Ayub Khan

Ayub Khan took power in Pakistan's first coup, presided over a decade of growth that economists admired and Pakistanis resented, and was forced out by the people the growth had not reached. He was a Pathan from Hazara, trained at Sandhurst, served in Burma, and became the first Pakistani commander-in-chief of the army in 1951. In October 1958 he supported the president's abrogation of the constitution and then removed him within three weeks, making himself the ruler and later, by referendum, president. He introduced Basic Democracies, an indirect system in which eighty thousand local councillors elected the president, which he presented as democracy suited to a poor country and his opponents read as a device to avoid a vote. His decade saw industrial growth of six per cent a year, the Green Revolution in Punjab, the Indus Waters Treaty with India, the Mangla and Tarbela dams and the building of Islamabad; it also concentrated wealth so visibly that his own chief economist said twenty-two families held most of the country's industry. He beat Fatima Jinnah in a contested election in 1965 that was widely believed to have been managed. The war with India that year ended in a stalemate and a settlement at Tashkent that Pakistanis took as a defeat, and his foreign minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto resigned and turned against him. Riots in both wings forced him out in March 1969; he handed power to Yahya Khan rather than to the speaker, as his own constitution required. He promoted himself to field marshal while in office. His memoir is called Friends Not Masters, a title aimed at the United States, whose alliance he had joined and whose arms embargo in 1965 he resented. He moved the capital from Karachi to a new city at Islamabad, next to the army headquarters at Rawalpindi. His son Gohar Ayub Khan became foreign minister in the 1990s.

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