President Bhutto’s announcement yesterday that Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was to be released unconditionally was welcomed, even though it had taken Mr. Bhutto 13 days to come to a decision. The delay was understandable in many ways. Mr. Bhutto had first to size up the situation in the immediate aftermath of Pakistan’s surrender in East Bengal, then to have discussions with Sheikh Mujib. Little has emerged about the upshot of their talks, but it seems certain that Mr. Bhutto would have wanted to get some understanding about future relations between East Bengal, or Bangladesh, and West Pakistan. Sheikh Mujib is most unlikely to have been willing to commit himself in any way. He has, after all, been held incommunicado in prison in West Pakistan for nine months. His first need will be to rejoin his Awami League colleagues in Dacca and find out for himself what conditions in his country are like. No doubt he will also want to have talks with Mrs. Gandhi and the Indian Government.

Another welcome gesture from Mr. Bhutto is avowal, in the same speech in which he announced Sheikh’s release, of his readiness to have talks with India and to go to New Delhi for that purpose. Typically, he cloaked this important point in the kind of socialist claptrap to which his Pakistan People’s Party platform commits him saying that both Pakistan and India had poverty and “there has been a conspiracy against the people in both countries by the capitalists.” But the claptrap need not conceal the fact that Mr. Bhutto still appears to be in purposeful motion towards cementing some kind of peace in the subcontinent.

Some evidence that Mr. Bhutto, for the present at least, does not take the claptrap in his party programme too seriously - though whether he will later remains to be seen - can be adduced from the earlier announcement of the “nationalisation” of 10 groups of basic industries involving 20 large industrial units. As Mr. Bhutto had it, “the people are now to control of their own industrial development”. But details given later by his Finance Minister are not to be dispossessed, and it is - or at least intended to be - a once-for-all measure.