If revolutionaries are connoisseurs of what is known as a revolutionary situation, the communists of East Pakistan must be thinking that they have now got it made. With the Awami League leader Shaikh Mujibur Rahman under detention and most of his lieutenants disabled or dispersed, the underground can move in. This is the hour for the guerrilla.

We do not know what the underground movement are doing, nor can we tell who is leading them if they are in fact doing it—if, that is to say, they are following their own coarse and not backing the Awami League. Some estimate of their capacity can be made, however, by looking a little closer at their recent history.

The bearded patriarchal figure in the forefront is Maulana Bhasani. He broke away from the Awami League in 1957 to form his own National Awami Party, but the advent of Field-Marshal Ayub Khan in 1958, at the head of a military government, sent this body underground.

But this did not silence the Maulana entirely. Now well into his eighties, he is the kind of figure who looks at home in an Islamic state; and what can be wrong with socialism so long as it is something called "Islamic socialism"?

But by 1964, when the Maulana was back in open political business, it became obvious that his N.A.P. was a communist front within which the forbidden communists of Pakistan could take refuge. It became obvious because by then the strains of the Sino-Soviet depute was wrecking the unity of all communist parties.

So in East Pakistan the split occurred too, and a group led by Professor Muzaffar Ahmed moved away to form the pro-Moscow wing of the N.A.P. This left the Maulana to be described as pro-Peking and for a time he relished the label.

But before long, others among his Bengali intellectual following and mostly from landlord families at that—found the Maulana's Islamic socialism not at all Maoist in content. Patriarch or no, the man was plainly and "incurably petit-bourgeois".

By 1967 when Naxalites across the border in West Bengal were promising to liberate the peasants, the mainstream Maoists of the N.A.P made some tentative contacts but without much effective result. Surprising as it might seem to Chairman Mao in distant Peking, Hindu Maoists and Islamic Maoists were not easily united in the cause.

Last year, the N.A.P. front began to disintegrate. The first question that split them was whether or not they should take port in the forthcoming elections.

To Maoists this interest to the polling booth was deviationist and revisionist. When it came to the point, even Maulana Bhasani stood back. Only Muzaffar Ahmed’s pro-Moscow wing put up candidates and actually won four seats in West Pakistan where Wali Khan, son of the well-known Abdul Ghaffar Khan, commanded a following in the North-West Frontier province.

The other sections of the N.A.P. waited their chances while the Maulana stood forth as the champion of independence for East Bengal—this being the only trump card left to him by the strongly supported Awami League led by Sheikh Mujib.

After the elections, a left-wing Dacca newspaper that supported the summed up the attitude of its constituent parts, now all committed in some form to East Bengal's independence. "Mujib's triumph could only be a holding action ", it said. "The sweep of the left will carry everything before it. If Mujib has the courage to join it, or even lead it, he will survive. If he cannot, he will fade faster than morning dew on a summer rose."

Various leaders of breakaway groups have been identified and from references made in the East Pakistan left-wing press, it is possible to identify the following groups:
Communist Party of East Pakistan (Marxist-Leninist) who are probably the mainstream Maoists led by Mohammad Toaha;
East Bengal Communist Party (Trotskyist);
Coordinating Committee of Communist Revolutionaries.

There may he as many other groups, such have been the fissiparous tendencies of the leftists.

It might be reasonable, however, to question whether Bengali left-wingers have the qualities for success in Maoist revolution. This may not require the martial qualities which are found to be lacking in the Bengali temperament but it does require discipline and solidarity. East Bengal's left does not look at all promising.