New Statesman

If blood is the price of a people’s right to independence, Bangladesh has overpaid. Of all the recent struggles to bring down governments and change frontiers in the name of national freedom the war in East Bengal may prove the bloodiest and briefest. On this level alone, the East Pakistanis have achieved a record of suffering. But even if their movement is destroyed within a few days or weeks, it may only be a temporary defeat in a war of liberation which will eventually be recognised as just. In all such cases, establishment opinion is heavily weighted in favour of the status quo. The chances of any world power declaring support for Bangladesh are minimal. The Bengalis’ case for statehood may be hard to refute, but it is inconvenient to everyone else. And yet, by an unusual combination of circumstances, Bangladesh has managed to obey all the rules. So this may be the moment to consider what we, and other countries, mean by those splendid words which recur like a chorus in the United Nations chapter: ‘the right to self determination of peoples.’ Objectively or subjectively, in Chinese or English, in capitalist or socialist jargon, it is hard to fault the East Bengalis, or justify their abandonment by all the major powers.

Piously required, as third-world countries always are by the West, to make their demands known through the ballot box - they did so. They won absolute majority in the all-Pakistan Assembly. It was the first general election the country had held, and the result came as a considerable shock. Given the long history of Bengali separatism, from the language and self¬constitution movements of the early Fifties until today, it should not have been so surprising. Loyalty became more important than ideology. A Bengali majority was the result. Faced with this, the Islamabad government of Yahya Khan, whose strength is based on an army from which the Bengalis are excluded, panicked, Islamabad fidgeted. The result was carnage. We have glimpsed via television and the newspapers what the West Pakistanis call ‘restoring unity’; the Easterners, genocide. The truth may lie somewhere in between the two. But for the foreseeable future pessimism is in order.

As with Biafra, many emotional left-wingers in the West have averted their eyes from the distasteful possibility that non-white people may be ill- treating each other, and concentrated on the humanitarian side. But beyond the salvage operation, it becomes more complicated. East Pakistan really cannot be called a ‘breakaway’ state in quite the same way. And the ‘exploitation’ takes a different form. The East Bengalis claim that they have been systematically used to subsidise West Pakistan ever since the partition. It began as long ago as 1948, when President Jinnah made the first of several centralising moves by withdrawing the provinces, rights to raise their own income and sales taxes, and keep the major part of their import and export duties. East Pakistan was particularly hard hit, since subvention from the central government was never correspondingly increased. Over the last two decades, for instance, 70 per cent of Pakistan’s investible funds went to the West and only 30 per cent to the East. Seventy-five per cent of revenue was spent in the West and only 25 per cent in the East. Foreign aid is based on population; yet East Pakistan, with two-thirds of the country’s people, received only 20 per cent of the cash. East Pakistani economists estimate that since independence, the real transfer of resources from East to West Pakistan has been to the tune of some £3,000 m. By this argument, Bangladesh would certainly be more economically viable on its own. Another qualification for statehood fulfilled.

The question of aid leads to that of great-power politics. East Bengal does not fit neatly into the cold war pattern, and the positions adopted towards it are particularly complicated. The British are allied with the West Pakistan government in Cento and Seato - mere planning organizations, to be sure, but through which weapons can be channelled, are closer and more significant. There are rumours that Peking will create diversionary activity on the Indo-Chinese border if India (backed by the Russians) intervenes in Bengal. China has cynically betrayed the West Bengali communists, who would have liked nothing better than to help their brothers across the border, but could not go it alone (perhaps this is final proof that the Chinese have achieved great-power status). As for Britain, what our government has to say is regarded, since Singapore, with cynical contempt on all sides.

There are still, however, ritual motions to be gone through and lessons to be learned. The ritual concerns the UN. The 75 million East Pakistanis feel they have at least as much ‘national’ call on the General Assembly as the 45 million Westerners, and are demanding what people always demand in such circumstances : that arms deliveries be stopped, aid cut off, sanctions imposed and so forth. None of this will happen. As Conor Cruise O’Brien put it, the United Nations is like the Delphic Oracle, and always gives the answer the strongest party to a dispute wants to hear. And there, for the time being, it rests.

But not for ever, Pakistan is only the most recent of the pre-imperial federation to be torn apart. When he drew the line across the Indian subcontinent, Mountbatten listened too sympathetically to those who took religion more seriously than geography. It was, of course, a plain case of failure to learn from our own parochial experience - as the whole unhappy history of Ireland has made only too clear. Since the original foundation of Pakistan, the West Indian, Malaysian, Rhodesian and Arabian federations have all collapsed. Significantly, each of them, like Pakistan, was a ‘state’ created from above for reasons of political expediency. So the lesson is a simple, if a hard one : that such artificial structures cannot survive. How much human misery must be endured before that fact is accepted?