President Yahya Khan’s long-awaited proposals to restore civilian rule to Pakistan are well meaning but will hardly meet the emotional needs of East Pakistan. For three months the province has been subjected to military brutality, enough to carry resentment far beyond the ranks of the politically conscious. What is necessary in face of this despair and hatred? Surely some magnanimity rather than the carefully hedged promises made yesterday. Surely something more generous in spirit than a constitution drafted by an expert committee.

No plan for the future will succeed unless it can hope to win over a large body of Bengali opinion. If those ready to respond find themselves in a category of collaborators they will be powerless. Yet the wording of the President’s proposals seems to call in East Pakistan for what most of its people will still regard as collaborators. Sheikh Mujib will still be an outcast if not a traitor. So will all those who have sympathized publicly with secession. Even those who escape this contamination must forswear the Awami League if they are to take their seats in the assembly when the new constitution has been drawn up. One can hardly imagine circumstances in which such a political solution could be acceptable to a majority in East Pakistan. Nothing was said yesterday that might turn the tide of bitter resentment at what has been done.

No doubt there are many people who can be blamed for what has happened in the past three months. But the luckless Bengalis will not be moved by an attempt to put the blame on plotting by the Indians or by a supposedly handful of “miscreants” subverting a united Pakistan. No excuse or recompense for the sins of the army is offered. Yet that is what looms largest in the minds of the people. These are not terms likely to call forth from the ranks of ill-used Bengalis the kind of politically cooperative volunteers who could escape the charge of collaboration.

Perhaps there is still a gap between the thinking in the Pakistan capital and the actualities in East Pakistan. If civilian government is to be restored there then reconciliation is necessary. But by all accounts, the hatreds aroused are to be exploited even further by appointing as agents of law and order the Bihari Muslims who are disliked by Bengalis almost as much as Bengalis dislike West Pakistanis. To the army of occupation will be added police and administrators in the same guise. Yet there have been officials from the west who have before won the confidence of the east. Can they not go back? Or would reappointing them be an admission that the campaign of repression has been a mistake? President Yahya Khan is right to stick to his view that the only solution must be a political one. Unfortunately everything that has been done in the past three months in East Pakistan has made that solution more difficult.

What is needed now is surely some measure of good will towards the Bengali population of East Pakistan that will encourage them to think that peaceful compromise might be possible instead of clinging to hopes of guerrilla warfare with all the added suffering that more fighting would bring. They will not be inspired by a statement, however well intentioned, that reads as if it had been drafted by an adjunct for battalion orders.