East Pakistan s Non-Violent Struggle


Left elements I am told one Editor in Delhi kept a sealed astrological forecast on elections in his drawer, but kept on informing everybody generally that the astrologer had given Indira Gandhi less than 200 seats in the Lok Sabhal I remember such newspapers well. Only a few years ago their Editors had gone to Pakistan and had written dispatches on how well the wheat was growing there, how disciplined and free from corruption the civil service was becoming, and how marvellously effici- ONE of the main reasons for Jinnah's withdrawal from the Indian National Congress when Gandhi took over its leadership was that the organisation was associated with the civil disobedience movement. lie had an Anglo-Saxon respect for the rule of law and established authority. Owing to the gap between the political consciousness and social awareness of the Hindus and the Muslims, a large section of the latter was not prepared to participate in a mass struggle, except when a religious question like Khilafat was involved. That is why during the latter half of the nineteen-twenties and in the thirties the majority of politically active Muslims kept away from the nationalist movement. In the forties, they did go in for mass action under the leadership of Jinnah, who by this time was not confining his activities to constitutional methods. But the non-constitutional activities were not directed against the established authority and they were very often welcomed by the representatives of that authority. They were directed against the Hindus and the Congress. The "deliverance" was celebrated when the Congress Ministries resigned in various provinces. And in Muslim-majority provinces like Bengal, the mass campaigns conducted by the Muslim-League resulted in the 'great killing, of Calcutta. The Muslim League leaders of undivided India mocked at Gandhian methods of struggle as unmanly and un-Islamic.