Ayub Khan

Field Marshal Mohammad Ayub Khan (14 May 1907 – 19 April 1974) was a Pakistani officer and politician who served as the second president of Pakistan from 1958 until his resignation in 1969, the country's longest-serving president. The first native commander-in-chief of the Pakistan Army (1951–1958), he seized the presidency in the military coup of October 1958, and his decade in power is remembered as the "Decade of Development" and criticised for concentrating wealth and power. He is not the Afghan commander of the same name who won the Battle of Maiwand in 1880, who has his own entry in this museum. ¹

Ayub Khan was born at Rehana, a village in Haripur District of the North-West Frontier Province, into a Hindko-speaking family of Pashtun descent of the Tareen tribe, the son of a Risaldar-Major of Hodson's Horse. Educated at Aligarh Muslim University and the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, he was commissioned in 1928 into the 14th Punjab Regiment, fought in the Burma campaign of the Second World War, and opted for Pakistan in 1947. On 17 January 1951 he became the army's first native commander-in-chief, and from 1954 he also sat in the cabinet as defence minister. ¹

On 7 October 1958 President Iskandar Mirza imposed martial law with Ayub Khan as Chief Martial Law Administrator; three weeks later Ayub Khan exiled Mirza and took the presidency himself. His 1962 constitution created a presidential system elected through 80,000 Basic Democrats; it respected Islam without declaring it the state religion, and his government restricted the use of religion in politics and reformed Muslim family law by ordinance in 1961 — state policies that his data record carefully distinguishes from any attestation of his personal affiliation. Foreign aid and liberalised industry produced South Asia's fastest growth, alongside the famous concentration of wealth in "twenty-two families". Pakistan fought India to a stalemate in 1965, settled at Tashkent. ^{1 2}

Rising prices and opposition movements led by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in the west and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in the east forced his resignation on 25 March 1969, when he handed power to General Yahya Khan. He died of a heart attack at his villa near Islamabad on 19 April 1974, and was buried at Rehana. His diaries of 1966–1972 were published thirty years after his death. ¹