Delhi, June 22
Evidence in Indian border hospitals is more than enough to show that Mrs Jill Knight, Conservative MP for Edgbaston, was apparently hoodwinked by her hosts when she visited East Pakistan recently. She said on her return to Britain that Western press reports of atrocities were exaggerated.

Mrs Knight is reported here to have given President Yahya Khan and his army a clean sheet and to have claimed that there was no evidence of army atrocities in East Bengal. She is also reported to have said that refugees in India should not be afraid to return to their homes.

Haripada Rai, aged 55. a cultivator from Chunkuri, a village in the district of Khulna in East Pakistan, would not agree with Mrs Knight. I found him recovering from a bullet wound in the neck in the small border hospital of Taki 12 days ago.

Mr Rai told me that he and about a hundred Hindus were lined up along the bank of the Chunkuri river Iast month and machinegunned by Pakistani troops. Miraculously he was hit in the side of his neck and he survived.

“I had already sent my family to India”, he said, “and about 10 days ago we heard that the army was approaching the village, so I joined a party of about a hundred Hindu man and boys who were planning to flee to India.

" But as we were about to cross the Chunkuri river the Pakistani troops approached with guns and ordered us out of the boat.

“They asked us whether we were Muslims or Hindus. When some of the boatmen said they were Muslims the soldiers ordered us to strip. Then they inspected us to see whether we were circumcised.
“All the uncircumcised Hindus were lined up on the river bank and a machinegun was set up. The Pakistani troops were joking and laughing and calling us Kafirs.

“When the machinegun started to fire I felt something hit my neck and I fell to the ground as though I was dead.”

Here, too, is the testimony of a Muslim whom I found lying in the Casa hospital neat Bongaon last month. Hasan Ali has also escaped across the border with a bullet wound in the neck.

The 25-year-oid cultivator said that he and two friends were surrounded by 70 soldiers while working in their fields near Jessore in April. "They wanted to know whether we were Hindus or Muslims. But they refused to believe we were Muslims. They started to shoot and I fainted.“
Binod Bhehari Shah, aged 70. was discharged from the Casa hospital recently. “They called me from my house at the side of the road and asked me whether I was a Kafir. I said: “Sahib. I am Hindu.”
“The soldier lifted his gun and I got down on my knees and begged for my life. The bullet hit my hands and my chest and I fell to the ground and pretended to be dead”

I found Katic Chadra Dev, a 25-year-old Hindu labourer from Jessore, marching along the road with hundreds of thousands of other displaced refugees last month. " We had to leave, the army troops came to our village and burnt down all our houses with petrol ", he said.

Then there Is Monoranjam Gayen, a young labourer from Paikgatcha village, in the district of Khulna. He was writhing in agony in the Taki hospital with burns covering the greater part of his body. He claims that Muslim peasants were instigated by troops to burn him alive in his house.

So the story continues from hospital to hospital along the border.

While there can now be no doubt that the Muslim zealots in the Pakistani Army have run amok in East Bengal, Bengali intellectuals have produced evidence to suggest that the plan to exterminate and drive out the Hindu minority had been formulated in cold blood in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan.

Dr A. R. Mullick. Vice-Chancellor of Chittagong University, has cited excerpts from ehe Government-controlled newspaper The Pakistan Times to support the Bengalis’ claims that the army had embarked upon a course to exterminate the Hindus and obliterate Bengali culture.

Dr Mullick claims that the newspaper has begun a campaign to justify the Government’s plan to drive the Hindus out of the province.