"We believed that the old-line politicians in the West would easily carry the day and, whatever their local differences, prevail in the Assembly over a divided East,” one key Western politician said two weeks ago.
"Instead, Bhutto, came out of nowhere with a Socialist appeal and beat us all, and Mujib rode that damned cyclone in for a complete sweep in the East."
With the election imminent, not one major figure from the Islamabad government ever showed serious concern the survivors of the cyclone and tidal wave late last fall that killed hundreds of thousands of Bengalis just before the election.
When other nations came flooding in with aid while West Pakistan kept its helicopters at home-in case of war with India, the government said a major political turning point grew out of what might have been just another, though bigger, disaster in an area where disasters are a predictable part of the yearly cycle.
"Mujib had been a power, but the disaster made him unstoppable,” an American analyst says. “That was what changed the course."
It Became Clear
When Sheikh Mujib won an absolute majority of the Assembly's seats, while Mr. Bhutto won a majority of the West's seats, the extent of the miscalculation became clear.
It was an understandable miscalculation: Pakistan had never before had a really free election on which to base predictions. But it left the West in an impossible predicament, for West Pakistan's economy was based largely on its ability to drain profits from the East by various means, and the Awami League program would have put a dead stop to that.
Blamed the Sheikh
Mr. Bhutto threatened to boycott the Assembly and to call a general strike if Sheikh Mujib did not forswear in advance the Awami League's insistence on local control of foreign aid and foreign trade, but the Bengali leader vowed to use his majority to enact the program that helped-elect him.
Faced with a sure fiasco, President Yahya revoked the March 3 date he had set for the Assembly's opening and went on radio March 6 to blame Sheikh Mujib for violence that broke out when the postponement was announced.
There was no evidence in East Bengal to back that charge, though the president, who came to East Pakistan only after nine more days, may have had no way of knowing the truth.
What actually took place in most areas was that police left the streets to the mobs, but Awami League volunteers, armed only with bamboo canes, brought the mobs under control in less than two days with the help of a widely publicized appeal by the Sheikh for nonviolence.
