Rawalpindi, June 20

President Yahya Khan faces increasing pressure to postpone yet again his long promised transfer of power to a popular government.

The absence of any reasonable hope of a political settlement with the rebellious eastern wing seems likely to prove a more than sufficient pretext for the-ruling military clique to insist on continued control by the armed forces in the name of the sacred unity of the Islamic state.

At the end of last month the President declared that despite what had happened in East Pakistan he still intended to carry through his plans for a “transfer of power to the elected representatives of the people”. An important statement outlining concrete measures was promised “within two or three weeks’’. Now nearly a month later it has been announced that the speech will be made on June 28.

A blunt and amiable soldier with little grasp of political realities, the President is believed to be genuinely desirous of a return to civilian rule. He appears, however, to have gravely miscalculated the difficulties involved, not least among them the absence in the eastern wing of an effective political structure to which power could be transferred.

The hope had been entertained here that many of those members of the now outlawed Awami League, who were elected to the National Assembly last December and were not actively engaged in the rebellion of March and April, could be induced to come out of hiding to form a new political party shorn of the separatist aspirations (whether real or imagined) of Shaikh Mujibur Rahman and his immediate circle of followers.

The small and rotund personage of of the Begum Akhtar Suleiman, the daughter of the late Mr Hussain Shaheed Suhrawardy, a former Prime Minister and the founder of the Awami League, was duly dispatched on a mission of reconciliation to the East. It was not a success.

No more than a dozen or so of the elected representatives of the Awami League are believed to have come forward, showing willingnes to cooperate with the centre.

One of the options open to the President on June 28 would be to set a deadline for members of the Awami League to come forward and claim their seats. Upon its expiry, those seats still unclaimed would be declared vacant and by-elections held to fill them with members of other parties. However, to hold such elections would demand a degree of security which the Army seems at the moment unable to provide.

The President could alternatively ask Mr Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), to form a government immediately. The justification for this would be that the PPP, which in December won 82 out of the 138 seats allocated to the west wing, is now the only big party left in the country.

There are, however, important objections to this course of action. Mr Bhutto's party has no national base. The transfer of power to him would effectively leave more than half the population of Pakistan without representation in either the Government or the National Assembly—hardly the proper basis for the reconciliation of the two wings of this unhappy country.

Mr Bhutto, as might be expected, is canvassing his claims loudly. It may be recalled that it was Mr Bhutto who before March 25 deliberately boycotted the meeting of the National Assembly—an action which directly precipitated later events — because he feared that the Shaikh would use his “brute majority” to form a government that would not include members of the PPP and would therefore only be regionally based.

Nowadays, however, there is no more ardent champion of the principle of majority rule than the ambitious and polished Mr Bhutto.

Mr Bhutto’s relationship with the generals, the ultimate sources of power in Pakistan, will determine whether or not he gets his way.

In drawing the balance between these conflicting pressures on June 28. President Yahya is likely to find that his own position, already considered insecure, is likely to become even more precarious.