FRONTIER, CALCUTTA, APRIL 17, 1971
Editorial
THE FAMILIAR PATTERN
Things have been overlapping in March. There was the famous Indira wave in India. Something quite different. March 18 marked the centenary of a historic uprising, the Paris Commune. The rout of the U.S. backed invasion of Laos was a magnificent tribute to this historic event, but before the world at large was able to estimate the magnitude and significance of the American defeat, President Yahya Khan unleashed his hordes in his East Pakistan. The Awami League leaders were prepared for traditional forms of repression but not for the bloodbath. Engrossed as people were in the brave but unequal struggle in Bangladesh, the government of Ceylon led by Sirimavo Bandarnaike went into action against “terrorists”. How many have been killed is not yet known. Once again it is clear how all these cynical government swearing by some sort of socialism and having the best of both imperialist and socialist worlds, reveal their sharp, ugly, yellow-fangs when the chips are down. Their tactics and strategy against forces of rebellion or revolution are in the famous American style-after all isn’t this the American century They have learnt from the American experience in Indochina that a protracted struggle must be avoided. Strike-and strike hard with all your might-when the movement is young and raw. This is the doctrine of blitzkrieg which the Yahoos, the Yahya hordes in East Bengal, and the Ceylonese forces have adopted, while much of what has happened and is happening in India is shrouded in hypocrisy by a subservient press and raving social democrats.
Quick victory in essential for the rulers. Of course if an unarmed and inexperienced people, fighting back, were able to snatch victory within a few weeks, nothing could be more welcome. The carnage and the human suffering would be less. Who wants men. women and children to be made homeless or butchered day after day? But such a victory for the people would be a miracle. Miracles do not visit the masses. It would be long before a poet could again write the East Bengal is like the sound of rain on the leaves of trees late at night.
It is no that our leaders and our newspapers do not know what is what in Hast Bengal. The banner headlines reporting every day the capture or recapture to this or that town when the troops, after deterat-the thought that secession has failed and the threat to India’s precious unity has receded. Such a threat in the Mizo Hills was contained five years ago with the help of ston-guns and helicopters and a regrouping of villages into Vietnam-type strategic hamlets. In Kashmir, it was a much easier task containing the secessionists. One cannot expect New Delhi to be too enthusiastic about raising East Bengal in the United Nations in the way one would expect it to be raised.
Rapport
New Delhi would be happy to see Mujib’s supporters settle for greater autonomy and shelve the talk of an independent Bangladesh. But since things have gone beyond the point of return, all would wait for a decisive end. There is close co-ordination and rapport between New Delhi, Washington and Moscow. It would be of some interest to know that when a veteran Bengali revolutionary (he lives in West Bengal) met the Prime Minister, she told him that both Mr. Podgorny and Mr. Nixon were prevailing upon Gen. Yahya Khan 10 stop the genocide. This was a couple of days before the Podgorny letter. Everyone seemed to know it was coming.
How would New Delhi look at an independent Bangladesh? The present leadership, might be replaced in Fast Bengal by a younger, radical leadership. Few countries would like a leftist leadership bid for control of Bangladesh. If a right or centrist leadership takes over, it necessarily will have to look to one or both the super powers for massive economic aid to reconstruct the economy of the new nation. Instead of the two super powers operating in two nations in the sub-continent, they would have to operate in there. In terms of India’s security two “Pakistan”, in the place of one makes little difference. But if a powerful leftist movement grows in Bangladesh, neither India nor the super powers would countenance such a situation. Once East Bengal is independent the Chinese, who are keeping their options; would have no difficulty extending arms help to the left there. These are the ‘”fears” openly expressed in informed quarters in New Delhi.
Outside this, there is little concern in New Delhi for Bangladesh or for Cyclon. It is a strange coincidence that the “left-of-centre” or “left-oriented” Ceylon government (which in some ways is a model for Mrs. Gandhi’s!) has used more drastic measures against the “Che Guevarists” than the CPI-M-dominated United Front government in West Bengal did against the Naxalbari rebels. It might suit the Communists and Trotskyites of Ceylon (now in a strange united front) to denounce the Che Guevarists while Mrs. Bandaranaike does not feel called upon to substantiate her charge that the whole movement is backed by a foreign agency. A government that claims to be left cannot tolerate any challenge from the left. The right wing is alright anywhere. The two Establishment, communist parties in India should have no difficulty in denouncing the Che Guevarists of Ceylon just as they have no difficulty in demanding recognition of Bangladesh. Between Bangladesh and the insurgency that is being crushed in Ceylon, the two communist parties of India should find themselves bewildered. The Indian communists never grasped the national question in any case and left it to Moscow to do all the thinking. When the Cabinet Mission visited India, the CPI pleaded for 1C constituent assemblies for the country. Earlier, they had espoused the cause of a “Sikh homeland” in keeping with their support for the two-nation theory. When the Soviet thinking on the national question in India changed, the CPI leadership became the perfect bourgeois nationalists and took national cauvinistic positions on every issue.
Armed struggle in Bangladesh and the insurgency in Ceylon are, objectively, two unwelcome things to any communist party functioning within the parliamentary system. The First has to be supported for one set of reasons but certainly dot because the communists parties love any armed struggle in the sub-continent. The second has to be denounced because insurgency anywhere in the sub-continent is disconcerting to those who believe in peaceful transition and parliamentary democracy