On December 9 and 17 of 1970, Pakistan held its very first elections on the basis of adult franchise.
Participating political parties and independent politicians had been campaigning for the event ever since January 1970, and Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League (AL) were drawing the largest crowds in West and East Pakistan respectively.
This did not seem to deter the Yahya Khan military regime that did not trust either of the two parties.
The regime had suspiciously read the two as being anti-status quo, but even though Yahya’s intelligence agencies had predicted a victory for Mujib’s AL in East Pakistan, the same agencies had almost entirely rubbished the idea of Bhutto’s PPP sweeping the polls in West Pakistan.
Hopeful of the elections generating a hung verdict that would be in the interest of the military regime, Yahya nevertheless decided to not only support various industrialist and feudal backed Muslim League factions, but also gave a nod of approval and support to the staunch right-wing Islamic parties, especially the Jamat-i-Islami (JI).
General Yahya Khan who took over power in 1969 after Ayub Khan’s dictatorship collapsed due to a widespread student and political movement.
Consequently, all that was brewing on the fringes of Pakistani urban youth cultures between 1966 and 1969, exploded onto the mainstream scheme of things in 1970.
During the PPP campaign, new-found youthful middle-class infatuations, such as radical leftist politics and revolutionary posturing, and its romance with the ways and culture of the working classes met with the street-smart moorings of the pro-Bhutto proletariat and the passionate music and mores of Sindh and Punjab’s rural and semi-urban ‘shrine culture.’
