To add to the many deep cleavages between the two wings is the most unbridgeable of all, the fact that they are separated by a thousand miles of a hostile India. This has been poignantly underscored in the past month by India’s banning of over flights between the two wings, causing immense cost, inconvenience and dislocation. No modern nation can expect to function on such terms, divided economically, socially, culturally and - the coup de grace - physically. These are among the reasons why in its 23 anxious years Pakistan’s leaders have failed to create a stable, durable democratic system. For the same reasons there seems no lasting cure short of major surgery which is worse than the disease - the splitting of Pakistan into two separate nations. Now that the long-simmering confrontation has come to the boil, the leaders are in position of no return.

To Pakistanis and their friends, as well as bystanders who are concerned about the repercussions of such, a breakup on the stability of the whole Southern Asia, this is a cruelly dismaying outcome to December’s National Assembly elections. For President Yahya Khan’s formula for a carefully phased return to civilian government seemed to be working so smoothly and fairly.

East Pakistan had been treated as a virtual colony of the West wing since independence in 1947. Now for the first time, it achieved its rightful place in the system of government. It was the majority wing. The elections cleared away a mass of discredited politicians and outmoded splinter groups. Two parties swept the polls. Mr. Bhutto, once President Ayub’s Foreign Minister, a silver-tongued millionaire championing the poor in the name of “Islamic Socialism’” won 85 of the West wing’s 138 seats for his People’s Party. The Awami League of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, darling of the Bengalis, a man of the people, won all but two of the East wing’s 162 seats, partly on the crest of the emotional wave generated by November’s cyclone disaster. He thus achieved a majority in the 300-seat Assembly.

It then seemed that it was in the interests of both political leaders to make common cause and agree on a new constitution which would enable President Yahya to leave the scene. There was little to divide them ideologically, and both men had left ample room for compromise on constitutional issues. But the election created not simple a two-party system, it created a two-party system in which, because of the population balance, the East wing would always rule the roost and the opposition could never turn the political tables. The result highlighted the differences between the two wings.

To safeguard its status and prevent further colonisation, East Pakistan insisted on almost total autonomy, embodied in the Awami League’s “Six Points”. Under these, the province would have sole control over such vital matters as its own revenue and expenditure, foreign aid and foreign trade, leaving only defence and foreign policy, and perhaps currency, to a weak central government. This was inevitably anathema in the West wing. It was unacceptable to Mr. Bhutto, not only for the considerable reason of his own overweening ambition, but because a strong central government is essential to his vision of a thousand-year war with India.

It was unacceptable, too, to Yahya, pledged to defend the integrity of Pakistan. It was unacceptable to the predominantly Punjabi army, which, while ready to grant the East wing its democratic due, could never go so far as to acquiesce in a system which made it permanently dependent on the non-martial Bengali majority for its appropriations. And it was unacceptable in its political logic, because a corollary of autonomy for East Pakistan would be equal autonomy four the fur provinces of the West wing, a recipe for disintegration. And so an impasse was reached before the Assembly could even meet.

WRONG STYLE

It was at this crucial time that Yahya seemed to lose his touch. He caused an upsurge in the East wing by postponing the meeting of the Assembly. After a week of disruption he put forward a new date, March 25 but his broadcast to the nation was misjudged. In the style more of a sergeant-major than a general, it did nothing to convince the by now impatient masses of the East wing that there was any hope for them but a unilateral declaration of the independence of “Bangladesh”. On Sunday, Sheikh Mujib came as near to declaring this as he could without inviting immediate, harsh reaction from the army. The army will quell any secessionist move, which means bloodshed.

If independence is achieved “Bangladesh” will have to retrieve, on its own, an economy which is in ruins. If it is averted or prevented, how to contain the great ground swell of a restive and increasingly extreme Bengali nationalism? And how to control and administer a nation with an occupying force a thousand miles from base? If the East secedes it will set up equally divisive strains in the West, where the economy is also frail.

The events in East Pakistan are also having an ominous effect in neighbouring West Bengal, India’s problem State. The Marxist leader Jyoti Basu is demanding his own version of the “Six Points” and separation from New Delhi. It is not for nothing that there are so many Chinese “observers” in Dacca these days.