March 26, 1971, punctuates a volatile moment in the subcontinent’s history. The Bangladesh liberation war saw East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in the throes of achieving an especially bloody independence. Thousands were killed, and many more displaced.
However, for Ceylon, the conflict came as a boon to its tea industry. In the run up to the war, the tea trade, which accounted for Ceylon’s primary foreign exchange, was in a precarious state. The Indian government’s decision to abolish export duty on tea crippled Ceylon’s competitive edge. Foreign buyers could now purchase more Indian tea for the same price. The 1969 Lusaka Conference, which appealed to the world’s nations to enforce trade sanctions against the racist South African regimes, further debilitated Ceylon. The country lost as much as 90 million pounds in foreign exchange, a third of which constituted tea exports.
Ironically it was the Bangladesh liberation war that offered Ceylon a temporary respite. East Pakistan, which was West Pakistan’s biggest market for manufactured goods, severed all ties with the latter. Syed Nazrul Islam, President of the ‘People’s Republic of Bangladesh’, called upon his countrymen to continue the boycott of all Pakistani goods.
And East Pakistan did not escape unscathed. Food stocks, jute mills and tea estates were destroyed by Pakistani troops.Thousands of tea workers were robbed of their only means of livelihood. Several started migrating across the Indian border in droves.
With its tea gardens in a shambles, Pakistan was compelled to look elsewhere to meet the West’s insatiable demand for tea. Every year as much as 70 million pounds of medium and low grown tea was imported from Pakistan. Of this, East Pakistan provided 65 million pounds a year. With the loss of its tea basin, Pakistan had little choice but to enter Ceylon’s tea auctions. It procured 15 million pounds of tea from the island country. This was a three-fold growth, compared to the five million it imported the previous year. Prices of Ceylon tea registered a 20 per cent increase per pound in the following weeks.
However, Ceylon’s successful economic recovery was soon to be complicated by the politics of the Bangladesh liberation war. India’s External Affairs Minister Swaran Singh’s three-day visit to Ceylon in September 1971 to strengthen economic ties was inflected by antagonism. A section of Ceylon’s free media found India’s involvement in the East Bengal crisis antithetical to its self-professed stance of non-alignment. Sun , an English daily, ran an article titled “Swaran Singh, the aligned non-aligned”. Ceylon Daily News ran a full-page advertisement insidiously attacking India’s intervention in a sovereign country’s internal affairs. It was widely reported that the Pakistan’s High Commissioner Altaf Ahmed Sheikh even wrote to the editors praising them for upholding the principles of non-alignment.
Not surprisingly, Ceylon, which had categorically announced its policy of strict neutrality, found itself under scrutiny. News of it providing fuelling facilities to Pakistani aircraft and ships made an already tenuous relationship with India worse.
While the war may have afforded Ceylon an ingenious economic opportunity, it also provided as many opportunities to burn bridges. Ceylon had found an easy market for its teas in Pakistan, though the continuing trade deficit and emergence of unregulated competition from Africa underlined the dangers of isolating India. A proposal for an Indo-Ceylon tea consortium was strongly lobbied. The agreement sought to enable price cooperation between the two countries to facilitate selling their teas on grounds of mutual advantage. The growing threats of Tamil militancy within Ceylon made India’s political support even more indispensible.
The uneasy tension of maintaining political alliances while meeting economic compulsions in circumstances of war remains exceptionally interesting.
