পাতা:বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র (চতুর্দশ খণ্ড).pdf/৬৪৯

এই পাতাটির মুদ্রণ সংশোধন করা প্রয়োজন।

617 বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ চতুর্দশ খন্ড East Pakistanis who escaped into West Bengal during the past few months are unlikely to return home except as rebels and saboteurs. Powerful disruptive forces are at work and West Pakistan's resources to meet the Herculean challenge of saving the east wing from the four horsemen of the Apocalypse arc strictly limited. The military authorities say that as soon as India stops its "campaign to divide Pakistan" they will be able to make a real breakthrough in the east wing. Some West Pakistani leaders, notably People s Party Chairman Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, believe that the restoration of civilian rule would do the trick. Bhutto says the situation in East Pakistan can be "put right" in just five years provided a civilian central government would take over from the military soon, A small but significant number of West Pakistani intellectuals believe that the battle against poverty and disruptive forces is already lost. They see the recent disturbances in East Pakistan as "the beginning of the disintegration of the entire subcontinent. They believe that the military will be unable to hold on to the east wing and that the loss of the province would be immediately followed by the secession of West Bengal from India. They point to the fact that West Bengal has been turbulent and under virtual military occupation for the past decade. The catalyst for such a disintegration, they claim, would be a war between India and Pakistan which would "break into pieces the mosaic of nations that covers the sub-continent. Neither India nor Pakistan have yet recovered from their losses in the 1965 war. But there are forces on both sides which advocate armed confrontation as "the final solution". The Indians seem to believe that by smashing Pakistan into pieces-using East Pakistan as the springboard-they would save their own unity. There are Pakistanis who would be prepared to meet the challenge in the hope of pulling down India as welt as they themselves into the abyss. Here, the policies of the Big Powers, have an important role to play, West is anxious to keep India as a buffer state between its own zone of influence and that of People's China, Peking, on the other hand, is also interested in keeping the buffer with Pakistan as a "corrective force" against Indian illusions. But the fate of the sub-continent is not being determined in either Washington or Peking. It is being decided in the two-halves of Bengal both of which are poor enough to think they would have nothing to lose but their chains when the final conflagration erupts in their midst. There are quite a few thinking East Pakistan's who believe that the disintegration of sub-continent would bring about "massacres unheard of in the annals of mankind". Millions of people lost their lives during partition and a fresh partition leading to the emergence, perhaps, of 20 different nation states in the sub-continent would be accompanied by far more widespread atrocities and genocide.