পাতা:বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র (চতুর্দশ খণ্ড).pdf/৪৪৬

414 বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ চতুর্দশ খন্ড This is the crazy logic behind the repressive overkill of the last few months. While the first great wave of refugees was overwhelmingly Muslim Awami League supporters, succeeding waves-until very recently when Muslim refugees began again to increase- have been overwhelmingly Hindu as the army and the razakars, or special constabulary, have incited and, at times, compelled the civilian population to turn against their Hindu neighbors. Pakistan propaganda for both home and external consumption has sought to present the whole Bengal problem as the work of a handful of treacherous politicians. Hindu money and Indian intervention. In so far as Yahya Khan is convincing on this, he can hope to mobilize, for his regime at least some Bengali opinion inside Bengal, win popular support in the Punjab and provide outside nations, uneasy as ever about internal conflicts, with some excuse, however feeble, for their own shameful silence. For precisely the same reason, because India knows that this is Pakistan's purpose and because India wants the world to see the crisis as it is, as a problem for Pakistan the Indian government declines to respond. Resolutely insisting that this is an 'internal' Pakistan crisis, maintaining strict discipline over the army's response to border incidents, concealing the communal character of the repression in Bengal, avoiding a direct confrontation with Pakistan in the Security Council, the Indian posture is grimly defensive. Meanwhile she has to accept the pain and the cost and disruption of an unprecedented influx of refugees, swamping West Bengal, Tripura and Assam and totally overshadowing the short-term outlook of the whole Indian economy. At one level it seems as if they are involved in a dreadful contest to establish whether Pakistan's capacity to inflict suffering is greater or less than India's capacity to absorb it. So far India has held her own-and the danger of a direct Pakistan military attack has slightly receded with the signing of the Indo-Soviet pact. But the contest is not yet over. The 8 million people who have swamped West Bengal and the other provinces of India are refugees not of hunger but of oppression and fear. In the next few months as hunger spreads inside East Bengal a second wave of people, the refugees of hunger, could well flow across the frontier in numbers difficult even to visualize. In facing these problems, India has the right to expect aid and encouragement from Britain, and from other powers in both West and East. But while assistance for India on a scale commensurate with her vast burdens must be forthcoming, this can be no more than a palliative. For the problem is not India but Pakistan, and the overriding aim of policy must therefore be to bring Pakistan as quickly as possible to accept freedom and self-government in East Bengal. Yahya Khan must not be allowed for a moment to believe that the ponderous diplomatic offensive launched this week, has even a hope of success. When Mr. Bhutto describes the recall of Tikka Khan and the appointment of a civilian as Governor of Bengal as "whitewash" and when the Pakistan government announces the easing censorship on the very day that the British High Commission has to suspend the distribution of British newspapers in Pakistan one need not perhaps worry unduly. But it should be recognized that these and other moves by the Pakistan government are designed to give some vestige of responsibility to their regime in East Bengal and thus to