Observer (London)

Rawalpindi, 24 July. In an atmosphere of political suppression and rigid censorship of the domestic Press, President General Yahya Khan and his military junta now seem more determined than ever to hang on to power. Like a man with gold dust leaking through his fingers, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto - Chairman of the left-wing Pakistan People’s Party and the most popular politician in West Pakistan - sees his political fortune wasting away as the General delays his promised transfer of limited power to the people. With the Awami League declared an illegal organization, the People’s Party, runner-up in the December national election, have now become the majority party of Pakistan, though they didn’t win one seat in East Pakistan, just as the Awami League didn’t win one in the West.

The promised transfer of power by November begins to look more and more like a sham. It now seems only a device to buy time during which a pro¬-military coalition of minor parties can be organized. Its candidates will then be thrown into the East Pakistan by-elections caused by the ban on Awami Leaguers, the obvious aim being in whittle away Bhutto’s majority, President Yahya is expected to visit East Pakistan at the beginning of next month - for the first time since his Army opened fire on 25 March - to set this plan in motion. Mr. Bhutto has so far replied to all this with the slogan ‘Power or Prison by November.’ He hastily adds he doesn’t want to give the impression that he is handing out ultimatums. But brinkmanship is clearly developing and the Chairman of the People’s Party isn’t doing a bad job for a man performing his balancing act on bayonets. Yet on the face of it, he is hopelessly outraged. The chance seems fairly high that his second part of his slogan will come true and that he will join his old rival, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the captive leader of the Awami League, in some dusty Frontier Province jail. Even so, Bhutto is far from beaten and the armour he may use to topple Yahya is already being forged. There are indications that the worsening economic situation, partly brought about by the loss of East Pakistan markets, will cause many redundancies among the industrial workers of Karachi and Lahore. Some diplomats here think there could be considerable industrial unrest by the autumn - and much of the People’s party’s support comes from West Pakistan’s new proletariat. It would be unlike Mr. Bhutto not to exploit any unrest in this sector of society. If it blossomed into the rioting which toppled the last military ruler, Ayub Khan, from power, there is no telling which way events might turn. It is uncertain if the West Pakistan Army would use the same ferocity against West Pakistanis as they used against the Bengalis. ‘It’s being a bit like the question of using British troops against White Rhodesians,’ said one diplomat.

Pakistan’s economy has always been blatantly bourgeois. In the cities, people are surrounded by most of the paraphernalia of modern living. Karachi has a veneer of affluence. Its traffic jams of private vehicles indicate where much of the country’s precious import restrictions were made tougher, and the spectacular daring passengers hanging grimly to the outside of crowded buses shows where the money might have been better spent. There are neon signs and cinemas and long-haired, Zapata- moustached young men who roar around in foreign sports cars looking for foreign birds to sit in them. But most of the population live away from the cities, scraping a living as peasant farmers on land irrigated by the Indus. Others survive as nomadic herdsmen, smugglers or bandits - sometimes as all three. And finally there is the Army, living isolated in its cantonments in the style of regular soldiers of the British Indian Army and having about as much in common with the rest of Pakistan as the inhabitants of Aldershot. Apart from the top 10 per cent or so, who generally live very well, most Pakistanis exist in a world in many ways less advanced than sixteenth- century England. Some of the nomads live a life which is almost completely Old Testament, except for a liberal use of fire arms. Few roads are safe to travel after dark. From the North-West Frontier to the deserts of Sind, banditry is rife.

Take a domestic flight anywhere in West Pakistan and, as likely as not, at the end of it an air hostess will come off the aircraft looking like a Dodge City hat-stand draped with pistol and cartridge belt to be returned to nervous businessmen continuing their journey by road. Mr. Bhutto, who 12 months ago was ambushed by tribesmen in the Sind Desert, rarely travels unarmed, despite a police bodyguard. He once told me he was a very good shot. There are two views about how economic disaster affects this sort of society. One is that the margin between subsistence and starvation is close and it doesn’t take much to push people over the line. The other view is that such a society has far more resilience than its complex Western counterpart. At the moment, Pakistani farmers are having a good year. For many of them, it has been their first harvest with the Nobel prize-winning Mexi-Dashpa wheat and some of them have already doubled their normal production.

But in the commercial and industrial sectors it is far from a good year despite patriotic assurances that business is booming from industrialists who would rather serve visiting reporters tea and biscuits than facts and figures. The two main industries of East Pakistan, tea and jute, are both seriously hit. Bengali guerrillas blow bridges, mine roads and make it generally impossible to send goods to Chittagong for export or for shipping to West Pakistan. Jute is one of Pakistan’s biggest exports. Much of it goes to Scotland. But since the Second World War, jute has been fighting a losing battle against synthetics in the bagging business; it has been kept alive by the ingenuity of West Pakistani and British businessmen who keep dreaming up other uses for it, like carpet backing and trendy curtains for Bedsitter-Land. But is main use, has always been to sacking and it’s here that it is most vulnerable. Already the Japanese are trying to move into the Australian wool market with synthetic sacks and this was previously almost a Pakistan monopoly.

East Pakistan tea from Sylhet is low hill tea, not a good as high hill tea, from Assam and Ceylon. Because of this, in recent years most of it has been consumed in West Pakistan. Even so, it was invaluable as an import-saver. Now more tea has to be imported from Ceylon. It is doubtful if either the tea or the jute industry will ever fully recover from the crisis in East Pakistan. The Bengalis are applying a scorched-earth policy which could be disastrous.

In West Pakistan, industries are affected by the loss of a protected East Pakistan market, the loss of raw materials from East Pakistan, and the necessity to pay cash for imported chemicals and machinery. Some Japanese companies have refused to give credit without guarantees from British banks. British exporters were put off when the Board of Trade declined to underwrite new contracts with Pakistan, though they are honouring existing agreements. Despite this, Mr. Ahmed Abdullah, President of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Karachi, assures me that ‘not a single letter of credit payment has been refused by Pakistan.’ But diplomats confirm that there have been no aid loan repayment since May. The question of outing off foreign aid to Pakistan leads to ambiguous answers. Both the British and Americans here say they are not planning any fresh projects but there is still plenty in cash or kind ‘in the pipeline.’ It could be several years before this runs out.

Meanwhile, fresh political headaches are developing for Yahya Khan. With the Army fully occupied with East Pakistan local leaders in Baluchistan and the Frontier have started agitating for more autonomy or complete independence. A Baluchi tribal leader I met in Karachi told me the situation in Baluchistan was growing ‘tense.’ It is perhaps worth recalling that before he dealt with the Bengalis, General Tikka Khan, now military Governor of East Pakistan, earned himself the title ‘the Bomber of Baluchistan’ for similar action he took against nomadic tribes in that area in 1966. On the North-West Frontier, the Pakhtunistan issue - an autonomous homeland for the Pathans - is said to have been resurrected. There are rumours of 20,000 men taking to the hills in the tribal territory around its Khyber Pass, with the object of waging guerrilla war against Afghanistan as well as Pakistan.

It is now Mr. Bhutto’s task to persuade the military that as a first step at least, it would be sensible for them to share with civilian politicians these menacing problems. In the past Mr. Bhutto has been criticised as ‘a playboy from Sind,’ but few deny his obvious talents as a leader. And there seems to be nobody else around capable of dragging Pakistan by its beard into the second half of the twentieth century.