165 বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ চতুর্দশ খন্ড শিরোনাম সূত্র তারিখ ৭১। যন্ত্রণা এবং বিপদ (সম্পাদকীয়) ক্রিষ্টিয়ান সায়েন্স মনিটর ৩১ জুলাই, ১৯৭১ THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR JULY 31, 1971. Editorial THE AGONY AND THE DANGER We have been clinging as long as possible to the hope that somehow the government and people of Pakistan would grope their way back to a tolerable relationship between the two separate parts of their bleeding and burning country, but with the greatest regret we must face the prospect that it is now too late for reconciliation. The official government of Pakistan four months ago unleashed a military fury upon the people of what was then known as East Pakistan. The results make up one of the horrors of history. Some seven million people from East Pakistan have taken refuge in India from the ruthlessness of the West Pakistan Army. At least a quarter of a million people have died. Estimates range up to a million. Cholera has been rampant. Famine is now taking its toll both among refugees in India and among those still clinging to the wreckage of their homes and lives. The refugee problem in India is beyond the capacity of India. One measure of the meaning what has happened is that people talking about the place where all this happened again call it Bengal, which is what it has been called down through the ages except for the few years from 1947 until now. There was a theory, back in 1947, that because a majority of the people in the Punjab and in Bengal were Muslim these two segments of the subcontinent could be linked into a single nation although separated by 1,100 miles of territory under the Government of India. It might have worked had the people of the two parts of the proposed new state of Pakistan been of the same language, race, and culture as they were of religion. It might have worked in practice had the fewer Punjabis been willing to let the more numerous Bengalis share fairly in the combined government and in the enjoyment of the two provinces. But in practice the Punjabis have dominated the government and have taken the lion's share of the wealth of Bengal to the Punjab. The attempted union of the two-inone state called Pakistan turned out in practice to mean the domination and the exploitation of the 75 million people of Bengal by the 56 million people of the Punjab, or West Pakistan. The treatment of Bengal was a logical progression from history. The West Pakistanis of today descend from the Persian, Afghan, and Pathan hill tribes who came down from the mountains of the north-west some 800 years ago and imposed their rule and their Muslim religion on the physically smaller and less warlike peoples of the valley and delta of the Ganges.
