723 বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ চতুর্দশ খন্ড শিরোনাম সূত্র তারিখ ২৮০। সীমান্তের ওপারের জনগণ সক্রিয় ফ্রন্টিয়ার ১ মে, ১৯৭১ FRONTIER, MAY 1, 1971 Across The Border THE MASSES ARE ACTIVE By Kalyan Chaudhuri Some political circles do not believe what is being described as people's participation in the Bangladesh movement. True, the main fighting elements are the East Pakistan Rifles and East Bengal Regiment personnel. But they are not isolated units or groups far away from the masses. The masses are active and lending all-out support to them. It is not a matter of purely passive patronage on the emotional level. It is somewhat contradictory to believe in the potential fighting capacity of the people in general and then deny its existence in the moment of struggle. My limited experience of the struggle (I have been in Bangladesh for one and half weeks, covering two districts, the peasant-based Dinajpur and Rajshahi) is that the movement was inevitable and that it matters little whether or not the Awami League leadership was guard up for it. What really matters is that a large section of the League having indisputable authority over the community had finally foreseen what was bobbing up round the corner. The same awareness was visible in the Maulana Bhasani-led National Awami Party and the NAP of Wali Khan. The EPR and the East Bengal Regiment did not also err in speculating about the coming revolt against the authority. The authority was equally sensitive to the possibility of an armed insurrection. That is why General Yahya Khan had been working for the past six months on a systematic plan of disarming the Bengalis in the EPR and the East Bengal Regiment, partly by outright official order and partly by ugly diplomacy. The disarming programme made a shrewd start when the Bengali personnel of the EPR were summoned back to towns and cantonments from their usual positions along the border with India. In army jargon this is a policy of "bottling up". That the seeds of an armed uprising were ripe is evident from reports in the East Pakistan press before March 25. Ittefaq, in its March 8 issue, published a photograph of members of the Chhatra League (CL), the students' front of the Awami League, parading in Pabna in "military style". Its significance is clear when one remembers the context of the essentially non-violent civil disobedience programme of the Awami League. It was a pointer that the powerful students' wing of the Awami League was not always docile enough to toe the line of the party. Further, in the March 22 issue of Dainik Pakistan and the March 23 issue of Pakistan Observer we find reports of the CL rejecting the usefulness of the Yahya-Bhutto-Mujib negotiations. They even took out rallies in Dacca and Chittagong demanding an open confrontation with the West Pakistan clique. Mujib was asked to quit the "talking table" and provide leadership to the struggle.
