IT was after midnight in a village south of Jessore. The local Awami League leaders had just said goodnight and left when a tall, sharp man in lungi with a rifle slung on his shoulder walked into the thatched hut I was staying. He was, I discovered later, one of the top leaders of Maulana Bashani's NAP (National Awami Party). This leader, who does not want to be identified, said he wanted to know what the world outside thought about Bangla Desh. In course of the conversation he bitterly attacked Sheikh Mujibur Rahman for having brought this inhuman suffering on the people.

Mujib, he said, never asked the Bengalis to prepare for protracted armed struggle - the only way a people can win its liberation. The precious week he spent behind closed doors with President Yahya Khan was used by the army to prepare a massive onslaught.

Although his party - the NAP was now actively participating in the liberation war, he did not foresee any prospect of victory in the near future. Given the low level of Bengali preparedness and the genocidal methods adopted by the army, public opinion might even swing overwhelmingly behind compromise rather than protracted struggle. He even insinuated this might exactly be what Mujib had bargained for.

When asked how the NAP was preparing to wage a prolonged fight for liberation, he frankly confessed that although the Maulana was respected universally his supporters were not yet organised. Naxalites like Mohammad Toha and Abdul Huq who had left the NAP were, he said, misled and sectarian - but nonetheless better organised. The army, he predicted, was bound at first to have the upper hand. A liberation rags-and-tatter army simply cannot hold towns against a modern military Machine. The people must retreat to the countryside and strike back gradually from there.

The Awami League leaders I talked to put a brave face on things. Yes, the people were suffering but soon the army's supplies would run short and "isolated, famished, battered by our Mukti Fauj (Liberation Army) they will throw in the sponge". But from the anxious inquiries they made about the possibility of foreign intervention to stop the massacre of civilians, or the chances of Bangla Desh being recognised abroad, indicated that psychologically they were not yet prepared to accept the losses protracted guerilla war against the government forces would involve. "You journalists should try to arouse public opinion so that foreign governments immediately recognise our government."

No such requests were, however, made by one member of the provincial assembly who had won on an Awami League ticket. "Our party has in many areas failed to give leadership to the struggle. Take Jessore district, from which five Awami League candidates were elected. Of them one has been arrested, three have fled and only one is engaged in organising logistics for our Mukti Fauj." With a wry smile he said, "you cannot of course blame them. When they took our party's ticket they hoped to be parliamentarians not commanders."

And that exactly is what gave Nazrul, a member of Mohammad Toha's EPCP (M-L) (East Pakistan Communist Party-Marxist-Leninist), his confidence. "We knew political power grows out of the barrel of a gun and we prepared accordingly," he told me while travelling on a truck carrying EPR (East Pakistani Rifles) soldiers to a front in Jessore. A student of Jessore government college, Nazrul was carrying a second world war bolt- action rifle he had taken from a police station just after the war started. His party's leaders, he said, had gone underground some time before the flare-up and had been able to organise rural bases in Pabna, Rajshahi and Jessore districts which incidentally border India.

Knowing that Mujib is anti-communist, how could they fight alongside the Awami League, I asked. "This," he said, "is just the beginning of our struggle for socialism and at this stage we can collaborate with all patriotic elements." He was sure that ultimately the leadership would rest with the most militant party of the proletariat - the EPCP (M-L).

Common people - from peasants to vendors and fishermen - I talked to invariably spoke with contempt for the "khans", as the West Pakistanis are commonly called: "The khans have bled us white." One vendor in a small market town pointed out the rice they grew in Bangla Desh cost less to buy in West Pakistani; Bengalis had to pay more for the paper they produced than people in the west. Jute, he said, was purchased from the peasant at Rs20 a maund and sold abroad at Rs60.

But this awareness of being exploited, the NAP leader told me, was not always matched by readiness to sacrifice what they have in order to get rid of the exploiters. Travelling through villages I also noticed that the further it was from the embattled town of Jessore, the lower was popular concern about the war. "The 'khans' wouldn't come this far," was the half- questioning assertion on many lips. To many who live closer to the Indian side of the district, the war is largely a distant affair - to be fought by the Bengalis of the EPR and supported from afar with sackfuls of rice, flour, eggs and meat.