Economist

Things show no signs of getting better in East Pakistan even though on President Yahya’s timetable they should start picking up from now on. No more Awami League members of the National Assembly have come forward to cooperate with the President beyond the 22 who have already declared themselves willing; indeed, a few of those have fled from Dacca because no one know who is to be on the list promised by President Yahya of Awami Leaguers wanted in connection with “crime” committed before the fighting started. The stories say there were at least 32 members on the list.

But even when the list is out, the continued activities of the Mukti Fouj may deter people from collaborating with the Martial Law regime, At the moment the main activity of the Bengali resistance is confined to the border areas, where India provides sanctuary and a certain amount of assistance from Indian regular troops in the form of covering fire. Even Rajshahi—separated from India by the Ganges, which is some five miles wide during the monsoon I heard noises of skirmishing in the night. Most of the Mukti Fouj’s work is sabotage and in one district alone, Comilla, it is officially admitted that eight rail bridges and 15 road bridges have been blown. This is enough to keep the 60,000 men of the Pakistani army in the east busy.

In the interior, the army has more or less had to limit its operations to the Madhupur Forest area north of Dacca, where, there are still more than 100 deserters from the East Pakistan Rifles and the East Bengal Regiment with a few machine-guns and mortars; the Noakhali area, where the Bengali communist leader, Mohammad Toaha, is operating, the Barisal area, where those members of the large community of Hindus who have not made it to India have apparently armed themselves; and the Khulna district, where there is evidence that Naxalites slipped over the border from West Bengal. Otherwise guarding the interior has had to be pretty well a police job.

The 5,000 policemen brought over from West Pakistan face a hideously difficult task in trying to protect the network of bridge that cross the water-ways of East Pakistan. Luckily for them, the Mukti saboteurs in the interior have so far shown themselves pretty incompetent. Last Friday, July 2nd, a pylon was brought down and Dacca was plunged into darkness, and on Monday a bridge on the main road from Dacca to Mymensingh was blown. But the pylon job was not followed up and the lights were on again in Dacca soon afterwards.

It is mainly the Biharis, many of whom were massacred by Bengalis before 25th March, together with Bengali members of the right-wing religious parties such as Jamat-e- Islam and the Muslim League, who are collaborating with the Government. So these people have become the particular target of the Mukti Fouj. There has been a spate of bomb explosion in all the major towns and so far ten ‘peace committee’ members have been killed in the province. In Khulna, the Chairman of the ‘peace committee’ got a threatening note from the Naxalites and later had his head chopped off. Captain Zaidi, the peace committee chairman in Pabna, west of Dacca, who has spent a year in jail for fraud and now runs a petrol station previously owned by a Hindu, has locked gates and three armed guards.

In the smaller towns, life has become more normal than it has been for months, though it is hard to say what is normal in so overpopulated a country. Industrial production is picking up. In Dacca, and in the important industrial town of Khulna, factories have about 60 per cent of their men back at work. But in Chittagong the figure is still very low—about 25 per cent — because most of the labour comes from the troubled area of Noakhali. The vast majority of those who have come back to work are people who have been in hiding inside East Pakistan itself. Few are refugees, returning from India.

THE TROUBLE ISN’T ONLY THE REFUGEES

Democracy has collapsed in West Bengal for the third time since 1967. The State is back in New Delhi’s lap with the imposition of President’s rule on 29th June. This was preceded by the dissolution of West Bengal’s assembly elected last March. The militant Marxist party sees all this as a conspiracy to enable the central government to run the state once again as its “colony”.

The truth is that the indecisive outcome of the March elections foredoomed the assembly. The ramshackle coalition put together by Mrs. Gandhi’s Congress party had a rather thin majority, which could hardly survive the threats by several members to break loose. The choice before the coalition was whether to risk a defeat or to quit. The decision, eventually, was to quit.

West Bengal was rapidly becoming ungovernable even before the influx of refugees from East Pakistan. Now, with more than five million refugees needing help, the administration is really hard pushed. West Bengal’s parties are demanding that the burden should be eased by dispersing the refugees to other states, but so far fewer than 100,000 have actually been moved. Apart from the obvious practical difficulties, the refugees are not anxious to move and the other states are not keen to have them. The central government, for its part, believes that dispersing the refugees may weaken international pressure on Pakistan to take back its citizens.

So most of the refugees will remain in West Bengal. Mrs Gandhi has taken the unprecedented step of assigning a Bengali member of her cabinet, Mr. S.S. Roy, to take over the job of co-ordinating relations between the state and the central government. His task is partly to handle the refugee problem, partly to nurse sick West Bengal back to health. One of Mr. Roy’s most urgent jobs is to halt the political violence which takes a daily toll of at least six lives. There are constant street brawls among activists of different political parties. The Marxists are the main culprits. But the other parties are willing to aid and abet the Maoists, who regard the Marxists “neo-revisionists” meriting maximum vengeance.