FRONTIER, MAY 1, 1971
Across The Border
THE MASSES ARE ACTIVE
By Kalyan Chaudhuri
Some political circles do not believe what is being described as people’s participation in the Bangladesh movement. True, the main fighting elements are the East Pakistan Rifles and East Bengal Regiment personnel. But they are not isolated units or groups far away from the masses. The masses are active and lending all-out support to them. It is not a matter of purely passive patronage on the emotional level.
It is somewhat contradictory to believe in the potential fighting capacity of the people in general and then deny its existence in the moment of struggle. My limited experience of the struggle (I have been in Bangladesh for one and half weeks, covering two districts, the peasant-based Dinajpur and Rajshahi) is that the movement was inevitable and that it matters little whether or not the Awami League leadership was guard up for it. What really matters is that a large section of the League having indisputable authority over the community had finally foreseen what was bobbing up round the corner. The same awareness was visible in the Maulana Bhasani-led National Awami Party and the NAP of Wali Khan.
The EPR and the East Bengal Regiment did not also err in speculating about the coming revolt against the authority. The authority was equally sensitive to the possibility of an armed insurrection. That is why General Yahya Khan had been working for the past six months on a systematic plan of disarming the Bengalis in the EPR and the East Bengal Regiment, partly by outright official order and partly by ugly diplomacy. The disarming programme made a shrewd start when the Bengali personnel of the EPR were summoned back to towns and cantonments from their usual positions along the border with India. In army jargon this is a policy of “bottling up”.
That the seeds of an armed uprising were ripe is evident from reports in the East Pakistan press before March 25. Ittefaq, in its March 8 issue, published a photograph of members of the Chhatra League (CL), the students’ front of the Awami League, parading in Pabna in “military style”. Its significance is clear when one remembers the context of the essentially non-violent civil disobedience programme of the Awami League. It was a pointer that the powerful students’ wing of the Awami League was not always docile enough to toe the line of the party. Further, in the March 22 issue of Dainik Pakistan and the March 23 issue of Pakistan Observer we find reports of the CL rejecting the usefulness of the Yahya-Bhutto-Mujib negotiations. They even took out rallies in Dacca and Chittagong demanding an open confrontation with the West Pakistan clique. Mujib was asked to quit the “talking table” and provide leadership to the struggle.
Outside the Awami League, Maulana Bhasani’s National Awami Party had long been clamouring for the same line of action. The NAP General Secretary, Mr. Masiur Rahman, told me early in April that his party was insisting on complete independence. At a Dacca rally in the third week of March he did not roll out any “six-ponit or hundred-point demands” nor even “autonomy”. He was emphatic on independence and nothing sort of it so that the people would have a valid brief to call the West Pakistan troops aggressors on Bangladesh soil.
Finally, Mujibur Rahman too sensed the inevitable. At his last Dacca public meeting of the Ramna Race Course he gave a call for complete independence even at the cost of blood and tears. But the very idea of struggle was never rehearsed by the Awami League machinery. And for all practical purposes, a party which has never worked out a plan for an armed movement cannot expect to retain its leadership over a people fighting a trained army as their enemy.
Nevertheless, it is Mujib and none else but Mujib who has released the “flush” in Bangladesh. Different as he is in political beliefs and actions, the NAP leader. Mr. Masiur Rahman said Mujib might have skipped his set programme, but the struggle which finally flared up was unlikely to assume such massive proportions if he had not leapt into it. It was, as Mr. Masiur Rahman explained, a sort of “negative contribution” to the liberation struggle.
Mr. Masiur Rahman was very emphatic in the use of the term liberation. The present upsurge has a clear-cut objective of throwing away once for all the shackles of western dictatorship. A few setbacks or even heavy loss of lives, he said, could not stifle the uprising of the Bangladesh people.
Those who think that the struggle in Bangladesh has failed to inspire mass participation and refer to the refugee influx in support of their view, should note that the number of evacuees, however large, is very small in ratio to a population of 75 million. Besides, the evacuees are mostly children, women and old men while the youths are staying on in their land to take part in the movement for liberation.
About mass participation one incident is worth describing. On April 2 an army column came out of the Rajshahi cantonment to attack Nababganj from the border outposts, facing attacks on the way. The situation was hopeless. But what happened was unique. As the news spread that the army was advancing with a tank, about 5,000 civilians grouped together for resistance with whatever they had-sticks, bows and arrows, spears and guns. It was not just a show of courage. They pounced upon the firing tank and captured it, though at a heavy price. Whatever the wisdom of the tactic it showed that the people acted on their own without any directive from the Awami League or NAP leaders to give vent to pent-up anger. Once the moment came the question of parasitic dependence on leadership just vanished.
Resistance Groups
During my short tour I found no village where there was no resistance group. Armed with crude weapons like sticks and bows they were a perfect picture of resolve and ambition. Emotionally tense, they will! however, have to learn the brass-tacks of a fight against superior power. They have already become wary of frontal engagements with the enemy and been turning to guerilla actions.
To drive further home my point that the people have taken part in the movement, I would like to refer to some “representative individuals” One is a boatman of Rohanpur of Rajshahi district. The poor man did not grudge cruising his boat every night to carry food given by the local villagers to the liberation forces fighting afar. Or think of the young boy who cycled 40 miles at a stretch to come over to Maida on our side for fuel for their petrol-operated transmission sets. These “representative individuals” are countless, cutting across party lines. With the obliteration of party labels one thing stands out-the “pointed demands” of the Awami League have expanded into a national liberation movement against the coterie rule of the west.
Liberation that is the word. Even the Swadhin Bangladesh Government will not be able to sit again with the western oligarchy for a so-called peaceful settlement. It is also a fact that the big powers can no longer push the Bangladesh people towards a conference table until liberation from the tyrannical rule of West Pakistan, a direct agent of world imperialism) is accepted as the major premise. Even if the new Government is content with big-power recognition under conditions that may annul the concept of liberation, the Bangladesh people will not accept it.
To convey the general sentiment of the Bangladesh people I would like to refer to a young girl of Dacca University whom I met in Calcutta. She is the grand-daughter of an 85-year-old political leader and ex-Minister of Pakistan who was killed in front of his Comilla residence. The incident took place before her eyes. The Army raided their house on the night of March 27 and dragged out Mr. D.N. Datta and his son who was also reported to have been killed as the Army made a bayonet charge. The girl who managed to escape told me that she did not like to stay in India as a refugee. “I must go back to Bangladesh: I cannot forget for a single moment even in any sleep the ugly face of the brute who killed my old grandfather and the innocent uncle. I must find him out and kill him the same way he killed them.”
The liberation forces are very much aware of the price they will have to pay for foreign intervention. They do not want India or any other nation to be directly involved in the conflict. Leaders as well as common people I met did not seem willing to receive from foreign powers any assistance beyond material help such as arms and ammunition. They were obsessed with the idea that the goal of liberation would be realized easier by fighting alone.
There can be no denying the fact that the present movement, is not the outcome of any class conflict. But rigid class consciousness is giving way. The Dinajpur SP. once a student of Dacca University, left his wife in a village camp with certain socalled low class people while he was engaged in operations on the front. He said it was a grand chance to get declassed.
The question is whether the ground for a liberation movement was fertile in East Pakistan. An analysis of certain socio-economic aspects would show that it was. In Pakistan’s budget last year about Rs 350 crores was earmarked for defense expenditure out of a total of about Rs 750 crores. About Rs 150 crores was see apart for annual loan repayment while maintenance of administration was alloted about Rs 100 crores. The rest-Rs 150 crores-was mainly spent on the development of West Pakistan where most of the private and public sector units are located. Strangely, the Rs 350 crores meant for defense expenditure was lifted fully from East Pakistan. East Pakistan used to raise about 65 per cent of the budget expenditure by selling her jute, tea and tobacco and most of this revenue was spent on the army. Since 1965 West Pakistan has received Rs c from the United States also as defence aid. All things considered, there was a glaring economic imbalance between West Pakistan and East Pakistan. The latter was treated not a shade better than a colony.
Another disturbing factor was the heavy land rewards to the retired Pakistan Army officers who are hardly recruited from the East. Once the army officers of the west are out of active service, they get land ranging between 50 and 300 bighas. In other words this privileged class of West Pakistani army officers is turned into feudal overlords and become a powerful tool of the machinery of exploitation. These are some of the long- standing grievances of East Pakistan against the western wing or late what hurt East Pakistan was the refusal of the army men to come to their help at the time of the devastating cyclone. American troops had to be invited to clear the huge masses of corpses from storm-ravaged localities. The army apart, no political leader from the west also cared to visit the cyclone-hit areas in East Pakistan.