Dacca

OUT of every 10 political slogans that one can still see on the roadside walls in Dhanmondi, an upper middle class residential area of Dacca, at least five contain a call for a socialist state of workers and peasants in East Pakistan. Out of every 10 educated Bengalis who did not vote in the December election, at least four do not believe it can provide an answer to East Pakistan's socio-economic problems. They assert that the country most needs an armed uprising to overthrow the established order.

Quite often, in small informal gatherings, someone will declare his unequivocal support for a Maoist revolution, denouncing the whole thesis of a peaceful transition to socialism. Immediately this touches off a heated debate on the whole range of questions affecting the long overdue social revolution in East PakistanÑgenerally ending in unanimous agreement that sooner or later East Pakistan, if not Pakistan as a whole, is heading for a revolution of sorts. The unanswered question is whether it should come now or later.

"If you are looking for signs of a left upsurge in East Pakistan," said a government official in Chittagong, "go to the villages or at least to the headquarters of districts and subdivisions." He described a new form of militancy among peasants everywhere, even in a place like Bhola which had been badly hit by cyclone last November, a militancy that most people confuse with lawlessness. Disorganised though it may be, he said, the militancy is not without direction, perhaps also not without its leaders. As he put it, the mood prevailing everywhere is one of defiance, best expressed in the words of a village leader, "Yes, we have voted for Mujib. But we know what to do if he fails."

The phenomenon - this unprecedented upsurge of the left in East Pakistan - is not without complex paradoxes. For one thing, the left forces have been almost totally crushed in the December election. Candidates put up by the pro-Peking group of Maulana Bashani's NAP (National Awami Party) withdrew just before the polls, using the cyclone disaster as a pretext. The nominees of the pro- Moscow NAP stayed in the field, only to face dismal defeats at the hands of Awami League candidates.

A few independent leftist candidates tried from a few isolated constituencies, but did no better than those of pro-Moscow NAP. As a Dacca intellectual ruefully observed, the East Pakistani contingent in the Constituent-cum-National Assembly will suffer from a total lack of any form of left representation. In contrast, the members elected on PPP (Pakistan People's Party) tickets from West Pakistan would definitely include several trade unionists and peasant leaders whose credentials as socialists can, at least for the present, be accepted at their face value. There are of course a few pro-Moscow NAP members elected from the North Western Frontier region in West Pakistan.

Given the aims of the left, it is not surprising that with the exception of pro-Moscow NAP leaders in East Pakistan who are reported to be particularly demoralised by their defeat, the election result has seemingly made very little difference to the extreme left which is loosely, often incorrectly, dubbed as Maoist, Naxalite or simply as pro-Peking. "After all," said a member of one splinter group, "so far nothing has disproved our basic contention that this election would not solve the country's socio-economic problems." Besides, he added, why should we regret losing an election that we did not contest?

United in their common dedication to the concept of an armed uprising in East Pakistan, in their indifference to the effort to draw up a working constitution and indeed in their distrust of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, leader of the Awami League, the pro-Peking left forces are divided in all other respects. For all practical purposes, Maulana Bashani's NAP has now ceased to be the front organisation of all pro-Peking left elements, including Maoist Communists. This is a recent development which can be attributed to Bashani's own moves to throw his leading communist associates out of the NAP - and to the left's realisation that this 89- year-old peasant leader was slowly trying to develop his own power base, independent of "genuine" socialist forces, behind the smokescreen of Islam and his call for the session of East Bengal from the rest of Pakistan.

Bashani has been also accused by several of his old left associates of creating a demand for secession merely to divert the attention of the masses of East Pakistan from "enemies of the people" within the province, thus protecting the interests of the petit bourgeois of East Pakistan, almost in the same way as Mujib.

The charges made against this provocative peasant leader over the years have only been matched for variety by his unpredictable and often inflammatory statements. Yet he has remained a central figure in Pakistan ever since independence, whose instinct for survival has so far defied all rational explanation. Before the overthrow of Ayub, NAP pro-Moscow elements had accused him of "total inaction" and of protecting the interests of the deposed president under the guidance of Peking; later he was criticised for his "left adventurism", "negative politics" and now for his thinly-veiled reactionary moves against the left.

At this moment, Bashani may well be a spent force as a rallying point in East Pakistan's left politics. The question is what the left forces are going to do without the Maulana.

Besides the pro-Moscow NAP members, there are four major splinter pro-Peking groups operating in East Pakistan today, whose relative strengths invite considerable speculation. Perhaps the most important one of them is the group led by Mohammad Toaha and Abdul Huq. A faction which broke away from Bashani's NAP, its leadership is in the hands of much respected seasoned former student leaders who are generally regarded by the authorities as senior members of the banned communist party of East Pakistan. The group publishes a weekly paper of its own, carries out considerable field work in several districts and maintains close links with Dacca intellectuals. It also has its own student front organisation.

The other important faction is the Matin-Alauddin group which till recently has been trying to retain its links with the Maulana. It has its own students' union in Dacca, some connections with the trade union movement in Chittagong and considerable hold in Pabna, the home town of the group's leader. The remaining two are usually known as the Zafar-Menon group - which takes the dubious credit of being the first to agitate for an "independent socialist East Bengal" and is a particularly militant group whose leaders are operating underground - and a tiny faction headed by Siraj Sikdar which is believed to be rather active in the coastal district of Barisal. The Sikdar group is said to spend a lot of time studying Mao-thought.

The main divisions between these groups are more in terms of personalities than of policies, these being still in a state of flux. But the differences - and clashes - between the leaders have produced variations, both subtle and crude, in policy directives which are issued from the groups from time to time. All of them may argue vehemently in favour of an armed uprising, but they differ on what kinds of weapons are to be used, whether foreign aid is to be sought and indeed about the time schedule.

There are differences on the secession issue, and wide divergences of views about the role and future of Bengali nationalism. The Zafar-Menon group may well be in favour of immediate separation from the rest of Pakistan, but a spokesman of Toaha-Huq group assured me that his "party" does not regard secession as an issue in itself, viewing Bashani's call for "independent East Pakistan" as a diversionary move. (Two years ago, the same group had openly blamed the United States and the "imperialist agents" for encouraging Bengali nationalism and instigating the secessionist campaign; it is now said that an independent East Bengal, under petit bourgeois leadership, would be "another Vietnam".)~

While confusion and dissension have been making a mockery of the left's unity in East Pakistan, precious little is known about where the communist party, illegal since 1954, stands. Its organisation had never been very strong even in its heyday; now it must be almost non- existent. Several senior members of its central committee are either in jail or working underground; some have aligned themselves with the pro-Moscow NAP. The top leaders of the various pro-Peking splinter groups also privately claim connections with the "party", but in most cases their credentials are doubted by those who knew its structure before it was banned.

It is highly improbable that any links, other than purely ideological ones, exist between these groups and China. In fact, Peking's thinking about leftist politics in East Pakistan is anybody's guess. However, one source in Dacca claimed Premier Chou En-lai had told a visiting Pakistani government leader late last year that China firmly believed in a "united" Pakistan, and that he had expressed "serious reservations" about East Pakistan's demand for total regional autonomy which could, he thought, lead to partition of the country. China may be far from committed to support a war of national liberation in East Pakistan - yet.

If Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto are able to frame a new constitution and give Pakistan its first popularly elected government, the ban on the communist party will eventually be lifted. This will enable it to undertake its long overdue reorganisation and come to grips with the manifold problems in both ideological and organisational spheres. But neither this nor the strength of the personalities involved can halt the sharp polarisation in East Pakistan's political scene.

The key factor is the revolutionary urge of millions of militant peasants in the province. Ayub Khan's 10-year rule, the mass upsurge against the army in March last year and the cyclone disaster have done something not just to the basic political pattern but also to the entire mental make-up of the people of East Pakistan. The new forces which have been suddenly let loose cannot be contained or even restrained within the existing framework nor even perhaps within the scope of Mujib's six-point programme. Perhaps the best the Awami League or other left-of-centre political groups can do is to use the breathing space to prepare for the next storm to break out in East Pakistan.