Dacca: Having created a political vacuum here in East Pakistan by banning Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's victorious Awami League, the military regime is trying to fill it by holding by-elections next month. But to see this as the beginning of a new phase of democratisation, as President Yahya Khan does, is to indulge in self- deception, for the by-elections are likely to prove a farce.

In the conditions currently prevailing in the eastern wing, perhaps even the most serious attempt to restore democracy might not work. The present efforts cannot be called that. Yahya Khan never once visited this part of the country after he ordered the military intervention last March. He is entirely dependent on reports sent by military and civilian administrators from West Pakistan who can hardly be expected to reflect popular feelings here. Bengali sentiment continues to be solidly based on near-worship of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, but his opponents are trying to make the Sheikh's election success their own.

In this somewhat questionable venture, six rightist parties have come together - the orthodox Jamaat-i-Islam and Nizam-i-Islam, three different Moslem Leagues and the Pakistan Democratic Party whose leader, Nurul Amin, was the only man who won against an Awami Leaguer in last year's general election.

These parties have been unscrupulously distributing vacated assembly seats among themselves. The exercise took place against the background of there being virtually no other party in the race. Naturally more than 30 of the 78 seats turned out to be unopposed. The abysmally frustrated Bengali voter will find hardly any sense in going through the motions of polling again.

Small wonder then that the Pakistani press takes no trouble in discussing the elections. They merely publish lists of candidates elected "unopposed." Eventually there may be no more than 10 constituencies with two or more candidates. This situation may be expected to continue even after the new National Assembly convenes on December 27, for most of the 88 Awami League parliamentarians "cleared" by the government prefer to remain underground. In short, the bulk of the seats conquered by the Awami League are now going to be occupied by what a Western diplomat in Dacca sarcastically called "a faction of bearded Mussalman."

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, heading the strongest party in the western wing, spoke of manipulations aimed at creating an "artificial majority" against his PPP (Pakistan People's Party) in the new Assembly. But he forgot that it was he who had boycotted the duly elected representative parliament and thereby started the whole crisis.

What a rightist leader called "the biggest surprise of recent months" was that Bhutto himself did not hesitate to seek a secret understanding with some of the orthodox "Mussalman." After his lieutenants investigated the prospects in East Pakistan and returned with extremely discouraging reports, some rightwing candidates were persuaded to withdraw. This eventually enabled the PPP to say that for the first time it will have three to five "unopposed" East Pakistani members sitting in the new central legislature.

However, the new unopposed legislators have embarked on a game that is not only dubious but risky. As an East Pakistani advocate put it: "The future Bengali parliamentarians will only be safe in the Assembly hall in Islamabad. Whether they can survive in their own constituencies remains to be seen." As if in grim confirmation of the warning, one newly elected legislator was shot dead near Dacca last week.