Dacca, July 2
President Yahya Khan’s address to the nation earlier this week revealed a gulf so wide between the minds of the rulers in Islamabad and the aspirations of the Bengalis in East Pakistan that any lingering hopes of reconciliation must surely have been dashed.

This is the almost universal view, not only of the Bengalis themselves, but also of Western diplomats and observers.

It was perhaps too much to expect that the President might have acknowledged, or expressed regret for the worst excesses of the Army. But to have asked the nation to bow down its head “in gratitude to almighty Allah” for the Army’s intervention was little more than a gratuitous insult to the hundreds of thousands whose homes have been destroyed and whose lives have been shattered.

The President, to be sure, extended his “fullest sympathy” to those who had been “terrorized and uprooted”. The cause of the suffering of these innocent people, however, was not the Army but “secessionists, antisocial elements, miscreants, rebels, infiltrators, mischiefmongers and saboteurs”; a litany of villains' familiar to all students of authoritarian regimes.

Nothing in his address was more eloquent of the bankruptcy of the President’s policies than the constantly reiterated appeal to the faith of the Prophet and the sacred memory of Dr Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the late leader of the Muslim league and the founder of Pakistan. For the unifying power of Islam was on the wane long before the events of March and April.

It must have been with a mixture of bitterness and derision that most Bengalis heard the President invoke the threat of external enemies who were doing “their level best to undo our dear country ... a people whose life is pulsating with the love of the holy Prophet, whose hearts are illuminated with the light of iman and who have an unshakable reliance on the help of almighty Allah”.

The constitution, the President said, must he “based on Islamic ideology’’ and must be “the constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan in the true sense”,

The militant ring of “Islamic” in this context is unmistakable. “Every one of us”, the President declared, “is a mujahid (warrior)”.

Such appeals are void of meaning for the Muslims of East Pakistan after what they have done to each other and what has been done to them by their co-religionists from the Western wing.

For the Bengal Hindus who have fled to India there can only be one conclusion, whatever' assurance the President may profess; it is that the “Islamic Republic of Pakistan” is no safe place for them.

Nor, it appears, will such a Pakistan, whose highest mission must be the preservation of her sacred unity, be able to afford the luxury of the “regional and parochial sentiments” associated with normal political life.

Everything, the President said, “which tends to make our political life cumbersome, shaky, insecure and unpatriotic” must be eradicated so as “to infuse the right spirit in the peoples and the politicians”.

The first step in this direction, is the removal of the task, of framing a constitution from the province of a constituent assembly to a special committee of experts selected by the President and his military advisors.

The President also said that he would recommend to the committee “that, in the interest of the integrity of the country, it would be a good thing if we ban any party which is confined to a specific region and is not national in the practical sense” and “eschew this business of having two, three or four sub-parties”.

This recommendation, if enshrined in the constitution would rule out any revival of the Awami League in whatever form. The party whose leader, Shaikh Mujibur Rahman, has now been held in prison without trial in West Pakistan for nearly three months, won all but two of the 169 seats allocated to East Pakistan in the election last December.

This gave it a clear majority in the Constituent Assembly. But the party did not enjoy any representation in the west wing where those of its candidates who ran for office received only derisory support. Much of the bickering that eventually led to the Army’s intervention on March 25 to halt what Islamabad saw as a secessionist movement turned upon Shaikh Mujib’s right to use his majority to push through a constitution that did not have the support of the other main party in Pakistan, Mr Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s Western-based People’s Party of Pakistan.

There is well-informed speculation, however, that the President also intends to revive the old Muslim League of Dr Jinnah and his colleagues by reuniting the several querulous and insignificant sects into which it has disintegrated. Hence last Monday’s reference to the undesirability of “subparties’’.

The opportunity for this act of resuscitation could come with the holding of the by-elections promised for East Pakistan.

It will be no great surprise if representatives of a revivified Muslim League are found to be conveniently on hand then. The by-elections would be a farce, but with virtually. no one else to vote for enough voters might be persuaded to turn out to ensure the success of the Muslim League candidates.