ISJ Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
From International Socialism, No.48, June/July 1971, pp.12-13.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
When the Pakistani army moved into action on 25 March it took control of the immediate future of Bengal. But it did so at enormous cost to itself and to its base in West Pakistan. By ruling out compromise it turned the tepid movement for constitutional change led by the Awami League into a recognisable movement for national independence. In trying to annihilate the rudiments of a Bengali armed force it created one.
Even in the short term, before the resistance can be expected to bite, the army’s problems look forbidding. It has taken on a fight in the most water-logged country in the world, although all of its training, tradition and transport is geared to the arid, flat plains of north-west India and Pakistan. It has taken on a close-packed society, almost totally rural, with a force as obviously foreign as the Americans in Vietnam. It has some air-power, now used for terror strikes in what amounts to a country-wide free-fire zone, but that will soon be grounded by the monsoons.
There are the towns of course. These offer some firm ground under foot. But even that is not much. Some – like Kushtia or Rajshahi which were evacuated and then retaken – are depopulated mounds of rubble. Others are standing empty. All are debengalized with no more than a fifth or a quarter of their combined populations in place, and half of these made up of the 700,000 or so Urdu-speaking non-Bengali communities forcibly introduced by Partition more than twenty years ago.
By and large these ‘Biharis’ identify with Pakistan. They are the army’s only large civilian base in Bengal, its main source of information and, now that they are being armed, a possibly useful auxiliary in future urban guerrilla warfare. Together with the trickle of carpet-baggers from West Pakistan eager for good abandoned Bengali houses and jobs, the Biharis now form a solid colon mass, administering the repression and forming part of it. In time they might even help to crank up the main towns into something like administrative normalcy. But one thing is beyond them – to restore to the towns their economic function and so renew Bengal’s value as a colony.
That value has been considerable. Bengal provided half and more of the country’s export earnings; absorbed half West Pakistan’s exports; produced a quarter to a third of tax revenue, three-fifths of which went to the armed forces. In exchange the Bengali three-fifths of what was Pakistan got thirty percent of all foreign exchange receipts including aid, the same proportion of government expenditure, 7-10 percent of recruitment into the armed forces, and all of the discrimination and social deprivation of a colonial territory. Even last year’s international cyclone-disaster relief was well masticated in West Pakistan before it ever reached the affected areas.
The key to Bengal’s colonial slaves in the past and the army’s only hope of success in the future is jute, the international cash crop planted in competition with rice on one fifteenth of the country’s sown area. If the army can get it in the ground this May and June it will have won a major battle. If it can then get it moved it will have gone far to winning the campaign. For a jute crop this year instead of rice will force the 2½ million or so urban refugees back from the lean countryside, open up a number of key areas to the occupying power and so undermine the economic and social base for a rural, guerilla-type resistance. If this happens the army might still hope to refurbish a Bengali base however small.
It is a very long shot. For years now rice has been edging out jute in order to cope with the growing number of mouths and hedge against the growing insecurity of the international jute market. With so many more mouths and so much more insecurity this season the peasant growers are bound to jump spontaneously for the safety of the subsistence crop. And what spontaneity does not accomplish, the Bengali resistance most probably will.
If the army loses battle for jute, there is little it can do to prevent the (West) Pakistan economy from careering out of control. Already transport and communications facilities are unimaginably stretched to sustain war and occupation 3,000 miles away by nearest permissible route. Industrialists are cutting back production to ride the loss of their profitable Bengal market. The State Bank privately expects a price inflation of 30-40 percent in West Pakistan this year and a sickening balance of payments crisis. For, quite apart from Bengal’s lost exports, aid is tailing off fast and the World Bank has so far rejected Pakistan’s appeal for a moratorium on debt repayments.
A tight economic squeeze can hardly be delayed beyond the Budget in mid-summer, by which time unemployment and inflation will have pulled a large number of factory and office workers out on the streets in an ugly mood. By then the major political party in West Pakistan, Bhutto’s People’s Progressive Party, will be finding out what it is like to be caught between its popular following and its army support; and might be expected to look for a solution in something it has avoided so far – the anti-Bengali pogroms which could light a train of communal killings throughout the West.
Once again the army will be called upon to keep order – in the West this time. Fatter by then, and more demanding, yet still unable to rupture precedent and its own social links with the landowners, it will turn to business to sustain it in its new role, size and reach. Given the likely economic circumstances, with business unable to pay it is quite conceivable that the army will take over large sections of industry in the name of a loyalty to the country that cannot be expected from what is, after all, a largely immigrant capitalist class.
By the end of the year Pakistan could be in such turmoil at home and in Bengal, with class, regional and communal war raging, that only a massive foreign rescue operation could salvage the army from defeat.
Such a massive foreign aid operation is probably not on. Meanwhile a militant nationalist movement is rapidly forming out of the ruins left by Yayha, Mujib and Mao in Bangla Desh. It will probably be able to deny Pakistan its jute, even if it cannot win the colon towns for the present. But the present will not last for ever. Weakened by the drain in Bengal, buffeted by the coming economic and social storms in Pakistan, and isolated internationally, the army might yet purge itself of its (Pathan) high command and sound the retreat from Bangla Desh.
ISJ Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
Last updated on 6.2.2008