Guerrilla Haven
Against the federal forces, the Bengalis could muster barely 15,000 troops, most of them militiamen armed with obsolete World War II weapons. But while the Bengalis were no match for the federal army in the cities, military observers noted that the surrounding countryside, where 90 per cent of East Pakistan's population lives, is a virtual haven for guerrilla warfare. A maze of sunken rice fields, tea plantations, jute fields and banana groves, it is an ideal ambush country reminiscent of South Vietnam's Mekong Delta. As a result, most foreign military analysts believe that prolonged military occupation of the cast would put an intolerable strain on the Pakistani Army.
Nonetheless if Yahya chose to indulge in wholesale slaughter, it was probable that he could stamp out the rebellion in East Pakistan, at least for the time being. And if the reports of Mujib's capture proved true, that would surely be a severe blow to the cause of Bangladesh. But no matter how harsh the federal crackdown. Bengali resistance whether in the form of civil disobedience or a Viet Cong-style guerrilla struggle appeared likely to continue. Yahya, in fact, was seemingly faced with the ugly prospect of being a colonial ruler in his own country. For when the federal army opened up with tanks and automatic weapons in Dacca last week, it mortally wounded any remaining chance that the two disparate wings of Pakistan could ever live in harmony again.
A People Apart: The Complex Bengalis
To anyone acquainted with the character of the Bengalis, it seemed almost inevitable that some day they would try to form their own independent nation. Despite their incorporation into India and Pakistan when the British Raj left the subcontinent in 1947, some 120 million Bengalis (70 millions of whom live in East Pakistan and most of the rest in India's West Bengal) still consider themselves a race apart from and above their neighbors. Emotional and talkative the dark-skinned Bengalis have more in common with each other than with their co-religionists, Hindu or Moslem, or with their compatriots, Indian or Pakistani. Says one Western expert: “They consider themselves to be Bengalis first, Moslems or Hindus second, and Pakistanis or Indians a poor third."
Culturally, ethnically, linguistically and spiritually, the Bengalis are different from their countrymen in Pakistan and India. For one thing, as Bengali scholars will inform all who pause to listen, the name Bengal is derived from the ancient kingdom of Bangla, which goes back at least to the third century B.C. One of the oldest literary streams in Asia also flows in Bengal, whose Indo-Aryan language and recorded history date back at least a thousand years. Boastful of this long literary heritage, intellectual Bengalis were most eloquent on the subject of Rabindranath Tagore, their greatest modern literary figure. In his combination of mysticism and lyricism, Tagore may have been the quintessential Bengali poet, novelist and dramatist; he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.
Talk
If the written language is one of the Bengali's glories, the spoken one is one of its burdens. In the cafes of Calcutta and Dacca, Bengalis palaver endlessly, spinning out airy intellectual concepts and political schemes. An Indian joke goes like this: “Every
