2 MARCHING TOWARD MARTIAL LAW
In the early 1950s, the central issue of constitutional politics in Pakistan was the proper distribution of administrative, political, and economic power between the center and the provinces, especially East Pakistan. One of the toughest challenges to the Islamic identity of Pakistan championed by the founding fathers was the early emergence of Bengali linguistic nationalism. Key to finding a solution to this problem was evolving a working federal constitutional formula to peacefully integrate the Bengalis into the national mainstream. However, the West Pakistan–controlled central government was loath to concede meaningful provincial autonomy lest a “tendency might develop which would have an adverse effect on the cohesion of the various units of Pakistan.”1 Although the Bengalis had a majority in the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan (CAP), the military and, to a lesser degree, the civilian bureaucracy were predominantly Punjabi. Hence the more resources the state invested in building the military, the more it perpetuated this gross regional imbalance and attenuated provincial autonomy. From the Bengali nationalists’ viewpoint, West Pakistani elites had effectively captured the state and excluded them from 72
