Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the leader of the East Pakistan Awami League, has promised to make an important announcement today, and he cannot leave his position on autonomy ambiguous much longer. The demand in his own party and to the left of it for outright secession by East Pakistan is becoming more vociferous with every hour. East Pakistan has been closed off from the world, but this means that to the crowds and the demonstrators the West Pakistan troops have become the symbols of the regime they are determined to overthrow. As a third of these troops and all the police are Bengalis the position cannot be contained for long by Karachi, no matter what reinforcements are on the way. Yet it is not certain that Pakistan is irretrievably broken.

There is still a possibility that Sheikh Mujibur will now successfully call for the making of two separate regional constitutions, each leaving provision for a central sovereign authority whose area and jurisdiction could go to negotiation subsequently. This seems the most that Sheikh Rahman could get his party to accept - or rather to try out. The Awami League controls 167 of the 313 seats in the constituent assembly elected in December, and it is exasperated at the way Mr. Bhutto has manoeuvred President Yahya Khan into postponing its sitting by the refusal of the People’s Party to go to Dacca for the meeting.

Mr. Bhutto’s position against the President was strengthened by the outburst of anti-Indian feeling in West Pakistan generated by the hijacked airliner incident. All that the East Pakistanis can see this is political chicanery by the West to remain in control when they have lost the elections and failed to accept East Pakistan’s fair claims in the ensuing discussions. Their separatist feelings, growing over the years, and finding at last electoral expression, were heightened by Karachi’s performance in the flood disaster.

Sheikh Rahman almost certainly does not want history to identify him as the Muslim leader who broke Pakistan in two. Mr. Bhutto has pushed him to that corner. If his hand is forced, and unless division can somehow come by mutual agreement, a grave crisis will face India and Pakistan. East Pakistan is moreover in turmoil just when West Bengal is going to the polls with a high likelihood of emerging as a communist state with a reinforced voice in New Delhi. The appeal of the Awami League to a full scale “Bangladesh”, or Bengali nationalism, may still be fanciful. It is all too possible that the excitement and violence involved in the repudiation of West Pakistan might boil over into attacks on the Hindu minority. Nevertheless, the growing community of ideological outlook in the two Bengals, culturally linked by language, literature and history, promises anxieties for New Delhi.

The Awami League, the East Pakistan successor to the defunct Muslim League that was the principle of Pakistan’s unity after independence, is nationalist and regional in outlook. Within it, however, Ihe National Awami Party, which was the cover for the banned Pakistan Communist Party, is broadly Maoist though it operates in different waves among students, trade unionists, and peasants. On the other side of the border, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which is likely to win the elections, is undeclared in allegiance and works as a united leftist front. But it gains from the terrorist activities of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) who are working together with the Naxalite militants to make sure that the poll will produce a communist victory. The pro-Moscow group is largely ineffective. Thus the political instruments for common action in both Bengals a general area of frustration and stagnation (though industry and progressive development is almost all on the Indian side) do exist.

Mrs. Gandhi may be able to reverse the tendency in India to regionalism and disintegration. China, moreover, is ill-placed to take advantage of the Bengal situation, even if Peking is disposed to look so far afield. It is a question which Pakistan would inherit the understanding with China. East Pakistan may prove more amenable to approaches - especially if accompanied by aid - from India with Russia in the background, and it is much more ready to drop the quarrel over Kashmir. Yet a broken Pakistan, one part of which cooperates with China over Kashmir, while the other part cooperates with China to detach West Bengal, is an uninviting prospect. For India, for the area of the Indian Ocean, for the contest between Russia and China, the problem of Bengal is indeed critical.