পাতা:বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র (চতুর্দশ খণ্ড).pdf/৩৩০

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বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র : চতুর্দশ খণ্ড
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to feel exploited and subjugated, grew more and more restive, their predicament being particularly galling because they constituted a majority of Pakistan's population. It was an attempt by the President General Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan-who, of course, is from West Pakistan-to deal with some of these problems that precipitated the present calamity. Apparently hoping to mollify the majority and to defuse what he regarded as a threat to the union of Pakistan, he decided, in 1969, to hand over his military government to civilian control, and in December of 1970 he allowed Pakistanis, for the first time in their twenty-three-year history, to vote - on the basis of universal male suffrage-for representatives to a constituent assembly. In the election, the Awami league, led by the Bengali pacifist Sheikh Mujibur Rahman or Mujibcampaigned openly for political and economic autonomy for East Pakistan, and own almost all the Bengal seats, while the Pakistan People's Party led by the Punjabi military Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was returned with a bare majority in West Pakistan. Once the election results had made it clear that the Awami League would dominate the constituent assembly-and no doubt, the civilian government that emerged from itBhutto let it be known that he would not participate in any assembly or government in which West Pakistan and the Pakistan People party were not equal partners with East Pakistan and the Awami League. Mujib saw in Bhutto's stand only a design for perpetuating the “colonial subjugation" of East Pakistan by West Pakistan General Yahya seemed to be caught or guard by the strength of the democratic forces he had released. The election had unexpectedly turned into a reference on East Pakistan autonomy, and now that General Yahya was actually confronted with the possibility that control might pass to the eager Bengali majority, he, like Bhutto, seemed unable to countenance any change in the relationship between East Pakistan and West Pakistan, which might be the beginning of the end of the union. He/thereforestried to get Mujib to moderate his demands, and, when he failed, temporized by fisting the inaugural session of the constituent assembly. This tactic aroused protest in East Pakistan in early March of this year, and he ordered his troops to shoot demonstrators; the shooting, in turn, led to an all-out Bengali civil disobedience movement later in the month, and he gave his troops, free rein, thus causing the death of perhaps as many as two hundred thousand Muslims and Hindus in the space of a few months-and the flight of the refugees.

 As I moved through the camps. I thought of all the discussion I had heard and read of how General Yahya came to chose a military solution to a political problem. Some people here condemn the truculence of Bhutto and his clamorous followers, who had wide support in the Army; others condemn the intransigence of Mujib and his impatient supporters, who, giddy with their new freedom and heedless of the examples made of the Hungarians in 1956 and the Czechs in 1968, dismissed the power of a modern state too lightly and assumed themselves to be immune from military action -partly because in their case the action would have to be sustained from a base a thousand miles away across Indian territory. Some say it was unrealistic ever to suppose that West Pakistan would yield its preeminent position without a fight. Others say the history of Bengali grievances was so long that East Pakistan was in no mood to capitulate, especially since a cyclone that struck a month before the election had drowned two hundred and fifty thousand people. Still others blame General Yahya for completely misjudging the commitment of the Bengalis to their cause, and for not playing for more time by, for