Our Special Correspondent recently in Dacca.

In the grounds of Dacca University radical groups have started training students in the use of firearms. In many of the villages in East Pakistan brigades of “volunteers” have been established as the basis of a people’s militia whose future task is to confront the Pakistan Army. Already petrol bombs and other home-made bombs manufactured from chemicals stolen from laboratories in the past few weeks, have made their first appearance in the eastern capital.

Most conversation with Bengalis inevitably touch on the subject of their “fight for independence”. Students talk of a popular uprising against the Pakistan Army units in the province which are recruited in the western wing and which they regard as an occupying force. Even those accustomed to more sober thoughts are being tempted by ideas of independence - if not through political evolution then through violent revolution against the central Government.

That such ideas remain half baked is the result of the movement in East Pakistan having matured overnight from a protest strike to a fully pledged and well disciplined civil disobedience campaign bordering on a unilateral declaration of independence.

Indeed, for the past three weeks East Pakistan, or Bangla Desh (Bengal state) as its people call it, has enjoyed an independence of sorts. From his modest home in Dacca’s middle class residential area Shaikh Mujibur Rahman, the East Pakistan leader and holder of the outright majority in the Pakistan National Assembly, and his advisers have juggled the administrative affairs of the province.

The judiciary has lent its absolute support; government offices have remained closed at the Sheikh’s directions; essential services operate according to his instructions; banks function within a strict framework established after a trial-and-error process; and even President Yahya Khan had felt it necessary to secure the Sheikh’s guarantee that law and order would prevail during his visit before he flew to Dacca.

Although Sheikh Mujibur has at all times carefully avoided the word “independence”, stopping short at “emancipation for Bengal” in both his public and private utterances, there is no doubt that the events of the past weeks have set the province firmly and irreversibly on the path of independence. Indeed, if Sheikh Mujibur’s movement had aimed at the correction of the imbalance in the two wings of Pakistan, its offspring has been the realization of Bangla Desh.

“The six-point programme was a formula for getting our due while remaining united within the context of Pakistan”, one Bengali political leader told me. “However, the past three weeks have faced both the east and west wings with the problem of how best to get out of each other’s hair once and for all”.

To understand Bengali thinking it is necessary to grasp some economic and social facts. For instance, although the export of jute from East Pakistan provided half of the entire country’s foreign exchange, the record of the past 20 years shows that four-fifths of the military and administrative expenditure has been in the west wing.

Development expenditures have been at the ratio of three to one in the west wing’s favour and that wing also accounts for 85 per cent of civil servants and 90 per cent of Army officers, although it has a smaller population than the eastern province.

Even superficially the disparity in the two wings is easy to detect. Whereas the cities of West Pakistan blossom with new and impressive buildings and are planned around a solid infrastructure, the look of the provincial town is yet to be erased even from Dacca, the capital of East Pakistan.

Poverty is much more visible, slums are ever present and the opportunities for those who manage to secure an education are few in the eastern province, while the relative security which comes with an industrialized and business oriented society is a more obvious feature of the west wing.

East Pakistan’s economists maintain that although manufacturing industry in the two wings began at the same level at the time of Pakistan was born, the east wing has since fallen behind and its industry is now less than 60 per cent that of the west wing. They blame the central Government for the disparity claiming that it has arisen from its tendency to use foreign exchange earnings from the east’s exports and to give liberal bank credits to the western business, not to those in the east wing.

Certainly, there has been an effort to redress part of the imbalance. The latest five-year plan for 1970-75 gives East Pakistan 53 per cent of the distribution of regional development expenditure compared with about 30 per cent which was set aside for it in the two previous five-year plans.

Those who advocate a complete break with West Pakistan maintain that an independent Bangla Desh would make economic sense. For a start, the country could make a full use of its income from jute exports. This does not take into account the uncertainty which faces the jute industry. Nor does it take stock of the province’s population explosion. The present population of 73 million threatens to double in the next 24 years giving East Pakistan a density of 11.5 people to the acre by the year 2000. Moreover, the birth control programme has fallen well short of expectation.

However, even if Sheikh Mujibur reaches an agreement with Preside Yahya based on his six-point programme giving East Pakistan regional autonomy with full control over her finances, the call for independence raised during the past three weeks will certainly not be satisfied.