered first, and then it came out in the open. The ML was still governing, but its hold on the district outlets fell on the slippery slope for diverse reasons enlarged in Chapter 1. Conspicuously, the ML did not have a charismatic leader at its top before the party headed for the 1954 election. Chapters 1 and 2 recorded the worst personal clashes in the ML, the UF, and the AL in the second half of the 1950s. The AL, the stronger partner of the UF coalition, bore the worst setback when its ideological nonconformists broke away to establish the leftist National Awami Party (NAP) in 1957.

Beginning with the post-1954 election in EP to the 1958 martial law in Pakistan, no single party enjoyed an absolute legislative majority in Pakistan’s east wing—the bigger parties required even the smaller ones and the independent members as well to sustain their legislative majority. One new feature of those years was the rising younger generation in politics—it happened through the student-propelled language protests while the prominent leaders were much older. The fledgling cohorts had visible trust in the rising opposition parties. Before the 1954–1958 turn, the EP ML enjoyed the unquestioned legislative majority. Ideologically, the younger recruits in politics after the 1954 election were, however, dissimilar—with exceptions, they were not the offspring of feudal and traditionally privileged families. They stood for the new variety of lawyers, politicians, and other professions; the bulk of that age bracket later became the ardent Bengali nationalists—they changed the trajectory of the parties they supported. If martial law did not cancel the projected 1959 elections, the political parties could have a fresh band of more trained and experienced politicians. And yet, when the post-1958 military administration condemned the political parties and disqualified their leaders, observers in Pakistan, including the majority in its eastern wing, yearned for the (pre-1958) “vanished regime!” The coalescing rulers of the mid-1950s established a measure of legislative collaboration—apparent give and take as well as the contrasting frustrations and uncouth squabbles occasionally prevailed between the opposing parties. The same cluster of EP politicians steadily joined hands against the military-civilian autocracy’s repressive measures since the 1958 martial law. A newfangled peer group of Bengali nationalists, regionalist thinkers, academics, economists, students, and disparity critics surfaced with more of their radical twists of the regional discrepancy questions.