The Ashes of Bangla Desh
MENON, B. P.
THREAT TO THE FREE WORLD The Ashes of Bangla Desh BY B.P. MENON IN FRAGILE river boats poled silently through rain-swollen streams, in wood-wheeled rickshaws and hand carts, trudging through the...
...Although my wife and son and I reached the jungle safely, my daughter was killed...
...I know them...
...The smiling guard quickly roused everyone...
...While the West realized the danger and banned the works of Tagore and other great Bengali writers, their influence on the younger generation could not be checked...
...All that the most critical of the students would have to offer was, "It is not for me to judge the Sheikh...
...He was just a funk, capable of performing only the most menial clerical work...
...T have to stay even if I know they will kill me.' " At this writing Sheikh Mujib faces the death penalty in some secret military court in Pakistan, but his elimination will not make it easier for the Army to pacify Bangla Desh...
...As the swami spoke of the problems that beset the camp, he was interrupted by people who cringed into his presence requesting food cards and various other favors...
...Khalek, a street vendor of herbal oils from Jessore...
...Ronojoy Karlekar, a young professor of English in Calcutta involved in the "clandestine" assistance being given to the Mukti Bahini (Liberation Force) across the border, explained: "The Mukti Bahini consists of 10,000 men, and of these only 2,000 are fully trained to fight...
...A Vietnam type of war would of course spill into West Bengal, where the Indian Communist movement is particularly strong, and perhaps involve the Nagas, the Mizos, the Ku-kis and other restive tribal peoples living in the hill areas of India between East Pakistan and Burma...
...As far as he was concerned, East would meet West, a la Kipling, only on the battlefield, when two brave men confronted each other...
...Karim, an agriculturist from Faridpur...
...Only he can get us freedom," declared one peasant in a camp to the applause of the crowd around...
...Has the Awami League forfeited the trust of the Bengalis...
...Written in Bengali, it was entitled "Why Golden Bengal Is a Desert," and listed the items of disparity between the Eastern and Western wings of the country...
...He made a bleak gesture of the hand in mourning...
...When the Mukti Bahini has double or triple its present strength the Army won't stand a chance...
...A great religious bloodletting on the subcontinent, accompanied by an Indo-Pakistani war, would strengthen both obscurantist Hindu revivalism and the extreme, violent Left...
...I do not know what will happen to them...
...With training they will go far as a fighting unit...
...History will judge him...
...Yes, just to make all the foreigners think that West Pakistan was beautiful...
...Otherwise he would be running like a dog with his tail under his belly...
...Several million will die in a few more months as local stocks of food run out, for there has been no sowing this year...
...It's very heartening...
...They have no shelter and no food except what we give them...
...If evidence of the power of dead men is necessary there is no better example than that of Rabindranath Tagore, undivided India's great Bengali poet...
...Oh my Golden Bengal, I love you," goes the refrain...
...T can't get the people in trouble and then run away,' he said...
...Instead, in late March President Yah-ya Khan outlawed the League and set his Army on the ruthless course of slaughter and terror that has left thousands dead and millions homeless...
...And with this small force they are stretching the Army very thin...
...They are old and could not come with me...
...I hoped it would not be a long war...
...In a way Tagore is as responsible for the upsurge in East Bengal as Mujibur Rahman, and the explanation is not metaphysical...
...Though the attitude of students and other educated refugees was not so simple, none said a word against Sheikh Mujib...
...A college student leader before trouble broke out, he was the most articulate of the group, speculating about the Pentagon Papers and saying optimistically, "If the Vietnamese can beat America we can certainly beat Pakistan...
...The most the Pakistanis can hope for is to prolong the war and try to starve the people into submission...
...The camp commander, Hadi Uzzain, a dark saturnine man with a bandaged ankle, seemed mistrustful of me and was uncommunicative...
...And then . . . !" He threw up his hands as if there was no need to describe the potential horrors...
...in the second, relegated there with considerable scorn, were the Bengalis...
...In December 1970 Pakistan, a nation divided in two by 1,100 miles of Indian territory, held its first free elections since gaining independence from Britain in 1947...
...Different parts of India have sporadically demanded everything from regional autonomy to full independence...
...Last March, the entire Bengali diplomatic staff of the Pakistan High Commission defected and took over its Calcutta offices in the name of Bangla Desh...
...American policy in the region, however, has been inconsistent and obtuse or even, as a large body of Indian opinion is now convinced, intentionally malicious...
...He had no pretensions to English education and did not presume to imitate the ruling elite...
...A family of swamp birds lifted long-legged from a bank of reedy grass, and fireflies sequined the tepid air...
...We took what there was and started walking toward the other side [India] the same day...
...On the contrary, it might make the task more difficult—no other leader enjoys enough stature to accept what must be an unpopular compromise if there is to be a settlement...
...Smoke from hundreds of little cooking fires swathed the wide expanse of huddled tents and curled lightly round copses of mango and tamarind...
...The Army now controls only the main urban centers and the main roads...
...The less fortunate filled the streets of Bongaon, overflowing from every conceivable shelter—from the narrow verandas of houses, from steamy cowsheds reeking of wet dung, from the shade of banyan and pipal...
...When I get back I will pay them for what they did...
...Bannerji described the camp as a basic training center: "From here the boys go to an advanced camp and then they are attached to a unit in the field...
...Tahiruddin Thakur, a member of the aborted Pakistan National Assembly, offered this assessment: "Not too long...
...The Bengalis were the first Indians to assimilate the language and culture of the British rulers, who disliked the resulting hybrid...
...The Punjabi, on the other hand, was pictured as a staunch and manly soul who would, once he had eaten your salt, be faithful to the last...
...The conflict between the Punjabis and Bengalis in Pakistan could be reenacted in India with dozens of different permutations and combinations, for this country's 18 states each have a peculiar ethnic shading and major language...
...As Amoury de Riencourt pointed out a decade ago: "Not knowing where it is really going, guided only by short-term policies, the West is gradually contributing to the destruction of institutions it had implanted in the Orient...
...Someone suggested that they sing the Bangla Desh national anthem, and Pro-mode Dutta led them into song under the dripping mango trees...
...In the violent and extended "language movement" that followed, the Bengalis were forced back on a literary tradition that was richly humanistic and tolerant—values directly antithetical to the very basis for Pakistani unity, fanatic religiosity...
...He had left his village in Khulna, he said, because his father and mother had told him to go...
...It was a soft, uniquely Bengal night, but ruined by the knowledge of misery in the tents...
...It will more or less equalize the populations of the two wings and then they can put on a show of democracy...
...And that is what the Pakistanis want...
...For if Yah-ya's Army maintains its oppressive rule for any length of time, the middle-class leadership of the League will certainly be replaced with a much more extremist group —and India will suffer the disastrous fallout...
...To them we weren't people...
...An example of the more civilized variety was the Punch cartoon that showed a dhoti-clad schoolteacher explaining two diagrams on a blackboard...
...Everyone ran into the jungle, which was close, but many were killed as they ran...
...We went back to our houses after they had gone but little was left...
...The existence of parliamentary democracy . . . and the authority and influence of the small English-speaking ruling class in India are the West's most precious assets in the Orient...
...The Nixon Administration's continuing assistance to West Pakistan's Army while spending millions to feed the refugees fleeing from that Army is a perfect case in point...
...they at least had a roof over their heads and a dry place to stay...
...It is afraid to move out into the country except in numbers...
...It is the least chauvinistic anthem ever written, consisting entirely of dulcet lines praising Bengal's limpid beauty...
...Language alone might not have caused as complete a break as now exists had there not also been the grating fact of economic exploitation...
...In this context India's endlessly repeated calls for a settlement in East Pakistan between the Punjabis and the Awami League becomes a poignant cry for help...
...In the Indian state of West Bengal, where the refugees have massed amid their ethnic, cultural and linguistic kin, the situation is critical...
...But the large majority have nowhere to go...
...The British Raj divided the peoples of India into two classes, the "martial" and the "nonmartial": In the first and favored category were the Punjabis...
...Indeed, once the country fell under military dictatorship the discrimination was extended to other areas, including civil administration, the Bengalis' traditional preserve...
...in fact, the present ruling party of Madras originally sought independence for southern India and is now asking the central government for increased state's rights...
...I'm surprised that we stayed together for 23 years," said Sheikh Mujib's press secretary, whom I met at the Bangla Desh mission in Calcutta...
...Similarly, the Central Civil Service drew a mere 15 per cent from the East and the Army even less, 7 per cent, yet the population of the East is 75 million compared to 55 million for the West...
...The reasons behind the Punjabi assumption of superiority over as cultured a people as the Bengalis are complex and historical, transcending ethnic issues (the Punjabis are fairer skinned and of bigger build...
...The Bengali "Babu" (an honorific that took on derogatory implications) became an object of contempt, the butt of many a barbed English joke...
...And after the great flood they didn't care to send any relief till other countries started sending it...
...Yet how long would he continue to blame his miseries on people far removed from his vengeance...
...The economy, too, came progressively under the control of Pakistan's powerful "22 Families"—all from the Western half...
...The Bengali Babu was conceived of as a half-baked, ill-educated person "aping the English" in the pompous and wholly unfounded belief that he was their equal...
...Eet-khola Camp lay in the bend of one of those meandering border rivers that stitch India and Pakistan together in a lazy denial of political boundaries...
...They are from my village and nearby," he said with his first show of anger...
...They are from every community," said Ronojoy with obvious pride...
...That was what made up our minds...
...Soon after the creation of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the Bengali Muslims' feelings of religious brotherhood with the Punjabis were shattered when the central government in the West imposed Urdu, a tongue spoken by 10 per cent of the population, as the national language...
...Bengali, spoken by more than 50 per cent, was given no official status...
...The reality, of course, was far from these simplistic stereotypes, but they were not without effect on the unsure psyches of both the Bengalis and Punjabis...
...Cholera is a swift killer when the victim is weak from hunger...
...A young, powerfully built man, Aminul Huq Badshah grew angry just thinking of Pakistani injustices...
...The Sheikh expected trouble," he said, "but he did not expect such a cruel assault...
...Most Bengalis I spoke to retained their faith in the imprisoned Awami League chief, Mujibur Rahman...
...How can we cope...
...Now the League is regaining lost ground by directing the fight against the Army and attempting to deal with the problems of the millions of refugees whom they had initially ignored...
...If the struggle goes on for even a year it will become a people's war like that in Vietnam...
...We might have trouble with quislings in the other 54,000, but the people on the whole are on our side...
...Their memories of the last year have made them grateful now for small mercies...
...A few days before it happened he told me that in the event of a showdown he would not run...
...They did nothing to control the floods...
...There are Muslims and Hindus and Namasudras [tribals] here...
...This, as much as the influence of the big powers or the recently concluded treaty between India and the Soviet Union, explains New Delhi's restraint in the face of massive public support for recognizing Bangla Desh and intervening militarily on its behalf...
...There were 45 in all...
...How long will the fight between the martial Punjabi and the non-martial Bengali last...
...Babies squalled unnoticed as mangy stray dogs snuffled round their naked frames...
...The physical instructor at the camp, an Indian called Bannerji, made the same point, adding that he had never seen less friction among the communities...
...Pointing to the angle facing left the teacher informs the class, "By special order of His Majesty's Government this is also to be called a right angle...
...Yet these, I soon realized, were the lucky ones...
...Their morale is very high...
...We walked for eight days before getting here...
...He believed in negotiation...
...He believed that the relatively few collaborators the Army had won served only from fear, and would gladly switch sides if the liberation forces became powerful...
...There are 250,000 people in camps here," the swami said...
...There was Mahbubur Rahman, 19, slim and thinly mustached, who thought the war would not last longer than three months "if we really tried...
...On the narrow road not far from the railway station I stopped as a young medical volunteer and an even younger mother tried to save her little boy's life...
...When Pakistan came into being, its Army was almost entirely Punjabi, and 24 years of independence did very little to change matters...
...There was Promode Dutta, a singer often heard over Radio Bangla Desh, whose ideological interpretation of the situation upset the Provincial Assembly member in charge of the camp...
...After the young voices had sent the last strains lifting into the dusk there was a stillness which no one broke...
...others congest over 500 makeshift camps strung all along the border...
...He dealt with them briskly but sympathetically, and they left in slavering gratitude that was demeaning to watch...
...The party's prestige has definitely suffered because its leaders cut and ran at the first sign of trouble, leaving the mass of their supporters to fend for themselves...
...Heavy-set and balding, he sat inside a stifling shed of corrugated iron—long oily licks of hair shining in the glare of a petromax lantern, bare torso glistening from the sweat he mopped occasionally with the end of his ocher dhoti, or loincloth...
...A small, emaciated peasant from the village of Nalamere in Jessore, he stood blinking in the light from our torch and spoke in a barely audible, unemotional voice: "They came at about 4:30 in the evening and started shooting people and burning huts...
...We were animals...
...The only leadership in Bangla Desh is nap [National Awami party, a leftist group including many Communists, led by the erratic Maoist, Maulana Bhasani...
...THE NIGHTMARE haunting many Indians, among them Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, is that the turmoil in East Bengal will send the whole of Eastern India up in flames...
...IS IT already too late...
...There was Mu-jid, a factory hand from Khulna...
...It was only a matter of time before the East found the West incompatible...
...Getting off the train there I had to tread warily, for the platform was a squirming carpet of people—eating, sleeping, squabbling, defecating...
...The trees dripped from a steady rain while in the arrow-straight line of tents below, the camp slept...
...Year after year thousands would die and starve because of the floods and the Punjabis would say there was no money to build dams, that there were other, more important problems...
...MENON IN FRAGILE river boats poled silently through rain-swollen streams, in wood-wheeled rickshaws and hand carts, trudging through the sludge of unsown paddies, the refugees come...
...And about 20,000 more come in every day...
...Quite a few Bengalis think a military victory will soon be possible, even without Indian participation...
...They sucked us dry, they treated us like a colony...
...The sky cleared as Ronojoy and I prepared to leave, and the boys assembled for drill...
...It is only the support of the Americans that is making Yahya so arrogant," he said...
...But parliamentary democracy, the legal system and liberal ideals of government can easily be destroyed...
...The others are floating...
...BADSHAH'S agitation mounted as the discussion turned to last year's tidal wave, which killed hundreds of thousands of Bengalis...
...There are 64,000 villages in Bangla Desh and the Army cannot control more than 10,000 at any one time...
...Another frightening consideration, one few Westerners are even aware of, is that latent in India's plural society are the seeds of national disintegration...
...Also, Mujib dead might be a more powerful force in East Pakistan than Mujib alive and in prison...
...How long before he listened to the propagandists of the fanatically Hindu Jan Sangh party and transferred his hate to the more than 60 million Muslims living in India...
...Although central government revenue was 150 million rupees from the East and 50 million from the West, only 20 per cent of foreign aid and 25 per cent of imports went to the East...
...The brown skeleton lay on the hard tar, twisting painfully every few moments to vomit out a thin white dribble...
...The constituent states have found their union mutually beneficial, and divisive pressures have not been allowed to reach explosion level...
...The answer, from what I gathered after talking to several score refugees ranging from peasants to students and doctors, is indecisive...
...They cooked over smoky fires of damp wood, ate by the roadside and slept in the mud, heads resting on baskets or bricks or whatever dry promontory offered itself...
...Nearly all the Awami League leaders who weren't captured or killed are now in India or scattered along the borders...
...On the way Jamaat Islami people who stood by the roadside with knives and sticks took what they wanted from us...
...The moderate leadership that has kept these forces in check and carefully nurtured a secular democratic society would not survive...
...Panchanen Roy was typical...
...SO I COULD see how the fighting force was being increased, Ronojoy took me with him on one of his supply trips to a training camp set in a mango grove across the border...
...Look at this one," he cried, seizing a mimeographed sheet and thrusting it toward me...
...As the swami took me around the camp, I spoke with several refugees, who told me their stories with surprisingly little bitterness...
...I asked Dr...
...Such demands have not resulted in civil war almost entirely because India is a functioning democracy with an honest judiciary and a liberal government...
...Nevertheless, the leadership of the resistance emerging inside Bangla Desh is increasingly Leftist, increasingly extremist...
...Bongaon, a little border town some 46 miles from Calcutta, is a demographer's nightmare...
...T. Hosain, the leader's personal physician and friend, who fled to Calcutta last April...
...And the longer the struggle goes on the harder it will be for the Awami League leaders to return—especially since most of them aren't leaders at all but simply locally influential people who stood on Mujibur Rahman's platform and won the elections...
...A very few have friends and relatives to stay with...
...Panchanen Roy blamed the Jamaat Islami (a fanatically Muslim organization collaborating with the West Pakistani Army) more than he did the Army itself for what had happened...
...Why didn't Mujibur Rahman take any precautions...
...No policymaker in Washington seems to realize that the free world's long-term interests are being eroded...
...The sheet, obviously left over from the elections, went on to list the prices of essential food items—rice, flour, mustard oil: All were substantially more expensive in the East...
...This could happen without much difficulty...
...Hosain, a dark portly man in his 50s, adjusted his thick-rimmed glasses and pondered briefly...
...By the time I had struggled through the crush of Bongaon's streets, hired a cycle-rickshaw and been pedaled to one of the camps in the area, it was nightfall...
...Already we have sent up five boys...
...Even if the Army manages to hang on for some time, it will control only a small part of the country...
...Whole familes slept together on the cement, protective arms flung unconsciously over pathetic belongings...
...She was eleven...
...That the United States is deeply committed to the defense of democracy on the Indian subcontinent has long been a cliche...
...And do you know that when they built Mangla Dam in Pakistan they spent thousands of rupees to import grass...
...In charge of the camp was Swami Bijoyananda, a Hindu monk from a religious relief organization...
...I did not want to go away but they abused me and beat me for staying...
...The Awami League, a Bengali party demanding autonomy for the East, won resoundingly, but the National Assembly was never convened...
...It did not last long...
...he was essentially a nonviolent man...
...To undermine them with ill-thought-out, hastily improvised policy stop-gaps is nothing short of madness...
...He pulled sheaves of papers from his briefcase and spread them across the table...
...There was Sheikh Abdul Malik, who did not know his age but looked about 15...
...He rolled his eyes...
...The refugees themselves, though, have not yet begun to feel demeaned...
...The camp, I later found out, had been in existence for just three weeks...
...In five months more than 8 million Bengalis have crossed from East Pakistan into India...
...The bourgeois leadership of Bangla Desh has been shattered," said one West Bengali politician who did not want to be named...
...He spat vigorously into the earth...
...About 300,000...
...They come wearily, mud-stained and mute under the damp compress of the monsoon sun, burdened with a sad motley of tattered bundles, old tin trunks, dented pots and pans, grimy kerosene lanterns—anything at all worth carrying...
Vol. 54 • September 1971 • No. 18
