185 বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ চতুর্দশ খন্ড By no means have all the reprisals been the work of the army. Bengalis also massacred some 500 suspected collaborators, such as members of the rightwing religious Jammat-e-Islamiand other minor parties. The Biharis, non-Bengali Moslems who lied from India to Pakistan after partition in 1947, were favorite and sometimes innocent targets. Suspected sympathizers have been hacked to death in their beds, or even be headed by guerrillas as a warning to other villagers. More ominous is the growing confrontation along the 1,300 mile border, where many of the Pakistani army's 70,000 troops are trying to seal off raids by rebels based in India. With Indian Jawans facing them on the other side, a stray shot could start a new Indo-Pakistani war and on a much more devastating scale than their 17 days clash over Kashmir in 1965, Embroiled in a developing if still disorganized guerrilla war. Pakistan faces even bleaker prospects as the conflict spreads. By now, in fact, chances of ever recovering voluntary national unity seem nil. But to Yahya Khan and the other tough West Pakistani generals who rule the world's fifth largest nation an East-West parting is out of the question. For the sake of Pakistan's unity, Yahya declared last month, "no sacrifice is too great". The unity he envisions, however, might well leave East Pakistan a cringing colony. In an effort to stamp out Bengali culture, even street names are being changed. Shankhari Bazar Road in Dacca is now called Tikka Khan Road after the hard-as-nails commander who now rules East Pakistan under martial law Honeyed Smile. The proud Bengalis arc unlikely to give in. A warm and friendly but volatile people whose twin passions are politics and poetry, they have nurtured a gentle and distinctive culture of their own. Conversation-adda- is the favorite pastime and it is carried on endlessly under the banyan trees in the villages or in the coffee-houses of Dacca. Typically. Bangladesh chose as its national anthem not a revolutionary song but a poem by the Nobel prize-winning Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore's "Golden Bengal" ....come spring, 0 mother mine! mango groves are heady with fragrance, The air intoxicates like wine. Come autumn. O mother mine! I see the honeyed smile of your harvest-laden fields. It is indeed a land of unexpectedly lush and verdant beauty, whose emerald rice and jute fields stretching over the Ganges Delta as far as the eye can see belie the savage misfortunes that have befallen its people. The soil is so rich it sprouts vegetation at the drop of a seed, yet that has not prevented Bengal from becoming a festering wound of poverty, Nature can be as, brutal as it is bountiful, lashing the land with vicious cyclones and flooding it annually with the spillover from the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers.
