Pakistan might soon want ‘East Pakistan’ back!

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In a new twist to its history, Pakistan thinks Bangladesh, having been its eastern province between August 1947 and December 1971, owes it as much as Rs. 9.2 billion. That demand, for demand it is, elicits no surprise. But it does induce in us a renewed sense of inquiry about the way Pakistan remains in a state of denial where dealing with reality, especially in terms of the 1971 conflict, is concerned. A principal point of argument which the government of Bangladesh led by Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman raised soon after Liberation was the matter of pre-1971 Pakistan's assets and liabilities. In other words, the government of the new State was making it clear that the Islamic Republic of Pakistan needed to come clean on the question of a distribution of assets and liabilities now that East Pakistan had transformed itself into the People's Republic of Bangladesh.

Now, forty five years after the political division brought about through a war between the two nations, Pakistan is trying, rather unconvincingly, to tell those willing to listen to it that Bangladesh owes it money. One could well consider the demand to be a bad joke, given that any study of relations between East and West Pakistan in the twenty four years prior to 1971 will make it clear why in the end the majority Bengalis (who constituted 56 per cent of the country's population, with the remaining 44 per cent in West Pakistan) decided to go their separate way. In 1956, when Pakistan's first Constitution was adopted — nine years after the creation of the country — the initial steps toward institutionalizing political and economic discrimination between the two wings were taken.

That was done in two ways. In the first place, the four provinces which made up West Pakistan were brought under the scheme of One Unit, to form a single province to be known, of course, as West Pakistan. The goal, as it was given out, was a promotion of parity between the two wings of the country. East Bengal/East Pakistan thus lost its majority through this regressive measure and henceforth it would not matter that Bengalis were the larger segment of Pakistan's population. In the second place, the dagger was twisted and turned a little more in the Bengali political psyche when Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy glibly assured East Pakistan that the 1956 Constitution had given it 98 per cent of provincial autonomy. He did not explain. Nor did anyone ask him to explain. It was terribly bad judgement on Suhrawardy's part.

But the ramifications of parity were soon to be felt, through the clear instances of disparity that were being revealed in nearly every sector of national life. It was obvious how Bengalis were losing out to West Pakistan on the development scale. Pakistan's two major cash crops, both grown in East Pakistan, were jute and tea. The chunks of foreign aid which came to Pakistan through the 1950s and 1960s were spent in large measure in the western part of the country, to a point where a group of leading economists in East Pakistan seriously contemplated the idea of the two wings eventually following a 'two economies' programme. As early as 1961, President Mohammad Ayub Khan convened a meeting in Dhaka with these economists and solicited their views on how they saw conditions as they prevailed. The meeting, as Professor Nurul Islam relates in his incisive work, 'Making of a Nation: Bangladesh: An Economist's Tale' (published by The University Press Limited in 2003), took place at President's House on 24 May 1961. The group included M.N. Huda, A.F.A. Husain, Abdullah Farouk and Nurul Islam. The economists eventually presented a memorandum to Ayub, spelling out details of the growing disparity between the two wings and recommending measures for conditions to be corrected.

The economists, on the assumption that their arguments might not sway the President, went an explosive step further. In the event of East and West Pakistan, as federating units of Pakistan, together being unable to reach a deal on removing disparity, the State could go for a radical transformation. And this was what the Bengali economists suggested, in the interest of what Professor Nurul Islam calls 'a complete decentralization of resources and economic policies':

One, the center would exercise authority only in the areas of foreign affairs, defence and certain aspects of inter-wing communications;

Two, the country could continue to have a single currency, but all matters relating to credit control and monetary policies would be decided by the local boards of directors of the State Bank of Pakistan in the two wings;

Three, all government revenues and domestic and foreign exchange resources would be under the control of the provinces, with payment for expenditure incurred by the center made through contributions by the two wings.

Mark that the year is 1961 and a group of Bengali economists are letting Pakistan's first military ruler know, directly, that Pakistan would need to reconfigure itself if disparity between its two wings was to go. Ayub Khan quietly shuffled away from the economists' suggestions. Small wonder, then, that in five years' time the Six Point programme of regional autonomy would be spelt out in Lahore by the rising Bengali political leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. In broad measure, the Six Points were an outcome of the economic exploitation of East Pakistan by West Pakistan. The economic infrastructure in West Pakistan was miles ahead of that in East Pakistan, despite the jute and tea produced by the latter and despite its being home to the majority of the national population.

The assets question, once you go back to the statistics relating to pre-1971 Pakistan, throws light on the conditions which in the end would compel East Pakistan to go for sovereignty as a separate State. It is not just that the genocide by the Pakistan army in 1971 compelled Bengalis to repudiate Pakistan on the battlefield. There is also the truth that even if a political arrangement had been worked out between the Awami League, the Pakistan People's Party and the Pakistan army in March 1971, it would have been on the basis of the Six-Point formula. The state of Pakistan would have reinvented itself as a confederation. Furthermore, over a period of time, perhaps a decade, a negotiated settlement would have led to the emergence of Bangladesh as a fully sovereign nation. The myopia of Pakistan's generals and the inordinate ambitions of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto only hastened the process, leaving behind a legacy of bitterness between the two countries.

Any question of disparity, of a sharing of assets and liabilities is dependent on how one observes the facts. Here are quite a few statistics, researched and documented as Bangladesh and Pakistan plunged into war at the end of March 1971:

• In March 1971, the population of West Pakistan was 55 million, while that of East Pakistan was 75 million

• West Pakistan had 12,400 doctors, while East Pakistan had 7,600

• The total number of hospital beds in West Pakistan was 26,000; in East Pakistan it was a mere 6,000

• Per capita income in West Pakistan in 1970 amounted to Rs. 492; in East Pakistan it was Rs. 308

• The price of rice per maund (82 lbs) in 1970 in West Pakistan was Rs. 18; in East Pakistan it was a whopping Rs. 50

• In the same year, wheat sold for Rs. 10 a maund in West Pakistan, while in East Pakistan the price was Rs. 35

The discrimination was stark, in nearly every sector. By the time war broke out in March 1971, the statistics were clear about the disparity between the majority Bengalis and the minority West Pakistanis. Observe:

• In the Central Civil Service, 84 per cent of the space was occupied by West Pakistanis; East Pakistanis constituted only 16 per cent

• Bengalis constituted 15 per cent of the Foreign Service, with West Pakistan taking up the remaining 85 per cent

• In the Pakistan army, 16 generals came from West Pakistan; only one was from East Pakistan

• In the Pakistan air force, altogether 89 per cent of pilots were West Pakistani, with only 11 per cent falling to the share of East Pakistan

• Overall, in Pakistan's armed forces, 500,000 West Pakistanis served. The number for East Pakistanis was only 20,000

• In West Pakistan, power was generated to the extent of 838,000 KW or 83 per cent of the total; East Pakistan's share in power generation was 179,500 KW or 17 per cent of the total

East Pakistan provided 60 per cent of the total revenue in the country but was given only 25 per cent for its expenditure. In contrast, despite contributing only 40 per cent to the national revenue, West Pakistan enjoyed expenditure at the staggering amount of 75 per cent.

In the decade-long rule of Ayub Khan between 1958 and 1968, West Pakistan's exports amounted to 820 million pound sterling and imports to 2,315 million pound sterling. In the same period, East Pakistan's exports were more, 1,153 million pound sterling, but its imports were lower, only 1,000 million pound sterling.

Industrial growth was severely tilted in favour of West Pakistan, which received 80 per cent of foreign exchange for overall development purposes, with the remaining 20 per cent going to East Pakistan. The ratio of foreign aid, minus its American component, allocated for West Pakistan till March 1971 was 96 per cent, to a paltry 4 per cent for East Pakistan.

In the year 1947-48, the production of cotton (in million yards) in East Pakistan was higher than that in West Pakistan, 508 to 350. However, by 1966-67, a stark reversal had come about, with West Pakistan producing 6,836 million yards to East Pakistan's 550 million yards.

The drain of capital from East Pakistan to West Pakistan was estimated for the period 1947-1971 to have been to the tune of 3,000 million pound sterling.

That is a glimpse of economic and social realities as they prevailed in Pakistan up until Bangladesh decided to go to war for its independence.

Following the emergence of Bangladesh as an independent nation, Bangabandhu and his government consistently and seriously pursued the issue of assets and liabilities with Pakistan. Once Pakistan, under pressure from such countries as Kuwait, Algeria and Egypt, accorded diplomatic recognition to Bangladesh on the eve of the conference of Islamic nations in Lahore in February 1974, the Father of the Nation travelled to Pakistan as the head of the Bangladesh delegation. At the time and after that, he was unwilling to establish diplomatic ties with Pakistan as long as the assets and liabilities question remained unresolved.

At the tripartite conference of foreign ministers of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh in April 1974 in Delhi, Pakistan's Aziz Ahmed assured Bangladesh's Kamal Hossain that Islamabad would settle the issue with Dhaka. The expectation was that when Prime Minister Z.A. Bhutto visited Dhaka — it would be in June 1974 — the two countries would sort out the issue. In the event, Bhutto and his team refused to be drawn into any discussion on the assets and liabilities question on the pretext that Pakistan's leader had not brought any economic experts along with him to Bangladesh. Predictably, the talks collapsed. No joint communiqué was issued.

Bangladesh kept putting pressure on Pakistan over the assets and liabilities issue until Bangabandhu's assassination in August 1975. Between 1975 and 1996, every one of the individuals who exercised power in Bangladesh carefully underplayed the matter, quietly pushing it under the rug. In 1976, Bangladesh and Pakistan decided to open embassies in each other's capital, with M. Khurshid and Zahiruddin, both lapsed Awami Leaguers, taking over as ambassadors for their respective countries in Dhaka and Islamabad. President Ziaur Rahman paid an official visit to Pakistan in 1978, but his talks with General Ziaul Haq did not cover the assets and liabilities issue. In subsequent times, both President Ershad and Prime Minister Khaleda Zia visited Pakistan. Assets and liabilities were obviously not a priority for them. Not until the Awami League, led by Sheikh Hasina, returned to power in 1996 and again in 2009 would the issue be raised again, for all the logical reasons.

And now Pakistan wants Rs. 9.2 billion from Bangladesh. Judging by the way men like Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan and his kind have been behaving of late in Islamabad, one will not be surprised if one of these days a petulant Pakistani regime demands that its lost province of 'East Pakistan' be returned to it as compensation for 1971!