David Loshak in New Delhi looks at the cost
and problems of the infant Bangladesh.
Mother India’s New Offspring
Bangladesh must now be regarded as a reality – “recognised.” as India and Bhutan have recognised it, or not. Indian forces are at the gates of Dacca. The Pakistan Army is being slowly throttled. The vast majority of the Bengali people have patently and jubilantly welcomed the Indian “liberators” and there are signs that even the intransigent Pakistani generals themselves, inside Dacca. are seeking a face-saving way out and are trying to sue for peace. For all these reasons, Bangladesh, the eighth most populous nation in the world, has become a fact of international life, and it is hard to see anything now, not even some further futile resort to military force.. if by some logistic miracle Pakistan contrived to mount an invasion – could he be unreasonable.
No event since independence has aroused such a fever of excitement among the people of India. The newspapers, from the Patriot on the Left to the Hindu nationalist Motherland, as well as the normally sober Right-wing Statesman and Indian Express, have come near to hysteria at times in both their news and editorial columns, writing of Bangladesh and the Bengali leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, in tones of outlandish fulsomeness reminiscent of Pravda adulating Stalin in his heyday.
India is exultant in the dismemberment of Pakistan. India has waited 24 years to see the two-nation theory, the partitioning of the subcontinent between Moslem Pakistan and Hindu India, discredited and destroyed The whole nation of a theocratic Pakistan has always been, repugnant to a secular India: the carving up of British India on supposedly religious lines has always been resented.
Who has Sind? India has never been reconciled to the creation of Pakistan. On the very day that war broke out, Dec. 3, Mrs. Gandhi was telling a Calcutta audience that no country could be based solely on a particular religion, yet Pakistan was based on that “absurd” idea. India and her leaders do regard, and have always regarded, Pakistan as a nation that did not deserve to exist and never ought to have existed. It is rather revealing, in this context, that the Indian propaganda machine, through its agency, the Ministry of Information. has just published an article entitled, “And now Sind Desh” – an independent Sind, West Pakistan’s second province after the Punjab. “Now that Bangladesh has become a reality, the demand for Sind Desh is gathering strength and will soon become a big thorn in Islamabad’s side,” the article says hopefully, and goes on to give details of the autonomous movement in Sind and the ways in which the Central Government has sought to repress it. There need be no dispute over the facts that are cited – it is that they are given at all that betrays the Indian attitude towards Pakistan.
Meanwhile India is committed, and obliged, to help to repair the tattered fabric of the fledgling nation. India must support Bangladesh if only to prevent economic disasters even more damaging than the influx of 10 million refugees from infecting the already frail eastern areas of the country and so corroding the entire structure of the Indian economy. There is also deep anxiety in New Delhi about spreading political corrosion if a moderate, pro-Indian and, above all stable Bangladesh Government is not quickly and safely installed. Already a team of top-flight Indian civil servants has been sent into Bangladesh. The immediate task will be to reorganize administration, and there are plans for engineers and doctors to follow.
Daunting task The task of ensuring the early return of the refugees, which India is determined to achieve and which is, indeed, her chief immediate war aim, is one of daunting magnitude. It could well require not merely administrative expertise but calculated compulsion, for there is no certainty that the wretched refugees, terrorized, rootless and bewildered, are in any mood for a further trek, this time back to uncertainty in everything except the certainty of poverty. It is easy to see that many may not be easily persuaded to leave the camps of West Bengal, Assam and Tripura, which, however miserable, at least provide shelter and regular free food.
But the refugees in India are only part of the refugee problem. There are, too, uncounted millions of helpless folk who have either fled from their homes or been rendered homeless by the depredations of the Pakistan army. refugees in their own country. Hardly anything is known of their fate or how they are managing to survive, but clearly their resettlement is vital. With harvesting of the staple diet, rice, cut short by the war, and the distribution of food made near to impossible by the disruption of road, rail and water transport, there is, yet again in this woebegone area, the serious prospect of a major famine, which India will have to strive, with out-side aid, to avert.
There is no reliable way of assessing how much marketable produce, such as jute, food grains and other cash crops, was sown and reaped this summer. But an essential task will be to enable the farmers to market what there is, and with the routes to the traditional large markets of Dacca and the ports in the south severed or blocked. India has to provide alternative outlets. This will involve organizing the purchase, storage and sale of as much of the crops as possible, to prevent a total breakdown of the rural economy, the backbone of Bangladesh. But that can be only a beginning. This chronically neglected area will be very dependent on India for many essentials if it is to struggle upward. Millions will need help to rebuild their homes and villages. Roads and railways will need repair and reconstruction. Such commodities as seeds, fertilizer and cement will have to come, at least in the early days, from big brother.
India is not unready to shoulder these burdens, if only because to shrug them of would create even greater difficulties. It could, for example, force Bangladesh to seek some willing friends, however steep the political price. Yet there are other, crucial political problems. For the Bangladesh leadership is far from monolithic. Many of the new young firebrands who have found fulfillment in the vanguard of the Mukti Fou guerrillas are not Awami League moderates like Sheikh Mujibur Rahman or Mr Tajuddin Ahmed, the Bangladesh Prime Minister. They are quite simply, impetuous impatient Communist revolutionaries, of various molds, who are intolerant of “bourgeois” methods and solutions, and certainly as distrustful of India in the role of Uncle Sam as India is of Uncle Sam himself.
First objective Meanwhile the immediate problem is to end the fighting. This India aims to do, and will be glad to do, once Bangladesh is cleared of Pakistan troops. That achieved either by outright military victory or by some negotiated settlement, India will have no pressing purpose in pursuing the war on the western front. There is no need for extra territory, except some small border outposts and enclaves, for strategic reasons and that applies even to Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, which India regards as rightfully her own.
But whether Pakistan could possibly accede to peace on such terms is another matter. And, of course, India’s military victory, even in Bangladesh, is, with great Powers now threatening to intercede or even intervene, hardly assured. India’s people have yet to absorb the full import of Mrs. Gandhi’s recent warning that “dark days” lie ahead.
Reference: The Daily Telegraph, 16 December, 197