Monarch's Right

Roly-poly Prime Minister Nazimuddin of Pakistan was leaving by the 5:30 train. The red carpet had been rolled out through Karachi station, but before Nazimuddin could put foot on it, he was called to the phone: Governor General Ghulam Mohammad had news for him. The news:

Nazimuddin was out of a job.

Nazimuddin protested that the Governor General had no right to sack him, and perhaps Nazimuddin had a point. Ghulam Mohammad succeeded to the governor-generalship when Nazimuddin stepped down in 1951. Now that Ghulam Mohammad had the title, however, he was Queen Elizabeth's official representative in the British Dominion of Pakistan and in the theory of British government has the monarch's delegated power to dismiss or appoint ministers and governments (in England, no monarch since the days of George III had dared invoke that power without the sanction of Parliament). Pakistan, however, is a special case: only 5 1/2 years a nation, it functions under the 1935 Government of India Act and has not yet adopted a constitution; nor does it have a directly elected Parliament, but a Constituent Assembly, functioning both as a Parliament and a constitutional body. "Illegal and unconstitutional!" cried Nazimuddin. "I refuse to resign."

But the fact was that Nazimuddin had lost the confidence of the country. Under his waddling government, the country was close to general famine. Hunger riots in the rich Punjab provinces had been put down by the army with loss of at least 300 lives (TIME, March 30). There was a budget deficit of some 300 million rupees. To deal with these urgent problems, Governor General Ghulam Mohammad appointed as Prime Minister 44-year-old Mohammed Ali, Pakistan's Ambassador to Washington, who had arrived in Karachi four days earlier to discuss an agreement by which the U.S. may send wheat to feed Pakistan's hungry. It was a popular appointment: having served his country abroad since it was created, he was free from any taint of local intrigue.

After thinking it over, Nazimuddin decided that he would not challenge Ghulam Mohammad's "unconstitutional" use of the monarch's prerogative. But he held firm on one point: he would not leave the Prime Minister's residence until someone found him a new house--a difficult task in overcrowded Karachi.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.