Kayhan International (Iran)

Noontime is kebab-time in Dacca’s riverside district. There are about 20 kiosks made of tin and tree-trunks which specialise in making a mixture of flour and minced intestines of sheep that passes for “kebab”. To the teeming crowds of the district this curious mixture represents a wholesome meal. There are thousands of fishermen, vendors, fortune-tellers, crap-shooters, lay-abouts, boatmen, beggars, ruined peasants wandering in the town and sundry other semi-naked walking skeletons who mob the “kebab-shops” at lunch-time.

The whole meal costs one-quarter of a rupee (about 2.5 rials) and yet most of the crowd who gather to watch the grilling of the coveted meal cannot afford the treat. Out of every 10 by-standers at the kebab-shops only one or two can afford the meal. They eat with pleasure and look as if they have just secured a chunk of paradise. The rest of the crowd look on in envy mixed with wonder.

“Too poor to be true”, the head of the East Pakistani water and power board—a charming Bengali—described his land when briefing us on the region’s problems. “We have the highest population density in the world and the lowest per capita income”, he said with a hurt smile. There are some 75 million people occupying an area of 55,000 square miles. The population of the region will be over 100 million before the current decade is over.

East Pakistan is a flat land “like the centre of a saucer” that “attracts all the floodwater from the uplands of India and Nepal”. Every year it is practically submerged by raging floods while the monsoon rains are heaviest in this eternally green and seemingly eternally poor land.

The water and power department chief told us that some $ 5 billion is needed to create flood control and irrigation network if the present standard of living—already the lowest in the world—is to be maintained over the next two decades.

This is equal to nearly one-third of Pakistan’s total GNP each year. The national government simply does not have the resources to meet the challenge.

In most areas of the province conditions of near famine have always prevailed. The recent disturbances — causing much destruction of capital, food and a huge loss of labour, have made the situation graver still. There is every possibility that the bulk of the jute harvest—the region’s chief cash crop and Pakistan’s biggest single source of foreign exchange —will be lost next year. Many fields are abandoned and few people feel inclined to set about their normal work as long; as conditions of uncertainty continue in the land.

The crisis has also hit the export of pineapples. India has banned Pakistani aircraft from overflying its territory and thus it is not economical to export pineapples by air.

To make matters worse, acts of sabotage, disrupt vital communication links making every single commercial transaction something like a military operation. In the remotest regions of the province such as Bogra and Sylhet rebels are still active, terrorising the peasant population and preventing them from tilling the land and tending the farms. Millions of peasants have been displaced and most of the government plans for flood control and irrigation have become nothing but paper dreams.

Even under the British this part of the empire—then serving as the backward and exploited hinterland of Calcutta —was proverbial for its poverty. In those days Malthusian “corrective measures” such as famine and cholera would make sure that the population did not grow beyond the means of the soil. Nearly 20 years of efforts by Pakistan—helped by half a dozen other countries—has kept the people of the region alive, but on the frontiers of semi-starvation. No progress beyond this has been possible due to the region’s centuries of accumulated backwardness and poverty and an unjust system of economic organisation that constantly disfavoured East Pakistan.

This was perhaps, only natural within a free-enterprise economic system. In such a system investment is motivated by a desire for profit and enterprises in West Pakistan—that was at least 200 years ahead of the east wing—were obviously more profitable. This led to a vicious circle. The more West Pakistan developed at the expense of East Pakistan the less attractive investment became in the latter.

For nearly three years now the central authorities as well as increasingly large section of public opinion in West Pakistan have been aware of this. But these were years of uncertainty and turmoil, and as a result, nothing positive could be done to save East Pakistan from further decline.

The West Pakistanis are now waiting for complete peace to return to the east wing before they launch their “crusade to save the east” from further suffering. They admit that they should have thought about this 20 years ago and blame one corrupt and inefficient central government after another for the present tragic situation.

Whether complete peace will return to East Pakistan in the foreseeable future remains any one’s guess. Over 35,000 guerrillas are being trained by India. A large number of the East Pakistanis who escaped into West Bengal during the past few months are unlikely to return home except as rebels and saboteurs. Powerful disruptive forces are at work and West Pakistan’s resources to meet the Herculean challenge of saving the east wing from the four horsemen of the Apocalypse are strictly limited.

The military authorities say that as soon as India stops its “campaign to divide Pakistan” they will be able to make a real breakthrough in the east wing.

Some West Pakistani leaders, notably People’s Party Chairman Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, believe that the restoration of civilian rule would do the trick. Bhutto says the situation in. East Pakistan can be “put right” in just five years provided a civilian central government would take over from the military soon.

A small but significant number of West Pakistani intellectuals believe that the battle against poverty and disruptive forces is already lost. They see the recent disturbances in East Pakistan as “the beginning of the disintegration of the entire sub-continent.”

They believe that the military will be unable to hold on to the east wing and that the loss of the province would be immediately followed by the secession of West Bengal from India. They point to the fact that West Bengal has been turbulent and under virtual military occupation for the past decade. The catalyst for such a disintegration, they claim, would be a war between India and Pakistan which would “break into pieces the mosaic of nations that covers the subcontinent”.

Neither India nor Pakistan have yet recovered from their losses in the 1965 war. But there are forces on both sides which advocate armed confrontation as “the final solution”.

The Indians seem to believe that by smashing Pakistan into pieces—using East Pakistan as the springboards—they would save their own unity. There are Pakistanis who would be prepared to meet the challenge in the hope of pulling down India as well as they themselves into the abyss.

Here, the policies of the Big Powers, have an important role to play. West is anxious to keep India as a buffer state between its own zone of influence and that of People’s China. Peking, on the other hand, is also interested in keeping the buffer with Pakistan as a “corrective force” against Indian illusions.

But the fate of the sub-continent is not being determined in either Washington or Peking. It is being decided in the two-halves of Bengal both of which are poor enough to think they would have nothing to lose but their chains when the final conflagration erupts in their midst.

There are quite a few thinking East Pakistanis who believe that the disintegration of the sub-continent would bring about “massacres unheard of in the annals of mankind”. Millions of people lost their lives during partition and a fresh partition leading to the emergence, perhaps, of 20 different nation states in the sub-continent would be accompanied by far more widespread atrocities and genocide.

The tragic events of the past few months in East Pakistan have led to a strengthening of militaristic tendencies in both India and Pakistan. The military chiefs, hungry for honour and desirous of “action for the boys” as they are beginning to wield increasingly effective influence over the policies of both Islamabad and New Delhi. Both countries have military heads that are too heavy for their frail bodies. There are nearly two million men under arms in the sub-continent and many more millions could be armed, no matter how crudely, if and when a confrontation comes.

When the Naxalite rebellion was in full swing in West Bengal the Pakistanis did all to help the insurgents in the hope of weakening India. Rebels found shelter in East Pakistan and the bulk of the arms they received from China passed through Dinajpur and Rajshahi. The result was that West Bengal became virtually ungovernable. Now the Indians are taking their revenge by sheltering East Pakistani rebels, training and arming them and throwing full political support behind them. Both sides might prove to have succeeded in releasing the Bengali giant that was captive in two interlinked bottles.

Yahya Khan’s government might well be the last Pakistani government capable of making a fair deal with India. But it is precisely this government that New Delhi hopes to overthrow. At the same time Mrs. Gandhi’s government risks becoming a captive of the military chiefs if the present situation deteriorates. In trying to stab Pakistan in the back India might well be committing harakiri at the same time.

But these are all considerations of a strategic nature. What is of immediate importance is to save East Pakistan from famine and West Bengal from economic collapse under the pressure of the refugees. The Americans have apparently promised massive financial and food aid to Pakistan. The first doses are expected to be administered before the end of the summer. But much more is needed. The situation in East Pakistan and West Bengal must be treated as one of vital importance to the world as a whole. For the seeds of a gargantuan Asian tragedy are being sown in this arena of human struggle against poverty and starvation.