For the feudal landlords, the big bourgeoisie, and the Pakistan army, the result of the December 7 general election is a much bigger shock than the cyclone that left nearly a million dead Bengali bodies in its wake.
It was widely expected that Sheikh Mujibur Rehman and his Awami League would win an overwhelming majority in East Pakistan. In the circumstances, the Awami League has won nearly all the seats in the East.
This gives it an overall majority in the new Constituent Assembly.
However, what must have come as an even graver surprise to the ruling class is the election results in West Pakistan, where Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto's PPP [People's Party of Pakistan] has won an overwhelming majority and has virtually destroyed the Muslim League (the party that established Pakistan) as a political force in West Pakistan.
The general election result represents, as far as the masses are concerned, a crushing defeat for the reactionaries in West Pakistan and a tre mendous victory for Bengali nationalism in East Pakistan.
But while there is no doubt that the masses overwhelmingly rejected the reactionaries, at the same time no socialist can afford to have any illusions regarding the Awami League and the PPP. They are both thoroughly bourgeois parties and will be unable to implement even the most modest reforms as promised in their preelection rhetoric.
The rise of the Awami League is undoubtedly due to the inability of the left to understand the importance of the national question in Bengal. By the time socialists had begun to come to grips with the fact that East Pakistan was a neocolony of the Western part of the country, they were a bit too late.
Mujib had already spent some time in prison because of his agitation on this precise question. The six-point charter of demands on which he has been campaigning represents the programme of the Bengali bourgeoisie; and as such visualized the central government dealing only with defence and foreign affairs.
It demands "two separate but free ly convertible currencies for the two parts of the country," the right of the provinces to taxation and revenue collection, the separate accounting of foreign exchange earnings for the two different parts of the country, and the setting up of a militia or paramilitary force for East Pakistan.
What Mujibur Rehman is demanding on behalf of the aspirant bourgeoisie of East Bengal is an equal share of the capitalist cake.
Will the Pakistan army and the capitalist barons of West Pakistan allow these demands to go through? The answer is quite clearly no.
What will probably happen is that in the short term, Mujibur Rehman will be allowed to increase East Pakistan's percentage of import and export licenses, and will be allocated a larger share of foreign capital investment. These are the "concessions" the army will be prepared to make in the coming few months.
If Rehman accepts them he will be allowed to stay in power. If not, it will be back to business as usual - in the shape of the army.
Of course, there is no doubt that in the event of another military coup there will be no holding back the immense grievances of Bengal, and the desire for an independent Bengal will increase a hundredfold. What happens then will depend on whether Bengali revolutionaries succeed in building a revolutionary organization to pose the question of state power.
If the political leadership remains in the hands of the Awami League, the result will be yet another betrayal.
The Awami League and its leader are guided first by the global interests of American imperialism and secondly by the urge to replace West Pakistani capitalists by Bengali capitalists. And a change in oppressors is not exactly what the East Pakistani masses need at this particular moment.
While the Awami League's victory represents a slap in the face of the ruling class by the Bengali masses, the latter will soon discover that (a) one slap alone is not sufficient, and (b) they will have to kick the Awami League as well.
The new period unfolding in Pakistan today could be the most vital period in its history; and in this history the role of Bengal is pivotal. An independent socialist Bengal, recog nised by China, could be the spark which could set alight the whole Indian subcontinent and pave the way to a period of protracted though uneven struggles throughout South Asia.
This process the United States will try to prevent from the very beginning. They will try to ensure a period of elected government in Pakistan in an effort to stem the tide. They will even try to press the Pakistan army to make concessions to the Bengali bourgeoisie, but they will not succeed. They will not be able to interrupt the march of history, as the Indochinese people have demonstrated quite clearly.
The lack of any real leftist opposition to the Ayub regime and the inability of both the pro-Peking and the pro-Moscow factions of the National Awami party to oppose the dictatorship were among the main reasons for the meteoric rise of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto as an oppositionist.
For seven years he had served Ayub faithfully; and the fact that he could emerge as the strongest oppositionist in West Pakistan, despite being tarred with Ayub's brush, shows clearly the bankruptcy of the traditional left parties.
The victory of Bhutto's People's party is in reality a sign of the fact that the masses in West Pakistan are de termined not to go on living in the same old way as before. In his rhetoric, Bhutto offered them a new deal. He promised an end to oppression, poverty, and misery. He even talked in vague terms of land reform, of social equality, etc., etc. His "left" face, his "left" voice swept him to power in the cities of West Pakistan, and in doing so smashed to smithereens the right-wing and semifascist parties, which with their talk of Islam and their acts of terrorism had petrified a section of the left into virtual impotence.
But West Pakistan is not only changing in the cities. In the countryside, too, there is a feeling of change in the air. That is one of the reasons why many landlords climbed onto the Bhutto bandwagon and have now been elected to the Constituent Assembly.
The leftists inside Bhutto's party are now coming forward and beginning to make serious allegations of treachery and betrayal semipublicly. Evidently a large number of socialists belonging to the PPP were encouraged by Bhutto to court arrest by openly attacking the military dictatorship of Yahya Khan. He assured them that he would get them out before the general election.
Soon after they were arrested, Bhutto made pacts with leading landlords and distributed the seats accordingly.
Socialists like Mairai Mohammed
Socialists like Mairaj Mohammed Khan and Pervez Rashid still languish in prison, while their "leader" prepares to negotiate with the Awami League and the Pakistan army.
It is acts like this that cause many militants to remark that Bhutto is a gravedigger of socialism and socialists rather than feudalism and the landlords.
The change in the countryside is reflected by the fact that in Northwest Pakistan, near the city of Mardan in northern Hasht Nagar, the peasants have been engaged in armed conflict with the landlords. The peasants have resisted all attempts to evict them, and have had to face Sten guns and light machine guns of the landlords. In some battles they have routed the police on several occasions and have suffered some casualties themselves. Over a hundred peasants have been arrested.
What is interesting is that one of the landlords, Nisar Ahmed Khan, is a leading light of Mr Bhutto's PPP. Small wonder then that the PPP newspaper Musseawat has ignored the Hasht Nagar battles completely as has a bulk of both the government and the opposition press. Only Sanober, the organ of the militant Kissan Mazdoor party (Worker-Peasant party), has published detailed reports.
The Hasht Nagar episode is likely to multiply in the near future as the
RAJA ANWAR: Revolutionary socialist leader still in prison.
more "advanced" landlords are today attempting to "modernize" their part of the countryside by evicting the peasant-proprietors and replacing them with tractors and agricultural labourers. The next period is there fore going to see an intensification of struggles in the countryside against the landlords no matter which political party they have aligned themselves with.
While Bhutto and Sheikh Mujibur Rehman celebrate their pyrrhic victories, they prefer to forget that there are many socialist militants in prison in both East and West Pakistan.
Raja Anwar in West Pakistan and Mahbubullah in East Pakistan in their prison cells understand better than most the real meaning of the general election. The trades-union leaders who are in prison for leading strikes will no doubt be better prepared to strug gle against the capitalist class with added fervour once they are released.
We will see whether or not the new government releases the political prisoners, guarantees trades-union free doms, allows the establishment of a Communist party, removes the curbs on the press, and takes out of the statute books all the repressive regulations that have existed since the days of British imperialism and that have been improved upon by the Pakistan army.
The new Constituent Assembly has been given 120 days to frame a new constitution. But it has to be approved by General Yahya Khan before it is allowed to operate, and if it is against "the interests or the ideology of Pakistan" then, of course, the general can refuse to approve the new constitution, dissolve the Assembly, and call a new general election.
With Mujibur Rehman having won a complete majority of the seats, it is clear that he will try to reach some sort of an "understanding" with Yahya Khan and maybe even with Bhutto. This "understanding," whatever it is, will sound the death knell of any hopes the Bengali masses may have placed in their leader.
The general election has shown quite unambiguously that the objective conditions in both parts of Pakistan are rotten ripe for socialism. The task of creating the necessary subjective factor — a revolutionary party of the urban and rural proletariat - confronts the socialist left as a stark necessity. If the United States should decide to pressure the army to allow a period of bourgeois-democratic government (in order to try to pre vent a mobilization of the masses), then clearly this period should be utilized to try to create the necessary subjective conditions.