Precarious Task

The peril implicit in a "guided democracy" is that the guide eventually has to depart. In the view of his critics, nothing has so become Pakistan President Mohammed Ayub Khan's autocratic leadership as his leaving of it. In so doing, Ayub has promised to restore universal suffrage and return Pakistan to the parliamentary system in a general election to be held near the end of the year. After a decade of one-man rule, the soldierly Ayub has announced his "irrevocable decision" to step aside at that point, leaving to a discordant array of opposition politicians the task of healing Pakistan's divisions, inflamed by five months of anti-government disorders. Last week new rioting and outbreaks of mob rule in East Pakistan showed just how precarious the task may be.

Marauding Mobs. Parts of rural Pakistan were afire with a savagery unprecedented in the recent rioting. For the first time, large-scale disorders spread into the countryside north of Dacca, the eastern capital. Marauding mobs of villagers executed at least 60 of Ayub's "basic democrats" (electors) and "criminals" who had allegedly been favorites of the regime; the victims were drowned, beheaded or burned at the stake. Five policemen were killed trying to stop the rampage. In Dacca itself, where four cinemas were sacked and burned, demonstrators and strikers brought the commercial life of the city to a halt. Conceding that "there is no respect for law and order in the country and mob rule is the order of the day," Home Minister A. R. Khan ordered two shiploads of troops to sail for Chittagong in order to help restore order in East Pakistan.

In West Pakistan, a wave of wildcat strikes continued to sweep the cities, as groups of workers, ranging from doctors to Karachi dockworkers, released the grievances pent up by a decade's prohibition of strikes; on one day last week, 2,500,000 employees walked off their jobs. Some invoked gherao, a tactic borrowed from India in which workers barricade employers in their offices until wage demands are met. Since the government had set the pace by awarding civil servants an $80 million pay raise, it might be some time before the labor unrest could be quelled.

Too Idealistic. The turmoil stemmed in part from the plans that Ayub had made for handing over his power. To a gathering of the leaders of eight moderate opposition parties, he candidly admitted the failure of his "basic democracy," which gave the power to choose Pakistan's President and rubber-stamp National Assembly to 80,000 popularly elected village elders and landlords. "I tried to evolve a system that was too idealistic or too unrealistic," Ayub said of the arrangement, which was based on the fact that four-fifths of Pakistan's 125 million people are illiterate. Still, Ayub was now prepared to clear the way for a parliamentary system of the sort that governed Pakistan before his takeover in 1958. He urged his guests to put off their demands for other reforms until a new Parliament could be elected.

The scope of Ayub's concession delighted some of the opposition leaders, but it did not please the President's principal critic, ex-Foreign Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. He called for Ayub to resign in favor of a caretaker government, presumably to be headed by himself. Nor did Ayub's plan mollify two leading East Pakistan politicians, Sheik Mujibur Rahman and Maulana Abdul Hamid Bhashani, the 83-year-old leader of the pro-China faction of the National Awami Party.

Playing on the longstanding resentment of East Pakistan's Bengalis over the economic and political dominance of West Pakistan, the two Easterners called for far more substantial autonomy for their region. They also wanted parliamentary representation by population (58% of the population of the dissected country live in the eastern sector) rather than by the 50-50 representational split that now prevails in the federal government. The fiery Bhashani warned that if the elections proceed before autonomy is granted, "we will set ablaze the polling booths."

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