The Year of The Vulture-Amita Malik

The Year of The Vulture-Amita Malik

Involvement
EARLY APRIL 1971. Reports had started trickling across the border about attacks on the civilian population of East Pakistan by the Pakistani army. The first wave of refugees had already begun arriving with stories of killings, rape, loot, arson and burning of villages.
Foreign press correspondents in Dacca had started filing the kind of graphic, horrifying atrocity stories which were later to grow into a flood and lead to the abrupt and forcible deportation of reputed newsmen representing the most illustrious international journals. One of the first accounts of the systematic, pogrom-style savagery which was decimating an entire way. of life came when the news of the killings of eminent professors and young students at Dacca University came across the border in chilling detail.
But I did not know these people personally. It was still like an account of that familiar phenomenon known in this part of the world as communal riots. Except that these were Muslims killing Muslims too and there seemed much more to it than religion. True, my maternal grandfather and paternal grandmother were East Bengalis, but they died long before I was born. My aunt, who had served as the principal of Dacca’s Eden Girls’ College had long since retired. So the horrors in Dacca, incomplete in detail and not always obtained first-hand, remained for me like a long shot sequence in a documentary film: real, but far away.
Then one morning I opened the newspapers and a headline caught my eye. It said, WOMEN WEEP FOR HELP. It was a small item, but it made the kind of sharp, direct, consciencestirring impact which challenges a writer to start a personal hunt for the truth so that it stirs the conscience of other people too. The news story read: Weeping women on the banks of the Padma in East Bengal today shouted across the river to Indian villagers, “They have killed our men and they have burnt our homes. They have taken away our daughters and shot our sons. Will you not help us? Please come to our help, otherwise what shall we do?”
A neighbour who had been attacked was asking for help a direct distress signal which I, at least, could not ignore. I there and then took a vow to do something about it that very day.
I rang up that morning all the women’s organizations in town and their executives and read out the item to them. The papers that morning were full of stories of how oil from Burma and refuelling facilities in Ceylon were helping the Pakistani military junta to transport entire battalions to East Pakistan to carry on the genocide.
“At least the women of India can appeal to the women of Ceylon and its woman Prime Minister and to the women of Burma, a country once represented in India by the widow of Aung San,” I pleaded. They all hurriedly consulted their governing bodies and by the evening I had escorted a powerful delegation of women to H.E. the High Commissioner for Ceylon in his house, where he had just returned from a game of tennis. Over glasses of chilled passion fruit juice he courteously promised to convey the protest. The gates of the Burmese Ambassador’s house were closed and a stern Gurkha watchman said H.E. and his wife were at dinner and could not be disturbed.
“Well,” I said, slipping the protest note through the bars, “You give this to him at dinner. I am going to say in the newspapers tomorrow that it was delivered. So if it is not, you will be held responsible.” The watchman looked suitably impressed. Then, having given copies of the protest to All India Radio, the news agencies and every news editor I knew, I at least ensured it was flashed all over India. I sincerely hope it reached the women of Burma and Ceylon.
But it still seemed too abstract and futile, sitting 1,000 miles away organizing general feminine protests. Next morning,

I decided that I had to do something more tangible about this terrible man-made calamity which was assuming such vast and immoral dimensions. It seemed to call out for every ounce of detailed and sustained coverage I could muster as a feature-writer, broadcaster and telecaster.
What stirred me even more in those early days was listening to Dacca Radio, which was fighting an amazing last-ditch battle against the oppressors. As a professional radio and TV critic, the broadcasts were something I had to monitor in the normal course of my work as a columnist. But it became a personal involvement as I realized the dimensions of the spirited fight that the besieged professionals of radio were carrying on with such physical bravery as well as an undaunted sense of humour.
The Bengali, whether in East or West Bengal, has a shrewd cockney humour which seems to thrive in impossible situations. Nothing could have been more humourless than the heavy, pompous military voices which put on the speeches of Yahya Khan. They seemed true broadcasting disciples of the Pakis– tani President, whose barrack-room voice and punch-drunk language underscored a mind as bereft of imagination as of mercy.
With impeccable programme sense, the Dacca Radio boys interspersed the fighting speeches of Sheikh Mujib with stirring Bengali patriotic songs by Rabindranath Tagore and Qazi Nazrul Islam. The boys of Chittagong Radio went even further. They fled with a mobile one-kilowatt transmitter to Rangamati in the Chittagong Hill Tracts and kept it going until the Pakistan Air Force put it out of commission.
Once again the professionals of mass media were underwriting one of the great stories of popular resistance to tyranny in our time. Somehow, I felt this story would have a happy ending. And I felt an irresistible urge to participate in the telling of that story.
So one evening, in April 1971, I hopped into the chair car of the fast Rajdhani Express in Delhi and next morning was in Calcutta, my home town. It was seething with anger and frustration at what was happening next door to people who spoke the same language, shared a common culture and who, in their suffering and distress, had miraculously stilled the numerous political controversies of troubled Calcutta in a mass surge of compassion.
The foyer of Grand Hotel in Calcutta was a veritable Who’s Who of international mass media on the trail of the biggest mass exodus in the history of mankind. They were compiling staggering statistics as interpreters struggled with inadequate success to translate the almost pure poetry in which the weeping refugees expressed their agony into cold, workable, Western journalistic copy.
But statistics were not my kind of story. With the advantage of the Bengali language, which is my mother tongue, I decided to document individual experiences and the thoughts, feelings and philosophic attitudes, if any, of the poor, ordinary people involved. I decided to head first for the border and meet fleeing refugees at the grass roots level.
I decided to do it alone, without official trappings. And right in the train to Bongaon, hardly five minutes outside Sealdah station, I met a distraught young man who had lost his entire family on the first day of the massacre by the Pakistani army.
At the border and in refugee camps, it was one long tale of bestial attacks by the professional Pakistani army and their Bengali and Bihari collaborators, the Razakars, which had sent millions running for their lives and honour to India. They had been robbed en route of everything they possessed. Many were separated from their dearest ones-mother from child, wife from husband, daughter from father. Women told me tales of dishonour which left me numb with shame and pity. Young boys recounted how their school and college companions had been killed in front of their eyes. Old men wept as they mourned for their young sons killed fighting an unequal battle in the Mukti Bahini. Mothers clutched the corpses of their dead infants in disbelief, a frozen, faraway look in their eyes. They had no husbands left to comfort them.
But somehow, even in those bizarre surroundings, those impersonalized refugee camps, each individual had managed to retain shreds of human dignity and goodness. These were a sensitive, civilized people, and it is this very civilization and culture which now seemed to give them some inner strength. They doggedly refused to give up their identity.
At Bongaon, the first sight I saw on entering the hospital was a little girl of six being wheeled out from the operation theatre. “We have just removed one of her lungs, which was riddled with bullets,” said a grim-faced surgeon. “I think she will pull through but it was a complicated operation. Since her whole family was killed before her eyes, she seems to have lost the will to live.”
In the over-crowded wards, young school and college boys with bayonet and bullet wounds, and sometimes with amputated limbs, lay in beds next to jute mill workers, army cadets, civil servants, peasants, engineers, cultivators. Old women, middle-aged matrons, little girls lay huddled sadly, their bodies having been subjected to the most cruel and sexually depraved atrocities. There was no discrimination in the matter of slaughter or rape. Christians, Muslims, Buddhists-it made no difference. It was simply enough to be a Bengali.
From the border I went straight to the Calcutta station of All India Radio, which had already put out some powerful appeals by intellectuals who had escaped to India. Dilip Sengupta, the Station Director, an East Bengali himself and as professionally involved as myself, was able to find out for me in a matter of minutes who were the artists, radio and TV professionals, writers, journalists, musicians and film personalities who had taken refuge in Calcutta. Within an hour, two intellectuals came to Dilip Sengupta’s room and gave me first-hand accounts of the massacre in the universities. But they both urged me not to mention their names in my articles: “We have relatives left behind and if we are quoted by name they are likely to be killed by the army.”
And it was the same story with everyone I met. The escape route was through Chuadanga. But with so many relatives and all their property left behind, it was a constant shuttling back and forth over the trail. Next day, I watched Satyajit
5

Ray shoot the last sequence of his film “Simabaddha” at the Tollygunje Studios. Ray told me how one of the leading film stars of Dacca, a young man, had quietly slipped into the studio and watched him shooting for an hour with cool, professional interest. Only after the last shot did he remember his troubles. He told Ray how he had trekked from Dacca for eleven days through hostile territory. But he had not given up. Next day he went back by the same route to see if he could trace his relatives and help his colleagues to escape. Which is why I did not write about him at the time or mention him by name.
That evening, in the house of Maitreyee Debi, intrepid fighter for just causes, I met still another wave of professors and artists and several journalists in exile. They were planning posters, newspapers, art exhibitions, lectures-anything to keep the Bangla Desh struggle alive in their own fashion.
I soon found that, faced with the individual suffering, humiliation, injustice and cruelty heaped on these unfortunate people, the tragedy of Bangla Desh assumed dimensions which the world was still finding difficult to grasp. It had not yet fully realized that what was taking place was a massive violation of human rights as defined in the U.N. Charter. And some of the most powerful nations in the world, which are always ready to plunge in with pious platitudes in the world’s trouble spots, were now not only bending over backwards to find excuses for the Yahya Khan regime but were continuing to supply it with more arms to mow down an unarmed civilian population which had won a democratic election at the polls and voted a much-loved leader and a responsible political party into power. In the words of Senator Edward Kennedy, their only crime was that they had won an election.
In late November 1971, I returned to Calcutta to collect and document material direct from individuals belonging to different professions and backgrounds who had been victims of the violation of human rights as defined in the U.N. Charter. There was no end to them-journalists, artists, film-makers, lawyers, bankers, women, children, old men, young girls, students. Their personal, unvarnished accounts of what they
had been through had the authentic ring of truth. It seemed ample justification of the military operations undertaken jointly by India and the Mukti Bahini in early December to liberate Sonar Bangla (Golden Bengal) from tyranny and oppression.
War is not a pleasant business and it could have plunged one into further gloom. But as I kept on interviewing people, I found that they were no longer without hope. It was a completely changed context. The tide had at last turned in their favour. But, coupled with their sense of relief that positive action had been taken at last, was a feeling of sadness at the loss of life which both the armed forces of India and the freedom fighters of Bangla Desh would inevitably suffer in that very task of liberation for which everyone had waited so patiently. Blood, it seemed, had to be shed for Bangla Desh to be free. But now, for a change, blood was being shed in the cause of justice and liberty and against oppression of a most savage, mediaeval type. One professional army fighting another professional army for a principle seemed to have more point than a professional army killing innocent civilians. –
The stirring news that Dacca had fallen and that the Pakistani forces had surrendered unconditionally was, however, again punctuated with gloom. For the dreadful news came through that on December 14, just two days before the fall of Dacca, the cream of East Bengal’s intelligentsia had been brutally murdered in a fresh pogrom. This time it was Bengali religious fanatics, a pro-Pakistani secret Fascist organization known as the Al-Badr which had killed in cold blood doctors, journalists, professors and even a woman journalist in a final frenzy of violence. Thus victory was tinged with mourning and joy with seething anger at this cruel waste of precious talent in a devastated country which would now need all its specialist resources in the gigantic task of reconstruction. Here was another man-made tragedy, the final act in a cruel drama. The spotlight was now on the agony of Dacca.
On January 2, 1972, I took off by DC6 for Dacca. The pilot of the plane was Swiss, and it did not seem at all strange that when he announced over the inter-com that we had crossed the Padma and were now over free Bangla Desh, he added a fullthroated Joi Bangla, which was the cue for everyone in the plane to sing “Amar Sonar Bangla” as a cadenza.
In Dacca, in the first days of 1972, the whereabouts of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman were still unknown and even in that gracious, beautiful city, with soft-spoken, cultivated and friendly people, one was never far away from tragedy.
The driver of a Red Cross wagon, a Christian, told me how his daughter had been dishonoured in his presence and then taken away. Every cycle rickshawallah could point out a spot where someone he knew had been shot. The first house I visited on my first evening was Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s residence at Dhanmondi. It had been reduced to an eloquent demonstration of senseless military fury: even the waterclosets in the bathrooms had been blasted by light machine guns. Family portraits of mothers and babies had been savagely torn out of their frames, books pulled out of their jackets, long-playing records trampled into fragments and tapes unrolled into ribbons. They all lay on the floor in a sorry heap. It was like a haunted house and it is a pity the house was not preserved in that state as a museum for posterity to see to what depths of degradation a once-proud professional army can be reduced.
In the evening, in Rayerbazaar, a suburb of Dacca, I saw vultures, crows and dogs fighting over the remaining flesh and bones of the intellectuals slaughtered on December 14th. It was like an open-air set for Hamlet, the grave-digger’s scene, with skeletons and skulls dotting the strangely beautiful marshes, looking like an opera back-drop in the setting sun. I tape-recorded, in an instinctive professional reflex, three puppies, their milk teeth barely showing, fighting over the remains of a skeleton, until I retched and fled to the car.
Next morning, in the morgue of the Dacca Medical College Hospital, I saw the rotting, exhumed corpses of professors, the cream of Dacca University, recovered from a disused grave-yard in Mirpur, the Bihari stronghold. In the afternoon, I attended their funeral in the mosque of Dacca University. That evening, in the maternity Ward of Mitford Hospital, I saw a little girl of thirteen in a red sari. She was seven months pregnant after repeated rape by soldiers in Dacca Cantonment. A child herself, she thought her marriage would still take place, as arranged, near the festival of Id in a few days. I did not have the heart to interview her.
Later that evening, three old-fashioned Bengali ladies in white mourning saris appeared on Dacca television. They were not the type one commonly associates with TV performances. But with consummate tact and delicacy the TV producers had coaxed them on screen to narrate their individual stories of the murder of a father, a husband and a son. I have seen harrowing TV programmes in many parts of the world, but nothing which combined in such measure dignity, poignancy and courage. They spoke extempore and without interviewers to fuss over them. They spoke straight from the heart and it is at such moments that the Bengali language can rise to tremendous heights of lyricism and compassion.
And yet, what finally moved me most was the resilience and strength of the people of Bangla Desh in the aftermath of such sorrow and suffering. At one moment, when I enquired about the welfare of a journalist friend, someone said, “Just hang on, and I’ll ring up and check if he is alive”-as if it were the most normal thing in the world. Then, having made sure he was, he plunged into a spirited discussion on Bengali poetry inspired by the year of sorrow.
In hospitals everywhere, quiet, practical doctors and social workers were speaking in detached modern terms about the formidable problem of rehabilitating dishonoured women in a traditional society. Newspapers, radio and TV, now with their own individual identity and new-found pride, were working in a surge of creative fervour to discover the truth, however cruel, and convey it in all the glory of a language they could use again without fear of firing squads. Dainik Bangla, an enterprising Bengali daily, had been first on the scene to discover some highly incriminating doodles of Major-General Rao Farman Ali. It published them with great professional courage.
Most moving of all, the girls were out again, on the streets, campuses and shops. On TV, a group of lovely young girls ensure that it is not repeated in human history. In the words of Sheikh Mujib:
WE CAN FORGIVE, BUT NOT FORGET

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The Border :
Early 1971
SEALDAH in Calcutta has always been one of the most depressing railway stations in the world. Since 1947 it has been an eternal refugee station, a transit camp with a look of permanent gloom. It seemed apt that I was departing from there to meet the newest wave of refugees from East Bengal.
It was also characteristic that I had been given the wrong” timing for the fast train to Bongaon by Telephone Enquiries. So I sat despondent on the platform for an hour with my wilting tomato sandwiches, unfilled notebooks and a first-class ticket which made me feel guilty in the midst of all that poverty. The hour was filled with increasingly gory stories about holdups by Naxalites from the railway staff. They added, with a look which made my individual stupidity clear, that it was the height of foolishness for women without a male escort to travel with gold bracelets. They said that the least I could do now was to get back from Bongaon to Calcutta before sundown, as there were no lights in any compartment. All the bulbs had been removed by the hold-up boys.
However, once the slow train left, 45 minutes late, I found that the first-class compartment was a myth. It was in solid occupation of cheerfully ticketless students who were fling. ing so much banter at each other that they hardly paid me any attention except to permit me the extreme edge of the seat near the window at the end of a long, overpopulated berth meant for about half the number occupying it. And April is sang victorious Tagore songs to celebrate the return of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. They had enormous beauty spots on their foreheads. “Did you always wear such large ones?” I asked. “Of course not,” they replied, “it is just that the Pakistanis did not know that all Bengali women, regardless of religion, wear these spots. They started accusing us of being Hindus and Indian agents because we wore them and we had to give them up to save our lives and our honour. So now we are wearing extra large ones to celebrate.”
The day before I left Dacca, Ayesha Nabi, the principal of the College of Social Work, Dacca University, asked me to tea to meet some social workers dealing specially with the rehabilitation of violated women. Ayesha has studied at McGill and is a very sophisticated woman, although traditionally Bengali in looks and speech. It was a gracious, lively tea party as in any civilized country with thin-sliced cucumber sandwiches and rich plum cake alternating with home-made Bengali savouries and the Bengali sweets for which Dacca is famous. Talking about Dacca muslins and babies provided light relief to the grim stories of the unfortunate women who now faced such a bleak future. Suddenly, one of the women present stopped dead in the middle of some cheerful banter. “Do you realize”, she asked with great solemnity, that this is the first time in nine months that we have dared stir out of our houses to meet in this relaxed way? That six months ago we would have been raped and even a fortnight ago, raped and killed?” It certainly was a sobering thought.
But those early days were still full of the euphoria of Independence after months of horror. The very happiness of freedom sometimes made one shut one’s eyes to the cruel aftermath of all those months of killing, arson, rape and destruction. The drama of the liberation movement soon gave way to bread-and-butter reality and the cold light of peace. But was it really peace or the stillness of the grave, with continuing fresh evidence of killings, the increasing problem of unwanted babies resulting from large scale rape, and the giant-scale destruction of land and property crippling a nation economically at its very birth?

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It was to take a look at the permanent victims as life slowly returned to normalcy of a sort for others that I decided to go back to Bangla Desh in the middle of 1972. What was happening to the women who had been raped and their unwanted babies? What about those widows whose husbands, and sometimes their sons, were killed before their very eyes. With the bread-winners of the family gone, how were these women and children to support themselves, and face up to life again without either money or comfort? What about the young heroes of the Mukti Bahini, some hopelessly crippled, now that the shouting and glory were over?
What I saw on return to Bangla Desh made it even more clear that the tragedy was by no means over. In a sense, it had only just begun. The toll it had taken in terms of mental cruelty was in many ways far more disturbing than the physical brutality which had preceded it. Now, when others were returning to normal life as best as they could, it is those who had to hide their shame although they had committed no crimes, those who had become the innocent victims of a society which had failed to protect them, that stirred most pity: the * teen-aged mothers who could not go back to school, or the dishonoured wives who now seemed misfits in their own homes and families.
As I saw the shattered and crippled bodies, the faces without hope of the young resistance fighters of the Mukti Bahini, as I faced tiny children who lisped out detailed descriptions of the killings of their fathers and mothers, the agony of Bangla Desh seemed to start all over again.
Indeed, the agony of Bangla Desh, the terrible price it paid for its freedom is in danger of being forgotten and buried in the endless archives of human cruelty and degradation, with Lidice, Biafra, Viet Nam and Belsen. Generalities might soon swamp the individual horror which has left a mark on so many human beings and which added up to the several agonies of a people who are among the most gentle, artistic and industrious in the world.
It is this agony which I now pass on to others, so that they too may become involved and try, in their own fashion, to one of the muggiest months in Bengal.
I looked out of the window for relief. It was Sonar Bangla come to life. Idyllic rustic scenery, a succession of sleepy villages with typical small ponds on which the ducks seemed to waddle even while floating. Bamboo clumps stood silhouetted against sultry, dramatic cloud-tossed pre-monsoon skies. The banana groves were heavy with fruit, the evergraceful coconut palms bent picturesquely with the breeze. New-born calves frisked beside their scraggy mothers with uncertain steps. The typical Bengali bashas (huts) with thatched roofs and matting walls seemed eternal. Nothing could have been more peaceful than peasants in brightlycoloured lungis ploughing golden-green paddy fields.
My mind simply refused to anticipate refugees fleeing from violence and terror from a stricken country just a few miles away. The students, in any case, were making so much noise that I could hardly think.
But in the midst of all this bedlam they noticed, even before I did, the silent young man sitting quietly amongst them without a word or a smile. A dark, short, chubby and very ordinary-looking Bengali boy of about twenty. His oncesmart terylene trousers and shirt were crumpled and his collar soiled with grime. Clutched tightly in his hand was a tattered bit of thick pink paper. The young man had a strange fixed stare, the sort of stare you see on the faces of the dead.
Suddenly the students stopped their banter and one of them asked the silent young man with deep concern: “Dada” (Brother), “Are you from East Pakistan?” “There is no East Pakistan”, said the boy, suddenly jerking back to life, “There is no Pakistan any more, only Bangla Desh”. The students immediately became silent too. Soon after, I invited the young man to sit beside me when some passengers got out at the next station.
The boy then told me that he was an artist from East Pakistan radio. He opened the crumpled pink folder which turned out to be a programme, in Bengali, of a studio concert in which he had taken part. His name which he pointed out to me with a flicker of pride was Swapan Das and he was listed
with the orchestra as a bamboo flute player (bansher banshi). He then said to me with the same fixed stare which had now returned to his face that he had fled to the border after he found out that his whole family had been wiped out.
After leaving Dacca he had walked for nine long days living mostly on daab (green coconut). What, however, seemed to have upset him most was that he had left his flute behind. “But you see,” he explained, “when the radio and TV stations were surrounded by the army, as many of us as could escape fled through the back door. We all lost track of each other thereafter. For three days when the army was shooting and killing in the streets I could not get home. When I finally made my way there on the third day it was through a street full of corpses. When I reached my doorstep, it was piled high with bodies. My family had apparently been machinegunned when they came out of their house after the soldiers set fire to it. I recognized one of the corpses. It was that of my baby sister. I knew that my father and mother were also lying dead in that pile of bodies, but I did not even try to look for them. I preferred to remember them as they had looked when alive and happy, not looking desolate and strange like my baby sister.”
“And what are you going to do now?” I asked. “Well, I go up and down in this train every day, hoping to meet someone I know from Dacca,” he said. “I was born after Partition and although my parents often told me we had an uncle and other relatives in Calcutta, all that I know is that they live near Howrah and that their name is Das.” “What about your uncle’s first name?” I asked, because looking for a Das in Howrah is like looking for a Smith in London or a Singh in Jullundur. “I don’t know,” he said woodenly. “Never mind,” I consoled him, “I shall ask the Calcutta station of AIR to broadcast an SOS message giving the names of your parents.” Then I promised “I shall meet you at Sealdah unless you can find me in the 4.15 train from Bongaon”, as he got off with the now solicitious students at their stop. “We’ll see that he meets you here,” said the students cheerily.

THE BORDER

In the mind of every Bengali child, the word Bongaon immediately means a reflex quotation: “Bongaon-ey syal raja” (In the forest even the jackal can be king) and, equally, Bongaon’s kanchagollah, a delicate sweet made from chhana (curd) is justly famous. Curiously enough, my last thought before I got out of the train was: “I must take back some kanchagollahs for my sister.”
But my mind was jerked back to reality by the cycle-rickshawallah, a thin young lad I picked out from a great clamour of them at the railway station. “You want to go to the border? Some shells landed this side yesterday,” he said with cheerful relish. “I want to go to the refugee camp,” I replied. “Do you have relatives there?” he asked kindly. “No, I am writing for the newspapers,” I explained. “Lots of people come here on Sundays, as if it is a picnic”, he said. “Sightseers from Calcutta. But once they see the poor refugees, they go away with serious faces,” he added chattily.
Again, the setting seemed completely unreal for tragedy. I remember the cycle-rickshaw rolling merrily across a quaint wooden bridge. In the waters below, a woman was bathing, with her children. There were picturesque fishing boats with sails on the river. We passed bazaars with enticing brassware and, of course, kanchagollahs. Cartloads of jute were being pulled along by venerable bearded peasants and the narrow roads, badly scarred in places, had typical small Bengali bourgeois houses, aptly plastered with LONG LIVE MAO (in English) and insulting counter rhymes about Jyoti Basu and the CPI (M) in Bengali.
The cycle-rickshawallah insisted on taking me to the Petropole border first. The border guard ordered me to hold back. “The earth was shaking with six-pounders not so long ago”. he said sternly. It seemed like a dream-sequence in a Bombay film, because mail was still passing across the check-post. At the border were buses marked KHULNA-JESSORE and MUJIBUR RAHMAN in English and Bengali.

HARIDASPUR CAMP

At the Haridaspur Refugee Camp, the first sight that met my eye were ducks, chickens, goats and cattle. A mother gave her son a resounding slap for being rude to his father. There was a long queue at the gate for registration, while those already in, robbed of all privacy, bathed, cooked, ate and slept in the open, on cemented platforms. Those still seeking privacy hung up saris, or got others to hold them in a sort of tent around them while they changed their clothes. But most had no change of clothes, so there was no problem. They were bathing in the clothes they wore, for they were the only ones they had. And standing around for their wet clothes to dry. “They are mostly agricultural,” said the registration officer. “All panic-stricken. But there are also some customs officers, civil aviation personnel and teachers,” he added.
First to register in my presence was Ashwini Kumar Das, teacher of Commerce from Jalnachakrakhali High School. He looked quite distraught. “They burnt everything, and not a person was left,” he said. “So I fled towards Ghughuda village, east of Manirampur because I had heard my family had left for the border three or four days earlier. I have come 50 miles, on cycle and on foot, looking for them. But they are not here. The military were shooting from their gunboats and I don’t know if I will ever find them,” he said with a wild look.
Bishwanath (28), his mother Kalpana (45) and brother Ganesh Chandra (26) confessed that they had left “because everybody left. They said the Punjabis and Biharis are coming, run for your lives.”
Mr. M.A. Mutalib, Senior Store-Keeper of Jessore Aerodrome, had not, however, fled in this sort of unsophisticated panic. He had retained his bureaucratic composure, although he had a hard time retaining his physical dignity in what he was wearing: a thick hand-spun sari which he had improvised with obvious embarrassment into a lungi. The language he spoke was pure officialese: “Monday 29 March was last day for joining duty under martial law. Accordingly a few mem
bers of staff attended duty on Monday. Some military personnel entered our office to check attendance of staff. They obtained list of absentee staff. On the second day (Tuesday) almost all staff of civil aviation arrived and attended office. At about 10.30 a.m. we heard some firing inside Cantonment adjacent to our building, only two furlongs. We got frightened and went downstairs from tower to passenger lounge. After about half hour we saw aerodrome surrounded by army personnel. After they surrounded, we were stuck on ground floor, about 40 members of staff, including self. As our residential accommodation was near we ran to quarters to meet family members. We heard firing all around…afterwards we heard that the East Bengal Regiment had resisted.
“We were terrified all night. In the morning military personnel entered my house and searched for weapons, persons, etc. I identified myself as Government servant and children. Military personnel then asked me to stay in the house. I appealed to brigadier, ‘No water. He refused. Again remained in house till 1.30 p.m. when again military personnel entered and asked us to quit the house in two minutes, at gunpoint. All family members started crying.
“We started running only in our clothes and with one suitcase. “Bhago’ (run) said the soldiers. But where to go? One soldier wanted to shoot me, but the other soldier was known to me. He said: ‘Oh Tu? Bachgiya, Bhago.’ (Oh, it’s you? Saved. Run.) We ran for three nights and days, from village to village, sheltering mostly in schools. We reached this camp on 5th day of April. Madam, I was only a Government servant carrying out orders. Why did they have to persecute me?”
At this stage I said to the camp commandant: “I would like to ineet some women who have been molested.” “Hindus?” he asked. “No,” I said, “It is much more significant when Muslims attack Muslims.” “Would you like to meet a family of which all the male members have been killed, and all the women raped ?”, suggested the camp commandant. I could only nod my head mutely.
Entering the main building of the camp, I was led to a vast hall where families were bunched together in clusters. The five women I met ranged in age from about thirteen to fifty. As I squatted on the floor beside them and explained that I was a newspaperwoman, I expected extreme shyness, if not resistance, which would be natural in the circumstances. But what I had not expected was the heart-breaking manner in which the oldest lady put her arms around me as she called me daughter. And thereafter the entire family, or what was left of it, not only clung to my arms but, for days afterwards, my arms carried the deep marks where their nails had dug into my flesh as they spoke with powerful anguish of the terrible experiences they had undergone.
“I shall not mention your names or identify your village, I began, “because I am anxious to protect your izzat (honour) and spare you the pain of having your tragedy exposed to public gaze.” “What izzat do we have left, daughter?”, asked Mariam Bibi, the eldest of them all, with a deep sigh, “publish our names and our photographs if you like. Because I want the whole world to know what they did to us.”
Mariam Bibi, a frail lady with a dazzling complexion and a look of exquisite daintiness, would have been considered a beauty anywhere in the world. But the radiance had gone from her lovely face, and nothing was left now except a weary, ineffable sadness. The women around her looked as bereft as she did. Except for the youngest girl: On her face was a look of frozen horror which haunted me for days. They were the widow and children of the Station Master of Benapole Railway Station on the Pakistani side of the Indian-Pakistani border. With all the men in their family killed and all their women except Mariam Bibi raped, they could hardly look anything but hopeless.
Said Mariam Bibi: “We do not have a single male member left in our family. And all this happened to us because, during the days of Awami League opposition and non-cooperation in the month of March, my husband, helped Sheikh Mujibur Rehman with the trains. So first they killed my husband in front of all of us. They cut him slowly to pieces so that he did not die quickly. Then they killed my 22-year-old son. After
this, we women had no man in the house to protect us, so we said to the killers: “Take everything in the horise, take our jewellery, but spare us five poor women.’ So they took all our money and jewellery and everything else they could take from the house, But this was not enough. After that they chased my daughters all night as they ran terrified in the fields near our house and every time they caught them they raped them. My daughters Tahira Kulsum was married for just 1 months when they came and was visiting me for the first time since marriage. Her husband is untraceable. My daughter Amina’s husband was a havildar in the East Pakistan Rifles and was one of the first soldiers to be killed. They burnt all his papers too, so that my daughter cannot now provide evidence of her dues as a widow. There is also no news of my son-in-law, husband of my daughter Naeema Khatun, who is only 20. My youngest daughter, who is only 14, was also brutally attacked by them. Do you see the look on her face, and those scratches? That is because she resisted them until she was overpowered by several men. Then, when we escaped across the border, these Bengali razakars who killed my men and dishonoured my daughters did not leave us. They followed us across the border, pretending to be refugees. The worst of them stopped us when we were about to seek shelter in a camp in India. He put a knife to the throat of our two small grandchildren and said, ‘I will slit their throats if you say you are the family of the Station Master of Benapole Railway Station. Put down these false names in the register and say you are from Jessore. Every evening he follows us about in the camp and tries to make us agree to be prostitutes. You have no men and no honour left now,’ they taunt. ‘That is the only way you can live. We had to lodge a protest with the camp commandant for our protection, for we are afraid all the time that they will carry out their threats. Please help to give us some protection.”
There was little I could do to comfort them, except repeat their complaint to the camp commandant. And what could I say to another very young woman who came up hopefully to me after Mariam Bibi had finished her tale? “My name is

20

Renu,” she said, “and I am from Barisal. My husband is a naik-babu and worked in the house of the Punjabi captain in the 25th Baluch Regiment. They took away my husband, they said he was to be a prisoner. When I cried, they hit me on my nose with a rifle. My father, Ejazul Haque Choudhury, works in the Gopalpur Sugar Mills. I told them that, but they took me away in a lorry, molested me, and then threw me out of the lorry. This child of 1 months won’t take milk any more, since they threw him out of the truck with me. I have three children and am now five months pregnant. Do you think I can go back to my country?”
She added, “I have money in the Kushtia Bank and also Rs. 2000 in Dacca. And I am sure they will not kill my husband and I can go back to him.”
Renu, who looked no more than twenty years old, was pale and thin herself and the little infant dangling at her waist looked more like a skeleton-an Oxfam ad. It was Renu’s innocence and trust that left me speechless. I just handed over the three oranges I had with me and asked her to persuade. the little mite, who did not look as if he would live for very long, to have a little orange juice. It was all I could offer. And it was precious little.
The ride back to Bongaon, to visit the injured in hospital, suddenly suggested to me that I might put in a visit to the local magistrate to inform him about Mariam Bibi’s fears and ensure her family some protection.
Every rickshawallah knew the magistrate’s office-cumresidence. Administrators in modern India live very modestly nowadays, and it seemed too much to hope for that he would have a guest room where a woman could powder her nose. But the magistrate kindly suggested that I walk across the road to the police station and he phoned through to ask the inspector on duty to have the Circuit House opened for me it was also across the road) so that I could have a wash, Women do not walk alone in Bongaon with tape recorders and professional bags slung across their shoulders, notebook and pencil in hand. Every step of mine was noted in the tea-shop full of local lads. But their gaze thereafter extended beyond me to the police station. And it was only when I entered that I suddenly came face to face with a group of young Naxalites, behind bars in the lock-up. They had a trapped look about them and some were slumped on the floor in the last stages of exhaustion. It was a terrible sight and my first instinct was to ask the police to let them have a bath and some food, because they seemed to be educated and intelligent young men from good homes to me, and it seemed all wrong that they should be exposed to the public gaze like animals at the zoo. But I would no doubt have been told that it was not my business so, like a coward, I turned my eyes away, took the key from the policeman, had a wash, some iced nimbu pani from my flask and the now dry tomato sandwiches. I felt a very privileged person indeed, and walked the gauntlet back feeling very guilty about those boys in the lock-up. Did I detect hostile stares from the boys at the tea-shop? I did not blame them much.
In the magistrate’s outer office, adjacent to the verandah on which a servant was cooking his lunch, I found a man in a white bush-shirt and grey trousers and some instinct told me he was a journalist. And so he was and had only just got across the border. Mahmud-ul-Haq, editor of Natun Desh of Navarone, said: “I used to work in Dacca but started Natun Desh, a Sunday weekly paper, after coming to Jessore in 1964. I immediately got involved in the Swadhin Bangla Andolan (Free Bengal Movement) and in 1969 it was banned. This was immediately after the war with India, which it had not supported. It proclaimed itself against the Muslim League and supported Bengali culture. This terrorize and then persuade campaign is entirely Bhutto’s”, concluded Mr. Haq as he outlined the struggle for Bengali culture against what he described as “a colonial regime”.
Now Mr. Haq was without his paper, without a livelihood and without a home. But he was planning a news sheet, in collaboration with other East Bengali colleagues to smuggle across the border and keep those left behind informed, as well as to keep up their spirits.

BONGAON HOSPITAL

However, it was time to visit Bongaon Hospital. And the first thing I saw when I entered was Amina Khatoon, age ten, being wheeled out of the operation theatre. An earlier X-Ray had revealed that she had a bullet in the leg. Another girl of six, with a bullet in her lungs, had survived because of a brilliant operation by a young surgeon from Jadavpur. “But she has lost the will to live,” said a grim-faced surgeon, “She saw her parents and her brothers and sisters slaughtered in front of her eyes.”
The patients I met in the wards after this encounter with two child victims had endless tales of trigger-happy soldiers and also of personal heroism. Ghulam Rehman, a mild, blackbearded worker from the finishing department of the New Mills of Jessore Jute Industries, was lying on a cot on the verandah. He looked pale from loss of blood and spoke with some difficulty.
“When the mills stopped work and the banks closed and the leaders went home, I started going home too. A military car stopped me and the soldiers asked for my identity card. After checking it they arrested me, another Muslim worker and a Christian friend of mine from the same mills. We were arrested round about 2.30 p.m. and taken to their camp. At 6.30 p.m. they tied our hands behind our backs. We asked for forgiveness, but they made lis first sit down and then shot us from the back. My Christian and Muslim friends died immediately. I was shot in the side, then kicked and thrown in the river. Luckily there was only about half a foot of water, and I was left for dead. When I saw that the soldiers had left for their camp in the distance I kept low and crawled for about a quarter mile. My clothes got completely torn but I was able to reach a brick kiln on the edge of the jungle and after hiding in my village for some hours I was able to reach the border, which was only three quarters of a mile from my village.”
Abdul Jalil, a typical thin, intense-looking soft-spoken Bengali boy, looking remarkably cheerful in spite of his wounds: “I was studying in Michael Madhusudhan College in Jessore for my Commerce Finals when I set out on a visit to my village. I was alone on a cycle, eight miles away from home, but there were several others walking on the road. A military patrol suddenly appeared and, after several other people had been shot, I had my baptism of fire too. I fell into a pond after I was shot. But a kind-hearted brigadier came up to where I was lying and said, ‘Will you go home or come with us? I said, ‘Home, sir,’ The brigadier said, ‘Let him go.’ Someone else said, “Shoot the dog.” But the brigadier spared my life.”
“He always says ‘brigadier’,” quipped Vilayat Khan, his neighbour in the next bed, “It was really a captain from the description he has given but he says ‘brigadier’ because it makes him feel more important.” Vilayat Khan was speaking with professional superiority because, although he was equally young, he was from the East Pakistan Rifles. “I joined the army as a kartobya ( a mission),” he said, “and received my first training under a Punjabi colonel. After martial law was declared on 25th March they took away our weapons and locked us up. When we realized we were going to die in any case, we broke open the locks and took out the weapons. This happened also in other training camps in Dacca, Khulna and Jessore. There were about 100-120 of us in our group and we brought out everything we could, including six vehicles with machine guns. We kept the army at bay for three days, but when we got out-numbered we realized we could not continue. There were no cars, so we walked seven miles to Jhikargacha. Our sector commander had gone to the cantonment when we escaped after breaking open the locks.
“After trekking for over two hours we found Malanchi village being burnt and there was shooting going on too. 10-15 of us marched to Malanchi and some villagers came running to us for help. During an hour of fighting with 303 rifles against light machine guns, we held them. Then they got superior fire power, so 14 of us marched to Malanchi village, which had been set on fire by the Pakistani army. We fought only with 303 rifles and ranged against us were LMG’s, mortars
and even a tank. I was hit by a LMG bullet, so I gave my weapon to someone next to me. Then two villagers carried me on their shoulders to the border and I was brought to the hospital here for treatment.”
Lying in the next bed was another very young man, and he looked like a college student. So he was. Mohammed Pyar Ali’s story was by now all too familiar: “I was an arts student of M.M. College in Jessore and joined the Mukti Bahini and got shot in the back. While I was recovering in the Sadar Hospital, the soldiers came and shot the Civil Surgeon and six doctors right in front of us.”
If I started by seeing children in Bongaon hospital, and my spirits had somewhat picked up after seeing the fighting spirit still left in the boys of the Mukti Bahini, they rapidly drooped at the sight of a beautiful old lady, age about seventy, who had an arm missing and was being helped tenderly with her tea by a young man, apparently her son. Her dignity and bearing were those of a duchess. It seemed a pity to interrupt her hot cup of tea, but the young man kindly told me the story of Mussamet Kustanissa. She was from Churanmonkathi.” “When the soldiers entered our house”, explained the young man, “they first molested her daughter-in-law. When mother lifted her arm to help her they hacked it off from the shoulder. Then she had to watch helplessly as they killed her daughterin-law in front of her eyes.”
Wandering round the wards of the hospital, I spent over three hours and I only remembered I had missed lunch when the nurses and doctors insisted on offering me tea. Then a doctor and a nurse offered to let me travel back with them on the 6.55 train. On the way back, in a cycle-rickshaw, the nurse insisted on stopping at a sweet shop. “However abnormal the conditions for your first visit to Bongaon”, she said kindly, seeing how shaken I was, “You must take some kanchagollahs back with you to Calcutta.” BACK TO CALCUTTA It was only when I got into the train that I remembered that I had missed the train on which I was supposed to travel with

25

Swapan Das, flute-player, and the cheery students. I hope he made it to All India Radio for help. It was the first thing I mentioned to Dilip Sengupta at the radio station when I called there next morning.
But on arrival at Sealdah, my first thoughts were about transport for getting home. It was already past 9 p.m. and by the time my turn came in the taxi queue, it was 9.45 p.m. I kept on remembering my sister’s warning about Naxalites on the bridge near her house in New Alipore, but after what I had seen in Bongaon, crossing the bridge seemed like a golliwog’s cake-walk.
As I finally staggered into the house with the kanchagollahs, my sister said: “Oh, we were getting quite worried, but we have waited dinner for you. “Good heavens!”, She exclaimed, after a closer look at me, “why are you walking like a zombie? You look absolutely exhausted.” As I slumped into a chair and looked at my forearms, with deep black lines and bruises on them where the family of the Benapole Station Master had dug into them in their anguish as they told me their terrible story of murder and rape, my sister gave me some neat brandy to swallow. Then, still walking like a zombie, I tried to adjust my mind to the gracious dinner table, with people eating lovely home-cooked food and with the silver and glasses glowing softly in the dim light. I remember telling them about the Benapole Station Master’s wife and her youngest daughter, with that look of frozen horror on her face.
“You said after dinner you’d be back in a minute and just disappeared,” said my sister next morning. “We found you in the bedroom later, you looked as if you had passed out. We did not have the heart to wake you up for the kanchagollalis”.
Next morning, my first thought was for the radio station and my missed promise to Swapan Das.
I set off as early as possible for All India Radio. AT A.I.R. Sitting in the spacious, orderly, official room of Dilip Sengupta, Station Director of All India Radio, Calcutta, I waited for the two intellectuals who had so kindly agreed on the telephone to come straightway to the radio station to recount their personal experiences to me. One was a professor and the other an artist. And I did not quite know what to expect. Bitterness? Self-pity? Anger? Hopelessness?
Nothing makes cruelty so concrete as direct confrontation with those who are its direct victims, and if those victims are as unlikely as the first two I met in Calcutta.
Prof. Sammad of Rajshahi University and Kamrul Hassan, Director of the Institute of Design, Dacca, entered the room and greeted me with quiet courtesy. They could have been two professors from any university entering the room of a radio producer to discuss their broadcast scripts. Prof. Sammad, I remember, was in a light grey bush-shirt and Mr. Hassan in camel-coloured pyjamas and kurta, and they both looked so normal that I was taken aback. It was only when I asked Prof. Sammad what exactly had happened at Rajshahi University that I realized the agitation he was trying so hard to conceal.
“I have just been interviewed by Le Monde and French TV because I was educated in France and speak French fluently. But, please,” he begged, “You must protect my identity as carefully as Le Monde, which did not mention my name, and French TV, which filmed me so that I was never shown full face, so that I am not recognized. We all have relatives left behind, we ourselves might have to go back to rescue them, and you can imagine how dangerous it can be if we are identified”.
“As far as Rajshahi is concerned, we were all at the university when the army came in without any notice. The army and police had never before entered the campus of Rajshahi University. Our Vice-Chancellor, who was a very mild, proGovernment man and, if anything, Jamait-ul-Islami in his leanings, said very politely to the army officer who strode into his office. “This is an academic area, a protected place, please go away.”
“‘Shut up, you old fool,’ replied the oflicer as his men proceeded to occupy Zoha Hall. We had already taken the

precaution of removing the girl students in small numbers to the professors’ houses, but the wife of a Bengali professor whose husband was not at home was beaten up when she refused to divulge his whereabouts. On the 26th and 27th there was no curfew or Section 144, but they started shooting the students, mostly in the legs to cripple and lame them. Meanwhile, in the town they had started shooting without any notice and set fire to nearby villages. It was the East Pakistan Rifles, however, who were in control in Rajshahi then and it was only when the university faculty heard that a leading lawyer, Bakth Sahib, and two much-loved local citizens, Biren Sarkar and Pandey had been shot-and they were all completely non-political people that 50 or 60 professors decided to organize themselves and leave. Later, some professors were also shot.”
Leading artist Kamrul Hassan was still calm, collected, the detached intellectual. His anger and anguish were in his words, not his tone.
“I was in Dacca on those dreadful days and managed to come out only on April 4.
“Actually, the artists were among the most politically conscious people and they had already got directly involved because earlier, during the other national calamity, the cyclone, we had designed satirical posters highlighting the neglect of the people by a callous Government. The Punjabi military officers who came to shoot us got no cooperation from the Bengalis in the police intelligence, who are the only people who could have identified us by our faces. The military junta was not interested enough in Bengali artists to even know their names, let alone their faces.
“Only those artists who had been photographed with foreign visitors or top Government people had something to fear. And I was one of them. I therefore gave up my house and kept shifting from the house of one friend to another in Dacca upto April 4. I crossed over from Faridpur, and luckily there was no army near the Padma. And now, the attitude of the artists of Bangla Desh is this: It is a matter of life and death. We are completely fearless and ready to fight, but we must
do it our own way. We can help by training young people in designing morale-boosting posters. We are also anxious to organize publicity against the vicious Pakistani propaganda about saving Islam. The intellectuals of Bangla Desh feel that the Pakistanis are not killing people, they are killing Islamic philosophy with mortars and sten-guns. Scholars and experts on the Prophet’s life should analyse these happenings and clear up this question once and for all: Did the Prophet pounce on his enemies without warning? Are newborn babies ‘miscreants’ to be machine-gunned? Even Hitler let Einstein go. But when a head of state permits atrocities like these, that country has no future.”
And then the painter’s face took on a wry look as he concluded, in almost a soliloquy: “Did you read that last speech of President Yahya Khan? It was so ugly. It used such ugly language.”
It had hurt his aesthetic sense as well, and it was this ability to combine idealism with practical sense which, I felt, would make Bangla Desh win through

29
2 :
Calcutta:
Late 1971
IT WAS on a very cold night in Delhi towards the end of November. I had just tucked my 80-year old mother into bed. Father had died recently and, to make matters worse, mother had slipped on a doorstep and cut open her forehead. I was about to drink a cup of hot milk before getting into bed myself, when the telephone rang. It was just a few minutes to midnight.
The caller was Humayun Rasheed Chowdhury, Chief of the Bangla Desh mission in New Delhi. Admittedly not yet recognized officially by anyone, but intensely active nevertheless. “Can I come and see you immediately?”, he asked. “What, at midnight?” I said, “Is it that urgent?” “Yes,” he said tersely, and he sounded as if he meant it. It was not very polite to make a potential ambassador sit on a small bucket chair in a cramped front room. But Humayun had known my mother when he was a small boy in Shillong and did not want her disturbed either.
“We are collecting direct documentary evidence of violation of human rights by the Pakistan junta in what used to be East Pakistan. We want as many interviews with victims as possible. Could you fly down to Calcutta tomorrow and do us some interviews?”
“Well, not tomorrow, because I would have to take mother down to Calcutta too, I cannot leave her here alone. But if she is willing, I shall make it day after tomorrow.” I replied.

We sealed the pact with some Bengali sandesh (sweet which used to be the traditional harbinger of good news, although that hardly seemed the context now). And mother, who has always been a great girl, said next morning, why not?
And so it was back to Calcutta again. This perpetually disturbed city had watched with increasing helplessness the massacre of the innocents going on next door. Some of the victims were in Calcutta itself, and many were in hospitals and refugee camps all over West Bengal. Calcutta had supped on horror and was neither as affluent nor as settled as it should have been to receive with equanimity the prospect of 10 million refugees staying on indefinitely.
I had started some intensive interviewing in Calcutta and environs and had just returned from a visit to a small centre for children which Mother Teresa had organized a little beyond Dum Dum. Tiny little children, barely saved from dying of severe malnutrition. It was not a very cheerful thought that some of them might never see their parents again.
As I got back to Calcutta at lunch-time, I was reminded that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi would be in Calcutta that day and the hotel staff told me that her public meeting at the maidan would be visible from the roof of our hotel. Although I could hardly hear her speech from that distance, the crowd was a cliché come to life: a sea of humanity which stretched as far as the eye could see. It was only next day that one got to know that Pakistan had struck at Indian Air Force stations in an Israeli-type blitzkrieg even as Mrs. Gandhi was speaking in Calcutta.
It was war and, at last, the sense of frustration was over. In the foyer of the hotel, Bangladeshis in exile were thumping each other on the back and embracing their Indian friends with tears in their eyes. The Pakistani army had had its innings of killing unarmed civilians. Now it would face tough professional soldiers, bolstered by the Mukti Bahini, which had already made life very difficult for them inside Bangla Desh and made Dacca itself the locale for dramatic hit-and-run raids.
Every journalist, radio and TV man who had converged on Calcutta had but one thought: to go inside Bangla Desh with the liberating army. But the war was far from won and now, more than ever, I felt, was the time to continue my interviewing and documentation of the violation of human rights. Wars, after all, are fought by the military. But it is the civilians who had suffered so cruelly who had to go back and face life again in a devastated land, where families had been torn apart and all norms of decent human behaviour flouted with ruthless sadism. Their problems, if anything, became even larger now. Peace, one felt, would be even more difficult to face than war.
I decided to begin my quest again at refugee camps. And this time I gathered material at the smallest as well as biggest ones.
TAKI CAMP Taki Camp, when I visited it in early December, still had 15,387 refugees: 9,281 Hindus and 6,091 Muslims. There were also 15 Christians. It was so near the Ichamati river that some men had sent over their women and children for shelter in the Indian camp, and stayed back bravely in their villages in Bangla Desh to tend their fields and keep the harvest going. Taki, in fact, was one of the oldest refugee camps, opened in 1947, following the partition of India and received the first wave of refugees from East Pakistan.
When I entered it on a sunny winter morning, it looked as if people were getting ready for a festival near the camp commandant’s office. But I soon discovered, since war had only just started, that they were standing around for news, for the signal to go home and end their impersonal, overcrowded lives in Taki Camp.
Typical of the current mixture of joy and apprehension was the spontaneous reaction of Sudhir Krishna Swarnakar, a tall, earnest looking man, with a thick head of hair, a typical sturdy East Bengali peasant, from Sripur Village.
“When I heard that Bangla Desh was going to be free on the radio, I was lying down on my mat on the ground. I felt so happy, I just took up my pillow and threw it in the mud.

It is ruined now, but I don’t care, it is the only way I could celebrate.” The nervous laughter from the crowd was explained as he went on:
“I come from Ashashat Thana in Khulna. We were a family of eleven including my two brothers. As soon as I heard the news, I went across the river in a boat. I am a farmer. I used to own my own field and sow my own crops. But now I have no home, no cow, no calf and all that is left in our village of Sripur is the fish in the ponds, because they could not burn and kill them. The Khan Sena went away before they could destroy the fish, but they have taken away the doors and windows of every house. Even if we live within the frame of the house, what shall we eat?”
“They have reached an extreme state of humiliation,” said Captain Mukherji, the camp commandant. “After they heard the news their initial reaction was romantic: Now We Are Free. But when it comes to the actual going back, they are doubtful, because of the atrocities they faced before coming. As a whole, they are afraid of going back, because they have lost faith in human nature. Most of them are poor peoplefarmers, fishermen, petty traders.”
This mixture of apprehension and hope was multiplied in the brief comments made by a group of village women squatting on the banks of the Ichamati river for a country boat to ferry them across to Bangla Desh. Zohra Khatun from Kaliganj in Khanjira Thana said: “I am frightened because I have nothing to go back to. What shall I eat?” But, she declared doggedly, “I shall go home.” Golap Dasi from Ghazipur added: “I just want to go back and see what has happened. I came away when they started shooting. I saw a man shot right in front of my eyes. It was terrible.” When we landed on the other side, I saw her looking apprehensively at a man going along on a bicycle with a sten-gun. It was a member of the Mukti Bahini.
ON THE ICHAMATI I had the advantage of a small motorboat kindly arranged for us by Major Jalil of the Mukti Bahini. His headquarters
near the Ichamati had a smart, disciplined look, and Major Jalil had the look of a Cuban revolutionary with his Che Guevara beard and peaked cap.
As we joined the convoy of small country boats ferrying refugees back, we caught up with Gholam Rahman. Before anything else one noticed his spotless white pyjama and kurta.
He was crossing the Ichamati in a small hand-rowed country boat being ferried across by a typical Bangla Desh boatman in a colourful lungi. And on his lap sat a solemn little girl of about six. Her mother had dressed her in a pretty flowered frock and her hair had a jaunty bow which someone had improvised for her from a bright blue silk ribbon. “How did you manage to find such lovely, clean and bright clothes in a refugee camp?” I asked from the faster motor boat with which we were overtaking them. “Ah, but we are going home,” said Gholam Rahman. And considering what he had been through, one could not blame him for celebrating in his best clothes. “See you on the other side,” said Gholam Rahman as we passed him.
“I used to be a bus driver in the garage of Mr. A.B. Khan of Satkhira,” said Gholam Rahman, as he caught up with me on the other side of the river, “Mr. A.B. Khan had to abandon his garage and flee to London for his life. I also escaped to India with my family after the sodiers shot our mukhtar and a school teacher right in front of us. I used to drive a bus on the Jessore-Khulna-Kushtia sector. The Pakistani soldiers came and first took away my bus and then destroyed my house. As soon as I heard the Mukti Bahini was in control of Satkhira again I left the refugee camp and made a preliminary trip across the river to have a look first at Sripur. After I have checked my own house and its state, I will take my family back home again. Don’t forget to ask for me at A.B. Khan’s garage when you come to Satkhira”, he ended with a cheerful wave of farewell.
Soon our boat bumped against the dark, wet sand of the Bangla Desh bank of the Ichamati. I tucked up my sari, slowly worked my way up to the country path which ran parallel to the river and, walking past small black goats and a buffalo, picked up a conversation with a tall bearded man with a huge pile of hay on his head. Mohammad Hassan said: “I sent my wife and daughter across the river to the refugee camp but stayed behind to look after my fields. I used to hide when I saw the Khan Sena and tended my crops when they went looting in neighbouring villages.”
As I walked along the bank I could not help looking across the river, twinkling silver in the afternoon sunlight, the banks lined with tall palms, banana groves and thick bushes. But there are crocodiles in the river,” said Parthasarathy Das, my Mukti Bahini escort, with a grim look.
Parthasarathy Das was young, intense, tall and with a smart military-style moustache. He seemed to keep a wary, guerilla’s eye on everything and everyone within sight. And the next sight that met our eyes was indeed unusual. GHAZI MOHAMMED MUSA The banks of the river Ichamati, the sand wet and slithery and with random villagers strolling along a rough village – path with bundles of hay on their heads, hardly seemed the right locale for a smart young man in a sports blazer to be cycling along. The badge said: “Football, 1968-69”. But Ghazi Musa’s prowess at football had been put into mothballs for the moment. He was now in the Mukti Bahini and Bangla Desh was about to be liberated. Satkhira, the nearest town, was already under control of the Mukti Bahini. And Ghazi Musa looked back with almost academic detachment on the horrors which he and his family had faced in the last few months:
“I was studying in Government College, Daulatpur, when the troubles started. I and my four brothers immediately joined the Mukti Bahini. I soon received a bullet in the leg, but I was luckier than my younger brother who was killed. My father used to be a prosperous timber merchant in Khulna. My brother Rehmatullah was Chief Petty Officer in the Pakistani submarine Mogra, and was one of the nine Bengali naval crew who defected to Bangla Desh while on training in France. Before that he was on the submarine Ghazi, which was sunk
35

in the December war by the Indian Navy. Lucky he was no longer serving on that.”
As Mohammed Musa cycled on, it was difficult to believe he was not on his way to football practice. He must be back in the team now.
“What was that you said about crocodiles in the river?’ I asked Parthasarathy Das, who was clearly a man of few words and extreme modesty. “And what particular crocodiles have you been fighting?”
It seemed to require a special effort on the part of 27-year old Parthasarathy to talk about himself, except when I met his wife Gouri, slim and beautiful, as she emerged from the village pond after a dip, a wet sari clinging to her elegant lines. They were roughing it out in a damp, dilapidated village house, their first after a dramatically interrupted wedding ceremony. But their professional coolness seemed to take everything in its stride.
PARTHASARATHY AND GOURI DAS “I am an advocate from Barisal,” said Parthasarathy on the boat coming back across the river. “I was actually in the middle of my wedding ceremony when the Pak Sena arrived. I had yet to put sindoor on my bride’s forehead to make her my wife. We simply had to run for our lives and abandon the wedding, but my father-in-law hurriedly handed over the bride to me and said: ‘Take her, I consider you her husband.” So we both escaped and joined the Mukti Bahini. Gouri was also a lecturer in Jhalokathi College in Barisal when we came to India.
“And now, as head of the women’s wing of the local Mukti Bahini she trains girls as spies”, said Parthasarathy, with pride. “I sent two girls, Bithika Biswas and Kanak Mondal regularly across the Ichamati River to bring back information for the Mukti Bahini,” added Gouri.
“We are getting special leave on Sunday, which is tomorrow, to go to the Kalighat Temple in Calcutta and complete our wedding ceremony,” concluded Parthasarathy, with a sudden burst of confidence, “I still have to put that sindoor on her forehead,” he said, with a tender look at his wife.
Parthasarathy’s father, owner of the RCBB rice mills in Barisal, is one of the most affluent and respected citizens of the area and head of a distinguished family which has contributed several educationists to East Bengal, including his sons.
But, alas, the young couple’s visit to Calcutta would also hold a sad note. For Parthasarathy’s youngest brother had got mentally deranged after watching all the atrocities and had to be put into a mental home in Calcutta.
SATKHIRA Leaving the Ichamati behind us, gleaming silver in the midday sun, we made a big detour by car according to Major Jalil’s precise instructions, to go to Satkhira via Ichinda. At this border village, we found a party consisting entirely of young children trotting briskly across the check-post towards Bangla Desh. They carried their meagre belongings, including schoolbooks, on their heads. “Our rice fields are now grass, all our vegetables have disappeared, and only the large trees, such as mango, jackfruit and coconut are intact,” said a chirpy. little boy, “because those Pakistani animals could not climb them.”
I found, however, that it was not so easy for me to cross the check-post and get permission for our jeep to negotiate the now distinctly country path, overgrown with grass. “There are mines abcut,” said the local commander, “Two chaps were blown to bits yesterday. I cannot let you through.” “What about those little boys?”, I asked angrily, pointing to two lads of about ten. “Can you de-fuse a mine?”, asked the commander tersely. I confessed I could not. “Well, these boys can”, said the commander. “And are helping us to escort their families across.” Well, whatever else Bangla Desh might or might not need after freedom, I said to myself, they certainly have an active little task force of little boys who can de-fuse mines.
I could only hope that they would get freedom soon enough to rejoin school with the books balanced on their heads so neatly. And that their infectious energy would be diverted to happier, more constructive childish pursuits.
BACK IN CALCUTTA
From the rural setting, the rustic patois of the refugee camps, of peasants crossing their beloved rivers in country boats with their families to pick up the threads of their hastily abandoned and basically simple lives, it was a far cry to the five-star hotel off Chowringhee where I had invited numerous intellectuals to relate their experiences to me.
For the top intellectuals of Bangla Desh, the artists, writers, journalists, technocrats, it was an ideological war in the best sense of the term, a war for human liberty that had been undertaken. Even if won, and no one was yet sure, it would be a hard fight on return to re-establish human and intellectual values which had been so ruthlessly violated. Each one of them inevitably made his or her individual experience a relevant detail in what had been a general assault on their professions, their code of values, and, indeed, their faith in human nature and civilization, MOHAMEDULLAH CHAUDHURY Urbane, witty, sophisticated, a typical Chief-Sub of any newspaper in the world, Mohamedullah Chaudhury, of The Daily Ittefaq did not exactly look at home in the somewhat formal atmosphere of the ritzy hotel in Calcutta. A slightly graying, dapper moustache seemed just right with his journalistic habit of flicking ash off his cigarette as he drove home a point. He related the destruction of his newspaper office, and the loss of life of his colleagues, with that cool detachment and strict accuracy which one would expect of a seasoned newspaperman.
“First let me give you the background to my newspaper,” he began with the thoroughness of a man whose job is to check stories.
“Trefaq being an Awami League daily had constantly resisted the military dictatorship and had the largest circulation too. It was persistent in asking for the restoration of democracy and for autonomy in East Pakistan. It protested against detention without trial, advocated secularism and asked for freedom of the Press. For this, its courageous editor and the paper had already paid heavily, for many years and long before the military crack-down. It was banned twice, first in 1954 by the Central Pakistan Government and then in 1966. The second time, its publication was suspended for three years. Its deposit was forfeited at least 20 times.
“Its founder, Mr. Taffazzal Hossain, was chairman of the Pakistan branch of the Commonwealth Press Union and chairman of the Pakistan branch of the International Press Institute for consecutive terms. He was imprisoned several times. The last time, he was released only after the International Press Institute and the world journalistic community intervened because of his broken health. During his imprisonment from 13th August 1966 to June 1968, his Press was confiscated by the Pakistan Government under the Defence of Pakistan rules. He died in a hotel in Rawalpindi under mysterious circumstances after being invited there for a meeting with President Yahya Khan after the overthrow of Ayub Khan.
“In this context, the deliberate destruction of our paper. and what it stood for was not surprising. But the methods employed for that destruction certainly took us by surprise when they came.
“At about 4 p.m. on the 26th March 1971, a Patton tank came up and took up position on the other side of the road, facing The Ittefag office. Eight journalists were still on the first floor of the office when curfew was announced.
“First the soldiers machine-gunned the board on which the name of the paper was written. After this blast, those of us on the first floor came out to see what was happening. We understood at the sight of the tank and fell flat on our faces. At this point, a canteen boy who was hiding somewhere on the first floor also ran out to see what was happening and had hardly peeped out when he was hit on the forehead and died on the spot. Hearing this shot our peon Shamsul who was on the ground floor also came out. Another burst hit him on the chest and he died.
“After this, the tank moved a few yards eastwards and started firing at the machine and recording room of The Ittefaq and kept on blasting away for about three minutes. Then there was silence for about 40 minutes. But in the meantime, the tank went round to the back of the building took up position and started blasting away at the Accounts Departments and the editor’s room. This continued for some minutes and after this some soldiers in uniform entered the machine-room, threw some hand grenades, then entered the Records Room and threw some more grenades. Both rooms caught fire.
“Mr. Asafuddaulah, News Editor of Ittefaq, suggested to the Executive Editor, Mr. Shirazuddin, that they should leave the building, but he replied: A newspaper is still the safest place in the world. If we can’t save our lives here, we can’t anywhere. After half an hour, it became impossible to stay on the first floor because of the heat. So we decided to leave. But how? If we left through the gate we would be shot, so we decided to squeeze through a gap of about one foot in the wall and jump into a side room. The younger people acted as ladders, the others stood on their shoulders to negotiate the wall and came down to the ground floor through another hole which was there because a lift was being constructed.
“One of the older persons, Mr. Iqbal Hussain, a renowned poet and journalist, could not negotiate the wall and was later found dead, due to suffocation from the heat. In the confusion we had not realized that Mr. Hussain was not there. When we came downstairs, we found the road blocked by the military, who were setting fire to the Editor’s room. So we again went upstairs the same way, and down to the machine room, which was now engulfed in flames. We negotiated the wide gap in the wall again, but when we came to the outer wall, we found it impossible to cross, it was too high. Suddenly, rescue came in the form of the owner of the adjoining flat. Finding us fighting for our lives, he went inside his house and fetched a long bamboo pole which he and his son pushed into the Ittefaq office through a window. “This is your last chance, sir,’ he said. And it was. The remaining seven of us climbed the wall with the help of the bamboo pole and were at last able to leave our burning newspaper office, which we had thought was the safest place in the world.

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“But our valued colleague, Mr. Iqbal Hussain, lost his life at what should have been the peak of his career. The Pakistani army had taken a terrible toll.” MOUDUD AHMED Dapper, bearded Moudud Ahmed, Bar-at-Law, one of Sheikh Mujib’s lawyers who had attended the round table talks with the Sheikh, had also witnessed the death of a newspaper on 25th March in Dacca, and much else too.
“I went to the Intercontinental at 10.30 p.m. on 25th March to brief some foreign correspondents. At 10.35 we were informed that the hotel had been surrounded by troops. Soon a notice appeared on a black-board. It said: ANYONE GOING OUT OF THE HOTEL WILL BE SHOT AT SIGHT.
“Some of us had wanted to go out, but when we saw tanks lined up in position we turned on our radios instead, but there was still no announcement of curfew. As far as I can remember, it was at 11.20 that we first heard shots, and the sounds were coming from very near the hotel. I saw a couple walking along the pavement outside the hotel, an ordinary well-dressed couple. They were just shot dead. Then all of us went up to the 9th floor, then the 10th and Ilth. We wanted to wake up Mr. Bhutto, but someone said he was sleeping and could not be disturbed, although about 40 to 50 foreign correspondents wanted to see him.
“At about 2.30 a.m. about two jeep-loads of officers and about 25 ground forces proceeded towards the office of The People. We could already see flames at Farm Gate, near the airport. Between 2.30 and 3 p.m., the offices of The People were attacked. It is on a narrow road whch was blocked with two old cars. The action took about 20 minutes, and a paan shop was drilled with bullet holes. Then someone shouted slogans and the army officers brought out a small mike and asked over the loudspeaker: ‘Anybody there?’ Then they took a small jeep with recoilless guns, went up to the huge steel gates of the newspaper office and entered. There were several bursts of fire at random and we saw about 20-30 people killed. Then they got out and when their flood lights showed stacked papers at the back of the building, they poured cans of petrol over them and set fire to them.
“Outside the office of Radio Pakistan opposite, seven or eight students were shouting Joi Bangla. They were all just gunned down. Meanwhile, at the office of The People, not a minute passed without gunfire. And by the morning it was all over.”
BEGUM MUSHTARI SHAFI *There is a journalist, the editor of a woman’s journals called, Bandhabi, in great distress. She also has fever, so she is sorry she cannot come to the hotel to meet you,” I was told by the boys of Radio Bangla Desh. I scribbled down the address and it was with great difficulty that we found her in a downat-heels hired two-roomed apartment in an obscure lane of Park Circus.
Begum Mushtari Shafi, one could see, was a woman of great spirit in spite of her emaciated, gaunt look. She was shivering with cold and fever because the house had no electricity. “I don’t have the deposit of Rs. 50,” she confessed when I enquired about it. It was winter, and both she and her children were shivering in thin cotton clothes.
It was difficult to believe that they were the wife and children of the leading dental surgeon of Chittagong. But that had certainly not afforded them any protection, as Begum Shafi made clear.
“On the 7th April, 25 army men, including two majors, entered my house in Chittagong without any notice or permission. They said: “We are searching for arms. We opened the doors and they searched very thoroughly and very roughly. Some relatives had taken shelter with us as the killings had started and while they looked on, the soldiers said: “Give us the keys. Then they searched the kitchen, the bedrooms and other living rooms in a very crude way, upsetting and breaking things, and when they found nothing, went away.
“But they returned within 10 minutes and called my husband from his dental chamber next door.” “First they shot our dog, just for barking, then they sent for the purohit (priest) from a temple next door. They asked him for the malik (owner). When the purohit said he did not know where he was they shot him dead in the same casual way as they had shot the dog, with absolutely no change of expression on their faces. My seven children, aged 6 to 15 years, also watched this and started crying.”
“Then the soldiers searched our house all over again in the same rough way, for nothing but sheer harassment. By now my 23-year-old brother, the only son in the family, who was studying for his M.Com. final in Chittagong University, came up and joined my husband. The major asked: ‘Who is he? and when I said he was my brother, he said: “Take him too. When I asked ‘Why take him? he replied, ‘because you are a leader of the Awami League. Though I said I am not even a member,’ he said: ‘You, your husband and your brother must come with us’. And then he showed me a typed letter, which gave my designation as a leader of the Awami League’. He said this information had been given by wit.” nesses. It was, of course, all faked.
“At this stage, all the girls started crying, and as this was drawing attention to them and no girls were safe with the army, I went outside on to the main road. The soldiers then spoke among themselves in Punjabi, which I could not understand, before one of them said to me: ‘You remain here, but don’t try to run away or we’ll shoot your husband and brother and dynamite your house. I agreed to stay and asked, ‘When will you let my husband go?’ They laughed and said, “We shall see. Then they took away my husband and brother. After that, the army came three times in three hours and asked me for Rs. 5000. They also made immoral proposals and said, ‘We’ll take away all the women too. I pleaded: ‘1 have no money. And have you no mothers or sisters that you should say such indecent things to me?’ The major said in English: ‘You must be a member of the Awami League, because Bengali women are not normally so spirited.’ ! said I had no cash, and offered ornaments. They replied,
Nothing but cash. So I asked for time, till 8 a.m. next morning, to raise the money.
“There was curfew from 6 p.m. till 6 a.m. and I asked my neighbours, non-Bengali businessmen, for help, but they refused. My telephone and electricity had already been cut off on April 6, so I sat trembling with my children in one small room in the house until 4.30 a.m. on 8 April. Then I decided to risk everything and left for a village 36 miles away, taking small lanes till I reached a friend, who helped me with a burga. He got me a rickshaw and put a Pakistani flag on it for protection. The rickshawallah dropped me 7-8 miles outside town. Then I walked with my children along the seashore for about 36 miles. When I reached Mir-Er-Sharai, a Pir (holy man) gave us shelter for one month and 17 days. During this trek we saw soldiers burning villages and taking away girls in trucks. On the 26th I crossed the border to India.
“As I had no relatives in India, I had to support myself and my children on my meagre earnings from occasional writing and broadcasting. I did not have Rs. 50 to pay the deposit for electricity, and we have all had bronchitis and colds throughout winter, without beds, blankets and warm clothes. Let alone go to school, and they used to go to the best schools in Chittagong, my children have been without shoes as well as books. My printing press and my husband’s surgery, including all the expensive machinery for my journal and my husband’s dental chair and other professional equipment, were completely destroyed by the Pakistani army. So they have robbed us of our means of livelihood built up over the years. I have edited Bandhabi for seven years, and now it is extinct.”
Here was a colleague from across the border, robbed at once of husband, only brother, home and her profession and means of livelihood. There was little I could do for Begum Shafi except appeal to Mrs. Dias, the very sympathetic wife of the Bengal Governor, to help her out with clothes and shoes, and blankets against the cold.
One month later, I flew to Chittagong by helicopter and one of the first people for whom I asked was Begum Shafi. After making a couple of telephone calls the District Commissioner shook his head sadly: “She still seems to be in Calcutta. Her husband just disappeared and is missing, believed killed.’ As for Bandhabi, it seemed to have died too. THE RADIO REBELS The saga of the radio rebellion following 25 March was stirring enough in print. It sprang to life as I met Shahidul Islam, young, intense, with one of the most vibrant voices I have heard on the radio. He was one of the bulwarks of Radio Free Bangla Desh and after a telephone call he came across. I tape-recorded him as soon as I realized that he was not only a lyrical exponent of the Bengali language but his manner of speaking and his unique voice made this a statement worth preserving in any radio archives. And no wonder, for Shahidul Islam was no ordinary broadcaster. He is also a lyricist, journalist (Daily Sangram) and newsman for Radio Bangladesh. He spoke with a passion and eloquence which was doubly moving because of his youth.
“We, of course, encountered great difficulty in our professional life, otherwise why would the entire Bengali people enter this struggle? We have our identity whether in social life, economic life or cultural life as Bengalis. Now those of us who were working as journalists found the news, the real news, coming in a particular way. But it was censored in such a way that we felt the Bengali identity was being destroyed.
“We got news on teleprinters and through other channels which we were not allowed to use because of Government restrictions. It was as if the Bengali race itself was being banished.
“For instance, news of disasters, such as the cyclone. In my opinion, two to two-and-a-half million people were lost. What did the Government do? We knew for sure, myself and our colleagues, that the relief material which came from outside for those who had lost relatives and everything else did not get to them. Expensive blankets meant for them were openly selling in the black market on the pavements.
I was sent to Bhola to cover the story. I found no relief

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had come and that the high officials there were sitting at the ghat and chatting. When I went to the interior, I found innumerable corpses, and women without clothes abandoned in houses. No one had rescued them for five days. I prepared my news–an eye-witnesses account-accordingly. None of this was ever used.
“Now about the suppression on radio and TV. As we were programme men we wanted to satisfy our listeners and give them the sort of things which they wanted. Not on one of the channels was this allowed. Typical Bengali culture was almost banned in a deliberate way. Before the elections they commissioned anti-Bengali records. Pressure was applied to us to write in a particular way-Pakistan, Pakistan all the time.
“Bengali culture was virtually obliterated. Rabindra Sangeet for instance. This internationally-renowned poet whom everybody, and Bengalis particularly, love and respect, his songs were arbitrarily banned, without any rhyme or reason. They were so ignorant that they said, officially: *Are you so obsessed with India that you can’t even write your own Tagore songs?
“After the army brutality started, I left Dacca on the 7th or 8th April and went to my village. After a month I came back to my house and was resting when a captain in charge of broadcasting, and Lt. Gul Baksh, with two other army men came to my house with a Sten-gun and forced me to read the news at gun point.
“Earlier, we were not allowed to use Bengali terms. For instance the word pesh, which is not Bengali, was thrust on us during translation, although Bengali is our mother tongue and was important for programme quality too. It killed our enthusiasm for broadcasting. After the massacre on 25th March, our mental state can be imagined. Yet we were asked to write songs in praise of Pakistan. When our own land, our brothers, mothers, sisters and fathers were being brutally persecuted, could I write about Pakistan with my blood? How could I write lyrics on directives?
“Why did I leave? It became impossible for one who believed in the freedom of Bengali culture and in every drop of whose blood there was love of Bengal. Words of Bengali could not help escaping from my mouth, so it became a question of risking my life for my language. You cannot write or work under such conditions.
“The second question was that in front of my eyes I could see, on my way home, bodies lying on the road. Then a man going in a bus, without any rhyme or reason he is dragged out and shot. Then near Narayangunje, near the oil godown, daily 100 to 200 people were shot. We watched this. Someone who was walking with us, suddenly he was blind-folded with a black cloth and taken away. We never saw him again. We have seen our mothers and sisters being molested and heard screams at night from next door. We reached a mental state where we wanted to jump into the fray at once. But we did not have the weapons and could only look on helplessly.
“The only weapon was to renounce all this.”
For me, Shahidul Islam represented the very essence of the young mass media professional who fought the radio battle with such burning patriotism, artistic excellence and passionate idealism. There were many Shahid-ul-Islams, then working in Free Bangla Desh Radio and from them I heard the full heroic story of how the Dacca staff had spiked the Yahya Khan tapes at risk of their lives and put on Sheikh Mujib’s tapes instead, against the clear orders of the military junta. They left only when the struggle became hopeless.
I heard in detail about the boys of Radio Chittagong, who held out until the Pakistan army overcame local resistance from the Bengal Regiments who, in turn, only went underground when hopelessly out-numbered and out-weaponed. Escaping to the Rangamati hill tracts with a one-kilowatt mobile transmitter, the Chittagong radio boys continued to broadcast the Mujib tapes and fiery patriotic Bengali songs until the Pakistan air force made several sorties in a frantic bid to silence the transmitter. Then they, in turn, also escaped and joined Radio Free Bangla Desh to carry on the fight.
When I flew to Dacca in the new year, there was Shahid-ulIslam again, back on his home ground, still questioning, still
arguing, the Angry Young Man who would always ask questions, who would always fight for principles, for justice. AN UGLY SCENARIO The two film personalities who came to my hotel room after Shahid-ul-Islam were vastly different in appearance and speech. Fazlul Haq, film producer and director, had the breezy manner and flamboyant outer trimmings of film people anywhere, down to his showy gold ring. After he had finished taping his experiences for me, his more shy colleague, Azhar Hussain, seemed a little diffident at sight of a microphone. This is where Mr. Haq took over the direction, distanced Mr. Hussain from the mike, told him exactly how to speak and what to say. Indeed, I had to do a little bit of tactful direction myself thereafter to ensure that Mr. Hussain’s personality did not get entirely swamped. But what they both said certainly added up to a bizarre scenario.
Mr. Haq started excitedly with a description of sustained discrimination against Bengalis in every aspect of film-making:
“It was part of the suppression of Bengali art and culture. East Pakistan had only one studio in Dacca, as against nine Studios in West Pakistan. It was the same in the matter of raw stock, other film material and even equipment. West Pakistanis always got priority, larger quotas and the sole agencies for raw stock, equipment and other material, so that Bengalis always had to obtain everything from West Pakistanis. All the head offices of large film equipment firms were located in Karachi or Lahore. Dacca only had small agencies and sub-offices,
“The Government Films Division, again with its head office in Karachi, employed a very small percentage of Bengalis who had to get their promotions the hard way as there was very little equity of any kind with West Pakistanis. What finally irked the West Pakistan film people most was that Bengalis in East Pakistan soon started making films for West Pakistan in the Urdu language and these fared far better at the box office than those made in West Pakistan itself. This so enraged the film trade of West Pakistan that soon they took their revenge.

“From the start, we in Bengal initially made films on the basis of the unity of Pakistan, national integration and the ideology which had brought Pakistan into being. But soon some curious things started happening.
“Following the example of India, the Ayub Khan regime instituted State awards for films with a President’s medal for the best feature film. The selection was made in Lahore, of course, but by secret ballot. As luck would have it, the first prize, the President’s award, was given to a Bengali feature film called Asiya. And that was the last time. After that, the President’s awards were withdrawn and never heard of again, simply because a Bengali film came out on top.
“Then, we in East Pakistan produced the most appreciated Successful box-office films in Urdu and made them in Bengali. Yet not a single East Pakistani director was ever asked to make an Urdu film in West Pakistan. Our Urdu films, made in a language which was not our mother tongue, ran for hundreds of weeks in Karachi and Lahore and broke all records and naturally Bengalis paid the highest film taxes, about 60 percent of the taxes in Pakistan. Even our poorer pictures were liked so much that they all paid their own expenses. We were making 50 pictures a year as against about 70 in West Pakistan, of which 40 percent were Punjabi films. So we were beating the West Pakistanis at their own game with only one studio against their nine in West Pakistan.
“When, in spite of all this, we found so much discrimination continuing, we discovered that making Urdu films was not serving our cause, so we switched back to making Bengali pictures. But before that I had a very strange personal experience.”
“I made a film which I called President. Its sole aim was to project the national unity of Pakistan. I took about three years to shoot the film, mostly on outdoor locations in Dacca, Chittagong, Karachi, Lahore, Rawalpindi, Islamabad, Peshawar and so on, which made a pleasant travelogue on Pakistan too. The central character was a small boy, which was rather daringly different for a Pakistani film. The boy was supposed to tour the whole of Pakistan because his younger

sister had been kidnapped and he was trying to rescue her from her kidnappers. After some thrilling adventures he finds his sister and is asked by someone in the film: ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ He replies: “I want to be President of Pakistan. Immediately the Board of Film Censors refused to certify the film for release, because a Bengali boy, according to their thinking, could not aspire to be President, even in a film. I fought the case right up to the High Court, but lost. Then I got disgusted and sold the film to a West Pakistani distributor. He promptly cut out the sentence about becoming President, re-named the film ‘Son of Pakistan’ and it did well at the box office. So now you can understand why we preferred to be Bengalis and preserve our cultural identity.
“After March 25, 1971, the Pakistan army looted the houses of all our top stars, because their addresses are known to all, since they are famous people, but luckily their affluence enabled them to flee to India for shelter. My family and I barely escaped with our lives to India. When we came out of our house on March 27, we saw many killings. We shifted from one house to another and saw many houses being looted. Kabari Choudhury, the top star, escaped miraculously because she had a car. All the lesser film folk, such as junior technicians and extras, fled to their villages in Bangla Desh, and filmmaking came virtually to an end. During the occupation, not a single film was made in Dacca. Not a single new film was released either. They ordered the cinema houses to keep open, showing mostly dated Urdu and Punjabi pictures, which did not interest Bengalis, so there was hardly any attendance, even if the Bengalis had been in the mood for seeing pictures while the looting and killing continued all those months. When the Mukti Bahini blasted the Gulestan Cinema with a bomb, the audience kept still further away, and only West Pakistani soldiers went to cinemas. So during the occupation and military terror, films were neither made nor shown.”
Mr. Azhar Hussain, quiet, shy and soft-spoken first told me that he went to London in 1960 for a two-year course at the London School of Film Technique. His teachers included

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Robert Dunbar and Morris Elvey and with this rather more academic and cosmopolitan background, Mr. Hussain looked forward to becoming a successful film distributor in East Pakistan. But that is when his troubles really started, as he
put it.”
“I came back to Dacca from London in 1963 and started as a film distributor by releasing the Soviet film, Ballad of a Soldier which I had seen in London.
“In 1966, I started film production, and that is when my troubles started. I produced an Urdu film, because there was a big market for Urdu films in West Pakistan, little knowing I would come up against vested interests there, in spite of all the talk about unity of the two wings. I thought that with my first picture I would cover the costs and make some profit too. When I completed the picture I went to West Pakistan to distribute it. I got a distributor in Karachi and another in Lahore. The first distributor exploited my film and then took illegal possession of the prints and cheated me of over Rs. 20,000. As a result, I could not sell my picture in Lahore. because he did not deliver the prints to the Lahore distributor either, so in the process I lost lakhs of rupees.
“So I switched back to Dacca and gave up all thoughts of making Urdu pictures for West Pakistani distribution too. Like other film-makers, I also fled from Dacca on March 27. In Dacca, I lived only four houses away from Sheikh Mujibur Rehman in Dhanmandi and there was havoc that night. We could not sleep because of the noise of automatic weapons, tanks and machine guns. Next day, Commander Amin, Intelligence Chief of the East Pakistani air force, advised us to leave Dacca immediately because he said a massacre of the civilian population had started. Even when we moved to Jhinjira, over one thousand people were massacred on the morning of 30th March. So we fled from village to village until we escaped to India.” Well, they are all back in Dacca now, getting back to their job of film-making.
It was left to Zahir Raihan, one of the most brilliant young film-makers of Bangla Desh and husband of leading film actress Suchanda, to make the supreme sacrifice. Raihan had made
a moving documentary based on actuality footage, of the Pakistani massacres. His feature film, Jeebon Theke Niye (Taken from Life) was released in India in December 1971 and marked him as a director of outstanding talent. Raihan, on return to Dacca, learnt that his brother, leading novelist and newspaperman, Shaheedullah Kaiser, had been taken away at gunpoint together with the other intellectuals who were executed at Rayer Bazaar in the suburbs of Dacca on December 14, a fiendish last-minute massacre by the Fascist organisation, the Al-Badr. Since Shaheedullah’s body was never satisfactorily identified, Raihan refused to believe he was dead. Raihan became one of the leading organizers of international and other protests about the killing of the intellectuals. And he paid the price.
One day, in late May 1972, he got an anonymous telephone call, that his brother was not dead but was detained in Mirpur, the Bihari suburb. He was asked to come alone to meet him.
Raihan went in his own car, with three armed police guards. Next day, the bodies of the three guards and Raihan’s car, badly smashed up, were found in Mirpur. Raihan was never seen again and all efforts to trace him have failed. Like his brother, he is missing, presumed dead. And the Bangla Desh cinema has lost one of its most illustrious young film makers. For Suchanda, his wife, there was only one tribute she could pay her husband. She has returned to film acting. The show, alas, must go on.
TWO ARTISTS On my second visit to Calcutta, Kamrul Hassan, artist and director of the Institute of Design in Dacca, was preparing to return home. When he came to the hotel, it was with a large group of his fellow-artists and they sat in informal groups on beds, on the floor and against the door. They corroborated cach other’s stories with individual experiences which left no doubt about the callous and, indeed, stupid way in which artists had been rounded up, interrogated, physically tortured and generally kicked around by the Pakistani army.
Typical was the experience of a young artist of 24, Syed
Abulbarq Alvi. Alvi, who is thin, slightly built and has a sad, sensitive face, studied art at Dacca Art College from where he passed out in 1968. He specializes in water colours and oils and paints, both landscapes and portraits. Alvi is looked on as one of the outstanding young artists in Bangla Desh. But the way he was treated by the Pakistani army seems to have been in spite of, or perhaps because of his standing as a painter. Speaking calmly, gently and in soft tones, Alvi said:
“I did a course in graphics in Karachi normally meant for teachers, but two 4th year students from Dacca, including myself, were somehow selected for the course. That is how I came to meet the American artist Michael Ponc de Leon, and he liked my work very much, which he saw in some slides ! had taken along. Towards the end of 1970, I got a letter from the Smithsonian Institute asking me to draw up a programme, and they promised to let me know more about it at the beginning of 1971. I was thus on the verge of getting a Smithsonian fellowship to go to the U.S.A. when the West Pakistan army started its operations in East Bengal.
“I was in a Government job in the Films and Publications Department of the Government at the time and left the office about 15 days after the troubles started because I was simply unable to work in that terrorized atmosphere, and I came away to India.
“I returned in August because I heard that my family was in some sort of trouble. I found them all in great fear and tension. I met some of my office colleagues on the road, but they did not press me to return to work. I had returned to Dacca on August 20 and when I found there was a Mukti Bahini operational group I joined up. Things went all right until August 29 when the house in which I lived was surrounded by the military. It was the house of music director Altaf Mohammed. These were regular soldiers in uniform with Sten-guns and rifles, and let there be no ambiguity on the point. They came at 6.30 a.m. and all the boys in the house were rounded up. We were taken to the Martial Law Court. Some officers were sitting there. We were first crowded into a little bathroom, about 15 of us, then taken out one by one for questioning. When they asked which one was Alvi I felt a little nervous, because so far they had not mentioned names.
“I was taken to the next room where a West Pakistani officer was sitting on a bed. He interrogated me in Urdu. Then they brought in a boy who had gone on operations with us and had obviously let out my name under torture. He identified me. I denied it, but the officer was not convinced. He threw away the paper in anger and said: “Take away the bastard and beat him up well.
“I was taken away to another room by a sepoy, kicked with his boots, slapped, boxed and beaten with sticks. After about one and a half hours of this physical brutality there was an interval. I fell down and could not talk. “Think it over,’ they said, and left me for about half an hour in the bathroom. This treatment went on for three days. I was interrogated about my visit to India. Then they named another friend who they said could identify me. I asked them to produce him. When they did not, I realized they were bluffing and that he had not been caught. During those days, the Colonel also questioned me. We were then lined up and listed. During this line-up l instructed my friends not to call me Alvi but Syed Abulbarq. On the third day, I told the Colonel a lot of lics about how impossible it had been for me to attend office. He was still not convinced and asked me to touch the Qurane-Sharif and inform on my friends.
“When they found it was no use, they let me go, and I gave them the address of my own house to which I had no intention of returning. Instead I went back to Altaf’s. Then I moved from house to house,
“As a result of the beatings, I had several minor fractures in my hands and I get terrible pains now after painting. I have scars and permanent swellings. I can no longer lift weights and have lost a lot of weight myself. It will take me a long time to revert to the normal life of an artist.”
But if Alvi the artist spoke softly and gently, Kamrul Hassan did not. Now, after all the months in exile, he had had time to look back on it all, a senior artist in an established job, who had felt at every step the discrimination practised from the
start against Bengali artists. It was mainly of this that he now spoke angrily.
“It is very difficult to give all the details about the suppression of art and artists because there were so many small ways in which this was done right from the beginning of Pakistan.
“For instance, at the time of the National Exhibition, the West Pakistanis, the artists as well as the officials, used to keep everything for themselves. We had opportunities, of course, but hardly worth mentioning, and we constantly felt cheated about artistic opportunities.”
“When they wanted a national college of art, they of course chose the Lahore Art College. We belonged to the group of Zainul Abedin, our most famous artist, and our group of painters included Sharifuddin Ahmed, Anwarul Haque, Khwaja Shafiq Ahmed. We had graduated from Calcutta and we were senior painters. But always we were deprived of everything by the West Pakistani administrators of our art galleries and art institutes.
“What we got in the way of money for our art movement, our art college is hardly worth mentioning. But in Lahore, in Karachi, in Rawalpindi, in Peshawar they started one art institute after another with third-grade and fourth-grade painters. That was their normal attitude to Bengalis. About art fellowships, it is the personal view not only myself but of my colleagues whom you have also met-Mr. Chakravarty, Mr. Zaman and Mr. Alvi-that they did not have proper chances to go abroad or even travel in Pakistan itself with the help of fellowships from Pakistan or other countries. All opportunities in the way of fellowhips went to West Pakistanis. There were many occasions when there were painters’ delegations from Pakistan going abroad. It is very unfortunate, but they hardly gave a chance to Bengali artists on these delegations.”
“On March 23, 1971, we painters met at Shaheed Minar (Martyrs’ Memorial) and had a cultural gathering there in the morning. Some of us also met on March 24, but after March 25 we lost touch with each other because we had to flee for our lives. My own house is between the airport and Hotel Inter

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continental and at 11.25 on the night of the 25th I heard the first firing. It was like a film, you know the sort of sound and fury. This continued for the whole night. When curfew was lifted on the 27th morning and I ventured out of my house, I found four dead bodies practically on my doorstep. These were people known to me and just like my younger brothers. I felt it my duty to remove their dead bodies and hand them over to their relatives. Then I started walking towards my office and found dead bodies and still more dead bodies and ruined buildings. I could not enter my oflice and returned home. My family was surprised I was still alive and we fled from house to house, among friends and relatives, through burning bazaars and localities. Before I left I heard through first-hand information that three art students in the hostel of the art college at Dacca had been killed. The hostel happened to be next to the East Pakistan Rifles Headquarters, and they were found dead in their beds, under mosquito nets, apparently shot while asleep.
“Those of us who escaped to India came with nothing but the clothes we wore. And we somehow managed to eat by working here and there. But there was no question of our painting or continuing with artistic activity. Bangla Desh will now have to start from scratch to give its artists the artistic atmosphere and opportunities they deserve.” TWO BROTHERS When Shahabuddin Ahmad and Ziauddin Ahmad came to see me together I should have guessed they were brothers. Both had the same thick crop of hair (but Ziauddin’s tended to be in deep waves), the same natty moustache (Ziauddin’s was more luxurious and upturned at the edges), and both spoke softly and in polished urban Bengali.
Shahabuddin, a banker, was a typical example of the persecution of technocrats in the frantic Pakistani bid to destroy the technical intelligentsia of East Pakistan. Ziauddin, who had studied political science at Dacca University, was the sort of intelligent Bengali student who naturally gravitates to politics from the university stage, and is willing to undergo endless hardship for the sake of political principles. Each brother, in his own way, had made a stand until it was impossible to continue.
Also an M.A. in Political Science, Shahabuddin Ahmad was the founder of the Dacca Urban Cooperative Bank, And it was in the bank that his troubles started. Although Mr. Ahmad was outwardly calm and detached when narrating his experiences, I could see by the way he was lighting cigarette after cigarette and then stubbing them out, that he was in a state of intense emotion while speaking.
*On March 25, I was working in the bank when I was informed, just after sunset, that an attack on the civilian population was expected from the Pakistani army and that the situation in the city was rapidly deteriorating. On getting this news, I got very alarmed, left the office round about 10 p.m. and started going towards my home in Narayangunje. I found the roads under blockade and so had to walk 10 miles to get home. At night I heard artillery. I stayed in Narayangunje until March 26, when the army attacked Narayangunje. But because of the blockades it took them two days to enter the city. Then we fled from the city and moved from village to village. “However, I had to return to Dacca on April 20 because a bank guard came down to my village and said that the military had asked him to inform me that unless the bank started functioning within 24 hours they would open the bank and take possession of everything. As the principal trustee of the bank, I felt it was my duty to protect the interests of my depositors who had placed their trust in me, even if it meant risking my life. So I returned to work and continued until September 10. During this period, I got dozens of circulars restricting the deposits of our Awami League clients and freezing their accounts. Even those who were ‘attached to the Awami League, although not members, had to be refused deposits and withdrawals through a secret circular from The State Bank of Pakistan. But how could we find out after payment who had sympathy for the Awami League? Incidentally, one of the reasons for this persecution was that my bank had Awami League members and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was a shareholder.”
“Soon the board was dissolved and 16 out of 21 directors were deprived of their directorships because of their association with the Awami League. In their place, some touts, and not one honourable person, all from pro-Pakistan political parties, were thrust on us. These newcomers wanted me to leave the bank at once. They said quite openly and sneeringly, Why are you stilll here? Why don’t you go away to India? Do you want to lose your life?’ One of the new directors had direct links with General Niazi and Rao Farman Ali. He is Shah Mohiuddin Ahmad who became chairman of the bank after my departure.
“Meanwhile, I had been helping the depositors to the maximum, but by this time they had gradually shunted out my entire staff and replaced them after terminating their services without any notice. They also appointed a non-Bengali as manager.”
**Finally, they laid a trap for handing me over to the military authorities. Some people from the bank were waiting there to hand me over one day, and the sweeper informed me of this as soon as I entered the bank. Even then, I went in to study them psychologically while talking to them. They were members of the Muslim League and other collaborators. When I found that what I had been told was true. I said I was going to the bathroom and left the bank. I told the bank guard that I was going to a party near the bank. Soon after I heard that some army people had been to the bank to enquire about my whereabouts so I decided not to return. This was in the second week of September. I went home and then spent the night outside Dacca. The following morning, I left the city by bus, and my family stayed behind with my mother and other relatives. In my native village I saw an army operation when they were searching for Awami League leaders and Hindus. They took away 16 people from one place and 12 from another. I saw them lined up, including young boys, renowned businessmen and advocates, and shot. Also hundreds of bodies floating in the river near Narayangunje. Then I fled to India.”

Although young, intense and only 21, Ziauddin Ahmad had a quiet demeanour and polished ways which indicated a boy who had had a good education. He comes from a large family of four brothers and five sisters, his father is a retired Government officer.
Ziauddin’s troubles started right in his house.
“It was raided at 3 a.m., three days before I left. About seven army people, including a havildar, came. They first jumped the wall and then asked the chowkidar, after waking him up, to open the door of our two-storeyed house. We were all sleeping upstairs, and the army men just came striding up and then said to me in Urdu: “Come with us. I asked ‘Why?’. And they replied, ‘because you are for Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.
“They took me along to a broken house where there were many army people. One of them said, ‘Ah, we have been waiting for you. Initially, they were polite. But when I said, ‘I haven’t done a thing, they raised their voices and one of them said, ‘Then why do you have a beard, and why did you grow it?’ I replied, ‘I haven’t been out of the house.’ Then they started really shouting and asked: “Where do the Mukti Fauj get their money? What do you know about the Mukti Fauj? Tell us, otherwise we’ll shoot you. One bullet will be enough. This sort of thing went on for three hours. They hit me all over with rifle butts and repeatedly slapped my face, I was mercilessly beaten up and all the time they kept on pointing their rifle at me. Again they started the same old questions: Where does the money come from? Then again they beat me brutally.
“When they got nothing out of me, they made me sign a statement that they had not searched my house and that they had treated me well. Then, since I was unable to walk, they dropped me at a street corner about two and a half miles from my home. I slept on the roadside because I was unable to walk. In the morning, my family found me there. I couldn’t walk or speak so they took me home where I was treated by Dr. Mahboob-ul-Rehman. I made my way from Dacca to Agartala after that by bus and boat. I walked for two days, sometimes I waded through deep water or used a boat. And finally I made it to Calcutta.” PARVEEN AKHTAR After this endless succession of men who had been the victims of the army, it was refreshing to have attractive Parveen Akhtar, a third-year student from Eden Girls’ College in Dacca, tell me what the girls had been through. In spite of her feminine charm, Parveen had done her stint in the Mukti Bahini. What got her into trouble was Rabindranath Tagore. “I used to lie low,” said Parveen, “because they did not like my singing Rabindra Sangeet.
“When our college re-opened in September (after being closed following the army clamp-down in March) no girl could go out. The military were everywhere and in some places grenades were still being thrown and they seemed to have destroyed everything.”
“My father was the Superintendent of Police in Rajshahi. I was in Dacca on March 25 and got to know they had arrested all my relatives. I left Dacca and moved from one village to another as they were attacked. I felt particularly unsafe as I had taken part in college politics.”
“Some of the indignities heaped on girls were dreadful. No one who has not seen them can believe them. In the next locality there was an incident in which both the mother and daughter were raped by the soldiers. These were acquaintances of mine molested in Nakhalpara. When the people of the locality complained about this to the martial law authorities they asked: “Can you point out the guilty soldiers?’ That evening those on army duty were called out for identification and the same evening Nakhalpara was set on fire. There was molestation of girls on a wide scale and a great sense of insecurity.
“As I was a young girl, I and many other girls were sent away to the villages. I stayed with a cousin in a village for 22 days while my parents stayed on in the city. When we found Maneckganj and Munshiganj had been declared enemy

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territory by the Pakistani authorities, we took shelter with a Hindu family. My brother and I left on October 11 and saw villages being burnt and many refugees on the way. We first travelled by boat and then many miles through muddy water. The CNB Road was particularly dangerous because of frequent military patrols and Razakars who took away money from trekkers. We therefore avoided it. Then my brother, who had escorted me, saw me into Agartala and went back home. So my family had to send me away from home because I was simply not safe there.” FOREIGN OBSERVERS So far, I had interviewed the victims themselves. I had spoken’ to them in Bengali, which made my involvement even greater. At this stage, I asked myself a professional question: Should I not talk to others, who were not so emotionally involved? After all, victims of atrocities can always be carried away and, without being liars, add something while narrating their actual experiences precisely because they had suffered so much horror..
It was with the specific purpose of getting neutral observers to give me first-hand accounts of what they had seen that I arranged to visit different refugee camps with some known and trusted social workers from abroad, whose integrity was above suspicion because some of them were internationally respected. What is more, they all spoke Bengali, which eliminated the risk of their having misunderstood something in translation MOTHER TERESA AND SISTER AMY It was deeply moving to visit a small camp for under-nourished children beyond Dum Dum in the company of Mother Teresa. As I saw the tiny tots sitting in a bunch in the sun on little beds, it immediately struck me that they were without their mothers. One little girl of about one and year a half kept on whimpering while the other infants looked on solemnly. As soon as I went up and cuddled it, it stopped crying. And it was a particularly bright child who spotted Mother Teresa with a whoop of joy and then followed her on her rounds.
“This little child has been roaming after me,” said Mother Teresa. “She must be about three or four years, although she looks much smaller. I believe she was very bad when they brought her. After the nutrition specialist came to India with Senator Edward Kennedy, it was discovered that over one million children were in danger of death from terrible malnutrition. After that, we decided to bring these infants, who were very bad, from Barasat and Salt Lake camps and give them very special care. As you will notice with these children, they don’t smile. Only sometimes, after much coaxing and petting.”
“The children are two, three and four years of age,” added Sister Amy, a warm, extrovert nun. “There are thousands of children in the camps, and they all have sad faces, it is very difficult to make them smile. Many miss their parents and they are away from their homes in the jungles and the fields where the farmers were living. And now they are in a crowd and that also does not have a very good atmosphere. They hang on to you in the camp when they get to know you, because they have a sense of insecurity. They want love, you see, and that is what they miss. Many of them have lost their parents after coming in the camp and that adds to their misery.” BRIDGET BATTEY A trained nurse with Save The Children Fund, Bridget Battey, from Yorkshire, had the glamorous looks of a film star. And she was indeed taking a star role in the real-life drama of Saving children from death through malnutrition. In a crowded chilren’s ward in Salt Lake Refugee Camp, she was struggling with admirable aplomb to introduce calm and security in the unnatural surroundings in which the children found themselves. She told me:
“A lot of children have died since I came, about 15 per cent. It’s mostly a problem of malnutrition but it’s complicated by other things, like dysentery. From what I can gather, they have become sick since they left Bangla Desh on the way, and since they arrived in the camp. There is a stage of malnutrition where they don’t seem to want food and cease to feel hungry and that is when we have to feed them through a tube.
“We found one or two abandoned children, one that had been abandoned by its parents in a drain. We found one baby with its placenta still attached in a field. It’s a lovely baby. One of the refugee mothers took it, because when she arrived in the camp she had lost her husband and had no children. I suppose she just wanted somebody to love, so she took the child. It is doing very well.”
SISTER MARIE SCOLT For someone who has worked as a trained nurse for 30 years. Sister Scolt, one would have imagined, would have seen everything in the way of suffering and sorrow. And now she was in the maternity shed of Salt Lake Camp. She said to me:
“I have been a nurse for 30 years. It’s something tremendous, it’s something we’ll never forget, and it’s something I’ve never faced in all my life. We have dealt with the poor in our hospitals, but it’s nothing to what these people have been through. Everything has been wrenched from them, even the small possessions they had were snatched away from them as they were coming along, little bits of clothing and utensils.”
“The women who have come out have been under great tension. They are undernourished, they are very anaemic. They really have no happiness at all. The expression on their faces and their feelings seem the same whether they have a still-born baby or quite a normal healthy baby. Then we have numerous premature babies mainly because the mothers are so anaemic that they can’t carry to full term, hence they go into labour earlier than they should.”
“Actually, there’s a very small percentage of really healthy children, they are premature by weight even more than premature by birth. We also had young children that had no parents and were sent to Mother Teresa’s home from the camp itself. There are many women who are separated from their husbands or their sons who are fighting and lots of them have lost their husbands. So there are women here with no husbands, women here with no parents and women here who have lost their children. And then, of course, when they come here they are so ill that they again face death every day, every day they face death in some form. They don’t seem to have a bright side to look on. It’s been a very sad fate all along.”
Typical of the women in this field maternity hospital was Bashona, a young woman from Faridpur Zilla. “My husband used to be a petty trader”, she said. “We came out four months ago, walking for 12 days. I was then five months pregnant. We left because they were shooting people. They shot my father’s brother right in front of our eyes. They just shot him in the back for nothing. Because the military were shooting for nothing. This is my first baby,” she concluded with a thankful hug.
FATHER HENRI Father Henri, a Belgian priest, came out to India in 1938. “I had several chances to go home, but I intend to work here and die here,” said Father Henri. His home in South Charlois in Belgium, where his people are glassmakers, seemed very far away to me as I heard him fiercely recount the fate of the twenty-five boys between the ages of 18 to 25 whom he was helping to teach some trades in his mission.
“Some of the boys come from Bandura, a boarding school. It was a missionary school run by Canadian Fathers. The Fathers of the Holy Cross. I know of boys being called to the bank of the river to get employment and then all of them being shot. They have killed a priest, Father Mariano, who had an ambulance and he lent his ambulance for the wounded soldiers of the Mukti Force. And it was in retaliation for this act of kindness that he was killed, an Italian Catholic priest.”
“My students are all of them higher than Matric, one has passed his B.Com. All of them say, youth is in danger, we have run away because we are young and we are not safe. They are between the age of 18 and 24 and all come from good homes and are very well behaved. They are very courageous. One joined the Mukti Bahini. He was well-educated. He said if we educated young men do not give to the cause then who will? He was determined to go through any hardship to free his country.
“The boys, except for one of them, who is a Muslim, are all of them Christians, Catholics. Out of 25, 24 are Christians.” FATHER JOHN HASTINGS When I met Father John Hastings of the United Relief Service in his office, I did not think he either looked or spoke very much. Originally from Norwich, he had also been with churches in Leicester, like a padre.
He was waiting for a long-distance call from London and near him was a tape-recorder on which, I later found, he had tape-recorded as many first-hand accounts of atrocities as he could. He had so many case-histories on tape that they could have filled a book. So I asked him to pick out just a few for me, at random.
“There are so many,” began Father Hastings, “I don’t know where to begin.
“One old villager I met in Berhampore Hospital, aged about. 65, gave me a story which I have tape-recorded. He told me how several hundreds came to the banks of the Ganga from the Rajshahi Area and while they were there they were surrounded by the Pak army troops and prevented from getting into boats to cross the Ganges. The women and girls were then put on one side and told they could go home. The men and boys were asked to sit on the sand and they were then all machine-gunned. Many were killed instantly, others pretended to be dead. Then they were all picked up and piled like faggots in a bonfire. Petrol was poured over them and this was set light to. This man said he was aware of what was going on but when the fire started he of course couldn’t pretend to be dead any more and he scrambled out of the pile of dead bodies and so did his son. There were several others with them and with their clothes burning and part of their bodies very badly burnt, they rushed into the Ganga as fast as they could. The Pak army still tried to shoot them, but now it was dusk and they could not be seen easily, so they escaped. Some of them died of their burns there even though they escaped

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the bonfire. This man managed to escape to Berhampore Hospital and was still there a month later with badly burnt legs and wearing the blood-stained clothes he had on at the time of the shooting.
“One morning, I looked across the railway line to Pakistan and saw a place which used to be a rice stock set ablaze with fire. There were Pakistani soldiers watching this and we saw officers on the other side with guns pointing in our direction. We went inside later and saw the next village, north of Hilli, being gradually and systematically set on fire. There was a column of smoke suddenly at one point, and then a few yards on, another big fire would begin. I took photographs of that too.
“In West Dinajpur District I saw families some of whom had tiny children which had just been born on the way from Pakistan. Some were born the day on which the flight began and some were born under trees by the side of the road. The plight of these mothers and new-born babies, of course, was horrifying. Further south, near Calcutta, at Bongaon, we met many people who had no one left. One woman had a child in her arms and said the other five had been killed, her husband was gone. And a young man said he had gone out to buy buffaloes. When he came back to his village, there was nothing of the village left and the didn’t know where his family was. “In May there were occasions when we visited Husnabad, Taki, Bashirhat and called at hospitals round camps. In Bashirhat Hospital there was one woman who had a foot amputated from a bullet wound. She had three children with her and all of them were injured, either by a bayonet or a bullet. They had bandages on and the baby had a bullet wound across the thighs and she said her husband had been shot. Then in Bongaon Hospital I saw young men and girls also. Some had been bayonetted in the vagina and one of them was so demented that she was crying all the time: They will kill us all, they will kill us all.
“We met a woman at Shikarpur who had a bullet wound right through her right breast. We also met young girls some
of whom gave their story reluctantly of how they had been raped, sometimes by more than one goldier. How their daughters had been taken off and not seen since. This was said by both Muslims and Hindus and at least in September half of those who came across were Hindus.
“Many Christians who came across in April from Dinajpur had their women raped and lost their wives, educated people, not peasants. We have eye-witnesses of that and there would be several thousand Christians who have come across from Ballabpur and other places in Nadia District. One senior Christian leader gave the estimate, he thought a third of the Christians had come out. Then there is Dr. Malik who was working in Rajshahi itself, in charge of the hospitals. He brought across several Christians who had been working with him. He had to evacuate the hospital.
“A last one about children: In Kalyani we saw a child of about three weeks, blinded by disease and with so many lesions on the lower part of the body we were surprised she was able to survive. I don’t think she survived finally….. This is just endless, one could go on for hours and hours and hours.” THE CHILD ARTISTS But before I left Calcutta, I had one of the most profound artistic experiences of my life. It was in a small improvised refugee school in Salt Lake Camp No. 5, just outside Calcutta. Mud floor, thatched roof perched on bamboo poles and thin shaky walls rigged up from chatai (matting). The teacher and children were packing up to leave, for Bangla Desh was now free.
As the children sang the national anthem Amar Sonar Bangla and rounded it off with lusty shouts of Joi Bangla, their minds did not seem to be entirely on this routine performance for visitors with tape-recorders. And nor was mine. Although I stood at attention too, my eyes kept on wandering back to the matting walls. There seemed to be pinned across them The Diary of Anne Frank in picturesan endless succession of Pakistani atrocities painted by children
with a degree of childish spontaneity which made them all the more harrowing.
These were small children from scattered villages who had witnessed mass horror all over Bangla Desh. They met by accident in a refugee camp, were about to part and perhaps would never meet again.” But what they would always have in common were the shared memories of unspeakable brutalities. The paintings left one in no doubt that these were actual, personal, eye-witness experiences. Their genuineness was as vivid as their grimness.
From end to end of one wall stretched variations on one monotonous theme: Pakistani soldiers with rifles and fixed bayonets killing unarmed people standing in line with their hands up.
Five-year-old Bela Rani of Class II had watched a man and his son being shot and her village home burnt and had made a faithful, precise and documentary visual record of all this. Apu, also of Class II, had not yet learnt to put the line above the first letter of her name in Bengali. But she had produced an almost three-dimensional version of the Pakistani attack on a family and home.
Archana, also of Class II, had discarded the red and green colours favoured by her friends for a soft composition in cornflower blue and light purple. She usually forgot to put the “A” at the end of her name in English, but had not forgotten the gruesome touch about a girl being pulled by the hair by soldiers prior to being raped.
Ten-year-old Krishna Mitra of Class V showed a mother kneeling with her back to a soldier while her husband’s corpse lay inert on the ground. Her class-mate, Anjali Suter also had some individual touches. She showed bullets flying from the rifle of the tin-helmeted soldier, while two other soldiers in the foreground stabbed a man whose blood spilled all over the ground in red paint.
But throughout their cruel exile, these children could not erase from their minds what Bengali village children normally draw in school: Trees, birds, mangoes, goats-the symbols of normal family life in a village.
As the children prepared to go home, their paintings again showed signs of returning normalcy and hope. The atrocities still lingered in their paintings. But there also reappeared the familiar symbols of daily life in rural Bengal.
Shanti, of Class V, had a Pakistani soldier in a characteristically murderous stance, but in the peaceful rural backdrop against which she placed him, and right next to an inert corpse, she put three trees and, at the other end, obviously unaffected by it all, a contemplative bird looking the other way. Sudhirabi Kar, of Class II, had a fierce bearded Pakistani soldier still pointing a sharp bayonet. But there were no human victims in sight. Perhaps they were in hiding after shooting down the plane which has crashed behind the soldier. So the bearded Pathan points his bayonet at the village goat, peering inquisitively from behind a tree, horns erect and with a pointed beard suspiciously like the Pathan’s.
The undaunted optimist and official war chronicler of Class II, however, seemed to be seven-year-old Tushar who left one in no doubt of the way the struggle ended. With meticulous precision he had labelled everything in clear Bengali script: From left to right he had painted first, a fleeing soldier with a rifle, labelled “Pak Soldier”. He is clearly fleeing from the Mukti Bahini, similarly labelled in Bengali. They are chasing away the Pakistani soldier with village spears. Over them all hovers a benevolent bird on what appear to be skis. Largest of all, however, is a magnificent mango helpfully captioned as such.
Tushar and Bela Rani and Archana and Krishna and Shanti and Sudhirabi have now gone back to their villages in their beloved Sonar Bangla. To their trees, their goats, their birds, their mangoes and, one trusts, to their homes. Father, if he is still alive, will have a hard time re-building his bamboo basha (hut). Since the Pakistani army had systematically burnt down most of the bamboo groves because the Mukti Bahini used to hide in them.
One can only hope that the children will keep on painting in their village schools, and forget the soldiers, the rape and the blood.

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3
Bangla Desh:
Early 1972
IN MID December 1971, the Pakistani army surrendered and laid down arms in a ritualistic ceremony which was flashed all over the world in print, visuals and sound. Bangla Desh was free. For every newspaper, radio and TV correspondent, there was but one thought: On to Dacca. War correspondents in Khaki sprouted all over the Bangla Desh landscape, not forgetting the most newsworthy hotel of the decade, the Hotel Intercontinental in Dacca. It was primarily a military story in those last heady days of 1971–all interviews with generals, photo scoops of the prisoners-of-war, television footage of spectacular surrender ceremonial and old-boy hand-shakes, pretty girls out on the streets of Dacca again, offering flowers to blushing Indian soldiers.
But as the stories of the last-minute atrocities on intellectuals and technocrats came through, of the senseless torture and execution of professors, journalists and doctors on December 14, two days before the surrender, as accounts came through of molested women released from Pakistani military barracks, bunkers and even tanks, as pictures came through of the ravaged towns and villages of Bangla Desh, I felt that it was time I followed up my documentation of atrocities in Bangla Desh itself, to find out details from those who had been victims in their own country, from which they had found it either not ‘feasible or not easy to escape.
Dacca itself was offering atrocity stories galore, and the

international press was concentrated there, also waiting for the biggest news story of all, the return of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. But outside Dacca in an unending stream, refugees were returning from India to their homes, or what was left of them. City and town dwellers who had escaped inside Bangla Desh to the more anonymous refuge of their villages, were now slowly emerging from their hide-outs to return to their homes and vocations in urban areas.
If my story was to be complete, it had to be resumed in Dacca, where it had all begun, the terrible year of the vulture. So I flew into Bangla Desh for the first time in the New Year, and took it up from there. FIRST IMPRESSIONS I really do not know what I expected of Dacca. Perhaps a mixture of the joy of freedom with the sorrow of so much bloodshed, dishonour and destruction. Indeed, it was not difficult to believe that it had passed through so much when I arrived. It was January 2 and young boys from the Mukti Bahini were still going about with guns and quite often firing in the air with exuberance, such as when the news of Sheikh Mujib’s release was announced over television.
But the local people constantly kept on mentioning two things: first, that Bengali girls were out again on the streets of Dacca; and second, that although the Pakistani military authorities had not destroyed many public buildings for the simple reason that they had thought they would stay on, entire streets had sometimes vanished, such as Sakharipara, the street of traditional goldsmiths in the old city. And every time I went past a particular spot on the way to the university, someone would say: “You know, there used to be two beautiful temples here. They were not only razed to the ground, the army brought in bulldozers to make sure that no trace remained of them.”
On the very first day, I was being driven in my host’s car to an appointment at the airport. The driver of my car, a cheery individual called Babul, lightly tapped the horn of the car. Immediately the Indian army jeep in front, with a Lieutenant
Colonel sitting in it slowed down, and the military driver courteously signalled to us to overtake him.
“Did you see that?” said Babul in triumph. “They gave me a pass. One month ago, I would have been shot dead for even touching the horn. Once, when there was illness in the house, I was asked to rush and fetch a doctor. I saw an army vehicle in front, and automatically used my horn. The Pakistani army people forced me to stop by halting in the middle of the road. ‘Get out, they said. “So you want to pass us, do you?’ And then the driver slapped me hard. “Don’t do that again, you bastard,’ said the driver, ‘Next time it will not stop at a slap, it will be a bullet which will send you to Bangla Desh’.”
At my host’s house, which was a very open, hospitable house, endless people kept drifting in and out throughout the day. One of my host’s business associates, a young man, told me how, only three months earlier, they had been woken up one night by the door-bell ringing loudly. “My servant opened the door and was immediately shot dead,” he said. “It was the Biharis, because I lived near Mohammedpur. They ransacked my house. Later, one night, I was caught on my way home, severely beaten up and still bear the scars.” My host’s daughter, a spirited young teenager, invariably cheerful and bright, looked sad during quiet moments with me as she said, “Do you know, they shot Uncle Pochu in Sylhet? He was my favourite uncle. What do you think they needed to shoot him for?”
In spite of everyone’s efforts to be brave and pick up the shattered threads of their life where they had left off, the atmosphere was distinctly tense. Every morning, the newspapers carried photographs of missing persons, hopefully asking for news of them. Everyone knew that they would never return and what added to one’s gloom were the photographs of bright young boys and girls which faced one in the newspaper every morning. There were also charming family photographs, of young couples with small babies. The husbands were mostly administrators or businessmen, prominent citizens who had served their country well. Some of them were members of the
civil service, magistrates, senior police officials, jute magnates, professors, journalists. They had simply disappeared without a trace.
Something, one felt, had to give. And it was a pity that the first big news story that I had to file was about the discovery of the corpses of more murdered professors. Being the daughter of a professor myself, it seemed inconceivable that anyone would want to murder educationists. I had to see their corpses to believe it.
It is strange how one stumbles on to big stories from little ones. Two foreign correspondents and I had decided to beard the controversial Biharis in their den, which was Mirpur. There was an Urdu-speaking driver and myself masquerading as a non-Bengali, if not actually a Bihari, and hoping I would not inadvertently break into Bengali, which might well have proved fatal. In those stormy days, apart from the fact that the Biharis were said to be armed to the teeth, Mirpur was supposed to be sheltering deserters from the Pakistani army, a hard core of military fanatics which had refused to surrender to the Indian army and was said to be helping the still rebellious and highly publicity-conscious Biharis in that camp.
The Biharis turned out to be a very smooth-talking people who had an answer to everything and tried, although unsuccessfully, to sell us a hard-luck story of being completely innocent of any collaboration with the Pakistani army and, on the contrary, of themselves being the victims of a state of blockade. As we drove out of the Mirpur area, we spotted a lorry with what appeared to be Mukti Bahini personnel, in varied attire, from lungis to khaki uniforms, speeding beyond the camp. They were armed, and I persuaded my journalistic companions to follow the truck, in case there was going to be any sort of encounter with the Biharis. After a hot chase, we drove up to a gate where a tough-looking man in khaki uniform stopped us: “Who are you and where do you think you are going?,” he asked sternly. “We are journalists and we wish to talk to the Mukti Bahini men in that truck,” I said in Bengali.
“Well, this is the Mirpur Police Station,” he said tersely, “and those are members of the regular police who have been underground so far and are returning to duty after being in the Resistance, that is why they are wearing all sorts of civilian clothes. Sorry, it’s a very routine, ordinary story. But if you want a really world class story, why don’t you go down to the Dacca Medical College Hospital morgue? We have just recovered the bodies of some more murdered professors from a disused grave-yard in our Mirpur area. They were most brutally murdered and this is something the whole world should get to know about.” THE MURDERED PROFESSORS When I rushed to the morgue of the Dacca Medical College Hospital, the sickening stench of the exhumed bodies had pervaded the whole compound. I could barely being myself to look at the sorry, rotting remains of the cream of the intelligentsia of Dacca University and, together with them, their medical officer. Outside the building, in a little courtyard, stood some young students, lovingly writing the names of their murdered professors in beautiful Bengali script on placards which they fixed to the simple, unvarnished coffins of their teachers. So depressing was the sight that the only son of Prof. Bhattacharya, aged 24, could not take it after identifying his father’s remains. He left for Calcutta by the first available plane to comfort his mother and left the arrangements for the funeral to the Ramakrishna Mission in Dacca. And one could not really blame him.
Inside the morgue, I looked reluctantly at the pale brown and sickly green and gray corpses of the professors, and wondered if it would be disrespectful to pour some eau-de-cologne from my hand-bag on to the handkerchief I held so reluctantly to my nose. It was a macabre sight, like something out of the grave-diggers’ scene in Hamlet, although I would have had no stomach for the cheery chatter with which Shakespeare had provided some relief. One of the bodies had just been identified by his stricken and shocked relatives as that of Dr. Mohammed Murtaja, Medical Officer, Dacca University, who had also written famous books, such as Marriage and Love, A Social Analysis and Population Problems and Wealth. He was
identified by the gamcha (towel) with which his wife had watched him being blind-folded by one of the hoodlums who took him away. Another professor, only whose legs were found, was identified through his daughter’s sari, with which he had been bound and to which another hoodlum had helped himself before removing the Professor at gunpoint for execution.
Other identified victims were: Dr. Santosh Bhattacharya, Assistant Professor of History; Dr. Serajul Haq Khan, Associate Professor of the Institute of Education and Research; Dr. Rashidul Hassan, Assistant Professor of English; Prof. Anwar Pasha, Assistant Professor of Bengali; Dr. Abdul Khair, Associate Professor of History, and Dr. Fauzul Mohi, Assistant Professor in the Institute of Education and Research.
And so, on that fateful afternoon of January 4, while the official, and now rival, student organizations were shouting counter slogans and being televised at a public meeting at Shaheed Minar (Martyrs’ Memorial) these most recent martyers were given a sad send-off by the more quiet scholarly boys whom they had taught, and by their own collegues of Dacca University. The mourners came softly and modestly down the shady paths of the campus to the funeral and there was not a TV camera or microphone in sight.
The murdered professors were given a moving and dignified burial in the grounds of the University mosque after Janaza (funeral) prayers. In the soft winter sunshine and the flowerscented air, the stench quickly disappeared, and instead there was the fragrance of rose-water and incense. Minutes before, I had followed the hearse carrying the coffins. It had halted at the house of each professor as their distraught wives and anguished children stood weeping at a distance. The state of decay of the bodies and the stench had cut out any question of their having a last look at their beloved ones.
At the funeral, everyone talked in outraged whispers of the horror that had taken place. There was a list of 3,000 intellectuals to be liquidated,” whispered one professor to me, “There were at least 50 in the first list from Dacca University alone. The Indian army arrived just 48 hours too late to save

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these poor colleagues, but at least the rest were saved. 40 to 50 professors from various other universities are still missing, and their fate can be guessed.”
Another professor told me: “All had their telephones cut, then they were taken away during curfew hours by the masked boys of the Al-Badr on the morning of December 14, so the murderers must have had the full support of the Pakistan army to be able to go about with such impunity during curfew hours. Some of them even addressed the professors as ‘Sir’, which is a certain sign that they were their own students. These students were encouraged by the Jamiat-e-Islami. The worst part of it is that some of the professors who are active members of the Jamiat-e-Islami and the fanatic students whom they incited in the name of religion are not only still on this campus, but some of them are undoubtedly at this funeral and no doubt gloating over their victims. One professor openly said in the staff common room: ‘Once the Indian army crosses the border there will be 24-hour curfew and the faces of some professors of this university will not be seen again. And that is precisely what has come to pass.”
I asked their colleagues at the funeral: “Were these professors involved in politics?” “Not one,” replied Prof. Morshed, Head of the Department of English at Dacca University, “Rashidul Hassan’s only crime seems to have been that he loved Shakespeare.” It was the unanimous opinion of every professor to whom I spoke that in the cold blooded intention to wipe out Bengali culture and language, the first victims seem to have been selected quite deliberately from the Department of Bengali and History, and anyone connected with Bengali history and thought.
Once again, it was the handiwork of the secret Fascist organization, the Al-Badr. And it had followed a familiar pattern. Two professors, Mr. A. Gaffar of the Department of Mathematics and Mr. L. Hak of the Geography Department, were eye-witnesses of the taking away of their colleagues at 9 a.m. on December 14, in broad daylight. “There was a 24-hour curfew,” they told me at the funeral of their colleagues, “and we watched from our windows in a neighbouring flat in the
professors’ staff quarters of Dacca University as our colleagues, Prof. Anwar Pasha and Prof. Rashidul Hassan were taken out blind-folded from their houses. When Prof. Santosh Bhattacharya, another victim, asked what it was all about, there was a curt ‘Shut up from the hold-up men. When Prof. Anwar Pasha’s wife started crying, they fired a shot to frighten her into silence.”
“All seven victims were driven away fast in an EPRTC (East Pakistan Road Transport Corporation) coach and were not seen again until the resting place of their pathetic remains was pointed out by the driver of the coach, who surrrendered himself to the police on Junuary 2. He claimed that he had been asked to drive the coach at gun-point and that he had watched the shooting of the professors from a distance.”
In a way, I felt glad the bodies had been removed after exhumation. It had been a different matter when, two days earlier, I visited Rayer Bazaar, the weirdly beautiful marshes on the outer fringes of Dacca, where the other lot of intellectuals, journalists, professors and doctors had been murdered, their bodies hidden in a pit from which they only emerged when they became bloated a few days after death. Vultures and dogs were still fighting over their bones, while in an adjoining field, peasants were ploughing the land and sowing paddy. The skeletons had already become a part of the landscape.
Two little girls, aged about eight and nine, emerged from a hut in the little narrow lane through which our car had been manouvred with difficulty. “Do you want to see the skeletons?” asked the little girls eagerly, like miniature tourist guides. I nodded mutely in assent.
The sun was setting, and it looked like a fairy-land landscape, like a set for a Dvorak opera by Josef Svoboda. The skeletons however were not difficult to find, because even if there were no dogs and vultures, there was always the smell, that dreadful sickly-sweet smell which followed one everywhere and made the little girls hold their noses and spit furiously on the ground in an effort to get rid of it. It was then that I heard the puppies growling: there they were, three of them, their baby eyes barely open, fighting ferociously over
the remains of an intellectual’s bones and flesh. I tape recorded them with that professional reflex which never seems to desert mass media people at even the most horrifying moments. But then I started retching and moved away.
Why, I kept on asking, had nobody removed the remains of the intellectuals and instead subjected them to this final indig. nity and humiliation?
The little girls had the answer: “Some people came to remove the bodies, but they could not identify them all, they were so badly mutilated, so who will take away a body of which they are not sure? Who, indeed? Then some people who tried to identify the bodies found that there were Pakistani snipers who fired at them to keep them away. I was shown the bunker under the walls of the picturesque mosque which overlooks the Rayer Bazaar marshlands. A die-hard Pakistani soldier, like those legendary Japanese soldiers who are periodically found on lonely Pacific islands, thinking Japan is still at war, had held out there until beyond the middle of January 1972, when lack of food and exhausted ammunition forced him to emerge from the bunker. The area had also been heavily mined, and two boys who had come in search of a relative had their legs blown off by a mine.
After that, except for the corpses immediately identified and with enough left for burial, there was nothing to be done except leave the rest to the dogs, the jackals and the puppies. But as the spirited growls of the three little puppies faded in the distance, I could not help wondering on whom were they feasting? A distinguished professor? A working journalist, like me, who had merely tried to be an honest journalist and report the truth? Was it a doctor who had performed live-saving operations and was now left without even the formality of a post-mortem for himself and a decent burial? Was this the whimpering end of their intellect and learning? To be fought over by puppies at sunset in that bizarre marshy setting? If there was a moral in this somewhere, I failed to find it.
But I could not help recalling the prophetic words of Prof. Mofazzal Haider Choudhury, scholar and gentleman, who studied in Tagore’s Santiniketan, a much-loved figure who was also executed by the Al-Badr on December 14, 1971, just two days before the surrender of the Pakistanis.
At the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, as far back as 1959, Prof. Choudhury had said, in a verbal encounter with some West Pakistanis: “Some day, the turn of history will take you out of our land, but what waste and filth you will leave behind. I should probably inform you that I am quoting from Tagore, from an address to the British imperialists. But then, have you ever heard of Tagore?” A HORROR DOCUMENTARY At the professors’ funeral, Prof. Rafiq-ul-Islam of the Bengali Department whispered to me: “At the television station you will find that there is a film record of the massacre of professors and students at Jagannath Hall. Ask them to show it to you.”
This sounded so incredible that I did not really believe it. However, I wasted no time in asking Mr. Jamil Chowdhury, the station manager of Dacca TV, whether he did, indeed, have such a film with him. “Oh yes,” he said, “but we have not shown it yet because it might have dreadful repercussions.” He was, of course, referring to the fact that the Pakistani army was still very much in Dacca in prisoner-of-war camps in the Cantonment, and it would have been dangerous to show them gunning down professors and students at Dacca University. The people of Dacca had shown tremendous restraint so far, but this would have been going a bit too far. However, I had it confirmed that N.B.C., VISNEWS and other international networks had already obtained and projected the film.
“But who shot the film?” I asked in wonder. “A professor at the University of Engineering, who had a video tape-recorder and whose flat overlooks the grounds of Jagannath Hall,” said Mr. Chowdhury. It is therefore by kind courtesy of Dacca TV that I sat in their small projection room on January 5 and saw for the first time what must be a unique actuality film, soniething for the permanent archives of world history.
The film, lasting about 20 minutes, first shows small distant figures emerging from the hall carrying the corpses of what must be the students and professors massacred in Jagannath Hall. These are clearly civilian figures in lighter clothes and, at their back, seen strutting arrogantly even at that distance, are darker clad figures, the hoodlums of the Pakistan army. The bodies are laid down in neat, orderly rows by those forced to carry then at gun-point. Then the same procession troops back to the Hall. All this time, with no other sound, one hears innocent bird-song and a lazy cow is seen grazing on the university lawns. The same civilians come out again and the pile of bodies grows.
But after the third grisly trip, the action changes. After the corpses are laid on the ground, the people carrying them are lined up. One of them probably has a pathetic inkling of what is going to happen. He falls on his knees and clings to the legs of the nearest soldier, obviously pleading for mercy. But there is no mercy. One sees guns being pointed, one hears the crackle of gunfire and the lined up figures fall one by one, like the proverbial house of cards or, if you prefer, puppets in a children’s film. At this stage, the bird-song suddenly stops. The lazy cow, with calf, careers wildly across the lawn and is joined by a whole herd of cows fleeing in panic.
But the last man is still clinging pathetically to the jack-boot of the soldier at the end of the row. The soldier then lifts his shoulder at an angle, so that the gun points almost perpendicularly downwards to the man at his feet, and shoots him. The pleading hands unlink from the soldier’s legs and another cropse joins the slumped bodies in a row, some piled on top of the very corpses they had to carry out at gun-point, their own colleagues and friends. The soldiers prod each body with their rifles or bayonets to make sure that they are dead. A few who are still wriggling in their death agony are shot twice until they also stop wriggling.
At this stage, there is a gap, because Prof. Nurul Ullah’s film probably ran out and he had to load a new one. But by the time he starts filming again, nothing much has changed except that there is a fresh pile of bodies on the left. No doubt some other students and professors had been forced at gun-point to carry them out and then were executed in turn. In so far as one can count the bodies, or guess roughly at their

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number in what is really a continuous long-shot amateur film, there are about 50 bodies by this time. And enough, one should think.
Prof. Nurul Ullah’s world scoop indicated that he was a remarkable individual who through his presence of mind, the instinctive reaction of a man of science, had succeeded in shooting a film with invaluable documentary evidence regardless of the risk to his life.
I immediately arranged to trace him down and he very kindly asked me to come round to his flat. Prof. Nurul Ullah is a professor of Electricity at the University of Engineering in Dacca. I found him to be a quiet, scholarly, soft-spoken, and surprisingly young man with a charming wife. He is normally engrossed in his teaching and students. But he happened to be the proud possessor of a video tape-recorder which he bought in Japan on his way back from a year at an American university. He is perhaps the only man alive who saw the massacre on the lawns of Dacca University on the first day of the Pakistani army crack-down. He took his film at great risk to his personal life. It was fascinating to sit down in Prof. Nurul Ullah’s sitting room and see the film twice with him. The second time after he had shown me the bedroom window at the back of his flat which overlooked both the street along which the soldiers drove to the university and the university campus. And through which, when he realized what was happening, he slipped his microphone outside the window to record the sounds of firing. The film was shot from a long distance and under impossible conditions. Prof. Nurul Ullah’s description of how he shot the film was as dramatic and stirring as the film itself.
“On March 25, 1971, the day of the Pakistani crack-down, although I knew nothing about it at the time, my wife and I had just had breakfast and I was looking out of my back windows in the professors’ block of flats in which I and my colleagues from the Engineering University live with our families. Our back windows overlook a street across which are the grounds of Jagannath Hall, one of the most famous halls of Dacca University. “I saw an unusual sight, soldiers driving past my flat and going along the street which overlooks it, towards the entrance to the University. As curfew was on, they made announcements on loud-speakers from a jeep that people coming out on the streets would be shot. After a few minutes, I saw some people carrying out what were obviously dead bodies from Jagannath Hall. I immediately took out my loaded video tape recorder and decided to shoot a film through the glass of the window. It was not an ideal way to do it, but I was not sure what it was all about, and what with the curfew and all the tension, we were all being very cautious.
“As I started shooting the film, the people carrying out the dead bodies laid them down on the grass under the supervision of Pakistani soldiers who are distinguishable in the film, because of their dark clothes, the weapons they are carrying and the way they are strutting about as contrasted with the civilians in lighter clothes who are equally obviously drooping with fright.
“As soon as firing started, I carefully opened the bedroom window wide enough for me to slip my small microphone just outside the window so that I could record the sound as well. But it was not very satisfactorily done, as it was very risky. My wife now tells me that she warned me at the time: Are you mad, do you want to get shot too? One flash from your camera and they will kill us too’ But I don’t remember her telling me, I must have been very absorbed in my shooting, and she says I took no notice of what she said.
“It so happened that a few days earlier, from the same window I had shot some footage of student demonstrators on their way to the university. I little thought it would end this way.
“Anyway, this macabre procession of students carrying out bodies and laying them down on the ground was repeated until we realized with horror that the same students were themselves being lined up to be shot. After recording this dreadful sight on my video tape-recorder, I shut it off thinking it was all over only to realize that a fresh batch of university people were again carrying out bodies from inside. By the time I got my video tape-recorder going again, I had missed this new grisly procession but you will notice in the film that the pile of bodies is higher.”
“I now want to show my film all over the world, because although their faces are not identifiable from that distance in what is my amateur film, one can certainly see the difference between the soldiers and their victims, one can see the shooting and hear it, one can see on film what my wife and I actually saw with our own eyes. And that is documentary evidence of the brutality of the Pak army and their massacre of the intellectuals.”
IQBAL HALL A postscript to Prof. Nurul Ullah’s film was added later by Hassena Akram, staff reporter of Dainik Bangla: “When I heard that my professors had been killed in Iqbal Hall on March 25, I could no longer stay at home quivering with fear. After all, I am a journalist. So I put on a black burqa (veil) and went to Dacca University. It was March 30 and the soldiers were still there. I was crying in any case, so they must have thought I was a relative. I felt worst of all when I saw the bodies of my professors being taken away by scavengers, together with the bodies of dead dogs, in a municipal van.. ……
Iqbal Hall itself was to tell another story. After the Pakistani Army surrender, a group of six skeletons was discovered in a corner. They were guessed to be those of girls, because the skeletons wore necklaces, rings and earrings on relevant bones. These once laughing, happy girl students at a famous university were now beyond identification except when anxious parents with missing daughters summoned up courage to identify them by their jewellery. But the soldiers had removed everything of any value, such as watches and jewellery made of real gold. All that remained were little trinkets of glass and beads, worth nothing.
No one had the heart to make a film of this. Not even Prof. Nurul Ullah.

SUPPRESSION OF BENGALI LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

After this personal confrontation and the detailed, manyfaceted account, by words, visuals and sound, of the massacre of the professors, I felt I must make a thorough search for what caused it. And for this, the best places to go to seemed to be the Bengali Academy, which had been a special target of attack, and to Dacca University, where many of the massacres had taken place, and whose staff had been the direct target of attack. And since mass media had been used for suppression of Bengali culture and the Bengali language, I also traced the events leading up to the deliberate attack on Bengali intellect and tradition at one of its main centres, Dacca TV. DR. KABIR CHOUDHARY Dr. Kabir Choudhary, Director of the Bangla Academy, had a strange round object on his otherwise scholarly office table when I visited him one morning at the Bangla Academy. I thought it was a round, smooth stone picked up on the banks of some river. But, explained Dr. Choudhary, it was not a stone at all. It was a shell which had landed right in his office when the Pakistani army fired on it at random on March 25. Dr. Choudhary’s brother, Bengali scholar and litterateur, Dr. Munir Choudhary, was taken away at gun-point on December 14 and was never seen again.
*One of the reasons we feel so strongly about the killing of intellectuals,” said Dr. Kabir Choudhary, “is because it is one of the worst war crimes in history and the scraps of evidence we have collected show the Pakistan army’s direct involvement. We have evidence that Bengali fanatics were groomed, trained and supplied with arms by the Pakistan army to form the AlBadr organization which later wiped out the cream of our academic life.
“Some of us feel that there are other, bigger reactionary international interests involved. Many of us believe that the blue-print of the massacre on March 25 was prepared by the notorious “Butcher” Jackson of the U.S.A. who came to Dacca just before the crack-down. This can be checked from the register of Hotel Intercontinental.
“We also have reason to believe that Major-General Rao Farman Ali master-minded the whole plan of massacre of the intellectuals and his plans were executed by Brigadiers Bashir, Kader and Hijazi, who were also official army interrogators. Colonel Taj, we are convinced, was directly concerned with the drawing up of lists. We know him well, because he used to come and rub shoulders with the intellectuals and carefully cultivated them to gain their confidence. He pretended to be a friend of Bengali culture and of the intellectuals. He had been in Dacca for three or four years before the army crackdown and established personal contacts which he put to dreadful use later. The two army interrogators, Capt. Qayyum and Major Aslam, also soon became familiar to all of us. One of the people interrogated and tortured by them was the present Secretary of the Education Department, who can furnish endless evidence about suppression of professors and other intellectuals.” JAMIL CHOUDHURY Jamil Choudhury, Station Manager of Dacca Television, is a young, sophisticated, widely travelled man with mod sidewhiskers and seemed to be everywhere all at once during those heady days following the return of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman to Dacca. When I met him on his home ground, which was the TV station itself, he traced for me with intellectual detachment as well as anecdotal, and sometimes very witty, details the ham-fisted manner in which the Pakistani authorities had interfered in the overall policy as well as day-to-day programming of radio and TV. In the process, they had not only built up solid resistance and dissatisfaction on the part of the Bengali programme staff, they had also made themselves the laughing-stock of the highly sophisticated people who had to carry out their grotesque orders.
Said Jamil Choudhury: “Radio and TV were two direct outlets for Bengali language

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and culture. So they became the targets for constant attacks and prolonged interference. After the war in 1965, the imposition of Urdu increased. The plea was that the nation must be united. This continued until December 13, 1971, when TV came to a stop due to lack of staff. When TV was resumed with a transmission on December 22, it was after years that all restrictions were removed.
“The first controversy started in 1965 with the ban on Tagore. Local artistes and journalists protested strongly about this. This protest was really the seed of the freedom movement, which had started with the language riots in 1952.
“The demand for the removal of the ban on Tagore continued until they were forced to withdraw it in 1966. But the unwritten policy was not to give prominence to Tagore. He was confined to a maximum of 40 minutes per month. Nazrul Geeti was permitted, but not songs with words such as Bhagaban (God, in Bengali) or Krishna (since he is a Hindu god) although Nazrul Islam is a Muslim himself. Songs which were banned included Tomar Charan Dooto Amar Booke Dhori (Let me clasp your two feet to my bosom, since this was considered a Hindu gesture to the deity) and Dhan Dhanye Pushpey Bhara, because this was also supposed to have Hindu overtones.
“Then Bengali words were slowly substituted with Urdu. Thus ma (mother) became amma, mantri (minister) became wazir. The language of radio and TV became so contrived and poor that it became quite different to what was spoken in West Bengal and to such an extent that people in West Bengal could not understand the Bengali language as spoken on Radio Pakistan. We were ordered to use even obscure Sanskrit or English words, so long as they were different to those lised in West Bengal. One of the most ridiculous instances was the use of the English world people in Bengali language broadcasts so as to avoid use of the common Bengali word janagan.
“Kazi Dil Mohammed, Director of the Bengali Academy, was present at the famous meeting where Governor Monem Khan said to the staff of the radio station: Why can’t you write your own Tagore songs.’ Then there is the example

of the same Governor saying to a cameraman who threw away his flash-bulb after taking his photo: ‘Why do you waste bulbs like this?
“And these were the people who wielded power over mass media.” PROF. RAFIQUL ISLAM I visited Prof. Rafiqul Islam at the Bengali Department of Dacca University barely two days after the funeral of the murdered professors, of whom at least one identified victim, Prof. Anwar Pasha, Assistant Professor of Bengali, was an immediate colleague of Prof. Islam.
Life was only very slowly returning to the campus and lectures had not yet started. Prof. Islam was the solitary occupant of his room, although his colleagues and students drifted in and out occasionally. But the most cheering sight was that of young girl students, typically Bengali with their long hair down and in cool cotton hand-woven saris, in the corridors and outside on the lawns of the Bengali Department, They were not yet chattering loudly, as young girl students usually do, but in quiet, soft whispers—an aftermath, no doubt, of the frightening things that had taken place inside the university only a short while ago.
Like a good academic, Prof. Rafiqul Islam started with a long and usefully documented history of the deliberate, steady and sustained suppression of Bengali literature and language from the very establishment of Pakistan. Only then did he go on to a first-hand account of the persecution and physical brutality he had faced after being taken to a notorious interrogation centre where he was detained for a considerable period:
“Since 1948, Dacca University was deeply involved in all sorts of political agitation and intense political activity after the language riots of 1952. Prof. Munir Choudhury and Dr. Mofazzal Hossain Choudhury, both of whom have since been killed, as well as several students took part. Thousands were imprisoned, rusticated and expelled until 1959, when Ayub Khan took over.

“After the take-over, and for a few years, up to 1962, there was very little political activity, since nothing was allowed. But Ayub Khan’s methods were subtle. They started purchasing the intellectuals through different sponsored organizations, tours, parties, prizes, titles. There was the Pakistan Writers’ Guild and the Arts Council. They wanted to keep us in good humour. This worked pretty well until the IndoPakistan war, when many noted intellectuals, including professors, got trapped.
“In 1965, there came a total suspension of cultural relations between India and Pakistan. Before, we used to get journals and books. Films used to come too. After the 1965 war even our radio stopped broadcasting ‘Indian’ songs, particularly Tagore songs
“After the cease-fire and Tashkent, Altaf Gauhar became very powerful. He was the Information Secretary and very close to Ayub Khan. He came to Dacca in November 1965 and called a meeting at Radio Pakistan and invited intellectuals to talk about the quality of programmes. In that meeting, I specifically raised the question of Tagore songs being revived on radio and TV. To my surprise, he agreed. Radio Pakistan started broadcasting Tagore songs again, although their frequency was low. But in 1966, the Minister of Information and Broadcasting, Khwaja Shahabuddin again promul gated a total ban on Tagore.
“At first about a dozen people protested. They were Prof. Mohd. Abdul Hai, Prof. Munir Choudhury (killed in December 1971), Dr. Badruddin Khuda, Dr. Kazi Motahar Hussain, Dr. Nilima Ibrahim, Dr. Khansarover Morshed, Dr. Anisuzzaman, Dr. Manirruzzaman, Dr. Rafiqul Islam, Dr. Shahidullah Kaiser (killed in December 1971), Prof. Shamshur Rehman, Prof. Hafizur Rehman and Prof. Mofazzal Haider Choudhury (killed in December 1971). This first protest against Islamabad’s cultural suppression was drafted by Prof. Munir Choudhury. Its main theme was that Tagore was part of the cultural existence of the Bengali, especially the people of East Pakistan.
“This was a bombshell to the Central Government. And they did not fail to note that the protest was organized by the Bengali Department of Dacca University. After this, there was an open clamp-down on Bengali culture:
1. They banned Tagore songs. 2. They tried to reform the Bengali alphabet in the name of making it ‘scientific and ‘phonetic. 3. They tried to change the script.
“The background to this is that first they tried to introduce the Arabic script and then the Roman script. When both measures were opposed by us and failed, they said they would reform’ the Bengali alphabet. Again there were protests from the Bengali Department and, as a result, all three moves were foiled and any further attempts to ‘reform’ the Bengali alphabet were stopped.
“Another move was to try and ‘reform’ the syllabus, which really meant to eliminate Rabindranath Tagore, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Sarat Chandra Chatterjee. This was also resisted up to the time of the crack-down on the Bengali Department of Dacca University. Only Rajshahi University changed its syllabus, no other university agreed. On the contrary, Dacca University carried on the struggle to preserve Bengali tradition and culture. This included compilation of documents on this movement for cultural freedom.
“So this was really a climax to the long struggle and prolonged discussions which had taken place among Bengali intellectuals after Partition. It centred round the question: What is our tradition?
“The official line was that our tradition was Muslim and Islamic. Liberals among the intellectuals, on the other hand, maintained that ours was a part of the tradition of the entire sub-continent and not merely communal culture but a broad, humanitarian culture. Ours, we insisted, was basically a Bengali tradition, and this included our literature, music and, indeed, every field of creative activity so that tradition played a very vital role in it. In other words, while the official line was the communal or religious line, the liberals insisted on a general line. From this point onwards, our official information media, such as radio, TV and official publications and documents avoided whatever they considered non-Muslim in the way of tradition. Later, all of Tagore and about half of Nazrul Islam was banned.
“As we intellectuals saw it, the Pakistani regime wanted to substitute Bengali culture with Lahore’s Hiramandi culture, what we call Bai-ji culture.* This was too much for us, this substitution of a tradition with this cheap professional culture’. Our tradition is a part of our way of life and goes far deeper.
“This was the basic conflict between East and West Pakistan and played a very vital role in the freedom movement. By trying to finish us culturally, the Pakistan regime found its doom. And this cultural suppression, along with economic and political suppression, ultimately finished the whole concept of Pakistan.”
“That is a precise account of the general persecution,” I said at this stage to Prof. Rafiqul Islam, “And now, won’t you please tell me about your own personal experiences as a victim of the Pakistani army?”
“Oh, it was really nothing,” said the modest professor, “What I went through was nothing, considering what many of my colleagues went through and considering many of them lost their lives as well. But I can certainly tell you about the methods that were used to break down the morale and integrity of intellectuals. And something of what they did to me personally, for what it is worth.”
“There were three places of torture for Bengali intellectuals and professional people: 1. What was known as The Torture Chamber, in the Pro
vincial Assembly House. 2. The PWI ‘Cage’ in the Cantonment, for interrogation of
civil service officers. 3. The FIC (Field Interrogation Centre) in the Second
Capital, which functioned under Brigadier Kader. “I was taken to the special camp in the Second Capital, which was reserved for top people, VIP’s, such as District
———————-
*Hiramandi is the red light district of Lahore, in West Pakistan. A Bai-ji is the form of address used for a courtesan.
————–
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Commissioners, Superintendents of Police, Post-MastersGeneral, Doctors, Members of the National Assembly. The interrogators here were known as the Inter-Service Screening Committee.
“I was let off with comparatively light physical tortures because the camp was under the over-all command of Lt. General Sahibzada, and I had been his Bengali teacher.
“The different forms of torture used at the FIC, where I was taken later, were basically used to squeeze out information. They took various forms physical, mental, psychological and, not least of all, allurements. All the interrogators were Punjabis. They did not wear uniforms, although they were well-known members of the armed forces’ Intelligence and the Punjab Police.
“Physical torture consisted of variations on stripping and beating, swinging back and forth after being tied upside down and being hit with rifle butts. Syringes were flourished and sometimes used too. Electric whips were another favourite weapon of torture.
“What was aimed at was confessions, and in my case, as in those of others, it followed a pattern. We were first handed a copy of a typed statement and asked to sign it. Questions and insinuations preceded the handing over of the statement to sign. In my case, the interrogator said: ‘I suggest that you did all this under duress. So I only want you to confirm that Prof. Munir Choudhury led the movement’. After beating me up they again tried to get me to give them the names of groups, and asked me to divulge where they used to hold their meetings.
“One of the stock confessions which professors were asked to sign after physical torture was: ‘l raped Punjabi and Bihari girls and killed Pakistani soldiers.’ I laughed when they asked me to sign this and said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous. But my colleague, Prof. Syed Ali Taqi of the English Department of Mymensingh University, and brother of Prof. Ali Hassan, head of my department at Dacca University, signed this confession under duress. He felt so humiliated and ashamed afterwards that he has now gone insane.
“At another stage I was told that I was about to be chargesheeted and produced for sedition and conspiracy. I was informed that the penalty ranged from 14 years’ R.I. to the death penalty. Five of my colleagues from the university were confronted with similar charges. During detention I was given kicks and blows and one DSP (Deputy Superintendent of Police) beat me to persuade me to involve others. We were given no reading material during detention, except The Holy Quran. Food was supplied to us from the district jail. I had to sleep on the floor for a month. Later I was given a bed of sorts.
“For the rest my interrogation was gentle to begin with and they were equally gentle when they suddenly released me in October. Even Brigadier Bashir suddenly started treating me like a professor and gave me an hour-long lecture. ‘Perhaps you have done wrong,’ he said in civilized tones as he shook hands, ‘You should now try to change’.
“The three most infamous interrogators were Brigadiers Kader, and Bashir and Lt. Col. Hijazi. I think there should be an inquiry commission into these crimes so that some nations which are hesitant about believing all this should have a chance to re-examine their conscience. We can never get the dead back, but if the world conscience is aroused, it will at least stop such gruesome acts in future.”
While Prof. Rafiqul Islam was speaking to me, he received a telephone cail. It was from the head of the Telephones Department who informed him that his telephone, which had been cut by the Pakistan army, was now being restored. “He was a fellow-prisoner with me,” said Prof. Islam with a wry smile. THE WOMEN There seems little doubt that more than any other crimes committed by the Pakistani army, it is their bestial and merciless treatment of women which turned the entire population of Bangla Desh against them.
When I went to Dacca in early 1972, the atmosphere, as far as the raped girls were concerned, was one of justified secrecy and protectiveness. Members of the Press were requested not to interview or photograph them. Doctors, with a high sense
of ethical values, were in unanimous agreement that they should perform abortions on girls not too far advanced in pregnancy. But the most difficult future faced the girls who were far advanced in pregnancy and had to go through the painful experience of child-birth, made all the more painful by the repulsive fact that these were babies conceived against their wishes as a result of savage rape by the enemies of their nation.
Most to be admired and listened to at that stage were the social workers of Bangla Desh and an outstanding woman journalist who had carefully compiled, with professional efficiency, the dreadful details about individual cases of rape. Although the names of these social workers are given it is at their special request that the names of the girls raped are withheld so as not to jeopardise their chances of marriage and their acceptance back into normal life. In a conservative society trying very hard to readjust itself to a problem that has affected almost every family in the land, it is natural that there should be a cooperative effort to protect the honour and future of the girls concerned.
The first social worker I met was Ayesha Nabi, Principal of the Post-Graduate College of Social Work, University of Dacca. Mrs. Nabi is an M.A. in Political Science and Social Welfare from Dacca University and a Master of Science in Social Welfare from McGill University in Canada. Mrs. Nabi is small and dainty and very lovely to look at. She is quiet and soft-spoken, but what she had to say had the unmistakable stamp of the voice of authority combined with the compassion and understanding of a woman who still has her roots in the traditional society of Bangla Desh. It is difficult to find the exact number of victims of rape,” began Ayesha Nabi, with that academic preamble with which most professional people began their account of atrocities which could be classified under specific groups.
“At the time the girls were abducted, conditions were dreadful. People were fleeing like cats and dogs because they were getting shot like cats and dogs. There was hardly any communication between towns and villages so there was little chance of collecting information or statistics. It will be impossible to collect statistics even now, because during the last stages of the war and after, girls were rescued by our people from cantonments, bunkers and even inside the tanks of the Pakistan army. Since most girls were taken away from March 25 onwards, and only rescued in late December, most of them are in an advanced state of pregnancy. This has caused untold misery and created a social problem of the most horrifying dimensions.
“The main problem is that ours is a traditional society. Even mad people are hidden away in families. In the case of pregnant girls the situation is much worse because families face the great future problem: How shall we get them married? In the early stages abortion is possible, but not at such a late stage. Most of the girls come from a poor economic background. They also tend to be more innocent, especially when they are from the villages. Girls in towns and cities are more sophisticated and their families have a more modern attitude. Then many of the girls are in the age-group 13 to 15, and this creates special problems.” THE RICKSHAWALLAH’S SISTER “Take the case of the girl S., whom you have just seen in Mitford Hospital. Her age is about 14 and she is 7 months pregnant. Her father and brother are both cycle-rickshawallahs and they lised to live near the Joint Quarters of Mohammedpur, the Bihari area near the cantonment. Their house was really a jhonpri (shanty) in no man’s land in a very poor area. The family tried to escape between March 25 and 27. They carefully planned the escape for the afternoon when the troops went for lunch and the curfew became a little slack About five or six Bengali families came out and tried to escape. The soldiers discovered them and started chasing them. They all got scattered and later on it was found that the only sister of the rickshawallah was missing. From March 25, right up to December, the brother kept on trying to trace her.
*One of the first things he did was to make friends with the soldiers by plying his rickshaw right near their barracks and thus getting friendly with them. He sometimes under-charged them to win their attention. Just before the Indian army entered Dacca, and as the Pakistani soldiers were preparing to leave, the rickshawallah said to a major, who seemed kinder than the rest: ‘Sir, I think my sister is inside your barracks. She is dark and not at all beautiful. What would they want with her now? Sir, once you told me that you had a sister. Will you not help me to find mine?
“Next day the major said to him: “We are letting four girls go. I will take you inside and you can check if one of them is your sister.’ He found that she was and as the army left in panic he got her back. But also with her were three other girls. One was a girl from Intermediate Arts at the University and the other two were also educated. He got hold of a scooter rickshaw and asked the other girls also to take this chance to escape. He took them all back to their homes. One of the girls was the only child of a maulvi (priest). The maulvi had moved her from house to house for months to save her, but . had failed. The second girl was restored to her father, an employee in the Posts and Telegraphs Department and from a highly respected middle class family. The third was also from a middle-class background. These three being in the early stages of pregnancy, women doctors at Mitford Hospital were able to perform operations on all of them, and they went back quietly to their families.”
“The rickshawallah then brought his sister to the doctors. He is very naive himself and said: ‘I am a poor man, but I will give you all the money I have. Please do something for her.’ He refused to believe that she could not have an abortion at seven months. ‘How is she different from the other three girls?’ he asked.
“Her marriage had been arranged before the troubles and he had told her fiancé’s family that she had been sent for safety to some friends during the troubles. But when he recovered her from the army cantonment he promptly told her fiancé that she had come back. When we told him he should have kept

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with great dilliculty, because she is dark and plain. If I had not told them she would never have got married.
“And now the problem”, said Mrs. Nabi, “Is that if her fiancé sees her he will immediately realize that she is heavily pregnant and refuse to marry her. It was foolish of the brother, otherwise we would have covered up. She could have gone away somewhere to have her baby and then got married afterwards. Now he is committed to arranging the marriage in a few weeks. We have advised him to say that because of the emergency he needs more time to collect money for the marriage. But the problem is that in their society the bridegroom bears most of the marriage expenses, so they are not likely to be convinced by this excuse.
“And there you have our main problem. You simply cannot motivate anyone in a conservative society, especially Bengali, Muslim society, where a man will say: ‘I like singers on TV, but not my daughter. I like films, but I don’t like my wife going to the cinema.’ Even husbands are not accepting back wives who were forcibly taken away and confined and dishonoured through no fault of their own. The attitude is: ‘I can go with 10 women, but my wife must be pure.’ It needs intensive social education to change all this.”
When I saw the girl at Mitford Hospital, in the maternity pleased with the new pretty red sari which her brother had brought her. She was complaining about the food in the hospital and wanted to go back to her brother’s shanty. When Mrs. Nabi suggested that she should give the name of a mythical “husband” to the other women in the ward, so as to avoid awkward questions, she replied with complete innocence: But I have no husband. I am getting married after Id’. “At first she simply could not understand what had happened to her or that she was about to become a mother”, said Mrs. Nabi. “She is a village girl and they only go to the fields to work after marriage, and then get to know the facts of life. One cannot help but admire the maturity and moral courage of her brother, a poor, almost totally uneducated man, who is trying so valiantly to rehabilitate his young sister in such an orthodox society and against such tremendous odds.

THE CLERK’S WIFE
Mavis Sultana and Mrs. Nurul Nahar, two social workers at Mitford Hospital, had numerous stories which they had got first-hand from the victims of rape. But they confessed that even for them one of the most moving was the case of the young wife of an ordinary clerk, with two small babies.
“Whenever they left the house,” they told me, “whether for office or for household chores, they had made an arrangement by which the husband locked the front door and left a large lock hanging prominently outside for everyone to see. It gave the impression that the family was out and offered some protection from marauding Pakistani soldiers and their collaborators. When lights were put on in the evenings, they were dim lights, so that it was like a perpetual black-out.
“One evening, the clerk went out after office to buy some mustard oil and spices while his wife started preparing dinner in the small kitchen at the back of the house. The two small children, unaware of the risk involved and longing to play in the front garden where they always used to play in the evenings before the troubles started, somehow managed to open the bathroom door while their mother was busy in the kitchen and slipped out into the garden.
“As their horrified neighbours watched helplessly, some Pakistani soldiers on the prowl spotted the children and rushed into the garden. When the frightened children ran back to their mother, the soldiers quietly followed them. They entered through the bathroom door too and cunningly followed the children to where their mother was still cooking in the kitchen. They immediately pounced on the woman. As she screamed in terror, the two babies ran up to her crying, Ma, ma’. While one of the soldiers started raping her, the others shot the two children dead. Then all the soldiers raped the woman in turn.
“When the husband returned with the mustard oil and spices, he found his wife, brutally violated, lying senseless in her children’s blood.

HASEENA AKRAM

As a journalist, I naturally looked for women journalists in Dacca who could give me a professional account of the atrocities, particularly on women.
When I went to the office of the Bengali daily Dainik Bangla it was primarily to get photostats of the doodles of MajorGeneral Rao Farman Ali, which had been front-paged in the paper after some of their enterprising reporters had discovered them in the drawer of a writing table in his house. It was in the editorial room that I found a bright, vocal young woman who turned out to be Haseena Akram, a staff reporter and professional to her finger-tips. But even more, she had descriptive powers in the Bengali language which lifted her accounts of individual case-histories far above the level of routine journalism to that of poetry. The tape I have of her descriptions would be prized by mass media archives anywhere. And yet, in looks and to some extent in attitude. Haseena Akram is still rooted in the village soil from which she sprang. She is tall and sturdy, with thick wavy hair. She has a round, moonshaped face which glows with passion as the words pour out of her in an angry, and at times barely controlled, torrent.
“We are the children of the Padma” she began with fierce pride, “We have learnt to survive the waves of the Padma and the same wave which took us away has now brought us back.”
“And are you going to write about it, a book perhaps?”, I asked with warm professional admiration. “No, no, I can’t”, she said, “It is too immediate and most of the atrocities I know of were committed on my friends. I get too emotional. Could you write a column about a friend whose husband and only son were killed and who was raped by 19 soldiers?”. “Perhaps not”, I agreed. “I tell you what,” then said Haseena, “I will tell you about them and you write about them. You will be more detached and I will vouch for the facts.” And that is how it came about that Haseena Akram told me about her own experiences and those of her friends.
“The day the Pakistani army surrendered and we became free, ny journalist husband and I walked out of the house from where I had not dared stir out all these months. We walked hand in hand like children, seeing only the light. I had spent those nine months collecting facts in my diary for future generations. I used to write letters to my three-year-old son, in case anything hapened to me. I saw soldiers pick up and kill babies. I saw the saris and legs of girls who had been kidnapped moving desperately in the trucks into which they had been piled. They were gagged, so they could not shout. I saw young boys, my neighbours, being taken away blindfolded. Their corpses were later found drained of all blood. They had been asked to donate blood for transfusions. It was all drained out until they died. But the worst case I know of, because of the senseless brutality on completely innocent people, was that of my friend, Mrs. S. THE BANKER’S WIFE “I saw her at the house of Dr. Helena Pasha in August, in Tangail. I am telling you her full name, but you must only describe her as Mrs. S., so as to protect her honour, what is left of it.
“Her husband was the manager of the Muslim Commercial Bank. They committed such awful sexual atrocities on her that I cannot tell you, even though we are both women. She was bitten so brutally on her cheeks and lips that this once beautiful woman, one of my dearest friends, now has a mutilated face.
“When I saw her, I felt that what she had been so cruelly robbed of was her womanhood, everything precious to a woman. She looked at me completely without expression and said in a toneless voice: “Why do you cry? Nothing has happened to you. As for me, nothing more can happen to me, becaute I am finished.’ And she looked inert and dead, a living corpse.
“Then I heard how the army first shot her husband, suddenly bursting into the house while the family was at dinner. ‘Which is S?’ asked the first army officer. ‘I am S’, replied her husband. They immediately fired at him, but he did not die at once. Mrs. S. fell on him and cradled his head in her arms and tried
to comfort him as he lay dying. Her husband looked at her and said with his dying breath: ‘Don’t look at me, just save the babies. But as he lay dying, the soldiers attacked her and that is the last thing her husband saw as he tried to raise himself before falling back dead. Seeing their mother attacked, her two babies ran towards their mother. So the soldiers next shot the babies and they also fell dead near her husband. 19 soldiers had entered the house, according to the neighbours, and they all raped Mrs. S in her husband and children’s blood.
“I no longer say Khuda Hafez (God be with You) for I cannot call God Khuda any more in the language of these murderers. I prefer to call him Allah.”
THE MUKTI BAHINI BRIDEGROOM “There was a boy in the Mukti Bahini whom I knew. He had to wait for months before he was able to marry the girl who used to fight by his side. On his wedding day, he said to me: ‘So many of my friends have died, I cannot even feel happy or excited on my wedding day. I feel particularly grieved about my tailor’s son, who fought by my side and got killed, leaving behind his bride of only a few days.’ This boy slept with his rifle on his bed on his wedding night and all that he kept on saying to his bride was: “We shall keep on fighting
“And all this,” concluded Haseena Akram as fiercely as she had begun, “was done in the name of religion. If I had my way, I would abolish all madrassahs (religious schools) and abolish the teaching of Arabic and Sanskrit if this is what is done in the name of culture and religion.’ THE VILLAGES OF BANGLA DESH What with the triumphant return of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and the politicking which started almost immediately, Dacca had become an international city, the destination of every newspaper, radio and TV chain in the world. Although tragedy still lingered in every street and home of Dacca, somehow the atmosphere had changed. The focus was now on the nation, and not individuals.

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I felt it was time to go out to the villages and find out what had happened there and how the refugees returning from India, the majority of whom were villagers, were succeeding in the giant task of rehabilitating themselves. This train of thought coincided with an exciting offer of a seat in a Bangla Desh helicopter flying down to Tongipara, the Sheikh’s own village. TONGIPARA As Flying Officer Sultan took off from Dacca, he kept the chopper low so that we could see the landscape. It was, indeed, Golden Bengal with fields and fields of mustard flowers. It was typical agricultural land, villagers ploughing, cows and goats grazing, clusters of mud huts in neat little villages. Then the fabulous beauty of the Padma, coming round almost full circle so that we had to fly twice over it, dotted with sailing boats. In little village ponds women were bathing and it looked like a ready-made scenario for a documentary film on rural Bengal. One could hardly believe this was a ravaged land, fighting for its survival.
But as a grim reminder, the helicopter had nine bullet holes. One of the favourite pastimes of the Pakistan air force had been flying low over villages, machine-gunning the peasants. One could therefore still see frightened children running for cover behind bushes, rather than gaping in wonder at the helicopter like their elders. But since every village looked like the last one, I wondered how the pilot would ever discover the Sheikh’s village. But there was no mistaking Tongipara when we flew over it. A motley village crowd, complete with Mukti Bahini men in lungis and the standard tin helmets and rifles, was waiting around the paddy field where our helicopter made a somewhat dusty landing amid lusty shouts of Joi Bangla. We got very smart salutes as we emerged from the helicopter and trotted briskly along a village path to stand face to face with what the Pakistani army had left of the Sheikh’s ancestral home-two battered doorways and a few solitary steps.
“How on earth did they burn down such solid brick?” I asked a Mukti boy. “They used some chemical,” he replied.
“It just entered like a river of fire and destroyed everything.”
At this stage, a strikingly beautiful girl with wild, long hair shook her fist at me. “That is Shephali,” said a gentle figure with a white beard, “She went off her head after watching the killings. She is Abdul Malek Kader’s daughter”.
The speaker was Maulvi Sheikh Abdul Halim, the village maulvi who is also imam of the village mosque. This was also his village, the village where the Sheikh’s entire family, including aunts, uncles, cousins and their children have lived side by side for generations. Tongipara had therefore received special and very brutal treatment from the Pakistani army. The maulvi, at my request, gave me an eye-witness account of what happened in the village soon after the arrest of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in Dacca, in March 1971. His account was endorsed by every villager present. THE MAULVI’S STORY “On April 19, 1971, about 35 soldiers came to our village in a launch at about 8 a.m.
“A couple of days earlier, I had asked the Sheikh’s father and mother to leave the village, but they refused. They said: “This is our home and we shall not go away.’ Soon after I heard the sound of the launch, a soldier came running and said: ‘Here, Maulw, stop, in which house are the father and mother of the Sheikh?’ So first I brought out his father. We placed a chair for him but they made him sit on the ground. Then Sheikh Sahib’s anma (mother) was brought out. She took hold of my hand and I made her sit on the chair. The soldiers then held a Sten-gun against the back of the Sheikh’s abba (father) and a rifle against mine. ‘We wil kill you in 10 minutes’, said a soldier, looking at his watch.
Then they picked up a diary from the Sheikh’s house and some medicine bottles and asked me for the keys of the house. I gave them the bunch of keys but they were so rough in trying to open the locks that the keys would not turn. So they kicked open the trunks. There was nothing much inside except five teaspoons, which they took. Then they saw a framed photograph and asked me whose it was. When I said it was Sheikh Sahib’s they took it down. I tried to get up at this stage but they hit me with their rifle butts and I fell down against the chair. Finally, they picked up a very old suitcase and a small wooden box and made a servant carry them to the launch.”
“Then they dragged me up to where tne Sheikh’s father was sitting and repeated: ‘We shall shoot you in 10 minutes’. Pointing to the Sheikh’s father I asked: ‘What’s the point of shooting him? He’s an old man and a Government pensioner.’ The soldiers replied: ‘Is liye keonki wohne shaitan paida kiya hai’. (Because he has produced a devil). ‘Why shoot me, the imam of the mosque?’ I asked. *Aap kiska imam hai ? Aap vote dehte hain’, (What sort of an imam are you? You vote) they replied. I said: “The party was not banned, we were allowed to vote for it. We are not leaders, we are janasadharan (the masses). Why don’t you ask the leaders?’ The captain intervened to say that eight minutes were over and we would be shot in another two minutes. Just then a major came running from the launch and said we were to be let alone and not shot.
“I immediately went towards the masjid (niosque) and saw. about 50 villagers inside. Three boys had already been dragged out and shot. The soldiers asked me about a boy who, I said, was a krishak (cultivator). They looked at the mud on his legs and hands and let him go. Khan Sahib, the Sheikh’s uncle, had a boy servant called Ershad. They asked me about him. I said he was a servant, but a Razakar maulvi who had come with them from another village said he was the Sheikh’s relative, which was a lie. The boy Ershad was taken to the line-up. He asked for water but it was refused.
“Another young boy had come from Dacca, where he was employed in a mill, to enquire about his father. He produced his identity card but they shot him all the same. Then they shot Ershad right in front of his mother. Ershad moved a little after falling down so they shot him again. Finally, the boy who had carried the boxes to the launch was shot. With the three shot earlier, a total of six innocent boys were shot by the Pakistani army without any provocation. They were all good-looking and therefore suspected to be relatives of the Sheikh.”

“After this, the Sheikh’s father and mother were brought out of the house. Anima was almost fainting. And then the house was set on fire and burnt down in front of our eyes, until all that remained was the frame of the doorway which you can still see. Altonissa, the lady with the blood-stained clothes of her son, is the mother of Torab Yad Ali who was shot. They did not allow her to remove her son’s body for burial, because they wanted the bodies to be exposed to public view to terrorize the villagers. They also shot Mithu, the 10-year old son of this widowed lady. She had brought him up with the greatest difficulty-they never had anything to eat except saag-bhaal (spinach and rice). They shot little Mithu because he had helped the Mukti Bahini. You can now ask the ladies about their narrow escape.”
Shaheeda Sheikh, Sheikh Mujib’s niece, then added that fortunately all the women were taken away to safety across the river to a neighbouring village three days before the Pakistani soldiers came. For months they had lived in constant terror of Razakars pouncing on them from bushes by the village pond. Beli, Begum Mujib’s niece, a strikingly lovely woman, told me how she had fled from the village when seven months pregnant and walked 25 miles to safety. Pari, a girl cousin, escaped with a temperature of 104 degrees. Otherwise they had would all have been killed.
SONAMURA After affectionate hospitality from the Sheikh’s cousins and a warm meeting with the ladies of the family, we boarded the helicopter again, for the flight back to Dacca. Over halfway back, I found Flying Officer Sultan’s helicopter hovering like a bce over a large village below. The villagers, the cows and even the birds were running and fluttering all over the landscape at this unexpected intrusion on their afternoon chores. A village had been picked up at random for an unrehearsed visit. I was delighted to hear as we landed that some makers of musical instruments lived in Sonamura and supplied them to one of the most popular shops in Dacca. (Dacca, of course, has long been one of the centres of music, both classical and light, on the sub-continent.) It seems that until the Pakistani army terrorized it, many Hindus and Muslims lived peacefully in the village. They tended their fields, their cows and other animals grazed peacefully on the land and Sonamura’s skilled artisans worked hard at making musical instruments and other hand-made consumer goods for shops in the city. But one day, in November 1971, the Pakistani army attacked the village without warning. The lucky villagers who survived gave me their individual accounts of how the raid had affected their personal lives.
Rabi Mandal, a fine sensitive-looking man, makes guitars for Jatin and Co. in Dacca. His neighbour, Dulachand, makes madals, a percussion instrument which has been used for centuries for accompanying religious and folk music and for ceremonial occasions.
Rabi Mandal said: “Between November 25 and 27, over a thousand soldiers arrived in about 30 launches. They first shot and killed whoever was in sight. Then they started chasing the villagers who were running for their lives. They made the villagers they caught strip first, then stand naked in a line and shot them. First they killed 30 boys at random and took away four or five young girls. As soon as my friend Dulachand and I got a chance, we ran away to another village. When we came back after Liberation, we found that all our musical instruments had either been destroyed deliberately or burnt when they set fire to our huts.”
An elderly villager turned to me as I noticed a sad-looking and very young girl peep from behind an improvised curtain and then vanish out of sight. “That is my daughter,” said Tukaram, “her husband was standing exactly where you are now standing. They caught hold of him at about I a.m. on the first night and just shot him in front of me and my daughter. We had done nothing to harm anybody. And now my young daughter is a widow.”
Said villager Lakhan: “I survived a firing squad. They caught hold of me and put me in a line after making lis all strip. I fell down as soon as they started firing and shouted “Hai, Hai,’ before I fell. I decided to lie there pretending to

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be dead, because it was my only chance. It was a moonlit night, so I had to be very careful. I lay still for an hour or so after the Pakistani soldiers had gone away. Actually, they were rather careless in checking, perhaps because it was at night. Because afterwards there were 5 of us who survived from a line of 10 villagers lined up.
“Before leaving, the soldiers also shot two milch cows. Some more cows got burnt alive when the soldiers set fire to the huts inside which they were tethered. You can see these IWO cows with bad burns. Altogether 12 cows got burnt including two out of four cows belonging to Shyamsundari Debi. The women had mostly been moved to neighbouring villages just before the soldiers sacked our village, otherwise many more girls would have been taken away. They also set fire to all the grain and rice they saw, so that we were left with nothing to eat. You can see for yourself the burnt grain which now looks like lumps of charcoal.
“They were quite puzzling in the way they chose people and things for destruction. Why burn the furniture made by Dulal Mandal, the furniture-maker? And why kill the son of Gopal Majhi, the boatman? And why should his daughter Kananbala, happily married for seven years and with a small son, have to watch her husband being killed for no reason at all? Or Dayai Dasi, an elderly lady, watch her sister being killed as she resisted rape?”
There were no answers to these anguished questions. There never can be. TUNGI: THE WEAVERS’ VILLAGE From ancient times, the area now known as Bangla Desh has nurtured some of the finest craftsmen in the world. Mostly traditional workers, whose skill and training are hereditary, yet whose incomes are far lower than those of industrial labour, their crafts have survived centuries of varying fortunes, for they are ingrained in the life of those who practise them with such devotion. These humble and highly skilled craftsmen include goldsmiths, weavers, potters, makers of musical instruments, makers of brass utensils and the like. During the trou bles, it was their misfortune that they had mostly lived in villages, or, as in the case of the famous goldsmiths of Shakharipara, in small lanes in the city of Dacca. The Pakistani army, in its brutal efforts to stifle a popular uprising with armed force, made these areas-villages and slums-special targets for attack.
KAFIUDDIN BHUYIA Kafiuddin Bhuyia may be described as the supreme artist for weaving of Jamdani saris. These are the famous Dacca muslins which used to be exported to Greece and other European countries in ancient times. There is also the charming story about the Emperor Aurangzeb and his daughter. One day she appeared in court before her father. He immediately chided her for being so indecently dressed-she was wearing the ancient equivalent of the see-through. “But, Father,” she protested, “I am wearing nine layers of Dacca muslin.” Kafiuddin is a direct descendant of these renowned weavers and lives in the village of Tungi which is across the river from Dacca.
We crossed the broad expanse of the river Sitalakshi in a small country boat and passed other boats ferrying across Cows, ducks, goats and other live-stock. It was, again, a peaceful rural landscape, although the mills of Narayangunje were visible across the river. But the thatched huts on the Tungi side of the river sustained the rustic atmosphere. A sailing boat laden with jute slowly overtook us. And that turned the conversation to the new problems about weaving Jamdanis.
Kafiuddin remarked that yarn had become a big problem, because the fine count yarn used to come from China and Japan. Although the heavier counts were available in Bangla Desh, much of it used to come from West Pakistan too. But Kafiuddin said with a smile that Tungi still remained the best situated village for fine muslin weaving. This was because the Sitalakshi river water is so sweet that it makes the best soda water in the world–the labels on the bottle say so.
And this sweetness, naturally, makes the threads for Dacca muslins extra soft for weaving and dyeing. And that is when I quietly turned the conversation to Kafiuddin himself and his considerable achievements came to light.
Kafiuddin has won the first prize for weaving for many years in Bangla Desh and his wife, Jahanara Begum, makes sikkas, which are colourful jute nets for hanging pots and pans and other household knick-knacks from the wooden beams of the village huts. They have become a very successful export to foreign countries for hanging flower-pots and for modern decor. His wife is also an award-winner from the State. Kafiuddin, his wife and five children, as well as the other villagers looked thin and still very nervous and unsettled after the months of terror from the Pakistani army. Their village was on the direct route to Dacca and the Mukti Bahini had fought several guerilla battles with the army in and near the village. These humble folk explained that it takes 10 days to weave a sari with two weavers working on one loom. The labour charges are Rs. 80 per sari, which works out to Rs. 4 per day per head for one of the most delicate hereditary crafts in the world. It seemed incredible that anyone should wish to kill or persecute such simple, humble and peace-loving folk. The basic kindness and hospitality of Kafiuddin Bhuyia and his fellow-weavers showed itself in the little village meal they offered us: It consisted of hard-boiled eggs (freshly laid and which his wife boiled over a rustic log fire), fresh bananas from his back garden and cups of hot, sweet tea.
Kafiuddin and his fellow-weavers were trying to resume normal life, after months of terror. And this is what he said of those dreadful months through which they had passed: “Our village was under constant firing as the Pakistani soldiers tried to shell the Mukti Bahini, who found our village paths ideal for catching the army unawares. But look at those charred trees near the mosque, they were burnt by the army. On the 25th March, when they started shooting people in the village, all of us fled to a village about six miles East. The dyers were Hindus and the weavers Muslims-we had always lived and worked together in peace and now we were fleeing together for our lives. But we could not desert our looms. Somehow, we used to sneak back two or three days in the week and weave what we could.
“They killed my son-in-law, who was one of the finest weavers among us. That is my young widowed daughter, who is only 20 years old. She cries all the time now, but we are trying to get her interested in weaving or sikka work with her mother. Then they did dreadful things to our girls, such dreadful things that I cannot speak of them to you. They robbed us villagers of our daughters’ and sisters’ honour.”
Kafiuddin Bhuyia’s village hut, made of bamboo and mud and thatch, was pitifully humble, but everywhere there were signs of artistic taste and love of beauty. The terracotta pots, the carved stands of the old wooden bed, the fine sitalpatis (rush mats) and a quaint carved wooden cupboard made from ordinary unvarnished wood had a primitive charm which any art collector would find exciting. Yet their quilts were pitifully worn. The entire village had only one house with electricity.
Life was hard enough for Kafiuddin, with a monthly income of Rs. 150 and seven mouths, as well as his widowed daughter’s, to feed. Now it would be harder. But Kafiuddin’s ancestors had survived even the atrocities of the British, who cut off their fingers so that the cotton merchants of Manchester could take over their market. Even as they spoke, the weavers continued weaving exquisite Jamdani saris, in ancient motifs in gold and white thread. For it is a craft that can never die. THE TECHNOCRATS In a systematic campaign to cripple Bangla Desh economically by exterminating its technological experts, the Pakistan military Government ruthlessly hunted down key figures in every sector of industry and endless technological institutions. After prolonged interrogation and torture, technocrats from every level were simply liquidated. Prime targets for attack were the key men in transport and communications, such as the railways, port and docks, civil aviation, and telecommunications.
The technocrats, on their part, displayed a remarkable degree of idealism and courage which is best illustrated by the poignant stort of the engineer who built a bridge and then helped his Mukti Bahini son to blow it up. When Rumi Imam joined the Mukti Bahini, his father carefully taught him how to blow up bridges. These were the same bridges that Mr. Imam had built for his country, which is why he knew their weak spots. But he was also a creative engineer who hated to have them destroyed. For instance, he had helped build Manickgunge Bridge. So he drew a precise diagram for his son and said: “You blow it up at exactly this point, then we shall be able to repair it and use it again when we are free and the bridge belongs to us.’
But neither the engineer father nor Mukti Bahini son lived to see that day. And that is the main sorrow of the only surviving member of this once happy family, Jahanara Imam, once a proud wife and mother, elegant and lovely and now in a widow’s white sari and without the vermilion mark on her forehead. For her beloved son Rumi, such a bright and handsome boy, did not die in operations with the Mukti Bahini, he died of brutal tortures by the Pakistani army. Her engineer husband could not bear this blow, and died of a heart attack on December 13, just three days before the surrender of the Pakistani army. Jahanara Imam’s personal grief was only part of the national mourning at the needless waste of the country’s most valuable technical talent. CHITTAGONG One of the worst hit cities in this respect was Chittagong. So when I got the chance to fly down by helicopter to visit this centre of transport and communications, I started off by going first to the office of the Port Commissioners where, I had heard, some of the worst atrocities had taken place.
The office of the Port Commissioners is in one of those handsome public buildings in which the picturesque city of Chittagong abounds. We had flown over and driven past wrecks of shipping, thanks to pinpoint bombing by the Indian Air Force. The harbour was littered with vessels lying drunkenly on their sides. And obviously the Port Trust would have to play a major role in reconstruction of the shipping facilities which had made Chittagong the most important port in East Pakistan.

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MAHMOODUL ISLAM

Mr. Mahmoodul Islam, Officer on Special Duty and Chief Engineer of the Chittagong Port Trust, is a tall, slightly greying and very distinguished-looking man. Educated at Sibpore Engineering College in West Bengal, Mr. Islam has also represented Pakistan for the high jump in the Asian Olympics. He could not help expressing his disillusionment over the fact that one of the most notorious Pakistani army officers during the army crack-down was Brigadier Lateef, once captain of the Pakistan Olympic hockey team.
Mr. Mahmoodul Islam had one of the saddest faces I have ever seen as he received us in his spacious oflice, with modern decor and a colour photograph of a Port Commissioners’ group on one wall. Smiling cheerfully in the photograph was a colleague of Mr. Islam who had been killed. And his very first sentence indicated his anguished state.
“You ask about the biggest damage in Chittagong? As far as I am concerned, the biggest damage is the loss of three of my closest colleagues, the Chief Engineer of the Chittagong Port Trust, Mr. Zaman, who worked directly above me, Mr. Nur Hussain, Executive Engineer, who worked directly under me, and Mr. G.A. Kazi, Deputy Conservator of the Port Trust.
“It’s a funny thing, but I remember it was a Friday. Mr. Zaman looked harassed that morning. He had already been taken away several times for questioning. I was with him up to 10.45 that morning, Friday being a half day in office. He was called away from this very room by the Pakistan naval people. One sector in the Port Commissioners’ building was theirs, and the port was virtually under their control by Martial Law. We knew that in case of emergency they would just take over.
“Although office was over by 12.30 p.m. I was detained up to I p.m. as I wanted to finish my work. I reached home at about 2 p.m. and immediately got a phone call from Mrs. Zaman. ‘Have you seen my husband?’, she asked, “He has not come home for lunch.’ ‘He must be in his office’ I replied. Since he had apparently been to see them, I informed both the
Secretary and the Chairman of the Port Trust about Mrs. Zaman’s anxiety. Commodore Malik was then Chairman of the Port Trust and came back at 5.30 p.m. from his office. Mr. Zaman came out of the naval base at 1.30 p.m, on May 21, got into his car, and he and his driver were never seen again.
“Mr Nur Hussain on the other hand, had left his house to safeguard himself and moved to a far-off officers’ colony where he was staying with his parents. He was apparently lifted from the road. His car was found abandoned and people testified that he had been taken away in another car.
“Mr. Kazi was presumed killed on April 16, 1971. He was taken from this office at 12.10 to the naval base. Whatever I learnt about my present job was learnt from Mr. Kazi. I later got to know that my name was on the third list so somehow I got spared. These lists were systematically drawn up for the elimination of all officers of the Port Trust, of advocates, doctors and railway personnel. After I left Sibpore College in Calcutta, where I studied from 1946 to 1950, I worked in the railways from 1951 to 1954 and only then came to the Port Trust. So I knew all the railway people. In fact, the construction of the port and jetties in Chittagong was under the railways, which is how I came over to the Port Trust.
“The Chief Electrical Engineer of the railways, Mr. Mohammed Haq Choudhury, was killed in his house. Others killed were Mr. Nasir, Chief Personnel Officer, and Mr. Jalal Hussain, Deputy Chief Traffic Manager. Mr. Shafi, the Chief Planning Officer of the railways, was very badly beaten and then brought back to his house, bound and bleeding profusely. He begged his wife to give all the money and jewellery she had in the house to the soldiers. She handed them over, but all the same, Mr. Shafi was taken away and never returned.
“Mr. Nasir had fled his house and taken refuge in his village. But when he sent a cheque for cashing to the railway building, the man who brought it was followed. Mr. Nasir was thus located in his village and shot. His sister, a doctor in the Port Trust, was very badly beaten up.
“All these railway officers, as well as my colleagues from the Port Trust who are known to have been killed were very experienced and highly trained officers and are virtually irreplaceable.
“I am also an eye-witness of what happened when the trouble at the docks started, as you know, when the vessel Swat arrived with 3,500 tons of arms and ammunition. I was sitting in my house on March 24, 1971 with my family, but thought I should go to the docks to check what was happening. I set out on foot at 2.30 p.m. and returned at 5 p.m. But while returning by Jetty No. 1, some workers said to me: ‘Sir, you can’t go home, every road is blocked.’ So I went to my father-in-law’s house and told my wife on the telephone not to worry. At 8 p.m., I again started going back home on foot and saw hundreds of people walking. But the roads were blocked by people with buses, trucks and boulders. When I came near the Embarkation Headquarters and fire brigade office, there was a terrific burst of automatic firing. I jumped over the wall to take shelter in my office, and five shots went barely above my head.
“So I crawled into the office and rang my wife and spent the night there. At 6 a.m., not seeing any military about, I again set out for home on foot. Then I saw young children in trucks shouting slogans against the unloading of the Swat. Suddenly one truck was chased by an army jeep firing LMG’s point blank at children aged between 9 and 10 years. The truck driver was clever and sped away but four or five children were killed right in front of my eyes.
“We had seen the Pakistani army arriving in Chittagong by air and by boat, plane-loads of soldiers arriving from Dacca by Boeing and Fairchild Packets. We little thought it was for shooting innocent children and unarmed civilians. The Pakistanis did not eventually destroy the port because they had a complete plan for evacuation from Chittagong. But the Indian Navy sealed off everything. The route for evacuation was also sealed off by us, so I am glad their plans to go to Burma were foiled jointly by us and the Indian Navy.” AMEENUR RASHEED CHOUDHURY I did not meet Ameenur Rasheed Choudhury in Chittagong.
In fact, I met him weeks later in Delhi. He was on his way back to Bangla Desh after six months of exile in London. But the story of his persecution and physical torture follows naturally on those about others narrated by another technocrat, Mr. Mahmoodul Islam. And in the case of Mr. Choudhury, he is at least alive to tell the tale.
Mr. Choudhury is no ordinary technocrat. His father was a distinguished legislator during British days and the Choudhury family made a long and useful contribution to the economy of East Pakistan through its extensive tea plantations in Sylhet. Two of Mr. Choudhury’s brothers served with distinction in the Pakistan Foreign Service. One of them, Humayaun Rasheed Choudhury, is now an ambassador for the Bangla Desh Government.
Mr. Ameenur Rasheed Choudhury was Vice-Chairman of the Pakistan Tea Association for six consecutive terms and Pakistan delegate to the ILO. Convention on Workers in Plantations from 1961 onwards. He was Vice-Chairman, Employers’ Group in 1966 and delegate to the ILO Committee on Workers in Plantations in September 1971, a session he attended with great difficulty. After Geneva, he went on to London and stayed there until Bangla Desh became free. Mr. Choudhury has now returned to tea planting and his house in Sylhet, Jyoti Manzil.
And this is what Mr. Choudhury had to tell me, with considerable agitation. “I was imprisoned by the British several times and was in constant political conflict with them. But it was nothing compared with how I was treated by Pakistan.
“I was a victim of the Pakistan army. Between March 25 and September 20, 1971, when I left the country I was subjected to various forms of torture during 29 days in the Army Camp in Model School, near the Sylhet airport, which became the Brigade Headquarters. Asa result of inhuman beatings, I have lost the use of two fingers of the left hand permanently. My house in Sylhet was thoroughly looted by Colonel Sarfaraz Malik, Major Qayyum of the Intelligence, who was in charge of the prisoners in the camp, and Captain Karam Khan.
“Major Abdul Qayyum was primarily responsible for the tortures and killings of the prisoners who, during my stay, included such persons as Mr. S.S. Abdal, Assistant Manager of Lackatoorah Tea Estate; Mr. Munsif, the Additional Superintendent of Police of Sylhet, who was put in the camp by his own Superintendent of Police; Mr. Aminur Rahman, the Vice-President of the United Bank, Ltd.; Mr. Mujibur Rahman of the Pakistan International Airways; my nephew, Shabbir Ahmed, a lieutenant in the East Bengal Regiment, whose father is a well-known advocate of Comilla; the local Ansar adjutant, Professor Karim of the Government College, Sylhet; Mr. Mazumdar of Dargamohalla, Sylhet, and innumerable others whose names I do not remember.
“The shrieks of prisoners were so sickening that we could not sleep during the day or night. I remember another person’s name, Mr. Durgesh Chandra Deb of Kulaura and still another, Mr. Manindra Chandra Das of Zinda Bazar, Sylhet, whose tooth came out as a result of beatings. I was later released from the camp and kept under strict house arrest under the care of a sub-inspector of police and six constables who were stationed in my house. This was supervised by the visits of Brigadier Iftekar Rana, Col. Sarfraz Malik, Captain Zafar and many other officers from time to time.
“The Pakistan army has killed my friend, Mr. B. Sengupta, popularly known as Pochu Sen, a famous and much-loved personality of Sylhet. They also killed the entire families of Messrs. Rajendra Gupta and Rabindra Gupta, my colleagues who were the owners, of Star Tea Estate, near Sylhet. My F.I.R. to the police regarding the looting of my house had to be changed by me since it had the mention of the army. But later the officer in charge of the Kotowali Police Station told me that under the direct orders of Colonel Sarfraz Malik, there would be no enquiry on it.
“Lt. Colonel Ghaus Shah was the man in charge of Sreemangal Area, where hundreds of people, mostly tea estate workers, were killed indiscriminately by the Pakistan army. The popular slang of the Pakistani Army about the killings was: ‘Sending to Bangla Desh’. Captain Karam Khan was known as the champion rapist of women in Sylhet and no

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Pakistan army officers or men were immune from it. The army unit which went to Nurjahan Tea Estate near Sreemangal on the 6th May 1971 stole 3 radios within 15 minutes. It was in charge of a captain who told me that he was born in Assam.
“My wife, Mrs. Fahmeeda Rasheed Choudhury, was also under house-arrest in Sylhet from May 8, 197! until we left Sylhet on 16th September 1971. She was regularly insulted during interrogation because she had led processions of the Awami League in Sylhet. She was threatened with dire consequences to herself and me and advised not to ‘shor karo’ (make a noise) when army officers came to our house.
“As arranged earlier, I was invited to attend the meeting of the ILO Committee on Workers in Plantations at Geneva on September 20, 1971. On my getting a telegram on September 12, I got released on September 13 and left for Dacca on September 16, and then for Geneva on September 19. But I was arrested at Karachi, en route Geneva, on the same day and brought back to Dacca by the next flight at my own expense. I was again released on September 20 and allowed to resume my journey to Geneva. I was thereafter in England from the beginning of October for the treatment of my fingers.
“I would like to add that I have received a letter from Mr. A. Sengupta of Kitapghar, Panbazaar, Gauhati, who is the brother of Mr. B. Sengupta referred to earlier. He says: “One Mr. Asrafuddin, Assistant Adjutant of Ansars in Sylhet who is at present in Shillong and who was also under detention along with Pochuda, confirms that on April 21, 1971 at 2.30 p.m. three Pakistani army personnel, by order of Brigadier Iftikar Ahmed Rana took away Pochuda, Col. Jiaur Rahman, in charge Sylhet Medical College, and Captain Alauddin of Bengal Regiment from the army detention camp at Salutikar (Sylhet) in an army truck with hands fixed at the back and blind-folded to an unknown place. The truck returned after an hour without Pochuda and his companions and they were not seen alive again. The army personnel implicated in their killings are (1) Captain Jaffar (2) Subedar Salim Quareshi and (3) Havildar Khan Mohammed.”

TWO FIGHTER PILOTS

The Dacca Club, the haunt of the hard-drinking upper crust of Dacca, mostly affiuent businessmen openly described as collaborators, was a strange place for a journalistic meeting. The polished wooden floors, on which, alas, nobody danced any more–not since the Pakistani army wives went awaygleamed in deserted splendour. It was typical of a British colonial club anywhere on the sub-continent. Life was still revolving round the bar, where Scotch was still a little lower than the January 1972 price of Rs. 300 per bottle.
At least two of the waiters of the club lay buried in the club grounds: they had been lined up in front of a firing squad before the Pakistani army said farewell to the club. The waiter serving Scotch walked with a limp and looked sullenly at the lurching businessmen shouting for Scotch in koi hai voices. He had been shot too but escaped death, as did the barman, who had once been at Firpo’s in Calcutta. “This place is a powder keg and will blow up soon,” said my journalist friend from Delhi darkly. The two waiters were buried beneath his window in the guest house of the club and he simply could not get away from them.
Sitting unruffled through all this were 24-year-old Captain Shahabuddin Ahmad and 25-year old Captain Akram Ahmad, sipping orange juice with evident enjoyment.
Capt. Shahabuddin, a slim, shy young man with a trim moustache, could easily have been a Bengali poet from his looks. But he was now in the Bangla Desh Air Force. What he and his air force crew had achieved with his Otter and Capt. Akram with his helicopter summed up the gallantry of the Bangla Desh resistance through the bitter months of the liberation struggle.
Said Capt. Akram: “When the non-cooperation movement started on March 1, the Bengali pilots of the P.I.A. also joined it. And why not? In P.I.A. itself there was dreadful discrimination against Bengalis from the start. Out of 15,000 P.L.A. employees, only 3,000 were Bengalis. Out of 350 P.I.A. pilots, only 30 were Bengalis. It was the same in the Pakistani Air Force, where there was only one Bengali MIG pilot.
“So after we joined the non-cooperation movement, there were no flights after March 25. That is when they killed four of our captains in cold blood: Fokker Friendship Training Captain Alamgir, Captain Islam, Captain Sikander and Captain N. Haider. They were just picked up from their houses by the army and never seen again.
“I then left Dacca and crossed over to India. I joined the Mukti Bahini in Agartala. In June-July, I came back again, although I knew they were looking for me. My father and mother were still in Dacca and I was also given small jobs to carry out by the Mukti Bahini. I came in wearing a lungi and travelled through villages, mostly by boat, and by avoiding check-posts and roads. After escorting my parents to a village for safety, I went back again to Agartala.
“Within two or three days there was a signal from Delhi for me to proceed to Delhi where I submitted a plan for a guerilla air squad. We got training in isolated air-fields. As a P.I.A. pilot, I had been on domestic flights, and also on the Kathmandu and Rangoon flights, so I knew quite a few routes. After this training, I joined the Bangla Desh Air Force, which was an isolated and secret air force until December.
“My first operation was on December 1, before the I.A.F. struck. The Bangla Desh Air Force consisted of exactly three aircraft: one DC 3 (Dakota), one helicopter and one Otter. The helicopter was equipped with rockets, machine-guns, two pilots and a gunner. The Otter had one gunner, one bomber and two pilots. Bomb-dropping was manual. Our total strength was nine pilots including a Boeing captain. The other two were Akram and Sharifuddin Ahmed. The Otter was a Government survey plane used for spraying.
“On the night of December 1, I was given the job of blowing up the Chittagong fuel dump in an Otter. This meant defying 14 ack-ack guns. But we had the advantage of a surprise attack. The Pakistanis simply could not imagine that a small plane could be bombing them. The target had to be attacked at I a.m. and I took off at 11.30 p.m. It had to be dead reckoning navigation because we had no radio. Taking off at 11.30 p.m. we reached the target at exactly I a.m. Chittagong was then completely blacked out. We were flying low throughout, at times as low as 50 feet to avoid radar, but generally at 200 to 300 feet. After reaching Chittagong, I pulled up to 1,000 feet.
“On our first run at Chittagong we released 4 rockets and hit two tankers. On our next run we released 6 rockets which hit another tanker, Then they really opened up with their ack-acks and machine guns and their gunboats opened up with pom-poms. Then we broke away from target and, flying low again, returned to base. They sent three Sabre jets after us, but they could not detect us because we were flying so low.”
On the same day, December 1, Capt. Shahabuddin’s helicopter took off at 11 p.m. and flew low to Narayangunj. “I reached target at 24.00 hours”, said Captain Shahabuddin, “Took a low turn and saw the fuel dumps which were our target. We fired 4 rockets and blew up two fuel tanks. There was no resistance whatsoever and we returned safely to base.
“After that we started regular Otter sorties and helicopter operations in Sylhet District. We attacked army headquarters at Maulvi Bazaar with a half-hour gap, the Otter flying at 120 m.p.h. and the helicopter at 115 m.p.h. We were sometimes able to give close support to the army. Thus after getting briefing from the army we used to attack Pakistani army positions. We destroyed many convoys both during the day and night. The Dakota was used mainly for transport and was piloted mostly by the Boeing Captain, Capt. Khaleq, who previously used to fly on the London-Tokyo-ShanghaiCanton route. And sometimes it was flown by Capt. Sattar and Capt. Muqeet who previously used to fly Fokkers on the domestic route.
“We came into Dacca on the 16th, many of us crammed into our own helicopter. Then we got busy flying our C-in-C. to Comilla and Agartala.
“But I must mention that our helicopter had one narrow escape when it was shot down in Sylhet. Capt. Rob forcelanded 15-20 miles south of Sylhet on December 16. But otherwise our mini air force remained intact, although each

plane received at least three or four bullets.
“But we are really civil pilots who volunteered for the Bangla Desh air force. Now that the struggle is over, we would like to go back to commercial flying again.” THE BIHARIS If there is any fate worse than death, it is surely that of having actively and savagely collaborated with an army that has surrendered and then being abandoned to your fate.
The Biharis are the most unwanted people in the world, at present. Pakistan does not want them, Bangla Desh does not want them, India does not want them. A visit to Mirpur at the height of the Bihari tension in the first week of January 1972 seemed a journalistic must, however dangerous for a Bengali woman. Prolonged and widespread conversations with the people inside the area left me with the firm conviction that if the Biharis had come to this sorry pass, it was a fate entirely of their own making.
A people that have been the neighbours of Bengalis for centuries and most of whom either speak or understand Bengali well got caught in a language net which they largely wove for themselves. A people who now claim that their roots are in India migrated in large numbers from Bihar and West Bengal in India during and after partition in what many people now consider a deliberate act of political opportunism. They thereafter kept aloof from the Bengalis of East Pakistan by boycotting their language in favour of Urdu, the language of West Pakistan. They enjoyed a long run of business facilities and prosperity in East Pakistan right up to the end of Pakistani rule. And now, they have put themselves in a position where they are likely to live in fear of sporadic reprisals from a population they helped to kill, suppress, rape and humiliate in a most arrogant manner as the pet collaborators of the Pakistani military junta.
All things considered, the people of Bangla Desh have behaved with commendable restraint in their post-Independence dealings with the Bihari minority. After all, they could have wiped out the lot had they been set on proportionate revenge.

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It was therefore with the aim of finding out the background, the motivation and the sentiments of the Biharis that I got hold of an Urdu-speaking driver on my very first week in Dacca, and decided to beard the Biharis in their own den with the somewhat shaky hope that I would not give myself away by breaking into Bengali, which is my mother tongue. I preferred to speak in Urdu, which I speak with a distinct accent, but which seemed to pass muster with the Biharis. The corpses of the massacred professors of Dacca University, as I discovered soon after, had been discovered that very morning in Mirpur, and it was not exactly the most auspicious moment for such a brash invasion.
However, as all newspaper, radio and TV correspondents soon discovered, the Biharis in Mirpur were extremely publicityconscious and the line they adopted with me was the same that they had done with all visiting V.I.P.’s, mass media people and foreigners generally. And the standard line from the beginning was to surround any car that entered the area, especially if there was a camera in sight, and bombard those inside the car with certain neatly tailored statements, written representations and appeals to be conveyed to the outside world in terms that sounded far too stream-lined to be either convincing or spontaneous, at least to me.
We approached Mirpur along broad, beautifully surfaced roads where people seemed to move pretty freely once we got past the “Bengali” areas. But as we entered Mirpur proper, it undoubtedly became clear that we were entering some sort of a ghetto. The faces were distinctly non-Bengali, even if the lungis and kurtas were not. We soon turned into a rough road leading to the then notorious Sector 12. This was one of six sectors with an approximate total population of 300,000, that of Sector 12 being 16995, according to statistics prepared by the residents. As our car entered the sector, it was immediately surrounded by a mob of men and children, only too eager to tell their hard-luck stories. Hearing my Urdu, they gasped with obvious relief, thereafter addressed me as Begum and I was accepted as a sympathizer from the start.
The first to step forward was Mushtaq Ahmad, who seemed
a sort of official spokesman. “We have no transport, no rations, no money because we are unable to go to work,” said Mushtaq Ahmad. He himself had originally come from Arrah District in Bihar, but had for some time settled in Calcutta, from where he migrated to Dacca in 1946. “I have a shop in Dacca and three widowed sisters,” he said, “all this tension has been created” just because of language.” “And did you encourage your children to learn Bengali?” I asked a little pointedly. He kept ominously silent.
Another young boy, who was sophisticated enough to quote statistics from the Pakistan White Paper on Bangladesh at every step, immediately plunged into an unsolicited apologia about himself.
“I didn’t want to be a Razakar, but the Pakistani soldiers grabbed me one day and said, ‘Unless you become a Razakar, we shall kill you.’ It is these Punjabis who created all the mischief. They kept me all night in the police station but I escaped at night and came back.”
But his dramatic tale of escape did not stand up to even the most superficial scrutiny. “When was this?” I asked. Under further questioning he said, he could not remember whether it was in summer, winter or during the monsoon, nor to which police station he had been taken and from where he claimed to have escaped. He quickly switched back to the woes of the Biharis but asked me not to mention his name, “because I fear persecution if I am quoted.”
“There were three deaths from starvation in this camp yesterday,” he continued. ‘I am sorry to hear that,’ I replied. “Could I please be directed to the houses where these deaths have occurred so that I can write about them?’ But once again, no one seemed to know where these deaths had occurred and no one offered to guide me to the bereaved families. I could not help remembering the sceptical comments of my colleagues from the newspaper world of Dacca who had assured me that Biharis had stocked enough food, in addition to arms and ammunition, to last them for months-a fact which has since been substantiated.
“We are in a state of blockade and are slowly starving to death,” persisted the crowd, a statement extensively quoted in the foreign Press, which I felt I should follow up. So I accepted the offer to walk round the area, visit some houses and speak to the women. And I must confess in all truth that the babies looked no more deprived or under nourished to me than the babies I had seen in refugee camps in India, and more relevantly, than the babies I could now see in Dacca, still reeling from several blows, not least of all war, and still suffering acutely from shortage of food and medicines. The Red Cross, for instance, confirmed that there was a general shortage at the time and it applied to everyone. I found grain, pickles, clean-washed clothes and other signs of reasonably normal life in almost every Bihari hutment I visited.
And it was during this round of the houses, all looking like junior Government employees’ quarters anywhere on the subcontinent, that I came across one of the great ironies of the Bihari problem.
This was Mr. Sayed Mohiuddin, who so obviously looked a South Indian, tall, dark and with thick wavy hair, that I was not surprised when he introduced himself as a Telugu who had come originally to Jamshedpur from Waltair in 1964, and had migrated to East Pakistan only later, after the Bihar riots in 1965. “I felt unsafe,” he explained, “and fled to Dacca and got a job as an estimator with the Delta Construction Company. The West Pakistani directors of my firm just abandoned me and left me high and dry and fled to Pakistan. And now I am cut off from my family in Karachi as well.”
“And how are you a Bihari?” I asked. “I am called a Bihari just because I can speak Urdu. I am no Bihari,” disclaimed Mr. Mohiuddin angrily. I felt genuinely sorry for him, because the other people in Bangla Desh originally from South India had not got involved in local quarrels and had not only survived, but had treated my South Indian press colleagues from India to idlis and sambhar, and other South Indian dishes in their homes.
“All the mischief,” went on Mr. Mohiuddin ruefully, “has been created by the Biharis who had settled in Calcutta and then came across afterwards. Being Urdu-speaking people who also knew good Bengali, they changed sides as it suited them and are still doing so. The Biharis who came direct from Bihar were mostly educated and literate. The Calcutta Biharis were mostly illiterate and have lived entirely by creating mischief between the Bengalis and Punjabis. And now, although I have taken no part in all this, I have no home in either India or Bangla Desh. I fled to this camp in fear. I wish I had gone back to Andhra Pradesh in India in the first place, instead of coming in panic to Dacca.”
At this stage, a chirpy Bihari woman speaking sing-song convent English chipped in: “Well, I am literate, I used to be a nurse in Calcutta but became a telephone operator here. Can you arrange for us to go to any country where we can live as Muslims? We shall go even to the jungles of Africa but don’t want to die here of starvation.”
By this time I had discovered that there was a Dr. Rahman from Bihar looking after the camp, as also a Dr. Moid. They invited me for a chat to their little medical room in Mirpur. Their case-histories, they told me, were typical of many professional men from Bihar. Dr. Moid came over from Patna in 1948 and Dr. Rahman from Ranchi after the communal riots in 1967.
“We came to East Pakistan because we had a natural aflinity with the Bengalis. After all, we could have gone to West Pakistan and chose not to,” said Dr. Moid. “But certain opportunists here hated us from the start and cleverly exploited the situation. Some hatred was also created by the rulers who exploited the country and the people. So all of us became the victims.
“Do you know, for instance, that in our service columns, up to 1952, they used to ask: “What is your birth-place?’ Thereafter the question became: “What is your father’s birthplace?’ Most of those who came here after 1952 from Bihar were not given full citizenship and there were thorough police investigations for the few who did. After the crack-down, the Punjabis often referred to us as ghaddar (traitor).
“But, Dr. Moid,” I cut in, “not one Bihari in this area, including highly educated professional people such as your self, has yet been able to convince me that you even tried to integrate with the Bengalis. It is all very well to blame the Punjabis now, but even if you did not actively participate in the atrocities, did any of you lift a finger to help your Bengali colleagues and neighbours? What do you think of the brutal killings of Dr. Rabbi, the heart specialist whose heart was cut out while he was alive, or Dr. Alim Choudhury, whose eyes were gouged out because he was a famous opthalmologist? Did you protest?”
“But Dr. Rabbi was my teacher, I was one of his favourite pupils,” protested Dr. Moid, “and both Dr. Rabbi and Dr. Choudhury practised in a Bihari area, in Baitul Mokarram. Yes, they were brutally killed, but there are loafers and villains in every community.”
“And what is your future here?” I asked. “I would like to return to India,’ replied Dr. Moid promptly, “My mother is still in Bihar. “But surely the right place for you to go to is Pakistan?” I persisted, “You supported them politically, should they not now support you?” “Ah, but I would be a refugee in Pakistan,” replied the doctor. Which, I felt, about summed up a grotesque enough situation.

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4
Dacca : Middle 1972
Having had the unique opportunity to meet the victims of the atrocities, first within days of the Pakistani crack-down in March 1971, then to see them in the changed mood of returning hope with the Indian armed forces and the Mukti Bahini marching into Dacca, and, most uniquely, to see the triumphant return of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman to his people in early January 1972, seemed like a natural climax to my story.
But something kept nagging at my professional conscience when I returned to Delhi: It had been altogether too exuberant and heady in Dacca in early 1972. And something else kept on haunting me: The desolate faces of the women, the children and the young boys of the Mukti Bahini. They, too, in spite of all their sufferings, had shown shreds of happiness at the return of Mujib, at being free and of being able to look forward at last. But I kept on wondering, what was their future, how were the women to live again, with their menfolk gone and with unwanted babies? Who was going to look after the orphans of politics, the small children suddenly rendered homeless and parent-less and who had undergone terrible experiences of a kind that had made psychiatrists fear for their mental balance and attitudes as adults? Above all, with the shouting and the shooting over, what was to be the fate of the young boys of the Mukti Bahini, some hopelessly crippled and doomed to spend the rest of their mutilated lives in hospital beds, no longer shining heroes but helpless invalids for life? There was also the still unbelievable story of the animals and birds at the zoo, which had apparently been the victims of atrocities by a professional army which had run berserk at the end.
All these angles, I felt, needed a documented follow-up, not only because they needed verification but because they were in danger of being forgotten in the joy and the relief of freedom, as well as the more immediate practical tasks of nation-building. So I decided to go back to Dacca in middle 1972, and have a more detailed look at the women, the children, the young boys and the birds and animals. They certainly seemed the most pathetic victims of the Bangla Desh tragedy, and the most unnecessary and helpless as well.
Above all, they were the most in need of prolonged and compassionate after-care if Bangla Desh was to live at peace with itself and the international community was not to be permitted to forget them. THE MEDICAL COLLEGE HOSPITAL By Asian standards, Dacca’s Medical College Hospital is clean, efficient and is the familiar combination of academic institution, with eager young students milling about the campus, as well as a top hospital to which patients are sent from all over Bangla Desh. It was in this hospital that I had seen the decomposing bodies of professors recovered from a mass grave in Mirpur in early January. Now, in late May, it looked more like a routine hospital.
But as I walked into the quiet, tidy office of the Medical Superintendent, Dr. M.R. Choudhury, I found that the hospital was still full of memories of the recent gory happenings in Dacca and the rest of Bangla Desh.
“The decomposed body of one of the most distinguished members of our staff and our most eminent cardiologist, Dr. Rabbi, was brought here,” said Dr. Choudhury. “He was murdered in cold blood and we all felt it very much. We saw so many bodies those days, some with their tongues, eyes and limbs removed.
“Then it was in July-August 1971 that one of our students, Humayun Kabir, sat for his final examination and was declared passed. I do not know whether to call him a student or a doctor, because the results had to be annulled as a result of the disturbances. Humayun Kabir and our colleague, Dr. Azharul-Islam were coming together to the hospital, where Humayun had become an intern, in November. They were picked up on Elephant Road by hoodlums who wore civilian dress. This was in broad daylight at 9 a.m. Next day, their bodies were found near a bridge. They had both been shot. At least six to seven of our students were also killed. One boy was taken away from the college hostel at midnight. He never returned.
“During the months of killing, our hospital was swamped with patients. At one stage, we even vacated the female wards to make room for the injured and dying. On one day alone, 600 injured were brought in at one stage. After liberation, some of the Mukti Bahini injured were taken over by the Red Cross and are now with the Bangla Desh Red Cross. Some have gone over to the Combined Military Hospital near the airport and others to the Post-Graduate Hospital at Shahbag. But we still have the most gravely injured Mukti Bahinis and you will find them in three wards. Some have been lucky enough to be selected for treatment abroad. And we are doing our best for the rest.”
At this stage, Dr. Choudhury sent for a bright young nurse to take me round what she described as “The Mukti Bahini Wards.” It was obvious that sister was an angel of mercy for the mostly very young boys in the wards, judging from the pleased smiles that greeted her and the rather more shy ones for me.
THE MUKTI BOYS To visit the casualty wards of any hospital are distressing enough. But Ward No. 3 in the Dacca Medical College Hospital was a very special ward. For in it were the incurables of the Mukti Bahini, young boys with torn bodies and shattered minds, who seemed to have little hope left for leading normal lives even if they left the hospital, which, at the moment, seemed improbable.
The day I visited the ward, two boys were about to leave for Russia for specialized treatment. It must have been a hard task for the Russian medical team which had to choose the young patients to be flown to Russia for treatment. For while the injuries might have varied in seriousness as well as chances of cure, one could not look at a single young face in that ward, mostly teenagers and boys in their early 20’s, without feeling that each one deserved the best and that no one could be left behind.
So while every boy rejoiced at the good fortune of the two boys selected that day, and rosogollahs were being distributed to everyone, including myself, to celebrate, one could see sadness mingling with fading hope on the faces of those left behind. It is not easy to be young and crippled. HAVILDAR JALIL AHMED Havildar Jalil Ahmed of the ASC was in one of the more cheerful wards. A professional soldier to the hilt, he still looked full of dash and good cheer.
“I came from Peshawar on leave on December 7th 1970. When the army crack-down came on March 25 I joined the Mukti Bahini without any hesitation. We operated near Comilla and ended up near Laksham where we killed 66 Pakistani troops. After two unequal encounters using some Mark 3 and Mark 4 rifles, a Chinese LMG and 2 mortars, we were too hopelessly out-numbered to fight on. But we killed a captain near Penaghat Bridge on April 27. We also killed 17 soldiers at Chandarganj on May 5 after they took away two girls, who were never found.”
Jalil Ahmed seemed to accept philosophically the bullet he had received in the leg and which confined him to bed. SHIRAJ-UL-ISLAM AKKAR In Ward 3, young Mukti Bahini guerilla Shiraj-ul-Islam Akkar of Faridpur, tall, lean and sensitive, with the now standard trim moustache, looked basically despondent in spite of his jaunty air, for his body had been brutally tortured and ruined by the Pakistani soldiers.
“I was hiding in the paddy fields,” said Shiraj, “when I was caught by Major Akram of the 6th Punjab Regiment on August 17. And it was Lt. Issar, his deputy, who tortured me most: I got at least 45 blows on my neck, electric shocks on my arms and wrists, of which you can see the scars for yourself. I was periodically hit on my head with iron rods. 45 of us were in custody for 6 days. During those days they used to cut off the hands, then the legs, and finally the heads of our friends and then show them to us to intimidate us. As a result of two bullets in my body, I have a disjointed collar bone and no feeling at all in my back. Of 40 boys who were operating with me in the Mukti Bahini, 16 were shot on the banks of the river.
But, in spite of everything, Shiraj-ul-Islam still looked trim and soldierly in his khaki uniform, although he feared he would never be able to do a normal job. One could only hope, slim though his chances were, that one day he would return, and this time to the regular army. He looked every inch a soldier, a potential dashing subaltern. MOHD. SAEED-UR-RAHMAN Mohammed Saeed-ur-Rahman, of Hili, fair, broad-shouldered and with a trim moustache on his upper lip, joined the Mukti Bahini as soon as he heard of the Pakistani army crack-down in March.
“I was caught near the border when fitting a mine on August 20, 1971. There was a light machine-gun blast and some boys were killed. I was the only one from my group of four who got wounded and caught, the other three escaped. I was taken to Bogra Cantonment Hospital where Capt Sher Ali took charge of me, which meant that once I got better, the tortures began. He used to hang me upside down from the ceiling for about an hour, until I started bleeding at the mouth and became unconscious. Then it was back to hospital until I became well enough to be tortured again.
“My sister, who was 15, had meanwhile volunteered as a nurse in the Mohammed Ali Hospital. She was taken away while serving as a trainee nurse to Bogra Cantonment. Later we heard that she had been killed. We have not seen her since.

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“Every time they took me back from the hospital to the Cantonment for interrogation, they used to give me food only at intervals of two or three days and say sneeringly: “We shall take you to Dacca for treatment. Once they made me lie for hours on a block of ice. Finally they removed me to the District Jail, from where I was freed by the Indian army.
“But as a result of the physical tortures to which I was subjected by Sher Ali, my right leg is permanently damaged so that I cannot get up. My left leg is better, but I shall always be crippled because my hip bone is missing. They picked it out slowly with a bayonet and threw it away in front of me. Then Sher Ali shot at me one day while I was hanging upside down. It was aimed at my chest, but luckily only caused a superficial wound.”
Saeed-Ur-Rahman lay partly on his side, like a crab and as a result of his missing hip bone on the right side, he lay in a heap, which made his torso look like a hunchback’s under the bed-sheet with which he covered his multiple injuries.
“Have hope,” I said, “You have already shown such great’ courage.” “I have no hope,” he said, because the Russians would have selected me for treatment if I had had a chance. I do not have courage either. I now think it would have been better if I had died, rather than live like this.
MUZZAMAL HUSSAIN At the opposite corner of the ward, watching intently, lay a young boy, with a small dark face. He was covered up to his chin with a sheet, but his eyes shone like stars with intelligence and youthful hope.
Muzzamal Hussain said he was 22, but pain and suffering had shrunk his face and he seemed much younger. He was from village Bharater Kandi in Sibpore Thana, Dacca District. After doing his B.A. from Narsindi College, he had wanted to study law. The son of a poor cultivator and the oldest of three brothers, he had struggled hard for his college education. And now he faced the fate of being paralysed for life up to his neck as a result of the torture by the Pakistani army. As he could not move in bed, dreadful bed-sores had formed around the wounds inflicted on his back from prolonged whipping. Standing round his bed trying to comfort him and help him were his younger brother and his Mukti Bahini comrade Jhuntu, who was barely 15.
“The Punjabis had made a camp at Jinardi station,” began Muzzamal Hussain, and we raided it. After the raid, they surrounded the village of Gajaura, of Kaliganj Thana in Dacca District, to catch Muktis who might have taken shelter there. They started committing such frightful atrocities, including lifting of girls, that we decided to put up a fight, even if we were hopelessly outnumbered. They had first surrounded the village and raped some girls, and the villagers said to us: ‘Why should this happen when you boys are here?”
“We had harrassed the soldiers at the camp for days, just thrown in mines and grenades at night, so that they were not allowed to sleep. So they were out for our blood. About 22 Bengali Muktis escaped after the raid on the station and about 500 heavily armed Punjabi soldiers came after them. They had the village surrounded by 2 p.m. and I was caught with a grenade in my hand at 5 a.m. on November 7, 1971. They had completely surrounded the village but we had fired back and 2 or 3 boys were killed.
“I was in a paddy field when caught and was brought to a house. I pretended that I was a banana seller from the village and the Punjabi soldiers were inclined to let me go. But a Bengali Razakar called Suraj Mia, who has since been killed, betrayed me and shot at me. Then another soldier caught one leg, and still another my neck, and asked me for information. When I refused to say anything, they first bayonetted me on the chest and then beat me up. Then they again asked me for information about arms, ammunition and people, while the Razakar kept on inciting them to kill me.”
**The Punjabi captain said, ‘Let us take him to the bazaar and I was dragged out of the house. When we came near a pond, Suraj Mia said: ‘If you take him to the bazaar the villagers will certify that he is innocent and you will not be able to kill him. So let us kill him here. Then the captain fired at my waist with a sten-gun from a distance of 15 yards

or so and immediately my legs got paralysed. But I managed to fall into the pond and clung to the trunk of a tree. Then the major fired six more shots and I was hit in the neck, near the navel and near the heart, but still I did not die. So then they picked me up half-dead. Suraj Mia said: “The bastard refuses to die. This made me so angry I cried: “This country will be free and then you will be dead.’ The captain asked what I had said, so I told him in English:
“‘Shoot me so that I can die, or send me to hospital.’ ‘We might get the information from him later,’ said the captain. Then he took my name and address and sent for the villagers. Send him to the hospital,’ he ordered them. So they sent me to Narsindi Matri Sadan Hospital and afterwards by ambulance to Dacca. We were stopped on the way by more soldiers, but the driver said I was suffering from stomach trouble and they let us pass. But after Independence they discovered I had a bullet in the spine, which is why I am paralysed, and they cannot remove it from my spine. I now have no feeling from my waist downwards and no control over my bodily functions. I cannot even sit up to give some relief to the bed-sores in the back. I am just given vitamin tablets and dressings and that is all.”
“I hope you have not given up hope, like Mohd. Saeed-urRahman” I asked, “I am sure you will walk again one day.” “If I had given up hope,” said Muzzamal Hussain with a bright smile, “I would have died long ago. I am still alive and I will make a fight to get well again. But the doctors must also try. I wish I could at least sit up in bed.”
As I left Ward No. 3, I felt that at least these boys were alive, had some sort of bodies left, and their minds were still alert and young. Unlike the professors whose decaying corpses ! had seen in the morgue next door only four months earlier. THE CHILDREN While people in Dacca were still hush-hush about the women who had been raped, there was no such secrecy about the children who had been orphaned and separated from their families as a result of the 9 months of terror. But everyone was a little vague about where exactly to find them. “Oh, there are two or three special orphanages,” said a friend. So I set about finding one through the best method in Dacca: I asked a cycle rickshawallah. And sure enough, he gave me precise directions about the road, even if he was a little hazy about the number of the house. I set forth in a jeep to locate the orphanage.
But once we had found the right road, the driver and I had little difficulty in finding the house where children rendered homeless by the Pakistani atrocities were staying. We could hear them from a considerable distance and long before I saw the board on which was written in large Bengali letters:Juddhatar Shishu Kalyan Sanghstha (Home for the Relief of Children Rendered Homeless by War). The distinction from an orphanage became evident as I talked to the children. Most of them had mothers, brothers and sisters. It was their fathers who had been killed, which is why the family had acute economic problems. With the wage-earner of the family killed, their mothers had reluctantly chosen to leave them in an institution rather than have them starved and neglected in a home with several mouths to feed.
A Bombay businessman had endowed the home and it had the support of Government. But once I walked into the front courtyard through a small opening in a large corrugated iron gate, after a woman had shouted to a child to open it, it became evident that the institution was understaffed, ill-equipped and the children were suffering from various summer ailments. There was no fan in sight and 1 felt positively guilty that one little girl kept on fanning me with a bit of card-board as I recorded the statements of the children. Some of them were under seven years old, but described their experiences with a graphic clarity that was truly awesome, and constantly reminded me of the wealth of gruesome detail in the child paintings I had discovered earlier.
Badal (age 4) still lisped and needed very patient questioning. But I was able to pick up a fairly coherent statement in bits and pieces.
“My father, Manik Sardar, used to dye textiles. About the
time the soldiers came to our village, abba had started buying material to build a house for us. In the bazaar he had just bought some tin sheets for the roof. When the bazaar was attacked by the Pakistani soldiers, my father got frightened and started running. The soldiers started shooting and he was hit by a bullet and died. He would not have died if he had not started running,” concluded Badal with a detachment beyond his years, “My father could run very fast, but you see, he had these tin sheets on his head.”
Waheed, the son of Habib, also aged 4, lisped out the following account:
“My father used to work in a house in Noakhali as a domestic servant. When he came home one afternoon, mother had cooked some rice and fish for him to eat, but while she was taking it out father went outside and sat under the mango tree. Suddenly we saw Pak soldiers coming and heard shots. We hid until they went away and then we came back to our hut. My younger brother said: ‘Father is still sitting under the tree, let us go and call him for his lunch’. When we called father, he did not reply and he kept sitting under the tree. So we went up to him and found there was blood all over him. He had been killed by a shell. The villagers gave us Rs. 30 and clothes for his burial.”
“But why have you come here? Didn’t your mother keep you? I asked. Waheed replied with a solemn wisdom tar beyond his age: “It was poverty; she could not keep me. So she asked me to stay here until she can take me back.” Manju (age 8), a little older, gave the following account:
“My father, Gafur Khan, used to work in a press in Sibsabazaar. He was a daftary (book-binder). One of his relatives joined the Mukti Bahini and the Pakistani army got to know of this. Father came back to eat one afternoon. The Koi fish was not properly fried, so he got angry with mother and asked her to fry it again. Then suddenly the Pak soldiers came and dragged him out. If he had run then, he could have been saved, because my father could run very fast, but he had no time to run. There were 9 other people taken away with him and 8 of them were killed. The ninth man kicked the soldiers.

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when they were crossing a bridge and jumped into the water. It is he who came home and told us that my father had been killed. The soldiers had bayonetted him to death.”
Jhunu, a pretty little girl of 8 with thick black curls and a bright smile, came up next.
“My father, Abul Cassim Munshi, used to be in the police in Khulna. I come from a family of three brothers and three sisters and two of my brothers and myself are in this institution because my mother now cannot feed all of us. I did not see my father being killed, but a man came with a piece of paper from the thana which reported that father had met his death at the hands of the Pakistani army.”
Naseema, a very pretty child of 6 was, if possible, even more curly-headed than Jhunu.
“My father was also a daftary (book-binder) in Maniknagar, I have 6 brothers and 2 sisters and I and one small brother have been sent here by our mother because she cannot feed us all now that father cannot support us. Some people came from his factory and told my mother that the soldiers came and shot him while he was doing his work. My mother tried to feed us for some time, but could not manage. Perhaps she will take me and my brother back when she can.”
Since meeting those children, sent to an institution although they had families and homes, I have often debated with myself on the rights and wrongs of it. And I have come to the reluctant conclusion that perhaps the mothers, with that rustic practical sense for which Bangla Deshis are well-known, had acted for the best. With two or three fewer mouths to feed, their families had a better chance of rehabilitating themselves over a shorter period of time. After which, it seemed reasonably certain that the children would return home. But that did not make even the temporary separation from their families any the less cruel.

THE WOMEN WHO WERE RAPED
It is perhaps poetic justice that the large, secluded and spacious house with a large garden, now used to rehabilitate the victims of Pakistani rape, belongs to Nurul Islam, the Bengali VicePresident of Pakistan looked on as a puppet by the people of Bangla Desh. I did not enter it, although I saw some girls in the distance. Instead, I was guided across the road to the woman Director of the Bangla Desh Central Organization for Rehabilitation of Women. This organization, with the help of professionally trained as well as voluntary social workers started working in January 1972 with the establishment of homes for destitute women who could be classified as victims of war. They are given vocational guidance and training and helped to place their babies if they do not want them.
For purposes of help, the women are divided into four categories: (1) Married women who were dishonoured, (2) Unmarried mothers whose babies resulted from rape by Pakistanis, (3) Pregnant women who are mentally disturbed, and (4) Women widowed and raped.
I asked the Director of the Centre for some typical case histories of the women under her care. Their names are deliberately withheld so as to protect them from social ostracism, but are available in the official records. The accounts are based on what the Director told me.
THE SOLDIER’S WIFE “She is a very beautiful girl and only 20. Her husband was in the East Pakistan Regiment and immediately the troubles started he revolted and joined the Mukti Bahini. He left his wife with her parents and his own father and mother were also asked to look after her. When the Pakistani army got to know of her husband’s defection, they first killed her father and then set the house on fire. This was in April 1971, in the suburbs of Dacca. The girl started running away from the house towards some fields near her home, but she was caught by the soldiers and taken away in a jeep. She was kept in the army camp for seven days where the soldiers tried without success to rape her. Then they tried to soften her up by taking her for a cruise on the river in a launch. When she continued resisting rape they shot her in the thigh, beat her mercilessly to make her submit, and when she still resisted, they took a dagger and cut out a portion of her shoulder muscles. Then they brought her back to Dacca Cantonment and when she continued to resist rape, although weak from pain and loss of blood, they brought into the room two other girls who had also resisted rape. Several soldiers took hold of their legs from either side and tore them apart, as a result of which they died slowly in her presence.
“The woman then fainted with pain and shock. When she came to, she found it was useless to resist any more and was kept confined in Dacca Cantonment until the army surrender in December. Then she was eight months pregnant. When her husband returned after liberation, he was sympathetic and was willing to take her back as his wife. But his father and mother opposed this on social grounds because she was pregnant and dishonoured. She then came to the Rehabilitation Centre for shelter. Embittered by her husband’s attitude, she decided to stand on her own feet. She has had the baby and has decided to keep it. She says: “After all the pain, physical brutality and mental torture which I had to undergo purely because I resisted the soldiers to protect my family’s honour, my husband and his family have discarded me. My father and only brother have been killed and are no longer there to protect me and my mother. I no longer want my husband. After my training I shall take up a job to support myself and my baby.”
“But it is not very usual to find women of such admirable character among the victims,” added the Director, “She is unique in having such tremendous guts.” THE MOTHER OF FIVE “She was from a middle class family in Dinajpur, with two grown-up daughters and two boys of 11 and 13 and a little girl. First the Pakistani soldiers killed her husband and one son, then they tied up the woman and her other son to a tree. The two girls were then raped in the presence of the brother and mother and then the mother was raped in front of her son and daughters in broad daylight. The boy who was tied up protested loudly, whereupon he was bayonetted to death. Faced with the loss of her husband and sons, and with herself and her two grown-up daughters dishonoured, the mother and two girls committed suicide. Only the little girl is left of a once happy family. We are trying to arrange for her adoption.” THE TEENAGER “In some ways, she is our most disturbing case,” said the Director. “She is between 13 and 14 years old, very beautiful and an unusually talented girl. She used to attend a very good school and was always good at studies and excellent in music, painting, and school functions, where she performed with great rest. She is gay, bright, charming and the oldest of five brothers and sisters. Her father is an Upper Division clerk in the Law Courts.”
“In May, 1971, when the schools closed down, the Razakars, who used to inform the Pakistani army about the whereabouts of pretty girls, guided the army to her father’s Government bungalow. Some officers and men came in a jeep and said to the father: ‘We want this girl. If you don’t give her to us, we shall shoot the whole family. But if you give her to us, we shall spare the rest. We give you two hours to think it over, and don’t try to be clever, because you will be shot. So for two agonizing hours, the father and mother discussed the question. Much as they wished to protect their daughter they knew that if they tried to hide her, they would all be shot, and the army would find the daughter anyway. So they decided to sacrifice the daughter to save the rest of the family.
“After that, the officers came back, and there is no doubt about their identity because the girl has appeared on television and given their names. They took away the girl at gun-point. They made her their mistress and they used to bring her back to the family every few days after using her in the Cantonment, and then take her back again whenever they wanted her.
“When the Pakistan army surrendered, the parents brought her to the Rehabilitation Centre, and she was cheerful and cooperative from the start. She took a leading part in organizing plays and other artistic activities. She is still ambitious and wants to do well at her studies. When she came to us she was three months pregnant, so we were able to arrange an abortion quite easily. But then we discovered that something terrible had happened. The soldiers had made her a sexual pervert.
“We explained to her parents that the only way to save her from ruin was to take her back into the family and let her resume her normal life at home and in school. After all, she had been sacrificed to save the family and it was the least they could do. But the father is reluctant to take her back. He says, after all, the neighbours saw her coming and going, and they will never believe or understand why we allowed it. They will spit on us for giving our daughter to the Pakistani army. More dangerously, they will denounce us as collaborators and I might lose my job as well.’
“What worries us social workers now is whether this poor child will ever lead a normal life again. She has now become precocious and might go gay in the wrong way. In fact, if she is not accepted back into the family, there can only be one end for her: a call girl or a prostitute. We are, however, still working on it. The mother is coming round to our point of view, and we can only hope that she will be able to bring round the father too.
“But then, you see, the army had no discrimination when they wanted to rape women. We had a 10 year old girl whom they had cut with a blade because she was not developed enough for them to rape her. She ultimately died, as did many others of her age, innocent child victims of insensate lust.” THE GRANDMOTHER “There was this woman of 50, a plain, unsophisticated village woman with grand-children. When the rest of the family ran a way to save themselves, she stayed behind to protect her home. When they found no one else, the soldiers asked her to cook for all of them. When they found no young girls in the neighbourhood, they got so infuriated that in her presence

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they killed a neighbour’s lame boy, who had not been able to run away. Then they said to her: ‘Well, at least you’re a woman, you’re good enough,’ and they all raped her. The poor woman got pregnant and although we performed an abortion, it was such terrible humiliation for her, she is completely broken mentally.” THE OFFICER’S WIFE “Another pathetic case is that of a woman of about 25. Her husband was a Government officer in a sub-division and she has three children. They first took away husband, although she cried and pleaded with them. Then they returned him half-dead, after brutal torture. Then another lot of soldiers came in at 8 or 9 p.m. and raped her in front of her husband and children. They tied up the husband and hit the children when they cried.
“Then another lot of soldiers came at 2.30 a.m. and took her away. They kept her in a bunker and used to rape her every night until she became senseless. When she returned after three months, she was pregnant. The villagers were very sympathetic about her but the husband refused to take her back. When the villagers kept on pressing him to take her back, he hanged himself. She is now in an advanced stage of pregnancy and we are doing all that we can to help her. But she is inconsolable. She keeps on asking, “But why, why did they do it. It would have been better if we had both died.’”
Struggling against tremendous odds, the Rehabilitation Centre had almost completed its work of rescue and medical help. Now it was providing training for the women, to make them self-supporting, arranging for adoption of unwanted babies both in Bangla Desh and other countries, providing shelter to women from families which refuse to take them back, arranging for jobs after training and arranging marriages after careful scrutiny of applicants. For the children, arrangements have been made for baby homes, day-care centres, reception centres for abandoned children and orphanages to house them.
But it is a stupendous task. Before I left the Centre, I said to the director: “Sheikh Mujibur Rahman keeps on mentioning the figure of 200,000 women victims of rape. Is there any way of checking on this?”
“Can you ever compile statistics on rape when everyone is anxious to hide her shame?” replied the Director. “But there is one reasonably good method. According to the official census, there are 62,000 villages in Bangla Desh. If even four girls were raped in each village, do you see what the total would come to? Then don’t forget the towns and cities, where the people were better educated, able to arrange for abortions and generally successful in concealing the dishonour of their wives and daughters and sisters. No, the figures are not exaggerated. If anything, they are on the low side.” THE WIDOWS When Farida Hassan, very chic and trendy, entered the house of a diplomat in Dhanmandi, one of Dacca’s fashionable areas, and walked briskly across the lawn with a witty greeting, I immediately realized that she was an unusual as well as an interesting woman. My eyes and ears kept on registering her although I was engaged in polite conversation with anothergroup on the lawn. As we got up for dinner, I could not resist asking my host: “Who is that charming woman?”
**She is Farida Hassan,” he replied. “Her husband was killed by the Pakistani army and in a particularly treacherous way. He had resigned from the foreign service, taken part in Left poltics and was engaged in business at the time of his death. One of his best friends was a Hindu businessman who was suddenly picked up by the army one day and taken away to the Cantonment. But Farida Hassan’s husband got a telephone call from the Cantonment: If you bring round a ransom of Rs. 100,000′, said an unmistakable army voice, *Your Hindu friend will be freed and you can take him back.’ Hassan hastily collected the money and drove off with it to the Cantonment. But it was a cruel trick. After Hassan had handed over the ransom money, he was shot in the back. His Hindu friend had already been murdered.”

“I would very much like to talk to Mrs. Hassan about this, if she is not too upset to discuss it,” I said, “Can I ring her up to make an appointment?” “She has no telephone,” said our host. “After they killed her husband, the army started pursuing her teen-aged daughter who is very lovely. They kept on ringing up Mrs. Hassan and saying ‘Give us your daughter.’ She frantically moved her daughter from house to house and when the Pakistanis discovered this they rang up Mrs. Hassan and said: ‘So, you’ve hidden your daughter. Then we can come round for you. You are not so bad yourself. This is when Mrs. Hassan had her phone disconnected and she has not had it restored since. It is too soon for her to forget the past.” I decided to leave Mrs. Hassan’s private grief undisturbed for the present.
It was with equal reluctance at intruding on someone else’s private grief that I made my way next evening to the house of Mr. Nurul Amin Khan, once a valued and distinguished member of the elite Central Service of Pakistan. He joined the CSP in 1961 and had served it with devotion and integrity for ten years.
But after he was taken away by the Pakistan army, he never came back. His lovely young wife, with two small children of six and two and a half, simply refuses to believe that he is dead. She has refused to accept the pension due to her and lives in hope. “She will never believe it,” say her brothers sadly.
As I entered her house on a particularly hot and sultry evening, Begum Khan’s cousin Shafi Sami, who is in the Foreign Service of Bangla Desh, pointed to the ceiling, “Sorry there is no fan in the drawing-room”, he apologised, “It was looted by the Pakistan army.”
There first entered the room an elderly lady of great poise and dignity, Mrs. Khan’s mother, wife of a judge. She was followed by a tall, dark young man, Major Haroon Ahmed Choudhury of the Bengal Regiment. It appears that it was the young major, then a captain, who had brought the wrath of the military authorities on this innocent family and led to the murder of Mr. Khan.

“It was in April,” began young Mrs. Khan, age about 23, slim and elegant in a soft shell-pink chiffon sari, but with a look of ineffable sadness on her face. “One night there was a violent knocking on the door and voices were shoutingDarwaza kholiye, darwaza kholiye’ (Open the door). Later we often wondered whether they had really come for my husband. We have often discussed it since and felt that all that they could have held against him is that once at a dinner party he is alleged to have said that he did not like martial law. At a picnic he is said to have remarked that he did not like any political parties, except perhaps the Awami League. Finally, while District Magistrate of Barisal, his last official posting outside of Dacca, he fell out with the martial law authorities because of an incident where he defended the rights of a civilian against the military authority. He was immediately removed from his post to Dacca.
“But even then, when the military came to our house on April 28, I think it was for my brother Capt. Haroon, because he had revolted from the Bengal Regiment and joined the Mukti Bahini. The army officers certainly asked for him when they came in. But immediately afterwards, they took away our entire family, even my three unmarried sisters and my two small babies. There was also my mother, my husband and my second brother, who is in insurance. We were taken away in a car in just the clothes we wore and the officer in charge was Major Ghulam Ahmed of the E.P.C.A.F. When we asked if we could take a change of clothing the major sneered: ‘What do you think? You are not going to a wedding.
“We were taken to the College of Physical Education, one of the interrogation centres.
“We were housed in a drawing-dining room and the women were separated from the men, who were asked to stay in the kitchen. The major came into the women’s room off and on and asked questions about Haroon, whether we had received any letters, trunk-calls or other communications.”
“After 15 days my husband, my children and I were allowed to come back. But the other members of the family, my mother, older brother and three sisters were released only
after 4 months and 10 days. While in detention, we were given ordinary soldier’s food: roti, dal and rice. All of us had to sleep on the floor, including my old mother. After much pleading, Major Ghulam Ahmed brought us one more set of clothes from the house.
“But when my husband started playing indoor games with my two young sisters, the major put a stop to it. You have not come here to enjoy yourselves,’ he said. They also stopped my husband from playing with my baby daughter and we were thenceforth forbidden to visit each other. Then my little daughter stopped eating so the major brought her some bread. “But this is for her only, and the others are not to eat it,’ he warned.
“We were in the house for 10 days after our release, but the major used to come almost every day and we were virtually under house arrest, with no phone, no visitors and no going out. Only my husband was allowed to go to office and come back. The major was polite enough and one day he asked us to shift upstairs: ‘It is more safe,’ he said. Next day, the major came round in the afternoon. I was upstairs and since I heard him shouting downstairs I came out on the top verandah. “I came to tell you that your mother is well,’ he said and asked for my husband’s office telephone number. When I wrote it down on a piece of paper and came down to give it to him, he said: ‘Oh, why did you bother?’ This was on May 19. Next day, my husband did not come back from office. On the 20th they summoned him and took him back to the Cantonment again. On the 23rd, they took away his revolver and at the same time they took away my older brother’s gun licence and passport and tore them up. Then the major said to my husband in the presence of my brother: *You can talk for about 15 minutes and then go home. That is the last time my husband was seen alive. When I rang up the major and my brother also asked him why my husband had not come home, he replied: “But I asked him to go home in your presence. It was obvious’, said Mrs. Khan’s brother, ‘that they picked him up just outside the gates. The major left for Pakistan the next day.'”

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Mrs. Khan’s two brothers said that the only subsequent trace of Mr. Khan was his name scribbled on the walls of a cell in the Cantonment together with the names of several other distinguished citizens. None of them has been seen alive since. There was another detenu too, who said he heard terrible thuds and moans one day in the next room. He peeped in when the major came out and saw a man lying on the floor, grievously injured and bleeding. His description tallied with that of Mr. Khan. He had paid the price for his liberal views and for the rebellion of his wife’s brother, Major Haroon Ahmed Choudhury. THE ZOO STORY Dacca in January 1972, with Sheikh Mujib just back from his death cell and the Mukti Bahini firing exuberant shots in the air to celebrate his return, had very little time for the horror story of Dacca zoo.
It seemed sheer coincidence that when I flew down by IAF helicopter to Chittagong, to get some documentary evidence about the massacre of technocrats in that city of ships and railways, the Indian army officer detailed to escort me was Lt. Col. B.L. Chuni. Col. Chuni had been seconded to the civil affairs staff of Dacca District when the Allied forces entered Dacca on December 16.
It was on the way back from Dacca airport at dusk that Col. Chuni told me in precise, documented army language:
“When I entered Dacca city at noon on December 17, I was told by the troops responsible for law and order in the suburb of Mirpur, the Bihari stronghold where the zoo is located, that the birds and animals were in very poor shape. They had obviously not been looked after, no one seemed responsible for them and they looked starved. I contacted the District Commissioner and requested him to appoint someone to feed the birds and animals immediately. A day later, the D.C. confirmed that he had detailed someone for the job. The animals and birds were given their first square meal in months.”
Unfortunately, it was my last day in Bangla Desh and I left Dacca with only a second-hand account of the atrocities on animals and birds at the Dacca Zoo. They sounded so incredible that I decided I would have to check on them firsthand. I therefore made it a point, when I went back to Dacca in mid 1971, to meet Dr. B.R. Choudhury, the curator of the zoo. A quiet, soft-spoken, modest and polite man, Dr. Choudhury divulged his formidable professional qualifications only after persistent questioning. A product of the Belgachia Medical College in Calcutta, Dr. Choudhury studied animal husbandry in Oklahoma State University from 1951 to 1952. From 1953 Dr. Choudhury taught Animal Physiology and Pharmacology at various leading institutions in what was then East Pakistan. He spent 1968-69 in Turkey for specialized zoo training and on his return, was appointed curator of the Dacca Zoo. One would not expect such a highly professional man to be given easily to tears. But Dr Choudhury broke down as he told me the story of what was done to his animals and birds.
“Forgive me,” he said, as he wiped his eyes, “I become a little emotional over this. I did not believe in God until the day came for me to leave the zoo, because my life was in danger. I have often felt that my birds and animals talk to me. There is a bear cub which I brought up in my bungalow. He is huge now, but still licks my hand like a baby.
*When I went to say goodbye, the birds came up and pocked at my hands. The animals licked me and then turned away their faces. I thought I heard them say, ‘Tui jodi chole jaash, amra banchbo naa (If you go away we shall not live). Please do not abandon us to our fate. So I decided I could not desert them, no matter what the cost. Instead, I kept a razor, a hair brush and a tube of tooth-paste in my pocket. I slept on tables, floors, the banks of the river. I only went home at night when it became too dangerous. But I always returned by day to my birds and animals.”
“The most cruel atrocities of all were committed on the two chimpanzees. A major and three other army officers used to come in a truck which they parked under the tree near the chimpanzee cage. They came with bamboo poles sharpened at the ends, as if they were pig-sticking. Six or seven of them used to push the bamboo pole towards the female chimpanzee and it soon became clear that they were trying to thrust it up her vagina. Chimpanzees are friendly creatures. At first they thought it was a game and both the male and female used to catch hold of the bamboo pole like gymnasts. But when they realised that it was used for baiting them they used to get very angry, particularly the male. The day the female chimpanzee was severely injured and died, I felt so mad, I put my hand in my revolver pocket and decided I would shoot some soldiers, no matter what the consequences. Some instinct made the soldiers go away immediately, and it did not come to that.
“But after they went away and we did a post-mortem, we found the female had died of injuries as her liver, lungs and uterus were ruptured. They beat the male chimpanzee’s right paw to pulp when he tried to help his mate which died screaming. The male did not eat afterwards for days. He used to sweat and his hair stood on end. He used to jump with rage or beat on a tin.
“The soldiers also bayonetted 11 Rhesus monkeys and the remaining ones, which used to be such friendly, chattering creatures now try to bite or snatch at the clothes of even my staff. They also burnt the back, because it was furry, of the bear which had grown up in my bungalow as a cub.
“They killed 11 barking deer, three sambhars and two spotted deer which they took away to eat as venison. They looted fourteen albino rats and three white rabbits, presumably to eat them too. And they also killed guinea-pigs from the small mammals section.
“As for the birds, all the edible ones were looted, including 9 goslings, Indonesian duck, 3 light Sussex fowls, 6 Asil fowls, 4 Jungle fowls, 1 Blue Leghorn fowl, I Ankara fowl, 3 pigeons, 2 ornamental Peking duck, 6 Pea-fowl chicks, 3 Indian runner duck, 1 Siberian chick, 5 Wild duck and 2 Guinea fowls. These were looted and presumably used for the table. But killed needlessly in our presence were 1 Mothuna and I Guinea fowl.

“However, the torture of birds was more prolonged. The emu, as you know, is a silly bird, always sticking out its long neck. It always comes up trustingly to human beings. The soldiers rode on our only emu until it died of exhaustion.
“Then there were the pheasants. You know how the male spreads out his tail. They waited until the two males did this, then they caught hold of their rear feathers and pulled them out one by one. I found them lying bleeding on the ground in great pain as soon as I rushed down to them on hearing of what had happened to them.
“There were also side victims. The milch cow, which used to provide milk for the chimpanzees, was looted, together with its calf and a bull. One male ass was killed and another injured in cross fire. So the total loss is 67 birds and animals looted, 34 killed and 5 severely injured.
“Of course they also once lined up some people from the villages near the zoo and shot them in our presence. But we were as helpless in protecting them as in protecting our birds and animals.
I was sitting and listening to all this while in the picturesque surroundings of the extreme end of Mirpur. It was a forest area with red soil, jackfruit trees heavy with fruit, the twitter of birds on the branches and the distant noises of animals. All this simply did not make sense. But as Dr B.R. Choudhury traced the background of the happenings for me, sitting in the calm surroundings of the zoo office, with maps on the wall, the paraphernalia of animal and bird care all over the room, and the animal talk which his staff were carrying on in animated voices, it slowly dawned on me that what Dr Choudhury was trying to convey to me in such elaborate detail was a simple enough fact: That the birds and animals in the zoo had also been the victims of political cross-fire.
“We were encircled by trouble spots,” continued Dr Choudhury. “The zoo is in a depression in the middle, with a canal on one side and the river Turat on the other. It is this canal, adjoining the Bihari section of Mirpur, which saved the lives of the zoo staff and myself.”
“It was early in March 1971 when our sweeper, Femil, who is an Urdu-speaking refugee himself and lived in Camp No. 2 in Mirpur, but utterly loyal to us, warned me that the Biharis were making weapons. Please run, Sir,’ he kept on warning me. So on March 15, I called a meeting of the entire Zoo staff of 90. I issued an official order that no women and children should stay in the zoo compound and I arranged for all the staff to be provided with spears which we got the ironmonger to make. I also took out my revolver and shot gun which I had for protection as a zoo official. On March 25, the day of the army crack-down, the darwan (watchman) woke us up shouting ‘Fire, fire. Later, hundreds of skeletons were found at Sialbari village and we discovered an entire village had vanished. I had already stored kerosene and a minimum of six months’ food for the birds and animals. The Bengalis from Mirpur were running away through the zoo grounds after swimming the canal and hiding in our jungles before escaping by crossing the river in boats or by swimming. Several students, members of the police and others escaped this way. Bengalis are very good swimmers but the Biharis are not, so once they reached the canal, the Biharis could only fire at them but eventually had to go back. When I first asked the Bengalis, ‘Why are you running away?’ they replied, ‘Sir, the military are there with guns that fire several bullets, they are in civilian clothes. A Bengali police officer from the Mirpur police station said, ‘Run, you cannot fight sten-guns with your shot-gun and revolver,’ He then hurriedly swam across the river with a bag of rice on his head for his family.
“I had nothing else except a lungi, a razor, a toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste, as you remember, and it was becoming very dangerous because the Biharis came up to the fence just below my house and shouted, “You have given shelter to thousands.’ I replied: ‘I am only a Government Officer and the zoo grounds do not belong to me.’ Ultimately I had to leave my house on April 6. Sixty people, calling themselves the Peace Committee, attacked the house with arms. They only fied when a jeep came from the radar station, because they thought it was the military. Worst of the lot was Akhtar Goonda, commander of the Mujahid Bahini, an uneducated
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hoodlum with a sten-gun. When I saw Akhtar Goonda armed and in khaki and aiming at my head as I looked out of my window, the villagers also running in panic, I decided to pull my head in and left the zoo for a week.
“Then the military used to come by helicopter at unexpected moments and we had to lie low. As thousands started fieeing through the zoo, I rang up the District Commissioner and the Superintendent of Police, but they said, ‘We are helpless, what can we do?’ and so it was that with our stocks of kerosene and food exhausted, we found it no longer possible to look after our birds and animals and it was all we could do to save our own lives. And now we are back at our jobs. But before you go, you must come and see the male chimpanzee, and see how badly he reacts to cars and human beings because of what the army used to do to torture them.”
I was driven up in a jeep to the chimpanzee’s cage. As soon as he heard the sound of the jeep, he got up angrily from the dejected position in which he had been sitting in a corner of the cage. He took hold of the metal swing in his cage and swung it back and forth and then flung it angrily towards us. Had it not been for the chain to which it was attached, it would have come straight at us.
“And this is the animal which used to be such a gay extrovert with visitors and used to try and sit on the lap of his keeper,” said Dr Choudhury despondently.
But soon the male chimpanzee, his injured paw now a mass of dry, lumpy flesh, slunk back to his old corner of the cage. He slumped down in a sad heap, the picture of silent dejection once again. And in the distance, the bear with the burnt back lay on the ground in the stifling heat. He lay so quiet that I thought he was dead, until he heard Dr Choudhury’s voice and turned over slightly to look at him with bearish affection.
It still does not make sense to me. It never will.

Epilogue

AS THE political background of the Bangla Desh upheaval recedes into its correct historical perspective, the vast human tragedy which accompanied it seems to come even more sharply into focus.
Mass graves have been discovered every day since the surrender by the Pakistani army and it looks as if they will continue to be found for years to come. As time progresses, it becomes apparent that even the most efficient census machinery in the world will never be able to compile final statistics about the number of killings, which Sheikh Mujibur Rahman has estimated at two million. The number of women raped has been estimated by the Sheikh at 200,000 and by Mother Teresa in her first week in Bangla Desh at 4,000 girls in Dacca alone. As the Director for the Rehabilitation of Women explained, with 62,000 villages in Bangla Desh, and with a modest count of four women raped per village, the figure is by no means too high.
In the killings and rape, no distinction was made on grounds of caste or creed. It was simply enough to be a Bengali According to the venerable Dhammaviriyo, General Secretary of the South-East Asia Buddhist Association, 5,000 Buddhists were killed in Bangla Desh. According to Father John Hastings of the United Relief Service, “Many Christians who came across from Dinajpur had lost their wives or seen them raped. We have eye-witnesses of this and there would be several thousand Christians who came across to India. One Christian leader estimated that about one-third of the Christian community fled from Bangla Desh into India.”
It will take many years to rehabilitate not only a shattered economy destroyed with ruthless efficiency but also rehabilitate physically and psychologically entire families who have suffered separation, loss of their homes and dislocation of normal family life. Male members have been killed, women dishonoured in the presence of their families, and children subjected to the most unspeakable horrors. Prime targets were simple villages and the poorest slum areas in cities and towns which were systematically destroyed, and with them innumerable people practising traditional, highly skilled crafts.
In a planned campaign to wipe out the intelligentsia of Bangla Desh a now familiar pattern for their elimination was followed. Professors, writers, artists, journalists, technocrats such as bankers, pilots, port and railway officials, doctors, planters and lawyers were ruthlessly persecuted and killed. Professional guardians of law, order and security, such as the armed forces, the police, para-military personnel such as the Ansars, were quickly attacked in their offices and their barracks on March 25, 1971, sometimes while asleep, in their beds, and gunned down with mrrciless military efficiency and no attempt at a trial or normal legal processes.
According to Prof. Rafiqul Islam, of the Bengali Department of Dacca University, Dr. Kabir Choudhury of the Bengali Academy and Mr. Jamil Choudhury of Bangla Desh television, there was a sustained plan to obliterate Bengali tradition, Bengali culture, the Bengali language and the entire Bengali way of life. The murder of the intellectuals on the first day of the military crack-down and the murder of still more intellectuals two days before the Pakistani army surrender, was as much part of a pattern as the logical culmination of a long process of deliberate genocide.
According to the International Press Institute in Zurich, eight prominent journalists of Dacca were believed to have been killed in the massacre of Bengali intellectuals on December 14th.
The I.P.I. Report, released on February 1, 1972, said the journalists were arrested in their homes between December 11 and December 15, and driven away in jeeps. They were not seen alive again. The report quoted the Bangla Desh Prime Minister, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, as having told an IPI representative that some of the journalists had their hands or fingers chopped off before they were killed. The IPI report also said that at least three newsmen were reported killed in the course of 1971. The report is based on information collected by the Institute’s Special Representative, Derek Round, after a visit to Dacca. The eight journalists presumed dead are: Sirajuddin Hussain, Shaheedullah Kaiser, Sheikh Abdul Mannan, N.M. Golam Mustafa, Nizamuddin Ahmed, Najmul Haque, Mrs. Selima Parveen and Mohammad Ajtar.
The fate of the women of Bangla Desh was, indeed, the proverbial fate worse than death.
“Hum ja rahe hain. Lekin beej chhor kar ja rahe hain” (We are going. But we are leaving our Seed Behind). It was an angry, frustrated Pakistani soldier who said this to a group of jeering Bengalis as he left Dacca cantonment with his regiment to surrender to the Indian army. He accompanied it with an appropriately coarse gesture.
Behind that bald statement lies the story of one of the most savage, organized and indiscriminate orgies of rape in human history: rape by a professional army, backed by local armed collaborators. It spared no one, from elderly widows to schoolgirls not yet in their teens, from wives of high-ranking civil officers to daughters of the poorest, villagers and slum dwellers. Senior officers allowed, and presumably encouraged, the forced confinement of innocent girls for months inside regimental barracks, bunkers and even tanks.
A respectable elderly gentleman out for his morning walk near Dacca cantonment a few days before the surrender of the Pakistan army was astounded one day to see about 20 girls in only their bras and panties, shivering in the cold and brought out like cattle to trucks outside the cantonment. They were trying pathetically to cover their shame and looked dazed and completely without expression.
Bengali women found inside barracks and bunkers had been subjected to sustained rape and sexual abuse. Many unfortunate girls hanged themselves with their saris, so they were deprived of their clothes. Others hanged themselves with their long hair so their hair was cut off. Lt. General Arora, G.O.C. in C. Eastern Command, said at a press conference in Calcutta in January 1972 that in Bhurangamari area in North Bangla Desh, 50 women, the youngest being 11, were found by the Indian army in a well-guarded place. Indian troops, with the help of the International Red Cross, rescued 51 girls from Dacca and Narayangunge cantonments when they entered Dacca. Most of the girls, aged 14 to 30, were found in rooms locked from outside and in a state of starvation as well as physical and mental collapse.
Another favourite target of attack throughout the struggle was the youth of Bangla Desh. To the army junta, youth was about the most dangerous element in Bengali political life. It is the students who laid down their lives in the language riots which led to the downfall of President Ayub Khan. In Dacca and other universities, students often led their professors in political thought and focussed attention on the dangers of cultural and linguistic fascism from West Pakistan. The Pakistani army atrocities on March 25, 1971 started with the shooting of students in their hostels and colleges, sometimes when asleep in their beds under mosquito nets. Youth represented nonconformism, rebellion and advanced thinking. It also represented the future generation. Youth, it seems was killed in such large numbers so that an entire generation of young male Bengalis could be wiped out and Bangla Desh left with only impotent old men.
As youth, largely inspired by Vietnam, flocked to join the Mukti Bahini guerillas and created a new dimension in heroic civilian resistance against one of the most professional armies in the world, the very name Mukti Bahini became a bugbear for the Pakistani army which often wiped out entire villages and areas suspected, sometimes quite unfairly, of sheltering them.
The scale of such killing, destruction and rape was only matched by the degree of bestiality and sadism with which basically ordinary, and presumably once decent, human beings carried it out. Their behaviour is likely to provide sociologists and army psychiatrists with endless data for research into human perversion. There were degrees of cruelty which
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