পাতা:বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র (চতুর্দশ খণ্ড).pdf/৪১৪

বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ চতুর্দশ খন্ড has happened. This is a war between the pure and the impure, he informed me over a cup of green tea. "The people here may have Muslim names and call themselves Muslims. But they are Hindus at heart. You won't believe that the maulvi (mulla) of the Cantonment mosque here issued a fatwa (edict) during Friday prayers that the people would attain jannat (paradise) if they killed West Pakistanis. We sorted the bastard out and we are now sorting out the others. Those who are left will be real Muslims. We wiłł even teach them Urdu." Everywhere I found officers and men fashioning imaginative garments of justification from the fabric of their own prejudices. Scapegoats had to be found to legitimize, ever, for their own consciences, the dreadful "solution" to what in essence was a political problem: the Bengalis won the election and wanted to rule. The Punjabis whose ambitions and interests have dominated government policies since the founding of Pakistan in 1947, would brook no erosion of their power. The army backed them up. Officials privately justify what has been done as retaliation for the massacre of non- Bengalis before the army moved in. But events suggest that the pogrom was not the result of a spontaneous or undisciplined reaction. It was planned. It seems clear that the "sorting out" began to be planned about the time that Lt.Gen. Thikka Khan took over the governorship of East Bengal, from the gentle, selfeffacing. Admiral Ahsan, and the military command there, from the scholarly Lt-Gen. Sahibzada Khan. That was at the beginning of March, when Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's civil disobedience movement was gathering momentum after the postponement of the assembly meeting from which the Bengalis hoped for so much. President Yahya Khan, it is said, acquiesced in the tide of resentment caused in the top echelons of the military establishment by the increasing humiliation of the West Pakistani troops stationed in East Bengal. The Punjabi Eastern Command at Dacca continues to dominate the policies of the Central Government. (It is perhaps worth pointing out that the Khans arc not related: Khan is a common surname in Pakistan.) When the army units fanned out in Dacca on the evening of March 25, in preemptive strikes against the mutiny planned for the small hours of the next morning, many of them carried lists of people to be liquidated. These included the Hindus and large numbers of Muslims; students, Awami Leaguers, professors, journalists and those who had been prominent in Sheikh Mujib's movement. The charge, now publicly made, that the army was subjected to mortar attack from the Jagannath Hall, where the Hindu University students lived, hardly justifies the obliteration of two Hindu colonics, built around the temples on Ramna racecourse, and a third in Shankharipatti, in the heart of the old city. Nor does it explain why the sizeable Hindu populations of Dacca and the neighboring industrial town of Narayanganj should have vanished so completely during the round-the- clock curfew on March 26 and 27. There is similarly no trace of scores of Muslims who were rounded up during the curfew hours. These people were eliminated in a planned operation: an improvised response to Hindu aggression would have had vastly different results.