Bangladesh Issue
Only Way Out Is to Let People Govern Themselves
-PROF. GALBRAITH
From Our Special Correspondent, NEW DELHI, Sept. 14.-Professor J. K. Galbraith, former U.S. Ambassador to India, said here today that a peaceful political solution recognizing the right of the people of East Bengal to govern themselves offered the only way out of the crisis there.
Addressing a Press Conference, the Harvard don said when he spoke of the right to govern it implied the right of the people of Bangladesh to have the Government of their choice regardless of whether it was good moderate extreme.
Speaking as a representative of the “liberal sensible wing of the Democratic Party”, the former. Ambassador said that he believed the people of Bangladesh should govern themselves, particularly when they had voted in such an overwhelming manner for a specific course of action.
People like him who came to study the problem from close, he felt, could help in their own countries by “putting in a word” for help in managing the great problem of the vast numbers of people driven away from their homes into India; and by suggesting a political solution “that, we feel, should come and which must-I would say categorically-enable the refugees to return with a sense of security”. This sense of security, he added, could arise if the people of Bangladesh were put in charge of their own security with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman at the helm of Affairs.
The people of Bangladesh, he repeated, must be “in charge” of their destiny, of their own lives, their politics and their polity. A solution could not be one that involved rule by and from West Pakistan. Only if the West Pakistanis should the necessary wisdom would the ultimate catastrophe be avoided. In such a situation it was quite likely that history would repeat itself and a situation emerge in which West Pakistan and Bangladesh might live as friends the same way as India and her former colonial ruler, Britain, were doing.
Professor Galbraith was appreciative of the latest turn in American foreign policy-less intrusive, less aggressive-but he disfavoured any assistance to Pakistan which “finances repression in East Bengal.”
Speaking as a economist. Professor Galbraith said, adds UNI, that an independent Bangladesh would be a disaster for West Pakistan depending as it did very heavily on the East Bengal market and the raw n.aterials. Continuance of the Bangladesh problem was not in the iriterests of West Pakistan itself.
The presence of a military Government in Pakistan was also a reason for the delay in finding a solution. “As I have said before, military Governments do not cure problems. They just repress problems and Pikistan has this unhappy experience of this long military rule”.
Reference: Hindustan Standard 15.09.1971