[The following article was written by lariq All, the rakistani-born british antiwar leader, for the radical newspaper Black Dwarf, of which he is an editor: Tariq Ali is a member of the International Marxist Group, the British attlliate of the Fourth International.J
During my recent visit to Pakistan I made as thorough a study as circumstances permitted of the prevailing political situation. I visited some of the storm centres of the recent upsurge at the invitation of militants who had spearheaded the struggle. I spoke to representatives of some of the political parties and spent_just over three weeks in both West and East Pakistan, though unfortunately my visit to Dacca was too short and I was unable to visit the countryside. At the end of this period one could understand clearly the problems which faced the revolutionary movement in Pakistan and also appreciate its needs. This, however, is not the place for a specialised report. A more general picture is necessary in order to demystify some of the ideas fostered by the British press.
A Dictator Falls
By a strange coincidence I arrived in Pakistan on the morning of February 21 1969. That same evening Ayub was scheduled to broadcast to the nation. He had been unable to meet the needs of a mass movement which had been active since November 1968. He had offered too little too late and political activists waited anxiously for his broadcast.
The atmosphere was reminiscent of Paris last June with students and workers waiting for de Gaulle to appear on the small screen. In the evening he announced
"irrevocable" decision to retire from politics. His voice was distraught. He spoke in simple Urdu of his deep love for Pakistan. (Cynics speculated as to which of his two favourite civil servants -- Altaf Gauhar or Q. Shahab -- could have written the speech. A few private bets were placed.)
Ayub is down, but is he out? Excitement ran high in the streets of the main cities. Crowds danced with pleasure. Few ponder about the future. Ihe present is more important. The struggle has been victorious.
The workers and students are aware of their strength. Yet few realise how close they were to a bloodbath on February 21. The original decision had been to
Copain
GENERAL YAHYA KHAN
impose martial law on February 21. Ayub had been consulting with the chiefs of the armed services and they had stated their willingness to impose direct military rule. What changed Arub's mind at the last minute was the situation in East Pakistan.
There a bogus frame-up, the Agarthala conspiracy case, was in progress, in which Mujibur Rahman, leader of the centrist Awami League "conspiring with and several others were being tried for an East
India." One of the accused was Pakistani army sergeant, Zahirul Hag.
During the course of his imprisonment Zahirul Haq was shot dead by his West Pakistani army guard "while trying to escape." It was obvious that there had been no escape attempt and that Sgt. Zahirul Haq had been murdered after a petty altercation.
A military curfew was imposed in Dacca, where the authorities feared popular demonstrations. The curfew was defied by over 100,000 workers, students, and intellectuals. Ihe general commanding the
Dacca garrison had two alternatives: he could start shooting them down or he could accept defeat. He wisely chose the second alternative.
The leaders of the demonstration then defied the army to open fire:
"Whenever there's a cyclone in East Pakistan thousands of peasants die. If Jou open fire it will be equivalent to for cyclones but we 1 get you in the
The message was not lost on Ayub Khan. He realised that imposing martial law on February 21 would have meant a virtual civil war in East Pakistan. So the generals were asked to be patient. The orders which had been printed were, however, not put in cold storage. The army decided to wait a few weeks.
Round Tables and Conferences
All the opposition leaders were invited to Rawalpindi to meet Ayub and discuss the constitutional future of the country. The Agarthala conspiracy case was withdrawn and Mujibur Rahman arrived.
Maulana Bhashani, the 86-year-ola left-wing peasant leader, refused to par-
'When the oopressed sit at the ticipate.
same table as the oppressor," he told a British IV team, "the oppressor usually wins. "
Mr. Zulfigar Bhutto and his People's party refused to participate unless Ayub was removed.
The only leftish party that participated was the pro-Moscow wing of Bhashani's National Awami party, but even they felt uneasy sitting at the same table with the neofascist Jamaat-i-Islami. It is clear that if the pro-Moscow NAP had not participated and had instead collaborated with the progressive forces outside, there would have been a united left opposition to the right-wing politics of both Ayub and those who were talking him about "constitutional procedures" which were no solution to the problems facing the country.
BREE
It soon became obvious that Ayub's supporters, in collusion with the neofascists, were deliberately creating a situation where the only alternative visible to the frightened middle-class and big business and feudal interests was the army.
An indication that the reports of "anarchy," etc., were grossly exaggerated
The movement which swept across Pakistan embraced virtually every layer of society except, significantly, the peasantry in West Pakistan, who comprise 75 percent of the latter province's population. The struggle was sparked off exclusively by the student community of West Pakistan; it was taken up by students in East Pakistan, and there it rested for some months before workers and other layers came out in open support.
Students -- the Vanguard
The role of the students in the upsurge has been of the utmost importance. They have acted as a conscious vanguard and their main demands have from the very beginning been political demands not really concerned with university reforms. The amazing thing is that the student revolt embraced parts of the country which had been considered completely nonpolitical. Rawalpindi, the interim capital, has never had any militant tradition. If anything, the city has been notorious for and yet it was in being politically dead,.
Rawalpindi where students first took to the streets to inspire a struggle that was finally to overthrow Ayub. It was here that the first student was killed.
In the past it has always been the East Pakistani students who have been in the forefront of the struggle, and too often they have waited in vain for corresponding actions of solidarity from their West Pakistani comrades. Ihis time it was West Pakistan that exploded. It was to take another month for the movement to grip East Pakistan as well.
However, there are basic ditferences between the student movement in fast and West Pakistan. The students in the West were acting spontaneously; there was no single organisation to give the movement any coherent direction and no real efforts were made to set one up. Their main demand was the overthrow of Ayub and repeal of the hated University Ordinances. Beyond that there was a vacuum.
Of course there were isolated examples of left-wing student activists who were quite clear insofar as they wanted a socialist Pakistan, but their numbers were limited and they were hampered by the lack of a province-wide organisation. The government made full use of the absence of a recognizable left-wing student organisation to set up fake organisations to confuse the movement even further. This, coupled with the fact that the liband right-wing student leaders were eral more worried about their personal "leaderships" than with the need of building a viable organisation, led to the fragmentation of the West Pakistan student movement.
Admittedly there were left organi-
196905 Which maintained onat "reports of the losses in industrial production and exports caused by lockouts, strikes and gheraos have been grossly exaggerated."
sations set up in Multan, Iyallpur, Karaeach ete., but they had not yet contacted chi, etc., but they had not jet contacted other.
In East Pakistan the students were united. Obviously a result of years of experience. In Dacca a Student Action Committee was virtually running the city for several weeks and the students had worked out an eleven-point manifesto which demanded regional autonomy.
However, in order to emphasize that it did not want to replace West Pakistani capitalists with indigenous ones, the manifesto's two important points were: nationalisation of the banks, insurance companies ana major industria. units; and -- to stress anti-imperialism -- an immediate withdrawal from CENTO and SEATO.
The strength of the student Action Committee was such that all the major political parties in East Pakistan had pledged their respective support to the students' demands. Not to have done so would have been tantamount to political self-immolation. Some of the largest public meetings organised in Dacca were under the aegis of the students, and no political gathering was complete unless the student representatives were present.
Powerful the students undoubtedly were but there were limits to what they could achieve. In a period where the government was deliberately fomenting chaos the students on their own could not run the city. The workers were unfortunately not sufficiently organised to make dual power a living reality.
lo a certain extent, therefore, it was easy 1or government-hired hoodlums to operate with impunity. Ihe Dacca police refused to act on the grounds that since the Student Action Committee controlled everything else, they could also solve murders and apprehend those who had committed them.
The aim of the government was quite clearly to frighten the middle classes in both Last and west fakistan. and this they succeeded in doing. But it is necessary to stress that, weak though the structures of Ayub's regime were, the students on their own would not have been able to down them. For that they needed the help of the working class.
Workers Support students
For some weeks the students of West Pakistan struggled on their own. Iney lought pitched battles with the police, defied the army, and emerged bloody but unbowed. I'he workers, inspired by the student struggle, began to support them in increasing numbers.
Throughout the province, workers in every industry came out on strike, and a steady escalation of strikes and militant demonstrations by the workers further weakened a tottering government.
In Lahore, 50,000 railway workers marched with red flags and chanted "Smash capitalism," "Keep religion out of poliapitalısm tics," "Down with U.S. imperialism."
Some days later a puppet (government-paid) trade-union leader was sent to provoke the railway workers. He went to address a meeting accompanied by two thuggish bodyguards armed with knives. His provocative antisocialist remarks resulted in loud heckling, whereupon one of his bodyguards stabbed one of the hecklers.
The provocation was successful. I'he workers beat the offending bodyguard to death, fractured the arms and legs of and burnt the stooge trade-union leader, his car. It was a costly provocation but it had served its purpose. The news was widely reported and publicised and helped to create the atmosphere that would convince the middle classes of the need for an army take-over in order to protect them from "extremists."
In East Pakistan there was a similar situation, and the workers "gheraoed" many a factory to win wage increases. Here too the workers linked arms with the students and helped swell the already massive demonstrations.
Unfortunately in both East and West Pakistan there was and is no coherent, disciplined workers organisation. If it had existed we would have seen dual power being exercised in East Pakistani cities.
The workers successes emboldened certain other layers to join the strike movement. In successive weeks we were to see postal workers, bank clerks, doctors, engineers, veterinary surgeons, coming out on strike. Ihe ten-year wage freeze imposed by the Ayub regime was over.
What was lacking was an organisation which could have coordinated the different strikes into a poweríul general strike throughout the country and impressed on the worker an understanding of his own strength.
In the industrial field, too, the government instructed its own trade-union organisations and its paid hirelings to join the movement to sow confusion, and in many industries workers were amazed to see their "leaders," who for years had acted as strikebreakers and police spies, now making lunatic demands. The stage was being prepared well. All that was needed in East Pakistan was to involve another powerful social force -- the peasantry.
Peasants -- Inactive in West...
Militant in East
The main weakness of the movement in West Pakistan was that it did not involve the 75 percent of the population who do not live in the cities. Ihe peasants remained unaffected except for isolated pockets in Multan, sargodha, and sections of the old North West Frontier. One reason for this was that most of the peasants were still under the control of the landlords, who because of their economic hold, could manipulate them politically almost at will.
Another reason was the fact that very little serious political work has been done among the peasantry. The left NAP has done some work, but by no means enough and mainly in isolated pockets. As a result, the upsurge in the Western province completely bypassed the peasantry, which explains to a certain extent the comparative ease with which martial law could be reimposed.
In East Pakistan the situation was radically different. Here too the mass of the people lived in the countryside, but there were two basic differences. Most of the peasants were peasant proprietors, because the landlords, who had largely been
Hindus, had left in
1947; also, patient political work had been carried out by Maulana Bhashani and other peasant leaders. As a consequence the peasant was faced mainly by government oppression in the form of rent collectors and West Pakistani civil servants.
When the movement got under way the peasants seized and burnt a number of police stations, expelled a few rent collectors, and set up their own administration. The reports that were, however, prepared and distributed by
•the government and spoke of "murders" and "rivers of blood" have no foundation in reality.
If more than a few people had been killed, we would have expected to see grisly photographs or ceremonial burials of the victims at any rate. Ihis has not happened, and there can be little doubt that the reports were wild exaggerations used to justify an army take-over.
But even if the peasants were on a rampage, it would have been the duty of every revolutionary to support them. In fact the situation in East Pakistan dia resemble to a certain extent the situation in the Chinese countryside in the twenties and thirties. Even then, socalled peasant excesses used to frighten the middle classes and sometimes even those who were part of the revolutionary movement. Commenting on this, Mao remarked in his celebrated report on the peasant movement in Hunan (1927): that
"The peasants' revolt disturbed the gentry's sweet dreams. When the news from the countryside reached the cities, it caused immediate uproar among the_gentry....Irom the middle social-strata upward to the Kuomintang right-wingers, there was not a single person who did not
It's terriblift is terrible! school then flooding the city, even quite revolutionary minded people became downhearted as they pictured the events in the counryside in their mind's eye; ana tne ere unable to deny the word 'terrible •.•.But as already mentioned, the fact is that the _great peasant masses have risen to fulfil their historic mission and that the forces of rural democracy have risen to overthrow the forces of rural feudalism....It's fine. It is not 'terrible' at all.
It is anything but terrible. No revlutionary comrade should echo this non
Mao Ise-tung, Selected Works sense....
vol. 1, pp. 26-27.)
Considering the similarities, it is inexcusable that the Chinese Leadership have not issued any statement on the situation in Pakistan and that there has not been any mention of the Pakistani upsurge in the Chinese press.
Conclusions and Lessons
The strength of the upsurge (its spontaneous character) was immediate and also its chief weakness. It is obvious that the intensity of the struggle took all the political parties by surprise. Their leaderships decided to emerge on the streets only after the struggle was well under way, but what is interesting is that even right-wing parties like the Council Muslim League realised what the masses were shouting for, and accordingly their latest party manifesto talks of nationalisation of industries, antiimperialist foreign policy, and -- wonder of wonders -- thoroughgoing land reforms in West Pakistan, which would, in fact, entail a liquidation of the party's only social base!
Ihe manifesto in places is much more radical than the election manifestos of the British and French Communist parties.
The Council Muslim League is not alone in its newfound radicalism. Most of he political lorces, excepting the Jamaati-Islami, the Pakistan army, and the Civil Service of Pakistan, are posing radical alternatives.
The only existing left party is the National Awami party. It is, as Maulana Bhashani himself acknowledges, a broad-based social-democratic party with members of the defunct Pakistan Communist party dispersed inside it. (The Pakistan CP was banned in 1951 after an attempted putsch.) The division of the party into pro-Moscow and pro-Peking wings is based not so much on political as on personality differences. In the Pakistani context it is an unfortunate division because the fascists bent on liquidating the left are not going to distinguish between pro- Peking and pro-Moscow sympathisers.
Some form of unity is therefore essential between the two factions. Their internecine squabbling has crippled the Pakistani left and also kept out some excellent cadres who are prepared for solid political work but who are disgusted with the petty and vindictive backbiting which characterises left politics in Pakistan. I'nough in some parts ol the country (particularly in the North-West Frontier) the leadership of the pro-Moscow NAP would prefer alliances with right-wing parties, there still exist cadres in both factions who would prefer some form of unity.
However, what is really needed in Pakistan today, is a well-disciplined, organised Socialist Workers and Peasants party which can build a strong force of cadres who are prepared to do some serious grass-roots political work, who will Iormulate their policies keeping the specific situation in Pakistan in mind, and who see the struggle for a socialist Pakistan in the context of the worldwide struggle against U.S. imperialism. It is only by working towards building such a party that we will be able to struggle against the exploitation of the worker, the peasant, and the student in Pakistan.
The recent struggle has brought the masses of East and West Pakistan clos-
Terrorist bombers hurled a live hand grenade at the national headquarters of the Socialist Workers party in New York City at 10:30 p.m. April 23. The grenade, which had been thrown at a second-story window, fell back into the street before exploding. Shrapnel from the explosion pierced the windows of the party headquarters, and a car parked on the street was damaged.
No one was injured in the attack, but the assault was plainly aimed at taking lives. Lights were on in the hall at the time and fifteen party members and supporters were present when the grenade was thrown. If the explosion had taken place inside instead of outside, serious injuries or deaths would certainly have resulted.
The right-wing Spanish-language er together. West Pakistanis have begun to realise that the enemy which oppresses the East oppresses them as well, and the East Pakistanis have realised that the West, too, is prepared to struggle. However, the imposition of martial law for a second time will be regarded by the East as a gesture designed to curb their demands for regional autonomy. And demands for an independent East Pakistan are bound to increase. For this the army is to blame and they are the ones who should be held responsible.
(It is interesting to note that the Indian government, while denying the Soviet Union the right to send planes loaded with arms for North Vietnam over Indian territory, have recently_allowed Pakistan to fly troops across India to East Pakistan.)
Having tolerated a military dictatorship for the last ten years, the workers, students, and peasants will not toler-
• the present military rulers for long. ate It is to be hoped that General Yahya Khan realises this, because if he thinks that the lack of an active opposition to martial law implies its nonexistence, he is bound to be sadly disillusioned in the not too distant future.
Already the coal miners in Baluchistan have defied martial law regulations and come out on strike; their leader has been shot dead and others arrested, but this is only the beginning.
The longer the country is ruled by medieval laws, the more vicious will be the revenge of the people. One nopes that the generals will take note of this before trying to pull Pakistan back to the Dark Ages.
daily El Tiempo on April 25 credited the attack to counterrevolutionary Cubans belonging to a group called Acción Revolucionaria [Revolutionary Action].
In addition to the SWP national office, the building at 873 Broadway also houses the party's New York office, the editorial offices of the revolutionary socialist weekly, The Militant, and the party's campaign headquarters for the New York mayoralty election. Paul Boutelle, the SWP's candidate for mayor of New York, told a press conference April 24 that the terrorist act "will not deter us from our election campaign."
"On the contrary," Boutelle declared, "we feel even more strongly the need to fight for a society free of exploitation, racism and violence."