বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ ত্রয়োদশ খণ্ড
Already there are riots in Assam where the hill people dislike the Bengalis from the plains, who have fled to their mountains, Already there are continual fights and quarrels, even in the camps around Calcutta. The Indian peasants welcomed their suffering brothers at first. Now, as they see the strangers take their jobs at starvation wages, despoil their field, and steal their goods and women, the hostilities grow.
Therefore, argues this diplomat, India will very soon be forced into a desperate military offensive against East Pakistan, gambling on clearing out Yahya Khan's troops (with the support of the local Bengalis) within a week. Then she will ship all the refugees back to East Pakistan. Then she will decide whether or not to make East Pakistan a province of India. It has to happen in November because snow blocks the mountain passes and prevents China attacking from the north.
This man has been in India for many years: he loves Bengal and even loves Calcutta. Until this summer he believed that India's terrible problems of recurrent crisis, famine and war were coming to an end with a new strong central government. He thought the country, at last, would being to be peaceful united and prosperous. Now this.
"I am more depressed than I can tell you." he says, “I cannot see any way out. I cannot see any solution. Death and ruination everywhere, that's all I can see."
My friend the Indian Army general has bags two inches deep beneath each eye. He seldom sleeps at night. 'I don't know if they're going to attack or where or how. I can no longer understand these Pakistani soldiers' minds,” he says. “Really, I think they've gone mad. They see the total collapse of their policy in East Pakistan, but it only seems to encourage them in their folly. They suffer from that tragic warrior's blindness: the more terrible, hopeless and unjust their cause, the more noble it seems to them. The more their actions threaten to annihilate everyone, the more they brandish their swords.
'Honestly, I think the Islamabad government is going to make a supreme gesture and go down fighting. If they do that they'll bring down the whole subcontinent with them, not to mention the refugees and our own Bengali people. Then may be China will join in, then Russia, then the Americans and yourselves, then we have a Third World War."
Meanwhile the luxurious swimming-pool has ceased to be the haven it seemed. A soft Plopping noise announces the arrival of a dead rat dropped carelessly from the beak of a carrion crow. It stains the tiling round the diving board.
Perhaps what makes all of us around the swimming-pool so neurotic and jittery is the unremitting ness of the disasters in this part of the world. They never stop. I do not mean by this the repetitive history of conquest and reconquest, when wave after wave of warriors reduced the once dazzling prosperous area of Bengal to the poorest part of the world, aided by centuries of natural disasters.
It was, of course, the East Bengalis' special bad luck that the Moghul emperors decided to forcibly convert them to Mohammedanism when they swept in from Persia and the West, Mohammedanism does not suit excitable and intellectual Bengalis, and had they remained Hindus there would have been no partition riots there, no religious problem in
