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From Survey, International Socialism (1st series), No.50, January-March 1972, pp.5-6.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Rarely have the policies of a government been such an unmitigated disaster as those of the West Pakistan military. Despite the utmost savagery, the rulers of Pakistan have lost well over half the population, not to independence, but to their most consistent rival, India. The institution around which the whole concept of Pakistan was built, the army, has suffered a crippling defeat in what is claimed was its main reason for existence, fighting Indians. Even on the western front, it has lost more territory than it gained, and is in no position at all to bargain for what it hoped would save its face, a bit of Kashmir. Khan directly assisted in the creation of the giant’s power. The Indian army has demonstrated its military superiority. The Indian generals have grown to be nine feet tall, and increasingly their shadows will grow long, not just over India and Pakistan, but over the whole of south Asia.
Politically, the new State is broken backed. The Pakistani people have been fooled for a long time by anti-Indianism and militarism. Bhutto has nothing to offer them except the same brew wth more pepper. But in a very much smaller cup.
East Pakistan was required to help support a military establishment of 392,000 men, costing – officially – 53 per cent of the budget of the unified Pakistan. The costs of the war, of the loss of East Pakistan as well as the cumulative foreign debt of Rs. 3,200 million (equal to a fifth of all the foreign exchange earnings of the unified State where East Pakistan produced about a fifth of the exports) will not just force a contraction of the army. It will also make very difficult any expensive Leftish adventures by Bhutto. In any case, Bhutto’s rhetoric has already frightened parts of the army and the conservative ruling order. He will have to make considerable concessions to them to be trusted. Meanwhile his own following might develop more intransigent ambitions.
However, the circumstances of massive military defeat for a people still passionately committed to war on India are hardly promising for a revolutionary movement of opposition. That chauvinism which has always robbed radical movements in West Pakistan of their most powerful weapon against the ruling class still reigns supreme. The military may be radically altered. The generals and Bhutto may find it necessary for their own survival to make more or less fierce growling noises at the 22 families that control Pakistan capitalism – may indeed expropriate some of them – but all this will not produce popular power, only rhetoric. Meanwhile, the aspirants for power in the ruling class can play leapfrog in coup and counter coup. Without a coherent party that has unequivocally abandoned Pakistani chauvinism, there can only be one or other version of Bhutto.
On the other side of the border, Mrs Gandhi emerges with a position of power unrivalled since Independence. She has, at very little cost, executed the central aim of Indian foreign policy since 1947, the reduction of the threat of Pakistan. She has also escaped with glory from the dangers facing her at home. For her massive electoral victory last March was on a programme of radical reforms. The fate of Mrs Banderanaike in Ceylon last April, also with a massive electoral victory behind her, must have been instructive in Delhi. For, like Ceylon, the ailing Indian economy can deliver very little in present condtions.
If Mrs Bandernaike had had 10 million refugees thrust upon her, no doubt she would have been able to escape the criticisms inevitable when she failed to honour any of her promises. Mrs Gandhi, full of virtue and weeping all over the poor Bengalis, sailed through triumphantly. War and victory will, temporarily, swamp any domestic critics, while allowing her complete power to squeeze, rather than increase, mass consumption.
The Indian Left (including the Communist Party of India -Marxist) were loyal to Indian chauvinism. There was no challenge to Mrs Gandhi’s war policy. At first it was supposed to be for the refugees, but in November, Mrs Gandhi suddenly announced that the presence of West Pakistani troops in East Bengal was a threat to Indian security – for the first time since 1947.
The attitude of the Left meant that only minor criticisms could be directed at, for example, the reintroduction of the Preventative Detention Act last June, the even more far reaching Defence of India Act, the arrest of countless ‘undesirable elements’, the escalation of inflation and military expenditure, the cancellation of the State Assembly elections (originally scheduled for next February, now put off until March 1973) and so on. On the first day of the Lok Sabha winter session, Mrs Gandhi prevailed on the opposition parties to withdraw their censure motions. All have been bent not to rock the boat (to end strikes, withdraw ‘excessive’ pay claims, work harder, etc.). The army the Left has been supporting in East Bengal will turn upon Indian socialists in due course.
If the refugees were the pretext for war, the Mukhti Bahini guerillas were the decorative façade. The real purpose was not left in doubt. Indeed, it would be exceedingly strange for an Indian government to be so passionate in support of the principle of national self-determination in East Bengal when it has bloodily and consistently tried to deny that right in Kashmir, in Nagaland and the Mizo country; when it has outlawed demands for secession to head off challenge by the Tamils, the Punjabis and others.
The guerillas were, whether they knew it or not, Mrs Gandhi’s public relations men. But even they they had to be carefully controlled lest they be infiltrated by revolutionaries. The Indian army directly supervised the guerilla training camps and the Indian Government both propped up the Provisional Government of Bangla Desh in Calcutta and supervised its relationships to other bodies. Indian pressure was exercised to prevent the creation of a united National Liberation Front, admitting only Bashani’s fragment of the NAP, the pro-Moscow NAP, and some insignificant groups. The important sections of NAP – armed, under Maoist leadership and fighting inside East Bengal – were firmly kept out lest a common Naxalite strategy develop on both sides of the border. When the campaign started, the guerillas were not there to act as runners for the Indian army, not fighters for independence.
Listen to the authentic tone of the Indian generals – General Jacobs (Times, 18 December report) to the Mukhti Bahini leadership:
‘“I want this transfer of power to go bloodlessly and without incident”. When they answered that they would try to do their best, the general roared: “Don’t just try – do it. If not, I’ll start shooting you fellows”’,
or a nameless brigadier general (Sunday Times, 19 December):
‘We are taking territory and are not ashamed of it. Bangladesh must simply be ours if it is to remain stable. Some semblance of democracy can be created but no-one in Delhi or elsewhere pretends that is the real reason we are here. Bangladesh will be like Calcutta, which we keep firmly under our thumb from Delhi, with no nonsense of local autonomy’.
The new State is born in the most unpromising circumstances. Before last March’s events, it was one of the poorest countries in a poverty stricken continent. Now, it has not recovered from last year’s cyclone (200,000 dead), let alone this year’s succession of civil war, savage Pakistani occupation, and new, Indian invasion and occupation. On top of that, the Indians will be trying to shove back into East Bengal 10 million refugees when their land and homes have already been scooped up by someone else.
The sleek gentlemen from Calcutta who have travelled to power in the tail of the Indian army cannot create their own power by magic. They are eager to establish their position, but that depends entirely upon the Indians. Independence by proxy is no independence at all. Indeed, so weak is the new government, it must inevitably continue to rely for a long time on Indians, in the army, the senior administrators and policemen now drafted into East Begal by Delhi, and on Indian handouts.
The small inner core of the Mukhti Bahini can no doubt be absorbed in the new State as army and police, although the Indians will severely circumscribe their power and prerogatives. But the mass of young men with guns cannot. The Indians know it and are moving rapidly to try and disarm them. For these young men, resentful that they who fought inside East Bengal are offered now only a return to their old life whereas those who went into exile have inherited all, learning the lessons will be hard. If, like the Maoist cadres in the countryside, they already see the drift of events, they will prepare for the long and bitter struggle against Indian miltary domination. But without a political awareness, they can become only armed gangs, as much bandit as nationalist, marauding the countryside, adding only further misery to the lot of their countrymen.
The border with India is too long for the Indians to be able to bottle up Bengali poverty outside of India. Gun running across the border and the exchange of political cadres – the other side of the coin to the flood of Indian carpet-baggers into East Bengal – could and almost certainly will spread the chronic infection into India’s heartlands.
China could well be of assistance here. Before the Indo-Pakistan war, China was busy trying to mend its fences with India, perhaps uneasily aware that its old ally, Pakistan, might well turn out to be loser so that new friends were needed. The danger was greater because the Soviet Union already holds an entrenched position in India. Chou En-lai sent a warm and friendly letter to Mrs Gandhi in mid-November, the first formal communication from China for years. Mrs Gandhi replied by suggesting the two countries raise their diplomatic representatives to the status of ambassadors and begin talks on disputed border questions. Even as late as 30 November, the Chinese government is said to have protested to Mrs Gandhi unofficially that China had never publicly denounced Sheikh Mujibur Rahman or the Mukhti Bahini, only foreign intervention in Pakistan’s affairs.
It was far too late to do more than injure Pakistani feelings. The outbreak of war made China’s attempt to do what the Russians did at Tashkent after the 1965 Indo-Pakistan war, establish a role as independent mediator, impossible. China could do nothing except support Pakistan with words and arms supplies. Perhaps now, the only means available to China – despite its desperate attempts to be a respectable member of the United Nations – to challenge Soviet power in south Asia is to support the guerillas in Bangla Desh.
The independence of Bangla Desh has not at all been won. The appalling repression by the Pakistan military has been ended. But that – despite the joy of the crowds in Dacca – is not the same as independence. The Indian government will be delighted if the Bengalis are satisfied with an ‘independence’ which means no more than the trivial symbols of a State – a flag, a President, a seat in the United Nations. Those are things the Indians, if not the Pakistanis, can easily concede. But the right of Bengalis to decide the affairs of East Bengal, regardless of the Indian ruling class, is quite a different matter. Indeed, at the moment, the new government has only Indian power to protect it from Bengalis. The war has not produced independent government, only a puppet on strings pulled from Delhi.
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