the professionals, large shopkeepers, and commercial interests that in the absence of an aristocracy or capitalist class form the upper crust of Bengali society. This group provides the leadership for the Awami League. Although its propaganda for national autonomy won it considerable electoral support in the major cities and towns of East Bengal, many Bengalis criticized the Sheikh's moderate approach long before the Army began its blitzkrieg.
Bengal's small shopkeepers seem to articulate their demands through the smaller National Awami Party (NAP), which also has significant peasant support in northern Bengal and me influence in the trade unions. As its name suggest, the NAP is a national party, with a following in West Pakistan among peasants and students in the Punjab and workers and students in Karachi. Arguing that the military would not voluntarily relinquish its power; the NAP boycotted the December election.
The NAP is split between pro-Moscow and pro-Peking elements, whose differences have generally boiled down to whether to follow the “peaceful road” to socialism, or take up the gun. The Moscow wing of the party is led by the grand old man of Bengali nationalism, eighty six year old Maulana Bhashani. Once thought to be pro-Peking, the Times of India reports that Bhashani now maintains that the stigma that he was pro- Peking must be forgotten"- perhaps because he recently visited India's Assam state, trying to raise arms from Mrs. Gandhi's anti-China government.
Nonetheless, Bhashani remains militant leader of some 55,000 well organized peasants under the NAP banner. And while the NAP lacks a concrete socialist program, it does express the essential radicalism of the Bengali peasantry.
Since the beginning of the civil war, the younger members of the NAP have gone underground, joining the cadres of the East Pakistan Communist Party-Marxist-Leninist. Mohammed Toaha, a veteran organizer in the Jessore area, leads the Maoist EPCP-ML. An educated man in his early forties, Toaha was Bhashani's right-hand man and secretary of the NAP until 1968.
No one outside the EPCP-ML knows with certainty its numerical strength thought it is estimated to be small. But the Maoists are believed to be extremely well organized; they constitute the only known underground in Pakistan.
While Yahya Khan holds Mujib prisoner in West Pakistan. Awami League officials based in Calcutta have formed a “provisional government of Bangladesh” and sent their agents through India and England begging diplomatic recognition, guns, and supplies to “begin a war of liberation”.
FOREIGN POWERS
Most diplomatic response to the massacres has been verbose. Great Britain and the Soviet Union have both denounced West Pakistani genocide in Bangladesh and called for a “peaceful solution” to Pakistan's “internal” problems. The U. S. government first declared itself “concerned” with the situation, though it, too, called it an “internal” affair. Then in mid-April, in a sudden switch which seemed to parallel the Indian position.
