NEW STATESMAN, SEPTEMBER 10.1971
BANGLADESH MUST BE FREED
By Peter Shore who has just returned from a visit to India which included a tour of Bangladesh refugee camps.
At the heart of the great crisis in Bengal is the break-up of the state of Pakistan. What Jinnah created with his fanatical resolve in 1947 has now been irrevocably destroyed by the stupidity of Yahya Khan and the ferocity of his generals.
Of course, at no stage in the 24 years of its existence as a single state could it have been easy by to hold together and weld into one political community, the 50 million people of West Pakistan and the 75 million people in far away East Bengal. But whatever the chances were, the successors of Jinnah have thrown them away.
Ironically, last year’s election, with its overwhelming victory for the Bengalbased Awami League and the subsequent negotiation for far-reaching autonomy between Sheikh Mujib and the Pakistan President, offered the last chance for a single Pakistan. It was destroyed not by the declaration of independence by the Sheikh, but by the President’s prior command to his troops to destroy the Awami League and to teach the Bengalis a lesson they would never forget.
Try as he may to disguise it, the situation is no longer in the President’s hands. The fury of Tikka Khan’s soldiers has released forces that will sooner or later destroy not only them but Pakistan. The key question for the world now is, not whether Pakistan can continue but how, without provoking conflict with other powers and without inflicting insupportable further misery on Bengal itself, its rule in Bengal can be brought to an end There is indeed great danger. Vicious repression of the inconvenient results of a democratic election are not unknown in human affairs, if the March repression had been limited to the elected representatives and key supporters of the Awami League, world opinion might have been brought reluctantly to accept it, but repression carried out as brutally and for so long that people have fled, not just from their homes but from their country at the incredible rate of I and a half million a month for the past 5 months-and still with no sign of abatement-indicates a near lunacy in the misuse of oppressive power. No wonder, then, that there is a growing tension far beyond the borders of Pakistan. No wonder that India in particular, waits and watches with strained intensity and feels obliged to sign a mutual security pact with the Soviet Union.
It would of course, be a desperate throw if Pakistan’s rulers were now to launch a military attack on India. But India is right to take the threat seriously. For the one slender hope that the Pakistan junta has of holding East Bengal is to seek to transform their own internal conflict with democracy and Bengali nationalism into a communal clash between Muslim and Hindu, and into an external confrontation with India.
This is the crazy logic behind the repressive overkill of the last few months. While the first great wave of refugees was overwhelmingly Muslim Awami League supporters, succeeding waves-until very recently when Muslim refugees began again to increase- have been overwhelmingly Hindu as the army and the razakars, or special constabulary, have incited and, at times, compelled the civilian population to turn against their Hindu neighbors. Pakistan propaganda for both home and external consumption has sought to present the whole Bengal problem as the work of a handful of treacherous politicians. Hindu money and Indian intervention. In so far as Yahya Khan is convincing on this, he can hope to mobilize, for his regime at least some Bengali opinion inside Bengal, win popular support in the Punjab and provide outside nations, uneasy as ever about internal conflicts, with some excuse, however feeble, for their own shameful silence.
For precisely the same reason, because India knows that this is Pakistan’s purpose and because India wants the world to see the crisis as it is, as a problem for Pakistan the Indian government declines to respond. Resolutely insisting that this is an ‘internal’ Pakistan crisis, maintaining strict discipline over the army’s response to border incidents, concealing the communal character of the repression in Bengal, avoiding a direct confrontation with Pakistan in the Security Council, the Indian posture is grimly defensive.
Meanwhile she has to accept the pain and the cost and disruption of an unprecedented influx of refugees, swamping West Bengal, Tripura and Assam and totally overshadowing the short-term outlook of the whole Indian economy. At one level it seems as if they are involved in a dreadful contest to establish whether Pakistan’s capacity to inflict suffering is greater or less than India’s capacity to absorb it. So far India has held her own and the danger of a direct Pakistan military attack has slightly receded with the signing of the Indo-Soviet pact.
But the contest is not yet over. The 8 million people who have swamped West Bengal and the other provinces of India are refugees not of hunger but of oppression and fear. In the next few months as hunger spreads inside East Bengal a second wave of people, the refugees of hunger, could well flow across the frontier in numbers difficult even to visualize. In facing these problems, India has the right to expect aid and encouragement from Britain, and from other powers in both West and East. But while assistance for India on a scale commensurate with her vast burdens must be forthcoming, this can be no more than a palliative. For the problem is not India but Pakistan, and the overriding aim of policy must therefore be to bring Pakistan as quickly as possible to accept freedom and self-government in East Bengal.
Yahya Khan must not be allowed for a moment to believe that the ponderous diplomatic offensive launched this week, has even a hope of success. When Mr. Bhutto describes the recall of Tikka Khan and the appointment of a civilian as Governor of Bengal as “whitewash” and when the Pakistan government announces the easing censorship on the very day that the British High Commission has to suspend the distribution of British newspapers in Pakistan one need not perhaps worry unduly. But it should be recognized that these and other moves by the Pakistan government are designed to give some vestige of responsibility to their regime in East Bengal and thus to open a way for a resumption of economic aid from the West.
It is imperative that these manoeuvres do not succeed. There must be no resumption of consortium aid to Pakistan this October. In this decision, Britain will have a considerable voice and it should be our particular objective to persuade this irresolute US Administration to keep in stop, not on with consortium aid but in stopping other economic and military aid programmes. The Pakistan economy is in fact vulnerable to the continued cut-off economic aid but, more than anything else a clear decision in this matter would had to shatter the complacency and self-decision about ‘getting away with it’ which play so important a part in Islamabad policies.
Finally, there is a role for diplomatic. It would be surprising if there were not good deal of common ground between the major powers, at least on the prognosis the coming collapse of Pakistan and perhaps on the need for a measure of stability in the East Bengal area….