Word: pakistan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Wreathed by a wispy beard, his face reflects an almost otherworldly serenity. As he plays with his grandchildren in a tiny village 60 miles north of the East Pakistan capital of Dacca, Abdul Hamid Bhashani, 86, looks the part of a Moslem maulana or guru, and to millions of Bengali peasants, he is. But the kindly grandfather is also Pakistan's most outspoken advocate of violence...
...Bhashani inspired the riots that last month forced President Ayub Khan to step down from the presidency. Now Bhashani is the most severe single threat to a fragile peace brought to the troubled and geographically divided land by the imposition of martial law. Under fear of harsh penalties, Pakistan's other politicians, including Bhashani's chief Bengali rival, moderate Sheik Mujibur Rahman, have kept silent. Not Bhashani, who continues to receive newsmen and followers at his bamboo-walled hut. "What have I to fear?" he asked TIME Correspondent Dan Coggin, as he adjusted his soiled straw skull...
...PAKISTAN'S President Mohammed Ayub Khan might well embrace that melancholy observation as his political epitaph. He had promised to renounce power on the expiration of his presidential term next year, and meanwhile to restore parliamentary democracy to his disturbed land. Far from calming the civil disorders racking Pakistan, his renunciation intensified the dissensions threatening to tear apart the fragile unity of East and West Pakistan, and led to still more bloody rioting. Last week, with the disruption beyond his control, Ayub abruptly departed, turning over to the army the world's fifth most populous nation. His voice...
...politicians, though still as divided among themselves as when Ayub once dismissed them as "five cats tied by their tails," were emboldened to press on. Not wanting to wait for the promised elections, they demanded satisfaction of other grievances immediately. So did the mobs in the streets: in East Pakistan, two weeks of vigilante murders, mostly of lower officials in the Ayub regime, cost more than 200 lives, and in the West hundreds of factories were strikebound by workers demanding better wages...
What forced Ayub to hasten his departure more than anything else was a challenge from East Pakistan's popular Sheik Mujibur Rahman. The impatient "Mujib" threatened to carry to the National Assembly his demands for purbodesh, a kind of associate statehood, for East Pakistan's Bengalis, which would seriously weaken the central government in Rawalpindi. If Mujib's East Pakistanis had their way, Ayub feared, what would prevent similar demands in West Pakistan that the province be carved up into four separate states? Aware for the first time that he might lose control of his once rubber...