The Strange Logic of East Pakistan
BELL, DANIEL
Asian Notebook-2 The Strange Logic of East Pakistan By Daniel Bell The most impressive new buildings in Dacca, the capital of East Pakistan, are the Shahbagh Hotel, a handsome four-story...
...But the communal issue fanned by Kashmir prevents any cooperation...
...There was a proposal once that the UN, as a non-political agency, take over flood control in the area...
...And politics in Pakistan consists of full-time agitation on the part of the "outs" to get in...
...the East Pakistan radio station, with its long walls of gleaming glass...
...the chief problems are markets and transport...
...vice-consuls on the necessity of his taking a part...
...The main market is West Pakistan, a thousand miles away across the large land mass of India...
...By accepted custom, if not union rules, the men receive one month's vacation and take another without pay, to spend time with their families in the interior...
...And, as for flats for Government workers, in Europe the state builds huge council houses for workers because the middle classes can lake care of themselves...
...1 If rational capitalism is to prevail, however, some change may have to take place in religious practice...
...But there are still 500 looms where the weaving and colonial revolution, every proletarian leader began his career in the choking hole of a j ute mill at the age of 9. There still may be child labor in the mills, but very little jute dust...
...In Dacca it is omnipresent...
...There, too, I met Horace...
...This time, the President stepped in and suspended Parliament, declaring that democracy could not stand such political instability...
...Much of the twisting and shaping of the raw jute into rough rolls for twine, twill, rope and burlap is done by machine...
...At an adjacent table, two young Moslem mothers, with children, were wearing heavy burkas, the cloths which mask their faces from the inquisitive males, in the 104° heat...
...Until they come, the barges are tied up, and costs mount...
...J. A. "Cap" Krug, the former Secretary of the Interior, was due with a group of engineers, on an ICA contract, to draw up plans for flood control...
...Horace was a recent graduate of a small Ohio college where he had majored in drama and poetry...
...The plants are well laid out, airy and conspicuously clean...
...The result is that again there may be famine this fall in East Pakistan...
...East Pakistan and Bengal, the nearby state of India, form a natural economic region...
...Bell is author of Work and Its Discontents, editor of The Neio American Right, a contributor to Princeton's history of American Socialism, and a lecturer in sociology at Columbia University...
...Bell was on a year's leave from Fortune magazine (where he is associate editor and labor specialist) organizing international academic seminars for the Congress for Cultural Freedom...
...The factories tolerate this practice since, with their investment in the training of the labor, more would be lost in a high turnover if the men quit...
...At the moment, he was trying to organize a presentation of Thornton Wilder's Our Tcnvn and arguing with one of the U.S...
...But neither country is interested in surrendering the slightest bit of sovereignty, even to avoid famine...
...When one considers, finally, that the two wings of the country speak totally unrelated languages, are separated by a thousand miles, and are united only by the spurious fagade of a common religion and the tough will of a President backed up by 50,000 guns, the future is bleak indeed...
...Being newer and more efficient, they are in a position to drive the Indian jute industry to the wall...
...Although production goes smoothly...
...In one of the provinces, the Minister of Transport was asked by a university economist how many barges, trucks, etc...
...Dean Mason of Harvard has a group there with Dave Bell, a former Truman assistant, as the resident chief...
...But two things work against any implementation: First, there are no technical personnel among the Pakistanis who can carry through by themselves...
...He had a collection of American and European folk songs which he played loudly, and, on finding out that I was a sociologist, he wanted to talk of David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd...
...A common market would make sense...
...One wonders whether Pakistan, despite the enormous American military and economic aid, can last...
...He had taught there for a year and was in Dacca, working for the USIA to bring American culture to the Pakistanis...
...and the impressive new flats, built in a series of compounds, for Government employes...
...At the airport in Dacca, I met two pleasant, thin-lipped, middle-aged women who were members of the Home Economics Department of Oklahoma A & M. They had been in Pakistan for six months, under contract with the Ford Foundation...
...On paper, there is considerable planning, much of it beautifully done, by U.S...
...shuttling is done by hand...
...every compound seems to have one, and it blares all the time...
...West Pakistan speaks Urdu, so the two wings of Pakistan communicate in English...
...his job was to provide cars for the other ministers...
...Pakistan seems full of Americans, most of them engaged busily in economic planning...
...Yet, there is, I suppose, an inevitable logic to this sequence: Without a new modern hotel, where would all the UN commissions, World Bank representatives and German businessmen (the order is taken from the hotel register) stay when they come to Dacca...
...Dacca has few amenities, culturally speaking, but it is "abroad...
...But India has its own jute industry in Calcutta, an hour's flight away...
...They could not be put in in the mud flats along the river, where the large majority of the population live...
...In fact, the jute mills in Dacca were built largely by Moslem industrialists who fled or were forced to liquidate their holdings in Hindu Bengal and have built these mills, with Government support, in retaliation...
...Whether the Moslem mullahs will be equally progressive remains to be seen...
...We've tried some automatic looms," said the works manager, a Scotsman named Johnston, "but the men aren't skilled enough, and the machines break down...
...A strange set of priorities for an underdeveloped country...
...Asian Notebook-2 The Strange Logic of East Pakistan By Daniel Bell The most impressive new buildings in Dacca, the capital of East Pakistan, are the Shahbagh Hotel, a handsome four-story structure with flaring wings and private balconies...
...And this itself seems to provide a fascination for a whole host of new-type plenipotentiaries that one finds in these provincial cities...
...There was the vice-chancellor of the University, a man from the Pakistan Foreign Office, the head of the British Council, an agricultural geographer from the University of Birmingham, the representative of the Asia Foundation, an economist from California, etc...
...In a poor country, where waste can mean disaster, some priorities—cement for roads and dams, hydroelectric plants for power, etc.—are needed...
...It was the reverse maneuver, in fact, of one some time before, when a group of Moslem Leaguers had crossed over to the Republicans and toppled the Government...
...The jute has to be floated down on barges to the coast, and await the irregular coastal and tramp steamers which come to pick them up...
...he looked perplexed and replied that he didn't know...
...Certainly the new lay-outs mean the end of one revolutionary legend...
...There are no real ideological issues, so the opposition simply goes hunting for any issue at hand...
...In the lore of learn to become devout since those wanting to pray are allowed five work breaks a day...
...but with the multiplication of saints production suffered, until the Church sagely established a single All Saints' Day...
...here the middle classes can't—or, rather, in this way they do...
...Earlier, a storm broke in Parliament when a party leader accused the opposition of failing to say "Pakistan Zindabad" at the conclusion of his speech...
...They even speak a common language, Bengali...
...One would think that the Government would be interested first in helping the dispossessed...
...The elaborate radio station has an equal logic: In a land of illiteracy, social control of the masses is won through radio...
...were available in the state...
...why not sell to India...
...I saw one plant, not the largest, which employed 1,500 workers on each of two shifts...
...In nearby Deniera, an impressive new jute industry is rising...
...I attended a number of small parties wherein the native and foreign elite of the town mingled, as if in a Chekhov play...
...Thus is economic logic shaped by communal politics...
...He has written for Commentary, Encounter, Preuves and scholarly journals in the United States and Europe...
...In the week I was in Calcutta, three jute mills announced their closing...
...Their purpose: to set up a home economics course in three projected women's colleges in Pakistan...
...Most of the workers are Mohammedans, and whether religious or not they This is the second of five articles based on a notebook which Daniel Bell (cut at left) kept while touring Asia last spring...
...The Pakistani jute plants, though privately owned, are built with Government money and are amortized in three years, or a whopping 331 3-percent exemption from taxes each year...
...experts—who would not be allowed to plan an economy at home...
...In Karachi, the Ford Foundation had purchased a set of buildings, equipped them with servants and cars, and made the apartments available for visiting technical personnel...
...A cotton mill nearby, nearing completion, will employ another 2,000 when it starts...
...While I was in Dacca, 30 Republican deputies in Parliament suddenly deserted their party and crossed over to the Moslem League, thus threatening to topple the Government...
...Heavy summer rains threaten the rice crop, but no flood control is possible since the division of the headwaters and the building of dams depends upon cooperation with India...
...No one, however, questions the need for planning...
...The Catholic Church once insisted that on each saint's day work was taboo...
...A former editor of The New Leader, Mr...
Vol. 40 • September 1957 • No. 39
