Book Name: “Pakistan: Failure in National Integration” by

Rounaq Jahan
New York: Columbia University Press, 1972

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Title Pakistan: Failure in national integration

Studies of the East Asian Institute, Columbia University
Author Rounaq Jahan
Publisher Columbia University Press, 1972
Length 248 pages

National integration and development have been

primary focuses in comparative politics for almost two decades.
Unfortunately, many of the works in this field have been highly
theoretical, using actual case material only illustratively rather than
rigorously for testing theories.

Rounaq Jahan’s – a leading political scientist, feminist

leader, and a member of the Political Science Department at Dacca
University in Bangladesh, is the author of this lucid study “Pakistan:
Failure in national integration” – a case study of the
interrelationship between nation-building, state-building, and
economic development in pre-1971 Pakistan. The book includes a
brief overview of the East-West Pakistan imbalances in the 1947-58
periods. It then systematically analyzes the Ayub regime’s
integration policies in economic development, in the bureaucracy,
and in local and party government, especially as these policies
related to East Pakistan.

The thesis shows the failure of the central government

of Pakistan to integrate its largest human sector, East Bengal, into
the Pakistani nation. Rounaq Jahan is well aware that there were
other objectives, such as state-building and economic development,
but her thesis is that there was no more crucial objective than
national integration and that if it failed, all else would. The quality of
the author’s analysis that has its most impressive impact is her
evaluation of the role of the Bengali counterelite, more particularly
the vernacular elite, in response to thrusts for change introduced by
Ayub. Rounaq Jahan's study concludes that Pakistan as a unity failed
in national integration. That seems true enough. The study covers
the period between 1947 and 1971 and focuses primarily on the
years of Ayub Khan’s presidency, 1958-69.

The elite of early post-independence Pakistan, including

the East Pakistani leadership, were cosmopolitan and nationally
oriented. Bengali representation was strongest within the political
elite and weakest in the administrative and military elites.
 Author argues that, in Pakistan the institutions needed
for national development (particularly in view of the physical
separation between the two wings) never emerged. The author
concludes that too much emphasis was placed on the needs of
“state- building” and not enough on those of “nation-building.” She
has systematically analyzed this problem with a degree of precision
not common in the literature on the subject.

As a result of Pakistan’s incapacity to develop

institutions which could effectively deal with the needs of a
modernizing society, by the mid-1950s the military assumed a
position of increasing importance. In the course of events the
military formed a close functional bond with the bureaucracy
through which it attempted to rule. The involvement of other
groups, particularly in East Pakistan, in the making and executing of
decisions in this highly constricted arrangement was limited. Ms.
Jahan notes the increasing frustration of the Bengalis over their
inability to achieve significant involvement in political and economic
affairs. This frustration resulted from, among other things, the
underrepresentation of Bengalis in the military officer corps and in
the bureaucracy and economic disparities between the two wings.
The author is in agreement that this arrangement provided much
too narrow and inflexible a foundation upon which to base
Pakistan’s political survival. In effect their fate was sealed when the
Pakistanis, after twenty-three years of trying, were unable to evolve
a rationale for their political system. In the end, Islam, which had
been the reason for a state of Pakistan in the first place, proved
unable to sustain it.

Moreover, the bureaucratic and military character of

the Ayub’s regime excluded Bengalis, especially representatives of
the new vernacular elite, from the centers of power. In time, Ayub
began to address himself to the economic disparities of the two
wings and the exploitation of East Pakistan, but the authoritarian
character of his early presidency and the manipulative aspects of his
"Basic Democracies" program militated against equitable Bengali
participation. At the same time, Bengali political leadership was
being increasingly shifted to new elites, many of whom were drawn
from the volatile universities. The only possible solution was
decentralization and meaningful participation by Bengalis at the
center, but decentralization threatened the basic goals of state-
building and Bengali participation threatened West Pakistani
dominance. The issue of full Bengali participation raised the
possibility of Bengali control of the center, which was unacceptable
to all major groups in the West.

In another way it is somewhat polemical in the sense

that little effort is made to examine what was transpiring in East
Pakistan between the numerous political aspirants and their seldom
harmonious organizations. The author’s insistence that the West
Pakistan leadership’s distorted sense of superiority and latent male-
violence is the crux of the dilemma apparently nullified any analysis
of internal Bengali politics.

The author is correct in stating that the growing

inability and unwillingness to form a national party or a national
coalition was an indicator of the process of national disintegration
during the Ayub regime, but it is also true that Ayub declined to use
ruthless methods to forge such a party or coalition. Pakistan was
never intended to be a one-party state. Ayub did aim at a future
merger of his “Basic Democracies” and the “Pakistan Muslim
League”, but little serious effort was put into this activity after 1966.
Ayub’s dependence on the higher bureaucracy, while unfortunate,
was still a more civilized approach to the problem of governing the
country in the absence of coherent political organization. Ayub
made many mistakes, and he certainly was insensitive to popular
complaints, particularly those emanating from East Pakistan. He was
no doubt ill-equipped for the responsibility which he assumed in
1958, but it is still difficult to classify him as an unrepentant dictator.

Rounaq Jahan's book is one that can be read with profit

by specialists of several kinds. It is, first and most importantly, a
meticulous examination of the efforts at national integration. The
wealth of detail about the failure of Pakistan and the politics of
Bangladesh, provided in eight table-packed chapters and an
epilogue, makes this a valuable contribution. Students of Pakistan
politics should welcome this volume, particularly as it represents
one of the few books to concentrate its attention on the subject of
political decay.