At Jhenida and Jessore is a force probably as large as any in the Liberation “army". It consists of perhaps 750 men of whom only about 200 are trained soldiers from the East Pakistan Rifles and the East Bengal Regiment. The rest are militia and freedom fighters. The patchwork administration of Bangladesh shows endless variety. Everywhere the existing administrative cadre went over as one man to the liberation movement, and in some towns they are still running affairs.
In others respected local citizens have been brought in or Awami League assembly members are in charge. In Jhenida, at an irrigation project headquarters, a former police superintendent is military commander.
A tall, handsome man wearing a striped shirt, a webbing belt and with a pistol on a lanyard, he arrived full of euphoria from the Jessore “front" the day I was there. “We have surrounded them and we will wait till they try to come out We ought to be able to handle a battalion “he reported.
In the cool of evening, a duplicating machine thumps on, turning out directives banning hoarding, ordering Government and other officials to return to their posts, asking all students to report to the command headquarters for military training and other tasks. Grouped round a lantern on the lawn. Captain Mahbubuddin Ahmed and his aides talk of the People's Republic of Bangladesh.
"We must have freedom, even socialist freedom but not the Chinese type of freedom where everybody cannot speak and is regimented". Another says: “We just forgot our Bengali identity when we became part of Pakistan You know, they even banned Tagore, the backbone of Bengali literature, just because he was Hindu."
Atrocity stories circulate continually, and some of them are undoubtedly true. In Faridpur District Sports club, which has become the town's military headquarters, a young magistrate from Khulna told me he witnessed the machine-gunning of a protest procession “without any provocation."
Thinking it a dreadful case of some army officer losing his head, he rushed to military headquarters in his jeep and confronted the Punjabi colonel. “The colonel said my complaint was nonsense, and that the next time people were shot. I the magistrate would be one of the first to die."
A young man is led in to recount the story of the death of a Catholic missionary in Jessore because Bengali have a sad conviction that such a death counts higher in our scales than the deaths of many Moslems. Excitedly, he explains that the priest was shot down in his mission, together with some native Christians, and that afterwards a Punjabi brigadier came and apologized, Saying it was an accident.
"The other priest told him how could such a thing be an accident when there is a Red-Cross mark on the roof of the mission,” The story has the ring of truth.
Without accepting the inflated stories of the number of deaths, it is more than clear (hat many people will die as the Pakistani Army moves on, and probably not just the young, men manning the roadblocks, or crouched with their Lee Enfield’s in the bushes near ditches they have dug across the roads.
