Observer (London)

Karachi, 5 December. Loudspeaker vans harangue you in the street, political charges and counter-charges bombard you from the newspapers. The Army stands by to head off violence. Monday, the momentous day in Pakistan’s history, when 56 million voters go to General Election polls for the first time in 23 years, will reveal whether or not the militant Left is on its way to power. That is perhaps a more important question just now than the risk of East Pakistan breaking away from West Pakistan, though the odds are on Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the fiery Bengali leader, who hints darkly of separatism, achieving a majority and the premiership of all Pakistan.

The Left in Pakistan is on the warpath. In the old garden city of Lahore, I found myself sitting at a long dining-room table in a palatial house with a young Punjabi millionaire, rich enough not to work, and a prosperous young lawyer who is running ex-Foreign Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s General Election campaign in the city. Both were in Cambridge. They picked at their food with languid Woosterish grace, and had just distributed Leftist tracts to the servants, who stood respectively behind us. The young millionaire, delicately popping food into his mouth, is a leader of the National Awami Party, an extreme group to the left of Bhutto. How does it differ from Bhutto? Tired eyelids drooped upon tired eyes, ‘Well, for some peculiar reason Bhutto seems to admire Sukarno. We very much look up to Mao Tse-tung.’

He gently plugged a cigarette into a long black holder. ‘Bhutto seems to be playing up to the Muslims. Well, my dear fellow,’ he looked at the lawyer, ‘the workers are roughing-up the old greybearded religious chaps these days, in case you hadn’t noticed.’ The lawyer replied that as Pakistan is still very much a traditional religious country - common religion is an important link between East and West - it is a reasonable tactic to plug Islam as well as socialism. In this deviousness the voters for the Left are plunging hands into a bran tub; they will only know what they have got in the next few weeks.

The Left is a strange thing, bizarrely mottled and fissured, it stretches from Maoism to Sukarnism and back for democratic socialism. Its leaders are mostly well-heeled. None is working class. Ranged against the Muslim parties of the Right and Centre, the stars of the Left have been active to the point of exhaustion - Mujib, whistle-stopping triumphantly in the East, Bhutto struggling hectically against traditionalism in the West. Mujib’s meetings are victorious affairs of hundreds of thousands; Bhutto himself is fighting five seats at once, as electoral law permits him.

Mujib’s problem is not how to win, but what to do when he has won. His platform insists, perhaps rashly, on six points for provincial autonomy. These leave defence and foreign affairs in central government hands, but snatch from them power to levy taxes. This President Yahya Khan, a stern, no-nonsense military man, will not accept; nor will even those West Pakistanis who mistrust the Army politically but passionately approve of it as a bulwark against India and resent anyone claiming the right to tinker with its budget. There is room for a clash between Mujib and the Army on this point when the newly-elected Assembly meets to evolve a new Constitution. The Army is not giving up power until it has a Constitution it approves.

This rising star in the East is a rough, tough-spoken, dyed-in-the-wool politician, with a deep voice and a very piercing eye. Meeting him in his relatively modest house in Dacca during Ramadan, the fasting month for Muslims, you find him snatching a surreptitious pipeful of tobacco and taking himself very seriously indeed. He argues nationalisation of banks insurance, shipping, and hints that East Bengal, so long ‘colonised’ by West Pakistan, would do well to start trade relations with Indian West Bengal. No one knows what sort of Prime Minister he would make. His colleagues are a mixed bag, including people further to the Left than he is, and their competence is uncertain.

Bhutto is the only campaigner with a really modern look. He is suave, sophisticated, colourful. His people hand out gay party caps and flags. Though his power base is Sind Province, he is striving to extend his support. Many think he can. He already has followers in the Punjab and the North- West Frontier. He is an enigma. He talks headily of imminent distribution of land to peasants - and of trying to undercut the traditional influence of landlords. In Pakistan today wealth and socialism confront each other or unite confusingly.

In the modern, unfinished capital of Islamabad, I visited deposed President Ayub Khan, taking tea on his terrace in the sun. He is now a symbol of things past and failed, lonely, abandoned by former friends and proteges - of whom Bhutto was one. Neither Bhutto nor any other Western Pakistani left-winger has a chance of real power this time. But the distinctly anti- Western climate of Pakistan, coupled with widespread warm feelings towards Peking, have provided a fertile soil for the Left to burgeon in. There is a danger that in post-election elation or despair the left-wing leaders might push things too far. If so the heavy brigade of Yahya Khan’s watchful military establishment could come charging down once more. And then Mujib, Bhutto and other frustrated political leaders, the long-awaited rewards of political freedom dashed from them yet again, might choose separatism or civil war, or both.