INDIA
Free Bengal
Kuldip Nayar
New Delhi: December, 1971 Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy, is said to have warned Mr Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, that his " moth-eaten " Pakistan would not "last for more than twenty-five years." If the anecdote is true, he was wrong only by a few months.
The partition of the Indian sub-continent took place in the middle of August 1947 when, after 150 years of rule, the British left, and Mountbatten, the Viceroy, became Governor-General. Since the sharing of undivided India was on the basis of the Hindu and Muslim majority areas, both Punjab in the west and Bengal in the east were also split in the process.
The result was the creation of a political monstrosity, East Pakistan, which was really the eastern part of old Bengal. It had no land connection with Pakistan's western wing except across a thousand miles of India. The only thing that strung the two wings together was religion, Islam.
Religious identity provided the necessary ethos for unity only for a while. Soon economic compulsions began to assert themselves. An East Pakistani saw a West Pakistani Muslim replacing a Hindu industrialist or shopkeeper, and the result was that where before he had been exploited ' by a kafir (infidel) Hindu, he was now driven out by his co-religionist.
Most jobs went to west Pakistanis; the bulk of recruitment to the armed forces was from the Punjabis, again west Pakistanis. Political power continued to be vested in the hands of persons from the same region. A survey revealed that the riches of east and west Pakistan were con centrated in twenty-two families, almost all hailing from west Pakistan. On the top of all this, west Pakistan sought to dominate even the cultural life of the east Bengalis. Urdu, a language similar to Arabic, was imposed. The Bengali language was relegated to an inferior position, and the master of this language, Rabindranath Tagore, was banned because he was a Hindu. Even the customs which grew from the composite Bengali culture of Hindus and Muslims of the region were to be suppressed.
The liberation of the Hindu-subjugated Muslim Kashmir was another slogan which west Pakistan repeatedly raised to arouse Islamic fervour among the 65 million Muslim (out of a total population of 75 million) east Pakistanis. But Kashmir proved to be a distant cry. Instead, the feeling grew that the Kashmir question was being perpetuated because a large west Pakistan-dominated military machine had to be maintained.
The two wings continued to drift apart. When the appeal in the name of Islam did not work, West Pakistan began using force. Many Bengali leaders were put behind bars, and even the semblance of representative administration (Preshads) at the village level were suppressed. To drape its authoritarian measures with credibility and possible acceptability, West Pakistan built up the theory of the nationalist East Bengali leaders being in league with "Hindu India." Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, a Gandhi of East Bengal, was tried by special tribunals more than once for conspiracy to make East Pakistan independent with the help of New Delhi.
Had West Pakistan done something to ameliorate the condition of east Bengalis or not diverted to Punjab and other regions of the west the foreign exchange earned with the East Bengali produce of jute and tea, the East Pakistan population might have been taken in by the West Pakistan arguments. But they began increasingly to feel that by trading with neighbouring India they could fare better. They could sell fresh fish to the sprawling city of Calcutta and get a better price for the raw jute by offering it to the West Bengal factories which found the jute produced in India inadequate and inferior.
The only key to their problems, the East Bengalis thought, was an autonomous status whereby they could manage their own trade, their own services and their own culture. No doubt, this did mean closer relations with India, but then what? The rulers in West Pakistan read in this attitude something more than there really was. And when Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his party, the Awami League, asked for authority to enter into foreign trade agreements independently, West Pakistan was convinced that what they were after was independence — and normal relations with India.
And then came the polls last December. They proved beyond doubt where the sympathies of the East Bengalis lay. On the slogan of autonomy, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman not only swept the polls in East Pakistan, but also secured a majority in the Pakistan National Assembly. All those candidates and parties who opposed the demand for autonomy were routed in East Bengal. West Pakistan rulers once again tried to negotiate with the Sheikh to see if they could make him drop his demand for autonomy.
When arguments did not work, Pakistan which has been more or less under a military rule, began shooting indiscriminately. The Sheikh raised the slogan of Jai Ban gla, Free Bengal. Pakistani rulers also saw in the happenings in East Bengal an opportunity to make Pakistan more Pak (pure) because it had never accepted Hindus as equal citizens and to rid itself, once and for all, of its great demographic handicap — the ten million Hindus in the eastern wing. And here it came into clash with India into which the refugees had trekked. New Delhi first thought that the number of refugees would be small and only for a limited period. But when the influx mounted to ten million — mostly Hindus — and when the refugees made it clear that they would not return to their homes unless they felt secure, India began agitating for a political solution. The release of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was demanded because, in New Dehi's view, only he provided a key to the lock which otherwise would not open. When the Pakistani rulers paid no heed to India's appeals and when even the world powers confined themselves to giving wordy sympathy and a dribble of relief grants, India started training and arming the freedom fighters from East Bengal (IVIukti Bahini); it also provided sanctuary to them when Pakistan forces in East Bengal chased them. As India's assistance to the Mukti Bahini increased in East Bengal, General Yahya Khan, Pakistan's President, struck on the western side to engage Indian forces to relieve pressure in the east. But the superiority of Indian forces — and Moscow's assistance under the newly-signed treaty of friendship and security — paid dividends. Pakistan forces not only surrendered in East Bengal within twelve days but also accepted India's ceasefire offer. And so came the recognition of Bangladesh by the world — a fact which India accepted de facto on March 25 when there was a military crack-down in East Pakistan, and de jure on December 6, when Pakistan had joined a regular war with India. Lord Mountbatten's prophecy has come true, but when history is written, the fault will be apportioned to West Pakistan which exploited its eastern wing in the name of Islam and left it no alternative to cutting the unnatural 1,000 mile long umbilical chord with the West and seeking its own place in the sun.
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