Dacca: There are about fifty villages built on mounds above their paddy fields. Their thatched walls shaded by mango trees and banana plantations, in the Union of Aminpur, 20 miles and a ferry ride across the Ganges from Dacca. The Awami League union committee was sitting on wooden benches of the lean tea shop, its walls patched with newspaper and page proofs from “Tales From Home and Abroad” as we entered. They were discussing, like similar action committees set up throughout this province, their next step in what they already regard as Independent East Bengal - Bangladesh.

Out of 58 villages, they have about three hundred active members, one hundred of them formed into an action committee ready to resist the army if need be and already being trained by a villager whose claim to expertise is service as a lance corporal in the Royal Indian Army Service Corps. They said bravely enough that they had only local weapons - sticks, spears, and arrows - but they hoped to take weapons from the enemy. I asked what would happen if the army moved against them. First they would stop the ferry, they replied, then try and block the road and ambush them - on highways raised on a narrow causeway, vehicles are pretty vulnerable.

‘LIBERATED’

I doubt that if the army moves it will come to Aminpur, whose claim to fame will remain the ruins of the old capital of this part of Bengal which it encloses. But the views expressed there are the commonplaces of Dacca conversation - except that one is not always able to get firm evidence that deeds are being planned to match the words. Even the friend who drives us out talks of returning to his village and declaring it a “liberated area” if the army clamps down.

For the student leaders in the deserted concrete boxes of Dacca University where the odd .22 rifles rest against a wall, independence has already come. If Yahya comes, says the Students’ League President, Nure Alam Siddique, then he comes as a State guest. “We have no more fascination for Pakistan. We have burnt the Pakistani flag. Have you seen a single Pakistani flag here?” The students who are able to organize large bodies of demonstrators at short notice, are one of the most powerful forces preventing Mujib from doing anything but suggest a compromise.

They have been instrumental in pushing him hard towards independence, though he has minced his words. Yet they, like everybody but a very few, insist that they will follow wherever he directs and give him carte blanche. “For the first time in history Bangladesh is speaking with one voice - the voice of Sheikh Mujib.” The man in the village tea shop or the chamber of commerce office say the same thing exactly. Students here have strong personal reasons for favouring independence. The job opportunities of the 700,000 or so they claim to represent are “almost nil”, they claim. If they are lucky, they say, they might become a postal clerk or a teacher. Government and business jobs, they claim are the preserve mainly of West Pakistanis, and they find it difficult to get a job that pays even £20 a month.

PROGRAMME

For them real independence may seem a promised land but their programme for an independent Bangladesh remains baffling. They are, for all their straight-forward nationalism, the most unideological students. They stand, they say for scientific Socialism or “Socialism adapted to the climate of East Bengal”. But when you suggest that socialism has become such an omnibus word in this subcontinent that it can mean anything you like they talk of bit of nationalization of jute and heavy industry, of which there is little here, and leave it pretty much at that.

For the scenario which paints Bengal as the cockpit of Asian communism prayed on by foreign influences, East Bengal has still to learn its lines “With friendship towards all and malice to none” was the definition of a Bengali foreign policy given by one student leader, though his colleagues stepped into rule out all foreign bases and insist on support for all freedom struggles. Freedom struggle is the way they describe their movement and they remain hurt that sufficient world wide notice has not been taken of it. They won’t guess aloud too much about what might happen but seem to expect the army to act. Students and villagers and those who have left Dacca for the villages begin to feel their brave words may be put in the test.