PAKISTAN: To Be Happier & Freer

Moving with the assurance of a man who knows his mind (and his power), Pakistan's autocratic, stocky President Iskander Mirza declared martial law throughout the land last week, thus snuffed out whatever life was left in the eleven-year-old democracy which had yet to hold its first nationwide election. In Pakistan itself, there were few mourners.

From the first, Pakistan has been divided against itself, its halves separated by 1,000 miles of hated India; it has no common language, no common history as a nation, no adequate economic base for its rapidly growing population, now 85 million. Only its Moslem religion unites it—and most of its politicians have no desire to see a theocratic state run by the mullahs. Corruption and instability compound Pakistan's woes. Food shortages are chronic, and foreign-exchange reserves are at an alltime low. Only last month, in East Pakistan's Provincial Assembly, the Deputy Speaker of the House was fatally injured in a parliamentary brawl (TIME,

Oct. 6). Political parties have taken to assembling private armies, and they objected when the government tried to halt them. Cabinets have changed so often that it became a Karachi joke that a minister had to fill his pockets in six months because that was all the time he was going to have.

The Scalawags. Tough, jowly President Iskander Mirza, who once declared himself in favor of "controlled democracy," watched the drift to chaos with mounting disgust. Son of a wealthy Bengal family,*graduate of Britain's Sandhurst, a major general before independence, he had long regarded most politicians as "crooks and scalawags." A Moslem who drinks whisky, smokes, shoots and rides, Mirza has always been blunt about his aristocratic creed: "Democracy requires breeding. These illiterate peasants certainly know less about running a country than I do . . . There has to be someone to prevent the people from destroying themselves."

Along with Mirza, the army's commander in chief, General Mohammed Ayub Khan (another Sandhurst man), had long ago concluded that the army would have to step in. Dressed casually in white cotton slacks, brown loafers, green diamond-pattern socks, the tails of his tan-striped sports shirt hanging out, General Ayub Khan calmly explained: "We both came to the conclusion that the country was going to the dogs ... I said to the President: 'Are you going to act? If you do not, which Heaven forbid, we [the armed forces] shall force a change.' " Mirza waited for the right moment, hoping to prevent "another Iraq." A police battle with Moslem League demonstrators provided "the perfect opportunity" for surrounding the capital with troops. On the chosen day Mirza wrote out his proclamation dissolving political parties and imposing martial law, had it typed under guard. Assured that the troops were in position, Mirza issued his orders. "I have no sanction of law or of constitution," he told reporters. "I have only the sanction of my conscience." At 11 p.m. he sent a personal note to Prime Minister Malik Firoz Khan Noon informing him that his government had been dissolved.