Internationalist

India and Pakistan, my shoes pushing into the soft mud of the bank. A young refugee was swimming across as the warm rains began again. He half¬waded half-swam the last few yards through the glossy green weeds, struggled up into the shallows, and stumbled on his hands and knees in the mud of India.

I side-footed down the bank toward him as he looked up from the mud. “Tell them” he said, “Tell as many as you can all that has happened to us.” An Indian photographer who had been frantically loading his camera, came scooting down the bank and asked the boy if he would go back into the river and swim the last few yards again.

Daily the Bengalis struggle into India at more than five hundred different crossing points. With numb eyes they tell their story of a village burnt, a family lost, a son shot, a wife raped. For a brief moment on this river bank, the refugees come into focus as individual people, and then pass on down the road and blur into the anonymous mass of half a million refugees in the nearby camps. The camps themselves are life at its least liveable. Huge sodden tents sag low over acres of refugees. Inside, people of all ages, sexes, and relationships are herded together, crouching, sitting or kneeling in the three feet of space between the tarpaulin and the mud. At night they sleep like a congealed mass of bodies, arms and legs overlapping. In the morning there is not usually any water to wash themselves in, or any other clothes to put on, or anything to eat or drink. There is no housework to do, no fields to work, no school to be on time for. Much of the day is spent in the unterminable queues for everything; milk powder, rice, biscuits, medicines, soap. They queue to live and live to queue.

The women, constantly tugging at their loose saris to keep themselves covered, shuffle away from the queues and disappear into the sea of tents to find the few square feet of mud that is theirs to sit down in. The children play games in the avenues between the tarpaulin ropes, taking it in turns to be Pakistani troops and Mukti Bahini freedom fighters. The remains of family wander up and down the rows of tents, peering under the tarpaulin caves, looking for lost relatives.

ANAWAR HUSSAN

In a dingy, urine-smelling, lattice-walled hospital-hut at Bangaon, I met a 40 year-old refugee called Anawar Hussan. He was a strongly-built farmer who had owned a two-room wooden house and a three-acre farm in Jessore.

Now his only possessions were the red and white check cloth which he wore round his waist and a blue-rimmed enamelled mug which stood on his board- bed. Slowly, as Anawar struggled to control his speech and two Bengalis struggled to interpret, his story of unimaginable suffering came through. Anawar Hussan had lost his home, his farm, both his parents, his wife, his seven sons, his two daughters, and had his right arm shot off at the shoulder all in the same day. When he had finished telling me all this, he tried to wave his non-existent arm at the children around us to show me what he was thinking about. When he saw that there was no arm there, he began to lift other arm. And then slowly his mouth opened and his eyes closed and he began to cry loudly.

A boy called Mustapha, 14 years old, limped down between the beds and put his head on Hussan’s shoulder. Mustapha had had his foot shot off at close range by a Pakistan soldier, and then seen his mother and father shot through the head and stomach as he lay screaming on the ground.

BENGALI SUFFERING

Bengal’s Nobel Prize-winning poet, Rabindranath Tagore (whose song “Amar Sonar Bangla” - ‘My Golden Land Bengal’ - has been adopted as the national anthem of Bangladesh) once wrote: “Man's body is so small, his strength in suffering so immense” These lines would make a more fitting anthem for Bengal. No people on earth, not even the Jews, have suffered as much as the Bengalis. The people who stayed in East Bengal this year are now either dead by violence or facing death by starvation. Those who fled are living in mires of misery as the monsoon rains descend on the refugee camps. In West Bengal, India, 10 million of the poorest people on earth still live in the hell of Calcutta, two million of them on the pavements, in the gutters, or down in the sewers.

THE JEWEL OF BENGAL

Bengal was once known as “the brightest jewel in the Imperial crown of the Moguls. ” When Clive of the East India Company first went there he wrote “It is a country of inexhaustible riches and one which cannot fail to make its new masters the richest corporation in the world.” How has the land of inexhaustible riches been brought to the inexhaustible poverty and wretchedness of the refugee camps where so many of its people are now gathered?

The decline and fall of the Bengalis began at Plassey when Robert Clive’s victory established the rule of the British East India Company over Bengal. Before that date, according to Stewart’s ‘History of Bengal’, the area was prosperous - “Hindu were placed on equality with Muslims, and revenues, instead of being drawn to the distant treasury in Delhi, were spent on the sPot.”(1) Ten years after the advent of the British East India Company, Bengal was ruined. Clive himself wrote of the period : ‘7 will only say that such a scene of anarchy, confusion and extortion was never seen or heard of in any country but Bengal, nor such and so many fortunes acquired in so unjust and rapacious a manner. ” (2)

British Parliament reports show that between 1757 and 1766, the first ten years of British influence, over £2,000,000 had been given by Bengal in ‘presents’ to servants of the British East India Company, and over £3,750,000 had been paid to the company as ‘compensation for losses incurred.’ These are only the official records. The historian Macaulay was moved to comment on Bengal ... “Enormous fortunes were thus rapidly accumulated at Calcutta, while thirty millions of human beings were reduced to an extremity of wretchedness ... ” (3)

HINDU V. MUSLIM

The rape of Bengal by the British East India Company was the first step for the Bengalis along the long road to the refugee camps. The rich Muslims who had been so prominent in the public life of Bengal and of India generally were crushed by the impact of the Company, and when the flag followed trade and the British Empire took over the administration of India, the Muslims were already a subdued and resentful race. It was largely because of this that the more amenable Hindus advanced in importance under the patronage of the British Raj.

“Almost to the end of the nineteenth century, the British distrusted the Muslim upper stratum as the former governing class, representatives of an older India, whose violent conservative revolt against Western influence lay at the heart of the Indian Mutiny. Hindus were regarded with more approved because they responded more readily to Western influence. Indeed the practice of favouring the Hindus over the Muslims was often regarded by British officials of the period as a basic feature of British policy.” (Gunar Myrdal: “The Asian Drama” Vol. 1, p. 237).

Even in the predominantly Muslim areas of India, the officials, administrators, and businessmen rose from the ranks of the Hindus. The Muslims had to be content with jobs as coolies and night-watchmen. It was the classic policy of divide and rule. But in discriminating against the Muslims, the British were sewing the seeds of Pakistan, and pushing the Bengalis one step further towards the refugee camps and the slums of Calcutta.

BENGAL AND PAKISTAN

The first recorded suggestion of an independent Pakistan was put forward in 1933 by Choudhury Rahmat Ali, a Bengali student at Cambridge University. Rahmat Ali did not include Bengal in his proposal for a new Muslim state. He took the initial letters of the Punjab, Afghanistan (North- West Frontier Provinces), Kashmir. And added the Persian word ‘stan’ to make ‘Pakistan’ which taken as a whole meant ‘Land of the pure’ and in a word, wittily appealed to Muslim political ambition and religious pride.

At the Round Table conference in London in 1933, the Muslim League dismissed Rahmat Ali’s proposal as the “irresponsible scheme of a student.” By 1940 it was the official policy of the Muslim League and by 1947 Pakistan was in existence. The resolution on Pakistan adopted by the Muslim League at Lahore In 1940 said : “No constitutional plan would be workable in this country or acceptable to the Muslims, unless it is designed on the following basic principles, viz., the geographically continuous units are demarcated into regions which should be constituted with such territorial readjustments as may be necessary that the areas in which the Muslims are numerically in a majority as in the North-Western and Eastern Zones of India should be grouped to constitute ‘independent states’ in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign. ”

Different Muslim leaders had different interpretations of the Lahore resolution, but it was clear that Junnah, the ‘architect of Pakistan,’ had in mind two separate structures - as East Pakistan formed from the predominantly Muslim areas of Assam and two-thirds of Bengal, and a West Pakistan formed from Sind, Baluchistan, NWFP and most of the Punjab.

PARTITION

Communal tension between Hindu and Muslim was given little scope for expression when the British held all political power. But all the suppressed tension of 200 years flared up as the British pulled out and India was divided. All the practical difficulties of partition; sudden division of land and property, resulting jealousies and injustices, arbitrary decisions in favour of either Muslims or Hindus, caused India to be torn in two in an orgy of forced migration, massacre, atrocities, rape and arson, stirred up by extremists of both religions and restrained only by Gandhi and his ‘fast to death’ in Calcutta.

The classic British policy of divide and rule had run out of control and ended in the not-so-classic-policy of divide and leave.

BENGAL TORN IN TWO

Partition had treated India like a starfish which could easily be cut in half and would quickly grow again into two healthy nations. But in practice the operation induced haemorrages for both India and Pakistan from which neither nation has ever fully recovered. Ten million Hindu and Muslim refugees shifted between India to Pakistan. Six months after partition 10% of Pakistan’s population were Muslims refugees from India.

Pakistan in particular suffered from the torn ligaments of an interdependent economy. India hung on to most of the subcontinent’s mineral resources, modern industries, ports, money, capital markets, technical and research institutions, the capital city, the central offices and the experienced administrative and business personnel. The Pakistanis had virtually nothing with which to set up home.

Finally, Bengal was split in two by partition. West Bengal remained in India and suffered the influx of literally millions of Hindu refugees from which its capital city, Calcutta, still suffers. East Bengal, in becoming East Pakistan, lost its main port, the pivot of its railway and transport system, and the industrial complex which processed its jute; and gained only a refugee burden which it could not support and a junior partnership in the new nation of Pakistan.

Socially and economically crushed when the British came, and violently torn in two when they left, the ‘brightest jewel in the Imperial Crown of the Moguls’ had been reduced to little more than the weak wing of a lame duck. With the establishment of Pakistan, the stage was set for the final act in the tragedy of Bengal.

THE PANTOMIME HORSE

Pakistan was an improbable arrangement. As the British critics said : Jinnah had given birth to a pantomime horse, a nation divided by language, culture, and a thousand miles of India, stitched together only by the thread of Islam. West Pakistan is dominated by the lighter skinned, warlike people of the Punjab, Aryans who eat meat and speak Urdu. East Pakistan is dominated by the slight, dark-skinned Bengalis, Dravidians who eat fish and speak Bengali. The only tangible connection between then was the Pakistan International Airline Corporation.

Even before partition, the two groups tended to despise each other. The Punjabis thought of the Bengalis as dark shiftless traders and the Bengalis scorned the Punjabis as ‘barbarians.’ The new nation of Pakistan was founded not on any bed-rock of nationalism; but only on the shifting sands of religious sentiment.

PAKISTAN’S WEAKNESS

Jinnah, who had become the first Governor General of Pakistan, died in the year after partition, and with him died any real hope of lasting unity. The Muslims had played little part in the administration or government of pre-¬partition India, and their new nation lacked a backbone of experienced politicians, civil servants and businessmen. This weakness, combined with the kind of centralised semi-autocratic governmental machine which Jinnah had established in West Pakistan, led to increased instability at the centre. Jinnah’s successor, Liaquat Ali Khan, was assassinated and the Muslim League began to disintegrate in the scramble for power. The Punjabi- dominated army became more and more important as Pakistan became less and less stable.

THE COLONIAL RELATIONSHIP

East Bengal bore the brunt of the economic and political fumbling and resentments grew as the elements of the relationship between East and West Began to combine into the Well-known formula of colonialism. East Pakistan, 98% Bengali, was in majority. But 70% of public sector investment was invested in the West, 68% of earmarked development funds were used for the development of the West, 80% of all foreign aid went to aid the West, and 70% of all government expenditure was expended in the West. East Pakistan exports earned over 60% of Pakistan’s foreign exchange, but West Pakistan claimed 70% of the imports which the foreign exchange paid for. (4)

At least 300 million rupees a year were being sluiced from the East to industrialise and develop the West. Income disparities between the two wings widened steadily. All senior positions in the Ministry of Finance were manned by West Pakistanis. 80% of the civil service and 90% of the army were recruited from the West which also had the capital city, the headquarters of the army, navy, and air-force, civil service and all banking and insurance companies.

“It was the struggle against coercion and the arbitrary rule of the Muslim League government, and for provincial autonomy and the cessation of discriminative practices against Bengalis that formed the political basis for the unification of the parties and organizations which opposed the Muslim League in East Pakistan. ” (Gankovsky (5)).

THE AUTONOMY MOVEMENT

The soaking of the East by the West was the mainspring of the coming crisis. Bengal’s resources were being drained for the industrial and military development of the Punjabis who dominated the power structures of Pakistan. Increasingly, the Bengalis began to see political autonomy as the indispensable re-requisite of the freedom to use their own development. Less than a year after partition, the central government announced that Urdu was to be the only language of the new nation. There was an immediate protest from the Bengalis and when Jinnah himself visited Dacca in March 1948 he was met by rioting students. The autonomy movement had begun.

The language issue simmered until February 1952 when it boiled over into rioting in Dacca. Again it was the students who led the demonstration. The central government replied neither in Urdu nor Bengali, but in bullets which cut down hundreds of students. The blood-letting had begun again. With each new act of repression and discrimination, the movement for autonomy grew stronger. In 1954, the Bengali opposition parties formed a United Front against the Muslim League and fought the provincial elections of that year on a 21 point programme which included, demands for provincial autonomy and an end to economic disparities between East and West.

Under the new slogan “Bengal for Bengalis” the United Front crushed the Muslim League at the polls and set up a provincial government led by Fazlul Huq. On the 30th May, 1954, the central government arrested Fazlul Huq as ‘traitor to Pakistan,’ dissolved the new Provincial Assembly, and imposed Governor’s rule. 695 members of the United Front were arrested and over a thousand imprisoned. Censorship was clamped on East Bengal and groups of more than five Bengalis were not permitted to meet 40,000 police and several military units were deployed to keep order in the province.

In retrospect the 1954 election victory, the 21 points on which it was based, and the repression which followed, seems like a rehearsal for the tragedy to come. But in the intervening 17 years, the autonomy movement in Bengal had gathered a momentum which could not be so painlessly checked. The gradual discarding of the trappings of parliamentary democracy in Pakistan and the eventual coup d’etat of General Ayub Khan, only served to frustrate the East Bengalis and strengthen their resolve for autonomy.

THE AWAMI LEAGUE

The 1965 clash with India, far from uniting East and West Pakistan in common cause, gave a new urgency to the autonomy movement in the East. As the Punjabi-dominated army fought a border war with India over Kashmir, the East Bengalis realized that not only were they bearing the main economic burden of the war, but that they themselves were left completely defenceless in time of crisis as the Pakistan defence machine was almost entirely controlled by, and located in the West.

A few months after the conflict with India, the Awami League leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, put forward his now famous 6-point programme in a pamphlet called ‘Our Right to Live.’ The 6-point programme demanded : (1) Parliamentary provincial autonomy for East Bengal within a Pakistan Federation based on the Lahore Resolution; (2) A central government responsible only for defence and foreign affairs; (3) A separate currency for East Bengal (or an alternative system to prevent any transfer of resources from East to West); (4) Control over all taxation and collection by the provincial government; (5) Control over all foreign exchange (both trade and aid) by the provincial government; (6) A separate militia defence force for East Bengal. Bengal united behind the plan. As the Sheikh’s popularity rise, Ayub Khan’s repression descended. Mujibur Rahman spent the next three years in a West Pakistan jail.

YAHYA KHAN

“East Pakistan should perhaps wait for a resurgence of democratic ambitions in West Pakistan which may help them in sweeping off the barriers to the realization of their legitimate aspirations. ” Jayanta Kumar Ray wrote these words early in 1968 and by the end of the year they had proved to be prophetic. A West Pakistan democratic revolt against Ayub Khan late in 1968 led to the Round Table Conference of 1969, for which event Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was released. Under pressure from both wings and unable to use West against East, Ayub Khan promised adult franchise and a return to democracy. This satisfied the opposition in the West, but made no concessions to autonomy in East Bengal. Mujibur Rahman and other East- wing leaders stormed out of the conference.

Having once again isolated East Bengal, the military-bureaucratic government decided that the time was right to crush Bengali aspirations by another show of force. But Ayub Khan was not the man to do it. On March 25th 1969, he was replaced by General Yahya Khan and another period of martial law was imposed. Yahya Khan immediately secured his home base by telling the West Pakistan democrats that he had no intention of going back on Ayub’s promise of free elections based on adult franchise. He then turned his attention to the East. In a public broadcast, Yahya Khan admitted that East Bengal had been subjected to some degree of discrimination in the past and therefore had a right to some degree of provincial autonomy in the future. Elections for a Constituent Assembly were called for the end of 1970.

THE 1970 ELECTION

Yahya Khan soon made it clear that the Bengali idea of autonomy was not quite he had in mind. He announced that the new constitution, to be drawn up by the elected Constituent Assembly could be vetoed by himself if it did not provide for a federal government with “adequate powers, including legislative, administrative, and financial powers, to discharge its responsibilities in relation to internal and international affairs and to preserve the independence and territorial integrity of the country. ” (6)

The mood of Bengal before the 1970 election was one of bitterness. Hundreds of thousands of East Bengalis had lost their lives and homes in the unprecedented cyclone and tidal waves of November 1970. Whilst Bengalis were in desperate need of help in the cyclone area, West Pakistan Army helicopters remained at their bases. For the East Bengalis, it was the final straw. The Awami League fought the election on Mujibur Rahman’s 6- point programme and on December 7th, the polling booths opened for the first and last free General Election in Pakistan’s history.

East Bengal spoke with one voice. The Awami League won 160 out of 162 seats in East Bengal, enough to give them an absolute majority in the new Constituent Assembly of Pakistan.

DEADLOCK

For a moment it looked as if East Bengal’s long struggle was over. Yahya Khan went on record as saying that Mujibur Rahman, as leader of the majority party in the Assembly, would be the future Prime Minister of Pakistan. The Awami League set up a committee to draft a constitution on the basis of the 6-point plan. But already, opposition was rumbling the West. Bhutto, the leader of the Pakistan People’s Party which had won a majority in West Pakistan, announced that he would not accept a constitution based on the Awami League’s 6-points. He insisted that East Bengal autonomy should not include control over taxes, aid, or trade, and threatened to boycott the Assembly if Mujibur Rahman was not prepared to negotiate on these points.

As far as the Awami League was concerned, the 6 points were no longer negotiable. Mujibur Rahman was committed to them by the overwhelming mandate of the East Bengal people. The two majority parties glared at each other over a thousand miles of India until the deadlock was arbitrarily broken by Yahya Khan who stepped in to postpone the Assembly only 2 days before it was due to convene.

The rejoicing of the East Bengalis turned into a revolt. Mujibur Rahman called for a policy of total non-cooperation and civil disobedience against the central government. The response was total. Yahya Khan retaliated with a spate of police and army repression which saw another two thousand Bengalis to their graves. But this time repression was not enough to subdue the newly aroused hopes of East Bengal and the policy of non-cooperation reached such a pitch that the Sheikh’s “Citizen Committees” soon became the only effective administration in the province.

Yahya Khan relented in the face of this mass determination and announced a new date for the convening of the Assembly - March 25th, 1971, adding the rider that the Awami League’s 6 points were an unacceptable to him as they were to Bhutto. Mujibur Rahman retaliated by issuing four conditions for

his attendance at the Assembly - martial law was to be immediately lifted off the back of East Bengal, the troops were to be withdrawn to their barracks, an enquiry was to be held into the killing of East Bengali demonstrators, and, finally, no restrictions were to be placed on the power of the Assembly to act on behalf of the people who had elected it.

TALKING FOR TIME

On March 16th, President Yahya Khan flew to Dacca to negotiate directly with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bhutto followed him. The visit was a recognition of Mujibur’s authority and Bengali hopes rose once more. But as Yahya talked for time, West Pakistani troops were already pouring into the East wing. On March 25th, the dock workers of Chittagong, acting on Mujibur Rahman’s orders, refused to unload army supplies and formed a human barricade to prevent West Pakistan troops from reaching the dockside. The army’s response was to machine gun the dockers out of the way.

Yahya Khan flew back to Karachi on March 26th, leaving the army to finish the negotiations. As the massacre began, Mujibur Rahman declared the Sovereign Independent Republic of Bangladesh. From Karachi, Yahya Khan charged Mujibur Rahman with treason, banned all political action in Bengal, outlawed the Awami League, expelled all foreign correspondents, and ordered the army to restore the authority of his government in East Bengal. What followed it now well known. Between 250,000 and a million people were massacred and millions more forced to flee into the refugee camps of India where this story of Bengal’s tragedy began.

The struggle for the “Right to Live” of the people of East Bengal is not yet over : “History testifies that determined people can successfully resist and overcome forces of repression” - Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.
References:

1. Stewart’s “History of Bengal’” p. 430, quoted in Lajpat Rai’s “England’s debt to India.”

2. Quoted in Ronald Segal’s “The Crisis of India,” p. 77.

3. Macaulay’s “Essay on Lord Clive.”

4. For facts and figures on the extent of West Pakistan’s exploitation of the East Wing, see “A History of Pakistan” by Y. V. Gankovsky and R. Gordon, Moscow, 1964. Also “Bangla Desh : A Struggle for Nationhood.” (Vikas Publications) and “Bangla Desh : Background and Perspective.” ICPS, New Delhi.

5. Yayanta Kumar Ray, “Democracy and Nationalism on Trial : A study of East Pakistan,” Simla, 1968.

6. The Legal Framework Order - “Election handbook 1970,” Karachi, 1970.