The germ of the six point proposal as early as 1962 in a pamphlet entitled The Challenge of Disparity Published in Dacca. It had urged that the only practical measures to redress disparity would be certain basic institutional changes which it outlined as follows: dismantling the central planning Commission and replacing it by two powerful regional planning bodies, and the bifurcation of the ministries of Finance and Economic Affairs. It was even suggested that aid requirements should be separately assessed region wise and that the regional bodies should actively participate in forming foreign aid policy. In this recommendation was the seeds of the idea of regionalizing economic management i.e. transfer to the regions of the power to tax, the power to make fiscal and monetary policy, the power to plan and control resources and to conduct foreign economic relations.
The analysis of the economists had shown that the main instruments through which transfer of resources had been made from eastern to the western wing were control over foreign trade, foreign exchange and foreign aid, The foreign exchange earned thorough exports of jute products from the east was consistently allocated for the economic development (including industrialization) of the western wing. Projects in the castern wing were not promoted with the foreign aid agencies with the same vigour as were project in the western wing vast investments in irrigation, agriculture and industries of the western wing had kept on widening the disparity between the two wings.
It is important to understand this since when ultimately the six point formula was proposed, the most unyielding resistance which was offered to it related to the points involving forcign trade and aid. The western ruling clite were not prepared to relinquish the instruments through which they had been able to dominate the economy.
Ayub's reaction, therefore, to the six point programme, was to repress it with force. He leveled the six point programme as a scheme for secession and declared that he would respond to it with the language of weapons”.
Sheikh Mujib and Awami League, sensing the mood of the Bengalis, took the six point programme to the people and a mass movement began to grow in its support. On April 18 Sheikh Mujib was arrested and on May 9 he was placed in detention under the Defense of Pakistan Rules. On June 7, 1966, a special protest day was observed in support of the six point movement. Ayub's Government moved to suppress it with force. The demonstration was fired upon, claiming a number of lives. Large-scale arrests followed and the newspaper which was the main spokesman of the Bengalis, the daily `Ittefaq` was closed down its editor arrested and its press forfeited.
In the face of such repression, the movement faced a setback. The initial response was to make these matters to court through writ petitions in the High Court.
At the end of December 1967 the atmosphere suddenly became tense and the air was filled with rumors. Ayub Khan who was visiting the Eastern wing was due to visit the Dawood complex in Chandraghona in the Chittagong Hill tracts suddenly cancelled his visit. It was given out that the cancellation was due to apprehension of an assassination or kidnapping plot. That the cancellation had been a last minute one was evident from the
