Times April 14. “They are so frightened of water you can't imagine. And we are masters of water. They won't be able to move their artillery and tanks, and their planes won't be able to fly. Nature will be our second army.”
But fighting has curtailed the sowing of the major rice crop which must be carried out according to meteorological schedule if millions of Bengalis are not to face famine some months hence. The monsoon will give the Bengalis a military advantage. but it will take its toll through starvation.
Leadership in a Bengali guerrilla war will most likely come from a Vietnam-like coalition of nationalist anti-imperialist forces developed at the local level. Most of the top Awami League leadership is either dead or in exile in Calcutta. The cadres of Bangladesh's small Maoist party-the East Pakistan Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist), or EPCP-ML-foresaw the blitzkrieg and went underground well before it hit, sabotaging bridges, power stations, and telephone lines on their way. The EPCPML are playing an important part in a people's war rallying the peasants for training in guerrilla warfare.
BRITISII IMPERIALISM
Nationalist anti-imperialism is not new to the Bengalis. Their struggles against imperial powers have been long and bloody. Before its mid-eighteenth century conquest by the British, Bengal's industrial development was what a British commission in 1918 described as “not inferior to that of the more advanced European nations.” Its cottage textile industry exported large quantities of fine cotton and silk cloth throughout the East and to Europe. More than self-sufficient agriculturally. Bengal exported rice, sugar, and butter. As part of the Mogul Empire-the civilization of the Taj Mahal-Bengal was Europe's equal, perhaps its superior, in everything but arms. Entering Dacca at the head of a victorious army in 1757, Lord Robert Clive exclaimed that “this city is as extensive, populous, and rich as the city of London.”
But within a generation, the ruling British East India Company had devastated the country and impoverished the people. With nothing but woolens to trade-Cor which the Bengalis had no use-the company's agents turned to extortion. By 1762 Clive's puppet royal Nawab was complaining of the Company's agents that they “forcibly take away the goods and commodities of the peasants and merchants for a fourth of their value and by. ways of violence and oppression oblige them to pay five rupees for goods that are only worth one rupee.”
In the space of a few years the Company allowed Bengal's extensive irrigation system to fall into ruin and raised taxes so precipitously that farmers were forced to give up seed and livestock. The resulting famine in the early 1770's brought death by starvation to fully a third of the Bengali nation. But British capital increased by gigantic amounts from its plunder of Bengal, fueling the first stages of the industrial revolution in England.
That dealt the death blow to Bengali textiles. After first using tariffs and outright prohibition to remove Bengali cloth from British and European markets, the British introduced machine-made goods into the Indian market. Within a few years Bengal's cottage textile industry was dead its practioners pushed into subsistence agriculture.
