| শিরোনাম | সূত্র | তারিখ |
| ১৩৫। বাংলার জন্য কাঁদো | নিউ ষ্টেটসম্যান | ২ এপ্রিল, ১৯৭১ |
NEWSTATESMAN, LONDON, APRIL 2, 1971
WEEP FOR BENGAL
By Mervyin Jones
"Despite censorship and official lies, reports are coming out of Dacca that must shock even readers accustomed to all that's implied in the sinister phrase: 'Order was restored.' President Yahya Khan's thanks have been ordered into destructive action, no holds barred, against the people of the East Pakistan; and, in grim logic, the enemy must be the whole people because they had declared themselves with rare unanimity for demands of self-rule.
"For the moment, one has to think of the human tragedy. With pitiful wooden shacks burned to the ground-soldiers were seen 'armed' with petrol cans-those who had little have lost their all. Many thousands, it seems, are fleeing to the countryside, dodging tanks that fire at random; but it is countryside they can barely feed its normal inhabitants. Hunger and disease must be the followers of sudden death. And, this only an episode in the bitter history of a people whose experience for almost 200 years has been of poverty, oppression and exploitation-at the hands of British rulers, of moneylenders and land sharks from other parts of the sub-continent, and, since 1947, of the arrogant oligarchy that dominates Pakistan.
"Nehru reflected in The Discovery of India (written during his last spell in prison) that the poverty of India can be correlated with the duration of subjection-the deepest misery in Bengal subdued by Give, and the most effective maintenance of a viable economy in Punjab where the British defeated the Sikh princes as late as 1845. Of course, there are other factors. Still, the sorrows of history gather weight with time, each generation laying a load on the last. And, it was chiefly Bengal that endured the primitive stage of imperialism as sheer robbery and wrecking. 'Bungalow' and 'jungle' are British words taken from Hindustani, but so is 'loot'.
"The extreme of poverty has continued to be a major theme in Bengal's experience: over-population long before the rest of the world knew it, marginal subsistence farming in the countryside, squalor in the cities (Dacca's shums have long rivaled those of Calcutta), famine in 1891, famine in 1943. The other theme was desperate revolt and political violence. "The background picture must also take account of a Bengali national character. One must handle this concept with caution, of course, but both reputation and self awareness react upon reality. These, then, would be the generalizations: Bengalis are spontaneous; talkative, emotional, sensitive to slights, quick with the handshake or the embrace but also with the knife. The value poetry and music, the decorative arts, good food, and beauty in women. Outsiders regard them as undisciplined, rather comic and certainly no
