By its sledgehammer attack on a largely unarmed population in the name of “One Pakistan” the military Government has made sure that Pakistan cannot remain one. Whether in two years, five years or ten the country is going to divide. But for the moment, except perhaps in Chittagong, the army is going to retain the master’s hand. With its troops mainly equipped with modern automatic rifles and few hesitations in using them, it faces a large but largely unorganised population with very few firearms, with perhaps some units of the East Pakistan Rifles, a kind of permanent territorial unit using 1939-type equipment. There are about 27,000 of these troops, about 80 per cent of them Bengali; but about 80 per cent of the officers are Westerners. Some of them had already been disarmed by March 25, other units were being posted close to regular army troops, and a careful watch was being kept on them.

The Naxalite guerrilla groups which operate in East Bengal already are small, disunited, and have very few arms. While you will find people who talk of arms consignments being smuggled in from south of Chittagong or run across the Burmese borders, and people who claim to deal in modern rifles tout their wares, not a very large number are thought to have entered the country yet. One leading member of a Naxalite group which was organising a labour march on March 25 could give me few examples of armed violence carried out by his group and admitted; “We are as yet very weak”. Even over the border in West Bengal where an average of perhaps half a dozen lives a day have been claimed by political violence this year, it is noticeable that the arms recovered by police include very few even halfway modern weapons. They include spears and home made pipe-guns that fire fifteen feet, and explosives for home made bombs. No doubt guerrilla activity will increase, and more arms will come in, only slowly.

The army on the other hand has been building up its resources for the past month. Many of the three regular PIA flights a day from Karachi have been bringing in troops, perhaps 130 at a time; I know people who have traveled on them. Transport aircraft have also been arriving regularly. Extra petrol supplies were requisitioned from Dacca civilian stocks.

MOST SERIOUS

There are estimated to be about three divisions of troops now in East Pakistan with concentrations of brigade strength at least at Dacca, Comilla (plus an artillery regiment), Rangpur (plus an armoured regiment with tanks), and Jessore. A battalion of the Bengal Regiment are stationed at Joydebpur about 20 miles from Dacca. The most serious situation appears to have confronted the army in the main port, Chittagong, where it does not have a large force. In early March when there were very serious communal riots in the city, killing about two thousand people and laying waste hundreds of square yards of squatter colonies, the army was stretched to protect the families of non-Bengalis. On the evening of March 24 the city was brought to a standstill by barricades erected to pen in troops who went to unload military supplies from s ship that had been in port for nearly a month. By the next morning the town was at a standstill, troops penned in and the road to Dacca cut.

This may have been the final straw which broke Yahya’s apparent patience. But it is clear that the military were planning a military solution to Mujib’s political disobedience movement all the time the strike were continuing. The incidents at Joydebpur, Saidpur and finally Chittagong gave the army the outward excuse it coveted for the action it had decided to take and for which Mr. Bhutto, whose party dominates the Western provinces of Sind and Punjab, and has close army connections, has now publicly thanked God.

The crucial question, of course, is how much the Awami League itself fomented these incidents. It must be said that Mujib did not do as much as possible to control the anti-Bengali implications of his nationalist and sometimes chauvinist movement. Communal violence is very close to the surface in the Indian subcontinent and in East Bengal it was directed not only at the West Pakistani exploiters but also unreasonably at the Bihari refugee. Mujib did condemn this, and insisted on the dismantling of roadblocks of the Students’ League after an incident involving the death of a Punjabi on the day of Yahya’s arrival.

On the whole the League retained considerable discipline. Awami League peace committees eventually helped cool the Chittagong situation in early March. The street patrols in the evenings in Dacca were often tiresome when they stopped cars, but rarely malicious. When influential people requested it they did give protection to individual non-Bengalis. On the other side there were some Fascist elements in the Awami League’s four- week rule: the encouragement of stick carrying thugs, some threatening phone calls to non-Bengalis by people claiming to come from Students’ League, the daily lists of people who gave or paid up to the League’s funds, the one-party state.

SO UNITED

“Never in the history of the world has there been a movement like this. Never has a people been so united”. I was told by umpteen friends and strangers at any party I attended in Dacca. “If the army were to move there would be no Quislings.” In those four weeks it certainly was not politic to resist the Awami Leaguers in offices and factories. When the strike was on, it was the Awami League which was asked whether the village ferry could move. Yet However cynical one likes to be, however sick of hearing endless repetitions of the same theme from sensible people, East Bengal felt like a place where the people believed they had come into their own these past few weeks. Yet there was always the fear that may be you could not trust the army, that it might act, even though people said over and over again that its lines of communication and its dispersed dispositions would not allow it to make sense of a military solution.

Well now it has acted. Perhaps the secret to Mujib’s failure to compromise successfully was that he never expected to succeed. That after 10 years or so in gaol he expected that something would come in his way. Certainly he saw himself as a martyr. In conversation with me and other journalists he frequently said : “If they come to arrest me, I will be here, I will not run away like other revolutionary leaders,” and he put his hands behind his back as if lashed together. Now what he feared has happened. Whether he lives or executed, the leadership will pass to elements who believe (and in this context who will find logic to disagree with them?) that the only solution is violence. For the moment, it will echo Cyprus rather than Vietnam. For the moment people will be found to run the civil service, people will return to work sullenly. The economy will flow more sluggishly for the damage of the past four weeks and for the dejection of the people as in Czechoslovakia, has already been knocked out of development programmes.

Objectively, natural problems - population pressure, vulnerability to cyclone and flood, climate - make East Pakistan one of the most frighteningly hopeless places in the world. If Sheikh Mujib had had to grapple with the economic problems of what he calls “my wonderful land” he might have become as disillusioned as his people. Perhaps that is why he preferred martyrdom to compromise.