Word: liaquat
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Though both Pakistan and India began as parliamentary democracies, they soon drifted along divergent political paths. Jawaharlal Nehru lived to guide India into a role as the world's largest democracy (pop. 547 million), but Pakistan's founding leaders, Mohammed Ali Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan, died soon after independence and eventually the country fell" under military control. Since the military was dominated by the Pathans, Punjabis and Baluchis of the West, it became established policy to short-change the poorer, more densely populated eastern wing, which before the refugee exodus began last March had a population of 78 million...
...Pakistan, upon its creation in 1947, began to loosen some of the old restrictions on women: purdah lost ground, women got a couple of seats (which they still hold) in the parliament. But the mullahs of Islam have reasserted the old customs; the Begum Liaquat Ali Khan, widow of the assassinated Premier and once a militant suffragist, has been forced into a quiet life, and the wife of the new Premier hides uncomplainingly in strictest purdah...
...objected to levies as high as 80% or 90% on his crops, the zamindar could seize his land (or his daughter) in payment. The zamindars gradually became the landholders, the peasants mere sharecroppers. "The most creditable products of zamindari," wrote the London Economist, "have been Rabindranath Tagore, the poet, Liaquat Ali Khan, the Prime Minister, and the Maharaj Kumar of Vizianagram, the cricketer . . . The majority have been as vicious as Thackeray's Lord Steyne, as idle as Jane Austen's Mr. Bennett, and as drunken as a Surtees squire...
...moderate, like Liaquat. The fanatic's bullets which brought down Liaquat killed a good and able man, but failed to insure the rule of fanaticism...
Meeting on the night of Liaquat's death, the Pakistan cabinet appointed as his successor Khwaja Nazimuddin. Roly-poly Nazimuddin, 57, who looks like a jovial friar in his long black Moslem coat, has been Governor General of Pakistan since 1948. Educated-like Nehru-at Cambridge, Nazimuddin opposed British rule in India, rose to be Premier of his native East Bengal, and in 1946 renounced his British knighthood. He is a devout Moslem, has made the pilgrimage to Mecca...