The 1968-69 movement was a great mass mobilisation. The industrialisation of the 1950s and 1960s led to the creation of a fresh proletariat class which was responsible for uprisings of a clearly socialist character. The movement was initiated through student demonstrations. Eventually attracting people from every profession, from doctors to railway workers and state engineers, it transformed into massive political struggle for social change. Unprecedented class solidarity was displayed and “the prejudices of religion, sex, ethnicity, race, nationality, clan or tribe evaporated in the red heat of revolutionary struggle.” Film makers and artists also played a significant role in inspiring people.
At the time, General Ayub Khan was celebrating what was called the Decade of Development. In response to the Decade of Development, in early week of October 1968, the National Students Federation started a protest campaign to expose the so called “development.” The first demonstration took place in front of the Board of Secondary Education in Karachi. The movement spread across the country when a group of students from Rawalpindi heading back from Landi Kotal were stopped at customs checkpoints near Attock. They were aggressively met by customs officials. On returning to Rawalpindi, they staged a protest against their mishandling by police. Protests grew to a sizeable amount, resulting in the police trying to dismantle the protests and shots being fired.
A student of Rawalpindi Polytechnic College, Abdul Hameed, was shot dead. Outraged citizens were protesting against a rise in the price of sugar; the death of Hameed sparked the whole society and workers to join. Prominent writer Tariq Ali narrates:
“Without any physical provocation the police, who were fully armed with rifles, batons, and tear-gas bombs, opened fire. One bullet hit Abdul Hamid, a first-year student aged seventeen, who died on the spot. Enraged, the students fought back with bricks and paving stones, and there were casualties on both sides.”
In February and March 1968, a wave of strikes occurred in the country. On February 13, for the first time in ten years, the red flag was hauled up in Lahore, as more than 25,000 rail workers marched.
By early 1969, the movement was joined by peasant committees and organisations in the country’s rural areas. In March 1969, a group of senior military men advised Ayub to step down, fearing the eruption of a full-scale civil war in East Pakistan and the political and social anarchy in the country’s west wing. Even Ayub Khan conceded how the movement had paralysed the functioning of the state and society.
Ayub Khan resigned as president of Pakistan and announced he was turning over the government of the nation to Army Chief of Staff Gen. Yahya Khan. Two days later, he highlighted reasons for his resignation in a letter to General Yahya Khan, “I am left with no option but to step aside and leave it to the Defence Forces of Pakistan, which today represent the only effective and legal instrument, to take full control of the country. They are by the grace of God in a position to retrieve the situation and to save the country from utter chaos and total destruction. They alone can restore sanity and put the country back on the road to progress in a civil and constitutional manner.”