The Duel (13 page)

The Six Points represented the charter of the aspirant Bengali bourgeoisie; it articulated their desire to create their own regional state apparatus and to have an equal share of the capitalist cake. But this was precisely the reason why the dominant bloc in West Pakistan was opposed to them. The Pakistan army was organically hostile to the prospect of a Bengali civilian government because of the danger that it would reduce the lavish military apparatus that had been a built-in feature of the Islamabad regime since Ayub seized power in October 1958. Some idea of the enormous stake the Pakistani officer corps had in retaining the status quo is reflected in that military expenditures over the preceding decade (1958–68) had absorbed no less than 60 percent of the total state budget. In the fiscal year of 1970 alone, some $625 million were allocated for the armed forces. The shortsighted West Pakistani political leaders who failed to appreciate this would soon become
the victims of the same machine, for the army was not seriously in favor of any government that might challenge the imbalance between social and military expenditure.

To their credit the Awami League politicians had repeatedly denounced these colossal outlays on a military machine that was overwhelmingly non-Bengali and saturated from top to bottom with racist and religious chauvinism against the Bengalis, who had traditionally been regarded as dark, weak, and infected with Hinduism. For its part, the Pakistani business class had its own material reasons for resisting the Six Points. Business interests in the West no longer regarded the East as an optimal field of investment. Bengal remained of vital importance to them, both as a captive market and as a source of foreign exchange. In the late sixties, between 40 percent and 50 percent of West Pakistan’s exports were taken by the East at monopoly prices. Where else could West Pakistani capitalism have disposed of its high-cost manufactures?

The Awami League won widespread political support in East Bengal for two important reasons. First, it grasped the importance of the national question: it saw clearly the subcolonial status of East Pakistan. Second, political parties of the extreme left, which gave opportunistic support to the Ayub dictatorship because of the latter’s “friendship” with China, failed. The Maoist wing of the National Awami Party (NAP) insisted, with Chinese backing, that the Ayub regime had “certain anti-imperialist features” and was therefore in some ways to be preferred to bourgeois democracy.

Thus the Awami League could present itself as the only meaningful opposition force in the province. It constantly carried out propaganda in favor of its Six Points; it called for free elections, and it organized demonstrations against the Ayub dictatorship. Some of its leaders, including Mujibur Rahman, were consequently arrested, which only increased their popularity. When the anti-Ayub upsurge resulted in the fall of the dictator and his replacement by the Yahya junta in early 1969, it was hardly surprising that the Awami League reaped the benefits. Yet it could still not disavow its heritage. In the weeks before the army persuaded Ayub to retire, the Awami League eagerly participated in the “constitutional” talks at the Round Table Conferences called by Ayub to reach a compromise. It had fueled the mass movement and witnessed
the anger of Bengali peasants and workers; even so it remained tied to its parliamentarist past.

T
HE
Y
AHYA
MILITARY
regime, unable to quell the mass upheaval in both parts of the country, was forced to promise a general election on the basis of adult franchise. Its advisers evidently believed it could concede this as a diversionary tactic. They were confident that the bureaucracy, from long experience in such matters, would be able to manipulate the results satisfactorily. To give the latter some time to prepare itself, the elections were postponed—ostensibly because of the cyclone disaster in late 1970, which claimed two hundred thousand Bengali lives. But the failure of the army to provide any adequate flood relief only intensified the deep anger of the Bengali people. When the different Maoist factions in East Bengal decided to boycott the elections, which were finally held in December 1970, the Awami League was given a free hand and won a tidal victory. Of the 169 seats allocated to East Pakistan in the National Assembly, the League won 167. It also gained 291 out of the 343 seats in the provincial parliament. Its bloc in the National Assembly gave it an overall majority throughout the country and entitled it to form the central government. Such a prospect traumatized the West Pakistani ruling oligarchy. Given that the Awami League had fought the elections on the basis of the Six Points and had indeed on occasion surpassed them in its electoral rhetoric, it was clear that the army would try to prevent a meeting of the National Assembly. In this they were greatly helped, if not led, by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who refused to countenance a Pakistan government led by the majority party.

Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party had triumphed in the western portion of the country and should have negotiated a settlement with the victors. Instead Bhutto sulked and told his party to boycott a meeting of the new parliament that had been called in Dhaka, the capital of East Pakistan, and thus provided the army with breathing space to prepare a military assault. He coined the slogan “Idhar Hum, Udhar Tum” (Here It’s Us, There It’s You), making it clear that, like the military, he was not interested in sharing power. This made a split inevitable. Bengal now went into noncooperation mode. A wave of strikes paralyzed
the province. Even in the army cantonments the tension was deeply felt. For instance, when the Awami League decided on noncooperation, all the Bengali cooks, servants, and laundrymen left the cantonments; in the food markets the vendors refused to sell soldiers any food, and Bengali cars visiting cantonments had their numbers published in the
People
newspaper. At one stage the situation became so desperate that special nourishment for the officers had to be flown out from West Pakistan.

E
VEN BEFORE THE
formal invasion took place on March 25, 1971, hundreds of Bengali lives had been lost at the hands of what was seen as an oppressor army dispatched by West Pakistan. Some of the generals involved at the time have subsequently written that Mujib, frightened of his own people, asked the army to crush the movement, but that this, in reality, was a trap to make them even more unpopular. What a tangled web they weave, those who practice to deceive.

These earlier demonstrations of the army’s brute power should have convinced the Awami League politicians of what was likely to follow unless they prepared the Bengali people for a protracted struggle. This they refused to do, despite the evident desire of the masses, expressed in thunderous slogans at Awami League meetings, for a total break with Pakistan. The rising tide of popular political consciousness was already clear in the enormous meetings that took place throughout the province both before and after the general election of 1970. At every stage the citizens assimilated the lessons of the past much more rapidly than their parliamentarist leaders and showed their willingness to fight the colonial state in East Bengal. At every stage they were again and again checked by the visceral constitutionalism of the Awami League leadership. This conflict between the mass movement and the tame reformism of its official guides was all the more tragic in that the existing organizations of the left were localized or discredited and thus not in a position to influence the course of the struggle decisively.

Ranajit Roy, a respected Indian press commentator, candidly noted a common element of Indo-Pakistani establishment politics in expressing his sympathy for Sheikh Mujibur Rahman: “The Awami League
leadership in many ways corresponds to the leadership of our own Congress—a leadership which, with the backing of peaceful agitation, sought to arrive and ultimately succeeded in arriving at compromises with our colonialist masters. Our independence was the result of an understanding with the British masters. Sheikh Mujibur hoped to pull off a comparable deal with Islamabad. Like the Congress Party in India, the Awami League does not have the stomach for the type of war circumstances have forced Bangla Desh to wage.”

These musings, of course, unwittingly pointed to an important difference between British and Pakistani colonialism in the subcontinent. British imperialism was able to grant a political decolonization because it nowhere meant the abandonment of its real economic empire, whose central segments were Malayan rubber and tin, Middle Eastern oil and South African gold, and Indian plantations. But the loss of political control of East Bengal affected the vital interests of the impoverished and wretched subcolonialism of Islamabad directly. For the weaker a colonial power, the more dependent it is on formal political possession of its subject territories. The history of the twentieth century has a striking lesson for us in this respect.

The European imperialism that waged the longest and most stubborn war for the retention of its overseas possessions was not industrialized England, France, or even Belgium. It was the small, backward, and predominantly agrarian society of Portugal. Lisbon fought a ferocious and unremitting campaign in Africa to keep Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea because of the enormous economic and ideological importance of these colonies. The subcolonialism of Portugal, whose own economy had been deeply penetrated by the capital investment of the advanced powers, furnished an instructive comparison with that of Pakistan. Neither had much politico-economic room for maneuvering; both were in their different ways consequently driven to extreme and unmediated measures of repression.

These led to a massive crisis for both countries: the breakup of one as documented in this book and a serious split in the army of the other. Portuguese majors and colonels were in the vanguard of the popular movement that toppled Salazar’s Estado Novo in the democratic revolution of 1974.

Any objective assessment of the Awami League, which is still a major party in Bangladesh, would conclude that it has been a secular, but conservative party since its birth. Its formative years, like those of its West Pakistani siblings, were dominated by parliamentary maneuver and intrigue. Its main social roots have always been in the functionaries, teachers, petty traders, and shopkeepers who proliferate in East Bengali society. Its founder, H. S. Suhrawardy, who for a short time succeeded in becoming Pakistan’s prime minister, distinguished himself in 1956 by supporting the Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt. He became one of the most articulate defenders of imperialist interests in Pakistan and American policy in Asia as a whole. Left-wing parties and organizations in East Pakistan who opposed these policies were physically attacked by Awami League “volunteers” and had their meetings broken up with monotonous regularity. Suhrawardy’s other notable achievement was to supervise the fusion of the provinces of Baluchistan, Sind, and the North-West Frontier into a single territorial unit dominated completely by Punjab. In this way he showed his respect for the “autonomy” of the West Pakistani provinces.

After 1958, Suhrawardy played a dissident role during the early years of the Ayub dictatorship and was imprisoned for a short time as a result; but his opposition was always limited to the bourgeois constitutionalist framework. Suhrawardy’s undoubted talents—he was a proficient lawyer, an artful political manipulator, and a glib conversationalist— placed him head and shoulders above the rest of the Awami League leadership. His ambitions were, however, far removed from Bengali independence: his aim was to make the Awami League an all-Pakistan electoral machine, capable of winning power as a “national” party and thus catapulting H. S. Suhrawardy into the highest-possible office. His untimely death in 1963 put an end to this dream.

It is essential to recall this early history to understand the later attitudes of the Awami League. It continued to play an oppositional role during the remaining years of the Ayub dictatorship. Ayub himself more than once considered the idea of reaching some compromise with its leaders and incorporating them into the central government, but the gangster politicians from the East Pakistani underworld, on whom Ayub had relied for so long to maintain “law and order” in Bengal, constantly
and successfully sabotaged this plan, as it would have meant the end of their own political careers.

The Awami League was thus offered no choice but to continue as an oppositional force. It joined a multiparty alliance (Combined Opposition Parties) in 1964 to field a candidate against Ayub, but the elections were rigged by the army and the civil service and the field marshal was returned with a comfortable majority. As a result the country suffered an inner breakdown, but nobody in power noticed. From now on the Awami League, however reluctantly, would be pushed in a different direction, leaving it with few options but to challenge the military head-on. The hopes of the transatlantic press rested on a military dictator. Some weeks before the military was unleashed against 75 million Bengalis, the
Economist
was representative of this mainstream opinion and approved of General Yahya: “It is also likely that the President will do his best to stay the army’s hand. So far he has proved a model soldier in politics, remaining aloof from the electioneering and releasing all political prisoners after the election.”

Jinnah’s Pakistan died on March 26, 1971, with East Bengal drowned in blood. Two senior West Pakistanis had, to their credit, resigned in protest against what was about to happen. Admiral Ahsan and General Yaqub left the province after their appeals to Islamabad had been rejected. Both men had strongly opposed a military solution. Bhutto, on the other hand, backed the invasion. “Thank God, Pakistan has been saved,” he declared, aligning himself with the disaster that lay ahead. Rahman was arrested and several hundred nationalist and left-wing intellectuals, activists, and students were killed in a carefully organized massacre. The lists of victims had been prepared with the help of local Islamist vigilantes, whose party, the Jamaat-e-Islami, had lost badly in the elections. Soldiers were told that Bengalis were relatively recent converts to Islam and hence not “proper Muslims”—their genes needed improving. This was the justification for the campaign of mass rape.