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It was an election that would transform history in our part of the world. Yes, we speak of the general election which took place in Pakistan on 7 December 1970. We who were around to observe politics shaping up in that year were of course aware of the consequential nature of the election that had been called by the regime of Pakistan’s second military ruler, General Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan. It was an election that testified to the success of the people in both wings of Pakistan in achieving the right to a vote based on adult franchise.
The election, which had originally been scheduled for October, was deferred to December owing to the devastating floods engulfing East Pakistan. Again, when a tidal bore in the coastal regions of the province in November left havoc in the form of a million dead and a landscape mutating into a wasteland, demands were made by certain quarters that the date of the election be shifted again. It goes to the credit of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman that he loudly opposed any further deferment of the vote.
The 1970 election had been a long time coming. Pakistan was already a twenty-three-year-old state created in 1947 but till 1970 had never had a nationwide election that would permit its citizens to choose a government through exercising their right to vote at the ballot box. Politics had consistently been hamstrung by intrigue and machinations indulged in by elements unwilling to loosen their hold on the state. Till 1970, the only election that had taken place in Pakistan was the provincial election in East Bengal, before it was rechristened as East Pakistan, in March 1954. The Jukto Front swept the polls but within two months had been dismissed by the central government based in Karachi.
The 1970 election was an exercise people thought would lead to the emergence of a genuine democratic order in Pakistan, one that would be similar to the democracy that had been an underlying constitutional principle in India since the departure of the British colonial power. In East Bengal, which Bengalis had already begun referring to as Bangladesh as a result of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s decision to replace ‘East Pakistan’ with the new nomenclature, it was evident that the Awami League would be putting up a strong show and obtain a majority in the province. The chief of the Awami League had already made it known that the election would be a referendum on the party’s Six Point Plan for regional autonomy.
In West Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) conducted its election campaign on the slogan of Islamic Socialism, though it was never explained how such socialism could come about. There were also the other parties, such as the Jamaat-e-Islami, Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam, Pakistan Democratic Party, Nezam-e-Islam and the various factions of the Muslim League, which on the face of it appeared to be giving the PPP a run for its money. In Balochistan and the North-West Frontier Province (today known as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) public sentiments pointed to a triumph for the National Awami Party (NAP) led by Khan Abdul Wali Khan.
The PPP did not put up any candidate for the National Assembly in East Pakistan. In West Pakistan, the Awami League nominated A.R.S. Doha as its sole nominee there. Throughout 1970, Bhutto and most West Pakistani politicians failed to visit Dhaka as part of their election campaigns. The Jamaat’s Moulana Maududi visited Dhaka but was unable to address a public rally there when his party activists came under attack. Meanwhile, Moulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani, leader of his faction of the NAP, toured West Pakistan. Between end-June and early-July Bangabandhu made a whirlwind tour of Karachi, Quetta, Lahore and Peshawar, where he addressed election rallies.
The 1970 election was conducted on the basis of the Legal Framework Order (LFO) promulgated by the Yahya Khan regime early in the year. A salient point of the LFO was that the National Assembly to be elected in the country would meet in session to formulate a constitution for Pakistan within a period of 120 days. Once adopted by the assembly, the constitution would go to the President, who would have the power to assent to it or reject it. As subsequent events would show, the LFO ended up being a document more ignored than followed, a reason being the crisis which Bhutto initiated when in mid-February 1971 he publicly stated his party’s plan to stay away from the National Assembly session scheduled to meet in Dhaka on 3 March.
The election results surprised the entirety of Pakistan, for the particular reason that of the 300 seats in the National Assembly, the Awami League garnered as many as 160 of the 162 seats earmarked for East Pakistan (it would subsequently add the seven women’s seats to its tally). In West Pakistan, the PPP, formed only three years earlier, romped home with 81 of the 138 seats allocated in total for the Punjab, Sindh, NWFP and Balochistan. In other words, the Awami League emerged as the majority party in the National Assembly and as such was poised to form Pakistan’s first elected government in Islamabad. The Awami League’s triumph put paid to projections by Pakistan’s military and civilian Intelligence services to the effect that the party would win no more than 60 seats in East Pakistan.
Things began to go wrong within days of the election. A brigadier at Comilla cantonment told the soldiers under his command – and they were all from West Pakistan – that the ‘black bastards’ (the reference was to Bengalis) would not be permitted ‘to rule over us’. General Yahya Khan visited Dhaka later in December and before flying back to Karachi stated to newsmen that Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was Pakistan’s incoming Prime Minister. Late in January 1971, Bhutto led a PPP team to Dhaka in the expectation that he would be able to convince Mujib that a grand coalition between his party and the Awami League, on the pattern of the CDU-SPD coalition forged by Kurt-Georg Kiesinger and Willy Brandt in West Germany in 1966, could govern Pakistan. The Awami League chief torpedoed the suggestion on the ground that his party had obtained a clear majority on an all-Pakistan basis at the election.
As a consequence of Bhutto’s threats to boycott the National Assembly session called for 3 March, President Yahya Khan suddenly postponed the session on 1 March. All hell broke loose.
The rest is history. But let us be reminded of the political personalities who played significant roles in the 1970 election campaign in the two wings of Pakistan. They were, besides Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, such senior political figures as Moulana Bhashani, Moulana Maududi, Khan Abdul Wali Khan, Professor Muzaffar Ahmed, Mian Mumtaz Daultana, Nurul Amin, Moulvi Farid Ahmed, Fazlul Quader Chowdhury, Khan Abdus Sabur, Khan Abdul Qayyum Khan, Ghaus Baksh Bizenjo, Khair Baksh Marri, Moulana Mufti Mahmood, Air Marshal Asghar Khan, Pir Pagaro and Nawab Akbar Bugti.
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Syed Badrul Ahsan writes on politics, diplomacy and history