The Rawalpindi Conspiracy 1951 —The First Coup Attempt in Pakistan
May 08, 2014
A banker by profession, Salim Ansar has a passion for history and historic books. His personal library already boasts a treasure trove of over 7,000 rare and unique books.
Every week, we shall take a leaf from one such book and treat you to a little taste of history.
BOOK NAME: The Rawalpindi Conspiracy 1951 — The First Coup Attempt in Pakistan
AUTHOR: Hasan Zaheer
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press - Karachi
DATE OF PUBLICATION: 1998
The following excerpt has been taken from Pages: 210 — 215
“This authoritative account of the first military coup d etat in Pakistan that came to be known as the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case is based on the official documents declassified (at the request of the author) by the government of Pakistan under the Archival Act. The records thus released contained the material placed before the Tribunal during the trial and included highly incriminating documents in the handwriting of the coup leader, Major General Akbar Khan.”
The First Coup Attempt In Pakistan - 1951
“Akbar Khan had started conspiring from the middle of 1949 less than two years after Independence - to overthrow the Prime Minister in early December of that year. It was a tremendous achievement of the founding leadership that it had set up a full-fledged functional state and government within this brief period. Akbar Khan and his accomplices were quite ignorant of the problems faced by the country and the constraints on the government. There was the problem of the refugees and there were economic problems. Considering the stupendous problems and the meagre resources, the government was handling the situation adequately. The fact was that Akbar Khan, the leader of the Conspiracy, and Latif Khan, his great admirer and an activist in the first part of the Conspiracy up to December 1949, were driven by Bonapartism. Ayub Khan was not far from the truth when he attributed rapid promotions in the army as one of the causes of the Conspiracy: ‘This raised expectations to unwarranted heights ... Perfectly sensible people, Brigadiers and Generals, would go about bemoaning their lot. Each one of them was a Bonaparte, albeit an unhappy one’. The American Assistant Secretary of State, George McGhee, perceptively remarked at the time that the Conspiracy’s ‘root lay in the ambition of senior officers concerned’.
“Sajjad Zaheer came to Lahore in August 1948 and decided to make it the headquarters of the Pakistan regional committee for West Pakistan. The city had many advantages: it had a small band of experienced workers like Ferozuddin Mansoor, Mirza Ibrahim, Eric Cyprian, C. R. Aslam, Muhammad Afzal, and Amir Haider (at Rawalpindi). Mian Iftikharuddin who owned, and Faiz Ahmed Faiz who edited the newspaper with the largest circulation in the country were friends of Sajjad Zaheer and a source of outside strength to the party in diverse ways.” Lahore was the centre of education; because the railway headquarters and workshops were located here, there was a fairly well developed trade union movement; and the city published a large number of magazines and newspapers, representing all opinions, including leftist. At Karachi, the party cadres had been severely depleted by the migration of non-Muslims and there was little chance of the gap being filled for quite some time to come.
“The party developed rifts from the very beginning. Eric Cyprian and Mirza Ibrahim distrusted Sajjad Zaheer. They differed with him on matters of both policy and personnel. On his return from the congress, Cyprian conveyed the party; line that it should consolidate and go slow. But Sajjad Zaheer favoured a more aggressive course of action. In this he was supported by Muhammad Hussain Ata, who was still more radical, enjoyed the confidence of the secretary general, and was a member of the regional central committee. Soon after Sajjad Zaheers settling down in Lahore in August, Cyprian wrote to him about the militancy of Ata who, Cyprian said, ‘has become a problem and his visits to W. Punjab have increased our difficulties ... he is working up an agitation against what he considers the wrong policies and decisions of the Punjab party, the NWR [North-Western Railways] union etc.’ Ata advocated a mass struggle for which Cyprian thought the party was not yet ready; he further advocated that a strike should be called, even if it lacked complete mass support. Ata, on the other hand, had written to Sajjad Zaheer in early 1948 about his differences with Cyprian and Ibrahim on the conflict between Tito and Cominform and the printing of the party name on Naya Zamana.
“From the beginning, Sajjad Zaheer had tried to induce dedicated workers from India to come to Pakistan to strengthen the newly-formed party. Prominent among those who migrated from India for party work were Sibte Hasan, Mirza lshfaq Beg, Hasan Nasir, and Hasan Abidi. Sibte Hasan was from district Azamgarh (eastern UP) and was educated at the Ewing Christian College, Allahabad, and Aligarh Muslim University from 1930 to 1934. In 1941, he became a regular member of the district Communist Party, Lucknow, and the following year he was called to Bombay as assistant editor of the party paper. In February 1946, he left for the USA and got an MA degree from Columbia University in May 1947. While touring Europe and meeting members of the communist parties of various countries in August 1947, he was recalled by the Communist Party of India to Bombay and instructed to report to the Pakistan party. He came to Lahore from Karachi and contacted Sajjad Zaheer who was staying with Fazalur Rahman, the son of Justice Sir Abdur Rahman (president of the Tribunal) in the latter’s bungalow on Davis Road; as Sir Abdur Rahman was in Karachi, the house was in the charge of his son. Fazalur Rahman invited Sibte Hasan also to stay with him. Sajjad Zaheer entrusted the editing and publication of the party paper, Naya Zaman, to a cell headed by Sibte Hasan. Sibte Hasan was the trusted aide of the secretary-general who made him convenor of both the regional committee and the central secretariat (both highest decision-making bodies) with the authority to call meetings in the absence from Lahore of Sajjad Zaheer. Mirza Ishfaq Beg was from Bhopal. He obtained his MA and LLB degrees from Aligarh University, worked for a time as editor of a leftist daily and weekly, and then became a whole time worker of the Communist Party in Delhi. In 1943, he shifted to Bombay and from there came to Lahore in September 1948 and was appointed cashier of the central party and entrusted with the organisation of underground workers. He was also given charge of the technical cell which was responsible for issuance of circulars, letters, leaflets, etc. Hasan Nasir was secretary of the district organizing committee, Karachi, member of the provincial organizing committee, Hyderabad, and a member of the regional committee. He was from Hyderabad Deccan. Hasan Abidi was from the UP and came to Karachi in 1948. He was directed to proceed to Lahore to act as courier and personal assistant to the secretary general.
“During its formative period, three personalities provided the ideological content to the Conspiracy. They were Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Latif Afghani, and Nasim Akbar Khan. Akbar Khan had known Faiz for a number of years; the latter was frequently a house guest at Akbar Khan’s. During the tribal invasion of Kashmir and later, Faiz was chief editor of Progressive Papers Ltd., which included The Pakistan Times and other newspapers and Akbar took him to the front lines on various occasions and kept him as aguest in his camp. Faiz was deeply impressed by the soldierly qualities of Akbar Khan who must have been influenced in turn by the intellectual horizons of Faiz. Their relationship was quite intimate and continued after Akbar Khan’s transfer from Kashmir. Visitors to Akbar Khan’s house often found Faiz staying there. Faiz Ahmed Faiz was not a regular Communist Party member but an activist in front organizations, and was on friendly terms with Sajjad Zaheer and other senior leaders. It is certain that over the long period during which the coup matured, Akbar Khan and his wife must have discussed it with Faiz who, in turn, must have briefed the Communist Party leadership.
“Akbar Khan was firming up the coup plans to be executed during the Prime Minister’s tour of the NWFP in the first or second week of December. The prosecution had produced evidence during the trial about the visit of Akbar Khan to Lahore in the third week of November where he obviously went out of his way to meet the Russian Progressive Writers’ delegation, at social functions arranged in their honour and separately also. A serving army officer or a civil officer would not normally be found moving around in such radical circles. In the Fatehjung meeting on 21 December, Akbar Khan exhorted Siddique Raja and Sadiq Khan to collect party funds and send them to Nasim Akbar Khan who was arranging the dissemination of literature through underground workers among army personnel. It appears that Akbar Khan and the Begum had developed contacts with the Communist Party about the coup plans. Given the kind of control that the Russians exercised over the communist movements in various countries, particularly the emerging colonial societies, it is reasonable to assume that news about Akbar Khan’s coup plans had reached Moscow. If so, the visit of the Pakistan Prime Minister would have been a great embarrassment to the Soviet government when he had been overthrown with the support of the communists. This seems to be at least one explanation of the Soviet government extending an invitation with such warmth and then going back on it. It would be difficult to establish this hypothesis with complete certainty, but the coincidence of the period when the Conspiracy was maturing and the Russians were trying to wriggle out of the invitation is too glaring to ignore totally the possibility of a linkage between the two proceedings.”
Postscript
“Asghar Khan relates the following story which also illustrates Akbar Khan’s impetuosity:
“On 14 August 1947, there was a reception by the Quaid-i-Azam for Mountbatten. A group of armed services officers was also invited, and I and Akbar Khan were among them. Akbar Khan said, ‘Let us go and talk to the Quaid’. So we went to him and Akbar said, ‘Sir, we are very happy at Independence and the emergence of Pakistan. But our hopes of a new system have not been realized. We still have the same colonial structure [referring mainly to British officers]. We should bring about a change in line with the genius of our people’. He continued in the same strain. The Quaid gave Akbar Khan a withering look and in his usual style, pointing with his finger, snubbed him: ‘Look here, you are a soldier. You have no business to criticize the government. You must concentrate on your profession’.”
salimansar52@gmail.com
www.facebook.com/PagesFromHistoryBySalimAnsar
Every week, we shall take a leaf from one such book and treat you to a little taste of history.
BOOK NAME: The Rawalpindi Conspiracy 1951 — The First Coup Attempt in Pakistan
AUTHOR: Hasan Zaheer
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press - Karachi
DATE OF PUBLICATION: 1998
The following excerpt has been taken from Pages: 210 — 215
“This authoritative account of the first military coup d etat in Pakistan that came to be known as the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case is based on the official documents declassified (at the request of the author) by the government of Pakistan under the Archival Act. The records thus released contained the material placed before the Tribunal during the trial and included highly incriminating documents in the handwriting of the coup leader, Major General Akbar Khan.”
The First Coup Attempt In Pakistan - 1951
“Akbar Khan had started conspiring from the middle of 1949 less than two years after Independence - to overthrow the Prime Minister in early December of that year. It was a tremendous achievement of the founding leadership that it had set up a full-fledged functional state and government within this brief period. Akbar Khan and his accomplices were quite ignorant of the problems faced by the country and the constraints on the government. There was the problem of the refugees and there were economic problems. Considering the stupendous problems and the meagre resources, the government was handling the situation adequately. The fact was that Akbar Khan, the leader of the Conspiracy, and Latif Khan, his great admirer and an activist in the first part of the Conspiracy up to December 1949, were driven by Bonapartism. Ayub Khan was not far from the truth when he attributed rapid promotions in the army as one of the causes of the Conspiracy: ‘This raised expectations to unwarranted heights ... Perfectly sensible people, Brigadiers and Generals, would go about bemoaning their lot. Each one of them was a Bonaparte, albeit an unhappy one’. The American Assistant Secretary of State, George McGhee, perceptively remarked at the time that the Conspiracy’s ‘root lay in the ambition of senior officers concerned’.
“Sajjad Zaheer came to Lahore in August 1948 and decided to make it the headquarters of the Pakistan regional committee for West Pakistan. The city had many advantages: it had a small band of experienced workers like Ferozuddin Mansoor, Mirza Ibrahim, Eric Cyprian, C. R. Aslam, Muhammad Afzal, and Amir Haider (at Rawalpindi). Mian Iftikharuddin who owned, and Faiz Ahmed Faiz who edited the newspaper with the largest circulation in the country were friends of Sajjad Zaheer and a source of outside strength to the party in diverse ways.” Lahore was the centre of education; because the railway headquarters and workshops were located here, there was a fairly well developed trade union movement; and the city published a large number of magazines and newspapers, representing all opinions, including leftist. At Karachi, the party cadres had been severely depleted by the migration of non-Muslims and there was little chance of the gap being filled for quite some time to come.
“The party developed rifts from the very beginning. Eric Cyprian and Mirza Ibrahim distrusted Sajjad Zaheer. They differed with him on matters of both policy and personnel. On his return from the congress, Cyprian conveyed the party; line that it should consolidate and go slow. But Sajjad Zaheer favoured a more aggressive course of action. In this he was supported by Muhammad Hussain Ata, who was still more radical, enjoyed the confidence of the secretary general, and was a member of the regional central committee. Soon after Sajjad Zaheers settling down in Lahore in August, Cyprian wrote to him about the militancy of Ata who, Cyprian said, ‘has become a problem and his visits to W. Punjab have increased our difficulties ... he is working up an agitation against what he considers the wrong policies and decisions of the Punjab party, the NWR [North-Western Railways] union etc.’ Ata advocated a mass struggle for which Cyprian thought the party was not yet ready; he further advocated that a strike should be called, even if it lacked complete mass support. Ata, on the other hand, had written to Sajjad Zaheer in early 1948 about his differences with Cyprian and Ibrahim on the conflict between Tito and Cominform and the printing of the party name on Naya Zamana.
“From the beginning, Sajjad Zaheer had tried to induce dedicated workers from India to come to Pakistan to strengthen the newly-formed party. Prominent among those who migrated from India for party work were Sibte Hasan, Mirza lshfaq Beg, Hasan Nasir, and Hasan Abidi. Sibte Hasan was from district Azamgarh (eastern UP) and was educated at the Ewing Christian College, Allahabad, and Aligarh Muslim University from 1930 to 1934. In 1941, he became a regular member of the district Communist Party, Lucknow, and the following year he was called to Bombay as assistant editor of the party paper. In February 1946, he left for the USA and got an MA degree from Columbia University in May 1947. While touring Europe and meeting members of the communist parties of various countries in August 1947, he was recalled by the Communist Party of India to Bombay and instructed to report to the Pakistan party. He came to Lahore from Karachi and contacted Sajjad Zaheer who was staying with Fazalur Rahman, the son of Justice Sir Abdur Rahman (president of the Tribunal) in the latter’s bungalow on Davis Road; as Sir Abdur Rahman was in Karachi, the house was in the charge of his son. Fazalur Rahman invited Sibte Hasan also to stay with him. Sajjad Zaheer entrusted the editing and publication of the party paper, Naya Zaman, to a cell headed by Sibte Hasan. Sibte Hasan was the trusted aide of the secretary-general who made him convenor of both the regional committee and the central secretariat (both highest decision-making bodies) with the authority to call meetings in the absence from Lahore of Sajjad Zaheer. Mirza Ishfaq Beg was from Bhopal. He obtained his MA and LLB degrees from Aligarh University, worked for a time as editor of a leftist daily and weekly, and then became a whole time worker of the Communist Party in Delhi. In 1943, he shifted to Bombay and from there came to Lahore in September 1948 and was appointed cashier of the central party and entrusted with the organisation of underground workers. He was also given charge of the technical cell which was responsible for issuance of circulars, letters, leaflets, etc. Hasan Nasir was secretary of the district organizing committee, Karachi, member of the provincial organizing committee, Hyderabad, and a member of the regional committee. He was from Hyderabad Deccan. Hasan Abidi was from the UP and came to Karachi in 1948. He was directed to proceed to Lahore to act as courier and personal assistant to the secretary general.
“During its formative period, three personalities provided the ideological content to the Conspiracy. They were Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Latif Afghani, and Nasim Akbar Khan. Akbar Khan had known Faiz for a number of years; the latter was frequently a house guest at Akbar Khan’s. During the tribal invasion of Kashmir and later, Faiz was chief editor of Progressive Papers Ltd., which included The Pakistan Times and other newspapers and Akbar took him to the front lines on various occasions and kept him as aguest in his camp. Faiz was deeply impressed by the soldierly qualities of Akbar Khan who must have been influenced in turn by the intellectual horizons of Faiz. Their relationship was quite intimate and continued after Akbar Khan’s transfer from Kashmir. Visitors to Akbar Khan’s house often found Faiz staying there. Faiz Ahmed Faiz was not a regular Communist Party member but an activist in front organizations, and was on friendly terms with Sajjad Zaheer and other senior leaders. It is certain that over the long period during which the coup matured, Akbar Khan and his wife must have discussed it with Faiz who, in turn, must have briefed the Communist Party leadership.
“Akbar Khan was firming up the coup plans to be executed during the Prime Minister’s tour of the NWFP in the first or second week of December. The prosecution had produced evidence during the trial about the visit of Akbar Khan to Lahore in the third week of November where he obviously went out of his way to meet the Russian Progressive Writers’ delegation, at social functions arranged in their honour and separately also. A serving army officer or a civil officer would not normally be found moving around in such radical circles. In the Fatehjung meeting on 21 December, Akbar Khan exhorted Siddique Raja and Sadiq Khan to collect party funds and send them to Nasim Akbar Khan who was arranging the dissemination of literature through underground workers among army personnel. It appears that Akbar Khan and the Begum had developed contacts with the Communist Party about the coup plans. Given the kind of control that the Russians exercised over the communist movements in various countries, particularly the emerging colonial societies, it is reasonable to assume that news about Akbar Khan’s coup plans had reached Moscow. If so, the visit of the Pakistan Prime Minister would have been a great embarrassment to the Soviet government when he had been overthrown with the support of the communists. This seems to be at least one explanation of the Soviet government extending an invitation with such warmth and then going back on it. It would be difficult to establish this hypothesis with complete certainty, but the coincidence of the period when the Conspiracy was maturing and the Russians were trying to wriggle out of the invitation is too glaring to ignore totally the possibility of a linkage between the two proceedings.”
Postscript
“Asghar Khan relates the following story which also illustrates Akbar Khan’s impetuosity:
“On 14 August 1947, there was a reception by the Quaid-i-Azam for Mountbatten. A group of armed services officers was also invited, and I and Akbar Khan were among them. Akbar Khan said, ‘Let us go and talk to the Quaid’. So we went to him and Akbar said, ‘Sir, we are very happy at Independence and the emergence of Pakistan. But our hopes of a new system have not been realized. We still have the same colonial structure [referring mainly to British officers]. We should bring about a change in line with the genius of our people’. He continued in the same strain. The Quaid gave Akbar Khan a withering look and in his usual style, pointing with his finger, snubbed him: ‘Look here, you are a soldier. You have no business to criticize the government. You must concentrate on your profession’.”
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www.facebook.com/PagesFromHistoryBySalimAnsar
