In downtown Dacca, jittery shopkeepers clanked their corrugated front doors shut and raced for home. Trains were derailed, cars were stoned and burned, tires were slashed. In one howling clash with police, four rioters were killed. At Narayanganj, 15 miles south of Dacca, rioters armed with shotguns stormed a police station, and seven more were gunned down. In Tejgaon, some 20,000 swarmed angrily into the streets, looking for trouble.
After a decade of mere talk about autonomy from West Pakistan, political leaders of East Pakistan took matters into their own hands last week and, in a violent 24-hour strike by thousands of workingmen, underlined their demands for freedom from President Mohammed Ayub Khan's western seat of power. The Easterners have a point. The two sections of the country, separated by nearly 1,000 miles of Indian territory, share neither borders nor cultures. West Pakistan is Middle Eastern, hot and dry in climate, puritanical in morals, warlike in manners, and multilingual. East Pakistan smacks of the Orient, with its hot and moist climate, its lush, green fields, its smaller and generally quieter people, and its lilting singsong language, Bengali. East Pakistanis complain that fully 70% of the country's civil servants and 90% of the army are recruited in West Pakistan, though East Pakistan accounts for 55% of the whole country's population.
Worst of all, East Pakistan feels isolated and unprotected. After last September's Indo-Pakistan war, when East Pakistan found itself guarded by only one of Pakistan's nine army divisions, the East's leading political party, the Awami League, decided that it was time for action. Led by spellbinding Sheik Mujibur Rahman, 45, the Awami League drafted a six-point platform calling for East Pakistan's autonomy in all matters except foreign policy and defense, and Mujibur Rahman stumped the eastern part of the country gathering support. Then early last month, the government arrested Mujibur Rahman and 20 other top Awami leaders for stirring up trouble. Last week's strike was Awami's form of protest.
At week's end, both East and West Pakistan were squaring off against each other. "It's going to be a long, drawn-out effort," says Syed Zahiruddin, a Dacca attorney and the league's executive secretary. Ayub compares the current tensions to the U.S. situation just before the Civil War. "If necessary," Ayub warns menacingly, "the language of weapons will have to speak."