The Second Flood of East Pakistan
The current tragedy in Pakistan is the lo gical end of the process that began with the dissolution of British India, 25 years ago. In insisting then on the creation of a separate and specifically Muslim state the late Mohammed Jinnah and his colleagues of the Muslim League gave birth to a pantomime horse – a nation divided by culture, language and a thousand miles of hostile Indian territory and stitched together solely by the thread of Islam.
What has happened is simply that after a quarter of a century of increasingly ungainly maneuvers on the world stage the hind legs of East Pakistan have parted at last from the forelegs of the West and it does not look this weekend as if all President Yahya Khan’s men – or his tanks – can ever stitch the two parts together again. For the moment, if reports from the area can be trusted. the President and his forces seem to be on top. The Eastern separatist leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, is said to have been arrested, martial law was declared throughout the Eastern wing and the 24-hour curfew imposed on Friday was Lifted for nine hours in Dacca, the Eastern capital, yesterday morning. The official Pakistan radio has been broadcasting President Yahya ‘s proclamations apparently without hindrance, and little has been heard of the clandestine station believed to be somewhere in the northern part of East Pakistan, which on Friday was reported to have announced the Independence of Bangladesh – the separatist name for the eastern province. Nor was there any confirmation yesterday of reports coming via India of widespread fighting in most of the major towns of the East and of “loyal Pakistani Army units in Chittagong surrounded by police armed militia and troops of the local Bengal regiment and facing imminent defeat.
Other reports from India said to be emanating from refugees crossing the frontier into the Indian state of West Bengal, spoke of 10,000 civilian casualties already, including 1.500 peasants who were said to have died in an attempt to capture the airfield at Jessore from the Pakistan Army. But these, too. had to be treated with reserve for, as first reactions in the Indian Parliament indicated, the instinctive Indian temptation to believe the worst about her neighbor has been given full reign. Some Indian parliamentarian are already talking about “genocide” and that passionately anti-Pakistan old warhorse, Mr. Krishna Menon, has called for immediate Indian recognition of Bangladesh.
On the other hand, the draconian measures announced by the official Pakistan radio, promising prison sentences of up to seven years for any infringements of martial law, imposing total censorship, a ban on all demonstrations and on the construction of unofficial road blocks or other barriers to the free movement of the armed forces suggests the extent of the resistance anticipated. With something like 100,000 armed militiamen believed to be organized in support of Sheikh Mujib, and another 12 – 15,000 local men of the East Pakistan Rifle Regiment expected to support the independence movement, President Yahya’s forces are bound to be fully stretched from the start to contain the likely armed resistance. Add to this the undoubted fact that virtually the entire East Pakistan population of 75 million is behind Sheikh Mujib, and the reported presence of some 70,000 troops from West Pakistan looks a flimsy instrument for imposing the President’s will.
Guerrilla territory The movement of Yahya’s forces will in any case, be difficult. The intricate mesh of waterways within which most of the Eastern people live provides ready-made territory for guerrilla resistance; and substantial reinforcement can only come from the West by sea – a six-day voyage from Karachi to Chittagong around the tip of India. All Pakistani overflights across Indian territory have been banned for weeks since the recent hijacking of an Indian airliner to Pakistan, and although flights might theoretically be made across Chinese Tibet any large scale airlift of troops and equipment is beyond Pakistan’s capacity.
Unless, therefore, the eastern populace can be cowed immediately by salutary bloodshed and the arrest of its political leaders the Army can look forward only to a deteriorating situation in which it will probably be forced to concentrate on the strategic centers and leave much of the countryside to take care of itself. Dacca and Chittagong, the main airfields, roads and radio stations, will be within their control, no doubt; but beyond these points anything may happen.
The neglected end
Whatever the immediate practical effect of President Yahya’s attempt to reimpose his authority on the East, psychologically the East’s secession is already established. The only real surprise about the current situation is that it has been so long in coming. From the earliest years of Pakistan’s creation the Bengalis of the East have felt themselves the neglected end of the pantomime horse. For a decade under the benevolent military dictatorship of Ayub Khan their grievances were suppressed – but not amended. And when Ayub was deposed in 1969, their resentment swiftly bubbled to the surface.
With 1,300 people to the square mile the Bengalis of East Pakistan suffer one of the highest population densities and one of the lowest standards of living in the world. Ruled as they were from Karachi and Rawalpindi more than a thousand miles away they felt little sense of identity with the central Government. The perennial Pakistani battle with India over Kashmir held no emotion for them, yet it consumed the State’s revenues in military expenditure of which Bengal contributed the lion’s share. Bengal’s exports of jute alone accounted for nearly half of Pakistan’s total foreign earnings. yet the East received less than a third of the central Government’s annual budget. Its people saw the grand new capital at Rawalpindi in the West erected without regard for cost. while their own public services decayed under the twin pressures of a soaring population and grudging government spending.
Under Ayub’s military rule the old animosity was deepened between the traditional “box-wallah” class of the Bengalis – the clerks and managers who were the mainstay of administration under the British Raj – and the equally traditional warrior class of the Punjab who have always dominated Pakistan’s Army as they previously dominated the army of British India, And after the inconclusive war with India over Kashmir in 1965, Bengal’s plight was worsened by a central ban on trade with India, which compelled the easterners to abandon the nearby port of Calcutta for their exports and deprived them of cheap Indian coal for their industries.
Mujib’s campaign
Ironically, it was President Yahya Khan’s promise to restore democracy after the downfall of Ayub that released these grudges. Sheikh Mujib, the leader of the eastern Awami League, had been arrested in 1966 by Ayub in the bitter aftermath of the Kashmir war, soon after he had first put forward his six-point programer for Eastern autonomy. To the Bengalis his arrest the fourth of his career – confirmed him as a martyr and the strikes and demonstration in his support were among the chief causes of Ayub’s overthrow. When he was eventually released he was already the natural focus of Bengali separatism and Yahyas decision to proceed with nationwide parliamentary elections last December forced him, willy-nilly, into a campaign for home rule whose outcome he could not control.
Sheikh Mujib is not, in any ordinary sense, a revolutionary but the strength of Bengali national feeling that crystalised around him had its repercussions in equally nationalist feelings in the Western half of the state. In an attempt to appease and at the same time control the threatening fission President Yahya committed himself to giving all the provinces of Pakistan, East and West, the maximum of “legislative, administrative and fiscal” autonomy; but behind the promise lay the unspoken fear especially in the Army that the dominant position of the Punjab might soon be undermined if it were ever carried out and the unspoken threat that the military would step in again if that ever looked like happening.
It is just conceivable that some compromise would have been reached if the elections had been held last October when they were originally scheduled, although even then the separatist tide in Bengal looked almost beyond control. But what chance there was of that was washed away in the different tide of last autumn’s disastrous Bengal flood. President Yahya postponed the elections but was faced with a problem of rehabilitation in the East whose enormity might have defeated the most united state and was far beyond Pakistan’s administrative or financial resources. Amid the unrelieved death and destruction throughout the Ganges delta, and with daily revelations of governmental corruption, incompetence and – even worse – apparent indifference to the plight of the East, Bengali emotion overflowed.
When the elections at last were held in December, Sheikh Mujib’s Awami League campaigned under the banner of home rule that stopped short of outright secession, reserving only defense and foreign affairs for the central government. Its victory was overwhelming, with 151 out of 153 seats allocated to the eastern province and Sheikh Mujib was placed in the paradoxical position of being the most powerful politician and prospective Prime Minister, of a country that his own programme and party seemed about to dismember. Simultaneously. in West Pakistan, Mr. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. leading the People’s Party of Pakistan, had a victory only a little less decisive, winning 81 out of 138 seats at stake. For the first time, the two wings of the country faced each other in naked division, the old thread of Islam patently snapped by other passions and only the conciliatory powers by the threat of military force, standing between the state and dissolution.
Extremists wait
Conciliation has now gone out of the window and nothing but force remains Where everything else has failed it can hardly be expected to succeed. Even if a few thousand dead are sufficient to coerce the Bengalis for the moment, the resentments that led to the current tragedy can only be deepened by the tragedy itself. The cost, both financially and emotionally, holding down 75 million people at the end of uncertain supply lines must be more than West Pakistan can stand in the long run. Yet there is scarcely a hope that anything can be achieved in East Pakistan to eradicate Bengali grievances in anything but a very long run, indeed.
What is worse, the chances of a genuinely independent East Pakistan, or Bangladesh, succeeding must be diminished, and may be ruined by President Yahya’s attempt at military occupation. Behind Sheikh Mujib, whether he is in or out of prison, stand other and more extreme men. Some of them are in his own party, the Awarni League, and were probably responsible in the last few months for pushing him farther along the road to secession than he may have wanted to go. Others are outside the League in more revolutionary organizations.
The National Awami Party, led by the aging but still respected Maulana Bhasani, boycotted the elections in December, and is driven by factions but there are probably hundreds, if not thousands, in its ranks who have already taken the point of the Naxalite movement across the frontier in India’s West Bengal province and are ready to adopt the tactics of peasant revolution along with the language and possibly the aid of Maoist China. A prolonged military occupation of East Pakistan would offer them their best possible recruiting slogans. And a brief police action, such as President Yahya seems to hope for, would mean finding alternative local leaders to unification – a possibility that now seems more remote than the moon.
Will it spread?
It is not enough to suppose, as the Punjabi hawks of Yahya’s Army may do, that the Bengali peasants have no stomach for war. In India, a great many of them have already proved that they have a stomach for some kind of people’s uprising, however confused or misled it may be; and the longer the Army has to hold the lid down in East Pakistan the greater are the chances that revolutionaries on both sides of the frontier will make common cause. This prospect should alarm both New Delhi and Rawalpindi, for what has begun in this overcrowded corner of the two countries need not stop there. The earlier reaction in West Pakistan to eastern claims for autonomy has revealed schismatic possibilities there which could be strengthened if the country’s vigor were to be drained by the fruitless attempt to grapple the East to its bosom with hopes of steel – especially if it were seen that such a policy was followed quietly at the behest of Punjabi military leaders. Punjab dominance is not so popular in the West that it can be accepted forever in pursuit of unrealistic policies.
It is true that the conservative force of Islam remains a powerful factor in the West, under-writing with all the faith of the Prophet and all the hallowed memory of Mr. Jinnah, the sacred cause of maintaining a united Pakistan. But that, too, is not necessarily proof against provincial resentments; and if Bengal’s psychological secession continues there may be increasing numbers in the West who will say that its physical and legal secession would be better accepted. Its jute may be valuable, but its poverty is undeniable; why not, they may ask, let it go to the devil in its own way?
In India, too, in spite of Mrs. Gandhi’s recent electoral triumph, the morass into which President Yahya has now ventured in Bengal may suck others after him. On the assumption that East Pakistan is now beyond real redemption it must, on balance, be to India’s advantage to see an independent Bangladesh recognized as soon as possible while Sheikh Mujib still has the chance to dominate it. For if he is locked away under military rule again the chances of the Indian Bengal being brought back to sanity will be diminished by the rising passions across the frontier.
Yet if secession is to be the answer India still cannot rest easily, for Mrs. Gandhi’s victory may not hide for long the separatist emotions that have appeared in some of her provinces – not only West Bengal – in recent years. All in all, unless President Yahya can pull the odds, this week-end could yet go down not just the logical end of the process that began with the dissolution of British India but as the beginning of the long road of fission throughout the whole harassed subcontinent.
Reference: The Sunday Times, 28 March, 1971