There’s an endearing delirium - as well as much blood-curdling blather - in Pakistani politicking. Maulana Bhasani, 89-year-old champion of peasantry and Peking, isn’t putting up any candidates at next Monday’s polls: instead when the Assembly meets to give the country a constitution he’ll send them a letter telling them what to do. Meanwhile, there’s a row because another ancient holy man found the “Thoughts of Chairman Mao” on his State airline seat and in Hyderabad the beggars have formed a trade union pledging votes for all who favour “we important members of society.”

You get a bitter and bizarre flavour as you go to meet Chaudhury Rahmat of Jamaat Islam the rightist of the Right parties, the holiest of the holiest. By repute the Jamaat can play it ruthless, and violence is understandable here - down a narrow alley as alive with filthy children as the market stalls are alive with flies. In a small decrepit house sits Rahmat, freshly returned - like almost every politician you can name - from the cyclone areas and treading a treacherous path, for the Jamaat want to keep Pakistan united and strong for Islam. “Well”, he says, “it was appalling.” “Had not the central Government far away in the West been desperately criminally slow to react?” some needier asks. Rahmat picks his words like a tough piece of Tandoori chicken. Well, “somewhat late” but kindly don’t miscue from that that the West cares nothing for the East. Every time disasters struck the East the Jamaat has collected bountiful relief in the West and he just happens to have relevant figures here going back 16 years.

“Dear me the figures for ’56 and ’57 have quite gone astray.” He’d like to light the torch but his matches are sodden. This charming amateurism makes Pakistan’s revived free politics - 25 parties plus a deluge of independents - flutter round wild woolly Centrism. On the one hand stand myriad politicians letting no cyclone horror pass unstressed and mostly drawing full ramifications for Bengal from it. On the other hand are the Civil service and the army; not all wholeheartedly behind renewed democracy and prone to bend an ear with plaintive tales of how they always hated serving Ayub - a hair-shirtiness that may not survive a few lost salaries. And somewhere in the middle lies as potent an issue as any election anywhere ever produced: the rise of Bengal. An issue dramatised by the disaster which it’s thought has made the Awami League triumph assured.

Voting symbols

One drives out to the sweeter suburbs of Dacca past straw huts and tin can estates of total squalor stretched along the roadsides, all have model boats dangling outside - a voting symbol in a land where only 16 per cent are literate - of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the next leader of Pakistan. Mujib at 50 has the charisma for the job : all imperious with flecks of grey and a flashing Bengali tongue which has drawn a million to a single meeting. Even early in the morning at his home there is a stagey quality. Dozens of youths, party workers and frantic emissaries from candidates needing his personal support mill outside the peeling villa. Mujib meets guests in a politically pictorial antechamber.

He chants amiably but a shade pontifically in stilted English and at the end disports himself on the lawn for some cameras with an assembled throng looking admiringly on. Will he win on Monday? Ninety seven per cent or there-about says Mujib - at any rate enough to give him from the East alone sufficient seats to dominate the Constitutional Assembly and enshrine his famous six points in Pakistan’s rules of game. Three of the six points guarantee a fantastic degree of autonomy for the East, strip Islamabad of everything but foreign affairs and defence.

Will the retiring Yahya and his generals wear it? It will be “the will of the people”, says Mujib, “the clique is going, the bureaucracy and vested interests are going. They will not oppose the will of the people”. Didn’t a British Cabinet Commission in 1947 propose precisely the same kind of autonomy? He will be at peace with all the world. He will trade “with all our neighbours” (which means Indians). He will obviously try for a Kashmir settlement. Will the army be happy? The army are “sons of the soil”. What suits people will suit them. “Everything is possible if the intention is good. So where I’m concerned my intention is always good”. Indeed, a slighting reference to the Vietnamese war is counterbalanced by remembrance of how much he enjoyed his stay in America.

There’s no note to give J. Edgar Hoover, the slightest gripe. Democracy itself brings a warm flow of praise from somebody who only last week was promising the prospect of another million deaths on the road to an autonomous Bengal. There’s a certain steel to his humour. When one asks what he does apart from politics, he smirks, “go to gaol”. And he has spent 10 years there, mostly as the man Ayub loved to incarcerate and thus ironically elevated to public affection. But many hard phrases have soft centres. Though he has little ministerial experience himself and most Awami Leaguers are scantily versed in the mechanics of government he still thinks “fighting” will dragoon and harness Pakistan’s vast Civil Service. Though he concedes that his way - the slow boat to a constitutional Bengal - may take many years, he believes the slum and village masses will wait and understand not rise and destroy. “Our people are very good people. They’re happy with small things. You give them a good start and they’ll be satisfied.”

Not everyone is so phlegmatic. Some fear a move from the West, when, say a defence budget is cut or Islamabad shifted to Dacca. Some fear Mujib will pursue purely middle-class politics on his middle-class way and the streets will run red with disillusion. Some fear that Mujib’s line on Bengali independence - “now?” “No not yet” - means that cutting adrift will be held in reserve, a grand gesture to clam ferment a couple of years hence.

No full scenario

Nobody possesses the full scenario. Nobody knows if Bengali Nationalism is the fighting continuing kind - or whether the post-electoral West may not sue for divorce first. At any rate there are few here who will give long-term long odds on Pakistan remaining one nation and the clouds over Bengal’s poorest area in Asia lifting. To a stranger it is numbers of people that are frightening, a crowd round every corner. Seventy-three million now. Double that in 20 years. Double the tragedy.

The cyclone death toll completely replaced a couple of months’ breeding. “Oh”, says Mujib, “ the population explosion is not a very big problem. If we can control the floods we can be self-sufficient in food within two years.” And as for the crowding there’s much more land to be reclaimed from the deadly Bay of Bengal. His henchmen students or ex-Oxbridge intelligentsia don’t find this bland unconcern wrapped up in intense pride for the fruitfulness of Bengal at all disquieting. But Mujib on quite another subject does confess a guiding bit of philosophy. “Always”, he says, “always, I prepare for the worst.”