Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan, H.Pk,
HJ,
S.Pk, psc
(February 4, 1917 – August 10, 1980) was the
President of Pakistan from 1969 to
1971, following the resignation of
Ayub
Khan. He has one son,
Ali Yahya and
one daughter,
Yasmeen Khan.
Early life
Yahya Khan
was born in Chakwal
, Pakistan,
in 1917 and traces his ancestry to Persia by way of antiquarian knowledge. His family
descended from the elite soldier class of
Nader Shah, the
Persian ruler who conquered
Delhi in the 18th century. According to a
number of sources, including
Time
magazine, Yahya Khan was an ethnic
Pathan.
Army career
Yahya Khan, H.Pk, HJ, S.Pk, psc joined the
British Army, and served in
World War II as an
officer in the
4th Infantry Division .
He served
in Iraq
, Italy
, and
North Africa.
Yahya Khan was commissioned from
Indian Military Academy Dehra
Dun on 15 July 1939.
An infantry officer from the 4/10 Baluch Regiment, Yahya saw action during
World War II in North Africa where he was captured by the Axis
Forces in June 1942 and interned in a prisoner of war camp in
Italy from where he escaped in the third
attempt.
Career before becoming commander-in-chief
In 1947 he
was instrumental in not letting the Indian officers shift books
from the famous library of the British Indian Staff
College at Quetta
, where Yahya
was posted as the only Muslim instructor at the time of partition
of India.
Yahya became a brigadier at the age of 34 and commanded the
105 Independent Brigade, which was deployed on the
ceasefire line in Kashmir in 1951-52. Later Yahya, as Deputy Chief
of General Staff, was selected to head the army’s planning board
set up by Ayub to modernise the Pakistan Army in 1954-57. Yahya
also performed the duties of Chief of General Staff from 1958 to
1962 from where he went on to command an infantry division from
1962 to 1965.
Upon the
formation of Pakistan, Khan helped set up an officer's school in
Quetta, and commanded an infantry division during the
Indo-Pakistani War of
1965. Immediately after the 1965 war Major General Yahya
Khan who had commanded the 7th Division in
Operation
Grand Slam was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant
General, appointed Deputy Army Commander in Chief and Commander in
Chief designate in March 1966. At promotion, Yahya Khan superseded
two of his seniors, Lt Gen Altaf Qadir and Lt Gen Bakhtiar
Rana.
As commander-in-chief
Yahya energetically started reorganising the Pakistan Army in 1965.
The post 1965 situation saw major organisational as well as
technical changes in the Pakistan Army. Till 1965 it was thought
that divisions could function effectively while getting orders
directly from the army’s GHQ. This idea failed miserably in the
1965 war and the need to have intermediate corps headquarters in
between the GHQ and the fighting combat divisions was recognised as
a foremost operational necessity after the 1965 war. In 1965 war
the Pakistan Army had only one corps headquarter (i.e. the 1st
Corps Headquarters).
Soon after
the war had started the U.S.
had imposed
an embargo on military aid on both India
and Pakistan
. This
embargo did not affect the Indian Army but produced major changes
in the Pakistan Army’s technical composition. US Secretary of State
Dean Rusk well summed it up when he said,
"Well if you are going to fight, go ahead and fight, but we’re
not going to pay for it".
Pakistan
now turned to China
for military
aid and the Chinese tank T-59 started replacing the US
M-47/48 tanks as the Pakistan Army’s
MBT (Main Battle Tank) from 1966. 80 tanks,
the first batch of
T-59, a low-grade
version of the
Russian T-54/55 series were delivered to Pakistan
in 1965-66. The first batch was displayed in the Joint Services Day
Parade on 23 March 1966. The 1965 War had proved that Pakistan
Army’s tank infantry ratio was lopsided and more infantry was
required. Three more infantry divisions (9, 16 and 17 Divisions)
largely equipped with Chinese equipment and popularly referred to
by the rank and file as
"The China Divisions" were raised
by the beginning of 1968. Two more corps headquarters i.e. 2nd
Corps Headquarters (
Jhelum-Ravi Corridor) and 4th
Corps Headquarters (
Ravi-Sutlej Corridor) were
raised.
President of Pakistan
Ayub Khan was
President of Pakistan for most of the
1960s, but by the end of the decade, popular resentment had boiled
over against him. Pakistan had fallen into a state of disarray, and
he handed over power to Yahya Khan, who immediately imposed
martial law. Once Ayub handed over power
to Yahya Khan on 25 March 1969 Yahya inherited a two-decade
constitutional problem of inter-provincial ethnic rivalry between
the
Punjabi-
Pashtun-
Mohajir dominated
West Pakistan province and the
ethnically
Bengali Muslim
East Pakistan province. In addition Yahya also
inherited an 11 year old problem of transforming an essentially one
man ruled country to a democratic country, which was the
ideological basis of the anti-Ayub movement of 1968-69. As an Army
Chief Yahya had all the capabilities, qualifications and potential.
But Yahya inherited an extremely complex problem and was forced to
perform the multiple roles of
caretaker head of the
country,
drafter of a provisional constitution, resolving
the
One Unit question, satisfying the frustrations and the
sense of exploitation and discrimination successively created in
the
East Wing by a series of government policies since
1948. All these were complex problems and the seeds of Pakistan
Army’s defeat and humiliation in December 1971 lay in the fact that
Yahya Khan blundered unwittingly into the thankless task of fixing
the problems of Pakistan’s political and administrative system
which had been accumulating for 20 years and had their actual
origins in the pre-1947 British policies towards the Bengali
Muslims.
The American author
Ziring observed that,
"Yahya Khan has been widely portrayed as a ruthless
uncompromising insensitive and grossly inept leader...While Yahya
cannot escape responsibility for these tragic events, it is also on
record that he did not act alone...All the major actors of the
period were creatures of a historic legacy and a psycho-political
milieu which did not lend itself to accommodation and compromise,
to bargaining and a reasonable settlement. Nurtured on
conspiracy theories, they were all conditioned to act in a manner
that neglected agreeable solutions and promoted violent
judgements”.
Yahya Khan attempted to solve Pakistan’s constitutional and
inter-provincial/regional rivalry problems once he took over power
from
Ayub Khan in March 1969. The tragedy
of the whole affair was the fact that all actions that Yahya took,
although correct in principle, were too late in timing, and served
only to further intensify the political polarisation between the
East and West wings.
- He dissolved the one unit restoring the pre-1955 provinces of
West Pakistan
- Promised free direct, one man one vote, fair elections on adult
franchise, a basic human right which had been denied to the
Pakistani people since the pre-independence 1946 elections by
political inefficiency, double play and intrigue, by civilian
governments, from 1947 to 1958 and by Ayub’s one man rule from 1958
to 1969.
However dissolution of one unit did not lead to the positive
results that it might have led to in case "One Unit" was dissolved
earlier. Yahya also made an attempt to accommodate the East
Pakistanis by abolishing the principle of parity, thereby hoping
that greater share in the assembly would redress their wounded
ethnic regional pride and ensure the integrity of Pakistan. Instead
of satisfying the Bengalis it intensified their separatism, since
they felt that the west wing had politically suppressed them since
1958. Thus the rise of anti West Wing sentiment in the East
Wing.
The last days of Pakistani East Bengal
Yahya announced in his broadcast to the nation on 28 July 1969, his
firm intention to redress Bengali grievances, the first major step
in this direction being, the doubling of Bengali quota in the
defence services. At this time there were just Seven infantry
battalions of the East Pakistanis. Yahya’s announcement was late by
about twenty years. Yahya’s intention to raise more pure Bengali
battalions was opposed by Major General Khadim Hussain Raja, the
General Officer Commanding 14 Division in East Pakistan suggesting
that the Bengalis were "too meek".
Within a year he had set up a framework for elections that were
held in December 1970. The results of the elections saw Pakistan
split into its Eastern and Western halves. In
East Pakistan, the
Awami League (led by
Mujibur Rahman) held almost all of the seats,
but none in
West Pakistan. In
West Pakistan, the
Pakistan Peoples Party (led by
Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto) won the
lion's share of the seats, but none in East Pakistan. Though AL had
162 seats in the National Assembly against 88 of PPP, this led to a
situation where one of the leaders of the two parties would have to
give up power and allow the other to be
Prime Minister of Pakistan. The
situation also increased agitation, especially in East Pakistan as
it became apparent that Sheikh Mujib was being denied of his
legitimate claim to be the Prime Minister of Pakistan.
Yahya Khan could not reach a compromise, and instead cracked down
on the political agitation in East Pakistan with a massive campaign
of
genocide named by
"Operation Searchlight" which began on 25 March, 1971, targeting,
among others, Muslims, Hindus, Bengali intellectuals, students and
political activists. 3 million people in the east Pakistan were
killed in the next few months along with another 400,000 women who
were raped. Khan also arrested
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman upon Bhutto's
insistence and appointed Brigadier
Rahimuddin Khan (later General) to preside
over a special tribunal dealing with Mujib's case. Rahimuddin
awarded Mujib the
death sentence, and
President Yahya put the verdict into abeyance.
Yahya's crackdown,
however, had led to a civil
war within Pakistan, and eventually drew India into what
would extend into the Indo-Pakistani War of
1971. The end result was the establishment of
Bangladesh
as an independent republic, and this was to lead
Khan to step down. After Pakistan was defeated in 1971, most
of the blame was heaped on Yahya. Despite overlooking and ordering
numerous acts of genocide against the Bengali people, General Khan
was never tried for
crimes
against humanity.
As
President Khan helped to establish the communication channel
between the United
States and the People's Republic of China
, which would be used to set up the Nixon trip in
1972.
Fall from power
Later
overwhelming public anger over Pakistan's defeat by India and the
division of Pakistan into two parts boiled into street
demonstrations throughout Pakistan, rumours of an impending coup d'état by younger
army officers against the government of President Mohammed Agha
Yahya Khan swept the country. Yahya became the
highest-ranking casualty of the war: to forestall further unrest,
on December 20, 1971 he surrendered to
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, age 43, the
ambitious leader of
West Pakistan's
powerful People's Party.
Shortly
after Yahya stepped down, Zulfikar
Ali Bhutto reversed Rahimuddin Khan's verdict, released
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and saw
him off to London
.
Pakistani
President Zulfikar
Ali Bhutto, in a supreme irony, ordered the house arrest of his
predecessor, Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan, the man who imprisoned Mujib
in the first place. Both actions produced headlines round
the world.
Death
Yahya
Khan died in August 1980, in Rawalpindi
.
References
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