by Yusuf Zaman*
*The author is a barrister and entrepreneur. Pakistani history and politics hold great interest for him. He can be contacted at: [email protected]
It is the 17th of April 1953, and the venue is the Governor-General House in Karachi. Prime Minister Khwaja Nazimuddin, arguably among the five foremost lieutenants of the Quaid-e-Azam, has been summoned, along with his cabinet, to meet with Governor-General Ghulam Mohammed. At the meeting, Ghulam Mohammed briefly expresses his dissatisfaction over the government’s performance and, without further ado, asks for a stunned prime minister’s resignation. When Nazimuddin demurs, rightly stating that he enjoys the confidence of the Constituent Assembly, which has passed his government’s budget only a few days earlier, the governor-general tersely closes the meeting by announcing the dismissal of the prime minister and his government1. Thus, in a brief period of less than thirty minutes, the course of Pakistani democracy is abruptly derailed by a naked palace coup.
While scholars and historians have placed considerable focus on the role played in the subversion of Pakistani democracy by five heads of state, namely Iskander Mirza, Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan, Zia-ul-Haq and Pervez Musharraf, the part played by Malik Ghulam Mohammed has received scant attention. This is all the more ironical since it was this person who first injected into Pakistani politics the lethal cocktail of autocratic rule, deviations from constitutionalism and involvement of the military in matters of civilian governance. Actually, it would not be inapt to describe him as the original architect of the nation’s myriad constitutional misfortunes and the seer for those of his successors who further trampled over the principle of parliamentary sovereignty.
For this reason, I believe a closer look is warranted at the life and times of Ghulam Mohammed, in particular the key milestones in his controversial career as Pakistan’s third governor-general.
Born in 1895 in inner Lahore to a Kakezai family of Jullundhri origin, Ghulam Mohammed completed his schooling in this city before moving to MAO College Aligarh for his graduation and an MA Economics. After a short stint teaching economics at his alma mater, Ghulam Mohammed qualified for the Indian Audit & Accounts service in 1920 and spent the initial years of his service in the Railway Accounts Department. Subsequently, he went on to serve as Financial Advisor to Bhopal State, Deputy Accountant General Posts & Telegraph and Additional Secretary of the Central Supply Department. From 1942-1946, he held the position of Finance Minister of Hyderabad, India’s most prominent Muslim princely state. Interestingly, he also served as a member of the governing body of the prestigious Indian Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and later as its chairman. Having been knighted for his services, it goes to his credit that he relinquished this honour in 1946 at the call of the Muslim League for all Muslims to renounce their titles in protest to the negative position of the British Government on the demand for Pakistan.
With his reputation cemented as a leading technocrat in the field of accounting and finance, in 1945 Ghulam Mohammed teamed up with fellow Lahorites, brothers K.C and J.C Mahindra, to become one of the founding partners of Mahindra and Mohammed, a private limited company set up as a steel trading entity. In addition, he also became a director of one of India’s foremost corporations, Tata Steel.
When Liaquat Ali Khan became Finance Minister of India in the Interim Government in the lead-up to partition, it was no surprise that Ghulam Mohammed was summoned to assist him in this onerous task, as well as to help the Muslim League in the negotiations with the Congress for obtaining a fair share of united India’s financial assets for Pakistan. His able performance in both these tasks made him the obvious candidate for selection as the first Finance Minister of Pakistan, the only technocrat and non-member of the Muslim League to have been given the honour of joining the cabinet (Foreign Minister Chaudhry Zafarullah Khan, also a technocrat, was not a member of the cabinet but of the outer ministry).
It is pertinent to note that had Ghulam Mohammed not opted for Pakistan and remained in India, he would probably have made a fortune in his myriad business ventures. Mahindra & Mohammed, which was renamed as Mahindra & Mahindra when Ghulam Mohammed relinquished his shareholding and exited the company to migrate to Pakistan, is today one of India’s largest business conglomerates. On the other hand, the constitutional history of Pakistan may also have been markedly different, arguably for the better, had Ghulam Mohammed chosen to stay in India.
Three features of Ghulam Mohammed’s tenure as finance minister from 1947-1951 are noteworthy. First, he forged a strong network with military authorities, in particular with fellow Aligarh graduate, General Ayub Khan, and he went out of his way to make maximum possible budgetary allocations for the armed forces2. Second, he became a leading member, if not the unofficial leader, of the cabinet faction which was active in seeking to ensure that the interests of the West Pakistan civil-military elite and Punjab were protected in any future constitutional dispensation, particularly vis-à-vis East Bengal. Finally, Ghulam Mohammed was one of the champions of the secular grouping in the cabinet, and for this reason he vigorously opposed the passage of the Objectives Resolution in 1949, a position which further put him at odds with Liaquat Ali Khan3.
The relationship between Liaquat Ali Khan and Ghulam Mohammed was a strained one but the powerful alliances forged by Ghulam Mohammed with the West Pakistani power-brokers made it difficult for the prime minister to rid himself of this thorn in his flesh. However, a golden opportunity to remove the finance minister from the cabinet arose when chronic ill-health led to a serious debilitation of his physical faculties, in particular his ability to speak coherently. For this reason, by early October 1951, Liaqat Ali Khan had determined to send Ghulam Mohammed home to a well-earned retirement or to ease him out by offering him the ambassadorship in Washington4.
To that effect, Ghulam Mohammed had already begun to take a back- seat from his ministerial duties and only the formal announcement of his departure from the cabinet remained to be made. Therefore, when the prime minister arrived in Rawalpindi on the fateful day of 16th October, Ghulam Mohammed, who was convalescing in the city, neither received him at the airport nor did he accompany him to Company Bagh for the public meeting that Liaquat was to address.
Fate had something else in store and Liaquat tragically fell to an assassin’s bullets before he could begin his public address. As a stunned nation struggled to come to grips with the dastardly elimination of the country’s leader, a huddle took place at the house of Nawab Gurmani, another cabinet member who also had been present in the city but had not attended the meeting at Company Bagh – it was rumoured that Liaquat was also planning to remove Gurmani from the cabinet. Ghulam Mohammed and Gurmani chalked out their strategy and then met with Khwaja Nazimuddin, who was prevailed upon, as an act of supreme national service, to step down from his role as the governor-general and to become the prime minister. Once the simple-minded and patriotic Nazimuddin had grudgingly relented to their proposal, Gurmani separately presented him with the choice of Ghulam Mohammed as governor-general, to which Nazimuddin blankly agreed5. This latter decision, which was almost extracted under pressure from Nazimuddin, was to cost him and the country dearly and the reverberations are being felt to this day.
The irony is that at a time when India had already elected veteran freedom-fighter Dr Rajendra Prasad as its first president, Pakistan installed a former civil servant who had played no role in the Pakistan Movement as the third occupant of the governor-general’s chair. The selection of Ghulam Mohammed as governor-general and Khwaja Nazimuddin as prime minister, not to mention the appointment of the senior-most civil servant, Chaudhry Mohammed Ali, as finance minister, was affected without meaningful consultation within the cabinet and with no recourse to the Muslim League parliamentary party. This signalled, all too starkly, that democratic traditions and conventions were already being subordinated to the dictates of realpolitik and a cabal of bureaucrats was beginning to wrest power away from the politicians.
It was not long before Ghulam Mohammed began to display his repudiation of democratic practice and constitutional conventions. He gathered around him a coterie of ministers and civil-military officials who carried out his instructions and, in effect, they bypassed the person to whom they were accountable, Prime Minister Nazimuddin6. Further, he actively interfered in the domain of the prime minister, even to the extent of asking him to drop two ministers, East Pakistan’s Fazlur Rehman and Sindh’s Abdus Sattar Pirzada, from his cabinet; Nazimuddin resented the governor-general’s gratuitous advice in this matter, and declined to do so. On matters of foreign policy also, discordant notes were struck; the governor-general, backed by Iskander Mirza and Ayub Khan, warmly favoured that Pakistan tie its colours to the USA’s mast, whereas Khwaja Nazimuddin was much less bullish on this matter and preferred to maintain closer relations with the UK.
Finally, the contours of the proposed constitution, as set out in the report of the Basic Principles Committee of the Constituent Assembly, drove a further wedge between Nazimuddin/East Bengal on the one hand and the axis of the Punjab/Sindh feudals, the Karachi business elite and the civil-military bureaucracy, on the other hand7. Ghulam Mohammed informally headed this latter group. For them the constitutional proposals were anathema, since they feared that these provided a basis for East Bengal, in tandem with the then NWFP and potentially other smaller provinces of the Western wing, to rule Pakistan in perpetuity.
The die was cast, and on 17 April 1953 Ghulam Mohammed launched his coup to dismiss Khwaja Nazimuddin with the active support of a powerful serving bureaucrat, Defence Secretary Major General Iskander Mirza, as well as the C-in-C of the Pakistan Army, General Ayub Khan, both of whom were answerable to the Prime Minister in whose ouster they contributed. The heavy troop presence on the streets of Karachi in the hours before the governor-general’s meeting with the prime minister, the disconnecting of the official telephone lines of the prime minister and his loyal cabinet members, the surrounding of the prime minister’s residence by an armed police detachment and the suspension of the overseas telegraph service (the last action taken to prevent the prime minister from cabling Buckingham Palace to seek the recall of the governor-general’s appointment), all give credence to the view that Ghulam Mohammed was aided and abetted in his action by the highest echelons of the civil-military bureaucracy8.
Having replaced Khwaja Nazimuddin as prime minister with a political non-entity and light-weight in the shape of Mohammed Ali Bogra, the equilibrium of power shifted squarely in favour of Ghulam Mohammed. As the de-facto chief executive of Pakistan, two objectives were squarely in the mind of the governor-general: first, to take Pakistan lock, stock and barrel into an alliance and embrace with the USA; and, second, to ensure that the future constitution be prepared in such a way that the numerical majority of East Bengal could be countered by the four provinces of the western wing, which would thus retain effective power to govern the country. In both of these aims, Ghulam Mohammed had the full backing of Iskander Mirza and Ayub Khan.
The extent to which Ghulam Mohammed was prepared to go to win American favour is illustrated by his unscheduled visit to the Pentagon during his state visit to the USA in 1954. Much to the surprise of Ambassador Syed Amjad Ali, Ghulam Mohammed insisted on visiting the Pentagon to meet with the US Defence Secretary, a totally uncalled for visit and unbecoming of Pakistan’s governor-general to break with protocol in this manner. Syed Amjad Ali was to be further horrified when he witnessed the unseemly sight of the governor-general beseeching the US Defence Secretary for discarded US Navy ships of WW2 vintage to be gifted to the Pakistan Navy9.
As the governor-general continued to call the shots and act as the de-facto chief executive, even the quiescent Bogra felt that he could no longer put up with this distasteful state of affairs. He mustered courage and spear-headed a move in the Constituent Assembly to clip the governor-general’s powers. An enraged Ghulam Mohammed retaliated first by delivering a furious verbal harangue and a dressing down to a quivering prime minister, and he followed this up in good measure by dissolving the Constituent Assembly, his second constitutional coup. It is noteworthy that the assembly was dissolved after it had finished its primary task of preparing the constitution and only its formal adoption through a vote was pending.
If the totally unjustified act of dissolution of the assembly was not bad enough on its own, Ghulam Mohammed delivered a more dastardly blow to the future civil-military equilibrium by installing a “cabinet of talents” under a severely chastened Bogra as prime minister. Included in the cabinet were Messrs Iskander Mirza and Ayub Khan, a fateful move which opened the doors for the formal involvement of the military in the country’s governance.
Even in his dealings with the country’s superior judiciary, Ghulam Mohammed set ignoble and destructive traditions. Above all, he sowed the seeds of the malaise of securing judicial partiality to the executive. In 1954, when the first Chief Justice of Pakistan, the much respected and upright jurist, Mian Sir Abdur Rashid, a scion of the Mians of Baghbanpura, retired, he was not replaced by the senior most judge of the Federal Court, Justice A.S.M.Akram of East Bengal. Instead, through an act of artifice, Ghulam Mohammed secured the appointment of a fellow Punjabi and Kakezai clansman, Justice Muhammad Munir, to the highest judicial office of the land10. The latter repaid the favour a few months later by marshalling a 4-1 majority verdict in the Federal Court to uphold the governor-general’s order of dissolution of the constituent assembly.
In order to secure this majority verdict, Justice Shahabuddin Ahmed, one of the judges of the Federal Court who was considered sympathetic to the case for the restoration of the assembly, was personally prevailed upon by the repeated requests of Ghulam Mohammed to accept the temporary appointment of Governor East Bengal as a critical national service – the actual motive being to remove him from the bench. Thus a dangerous tradition of judicial bench-fixing was established, and this has sadly stood the test of time. Interestingly, in 1990 President Ghulam Ishaq Khan took a leaf out of Ghulam Mohammed’s book to make Sindh High Court Chief Justice Sajjad Ali Shah the acting Governor of Sindh, so that he could not chair the bench of the Sindh High Court which was hearing the petition against the dissolution of the Sindh Assembly11.
While Ghulam Mohammed’s mental faculties had remained intact during his time as governor-general, his physical disabilities had gone from bad to worse. In particular, it was no longer possible for his slurred speech, the result of repeated strokes, to be understood by others. This led to a host of embarrassing incidents, particularly on account of the governor-general’s interaction with foreign dignitaries. On one such occasion, Ghulam Mohammed played host to the Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and the dialogue went thus:
Ghulam Mohammed – “Last year I fell very ill”;
Nasser – “Very good, Your Excellency” (not having understood a word of what the other had said)’
Ghulam Mohammed – “Actually, I was so ill that I thought I would die”;
Nasser – “Excellent, Your Excellency”!12
On another occasion, a private luncheon with US President Eisenhower in Washington became such a painful affair with Ghulam Mohammed’s words being totally unintelligible to the former, that ambassador Syed Amjad Ali had to intervene and divert the conversation by starting a general discussion on the gifts being presented by the Pakistani delegation and Pakistani flaura and fauna, in order to prevent the governor-general from further embarrassment13.
These and several other painful incidents made it clear that Ghulam Mohammed was not fit to hold any public office, leave alone the highest office of the land. However, neither did Ghulam Mohammed have any intention of stepping down and ending the national and international shame being experienced by the country on account of his painfully evident disabilities, and nor did the weakened Prime Minister Bogra have the power or the gumption to remove him from office, particularly when the governor-general retained the support of Iskander Mirza and Ayub Khan.
Finally, Ghulam Mohammed’s inability to fulfil the duties of his office became so egregious that even Iskander Mirza and Ayub Khan had to conclude that his departure from the national scene had become imperative. In August 1955, he was prevailed upon to proceed to Switzerland for rest and recuperation and Iskander Mirza took over as acting governor-general. Ghulam Mohammed returned to Karachi after some months, but his flagging health soon led to his permanent exit from the governor-general’s office. He lived out the remaining few months of his life in quiet retirement at the house of his daughter in Karachi. When he passed away on 29 August 1956, the first person to reach his house to offer condolences was Khwaja Nazimuddin, the man Ghulam Mohammed had wronged so grievously in April 1953.
Ghulam Mohammed’s legacy is a chequered one. On the one hand, he was a man of considerable financial acumen who stabilized Pakistan’s financial affairs in the face of grave challenges after partition, set up the infrastructure of the finance and economic affairs ministry and laid the foundations for Pakistan’s international financial linkages. His command over administrative matters was of such a high nature that it was on his advice that King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia drew up the rules of succession whereby the kingship was to pass from his eldest son to the next brother and on and on, a system which stood the test of time for over 60 years until it was turned on its head by King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Saud14. For this service, a grateful monarch gifted Ghulam Mohammed a house next to the Haram Sharif, which was handed over by the latter to the Pakistan Government for the use of Pakistani pilgrims.
On the other hand, Ghulam Mohammed indulged in deep palace intrigues, trampled over constitutional conventions, negated the letter and spirit of parliamentary practices and traditions, co-opted the civil- military bureaucracy in state governance and made himself a civilian autocrat. Finally, by clinging to office even in the face of his monumental physical disabilities, he debased the office of governor-general and humiliated the country nationally and internationally. Therefore, history will judge Ghulam Mohammed severely.
References
- For a detailed account of the dismissal of Khwaja Nazimuddin see Voyage Through History Volume II, by Masarrat Hussain Zuberi (Hamdard Foundation), at pages 214-217
- See Ghulam Mohammed: His Life & Work by Mansoor Akbar Kundi (Journal of Political Studies, Vol.23, Issue -2, 2016, 341:356, at page 344
- Learning From Others, The Autobiography of Syed Babar Ali, at page 224
- The Destruction of Pakistan’s Democracy by Allen McGrath (Oxford University Press), at page 79
- Ibid, at pages 79-80
- Ibid, at pages 81-84
- See The State of Martial Rule by Ayesha Jalal (Vanguard Publications), at pages 174-175
- Ibid 1, at page 138
- Interview with Syed Amjad Ali, former Finance Minister of Pakistan, in “Pakistan – Siyaasi Jawar Bhaata” by Munir Ahmed Munir, at page 203
- A History of the Judiciary in Pakistan by Hamid Khan (Oxford University Press), at pages 30-32
- Law Courts in a Glass House, An Autobiography by Sajjad Ali Shah (Oxford University Press), at pages 146-147
- Shahabnama by Qudratullah Shahab (Sang-e-Meel Publications), at pages 444- 445
- Ibid 9, at page 201
- Reminiscences of a Pakistani Diplomat by Shahid.M.Amin (Karachi Council on Foreign Relations, Economic Affairs & Law), at page 65
