বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ ত্রয়োদশ খণ্ড
Bengal, and most important of all, no splitting off of the nonsense province of Hast Pakistan, They would all have been part of India, which is the only geographical arrangement which makes economic sense.
What really hurts is the recent history. Misfortune created poverty which created greater misfortune which could not withstand further natural disasters, exploitation, internal corruption, religious bigotry and political inflammability. In such a hopeless, messy place, how could the disciplined Punjabi rulers of Pakistan creater any order and prosperity? How could they stop their brisk merchants from exploiting the place? How could they defy Muslim principles and start a proper birth control programme to reduce the bursting population?
How understandable that East Pakistan became in essence a colony of West Pakistan with racial hostility between the tall brown unemotional Westerners and the small dark excitable talented Easterners. The Punjabis and Biharis thought of Bengalis as little better than poor grubbly monkeys and uncontrollable. And in their own terms the situation seemed to justify that belief.
The Bengalis saw the Western army rulers, merchants, and money lenders as worse than the British imperialists, less benevolent, less understanding of their special sensitiveness and talents for self expression. No wonder that hostilities built up so fiercely that just before the blow-up last March the Bengalis had been demonstrating, ferociously and killing Western 'foreigners' in their country. Because they had lived such doomed lives for so long, such atrocities (which have long been a part of violent tradition in the subcontinent) were entirely understandable. And no wonder, finally, that East Pakistan, after a million of its inhabitants were reportedly drowned and killed in the cyclone disaster last year, finally voted almost unanimously for their own Awami League and against Isla- mabad domination.
What was criminal and stupid in this situation was General Yahya Khan's decision that the simple military solution was the only one possible. He should have known that no military solution could cope with such hostility, that it was not only obviously unjust and illegal to take the action he did, but bound to fall.
In the months that followed the March attack, everything happened that Yahya should have been able to predict. The country grew not less but more hostile. The Bengali guerillas destroyed all communications. And where they failed the Army's counter-attacks succeeded. The food harvesting in this naturally fertile area was largely disrupted. The hostility and killing began to be increasingly religious as well as racial. There were about ten million Hindus living amongst the Moslems in East Pakistan. As soon as it became clear that the Pakistani army was killing Hindus indiscriminately, nearly all of them fled into India. With them came Moslem Bengali Nationalists. Awami League supporters and people who merely wished to escape the fighting. As the fighting and chaos grew, it became self-perpetuating. The Army would be attacked by guerillas from over the Indian border and would retaliate against the local population. Then irregular Moslem volunteers were recruited to help the Army hold down the Bengalis, and it is these recruits, or razacars, a bunch of Moslem fanatics, hoodlums, time servers, who are now doing most of
