IN 1946, barely a decade after its electoral triumphs of 1937, the Krishak Praja Party was wiped out as a political force in the Bengal delta. The Muslim League scored decisive victories over their KPP rivals, especially in the rural Muslim constituencies in jute-growing distrits, the KPP’s former heartland. The League received 83.7 percent of Muslim votes in Bengal as a whole and performed even better in the jute tracts, where it received 87 percent of the vote. On the other hand, the KPP received just 2 percent of votes in jute-growing districts. The Muslim League had campaigned in elections throughout British India on a Pakistan platform, transforming the elections into a virtual referendum on the Pakistan cause. The all-India Muslim League leadership left the idea of Pakistan sufficiently vague and capacious for local branches of the party to define and specify Pakistan through their election campaigns.1 In Bengal’s jute tracts, the League and its candidates presented Pakistan as a utopian peasant society: Pakistan was a place and time characterized by freedom, truth, justice, and morality; and free from sin, corruption, exploitation, greed, scarcity, and hunger. As the League’s overwhelming electoral success underscores, the delta’s jute cultivators were persuaded that they could realize this peasant utopia—all they had to do was vote for the Muslim League and the Pakistan cause.
During the depression decade of the 1930s, the delta’s jute cultivators had voted for state-centric and legislative solutions to immiseration; in the postfamine election of 1946, they turned to the utopian promise of Pakistan. The League’s Pakistan campaign utilized many of the same slogans, idioms, and tropes as the KPP’s peasant populist campaign ten years earlier, repeating popular slogans like “The Land Belongs to the Tiller” and “Abolish Zamindari.”2 The erstwhile KPP stalwart, Abul Mansur Ahmed described the Pakistan movement as a continuation of the krishak praja movement that underpinned the KPP’s political organization: “today the Muslim League is the carrier and conductor [dharok o bahok] of the krishak praja movement . . . [and] the Praja movement has been fully realized in the Pakistan movement.”3 The Pakistan campaign, however, was crucially different from peasant populism: while the KPP promised pro-peasant state action, the League campaigned on the poetry of utopia. Pakistan was the “land of eternal Eid,” where “speech and food were pure,” where the nightingale calls the azaan and the flowers say their namaaz after doing their ablutions with the morning dew.4
Prior to the 1946 election campaign, debates and discussions on Pakistan were restricted to Calcutta and Dacca’s Muslim literary and political milieus. The Muslim League did not have any official branches outside Calcutta, though the family home of the Dacca nawab, the Ahsan Manzil, functioned as an unofficial second office in Dacca. Prior to the elections, the idea of Pakistan was popularized by a Calcutta-headquartered Muslim Bengali cultural and literary organization: the East Pakistan Renaissance Society, founded in 1942. The Renaissance Society established a second center in Dacca and offices in several mofussil towns, but was most active in Calcutta. Members of the Muslim League and the Renaissance Society discussed and debated Pakistan in terms of culture and territory: the cultural distinctiveness of Muslim Bengal that necessitated forming a separate nation-state from Hindu Bengal, and the potential and appropriate territorial extent of that nation-state. Discussions of Pakistan in terms of cultural distinctiveness or territorial extent in metropolitan Muslim literary circles did not generate interest among the delta’s jute-cultivating peasantry. However, rural Muslim voters would subsequently respond enthusiastically to the League’s election campaign in the winter of 1945–46, during which the League’s candidates consistently described Pakistan as the promise of an ideal Muslim peasant society that would be characterized by justice, truth, morality, and the absence of sin, corruption, exploitation, and hunger.
Pakistan was realized through the partition of Bengal. On August 14 and 15, 1947, just as cultivators were bringing their jute crop into market, the postcolonial nation-states of Pakistan and India came into existence. A four-thousand-kilometer line carved out the Bengal delta and incorporated it into the territory of Pakistan. Partition and independence had separated the jute tracts from their industrial and commercial center; East Pakistan was a hinterland without a metropolis. The decision to partition Bengal was greeted with dismay by Muslim League leaders who could not imagine that the territory of the impoverished and famine-racked jute tracts shorn of metropolitan Calcutta and western Bengal’s mineral resources could constitute a viable nation-state. In support of a last minute scheme to create a United Independent Bengal, spearheaded by the Bengal Muslim League’s leaders—H. S. Suhrawardy and Abul Hashim, M. A. Jinnah stated: “What is the use of Bengal without Calcutta; they had much better to remain united and independent. I am sure they would be on friendly terms with us.”5
With partition and independence, the promise of Pakistan as peasant utopia ran up against the imperatives of postcolonial state formation: the necessity of creating a national economy that produced sufficient revenue and resources to sustain the institutions and pageantry appropriate to a modern state. For post-partition Pakistan, which had received a raw deal in the “spoils of partition,” this task of creating a territorial and sovereign national economy appeared particularly daunting.6 Jute became critical to the statist project of fashioning a national economy. Fiber was the leading source of state revenue and foreign exchange. It was of strategic importance in Pakistan’s emerging rivalry with India—East Pakistan’s jute farmers produced 70 percent of the world’s jute and India’s jute mills consumed 70 percent of East Pakistan’s jute. However, in order to derive revenue, foreign exchange, and strategic advantage from fiber, the postcolonial state had to monitor, regulate, and police the production and circulation of fiber within and across the jute tracts. That is, the state had to establish its sovereignty over fiber.
Toward this end, the Pakistani state established customs offices, regulated currency exchanges, monitored the “national loyalties” of jute traders and merchants, and kick-started a jute baling and milling industry. Simultaneously, the state criminalized economic activities—such as smuggling, black-marketeering, and tax evasion—that subverted the statist project of extracting revenue, resources, and strategic advantage from fiber. Jute cultivators and traders were subjected to intense state surveillance; they were liable to being criminalized, and to being subjected to draconian punishment. Ahmed Kamal has described how the peasant utopian vision of Pakistan was rapidly extinguished by the Pakistani state embarking on a campaign of violence against sections of the peasantry: brutally enforcing state policies of food supply and distribution and water management on its peasant population and violently punishing peasant attempts to evade state policies.7 The history of jute in post-partition Pakistan accords with Ahmed Kamal’s narrative of centralizing bureaucratic policies, the criminalization of peasant avoidance and evasion of such policies, and the inhumane treatment of said criminals. Instead of the promised utopia of freedom, emancipation, justice, and morality, East Pakistan’s peasant households experienced statist harassment, oppression, and violence. This chapter adds another dimension to this larger narrative, demonstrating how the state’s efforts to monitor, regulate, and police fiber turned, in Ahmed Kamal’s brilliant phrase, “the state against the nation”—that is, the bureaucratic structures of government against the utopian vision contained in the idea of Pakistan.
The contradiction between postcolonial state formation and peasant utopian aspirations is exemplified, as Ahmed Kamal demonstrates, in an encounter between Ataur Rahman Khan, a young Muslim politician who would later become chief minister of East Pakistan, and an elderly villager, soon after independence in August 1947. The elderly man asked the young politician: “Now that Pakistan has been achieved, should there still be police, courts, and kutcheries, soldiers and sentries, jails and lockups?” Khan replied, “Why not? How could you protect the state without these institutions?” The old man sighed and responded “then what kind of Pakistan have we got? Change the name please. You will name it Pakistan yet allow sins and corruptions to exist.”8
The first section of this chapter explores the formulation of the idea of Pakistan as peasant utopia during the League’s 1946 election campaign. The following sections describe how peasant aspirations for Pakistan gave way, after partition and independence in 1947, to extreme disillusionment. The second section examines the Pakistani state’s attempts to harness jute as a national resource by establishing bureaucratic institutions and processes to monitor, regulate, tax, and police flows of fiber across newly drawn partition lines. The final two sections of the chapter investigate this dynamic of harassment, evasion, and violence in state and society relations in postcolonial East Pakistan: first, with respect to petty traders and the state’s efforts to criminalize and punish certain forms of trade as jute smuggling and, second, with respect to jute cultivators and the state’s efforts to impose a tax on jute production.
Prior to the 1946 elections, the idea of Pakistan in Bengal was limited to Muslim literary milieus in Calcutta. In Calcutta, the East Pakistan Renaissance Society and the journal Mohammadi provided literary and cultural forums to discuss and develop a Muslim Bengali idea of Pakistan during the early 1940s. The speakers and writers at the society envisioned Pakistan in cultural, economic, and territorial terms.9 In a landmark speech to the society’s annual meeting in 1944, Abul Mansur Ahmad, whose involvement in the Khilafat movement was discussed earlier, characterized Pakistan as a space of “cultural autonomy”—tamadduni azadi. Ahmed suggested that Pakistan would provide the autonomous space needed for a “renaissance” in the distinctive Bengali Muslim culture. These cultural imaginings were accompanied by territorial imaginings. Mujibur Rehman Khan wrote a pamphlet in 1942 discussing the appropriate territorial limits of “Eastern Pakistan.” Khan’s proposal focused on securing an expansive territory that would provide for a viable and prosperous nation-state. His state encompassed the entire province of Bengal and large portions of Assam, and was far larger than East Pakistan’s final territorial inheritance of solely the jute tracts.10 However, these discussions in metropolitan Muslim literary milieus during the early 1940s did not make much of an impression among rural Muslim voters in the delta’s jute tracts. The election campaign during the winter of 1945–46 popularized the idea of Pakistan among rural Muslims and redefined Pakistan as peasant utopia.
In March 1945, to mark the fifth anniversary of the Lahore Resolution, the Muslim League organized Pakistan Day celebrations throughout Bengal.11 The League’s events were “thinly attended,” and the colonial state received “no indication from the districts that the celebrations were on any large scale.”12 Even as the Muslim League failed to generate enthusiasm around the Pakistan movement, peasant meetings focused on agrarian issues such as jute prices, tenancy laws, and shortages of cloth, kerosene oil, and rice drew large crowds. In March 1945 crowds of more than three thousand peasant men attended meetings organized by the Communist-affiliated All-India Kisan Sabha in Jamalpur, Kishoreganj, Faridpur, and Bogra.13 In less than a year, however, the Pakistan cause moved from the fringes of the delta’s politics to its very heart, and Pakistan came to represent a promised utopia for the vast majority of the delta’s jute-cultivating Muslim peasantry.
The Muslim League’s “left-faction”—under the leadership of H. S. Suhrawardy and Abul Hashim—spearheaded the Pakistan campaign and, in the process, sidelined the party’s traditional zamindar faction. Hashim and Suhrawardy carefully and deliberately constructed a party organization and campaign message that reflected the peasant politics of immiseration. When Abul Hashim was elected general secretary in 1943, the League had no offices in the province of Bengal outside Calcutta.14 During 1944 and 1945 Hashim toured the entire province, visiting every part of Bengal: “not only district and sub-divisional headquarters but also important places in rural Bengal.”15 In each of these locations, Hashim established local offices, absorbing krishak sabhas, former KPP members, and a new generation of idealistic young Muslim men into the Muslim League in the process. In his autobiography, Hashim fondly reminisces on the hours he spent in discussion with idealistic mofussil Muslim men.16 After elections were announced in September 1945, Hashim and Suhrawardy gained control of the Muslim League’s Parliamentary Board in an acrimonious intraparty election. Through the board, Hashim and Suhrawardy hand-selected the League’s candidates to contest the elections, vetting potential candidates to screen out zamindars and pro-zamindari individuals. The two men even handpicked the slogans that would define the League’s campaign: “Land belongs to the plough,” “Abolish Zamindari without compensation,” and “End interest payments to moneylenders.17
In its campaign through the hinterland, the Bengal Muslim League’s candidates did not dwell on the cultural aspirations of Bengali Muslims nor on the territorial limits of the proposed state—topics that had hitherto dominated discussion in the Eastern Pakistan Renaissance Society and in the pages of the Mohammadi. Instead, they characterized Pakistan as a place of freedom, emancipation, and justice, free of hunger and scarcity. Suhrawardy spelled out the promise of Pakistan in a campaign speech: “[Pakistan] will mean raising the standards of living for the poor, the oppressed and the neglected; more food, wealth, resources, work, better living conditions and more joy and happiness for the common people; opportunities for all and the establishment of a reign of truth and justice, of tolerance and fair play.”18
The utopian ideal of Pakistan combined an aspiration for a moral and ethical society with that of a society free of hunger and starvation. For “the ordinary Muslim peasant,” Ahmed Kamal has argued, Pakistan was both the promise of “a new moral community, where an ethics of reciprocity and justice would dominate social life” and, also, of a “land where the poor peasants’ dream of ‘two square meals a day’ would come true.”19 The poetry of peasant utopian Pakistan equally emphasizes moral and ethical life and food, as in the following boyan written in postcolonial Pakistan:
Always speak the truth
In the land of Pakistan
Everything is pure in Pakistan,
Food and speech, all aspects of life.
Falsehood and bad deeds
Must be shunned.20
The configuration of Pakistan as peasant utopia took place in the context of a post-famine peasant society. The Millat, the League’s newsletter, carried numerous articles on Bengal’s post-famine peasant society.21 In many articles advocating abolishing zamindari, tackling the debt crisis, guaranteeing food security, and bolstering jute prices, the Millat’s writers evoked the horrors of famine. An October 1946 article “Bengal, Granary of the Past, Yet people Starve to Death” urging for concerted measures to grow more food stated: “The famine has ripped apart and emptied our political, social and economic lives (rashtriyo, shamaji, o arthanaitik jibon). Three years later, we still feel the effects of the famine with every step.”22 Famine was also evoked in arguing for the “absolute necessity” of abolishing zamindari: “it is clear that the 1943 famine would not have taken this terrible form if zamindari law did not prevail over this country.”23
Proposals to abolish landlordism and debt and to raise jute prices and guarantee food security were hardly original in the Bengal delta. These were the very proposals that the Krishak Praja Party had floated a decade back. On the eve of the elections, Abul Mansur Ahmed—who had earlier described Pakistan as the promise of cultural autonomy—wrote: “the Muslim League is the carrier and conductor of the krishak praja movement . . . [and] the Praja movement has been fully realized in the Pakistan movement.”24 Indeed, in characterizing Pakistan as peasant utopia, the League had absorbed the Krishak Praja Party’s idioms and slogans, institutions and organizational structure, and erstwhile supporters. However, unlike the KPP’s peasant populist campaign, Pakistan was not a manifesto of legislative reforms and executive action. It was instead a promised future: “Pakistan will be the ordinary people’s state, where zamindars and the rich will have no place.” Pakistan was not a program of policies but an aspiration: “the Pakistan demand is a symbol of Muslim mass aspiration (gono-akangkha).”25 This symbol of aspiration could even be generously extended to all of India’s “oppressed masses”: “Pakistan’s message is of the right to self-determination (atmo-niyontron); it may have been uttered by Muslims, but it is the demand of all of India’s oppressed people’s (nirjatito jati). It is true that Bengal’s praja movement was started solely by Muslims, but the movement is that of all of Bengal’s oppressed masses.”26
Unstated in Abul Mansur Ahmed’s editorial but explicit throughout the League’s campaign was perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this promise: that the peasant utopia of Pakistan could be achieved by the simple task of voting. The Bengal delta’s Muslim jute cultivators responded to the Muslim League’s campaign in overwhelming numbers. The League secured 87 percent of the rural Muslim vote in Bengal’s jute tracts. Muslim League candidates inflicted heavy defeats on incumbent legislators from the KPP: the KPP incumbent from Tipperah Central received just 900 against 23,800 votes for the League candidate; the KPP incumbent in Tipperah West received 890 votes against 19,200 for the League candidate; and in Bogra North, the KPP incumbent received 510 votes against 19,700 for the League.
The Muslim League’s ability to contain the utopian politics of Pakistan within an electoral contest is actually remarkable. This was utterly unlike the peasant pursuit of utopian swaraj during the Khilafat movement of 1921–22 (chapter 3), where peasants willfully and forcefully disobeyed, resisted, and boycotted the colonial state and its agents. In 1946 utopian politics focused on the polls—on the act of going and voting for the Muslim League in the polling booth. The peasant politics of utopia did, however, spill out of the polling booth after the elections, manifesting in violence against Hindus in parts of Tipperah and Noakhali in October 1946. The following description of the Noakhali riots of 1946 by a colonial official is worth quoting in full:
The ‘modus operandi’ appears to have been for a mob of Muslims to surround a Hindu village and offer protection if the latter would embrace Islam. Many thousands of Hindus, to avoid extinction, capitulated while panic seized others who bolted before they were approached. The method of conversion has been, in the main, not forcible. In some cases Hindus have been made to eat the flesh of their own cattle but usually the Mahommedans have eaten that themselves and have been content if the Hindus have donned “the cap,” very large numbers of which, bearing the legend “Pakistan Zindabad” have appeared mysteriously as required; or substituted lungi for dhoti. There appears also to be a large supply of the former.27
The riots were instigated by a former member of the Legislative Assembly, Golam Sarwar, who had been soundly defeated in the 1946 election by the Muslim League candidate, Fazlul Karim.28 The “Mahommedan mob” consisted of a number of demobilized soldiers and local Muslims who joined in attacking their neighbors. Further, the attacks were preplanned, as the sudden appearance of large numbers of lungis and caps in the cloth-starved province suggests. “Conversion” thus consisted of donning specifically Muslim articles of clothing: that is, of forcing Hindus to adopt the distinctive material cultures of Bengali peasant Muslims that had been crafted through consumption during the pre–World War I era of prosperity.
The idea of Pakistan that peasants had voted for and, in postelection Noakhali and Tipperah, had violently attacked the Hindu community to achieve, did not entail or envision the partition of Bengal. As partition emerged as the likeliest outcome, articles and editorials in the Millat took on a strident note criticizing the British and Congress partition movement—the Banga-bhanga andolon. In May 1947 the Millat ran an editorial characterizing partition as an imperialist-capitalist and upper-caste Hindu plot to maintain ownership over Calcutta’s wealth, which had been built up through two centuries of exploitation of the jute-cultivating peasantry.29 On June 4, 1947, when Lord Mountbatten presented partition as a take-it-or-leave-it scheme for the Muslim League, the Millat ran an editorial titled “Crippled (Pongu) Pakistan.” “According to the British government’s announcement, Bengal will be partitioned (dikhondito),” the editorial announced, “and of this partitioned Bengal, the wealthiest, most advanced, and resource-rich portion will be snatched away from Bengali Muslim hands and given to a few self-interested friends of the British.” The partition plan, the Millat’s editors alleged, was intended to “squeeze Bengal’s Muslims into one corner of Bengal and to crush them to death.” The “crippled (pongu) Pakistan” would be an economic disaster with a bleak future; partition was a “fearsome cloud over the lives of Bengali Muslims.”30
Abul Hashim, the architect of the League’s Pakistan campaign in the delta, greeted Mountbatten’s partition plan with dismay. He stated to the Millat that he had accepted partition not out of “satisfaction and hope but out of fear and helplessness.” He feared that the state would not be able to achieve the promised peasant utopia: “Eastern Pakistan will be mainly reliant on jute. This is probably the most densely populated region in the entire world. . . . At anytime, artificial jute might be invented and, if that happens, it will be a disaster for jute cultivation. . . . In this situation, Eastern Pakistan will probably develop as a good market for American manufactured goods. America might give us loans and we will have to buy American cigarettes and other goods to repay those loans.”31 Notably, Hashim chose the agrarian Islamic critique of the consumption of American-made cigarettes to explain his fears for the post-partition state.
The East Pakistan Renaissance Society had floated a territorially expansive vision of an East Pakistan that included not only the entirety of Bengal, but also Assam: “East Pakistan must include Assam to be financially and economically strong.”32 Colonial officials and academics wrote disparagingly about the future of an East Pakistan that excluded Calcutta. In a conference of provincial governors, it was stated that “economically [East Bengal] could not survive as all the coal mines, the minerals and the factories are in western Bengal, so are the jute processing mills with two exceptions.”33 In 1943 O.H.K. Spate, a geographer at the London School of Economics, wrote gloomily about the economic prospects of “Bangistan” composed solely of the delta’s jute tracts: “If partition left this metropolis [Calcutta] out of Bangistan, the economic situation of the remnant state would not be enviable—a small territory suffering from severe agrarian overcrowding, cut off from the sources of power and raw materials on which Bengal’s industries have flourished, and by the very communal hypothesis to which it owed its existence unable to seek relief in emigration.”34 In supporting the short-lived United Independent Bengal scheme promoted by Hashim and Suhrawardy, Jinnah stated: “If Bengal remains united . . . I should be delighted. What is the use of Bengal without Calcutta; they had much better to remain united and independent.”35
These fears were put aside at the moment of independence. On August 14, 1947, Pakistan was celebrated with joy and fanfare throughout the delta’s jute tracts. In the new provincial capital of Dacca, gates were erected, buildings decorated, processions brought out, and flags of the new nation raised. Celebrations also took place in mofussil towns such as Barisal, Sylhet, and Rajshahi and in rural parts of Mymensingh and Tipperah.36 Probhash Chandra Lahiry, a Congress politician in Rajshahi and participant in the celebrations, in 1964 remembered that “every face of the vast population . . . [showed] signs of a radiant glow of fulfillment of a long cherished desire of winning freedom.”37 The bureaucrats charged with running the newly created state were conscious of their challenges, but were also optimistic. O.H.K. Spate wrote in January 1948: “Morally, to judge from many conversations with young Muslim officials flocking into Western Pakistan there is a good spirit among them—a realization of the enormous difficulties, the shortages of resources and of technical cadres, but a determination to tackle them resolutely.”38 Bureaucrats in the capital of Karachi announced a program of rapid industrialization and economic modernization, in order to bring “improvements in the standard of life of the people . . . by harnessing, to the maximum extent possible, the forces and treasures of nature in the service of people by providing gainful and legitimate employment and by assuring freedom from want, equality of opportunity, and a more equitable distribution of wealth.”39 Their plans and ambitions focused on jute, on harnessing fiber toward programs of nation-state formation. Jute was Pakistan’s “golden fibre,” the national resource that would finance the making of a modern nation-state.
Jute was thus transformed from a colonial commodity into a national resource, from the basis of colonial exploitation through the exchange of fiber for cigarettes to the means of national development by generating revenue and resources for the state. The hinterland’s severance from its former metropolis came to be seen as a boon to the post-partition nation-state. In publicity and propaganda pamphlets, the Pakistani state celebrated East Bengal’s “virtual monopoly” over jute, and “practical monopoly” over “finer varieties of jute.” Partition harmed the metropolis more than it did the hinterland: “the emergence of Pakistan as a separate sovereign state has substantially altered the position of India. . . . While Pakistan has emerged with 80 percent of the world’s jute and 100 percent of the best varieties of the fibre, India has only about 18 to 20 percent of the jute fibre which is quite insufficient to feed her mills which number more than a hundred.”40 Partition liberated the hinterland from the metropolitan capital: “Her jute market has now shaken off her age long dependence on Calcutta and is at present linked with the world market of jute independent of her earlier intermediaries in Calcutta.”41
Pakistan’s national economy was critically dependent on primary commodity exports: jute, cotton, tea, and hides and skins. Export duties on primary commodities contributed the lion’s share of state revenue and, even more significantly, brought in foreign currency. The postcolonial state-building project relied on earnings of foreign currency to finance imports of capital goods, military stores, and consumer goods. Pakistan benefited from high global commodity prices in the years following 1947, particularly during the Korean War commodity boom of 1950–51.42 The high prices of its chief commodity exports enabled Pakistan to maintain a favorable balance of trade position and to import capital goods for industrialization, arms and munitions for the armed forces, and consumer goods for a burgeoning urban middle class. A government pamphlet celebrating the fifth anniversary of the Pakistani state noted: “a favourable balance of trade position . . . has, of course, been a cornerstone of Pakistan’s economy.”43
The commerce minister, Fazlur Rahman, underscored Pakistan’s reliance on jute and cotton in a broadcast on Radio Pakistan in February 1952:
Immediately after partition it was realized that Pakistan’s internal economy as well as the external financial position will depend almost entirely upon the two major cash crops of jute and cotton. All our defense stores, capital equipment, materials required for industrial consumption and essential consumer goods had to be paid for out of our earnings of foreign exchange from the exports of jute and cotton. . . . The export duties on jute and cotton . . . constitute the single biggest source of internal revenue of the Central and Provincial Governments. In fact the entire fabric of Pakistan’s economy is woven with these two fibres.44
In weaving the “fabric of Pakistan’s economy” from jute fibers, the Pakistan state sought to transform jute from a colonial commodity subject to the speculations of colonial capital into a national resource producing revenue and foreign exchange for the state. Toward this end, the Pakistani state had to create the bureaucratic structures necessary to monitor, regulate, and police circulations of jute through its territory—in other words, it had to assert its territorial sovereignty over the commodity. In order to do so, the postcolonial state had to create—more or less from scratch, given the dislocations of partition—customs offices, regulatory institutions, procedures of inspection and documentation, and systems of penalties and punishments.
The postcolonial transformation of colonial commodity into national resource took place gradually, over the first few years of independence and partition. Partition did not initially disrupt the circulation of jute between peasant farms and metropolitan Calcutta. In their haste to depart India, the British Empire did not work out a trade agreement between the partitioned nation-states and, instead, independent Pakistan and India decided on a “standstill agreement,” agreeing to let trade continue as before. In the months following partition, jute prices barely registered a blip and more jute was transported to metropolitan Calcutta than in the previous pre-partition year. This situation, however, would not last.
On October 13, 1947, after two months of unobstructed flows of jute between East Bengal and Calcutta, officials of the Government of Pakistan wrote to their counterparts in India complaining that they were not receiving their legitimate share of the export duty on jute.45 They pointed out the injustice that “India is likely to receive over 90 percent of the jute revenue, although only 27 percent of the jute is grown in that Dominion.”46 They proposed that Pakistan should receive “at least 75 percent of the export duty on 5.9 million bales” as its legitimate share. Officials of the Government of India prevaricated in their response, arguing that any agreement on jute would have to wait for a comprehensive trade and payments agreement. They stated that it would “scarcely be fair to question its equity isolating any particular source of revenue . . . in regard to which one party may feel that it had any special claim.”47
The newly created Pakistani government desperately needed revenue, and was not willing to forego the export duty earned from fiber. On November 13, 1947, Liaqat Ali Khan, the prime minister of Pakistan, wrote directly to Jawaharlal Nehru announcing that, “in the interests of their revenue my Government now feel compelled most reluctantly to charge export duty on jute leaving borders of East Bengal both by sea and land.” This was a momentous announcement: for the first time since its creation, Pakistan was to enforce its sovereignty upon flows of commodities across partition lines.
The Pakistani government hurriedly established customs posts and checkpoints and appointed customs officers in thirteen key jute-trading towns, located on rail and steamer routes connecting the delta to Calcutta (see map 3). The Central Board of Revenue in Karachi announced that “customs on raw jute exported from the Dominion of Pakistan by land” would be collected at river ports like Chandpur, Narayanjganj, Sirajganj, Munshiganj, Dacca, and railway towns like Sarishabari, Hajiganj, Bera, and Ishwardi. In these towns, the state constructed customs offices, appointed customs officials, and distributed the forms, receipts, and other paperwork involved in customs collections. None of these towns were located on the physical border, which was yet to be officially demarcated. The government found it easier to police jute bulked on steamer flats and railway wagons in jute-trading towns, rather than smaller quantities loaded on country boats and ox carts along its borders.
In September 1948 India and Pakistan signed their first trade and payments agreement. The two governments specified their requirements of essential commodities from each other. India wanted 5.5 million bales of raw jute and 900,000 bales of raw cotton from Pakistan; Pakistan wanted 3.4 million tons of coal, 400,000 bales of cotton cloth and yarn, and 50,000 tons of jute manufactures from India. This trade would take place at “free” or market prices, between private merchants and traders. The two governments agreed, in principle, to free trade: “both Dominions should try to reduce the number of commodities which when moving from one Dominion to the other shall be subject to an import or export duty.”48 They agreed that Pakistani and Indian rupees should be of equal value, and payments up to 150 million rupees should be settled in local currencies—saving scarce foreign currency for trade with the wider world. The official agreement to free trade between the post-partition states was not, however, implemented in practice. Pakistan imposed duties on exports of jute and cotton fiber to India and India on exports of manufactured jute and cotton cloth to Pakistan. Commodities traded exclusively across Bengal’s partition lines were also subjected to duties: Pakistan on exports of fish and bamboo to India and India on imports of raw tobacco.49
India and Pakistan also pursued plans to disentangle their economies: in the language of the state, to reduce their “economic dependence” on each other. For the Bengal delta, this meant disentangling the hinterland from its metropolis. The Pakistani state attempted to build trade and manufacturing facilities within the hinterland to displace flows of jute to Calcutta. The state allocated scarce foreign currency and subsidized loans to favored businessmen, particularly the Adamjee and Ispahani families, established Calcutta jute traders and prominent donors to the Muslim League in the years preceding partition. In the first months after partition, the Ispahanis had established three large warehouses in Chittagong—which were, according to a Dundee jute businessman, “of immense trading value”—and had imported secondhand machinery from Dundee to start a 500-loom jute mill, also in Chittagong. The Ispahanis were dwarfed by the ambitions of the Adamjees, who announced plans to build a 3,000-loom jute mill near Narayanganj. The Adamjee Mills would become the largest jute mill in the world, displacing the Ludlow Jute Mills in Massachusetts. By February 1952 the Adamjees had installed 2,000 looms, of which 1,200 were in production—it was, in the words of a Dundee businessman, “a tremendous project.”50 For East Pakistan, the Adamjee Jute Mills were a symbol of the successful partnership between the state and favored capitalists in creating a modern and industrial economy in the agrarian delta.51
On the other hand, the Indian government focused on increasing jute cultivation within its borders: India’s output of raw jute increased from 1.6 million bales in 1946–47, to 2 million in 1947–48 and 2.8 million in 1948–49.52 The provincial governments of Assam, West Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa distributed jute seeds and provided advice and technical assistance to cultivators. India also constructed the Assam Link railway, a single-track narrow-gauge railway line connecting Calcutta with jute and tea tracts in Cooch Behar, Assam, and Tripura without passing through Pakistan.
In September 1949, barely a year after the two governments had concluded their trade agreement, all official trade between Pakistan and India came to an abrupt and prolonged halt. The Pakistani and Indian rupees were pegged to the British pound sterling. When Britain devalued its pound, India followed suit but Pakistan did not. Hence, the exchange rate stood at 144 Indian rupees for a 100 Pakistani rupees. India refused to honor the new Pakistani rupee and official Indo-Pak trade came to a sudden standstill. Official trade resumed in April 1950, when the two governments signed a new and much more limited trade agreement. The devaluation crisis and trade stoppage of 1949 and 1950, rather than the political partition of 1947, rent asunder the formerly united economic space of British India.
In the aftermath of the crisis, both India and Pakistan stepped up efforts to reduce their dependence on each other. As India increased domestic jute cultivation and Pakistan expanded manufacturing capacity, the two economies began to compete with each other for international markets for jute manufactures. The two governments openly discriminated against each other and engaged in frequent economic warfare. The Pakistan government imposed a license duty payable solely on exports of jute fiber to India and imposed higher export duties on exports of kutcha bales, which were only sold to the Calcutta mills. India, for its part, imposed a surcharge on exports of coal to energy-starved Pakistan. When the Indian trade delegation accused their Pakistani counterparts of discrimination in raw jute exports in July 1952, the Pakistani delegates countered that, “this was, in fact, not an act of discrimination, but merely a matter of their commercial policy calculated to help the sale of raw jute. . . . India, having progressed towards self-sufficiency in raw jute, could only consume a small part of the raw jute which Pakistan had to sell. Therefore, Pakistan had no option but to offer jute to India’s competitors at cheaper prices so that the latter could stand in competition with India in the American market.”53
The trade stoppage of 1949–50 also witnessed an intensified effort by the Pakistani government to police the national loyalties of traders and corporations engaged in the jute trade. The Marwari and Hindu traders who dominated Bengal’s hinterland jute trade were particularly subject to state suspicion. In July 1949 an editorial in the Dawn, the Karachi-based official mouthpiece of the Pakistan government, blamed the fall of jute prices on “Indian Big Business.” They pointed the finger of blame at “big Marwari business interests in Dacca and other places who, acting as the agents of jute manufacturers in India, are engaged in speculation in jute crops in order to force down prices.” The Dawn urged the government to tackle the issue “with prompt and energetic action.” “Tendering advice to the Big Business in India,” the Dawn opined, “is as futile as preaching the gospel to an angry bison.”54
The East Bengal legislature passed the “Jute Dealers’ Registration Act.” Ostensibly meant to standardize weights and measures and prevent illegal exactions in hinterland markets, the central feature of the act was to make it compulsory for all jute dealers to be registered. The act became a means of controlling the national loyalties of jute dealers, as merchants and corporations whose Pakistani loyalties were suspect—mainly because they were Hindu—were frequently denied licenses or had their licenses canceled.55 Marwari firms were also denied access to state facilities and contracts. During the devaluation crisis, in an attempt to shore up jute prices, the National Bank of Pakistan provided credit on easy terms to dealers to purchase fiber. Only registered firms were eligible for state credit and only three Marwari firms in all of Bengal made the list.56
Following the devaluation crisis of 1949–50, the Pakistani state intensified its surveillance of the jute trade. From the state’s perspective, it became even more important to police flows of jute across national borders and to punish traders who were trying to evade state surveillance. The state’s desperation resulted in a dynamic of harassment, evasion, and punishment that came to characterize state and society relations in the postcolonial Pakistani jute industry. This was not limited to those whose national loyalties were considered suspicious—that is, to Hindus and Hindu-owned businesses. In 1954 the Pakistan Jute Association (PJA) complained that steamers carrying jute from Narayanganj to Calcutta had to pass through numerous customs or police checks and, at each point, the shipment was stopped and inspected and traders were harassed.57 Jute shippers’ exports were monitored through a complex system of documentation and inspections that the PJA described as “cumbersome, complicated and time-consuming.”58 In 1954 the president of the Pakistan Jute Association complained: “the export control procedure for jute which has been allowed to just grow since partition without a systematic overhaul, has become so unwieldy as to render it almost unworkable.” He detailed the delays and difficulties involved in exporting jute through official channels:
The procedure for obtaining State Bank permission to export through EPC forms, and obtaining export licenses from the Jute Board has become lengthy and unwieldy, it is still difficult to get the State Bank to allow remittances to buyers to their legitimate claims. The Customs Department . . . are delaying consignments where there is the slightest reason. All these difficulties are . . . having an effect on consumers of jute causing confusion and uncertainty not only within Pakistan but also in the trade and industry all over the world.59
State harassment was coupled with jute traders’ evasion and avoidance. They falsified paperwork: “under-invoicing” and “under-grading” were rife in jute exports. Firms underreported the value of exports in official documents, claiming smaller quantities or a poorer quality of fiber than the actual consignment. Traders then collected the difference between the officially reported value and actually received value for themselves, thus denying the state its share of revenue. The state responded with punishment. In November 1954 the government canceled the licenses of thirteen firms, stating in a press release that “they were forced to take this measure owing to the alarming proportions that malpractices in the jute trade, such as under-invoicing, under-grading and registration of bogus contracts were assuming, resulting in loss of foreign exchange to the State and making it increasingly difficult for reputable shippers to carry on normal trade.”60
Even such punitive measures did not put an end to the practices of under-invoicing and grade manipulation. Avoidance, evasion, and corruption were so widespread as to be considered commonplace. In May 1955 the Calcutta Jute Brokers and Dealers Association wrote to ask the Indian government not to protest Pakistani trade policy, because “if the Pakistani authorities rigorously enforced their rules about currency exchange and correct grading, India would have to pay more for Pakistani jute than she has done in the past.”61 They added, “if one takes the prices current in Pakistan, adds the cost of transport, insurance, export duty, etc. and converts into Indian currency at the Pakistani rate of exchange, it is obvious that Pakistani jute cannot be sold in India at the prices at which it is sold, unless there is under-grading or exchange manipulation or some such irregularity.”62 In effect, Indian jute importers were asking their government not to push the Pakistani government to relax its regulations on jute exports to India because Pakistani jute exporters were effectively abrogating those regulations thus making them meaningless.
The Pakistani state’s failures in implementing its laws did not, however, diminish the dynamic of harassment, evasion, and avoidance that characterized postcolonial state and society relations in Pakistan’s jute economy. This dynamic was not restricted to merchants with means in the export trade; it also extended down to petty traders and cultivators. When the Jute Dealers Registration Act was floored in the Legislative Assembly, Mir Ahmed Ali, a legislator from a rural, jute-growing constituency, asked that the act exclude farias and beparis—petty jute traders who often combined cultivation with small trade. He said, “If the Act does not exclude those who do business with less money, who buy and sell less than 100 maunds of jute, these people will be oppressed (zuloom). I am saying these few words so that these poor people are not made to suffer and the police don’t go after them. . . . Please remember Pakistan is a country of the poor.”63 Farias, beparis, and cultivators were also subject to bureaucratic harassment and they were just as adept at evading and avoiding the postcolonial state as more substantial capitalists at the top of the commodity chain. They were, however, subject to far more extreme forms of state violence than wealthy and well-connected merchants.
When the devaluation of September 1949 put a stop to official trade between India and Pakistan, smuggling flourished. British trade interests estimated that 600,000 bales of jute were smuggled out of Pakistan in the first six months of the trade stoppage—that is, 600,000 bales were transported across partition lines to India without paying any duties and exchanging currencies on the black market.64 During the 1950s and the 1960s, the IJMA and PJA regularly estimated the amount of jute smuggled out of Pakistan into India: estimates ranged between 300,000 and 900,000 bales annually. Smuggling was a threat to Pakistan’s national economy and jute smugglers were enemies of the state. Not only were jute smugglers denying the state much-needed revenue and resources, they were aiding and abetting the enemy: India.
Smuggling was, however, almost impossible to control. While the Pakistani state had hurriedly established customs posts and checkpoints along major railways and steamer routes connecting the delta to its former metropolis in Calcutta, it found it much more difficult to police the numerous country roads and waterways that crisscrossed East Pakistan’s twisting and undemarcated borders. In the northeastern borders of Sylhet and Assam, jute was smuggled on country boats into India, where it was relabeled as Indian-produced jute, before being transported to Calcutta. P. Das Gupta, the Government of India’s trade commissioner in Dacca, stated in a report in December 1949: “On the Sylhet border, it would be quite true to say, that jute is smuggled into Assam and rebooked to Calcutta in bond through Pakistan.”65 In the southwest, the borders of Jessore and Khulna close to Calcutta, “have gained some notoriety for smuggling to India.”66 The rhythms of smuggling were closely related to the weather. During the monsoons, smugglers along the northern borders, where the Brahmaputra and Meghna river systems crossed partition lines, used boats to cross the flooded borders. On the other hand, in the southwest region, smuggling increased during the drier winter months, as waters receded and rural roads became usable by ox carts. On December 8, 1949, the Indian government reported that smuggling “was expected to increase in a few weeks time with the drying up of the roadways which were at present impassable. It was estimated that 2 to 3 lakhs bales in all would move into India by this means.”67
Smuggling was financed by black-market currency transactions. The overvalued Pakistani rupee had resulted in a substantial unofficial market, where the Pakistan rupee traded at much lower values. Within a month of devaluation a “free market on a strictly cash basis in Indian and Pakistani currency had sprung up in Calcutta at rates varying from Rs. 100 to Rs. 115 (Indian) to Rs. 100 (Pakistan).”68 Rates for “Hundi transactions”—promisory notes—varied from Rs. 105 to Rs. 115 Indian to Rs. 100 Pakistan. This was against an official rate of Rs. 144 Indian to Rs. 100 Pakistani. Currency black markets sprang up all along the East Pakistan–India border in order to finance the illicit trade between the regions: the value of the Pakistani rupee increased as one moved further away from the border into East Pakistan.
For the Pakistani government, jute smuggling resulted not just in reduced revenue to the state but also weakened its bargaining position vis-à-vis India, in trying to force the Indian state to recognize the higher value of the Pakistani rupee. India, on the other hand, did its best to encourage—or at least not prevent—smuggling. The Indian collector of land customs stated in November 1949: “The only [Government of India] restriction in regard to jute smuggled into the Indian Union was insistence on the execution of a bond from the parties that sales would be made only to duly licensed purchasers. . . . [We] were inclined to the view that no restrictions of any kind should be placed on the flow of jute across the border from Pakistan into India.”69
The Pakistani government, on the other hand, attempted to put an end to smuggling during the devaluation crisis. They intensified the surveillance of jute-laden steamer flats and railway wagons: in November 1949 steamer companies claimed that between 700,000 and 800,000 maunds of raw jute loaded onto flats were being held up in Khulna’s river port. The Pakistani government refused to release flats without proof that payments for the jute, including export duties, had been made in Pakistani rupees at official exchange rates. The steamer companies complained that it was difficult to provide these documents as the seized jute was made up of small consignments purchased in small trading towns scattered throughout the delta.70 The procedure was considered to be so “complex and difficult” that the Pakistani government never actually received a written request for the release of jute, though the IJMA sent several representatives to meet with Pakistani authorities.71
The government also seized consignments of “India to India” jute—that is, jute from Assam, Tripura, or Cooch Behar—traveling through its territory. On December 22, 1949, the Indian government was informed that “24 flats loaded with 345,116 mds (or 69,023 bales) of ‘India to India’ jute were being held in Khulna by the Pakistan authorities. It was also reported that Pakistan proposed to appoint a jute expert for inspecting every consignment with a view to determining whether the jute was of Indian or Pakistan origin.”72 The steamer companies responded by stopping loading jute for Calcutta in river ports in Assam. Jute was stuck in the Indian state of Tipperah, unable to find transport through Pakistan. Pakistan’s barriers to the transit trade led to a rapid buildup of raw jute in Tipperah and “some parties had found it worth their while to shift jute by air from Tipperah State to Calcutta.”73
While the Pakistani state found it easy to police jute bulked on railway wagons and steamer flats in market towns, they found it much more difficult to police the nation’s largely undemarcated borders. The government attempted to control sales and movements of jute in border regions by instituting a border security force—the East Pakistan Rifles, reconstituted from the colonial Eastern Frontier Rifles. The strengthening of its border force constituted a significant portion of the province of East Bengal’s budget, eating up the province’s strained resources.74 In 1951 the EPR seized three jute-laden country boats at the Assam/Mymensingh border, near Kaliarchar thana.75 Later that year, the officer in charge of the Fulbari police station, at the Rangpur–Cooch Behar border, prevented a number of jute-laden ox carts from going to India. The Indian government alleged that about six thousand maunds of jute from an Indian enclave in East Pakistan could not be transported “on account of harassment caused at the Rangpur border to the cartmen carrying jute by the East Bengal Police of the Fulbari police station.”76
In November 1949 the Pakistani government appointed agents to buy up all the jute within ten miles of Pakistan’s international boundary to prevent smuggling: the state’s favored capitalists, the Ispahanis, received the bulk of the contract. In subsequent years, the government intensified these controls. In 1953 the provincial government of East Bengal assumed the power to ban jute cultivation outright in parts of East Bengal for “improved quality, to prevent smuggling, and to bring more money to cultivators.”77 In 1954 the government issued orders banning the movement of jute within five miles of the border, with only the Jute Board authorized to arrange for purchases of jute. Such measures were experienced as oppression and harassment by the delta’s citizenry. In October 1954, Probhash Chandra Lahiry, the Congress member from Rajshahi, complained that jute could not move “to the bazaars of the interior of the country” as the Jute Board had not, as yet, arranged for purchases of jute from those areas.78
These measures, however, were not sufficient to put an end to smuggling, and the increasingly desperate state adopted more draconian measures. In February 1952 the civilian government called in the army—with shoot-to-kill orders—to put a stop to smuggling. This measure was justified on the grounds of national security, the economic and existential threat posed by India. In a speech in February 1952, Fazlur Rahman, Pakistan’s commerce minister, argued that, “instead of coming to an agreement with us, India is banking on smuggling jute from Pakistan. . . . This therefore has thrown a challenge to the integrity of our people and the efficiency of our administration. . . . The issue is made one of national prestige and honour.”79 The India Pakistan British Association catalogued the draconian anti-smuggling measures taken by the Pakistani state in 1952:
The Government are certainly taking determined steps to stop the smuggling of jute which has undermined the strength of their bargaining power with India. During the past two years, smuggled jute has done much to keep some of the Indian mills going. The Army has been called in to help deal with smugglers and orders are practically on a “shoot at sight” basis. The National Bank of Pakistan has advanced Rs 50 lakhs to the cooperative societies in East Pakistan and these societies, and some private firms, are to buy up all jute within five miles of the frontier. After six weeks, even possession of jute within the five-mile belt will be an offence.80
Even army intervention could not stop smuggling. The government of Pakistan called in the army once again to prevent smuggling in late 1957—the military’s anti-smuggling mission was appropriately titled “Operation Close Door.” Defending the decision to call in the army, then prime minister of the East Pakistan provincial government, Ataur Rahman Khan, said, “I considered it [smuggling] to be a war. It was one of the greatest menaces trying to strangulate East Pakistan.”81 The military’s anti-smuggling drive led to accusations on the floor of the East Pakistan Legislative Assembly of “indignities, harassment, physical assault inflicted upon licensed businessmen and traders and citizens holding responsible positions.”82 Fazlul Quader Chowdhury defended the army in the assembly, pointing to its success in preventing smuggling—the army had seized fifty thousand maunds or ten thousand bales of jute during the operation. Ten thousand bales, however, was only a fraction of the several hundred thousand bales smuggled to India annually.
This dynamic of harassment, evasion, and punishment extended further down the jute commodity chain, down to the primary producers. In 1948, in a desperate attempt to raise revenue, the cash-strapped provincial government of East Bengal announced a tax of one rupee per acre on jute cultivation. The provincial government had inherited the task of regulating the acreage of jute by issuing licenses to individual jute cultivators. The peasant populist Krishak Praja Party had undertaken the task of regulating acreage through licenses as a means of raising jute prices during the closing years of the depression. For the resource-starved post-partition provincial government, this duty was to prove onerous and expensive.
The provincial government estimated in 1948 that over 5 million licenses were to be issued at a total cost of 5.6 million rupees. The Finance Ministry proposed that “the cultivators may perhaps pay a portion of the cost of the Jute Staff maintained for their benefit.”83 The ministry estimated that a license fee of 4 annas per quarter acre of land sown with jute would provide the government with about 2 million rupees. The provincial government of East Bengal decided to implement the Finance Ministry’s proposal through an ordinance, bypassing the need for debate and discussion in the legislature.84 On February 26, 1948, the government promulgated an ordinance stating that “no grower of jute . . . shall be granted a license unless he applies in writing to the licensing officer . . . and that no such appliance shall be entertained unless it bears a court-fee stamp calculated at [four annas for every quarter acre of jute].”85 Just over six months after independence and partition, the postcolonial state of Pakistan had imposed a tax on jute cultivation.
The ordinance was renewed in 1949 and extended to Sylhet district, formerly a part of Assam where jute cultivation had been unregulated prior to partition. In February 1950, after two years of collecting license fees, a bill was finally introduced on the floor of the Legislative Assembly. Tofazzal Ali, agriculture minister of the provincial government, introduced the bill, stating that it was “in the interests of the national economy that the cultivators should also pay a portion of the cost [of regulating acreage] in the shape of a jute license fee.”86 Tofazzal Ali did not think that the fee was excessive: “I, for one, hailing from a rural area of this province, having been in constant touch with the jute growers, make bold to submit that this fee will not be a burden on the growers to an extent that they will find difficult to bear.”87
The jute license fee proved an extremely difficult tax to collect, and government collections regularly fell far below expectations. The director of agriculture wrote in September 1949 that “it now appears that a large sum on that account [of the Jute License fee] for both years [1948 and 1949] still remains unrealized. In majority of cases this was due to the intentional defaults of the growers.” In 1950 the Jute Regulation Department listed the reasons why “the collection of license fees have been so far very unsatisfactory in most of the districts”: the “exodus” of Hindu growers and Hindu government employees, “economic distress among the people,” the “scarcity of Pakistani small coins in Mufassal areas,” and the nondisposal of prosecution cases against cultivators for not paying fees in the previous two years.
The collection of the license fee was a burdensome task. The distribution of five million licenses required a lot of paper and paper was scarce in East Bengal. In January 1949 S. Abdullah, the director of agriculture in East Bengal, wrote that there would be delays in issuing licenses because “there is almost no chance of getting from the Government Press the Jute Regulation forms sent for printing.”88 Further, the administrative hierarchy of the new government was weak. In April 1949 the chairman of the Goalmari Jute Committee wrote to the Jute Regulation Department of the Government of East Bengal, stating that they had collected up to 60 percent of the license fee and asked if the government would extend the allotted time period for collections. The telegram stated that “partial collection . . . will create serious disturbances.”89 The Jute Department wrote back somewhat irritably that the period had been extended until June and there should be no confusion about full collection.
The main problem with the collection of license fees was, however, that cultivators simply evaded and avoided them—that they “intentionally” or “willfully” defaulted on payments. The Jute Department felt that this was due to “some parties . . . making anti-propaganda against collection of jute license fees which as a result is badly suffering in certain areas.”90 “Anti-propaganda” was met with “counter-propaganda.” In April 1949 the Directorate of Agriculture requested 150 rupees to print and distribute leaflets in jute tracts in rural Bengal “to make counter-propaganda”—100 rupees for Mymensingh and 50 rupees for other parts of Bengal. The following year, the department requested 965 rupees for distribution of pamphlets throughout the delta. The pamphlet distributed in Mymensingh stated, “It is regrettable that in some places Pakistan’s bitter enemies (ghorotor shotru) are misinforming simple believing peasants (shorol, bishwashi chashigon), who are hesitating to pay the license fee.”91
The pamphlets also announced punishments for cultivators who sowed jute without paying license fees, warning that failure to pay the fee in time would result in six months’ imprisonment or a 350 rupee fine. In the summer of 1949 the department prosecuted cultivators across the jute tracts for not paying the fee. The government, however, was concerned that strict punishments would result in agrarian unrest. In August 1949, when touring the jute-growing subdivision of Gaibandha in Rangpur, “certain people complained” to the provincial minister of relief “that cases have been instituted against cultivators who did not pay ‘jute license fee’, and in some cases the court has fined the accused. The local grievance is that it is a hardship on the part of the cultivators.”92 To prevent these grievances from boiling over into agrarian unrest, the government proposed that prosecutions would be withdrawn “in cases . . . in which the persons prosecuted pay up the license fee and apologise.”93 The Jute Department tasked with collecting license fees, however, felt that lenience would only encourage evasion. The director of agriculture wrote that the withdrawal of prosecution cases would “likely result in serious consequences and regulation of jute cultivation would become meaningless and collection of license fees would in course of time be impossible. . . . Once this is given out that the growers can get out of prosecution only by paying the license fee it would be impossible to control such a large number of them.”94
In an effort to put more pressure on cultivators to pay license fees, the Directorate of Agriculture requested permission to prosecute cultivators under the Public Demands Recovery Act. Under this act, the department would be able to confiscate the cultivators’ property as punishment for nonpayment of license fees. They “hoped that the mere fact of the grant of permission . . . would have a salutary effect on growers and it may not be necessary to have recourse to that procedure in large scale.”95 In the end, the government chose not to confiscate property, though the debate underlined the repressive tendencies of the postcolonial state as it set about realizing revenue from jute. Notably, peasant households did not simply submit to government policies—farias and beparis continued to smuggle jute and jute cultivators continued to withhold taxes. The government responded with draconian laws—six months’ imprisonment and/or a 350 rupee fine for nonpayment of taxes and shoot-on-sight orders for the smuggler sneaking a boatload or ox cart of jute across the border. These draconian measures were implemented sporadically and unevenly, which further encouraged evasion. As Ahmed Kamal has demonstrated, this dynamic of surveillance, evasion, and violence put an end to the peasant utopian vision of Pakistan.
Jute informed both peasant aspirations for Pakistan prior to 1947 and peasant disillusionment with Pakistan after 1947. Through the 1946 election campaign, the Bengal delta’s jute cultivators came to see Pakistan as a Muslim peasant utopia—a promised time and a place characterized by justice, truth, morality, and freedom, and devoid of corruption, sin, exploitation, and hunger. In formulating Pakistan as peasant utopia, the Muslim League absorbed the idioms, institutions, and even the personnel of the Krishak Praja Party. However, while the KPP had campaigned on legislative and statist solutions to agrarian immiseration, the League campaigned on the poetics of utopia. Famine had discredited the KPP’s statist solutions to agrarian immiseration and, moreover, famine had heightened the appeal of a peasant utopian Pakistan. Remarkably—with the important exception of violent attacks on Hindus in Noakhali and Tipperah after the 1946 elections—the Muslim peasant utopian politics of Pakistan was contained within electoral processes.
Peasant disappointment with Pakistan arose out of the postcolonial state project of transforming jute from a colonial commodity into a national resource producing revenue, foreign exchange, and strategic advantage for the state. The project of harnessing fiber to the national economy required the state to monitor, regulate, and police circulations of fiber across the Bengal delta’s newly and arbitrarily drawn partition lines. The Pakistani government’s first attempt to enforce these partition lines took place in November 1947, through an effort to assess an export duty on jute fibers traveling from the delta to Calcutta.
The devaluation crisis of 1949 brought an end to the possibility of free and open trade between the two post-partition states. India and Pakistan now engaged in open and hostile economic rivalry. The delta’s former metropolis of Calcutta was now, in the state’s imagination, enemy territory and flows of jute along well-grooved lines between the deltaic hinterland and metropolitan Calcutta were subjected to extreme forms of surveillance. Attempts to evade surveillance were criminalized as smuggling and black marketeering. The postcolonial state did not see smugglers and black-marketers as average criminals, but as enemies of the state who, in the words of an East Pakistani chief minister, were engaged in “war” with Pakistan. Thus the Pakistani state’s project of transforming jute into a national resource resulted in extreme forms of state violence against its own citizenry, as the army was deployed on East Pakistan’s border to shoot and kill suspected smugglers on sight.
The efforts to transform the colonial commodity into a national resource created a particular dynamic in state and society relations around the jute economy, up and down the commodity chain. The state implemented measures to regulate, inspect, police, and tax the production and circulation of jute; jute cultivators and traders devised strategies to evade the state; and the state implemented draconian measures to punish jute cultivators and traders for their evasions. For jute cultivators, this dynamic of harassment, evasion, and punishment took place in the form of a license fee on jute cultivation; laws that restricted the trade of jute near borderlands; and, subsequently, laws that banned jute cultivation from borderlands outright. Wealthier jute cultivators who combined cultivation with petty trading faced even more regulations—they were required to register as jute dealers, their ox carts and boats could be seized upon suspicion of smuggling, and, in the most extreme case, they could be shot on sight if suspected of smuggling. The state’s extreme measures never worked: smuggling continued unabated and the government was unable to realize license fees from most cultivators. Yet failure only prompted the state to implement ever harsher punishment against those who thwarted its ambitions.
Far from the agent of peasant economic emancipation, the postcolonial Pakistani state was a source of harassment and oppression, an entity to be avoided and evaded. Ahmed Kamal has argued that in East Pakistan, during the years following independence and partition, the “state” turned against the “nation,” brutally suppressing peasant movements over sharecroppers’ rights, water management, and food distribution.96 This violent oppression of its agrarian citizenry, Kamal contends, extinguished the aspiration of Pakistan as peasant utopia, leading to the resounding electoral defeat of the Muslim League in 1954.97 Complementing Kamal’s argument, this chapter has charted the dynamics of harassment and evasion that resulted from the state’s efforts to assert sovereignty over fiber. Jute cultivators’ disillusionment with Pakistan arose out of the government’s frequently violent efforts to monitor, regulate, and tax the cultivation and trade of jute.