The Complete Politician

One day last year a squat, dynamic Bengali named Hussein Shaheed Suhrawardy retired to his big, rambling house on Karachi's fashionable Clifton Road to await the call that would make him Prime Min ister of Pakistan. The call did not come. In a last minute switch, Pakistan's President Iskander Mirza passed over Suhrawardy in favor of a more malleable candidate, Financial Expert Mohamad Ali. "Mirza is an unscrupulous schemer," cried the outraged Suhrawardy. Vowed Mirza in return: "Suhrawardy will get the premiership only over my dead body."

Last week in the President's home, a very much alive Iskander Mirza swore in 64-year-old Hussein Suhrawardy as Pakistan's fifth Prime Minister since independence, and then, with a broad smile, garlanded him with roses and jasmine.

It was not sudden friendship, but sheer desperation that led President Mirza to accept Suhrawardy as Prime Minister of the nation accounted to be the staunchest U.S. ally in Asia. Pakistan was in trouble and heading for worse. East Pakistan, with 55% of the country's population, was convulsed by famine compounded by official corruption. Pakistan's much-heralded Five-year plan was already three months old, but because of political bickering, not one of the projects envisioned in it was under way. The once dominant Moslem League Party was fragmented into half a dozen parties and factions, eliminating the one force for political stability. When Mirza finally pressured Mohamad Ali, a shy and indecisive public servant, into resigning the premiership (TIME, Sept. 17), he knew that he had to replace him with a man more willing to mix in the political free-for-all and more able to involve grass roots support.

The Jivester. To a chance acquaintance, dapper, potbellied Hussein Suhrawardy would seem an unlikely choice for so forbidding a job. A widower he shuns liquor and tobacco but likes feminine companionship, nightclubs and rumbaing till dawn. He has a concrete dance floor on the roof of his Karachi house, and his record collection includes 1,200 U.S. dance records. When he isn't on the dance floor, Suhrawardy spends most of his time at home in a small bedroom furnished with twin beds. On one he sleeps; on the other, which is piled high with files, telephone books, old magazines and fly swatters, he conducts political negotiations.

On With the Dhoti. For all his playboy manner, however, Suhrawardy is a deliberate contender for power. His opponents call him "a complete opportunist"; Suhrawardy softens that to read "complete politician." The son of a rich Calcutta mill owner, he entered politics soon after his graduation from Oxford, was a sufficiently good administrator to become Chief Minister of Bengal, one of the biggest jobs in British India. With India's independence and its partition into Hindu and Moslem nations. Moslem Suhrawardy, instead of going to Moslem Pakistan, toured Bengal with Mahatma Gandhi and tried to put an end to the bloody post-partition riots between Hindus and Moslems. (This, however, failed to endear him to Hindus, who charge that he had helped to provoke the Bengal riots in the first place.)

In 1949, after the Indian government slapped a crippling tax bill on him, Suhrawardy finally moved to Pakistan. By then, Moslem League leaders regarded him as a pro-Indian traitor and strove to freeze him out of Pakistani politics. Doggedly, Suhrawardy launched a party of his own, the Awami League and, doffing his habitual Western clothes in favor of a dhoti, began to stump East Pakistan's villages in search of support. With undisguised opportunism, he welcomed all recruits, including Communists and fellow travelers. By 1954 he had built the only political party in Pakistan that reached down from the well-fixed minority to assemble genuine popular support.

The Biggest Problem. Unquestionably, the Awami League got some of its strength by playing on doubts about Pakistan's firm alliance with the West (doubts that have increased since last January, when the U.S. failed to meet Russian endorsement of India's claim to the disputed state of Kashmir with a counter-endorsement of Pakistan's claim). Under the influence of its Red-tinged left wing, the Awami League has plugged neutralism and the acceptance of military aid from anyone who will give it, including the U.S.S.R.

As he stepped into office last week, Suhrawardy threw a bone to his neutralist supporters by qualifying Pakistan's previous support of the British position on Suez, accepting an invitation to Egypt's counter-Western Suez conference as well as to the British canal-users conference. Pakistan, he loudly proclaimed, will "refuse to be made a pawn in international politics." But the new Prime Minister is personally strongly pro-Western, and he took pains to state that Pakistan will stand by her alliance with the U.S. as well as the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization. Asked whether his most important problem was famine or foreign policy, Suhrawardy replied: "Idiot! Political stability. That's the biggest problem."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.