PAKISTAN – Jinnah’s Fading Dream Monday, 15 March 1971 – Time Magazine

PAKISTAN – Jinnah’s Fading Dream

Monday, 15 March 1971

Time Magazine

MuktiJuddho e-Archive Collection

If we begin to think of ourselves as Bengalis, Punjabis and Sindhis first, and Moslems and Pakistanis only incidentally, then Pakistan is bound to disintegrate.

—Mohammed Ali Jinnah, 1948

The blood was still flowing from the murderous communal clashes that followed the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent when Pakistan’s founder gave voice to that fear. Last week blood flowed again as the world’s fifth most populous nation (130 million), divided between a wheat-growing West with tall, light-skinned people and a rice-growing East with short dark-skinned people, moved ominously toward a breakup—or a civil war.

The man behind the impending split is Sheik Mujibur (“Mujib”) Rahman, the unchallenged political leader of the more populous, poverty-stricken, eastern segment. “Pakistan, as it stands today, is finished,” Mujib told TIME Correspondent Dan Coggin in Dacca last week. “There is no longer any hope of a settlement.” He urged that East and West Pakistan adopt separate constitutions, and that his followers refuse to pay taxes to the central government, which is situated in the West. He seemed on the brink of an outright declaration of independence for what he calls Bangla Desh (Bengal State), which would become the world’s eighth most populous nation. If Mujib should make such an announcement, open warfare might well erupt between the East Pakistanis and the estimated 60,000 army troops, mostly Westerners, in their midst.

Poles Apart. The crisis is an extension of the rioting over the central governments neglect of East Pakistan that helped force President Mohammed Ayub Khan to resign two years ago. Ayub’s successor, authoritarian but fair-minded General Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan, held out hope that the long subservient East would have a greater voice in running the country.

Last December he held elections for a Constituent Assembly that would draft a new constitution—Pakistan’s fourth since 1947. Yahya thought Sheik Mujib and his restive Awami League would win perhaps 60% of the East’s allotment of 169 seats in the 313-seat Constituent Assembly. The remaining East Pakistan delegates, Yahya figured, would align themselves with West Pakistani parties and prevent Mujib from winning majority control over the entire country. But in a stunning victory that amounted to a vote for wide-ranging autonomy, if not outright independence. Mujib’s Awami League won 167 of the 169 seats and an overall majority in the Assembly.

Strengthened by the mandate, Mujib pressed a six-point program demanding that East Pakistan handle its own taxation, foreign trade and foreign aid, thereby bringing an end to the West’s longtime dominance. Mujib accuses West Pakistan, with 58 million people, of taking 70% of the nation’s foreign aid and 70% of its imports, and of monopolizing 85% of the central bureaucracy and 90% of the army. By contrast, the more populous East Pakistan, with 72 million people, remains one of the world’s most densely populated regions (1,400 per sq. mi.), one of the poorest ($50 per capita income a year), and one of the most disaster-prone (last year’s Ganges Delta cyclone killed as many as 500,000 East Pakistanis).

In West Pakistan, ex-Foreign Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and his Pakistan People’s Party emerged as the strongest force, capturing 83 of 144 seats. Bhutto, 43, and Mujib, 48, are poles apart. Son of a wealthy feudal landowning family. Bhutto is pro-Chinese and anti-Indian: Mujib, product of a middle-class village family, is pro-Western and would like to make peace with India. More important, most of West Pakistan’s capitalists, bureaucrats and army officers support Bhutto, who opposes Mujib’s six points because they would destroy Pakistan’s unity and his own ambitions.

Following the December elections, Mujib twice turned down Yahya’s invitations to confer in Islamabad, the national capital located in the West. Yahya went to Dacca, the capital of East Pakistan, and so did Bhutto. They got nowhere with Mujib, who warned stiffly that the minority would no longer rule the majority.

To Their Knees. Two days before the Constituent Assembly was set to convene in Dacca last week, Yahya postponed it indefinitely to give the political leaders a chance to reach an understanding. The postponement infuriated the Bengalis. “I am not imposing the six-point program on West Pakistan,” declared Mujib, “but the people of Bangla Desh are entitled to it, and they will have it.” In protest, Mujib called an all-day general strike for the following day, and half-day strikes for the rest of the week, shuttering offices, shops and factories and halting trains, planes and even rickshas. Angry mobs carrying bamboo staves, the weapon Mujib prescribes, roared “Joi Bangla!” (Victory to Bengal) through Dacca’s seamy streets. At least 25 died in Dacca in clashes with soldiers: another 100 were killed at the port city of Chittagong. Mujib denounced the army shooting as an “unforgivable sin” and warned: “There will be civil war if they do not withdraw.”

At week’s end Yahya Khan announced in a radio broadcast that the Constituent Assembly would convene after all on March 25. “As long as I am in command of the armed forces, I will ensure the complete and absolute integrity of Pakistan.” Nevertheless, it seemed doubtful that Yahya’s decision to convene the assembly would pacify Mujib. Two days earlier, the East Pakistani leader said of the West Pakistanis: “I will break them and bring them to their knees.” After such a statement, an outright declaration of independence could be little more than an anticlimax.