NEW STATESMAN, LONDON, APRIL 2, 1971
WEEP FOR BENGAL
By Mervyin Jones
“Despite censorship and official lies, reports are coming out of Dacca that must shock even readers accustomed to all that’s implied in the sinister phrase: ‘Order was restored.’ President Yahya Khan’s thanks have been ordered into destructive action, no holds barred, against the people of the East Pakistan: and, in grim logic, the enemy must be the whole people because they had declared themselves with rare unanimity for demands of self-rule.
“For the moment, one has to think of the human tragedy. With pitiful wooden shacks burned to the ground-soldiers were seen ‘armed’ with petrol cans-those who had little have lost their all. Many thousands, it seems, are fleeing to the countryside, dodging tanks that fire at random; but it is countryside they can barely feed its normal inhabitants. Hunger and disease must be the followers of sudden death. And, this only an episode in the bitter history of a people whose experience for almost 200 years has been of poverty, oppression and exploitation-at the hands of British rulers, of moneylenders and land sharks from other parts of the sub-continent, and. since 1947, of the arrogant oligarchy that dominates Pakistan.
“Nehru reflected in The Discovery of India (written during his last spell in prison) that the poverty of India can be correlated with the duration of subjection-the deepest misery in Bengal subdued by Give, and the most effective maintenance of a viable economy in Punjab where the British defeated the Sikh princes as late as 1845. Of course, there are other factors. Still, the sorrows of history gather weight with time, each generation laying a load on the last. And, it was chiefly Bengal that endured the primitive stage of imperialism as sheer robbery and wrecking. ‘Bungalow’ and ‘jungle’ are British words taken from Hindustani, but so is ‘loot’.
“The extreme of poverty has continued to be a major theme in Bengal’s experience: over-population long before the rest of the world knew it, marginal subsistence farming in the countryside, squalor in the cities (Dacca’s slums have long rivaled those of Calcutta), famine in 1891, famine in 1943. The other theme was desperate revolt and political violence.
“The background picture must also take account of a Bengali national character. One must handle this concept with caution, of course, but both reputation and self awareness react upon reality. These, then, would be the generalizations: Bengalis are spontaneous; talkative, emotional, sensitive to slights, quick with the handshake or the embrace but also with the knife. The value poetry and music, the decorative arts, good food, and beauty in women. Outsiders regard them as undisciplined, rather comic and certainly no fighters (the British excluded them from the ‘martial races’ and recruited only a regiment of Sappers and Miners) ; resenting this, they are prone to demonstrative acts of heroism. They are skilful and inventive’ but not systematic at work. West Pakistanis are the opposite of all this, and the absurd state of Pakistan is something like a forced union of Britain and Italy, with France in between.
“Pakistan is a Moslem nation, but history qualifies this too. Being a Moslem in the West is partly a racial inheritance, deriving from settlement by people of Iranian and Afghan origin. Conversion to Islam in Bengal was an opting out of the caste system by the poor. Moslem or not, Bengalis still felt passionately Bengali, so much so that they protested furiously when, in 1905, Lord Curzon tried to divide the province into East and West Bengal; it was one of the rare occasions when a Viceroy had to renounce a pet project. That Bengal was thus partitioned in 1947, with British rule ending, is a wry historical irony.
“Jinnah. the founder of Pakistan, was an upper-class Bombay Moslem anglicized in his habits and not very religious, just as Carson was an upper-class Dublin Protestant. Power in the new state was monopolized by landowners and Sandhursttype generals, all from West Pakistan, with no background in the fight against imperialism. This, in addition to the theocratic basis of Pakistan, was what Indians like Nehru so disliked about them.
“From the outset, they had no more intention of creating a democracy then had the similar oligarchy in Northern Ireland. True, the Bengalis were fellow Moslems and had no yearnings to reunite with India (though they wanted neighborly relations and lacked interest in the Kashmir vendetta). The point was that they were unreliable chaps, outside the closer circle. Top jobs in the civil service and the police went to men from the West.’ Economic development, not very impressive anywhere, favored the already wealthier western provinces. Attempts to right the balance were frustrated, when government was not openly dictatorial, by a limited franchise (80,000 citizens in a population of 100 million could vote for the presidency) and a judicious mixture of intimidation and bribery. 1 happened to be in East Pakistan when Ayub Khan was getting himself re- elected in 1965. An American friend used to exclaim ‘There’s a voter’ whenever we saw a man inexpertly riding a new Honda.
“When real elections came. Sheikh Mujib’s Awami League won a victory in the East comparable only to Sinn Fein’s sweep in 1918. The difference was that he was demanding only ‘home rule’. He was aware both of the appalling consequences of an armed clash and of the hard row that an independent Bangladesh would have to hoe even if it could be achieved, given its wretched poverty. Popular feeling and Yahya Khans stubbornness drove him, in the moment of crisis, to claim independence. I suspect that one could listen to an interesting debate if one could be a. mouse under a table in Washington. There would be advocates of the oligarchy as the ‘safe men”, the counterparts of similar regimes endorsed from Greece to Brazil. There might be voices arguing that Bengal can’t be held down and that Mujib-a popular leader but no revolutionary-is the best insurance against less controllable forces.
“Certainly, though the army may have won the first round by sheer brutality, maintaining detested suzerain(y over 73 million people isn’t like sending (he police (o Anguilla. Bengal has no forests or mountains except on its eastern borders, but in its odd way it is fine guerilla country. The great Ganges-Brahmaputra delta is spattered with water at any time; when the monsoon breaks, after early June, main roads on embankments rise above an immense lake. I’ve only been there in the dry season, but I recall seeing the noses of boats’ submerged to keep the wood from cracking in the sun, which are the sole means of movement once the rains begin.
“The crime of Yahya Khan in provoking war-if not now then surely some time-is not incalculably but calculably appalling. We know from the Congo and Biafra that a rural population with minimal living standards can be plunged into the abyss of famine by any disturbance of the tenuous rhythm of sowing and reaping, marketing and buying. Last year’s typhoon, with the Royal Navy rushing to the rescue, took 200,0(X) lives according to probably minimized figures. A season’s war is bound to take millions. A starving child does not suffer the less because the ends of power are being secured-nor because it is statistically surplus to its homeland’s resources.”