Bangladesh, though like the U. S., India would be most comfortable with a bourgeois. Western-oriented Bengali Nation under Awami League leadership. India has opened its borders to a million East Bengali refugees, supplying them with medical care, shelter, and some food. It has also harbored Bangladesh liberation fighters, and Pakistani regulars have already fired on Indian border villages-the passage to safely for thousands of Bengali refugees.
The government of India's West Bengal state-where the electoral power of the pro- Moscow communists is strong-has expressed support for, East Bengali liberation. but it has little power to implement that support.
Like East Bengal, West Bengal is thoroughly exploited by non-Bengalis. Wages there are less than a third of those in the rest of the country, and the great bulk of capital and entrepreneurship is not local. West Bengalis fee] that non-Bengalis come to Calcutta only to make money, which they export from the state.
Nor do West Bengalis hold effective political control of West Bengal state. Communist leader E. M. S. Namboodripad explained on April 23 that while West Bengal was not directly under military rule (as was East Bengal), it was actually the Army that was running the administration of the state. Since the West Bengali “Naxalites"-the blood brothers of East Bengal's EPCP-ML-began their own Maoist struggle more than a year ago, several thousand Indian federal troops have been stationed in West Bengal to “curb disorders". Born of a melding of student and peasant movements in 1968, the Naxalites have gained wide support among the unemployed and underemployed in Calcutta as well as among the peasantry in the surrounding countryside. Sabotage is increasing in the city, and land lords have left some areas of the countryside for the cities after a wave of Naxalite attacks.
The Indian government is, in fact, in a quandary. While Prime Minister Indira Gandhi would like nothing more than a divided Pakistan, she fears above all that the East Bengal movement is becoming Maoist, under EPCP-ML leadership, and that its liberation movement will spread into India. Indian arms, she undoubtedly feels, would probably fall into the hands of Maoist guerrilla forces rather than those of the Awami League and, given time, they might return home in the hands of the Naxalites who threaten her government. While the 'peaceful road' communists in West Bengal wring their hands and say there is nothing they can do to help Last Bengal liberation, Naxalite cadres have been crossing the border actively helping their eastern brothers. They say this is both to advance the struggle in the East and to “get experience” for their struggle in the West.
Mrs. Gandhi faces an equally difficult problem in Assam, the mountainous Indian state that lies between East Bengal and Burma, and shares a long boundary with China. Many Bengalis have escaped to Assam, where Indian troops have for some years been fighting rebellious and Naga and Mizo tribesmen armed with Chinese AK47 rifles and the thoughts of Chairman Mao. As the struggle in East Pakistan develops into a bonafide people's war. such armament will undoubtedly move down mountain trails into East Bengal.
Issued ten days after the Pakistani military began its attacks, China's carefully-worded statement on the civil war did not denounce' Pakistani genocide. On the country,
