পাতা:বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র (চতুর্থ খণ্ড).pdf/৩৪৩

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বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিল : চতুর্থ খণ্ড
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 By 1850, once-thriving Dacca had shrunk from Clive's “London” of 150.000 people to a village of 20.000. And India was absorbing a quarter of Britain's textile output, providing for the employment of an eighth of the English working class.

 With the skills and craftsmanship of Bengal's famous textile industry only a vague memory, modern Bengalis have been completely dependent on an agrarian export economy. More than four fifths of the land is given over to subsistence rice farming. The average family works some three and a half acres, usually in widely separated (thus inefficiently farmed) plots. The land bears two rice crops a year, but farming is risky-the monsoon climate floods the land each summer and parches it each winter. During the last few years East Pakistan has had to import about ten percent of its food grains-mostly from the U.S.

 Though tea and betel nuts are grown in East Bengal, most of the cropland not given over to rice is used to grow jute, (he farmers' cash crop. These fields yield forty percent of the world's jute, which is used for making rope, burlap, and gunny. Except for the civil service and small commerce-mainly in Dacca-jute is the only East Bengal industry. The West Pakistani elite, which has monopolized the international aid funds granted for the government's first and second five-year plans, and has siphoned off the international exchange generated by East Bengal's jute export, is partially responsible for the lack of industry in the East. Since independence, West Pakistani capitalists have replaced Calcutta's' rich Hindus as owners of the jute processing mills and export firms. If East Bengal could free itself of West Pakistani imperialism, it would have a favorable balance of trade. Its jute, just prior to the current crisis, was earning half of Pakistan's total income from commodity exports-some $ 50 million a year.

 Beyond their common Islamic religion, the Bengalis have little in common with West Pakistan's Punjabis and Pathans. Even the language of West and East differ; the West's Urdu has a Persian base and Arabic script, the East's Bengali a Sanskrit basc and script. While the British destroyed Bengali culture, they trained the Punjabis for military, administrative, and entrepreneurial roles in colonial India. Tall and light-skinned, many Punjabis consider themselves superior to the small, dark-skinned Bengalis, and the Easterners feel and resent it.

 Many Bengalis believe-with reason-that they have traded colonial subjugation by the British for subjugation by West Pakistanis, especially the Punjabis. Not surprisingly, Bengal has been a hotbed of rebellion against first British, then Pakistani imperialism. The British partitioning of Bengal in 1905 brought strong nationalist protests, though British policy markers persisted in their divide and rule policy by having Hindu and Moslem Bengalis select separate members for the viceroy's advisory councils. At independence, many East Bengalis opposed the creation of a Moslem Pakistan, preferring to be reunited with their West Bengali brethren. Since partition East Bengali dissatisfaction with the central government has played a major role in precipitating most government crises.

BENGAL'S POLITICS

 But Bengali politics have traditionally been dominated by the upper petty bourgeois-