পাতা:বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র (ত্রয়োদশ খণ্ড).pdf/৭৩

45 ংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ ত্রয়োদশ খন্ড Members share at what has happened, what is happening and what will happen if nothing is done. I was particularly grateful to him for pointing out earlier that this was a somewhat unfamiliar situation, since, if we are faced with any kind of revolution at all, it is not a Marxist or Socialist revolution, but a good old-fashioned 19th century Liberal revolution. Perhaps we have lost the knack of dealing with it. There is a grave danger that this debate will be simply an expression of horror, simply a matter of saying, "Well, there is nothing concrete we can do". There has been running through some of the speeches, and, before the debate, through some of the reactions to this event, even a feeling that there is nothing we should do, that we are no longer an Imperial Power, that pax Britannica is dead, if it ever existed-which is somewhat doubtful—and that therefore we should stay out of it, with due expressions of horror, alarm and agony. I do not believe that the fact that we are a post-Imperial Power means that we must spend our days continually passing by on the other side. If we can act, we have a moral duty to do so, and our desire and determination to do so is an honorable reaction and not just a post-Imperial twitch. The Pakistan situation is important, not only in human terms and because it raises immense human sympathies, but because it is a microcosm of the problems faced by the world. These are problems of overpopulation, hideous poverty, starvation the continuance of community violence and the tremendous problem of what exactly we mean by self-determination. As has been said, anyone who looks at the map of Pakistan can see that the country has inherent geographical contradictions. It is perhaps not geographically unique because there are other countries which have at least as wide a spread between their component parts. When looking at a country as geographically divided as this, all history cries out that it is impossible for the two parts to hang together simply through religion alone. There must be a community of interest and I do not think that it is an over-Marxist interpretation of history to say that there has to be, first and foremost, an economic community of interest. There is not, and there has not been for some years, in the Pakistan situation that kind of community of interest between the two component parts. The State depended for its foundation and existence on a fear, even a hatred, of India. East Bengal has for obvious reasons no great interest in such fear or haired now. The Hon. Member for Croydon, South (Sir R. Thompson) raised the point that 25 years ago it was different. Of course it was. But one of the factors in that difference was—and this is my reading of our imperial history, if it is not his -that we used the religious division between these communities to divide and rule the whole of the Indian sub-continent. To a large extent we whipped up, just as we have done in Ireland over the years, for our own imperial reasons the division between the two communities. Sir R. Thompson: I can assure the Hon. Gentleman he is quite wrong. We wanted the unitary state in the Indian sub-continent. We jolly nearly got it, and it was only because we were at a state of total deadlock where we could not withdraw from the sub-continent, without leaving some effective government behind that we had to settle, against our better judgment, but because it was the best thing 'that could be achieved, on the division of the country into two groups, one of them religious.