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REPPRESSION AND CLASS STRUGGLE IN BANGLADESH
from the South Asia Research Group

The trial of Dutch journalist Peter Custers in Bangladesh (see The Guardian (New York), Sept. 1) is only the tip of the iceberg of an ongoing process of class struggle and repression in that country. Custers had been identified with the left wing JSD (Jatyo Samajtantrik Dal, or Socialist Nationalist Party), which is the strongest oppositional force in Bangladesh and one which still has an underground network, with surviving units of its People’s Revolutionary Army.(PRA) Recently 15 JSD members and sympathizers were sentenced by a military tribunal and one, Colonel Abu Taher, was hanged. The irony of the situation is that Taher, a hero of the 1971 fight against Pakistan who had broken with the corrupt and pro-Indian regime of Mujiber Rahman (Mujib) had helped to organize the Nov.7, 1975 army mutiny which put the present military commander, Major-General Ziaur Rahman (Zia) in power.

The present regime is anti-India, anti-Societ, pro-American and pro-Muslim and represents a reversal of the trends that brought Mujib to power – and yet to stay in power it has had to repress the forces which came out of the 1971 struggle for independence against Pakistan to demand that this independence should lead to a true national-democratic regime moving toward a goal of socialist revolution.

The Bangladesh events are a tangle of superpower contention and the growing contradiction between the ruling class and the masses of Bengali people. In the 1971 “liberation struggle” a larger percentage of Bengalis fought against Pakistan, including many Marxist-Leninist who organized armed bands to oppose both Pakistani soldiers and Indian invaders and in some cases reactionary Bengali landlords. But the leadership of the movement was held by the anti-communist Mujib, and an Indian army invasion actually put him in power in 1972. Three years of corruptions, open terrorism by Mujib’s special police, jute smuggling across the Indian border, and high prices and famine were enough to make most Bengalis thoroughly sick of the regime. Mujib received strong backing from India, the Soviet Union, and pro-Moscow leftists, but he began to be opposed not only by the fragmented but surviving Marxist-Leninist organizations but also by a major section of the young people and soldiers who had fought against Pakistan. These began to turn left, to increasingly develop an independent Marxist position, and in 1972 many formed the JSD which emerged as the major oppositional force in the country with a Marxist-Leninist nucleus. The JSD developed a working class base, held major mass meetings, and then was banned by Mujib, went underground and began to develop its PRA with units inside and outside the regular army. When Mujib was overthrown by an army coup on August 15, 1975, there was a general rejoicing in Bangladesh. Then another coup occurred on November 3, a “restorationist” pro-Mujib coup reportedly backed by the Indian embassy. This pattern of elite infighting was broken through by the explosion of the Bengali masses themselves. On November 7 soldiers in the army mutinied and people surged into the streets to overthrow the second group of generals and bring Zia to power.

The mutiny represented the spontaneous feelings of the soldiers, but behind it what major organizing force was the JSD and Colonel Taher, leader of the PRA. The soldiers in their famous “Twelve Demands” declared that up through August 15 the army had represented the interests of the “richer classes” and been their tool, but “from today onwards the armed forces of the country will build themselves as the protector of the interests of the country’s poorer classes.” The army revolt currently frightened the ruling classes of the subcontinent. It had echoes of earlier anti-imperialist mutinies against British rule in India, as well as the important revolutionary role of democratic soldiers’ movements in Portugal and elsewhere. But it put its main organizers, the JSD, in a dilemma. Though the JSD had been developing a nation-wide movement building towards a rural-based armed struggle, the mutiny was for them a bit premature; the organization had led it, but was not strong enough to take power on its own. Thus Zia was put in power, but after a brief honeymoon in which he hailed Taher as a deliverer and freed JSD members and other leftists from jail, it became clear he was not willing to meet the revolutionary demands of the soldiers. Consequently JSD members were rearrested – when they could be found – and secret tribunals have begun to condemn them.

The Zia regime is gaining some degree of popularity in opposing India, and it appears that it will attack corruption and establish a more efficient state than Mujib did. But it is pro-American and finds much of its social, administrative and military cadre among pro-Pakistani elements who had been antagonistic to the national struggle in 1971. It is beginning to use a reactionary form of Islamic ideology as an integrating force, and to rely on Western imperialist investment and World Bank aid.

The final irony of the situation is that just as Mujib’s pro-Indian regime was backed by revisionist “communists”, so Zia’s pro-American and pro-Muslim section of the ruling class is receiving a backing of the section of the Marxist-Leninists. This is Mohammed Toaha’s Communist Party of East Bengal (ML), which was one of the four Marxist-Leninist organizations carrying on some kind of armed struggle in 1971 and which today takes the stand that social imperialism and Indian expansionism are the main enemies and the present regime must be backed as representing the “patriotic national bourgeoisie.” According to Toaha (interviewed for Far Eastern Economic Review, Dec. 5, 1975) the JSD consists of “enemy agents” who are “raising the bogey of class differences in the armed forces.” Class struggle, according to him, must be played down or it will cause turmoil that will play into the hands of Indian expansionism. Toaha’s group thus seems to be moving into the same kind of revisionism as the pro-Moscow communists, only form a different direction – promoting the illusion that a section of the bourgeoisie in control of the state can in fact carry through an anti-imperialist and democratic revolution.

The attitude of other Marxist-Leninist organizations is not yet clear. For its own part, the JSD is still in the process of development. Its organizing core is a Marxist-Leninist nucleus dating back to 1962, but they do not consider themselves as yet a true communist party because no congress has yet been held. Their analysis is that the principal contradiction is between the masses of the people and the Bengali bourgeoisie, and thus “socialist revolution” should be fought for, but they felt from the beginning that because of uneven development in united Pakistan the national question was first focus for organizing. Thus they played a leading role in organizing the 1971 independence struggle and developed their armed units from that period, and then broke with Mujib in the course of attempts to move towards a truly popular revolution.

Whatever the results of the trials in Bangladesh in terms of the loss of some top leaders (and some progressive sympathizers like Custers) most of the JSD central leadership is outside and its networks are intact. The contradictions in Bangladesh will grow, perhaps to provide a spark to the entire subcontinent in the future

for more information on Bangladesh, write:
De Groend Amsterdummer
Westeinde 16
Amsterdam, Holland

or Bangladesh Liberation Bulletin
c/o Sheffield Community Press
310 Albert Road,
SheffieldSB9RD England.