381 বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ চতুর্দশ খন্ড "How many did you get?" The answers are seared in my memory. All this is being done, as any West Pakistani officer will tell you, for the "preservation of the unity, the integrity and the ideology of Pakistan." It is, of course, too late for that. The very military action that is designed to hold together the two wings of the country, separated by a thousand miles of India, has confirmed the ideological and emotional break. East Bengal can only be kept in Pakistan by the heavy hand of the army. And the army is dominated by the Punjabis, who traditionally despise and dislike the Bengalis. The break is so complete today that few Bengalis will willingly be seen in the company of a West Pakistani. I have a distressing experience of this kind during my visit to Dacca when I went to visit an old friend. "I'm sorry," he told me as he turned away, "things have changed. The Pakistan that you and I knew has ceased to exist. Let us put it behind us." Hours later a Punjabi army officer, talking about the massacre of the nonBengalis before the army moved in, told me: "They have treated us more brutally than the Sikhs did in the partition riots in 1947. How can we ever forgive or forget this?" The bone-crushing military operation has two distinctive features. One is what the authorities like to call "cleansing process": a euphemism for massacre. The other is the "rehabilitation effort." This is a way of describing the moves to turn East Bengal into a docile colony of West Pakistan. These commonly used expressions and the repeated official references to "miscreants" and "infiltrators" are part of the charade which is being enacted for the benefit of the world. Strip away the propaganda, and the reality is colonization-and killing. The justification for the annihilation of the Hindus was paraphrased by Lt.-Gen. Tikka Khan, the military governor of East Pakistan, in a radio broadcast I heard on April 18. He said: "The Muslims of East Pakistan, who had played a leading part in the creation of Pakistan, are determined to keep it alive. However, the voice of the vast majority had been suppressed through coercion, threats to life and property by a vocal, violent and aggressive minority, which forced the Awami League to adopt the destructive course." Others, speaking privately, were blunter in seeking justification. "The Hindus had completely undermined the Muslim masses with their money," Col. Nairn, of 9th Division headquarters, told me in the officer’s mess at Comilla. They bled the province white. Money, food and produce flowed across the borders to India. In some cases they made up more than half the teaching staff in the colleges and schools and sent their own children to be educated in Calcutta. It had reached the point where Bengali culture was in fact Hindu culture and East Pakistan was virtually under the control of the Marwari businessmen in Calcutta. We have to sort them out to restore the land of the people and the people to their Faith." Or take Major Bashir. He came up from the ranks. He is SSO of the 9th Division at Comilla and he boasts of a personal body count of 28. He had his own reasons for what
