PAKISTAN: The Scrimmage

“In this country,” said one Pakistani not long ago, “politics is not a race. It’s a scrimmage.” Last week the scrimmage in Pakistan got so heated that nobody, including the players, was quite sure who had the ball.

The trouble started in East Pakistan, the tropical province separated from the rest of Pakistan by nearly 1,000 miles of Indian territory. Early last week thousands of angry peasants poured into the East Pakistan capital of Dacca to protest against persistent food shortages that have almost doubled the price of rice in the last two months. When the crowd swelled to 15,000, Dacca’s police opened fire “in self-defense.” The riots kept on for two days, and finally, after five rioters had been killed and two leading politicos smeared with filth by the mob, East Pakistan’s nervous Governor Fazlul Huk gave in and asked the rabble-rousing Awami League Party to form a new provincial government.

Rule of East Pakistan by the Awami League, which wants Pakistan to switch to a neutralist foreign policy, carried unpleasant implications for the U.S., which considers Pakistan its most reliable ally on the Asian continent. It also posed a considerably more immediate threat to Prime Minister Mohamad Ali, 51, the lean financial expert who has led Pakistan’s central government for 13 turbulent months. In the last two years Pakistani politicians have taken to switching parties with all the abandon of a woman trying on hats, and it was now almost certain that a number of East Pakistan members of the National Assembly, their eyes fixed on the main chance, would soon switch their allegiance to the Awami League, which has been in bitter opposition to Ali.

Even without this flank attack, however, Ali’s position was untenable. On the same day that the Awami League took over East Pakistan, two of Ali’s central government ministers deserted his Moslem League Party, leaving the league with only eleven out of 80 seats in the National Assembly. To make matters worse, the Moslem League itself was talking of expelling Ali on the grounds that he had been dealing over-enthusiastically with other parties in the coalition on which his government depends.

Late last week, protesting bitterly at “the campaign of vilification and slander against me.” Ali resigned both the premiership and his membership in the Moslem League. Pakistan President Iskander Mirza, announcing that he wanted time to review the play up to that point, asked Ali to remain on the job temporarily. At week’s end Mirza was still deep in review and looking for a ball carrier.