387 বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ চতুর্দশ খন্ড crackle of flames behind shuttered doors as the fire spread to the shop on the left, then on to the next one. At this point Rathore was beginning to get anxious about the gathering darkness. So we drove on. When I chanced to meet Major Iftikhar the next day he ruefully told me, I burnt only sixty houses "If it hadn't rained I would have got the whole bloody lot." Approaching a village a few miles from Mudafarganj we were forced to a halt by what appeared to be a man crouching against a mud wall. One of the jawans warned it might be fauji sniper. But after careful scouting it turned out to be a lovely young Hindu girl. She sat there with the placidity of her people, waiting for God knows who. One of the jawans had been ten years with the East Pakistan Rifles and could speak bazaar Bengali. He was told to order her into the village. She mumbled something in reply, but stayed where she was, but was ordered a second time. She was still sitting there as we drove away. "She has," I was informed, "nowhere to go-no family, no home." Major Iftikhar was one of several officers assigned to kill and burn missions. They moved in after the rebels had been cleared by the army with the freedom to comb out and destroy Hindus ahd "miscreants" (the official jargon for rebels) and to bum down everything in the ateas from which the army had been fired at. This lanky Puhjabi officer liked to talk about his job. Riding with Iftikhar to the Circuit House in Cbmilla on another occasion he told me about his latest exploit. "We got an old one," he said. "The bastard had grown a beard and was posing as a devout Muslim. Even called himself Abdul Mannan. But we give him a medical inspection and the game was up." Iftikhar continued: "I wanted to finish him there and then, but my men told me such a bastard deserved there shots. So I gave him one in the balls, then one in the stomach, then I finished him off with a shot in the head. " When I left Major Iftikhar he was headed north to Brahmanbaria. His mission: another kill and burn. Overwhelmed with terror the Bengalis have one of two reactions. Those who can run away just seem to vanish. Whole towns have been abandoned as the army approached. Those who can't run about a cringing servility which only adds humiliation to their plight. Chandpur was an example of the first. In the past this key river port on the Meghna was noted for its thriving business houses and gay life. At night thousands of small country boats anchored on the river's edge made it a fairyland of lights. On Arial 18 Chandpur was deserted. No people, no boats. Barely one per cent of the population had remained. The rest, particularly the Hindus who constituted nearly half the population, had fled.
