460 বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ পঞ্চম খন্ড ১২ ও ২২ জুলাই, ১৯৭১ ΝΟΤ"SΕΡΑRΑΤΙSΜ': Α WΑR ΟF LΙΒΕRΑΤΙΟΝ A section of the world seems to be in the habit of referring to the struggle for emancipation of the people of Bangladesh as a 'secessionist or a separatist movement'. This indeed builds an impression similar to that of the separatist movements of the French-speaking people of Canada or the Flemish-speaking people of Belgium. This also builds an image about the future-a future similar to that of Katanga of Congo or, lately, of Biafra. General readers have little time to go through the pros and cons of the upheaval to discover that the movement in Bangladesh is significantly distinct from any of the upsurges mentioned earlier. Although the sympathy for the plight of the people of Bangladesh following the genocidal war launched by Pakistan against them is universal, few of the newspapers, especially those of USA, take the trouble to explain the significant difference and to emphasize that in the case of Bangladesh the end is bound to be nothing else but victory unlike Katanga or Biafra. Part of this vital discrepancy is due to the comparative ignorance of the correspondents themselves about the real nature of the movement. But to a great extent it is a deliberate attempt at downgrading the liberation movement-an attempt that is being constantly made by these forces who want to preserve the political status quo in the subcontinent for their own ends. Perhaps time is here to explain to the world once again, in clearest possible terms, the radical distinction that exists between the national liberation struggle now being waged by the people of Bangladesh against a foreign army and a secessionist or separatist movement. Pakistan came into being because various nationalities of the sub-continent belonging to the religion of Islam chose to avoid the overwhelming economic and political domination of the Hindu majority. At the Lahore meet of the Muslim League in 1940 they agreed to work for the achievement of Pakistan on the condition that each region coining within the new state would be granted sovereignty and total economic and political autonomy. The historic Lahore Resolutions promised to ensure such a loose federation. This shows that the then Muslim League, recognized the ethnical, cultural and linguistic differences that existed among the nationalities that lived in various parts of this vast sub-continent inspite of the fact that they followed the same religion. What the Muslim League strived for was to create a new state where a lasting unity would be achieved among the various nationalities of the union through an equitable and rational distribution of economic resources and political power. In fact, the very future of the new state depended entirely on the realisation of this fundamental premise-a premise that was to be founded on mutual trust and respect-a premise that did not exist in 1947 when the state of Pakistan came into being. In the ecstasy of the freedom from colonial rule after two hundred grueling years few of the Moslems in partitioned Bengal had the time to examine the real nature of the power transfer. Quietly the British colonial government left the reins of power to those who would serve their interest best in the sub-continent. We found a group of capitalists,
