Bangladesh is now a reality. The people of East Bengal have achieved their right of self-determination from the subjugating forces of West Pakistan. It is right to remember at this stage that none of the ill-effects of a hasty and haphazard partition of India has been undone. The situation is that an ethnic group, who, by their own free will, allied themselves with another group geographically, historically, culturally and linguistically different to form a nation, religion being the only common factor, are now disentangling themselves from the disaster of their thoughtless union.

The hostilities and atrocities which have preceded the birth of Bangladesh would not have been necessary had India not been partitioned the way it was. It would not have been the case either if the leaders of the Eastern Wing of Pakistan - three of the five Prime Ministers came from the East - had behaved more realistically and safeguarded the interests of the people they claimed to represent from its inception.

The Moslem League, which brought about the partition of India, claimed to speak for the majority of Moslems. They did. They wanted a separate homeland for Moslems in India safe from the threat of the Hindu majority, because their leader, Mr. Jinnah, propounded that Moslems were actually foreigners in India. They were not Indians at all. They had come with the invading Moslem Army from the Middle East centuries ago. Therefore, culturally and in any other way they were a different nation.

Emotionally distraught as they were then, the Bengali Moslem League leaders did not take into account during the run-up to the partition of India that, while most Moslems in Western India and some other parts might perhaps fit Mr. Jinnah’s proposition, the vast majority of Bengali Moslems were only first or second generation Moslems, mostly converts from the persecuted Hindu lower caste. Hence the basic premise of “two nations” did not apply to Bengal. Under the occupying flag of the British Raj, India was at least a unified country with diverse religions and linguistic groups co-existing as in any other country of comparable size. What was meant to be achieved from such an ill-defined partition of the country is difficult to see even today, except to serve as an expedient for the British to leave India. It was declared in early 1947 that the transfer of power, its form still totally undecided, must take place by June, 1948. If agreement was not forthcoming, sovereign power would be transferred to each Indian province individually regardless of any other consideration, to make sure the Raj ended by that date. In the event, by common consent, the British felt able to leave India within a few months, in August, 1947.

It is interesting to note that now in the seventies, a comparable solution for Northern Ireland is envisaged to take at least 15 to 20 years if everything goes right, and for Rhodesia a few decades.

India has always been blamed by Pakistan for not accepting the partition; Hindus have always wanted to subjugate the Moslems. This dangerous over-simplification never takes into account that India, though a predominantly Hindu country, has never claimed that her national unity is founded on the religion of the majority. On the contrary, there is constant strain between Hindi-speaking North and non-Hindi-speaking South, between Bengalis and non-Bengalis, between Tamil-speaking and non- Tamil-speakers in the South - though most of them are Hindus. Not to mention the existence of multitudes of Moslems in all parts of India - still India’s largest minority in spite of partition - and of other religious groups. What has always escaped the theocratic Pakistanis is that to be Indian is to be “from India,” no more, no less.

Mr. Nehru’s Indian Congress never gleefully accepted the tri-furcation of the country. It was consented to, though short-sighted, only as an expedient to get rid of an alien power and to wish away the monstrosity of Hindu- Moslem killings. Events soon proved to the Indians how naive it was to think that a Moslem Pakistan would rid the subcontinent of its endemic communal trouble. As far as Pakistan is concerned, it has taken more than two decades and a bloody holocaust to prove that religious bigotry and national identity are not synonymous.

WHAT HAS INDIA GAINED?

Mr. Bhutto, when passions have died down, must realise that Pakistan is no longer providing a homeland for the Moslems of the old British India, let alone the uneasy death of the “two-nation” theory which never was; that the largest Moslem State in the world has been born in Bangladesh - of 75 million against his own 55; that India, his avowed enemy, has more Moslems than his Islamic State. Hence, if he keeps on dreaming of regaining the dead East Pakistan, he will only delay a possible, though it may be a remote entente cordiale with Bangladesh. Also, if he reaffirms his aim of “liberating” Kashmir, regardless of the near impossibility of its achievement, he will only escalate Indo-Pakistan tension and defence expenditure, which in its train will annul all the Socialist programme he says he has embarked on to alleviate the suffering of the common Pakistani.

What has India gained in this war? At best she may have bought some peace in her eastern part. One only hopes the sacrifices made by India in blood and resources will not be easily forgotten by Bangladesh citizens. On the present status quo India still has to live with a disembowelled Eastern India, the tenuous Assam-Bengal link. Unless the balance of power changes, she will still have to think of the Chinese across the Himalayas. Sheikh Mujib will have a lot of responsibility to achieve stability not only in his own country but in that part of the sub-continent in general. For the first time in modern history a Moslem-majority State has by declaration become a secular country. Hindus (and now the Moslems) have undergone limitless suffering. Bengalis are by nature sensitive, friendly, yet volatile, and can be rabidly emotional. It is for the leadership to see that the lessons of the past three decades are not forgotten easily.

In the immediate future the Indian sub-continent will have three independent Governments, three Prime Ministers, three Parliaments, three sets of embassies abroad; in short three of each show, when it can ill-afford anything more than one. Besides, the great Powers will be intent on courting each of the three States in such different permutations and combinations as are convenient to their own plans. Here again, Mr. Bhutto must realise that his hobnobbing with China may send a few apprehensive shivers in some Indian spines, but China will not be elated to have a powerful and a prosperous Indian subcontinent. Indeed the anachronistic friendship between a militarily dictatorial Pakistan and the “Brahmin ” of all Communists, was for China to be able to retain a divisive foothold in the Indian subcontinent. Unless Mr. Bhutto is determined to trade his country’s independence to spite India, such unequal friendship is likely to have a tragic end.

Hence, if the thought of a robust and viable independence is paramount, it is almost inescapable that sooner or later these three countries will have to come to an arrangement, to begin with economically, for mutual prosperity. Obviously, it would not be difficult for Bangladesh and India to organise such a deal in the near future. If the West Pakistanis realise that the basic tenet of their origin as a nation has fallen apart by its own untenability, and not because of what India has done, then in course of time Pakistanis should feel less reluctant to join in. And if the British, the Germans and the French can cooperate in an Economic Community after two bloody wars, there is no reason why the old “British Indians” cannot. If such an understanding, however imperceptibly and slowly, creeps in, one may dare to predict that a South Asian economic community will in the distant future re-establish the political homogeneity of the subcontinent. It is certainly a kindly star worth following.