Nixon's visit to China has clarified Chinese policy in relation to South Asia and has brought the regime of Mao Tsetung into line with the policies of Brezhnev and Nixon. We can soon expect a rapprochement between Peking and the Indian bourgeoisie.
The three major powers are agreed that the situation in the Indian subcontinent is far too unstable for them to play around with it and that henceforth the "stability and peace of Asia" depend on the preservation of the status quo in South Asia.
It is of course understandable why U.S. imperialism is worried. The success of the struggle in Indochina and the ultimate withdrawal of American troops from
Southeast Asia would leave the subcontinent as the largest Asian land mass still to be liberated from the tyranny of the capitalist world market.
The continuous rise of mass movements and the establishment of liberated areas in this region would therefore mark the beginning of the end for imperialism in Asia. A successful seizure of power in India would change the map of Asia overnight and the revolutionary wave would engulf other areas of struggle such as the Middle East. As we have argued be fore, a socialist revolution in India would also greatly alter the balance of forces between the Chinese bureaucracy and the Chinese masses in favour of the latter. Hence the unanimity of views between Nixon, Chou En-lai, and Brezhnev as far as South Asia is concerned. A formidable alliance, which we saw in operation in Ceylon and which aided in the repression of the militants of the Ceylonese JVP [Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna-People's Liberation Front].
The enormous strategic significance of the Indian subcontinent— the fact that after Indochina it is imperialism's weakest link in Asia today- necessitates on the part of the revolutionary movement in the Indian subcontinent and abroad an understanding of the problems that South Asian revolutionaries will confront and the areas where success is most likely. We will not try to concentrate on all problems in this particular article. Rather we will concentrate on the four principal zones situated within the subcontinent that we would characterise as the weakest links within the weak link itself.
Pakistan
The defeat of the Pakistan army in Bangladesh created a situation in which it was impossible for General Yahya Khan to carry on governing the country in the same old way. The army itself was completely discredited, and the more sophisticated officers, led by General Gul Hassan, engineered the removal of Yahya and his replacement by
Zulfikar Ali
Bhutto. A civilian "martial law administrator" thus came into being and ordered the dismissal of several leading generals associated with Yahya Khan. The latter was placed under house arrest.
To understand this turn, we have to appreciate that within the army itself, a whole wave of junior officers were revolted by the behaviour of the High Command, which they characterised as bankrupt and consisting of drunkards.
The crack armoured division was on the verge of open mutiny soon after the war. A large number of junior officers met and decided to lead their division into Islamabad and overthrow Yahya forcibly, despite the risk of civil war.
This situation was avoided only by the intervention of General Karim, the senior officer of the division. He persuaded the officers to postpone their projected action, went to Islamabad, and made it clear that unless Yahya and the generals closest to him were ousted, the country would be engulfed in a civil war. At a stormy meeting of senior officers, General Hamid (an old Yahya stooge) was abused and almost physically assaulted. It was agreed to send for Bhutto. A new military leader would not have been welcome at that particular moment.
Bhutto's take-over of the country was thus carried out with the full support of the army, but he rightly felt uneasy at being appointed president by General Gul Hassan, an officer well known for his political ambitions and a Pathan inhabitant of the North West Frontier Province to boot.
The continuing unrest in the country, particularly the strike by the police force, created a tense situation in which it was becoming clear that the intervention of the army might be necessary. Gul Hassan, we now learn, refused to allow the army to be used to crush the police strike and was, as a result, removed from his post appointed ambassador to Switzerand land. The police demand for a trade union was accepted.
The new army chief is none other than General Tikka Khan, the butcher of Dacca. His appointment can only be seen as a warning to the two provinces of Baluchistan and the North West Frontier. There Bhutto's Pakistan People's party (PPP) is a small force and the National Awami party (NAP) of Wali Khan is dominant, and, more importantly, the government has néver been able to enforce laws restricting the use of firearms.
Unrest is also spreading in the armed services. Last January hundreds of members of the air force marched in the streets of Karachi against their officers. They declared that the officers were totally re dundant and that the rank-and-file pilots were totally capable of managing the air force bases on their own!
In February the NAP and PPP signed a pact. Bhutto agreed to remove martial law on August 14, 1972, and to convoke the national assembly whose members were elected in December 1970.
On the economic front, the situation has been characterised by a growing wave of strikes, factory occupations, and gheraos (strikes in which the manager is surrounded and not permitted to leave until he has agreed to the workers' demands]. In the March 1972 Pakistan Forum, Feroz Ahmed writes:
the se maion of Past Congal or is est
"The major economic consequences of
Pakistan are:
"1. Reduction of at least 45% in GNP [Gross National Product], not counting the downward economic trend in West
Pakistan itself.
"2. At least a 50% reduction in export earnings, again not counting the re duced capacity for earning foreign exchange in West Pakistan. This would mean a drastic (at least 40% ) reduction in the foreign exchange available for the importation of capital goods and industrial raw materials. West Pakistan earned, at the most, 50% of united Pakistan's foreign exchange and spent, at least, 70% of it.
"3. Loss of markets for Rs. 1.7 billion [one Pakistani rupee equals US$0.21] worth of West Pakistani goods annually, including approximately 40% of West Pakistan's manufactured goods. Even if alternate markets are found in the middle east, there will be no incentive to expand industries such as cotton textiles.
"4. It will be necessary to spend Rs. 550 million annually in foreign exchange to purchase tea, jute and paper, assuming that no foreign exchange is spent on Rs. 200 million worth of other commodities which were purchased every year from East Bengal.
"5. Repayment of nearly $5 billion, owed foreign creditors, from West Pakistan's resources alone.
"6. Bearing a tremendous burden of military expenditure; the defense budget of undivided Pakistan being roughly 5% higher than the total revenues of West Pakistan.
"7. It will be necessary to absorb the surplus (about 50% ) West Pakistani civil service personnel in the central government who were employed in a ratio of more than 4 to 1 as compared to East Pakistanis."
Both Wali Khan and Bhutto have issued appeals for an end to violence, coupled with exhortations to "work hardex." While Bhutto states that he wants to encourage indigenous businessmen and foreign investment in the name of a "mixed economy," he cannot expect the workers to have anything but contempt for his government and the class rule it seeks to preserve. In that sense a PPP-NAP government, even after the removal of martial law and even accepting the fact that pro-Moscow Communists are working inside the NAP, will be a bourgeois government faced with exactly the same problems that confronted Yahya and Ayub before him.
The land reforms recently introduced by Bhutto are a sham that preserves the semifeudal character of the countryside. Given the fact that various PPP leaders in their election rhetoric had been promising that landlordism would be abolished, we can expect to see an acceleration of struggles in the countryside.
Capitalist industry has been severely crippled by the loss of Bangladesh, and here too only a new mode of production would have satisfied the workers. Neither the NAP nor the PPP are capable of smashing the existing social structure. They are, in fact, part of it.
The fact of the matter is that it will be impossible for Bhutto to contain the mass movement indefinitely with or without the help of Wali Khan. This means that the army will be back in some form or shape. To postpone this possibility Bhutto is now preparing to take part in a subcontinental summit, first with Indira Gandhi and then with Sheik Mujibur Rahman. But while political manoeuvres such as this can give him more breathing space, they cannot solve the problems that confront the Pakistani bourgeoisie.
The complete lack of an organised revolutionary force means that the death throes of this class will be prolonged. The main task confronting revolutionists in West Pakistan is to build independent today organisations that can arm the masses politically to resist the onslaught that will be unleashed against them. The situation in Pakistan today cannot be compared with the 1950s: A great deal has changed since then, and to imagine that the left can simply pick up where it left off in 1958 (Ayub's coup d'etat) is to sow the worst possible illusions. The "stages" theory of first bourgeois democracy and then socialism is extremely dangerous and has to be discarded completely.
West Bengal
The tragedy of West Bengal is not so much that the Congress has won, but the fact that the organisations of the left are in a state of disintegration. The ultraleftism of the Naxalites and the opportunism of the CPI (M) [Communist party of India (Marxist)] have created a situation where hundreds of political militants can be killed both inside and outside the state prisons without evoking any serious response from the workers' organisations.
There is a tendency to blame the defeat of the CPI (M) on the gangster tacties employed by the Congress, but this is an over-simplification. The real reasons for the defeat are political and are due to the centrist vacillations of the CPI(M) leaders, who have, after all, participated in bourgeois governments and unleashed repression against those on their extreme left in the past. As always, it is the bourgeoisie that gains from the weaknesses of the left, and therefore Indira Gandhi's election victory is no surprise. According to the Calcutta left-wing weekly Frontier:
"To conduct free and fair elections the
State Government fielded in West Bengal a strength which, Governor Dias boasted, surpassed that of the army in any sector during the 1965 Indo-Pak war. This was in addition to the police and armed police, national volunteer forces and home guards. To conduct this free and fair poll, 6,000 leftist election workers were arrested without trial last week, which took the total of people arrested in the State to 32,600. Four thousand leftist election workers and their families were externed from the localities by the local roughs. The CPM could not appoint polling agents in 96 centres out of 171 be cause it feared that the agents would be killed by either the police or the roughs or both.
"Mrs
Gandhi came to the State on a whistle-stop campaign and addressed a score of gatherings. At the Tallah gathering PWD [Public and Works Department] workers worked for 10 days to prepare for the election meeting and that cost the State exchequer 1.5 hundred thousand rupees lone Indian rupee equals US $0.137].
Rs. 44,000 was spent for the Chinsurah meeting, Rs. 50,000 for a North Bengal meeting. The cost of these was borne by the State Government, be cause of the principle that any visit and meeting of the Prime Minister is the charge of the Government."
All this is no doubt correct, but on its own does not and cannot explain the defeat of the CPI(M). The latter, like the Indonesian PKI [Partai Kommunis Indonesia- Indonesian Communist partyl, thought that its size would be sufficient to protect its cadres. It has now discovered that unless you prepare your own party to fight physically against repression by the state and unless you prepare an army based on the masses to challenge the power of the state, you can be crushed and defeated.
The CPI(M) never understood the class character of the state or the necessity for a mass armed struggle, nor the tactic of the united front (as opposed to the popular front). It was its opportunism that created the Naxalites and launched them on an ultraleft course. And if the CPI(M) leaders still don't understand the real reasons for their defeat, what is left of their party will also collapse and leave them with little option but to heal the breach with the CPI [Communist party of India] and ask to be readmitted to its ranks. A mountain will have given birth to a mouse.
It has to be understood that the objective conditions in West Bengal today are such that the Congress government will not be able to bring any real change in the situation. But what the defeat in West Bengal has done is to give the Congress party a few more years to rule India on behalf of the bourgeoisie before the latter look for tougher solutions.
The Congress government in West Bengal will make sure that contact between revolutionary groupings in both parts of Bengal is restricted and that there is a strict policing of the border. The complete failure of the Naxalites in both political and military terms and the split between Mazumdar and Chatterji on the question of the real character of the Pakistani bourgeoisie (Ashim Chatterji characterised Yahya as the Prince Sihanouk of the subcontinent: it is not necessary to elaborate on the bizarre consequences of this bizarre methodology) mean that the creation of a new revolutionary organisation with a worked-out strategy and corresponding tactics should be the first item on the agenda of every revolutionary group in West Bengal today.
Bangladesh
Japanese capital and Indian monopolists are today making a bid for the new market that has opened up in Bangladesh. It is becoming clear that they will dominate it, even if Bhutto recognises Bangladesh and trade is resumed.
It is also clear that the Awami League will sponsor several Bengali monopolists and try to establish a strong and indigenous bourgeois class. It is the absence of this and a corresponding military and political superstructure that is making it difficult for the Awami League as a party to control Eastern Bengal.
Mujibur Rahman's personality will not be able to solve the problems of famine, pestilence, and unemployment. Here too, as in West Pakistan, only a radical break with the past- in other words the smashing of the existing relations of production and their replacement by a new, socialised mode of production based on planning-can begin to solve some of the problems that have been haunting the Bengali countryside and cities even before the invasion by Pakistan. This Mujibur Rahman is not capable of doing: he is, after all, a classic petty-bourgeois politician and his inspiration comes from the House of Commons rather than the Sierra Maestra.
The Awami League will therefore go along with the plans of the three big powers for the stabilisation of the subcontinent. Of course, it cannot be excluded that many armed sectors of the people will at some stage in the immediate future be forced to resume the struggle, albeit in a confused and chaotic fashion.
The Maoist groups, which dominated the extreme left, are split amongst themselves. The Toha group, which still re mains pro-Peking, recently issued its first public statement— a hotch-potch of theoretical confusion, lies about its past (e.g., it claims to have led the fight against the Ayub dictatorship!), and a complete failure to understand and its significance.
A number of militants have broken with Toha and have formed a Communist Unity Consolidation Centre. They include one of Bengal's foremost Marxist intellectuals, Badrudin Umar. The aim of this group is to try to form a united revolutionary party; they have made serious self-criticisms of their past, particularly on the national question. In their view:
"... now the most important question is to carry the struggle, which brought about our freedom, to its logical end, that is, bringing about a total, absolute and complete revolution in our political, social and socio-psychological patterns of living, culminating in the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat."
However, no mention is made of the Chinese position on the subcontinent, a serious weakness as those revolutionists who fail to understand this question or admit its relevance once again open the doors of opportunism. Nor is there any reference to West Bengal.
Other Maoist groups are beginning to discuss all these questions as they understand what the Chinese attitude has cost them in terms of support within Bangladesh. But essentially the extreme left remains localised, though in some areas such as Noakhali it is armed and capable of resisting repression for a certain pe riod.
The pro-Moscow CP is now legal and functioning. Its policy is little different from its counterpart in India, and it shamelessly tail-ends the Awami League. Given Mujibur Rahman's recent visit to Moscow and the reception that the bureaucrats staged, it is clear that this party will not be capable of any serious opposition. Its aim is to get a few places in the government. If the Awami League leadership were a bit more sophisticated, they would include men like Mozaffer Ahmed in their government: he has talents that would be useful to any bourgeois government, particularly in giving advice on how to deal with the extreme left.
Of course, what has also to be remembered is that Bangladesh is only half a nation. West Bengal is still under the connation. West Bengal is still under the control of the Indian bourgeoisie, and any talk of national self-determination for Bengal that excludes its western part is hypocritical rubbish. That is why the fight for a united socialist Bengal (i. e., real self-determination) has to be started within the ranks of the vanguard itself.
Both Mujib and Indira Gandhi are opposed to the idea of a united Bengal. So, incidentally, are the United States and the Soviet Union. They understand that a united Bengal would continue the disintegration of the subcontinent and considerably weaken the Indian bourgeoisie. That is precisely why revolutionists should focus on detaching West Bengal from the Indian Union and removing any government in East Bengal that refuses to aid this process.
Ceylon
The alliance that Nixon sought in Pe king
: has already been demonstrated in practice in Ceylon. All the major, and some minor, powers supported the Bandaranaike regime against the JVP.
The reason for this was not because vast uranium or oil deposits had been discovered in Ceylon (the bourgeoisie is rarely guilty of economism), but because they understood that if the JVP managed to link itself to the Ceylonese working class, the Bandaranaike government was doomed. A new Cuba in South Asia in the present situation would have shattered the stability that all the big powers are so anxious to preserve. It was the exemplary effect of Ceylon that worried them, and that is why they intervened with money, arms, and men.
Thanks to the foreign help, which they 452
thankfully accepted, the Ceylonese rulers succeeded in repressing the JVP, killing many of their cadres and imprisoning thousands of others. Today there are 16,000 political prisoners in Ceylon. They have been incarcerated on the orders of the bankrupt coalition of Stalinists, renegade ex-Trotskyists, and the bourgeoisie.
What is interesting is how the press of the international bourgeoisie ignores these prisoners. Not a single editorial comment has appeared in any leading bourgeois paper either in Europe or North America. Compare this to the articles written on Nkrumah's Ghana, or Ben Bella's Algeria, or even Nasser's Egypt when they imprisoned political oppo the objectivity of the ree press in and you get a good measure of the "objectivity" of the "free press" the capitalist world.
Ceylon provides the best example of the importance of building revolutionary organisations not tied either to Moscow or Peking. That is why we argue that the Fourth International offers the only coherent analysis and why it has to be built in Asia.
This is not sectarian utopianism, but a very necessary and realistic task that confronts the revolutionary movement today. We have seen that in all the cases discussed above, the lack of a revolutionary organisation of the workers and poor peasants has enabled the bourgeoisie to carry on ruling in the same old way.
The masses are not prepared to let this continue indefinitely, but they lack political organisations. So while we will continue to see spontaneous strikes, peasant uprisings, occupations of factories and government offices, acts of individual terrorism, etc., we will not see any successful conclusions to these struggles because they will not be organised and there will be no organisation prepared to confront the state and its repressive apparatuses. In short, there will be no seizure of power and no dictatorship of the proletariat. That is why, in the political context of South Asia today, the question of organisation becomes absolutely paramount.