Introduction

In 1968 on the completion of ten years of autocratic rule, Pakistan's first military dictator, General Ayub Khan decided to celebrate ‘the decade of development’. The Ayub regime had achieved the fastest economic growth in Pakistan's history and was lauded in the West as a dynamic model for Third World capitalism. Despite this, inequality and the percentage of the population living below the poverty line had increased. Wealth was concentrated in few hands and the country's twenty-two richest families controlled approximately 90 percent of the assets of financial institutions. In 1968 disillusioned students, workers and peasants, as well as members of the military and the professions mounted public protests against the dictator.

At the start of 1968 the military dictatorship of Ayub Khan appeared as one of the most stable regimes of the time. His confidence could be judged from the fact that he arrested the country's most popular political leader Shaikh Mujeeb-ur-Rehman (later founder of Bangladesh), with twenty-eight civil servants, politicians and members of the armed forces on charges of being implicated in an Indian government supported conspiracy to separate the province of East Pakistan from the rest of the country. Ayub had posed as the country's saviour and in 1968, the tenth year of his presidency, he advised his close associates to begin a one-year celebration labeling it the ‘Decade of Development’. The achievements of the military dictatorship would be highlighted through the government-controlled media. Meanwhile resistance against the regime was gathering momentum (Dobell 1969).