Pakistani army; and lastly, by recently visiting the capital of Bangladesh itself. Gandhi has responded by exploding an atomic bomb, the fallout of which has been felt in both Islamabad and Dacca, not to speak of
Peking. Of the three major leaders of South Asia, the most obvious and blatant failure has been Sheikh Mujibur Rehman.
28 basic theory and policy of proletarian internationalism -which involves a firm orientation toward the world socialist revolution, the subordination of any given part of the movement to the interests of the revolution as a whole, and the clear consciousness of the world unity of the struggle of the working class - the Soviet bureaucracy created an identity between the "interests of the communist movement" and the "interests of the bulwark state" (or "guiding state"). With fatal logic, this implies the risk that the emergence of several "bulwark states" with their own apparent interests, mediated by the specificity of the interests of the bureaucracies governing them, would involve violent conflicts among those states. The leaders of the pro-Moscow CPs accuse the Maoists of "Chinese nationalism" because they subordinate the interests of the international communist movement to the interests of the "great power, " China. But by defending the concept that the contradiction between the "socialist camp" led by the Soviet Union and the "imperialist camp" should be substituted for the contradiction between the world proletariat and the world bourgeoisie (of which the former contradiction is an important expression) what are these leaders doing if not defending a "theory" that is identical to that of the Peking leaders, except that "the Soviet Union" (or "the socialist camp") is inserted in place of "the People's Republic of China"? The petty-bourgeois nationalism that guides the attitude of the Soviet and Chinese leaders in their mutual relations is the expression of the particular interests of the bureaucracy -- a thousand miles removed from the interests of the proletariat and the world revolution. The grave implications of the Sino-Soviet conflict on the level of state relations once again demonstrate that these interests are also opposed to the real interests of the Soviet and Chinese workers states themselves. In the final analysis, the bureaucracy's interests objectively serve only to strengthen the counterrevolutionary capacities of imperialism.
Both internally and externally he has been unable to gain any victories and has stumbled from one crisis to another. Bangladesh: the weakest link
The root of the crisis in Bangladesh has been the regime's failure to develop a strong and stable bourgeois class and corresponding institutions that could provide a solid material base around which the state apparatus could be stabilized.
As a result, the Bangladesh army, police, and special police.
have been partially dependent on the Indian state for sustenance. Mujibur Rehman is desperately trying to decrease his reliance on India. His emissaries have visited Peking and it is likely that the latter will soon recognize the regime and begin trade in earnest.
Left. Bengali civilians killed during Pakistani genocidal war in 1971.1 l Right. Bhutto and Rehman. Friends again? Inviting Bhutto to visit Dacca was another step in Rehman's attempts to diversify his international support. In the days immediately preceding Bhutto's arrival Rehman realized that Bhutto might receive too enthusiastic a welcome. Two days before the latter left Islamabad, the Bengali press and television started republishing and rescreening stories and films of the atrocities committed by Pakistani troops during the occupation. But the effect seems to have been minimal. Thousands of people turned up to welcome Bhutto with chants of "Pakistan Zindabad" (Long Live Pakistan). This was the biggest indictment ever of the Awami League regime, which has held power since the establishment of Bangladesh. The favorable reaction to Bhutto, who was a leading supporter of Islamabad's genocidal war in Bangladesh, reflected the growing disillusionment with the Awami League. Without doubt, thousands of people recalled that the cost of living was lower when Pakistan was united. Unable to look forward to the future -- and given the state of the left this is hardly surprising -- sections of the masses yearn nostalgically for the past. The possibility that resumed trade with Pakistan would result in cheaper consumer goods (sugar, vegetable oil, wheat, textiles) also played a part in the welcome given to Bhutto. But the Pakistani leader failed to realize that by making a number of concessions he could have enlarged his constituency in Bangladesh. As a result, the Pakistani team played hard and no real gains could be recorded by Bangladesh. Sheikh Rehman will thus have no option in the immediate future but to continue to rely on India. The extent of the social and economic crisis coupled with the inability of the far left to exploit the situation politically has led to a massive growth of right-wing currents, not least inside the Awami League itself. Rehman's response to the crisis has been simple: intensified repression. Most of the 36,000 prisoners arrested for collaborating with the Pakistani army during the war of independence have been released in order to make room in the jails for the 20,000 leftists now being held without trial. In February 1974 the Awami League went beyond the powers of the previous military dictators Ayub and Yahya by promulgating the Special Powers Act under which any newspaper or journal that publishes "prejudicial" reports can be banned and its editors imprisoned and fined. To further discourage dissent the private paramilitary formation of the Awami League, the Jatiya Rakhi Bahini, was given special powers by Parliament to arrest and detain without trial any citizen of the country. "Arrest and detain" is of course an extremely euphemistic phrase. The real function of the Bahini is to liquidate political opponents, a task that it is carrying out fairly efficiently at the moment. And to make sure that no bright citizen should think of appealing against the arbitrary brutalities of these Awami League thugs in uniform the parliamentary act specifies the following: "No suit, prosecution, or other legal proceedings shall lie against any member of the Rakhi Bahini for anything which is in good faith done or intended to be done in pursuance of this order or rule made thereunder." The major victims of the repression have been the supporters and members of the JSD (Jatiya Samaitantrik Dal -- National Socialist Party) led by former members of the Awami League who participated in the guerrilla struggle and split from the League in disgust with its rightist policies and its encouragement of corruption. The JSD is undoubtedly the major oppositional force in Bangladesh today and its principal leaders have already suffered numerous attempts on their lives. Some of the Maoist groups have also lost members in the large-scale repression that has been carried out. The pro-Moscow Stalinists, who have up till now supported the Awami League uncritically (as their counterparts in India support the Congress), have participated in the repression against "left adventurism." Extremely short-sighted, they fail to realize that the repression will one day be directed against them as well, regardless of their reformist politics. The repression, however, is a cover to hide the real weakness of the regime, which is confronted by a total crisis of perspectives. The only way out would require solutions that would sound the death knell of the Awami League and the aspiring Bengali petty bourgeoisie and would never be tolerated by the Indian and Pakistani armies. For the real solution is to unite the Bengali nation. Socially, economically, and culturally this is the only serious way out of the crisis, but it involves a complete and total break both with the bourgeoisie and with bourgeois politics. To a large extent, the Bangladesh left is still a prisoner of its past wrong strategies and conceptions. The JSD, the only leftward moving mass current to emerge after the establishment of Bangladesh, is still in process of formation. The result is that while Bangladesh is clearly the weakest link of the South Asian capitalist chain, it is unlikely that it will be broken in the coming period because of the inadequacies of the left.
29
SOUTH ASIA What's left in Pakistan? Bhutto's position in what is left of Pakistan is only marginally better. Given the greater industrialization and smaller population this was only to be expected, but the crisis has continued nevertheless and has even found a reflection in the ruling People's party, where J. A. Rahim, a senior cabinet minister and close associate of Bhutto's, has recently resigned in protest against the "lack of socialism and secularism" in the government. Bhutto's way out of the crisis has also been repression, but it has been carried out on a somewhat more selective basis. If this fails, the alternative is not socialism, but a new coup d'etat, warded off for the time being by Bhutto's foreign policy successes. To understand why the left is weak it is essential to explain the circumstances and environment in which it has developed. Historically the areas that now comprise Pakistan have never been able to boast of a strong Marxist tradition. The strong grip of tribalism and feudalism, lack of industrialization, the virtual non-existence of even a strong bourgeois-nationalist tradition (with the partial exception of the North-West Frontier Province) have all played a contributing role in this regard. Over the last thirty years, however, two other factors have helped to denude the region of the few advances that had been made: the migration of hundreds of Sikh and Hindu communists to India after 1947 and the establishment of Bangladesh in 1971. Partition took away most of the communist cadres. There was no corresponding entry into Pakistan of large numbers of communists of Muslim origin from India. Those that came did so reluctantly, and only on the instructions of the Communist party of India (CPI). But here too the CPI bungled and instead of sending trade union and peasant organizers they sent intellectuals such as the late Sajjad Zaheer and Sibte Hassan. Both were excellent literary critics and wrote political pamphlets in a refreshingly crisp and pungent Urdu prose, but as communist leaders they were hopelessly, albeit endearingly, inadequate. Their arrival, together with that of a few others, made the infant and minuscule Communist party of Pakistan (CPP) so top heavy that it could never acquire a mass base of any significance. Desperate, the CPP leaders looked for shortcuts. An attempted putsch by an extremely dubious bunch of army officers, one of whom had links with the CPP leaders since they attended the same cocktail parties, appeared to provide an opening. Eagerly these communists went into it, only to recoil with horror when they realized that some of the "army chaps" were diehard Muslim chauvinists. Immediately they withdrew, but by that time their childish and naive altempt at "conspiracy" had been discovered. Sajjad Zaheer, Sibte Hassan, Faiz Ahmed Faiz and several others were arrested on charges of "high treason." They served a relatively short time in prison. Sajjad Zaheer had decided that enough was enough and his family connections with the Nehru clan had led to Jawaharlal's personal intervention and he was given permission to return to India, where the cultural and political milieu was much more to his taste.
Alliance with bourgeois nationalists Meanwhile back in Pakistan the CPP had been banned. A party which had found it difficult to function in conditions of legality became totally paralyzed after it was banned. It disintegrated rather rapidly and the cadres were told to help in the formation of front organizations in which the communists could participate. The first of these was formed by Mian Iftikharuddin and was known as the Azad Pakistan party. It had 30 a brief and inglorious existence and was finally replaced by a new alliance between the communists and bourgeois nationalists which resulted in the formation of the National Awami party (NAP). At the time of the Sino-Soviet split the communists inside NAP engineered a split in the party. At various times both Maulana Bhashani (pro-Peking splinter) and the Pathan nationalist leader Wali Khan (pro-Moscow splinter) complained both publicly and privately that these "wretched communists" who couldn't form a party of their own had been the ones who had split a perfectly decent democratic party in this fashion. The division of NAP from 1964-65 onwards during the period of the Ayub dictatorship (1958-1969) undoubtedly weakened the liberal-democratic opposition to the regime, but it did much more than that: It totally eliminated the possibility of the development of an independent Marxist opposition to Ayub raj. The decision of the Ayub regime to develop friendly relations with China provided the pro-Peking Maoists in the NAP with a golden opportunity to abandon the opposition. Ayub was suddenly transformed into an anti-imperialist, and the task of Pakistani Maoists became supporting the military dictatorship against its enemies at home and abroad. This they did with a newly-found fervor - some Maoists going so far as to describe Ayub's "basic democracy" system as the harbinger of soviet democracy -- and as a result sabotaged the possibility of the anti-Ayub movement being led by the left. It was this vacuum which was filled by two politicians who used a similar demagogy despite their different backgrounds: Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and Mujibur Rehman. While Pakistan remained a united state, the effect of a number of Bengali Marxists on the whole Pakistani left was relatively positive, despite all the aberrations of the Maoist intelligentsia. The establishment of Bangladesh removed this last contact with some vestiges of what could be characterized as a revolutionary tradition. During the struggle in Bangladesh the Maoists in West Pakistan were faced with a severe dilemma. Peking had given open and unstinted support to Yahya Khan, expressed both in Chou En-lai's notorious letter and in the visit of Chinese de legations during the massacres in East Bengal. At the same time, many Bengali Maoists were obviously suffering from the repression as much as anyone else and many were fighting back. The overwhelming majority of West Pakistani Maoists decided to excuse the repression in East Bengal and justify the atrocDacca police attack demonstrators.
ities. Indian "expansionism" and Soviet "social imperialism" were deemed responsible for the uprising in Bangladesh. The national oppression inflicted on the Bengali masses by the Pakistani bourgeoisie and its state apparatus was considered irrelevant. To have understood its importance and its repercussions would have meant a break with Muslim chauvinism and the whole reactionary concept of a contessional state. The very thought of such a heresy made West Pakistan's establishment Maoists recoil with horror. The total capitulation to national chauvinism by the Maoists contrasted with the equally bizarre position and role of the pro-Moscow communists safely ensconced in their NAP. They thought that a socialist revolution in Pakistan was neither possible nor desirable at that particular stage. What Pakistan needed was a regime like the one that existed in India. In other words a regime which they could support and which in turn was looked upon in a friendly way by Moscow, to which most of them still had a partly sentimental and partly financial loyalty. The friendship of the Pakistani dictatorship with China was an obvious barrier and thus the pro-Moscow elements in the NAP opposed the Pakistani army's repression in Bangladesh. Its members privately welcomed the intervention of the Indian army. The only criticism some of them made against India was to bemoan the fact that the Indian army hadn't carried out a mopping-up operation in West Pakistan while it was in its "liberating mood. " If India has been a socialist country such a view could have been perfectly comprehensible, but the men of Moscow deliberately chose to ignore the conditions that prevailed in India: the fact that its economy was in the grip of capital and that the Congress government, despite all its pretensions, was prepared to go to inordinate lengths to maintain the status quo, the intervention in East Bengal and the vicious repression in West Bengal representing only two of the most blatant expressions of this fact. The advent of the People's party government under Bhutto has not substantially altered the peculiar position of the left in Pakistan. The main opposition today does not come from the Maoist Mazdoor-Kisan party led by Major Ishaq (a party which, incidentally, begins its private and public meetings with recitations from the Koran and whose manifesto is liberally spiced with quotations from the same tome!), but from the NAP of Wali Khan. Of course this opposition is situated firmly within the bourgeois nexus established by Bhutto himBhutto. In Baluchistan, where the local population has continually suffered from military oppression, the former governor and the former chief minister, Bizenjo and Mengal, are in prison, as is Khair Bakhsh Marri, the chairman of the Baluchistan NAP and a leading member of the national assembly. Their followers have taken to the hills and a limited guerrilla war is in progress with mounting army casualties. Tikka Khan, the butcher of Dacca, has made numerous visits to Baluchistan, as has his boss, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. Never was rebellion inflicted on such reluctant rebels as the NAP leaders. They pleaded with Bhutto not to dismiss them and warned him of the consequences. He disregarded their advice and preferred to listen to the words of his old friend and ally, Reza Pahlavi, the Iranian dictator, who refused to tolerate a NAP government in Baluchistan which might, even if inadvertently, have caused a nationalist upsurge in the Baluchi parts of Iran. Both the NAP leaders and Bhutto tried to compromise, since what was intended as a quick "raid and destroy" mission has manifestly failed. While the NAP continues to fight, what are their Maoist opponents up to? While the Mazdoor-Kisan party has been reduced to impotence by the Bhutto regime, in the sense that it has voluntarily reduced its activities, the Maoists in the People's party, who thought that they could either convert Chairman Bhutto or take the party over, have been smashed. Their leading spokesman, Mairaj Mohammed Khan, possibly one of the top agitators with a mass appeal in the country, was for many months a member of Bhutto's government. He was nicknamed "minister for fatihas" by his opponents since his major function appeared to be to go and pray over the graves of workers who had been killed by the police on the orders of the People's party government. (The Fatihah is the opening seven verses of the Koran -- INPRECOR.) Once he had outlived his usefulness, Mairaj was unceremoniously discarded. His supporters in People's party branches in different cities were similarly treated and Bhutto's leading henchmen, Mustafa Kar and Mumtaz Bhutto (both leading landlords), witch-hunted many leftists out of the party. In June, Mairaj himself was arrested while speaking at a rally of striking teachers. The circle has turned full wheel! Thus the left in Pakistan is in a state of disarray. There is no revolutionary organization worth the name in the country. Apart from the Mazdoor-Kisan party there is the Pakistan Socialist party led by ex-Maoists C.R. Aslam and Abid Minto, who have broken with Peking and are more sympathetic to Moscow, as well as the tiny Pakistan Workers party led by veteran trade-union leader Mirza Ibrahim and the old Stalinist, Sardar Shaukat Ali. Both parties are, however, the voice of the past. In this situation two new factors are worth noting. Militant workers in Karachi have tended to move in semisyndicalist directions with such groups as the Muttahid Mazdoor Federation, which is widely respected precisely because it is both militant and not attached to any of the discredited leftist groups. Its leaders, some of whom are Marxists, are usually either underground or in prison. Attempts to crush the Federation have failed and it undoubtedly represents the proletarian vanguard of Karachi. Second, study circles have sprung up all over the country and these are beginning to analyze the lessons of the failures of Pakistani "communism. " They are of a varied nature, are uncoordinated, and differ from city to city, but one healthy sign is that they have abandoned the old phobias of Indian Stalinism and their reading lists include figures historically blacked out by both Peking and Moscow: Trotsky, Preobrazhinsky, Bukharin, Rosa Luxemburg, as well as Lukacs, Korsch, Althusser, Sweezy, and Mandel. From this nothing but good can emerge, even if the trend today is inc lined towards theoreticism and academicism. These are deviations which the revolutionary movement can afford today, provided that it transcends them tomorrow, as it takes the first tentative steps toward establishing revolutionary For the past decade imperialism has been trying to unite the various bourgeois forces on the Indian subcontinent. In a curious way, the break-up of Pakistan and the establishment of Bangladesh has made this task much easier, for it brought home to the ruling classes that unless they united politically they would not be able to confront the mass movements from the best strategic position. And while continuing bourgeois disunity (given a fillip by the explosion of the Indian bomb) is irritating to the State Department, Washington is prepared to operate within its confines as long as the revolutionary movement in the subcontinent is weak, disorganized, and broken by repression. (There are nearly 70, 000 political prisoners in South Asia today, of which 30,000 are in India.) Thus, long-term tendencies towards military and political, if not territorial, unity exist in the subcontinent. How they will develop will depend to a large extent on the rise of the mass movement and, more importantly, on the development of revolutionary parties, which are vital if the mass move-
the communist party and the kurdish
KURDS revolution: AN EDITORIAL NOTE Once again civil war has broken out in northern Iraq between the armed forces of the Kurdish liberation movement -- led by the Kurdish Democratic party (KDP), which is organized around the personality of Mulla Mustafa el-Barzani -- and the Baath party regime in Baghdad. The immediate cause of the war was the government's refusal to comply with the terms of the agreements signed on March 11, 1970, "guaranteeing" autonomy and self-government to the Kurds. The latest outbreak of civil war in Iraq fits into a whole chain of events whose history runs back to imperialism's division of the Arab world just after the first world war. There is, however, a unique aspect to the current conflagration: The first assaults on the Kurds were led by the Central Committee faction of the Iraqi Communist party (ICP). Here we have the pathetic remnants of a Communist party acting under the banner of "national unity" with the Iraqi wing of the Baath party (the same party that decimated the