WORKERS PRESS, DECEMBER 17, 1971
SURRENDER A GREAT VICTORY FOR BANGLADESH
By John Spencer
Pakistan forces in Bangladesh surrendered unconditionally to the Indian army and the Mukti Bahini yesterday. Indian premier Mrs. Indira Gandhi told a wildly cheering parliament that ‘Dacca is now the free capital of a free country’.
India has already recognized Bangladesh, which now becomes a state in reality as well as in the minds of the Bengali people.
The final surrender came just ten minutes before that expiry of an extended ceasefire, and India had threatened to resume the offensive with the utmost vigour, if its surrender call was not obeyed.
The Bangladesh provisional government is to take office in Dacca today. The Awami League leaders who make up most of the new government were unable to reach there yesterday because of transport problems.
Victory
The liberation of Bangladesh from the Pakistani dictatorship is a tremendous victory for the Bengali people. But the situation is still fraught with danger.
The Awami League is taking office with a thoroughly conservative and bourgeois programme which has nothing to offer the mass of workers and peasants beyond empty proclamations.
The Awami League proposes no real agrarian reform beyond vague promises to ‘rationalize’ land holdings and to the landless peasants.
This cannot overcome the chronic agrarian crisis in Bangladesh, where a predominantly peasant majority lives in a state of perpetual poverty.
The new government’s promise to ‘reverse effectively’ the monopolist bias’ of industry is equally vague and demagogic.
Bengali workers and peasants can place no reliance on the promises of the bourgeois leaders of the Awami League and the Gandhi government.
They must organize independently of the capitalist class and resist all attempts to disarm them or recruit them for a war of annexation against W. Pakistan.
W. Pakistanis were not informed of the surrender, though the governmentcontrolled radio” which has been broadcasting martial music for the past two weeks, announced that the situation in E. Pakistan was ‘very critical’.
Surrender
Eventually, Yahya Khan went on the radio to announce the surrender in the East but said the war would continue in the West.
‘We shall fight on,’ he said, urging the people to be patient and prepared for further sacrifices.
He thanked China, the US and the Moslem states for their support.
China yesterday sent a stiff note to New Delhi protesting at an alleged violation of the border with Sikkim. In a separate announcement, the New China News Agency said China would continue to provide ‘material support for Pakistan and charged that India wanted to ‘destroy Pakistan as a whole.’
The US, which is also backing Pakistan, has sent the USS ‘Enterprise’-an aircraft carrier with 90 planes and one of the most powerful vessels in the world-into the Bay of Bengal.
If the Americans intended to use the ‘Enterprise’ for an evacuation operation they are too late, because the Pakistan army in Bengal has surrendered unconditionally.