Why Bangla Desh?
On 26 March 1971 the usual news broadcast from the Chittagong Station of Radio Pakistan was interrupted at 2.05 p.m. Dacca Betar Kendra till then under the control of the staff who owed their allegiance to Mujibur Rahman had already been taken over by the Pakistan army in the morning. At 2 p.m. the Chittagong Radio station was relaying a news broadcast from Karachi, when suddenly, it was interrupted and Abdul Hannan, Secretary of the Chittagong District Awami League, made the first public declaration of independence of Bangla Desh. He did it in the name of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. It was a short but unique declaration. Hannan appealed to every able bodied man and woman to be ready to face the enemy soldiers i.e., the Pakistani occupation army. Later, Awami League workers claimed that Sheikh Mujibur Rahman himself had made the declaration at 11 p.m. the preceding night (on 25 March) and had communicated it to important party leaders outside Dacca. Why did the leaders of the most popular party of Bangla Desh declare independence from Pakistan? Only three and a half months earlier the Awami League had won the first ever general election held in Pakistan so decisively that it had earned the right to call itself the sole representative of Bangla Desh (or East Pakistan as it was then called). Out of 169 National Assembly seats from Bangla Desh the Awami League had won 167 seats and those too with very large margins, Their victory in the Provincial Assembly election was also equally impressive. The success of the Awami League was based on the Six Point Programme of Mujibur Rahman as well as the Eleven Point Programme of the students incorporated in its election manifesto. Earlier in 1969 the popular movement based on these programmes had contributed significantly to the unseating of President Ayub Khan. Time and again Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his party leaders told the electorate that the 1970 election should be treated as a referendum and that should there be any conspiracy to foil the Six and Eleven Point programmes they should launch a resistance movement. The series of events since the announcement of the election results to the declaration of the independence of Bangla Desh (from 7 December 1970 to 26 March 1971) convincingly prove that the West Pakistan army leaders and politicians were shocked and alarmed by the election results and were determined to stop the implementation of the Six and Eleven point programmes. Could one not have foreseen that the Pakistani imperialists would behave like this? During the elections I was serving one year rigorous imprisonment in Cornilla
Personal Income Distribution and Personal Savings in Pakistan
One of the objectives of Pakistan’s Third Five-Year Plan is ‘to make substantial progress towards achieving certain specific social objectives such as diminishing inequalities in the distribution of income...’ [4, p. 39]. The main purpose of the present study is to measure these inequalities. As the basic source we have used provides data on private consumption as well as on personal income, some rough calculations on personal savings (as residuals) have been included in this paper.
National Income Estimates 1949/50 to 1963/64
A number of national income estimates are available for pre-Partition India. Many of these estimates, especially those pertaining to the last quarter of the 19th and the early 20th centuries, had their origin in political controversy. The estimators were mainly concerned with proving or refuting the idea that the per capita income was very low and that the government had failed to improve the economic conditions of the masses[6]. The earlier estimates were based on scanty data but as time passed, the basic statistics as well as the methods of income estimation improved.