THE DAILY MIRROR, DECEMBER 7, 1971
ALIVE AND FREE
The Mirror’s John Pilger reports on the birth of Bangladesh, a nation
that cheated the executioners
Calcutta, Monday. Five months ago I crossed the border between India and what was then East Pakistan, and reported that a nation called Bangladesh existed; and that its people were being murdered in their thousands for wishing to be free.
On that day, the mirror’s front page said “Death of a Nation.” Bangladesh, it seemed, was to be stillborn, for already 5’00,000 people had been killed by the Pakistan Army, and 7,000,000 had fled to India, where unaccountable numbers died from diseases like cholera.
Then we in the West cared briefly, we gave charity until the story of their suffering was no longer immediate news.
But. really, we did not care about these boxwallahs of our colonial past; we did not care or understand about their uprising against that colonial past, and its legatees, the military despots of West Pakistan whose almost comical delusions of Aryan superiority had parallels in Nazi Germany, and whose determination to rule Bengal included a policy of genocide: to be exact, the death of a nation.
I now report the birth of a nation. Bangladesh, Clive of India’s Golden Bengal, having in the last year lost more than 1,000.(X)0 people through violence, cyclone and disease, and now facing perhaps the greatest famine of our time, has survived.
Moral movement
This morning, the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, comprising 2 percent of the human race, was formally recognized by the Indian Government, whose army is now attacking the army of West Pakistan on twenty-two fronts inside Bangladesh.
Tonight and tomorrow at least a dozen other countries are expected to offer recognition.
Like other reporters here, who have worked on this story alongside Bangalees. I do not conceal my support for Bangladesh, which I believe embodies the most moral national movement since the cause of those who fought the Spanish Civil War and lost.
My feelings stem not only from my regard for the Bengalese who are among tile most attractive and resilient people on earth, but also from the knowledge that their triumph today-as yet to be confirmed by India’s victory in this war-is in spite of an enforced poverty typical of two-thirds of the human race, and unimaginable in the West.
Usually we in the West, who are the world’s rich, watch the new nations, who arc the poor, fall quickly to systems of dictatorship and corruption.
This has been true in Latin America, African countries like the Congo, and in West Pakistan.
We have preached to the poor nations, which have problems of survival we cannot comprehend, that they must first erect a parliamentary democracy on the Westminster or Washington models, before they can receive our blessing, which, at best, will be aid with political strings attached.
Refugee camp
Somehow, Bangladesh has called our bluff. Somehow last December 98 percent of the East Bengali people voted for a parliamentary democracy, and for a moderate man as Prime Minister Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.
They did not vote for independence from the government of West Pakistan, a thousand miles away: they asked only for democratic autonomy within the state of Pakistan. For this, they were crushed last March by the army of Yahya Khan.
Since then, no people, not even the Jews, have suffered as much as the Bengalis. The ‘People who stayed in their country died by violence or by starvation. Those who fled to India walked along corridors of agony to the refugee camps, for they ceased, it seemed, to be human.
Even before Yahya’s army struck a cyclone last November killed a quarter of a million. Bengal and the Ganges delta have always been a geographical coffin.
And long before that, Clive of India stripped Golden Bengal of what he described as hidden “inexhaustible riches” and there followed according to an historian of the time, a period when enormous fortunes were made in Calcutta while 30,000.000 human beings were reduced to an extremity of wretchedness.
Finally, in 1947, Britain divided Bengal into two parts and assured her poverty, some say, for a century or more.
Bengal’s and India’s greatest poet, Tagore, wrote of his people: “Man’s body is so small: his strength in suffering so immense.” But this afternoon as my taxi approached the Bangladesh mission in Circus avenue, Calcutta, history’s gloom had gone.
Arms linked
From a block away I could hear the humming and singing of several hundred Bengalis (in politics and in song they are like the Welsh) and when I arrived people were standing together, arms linked: and many were crying (in their emotions they are like the Jews).
A transistor radio was still blipping the news that, after centuries, Bengal was officially a nation. The only equivalent of this I can think of is the recognition of the State of Israel.
In the garden of the mission exiled parliamentarians, in suits and white shirts, stood with young bearded men of the Mukti Bahini, the Bangladesh freedom fighters. The nationalism they expressed was, like them, gentle. They sang this anthem:
Oh Golden Bengal, I love you!
your groves are heady with
fragrance
The air intoxicates like wine-
Come autumn. I see the honeyed
smile of your harvest laden fields.
Oh Golden Bengal!
Pecking garbage
And then they marched into the streets of Calcutta into the flyblown remains of the Raj’s Golden Bengal past the little bundles in the gutters which are asleep or ill or dead, and the birdlike children pecking at the garbage, and the beggars and lepers and one or two white Sahibs.
Old men and ragged women with children, and angry-eyed young men came out of doorways and alleyways and off trams and buses to march with them, and to shout “Joi Bangla,” which means “Long live the Bengali nation.”
As 1 left the mission a friend, Moudud Ahmed, who is one of the many young ones in the new, hopefully non-aligned government, shouted to me: “Remember your ‘Death of a Nation.’ Please tell them that a new headline is necessary now: Birth of a Nation.”