THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, JULY 31,1971.
Editorial
THE AGONY AND THE DANGER
We have been clinging as long as possible to the hope that somehow the government and people of Pakistan would grope their way back to a tolerable relationship between the two separate parts of their bleeding and burning country, but with the greatest regret we must face the prospect that it is now too late for reconciliation.
The official government of Pakistan four months ago unleashed a military fury upon the people of what was then known as East Pakistan. The results make up one of the horrors of history.
Some seven million people from East Pakistan have taken refuge in India from the ruthlessness of the West Pakistan Army. At least a quarter of a million people have died. Estimates range up to a million. Cholera has been rampant. Famine is now taking its toll both among refugees in India and among those still clinging to the wreckage of their homes and lives. The refugee problem in India is beyond the capacity of India.
One measure of the meaning what has happened is that people talking about the place where all this happened again call it Bengal, which is what it has been called down through the ages except for the few years from 1947 until now.
There was a theory, back in 1947, that because a majority of the people in the Punjab and in Bengal were Muslim these two segments of the subcontinent could be linked into a single nation although separated by 1,100 miles of territory under the Government of India.
It might have worked had the people of the two parts of the proposed new state of Pakistan been of the same language, race, and culture as they were of religion. It might have worked in practice had the fewer Punjabis been willing to let the more numerous Bengalis share fairly in the combined government and in the enjoyment of the two provinces.
But in practice the Punjabis have dominated the government and have taken the lion’s share of the wealth of Bengal to the Punjab. The attempted union of the two-inone state called Pakistan turned out in practice to mean the domination and the exploitation of the 75 million people of Bengal by the 56 million people of the Punjab, or West Pakistan.
The treatment of Bengal was a logical progression from history. The West Pakistanis of today descend from the Persian, Afghan, and Pathan hill tribes who came down from the mountains of the north-west some 800 years ago and imposed their rule and their Muslim religion on the physically smaller and less warlike peoples of the valley and delta of the Ganges.
But the two peoples never became one people in anything but religion. The Punjabis have always been the conquerors, the Bengalis the conquered.
Last March that status of conqueror and conquered was put to the test. The Bengalis won at the polls the right to take over the Government of Pakistan. They had the majority of the votes. But when it came to working out the constitutional consequences the Punjabis turned loose their Army in the middle of the night and being one of the great slaughters of history. It was an effort to reassert the conquest of 800 years ago.
Today, four months later, the Pakistan Army controls the main cities of Bengal, but not the countryside. Resistance is increasing. The guerrillas have been able twice to knock out the power stations serving Dacca, the capital. They frequently cut the rail lines from Dacca to other cities. The occupying Punjabi (West Pakistan) Army faces precisely the same prospect in Bengal that the Thieu regime in South Vietnam faced back before massive American intervention-the prospect of a pacification program stretching endlessly into the future.
This tragic and dreadful condition leaves everyone concerned with two problems. There is the immediate problem of how to put an end to the horror and misery in Bengal. The Punjabis must give up a military repression policy which is atavistic, self-defeating, and is bringing into being the very thing it was designed to prevent; the existence of a separate Bengal.
But it very much seems that this can happen only if some progress might be made toward the solution of the larger problem; the problem of the relations of the great powers to Pakistan.
There is no effective pressure on the official government of Pakistan as Islamabad to abate the terror in Bengal because China and the United Stales have chosen not to risk intervention whereas Russia is becoming the main outside friend of India. Washington refuses to do anything which might alienate Gen. Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan who was involved in the breakthrough in Sino-U.S. relations. The Chinese, naturally, cling to their advantage in Pakistan. And everyone is aware of how dangerous an apple of discord in independent Bengal would be. It could trigger a war between Russia and China.
The theoretical solution is easy. All it requires would be an agreement between Russia. China, the United States, and India that Bengal should be free and untroubled by either China or Russia.
That’s “all” it would take, but getting it appears to be presently impossible, China must be greatly tempted at the possibility of acquiring control of the Ganges basin with an outlet on the Indian Ocean, Russia certainly would go to great lengths to prevent any such thing.
Meanwhile war could break out again between India and Pakistan at any moment. It is almost more than India can bear to have so many of its Hindu kinfolk being killed by Punjabi Muslims just over the border.
India’s Prime Minister, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, deserves highest marks for her own restraint and the restraint she has imposed upon her generals.
But the fragile peace which still prevails among the surrounding powers is being bought at the price of the misery of the Bengal people.
The only faint hope we can see for a long-term settlement would be from a meeting of those countries with vital interests in the result. Prime Minister Chou Enlai of China has proposed to President Nixon a conference to consider the Vietnam problem. A conference which included China, Russia, India, and the United Stales could also do some quiet work on the side about Bengal and Pakistan.
The tragedy and the danger underline the need for a new “concert of the great powers”. Nothing else has ever yet been invented which could manage a problem of such proportions and complexities.