Observer (London)

In the desolation created throughout East Pakistan by the troops of President Yahya Khan, one certainly stands out. Ten million Hindus, who had stayed hopefully on this Muslim State after Partition and then endured 23 years of harassment and injustice, have finally been persuaded that their only hope lies in India. In the years since 1947, before this last massive flood of fugitives poured out across the frontiers, more than six million Hindus had left. Some fled because demands were being made on their womenfolk across the communal line. Others had been squeezed out of their jobs or off their land. Religious riots drove out thousands more; others came into India because they could no longer stand the uncertainty of their lives.

For a time last year, the Hindus still inside East Bengal rallied to the heady promise of an equal life for people of all religions offered to them by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman of the Awami League, who had challenged the military rule of Yahya Khan - and is now his prisoner. But when the Pakistan Army was ordered out to crush the Sheikh, free rein was evidently given at the same time to the communal fanatics of the soldiers. The Head of the Bangladesh (East Pakistan) mission in Calcutta, Hossain Ali, says that the Martial Law Administrator, Lieutenant-General Tikka Khan, called his officers together and gave them specific instructions to kill Hindu men, ravish their women and destroy their crops. Whether or not these orders were given, the soldiers clearly behaved as if they had. But in a land where Hindus and Muslims wear the same clothes, eat the same food and use the same rough dialect, the orders could not have been carried out without local civilian assistance.

The network of ‘Peace Committees,” set up to ‘restore normalcy’ in East Pakistan are now finishing the job. In a shower of leaflets and through loud-speakers they are inviting the Muslims of East Bengal to drive the Hindus away and acquire their property. Muslims of the Awami League are free to make their peace with Yahya Khan and stay. The Hindus who voted for the League in last December’s election must go. As a result, four million Hindu refugees have scrambled across the Indian border since 25 March. Even if the Pakistan Army rolled away from East Bengal, the Hindus would be unwilling to go back. On the contrary, India must be prepared to receive as well the remaining six million Hindus - or those of them who are still alive.

On the eve of Sheikh Mujib’s bid for Bangladesh, only two classes of Hindus remained in East Bengal. They were professional men who had planned their lives so that they could leave at a moment’s notice - and peasants who had nowhere to go. Successful lawyers lived in huts of bamboo matting and ate off tin plates. Doctors practiced from ramshackle sheds. Their lives, children and money had all been sent to safety in India. The other Hindus were all cultivators, weavers, iron-mongers and fisherfolk on the lowest rungs of the caste ladder.

One of the middle-class fugitives now in Calcutta is Kamrul Hassan, a 50- year-old painter who was head of the Design Centre in Dacca, East Pakistan’s capital. He is sure that Yahya Khan’s aim was to dissipate the Bengali nationalist movement by driving a wedge between the two religious communities, diverting attention from the purely political carnage and hoping to provoke retaliatory religious massacres of Muslims in India. Used to Indo-Pakistan conflicts of this sort, the world might then be expected to lose sight of the true and oppressive intentions of the military regime.

The plan might have succeeded better if the Hindu refugees had not been to utterly exhausted in body and mind. Even so, there have been minor communal troubles at the Indian border towns of Barasat and Basirhat. Only a strong police cordon was able to stop a mob of Hindu refugees, armed with spears, daggers and staves, from invading the West Bengal town of Murshidabad and attacking its sizable Muslim community. ‘The Peace Committee told us to go to India where there was food and land for us all,’ one refugees said. ‘Now we will tell the Muslims here to go to Pakistan.’

Meanwhile, houses abandoned by Hindus in the north-east Pakistan town of Sylhet are being auctioned to local Muslims for nominal sums. Even the formality of a sale is being dispensed with in Dacca, where abandoned houses are for the taking. Paddy land is being distributed as a reward for loyalty to the Yahya Khan regime. In these circumstances, it is difficult to take seriously Yahya’s offer of a safe return to the refugees.

Hassan is convinced that the Muslim collaborators in East Pakistan are not Bengalis. He says that Nurul Amin, the elderly former Chief Minister and the only important follower in East Pakistan of Mr. Z. A. Bhutto, West Pakistan’s political leader, has flatly refused to head a puppet Government under the military junta. That rejection ended all possibility of even a bogus democratic Government and rule by martial law must continue. The only people who will talk to Yahya Khan’s regime belong to the Muslim League (which has always supported the military rulers) and to the orthodox Islamic parties - the Jamaat-I-Islami and the Nizami-I-Islam. Together they do not account for more than 19 per cent of the population. Only about five per cent of them are Bengalis. The rest are Bihari Muslims who migrated to East Pakistan at the time of Partition and Punjabis who have moved from West to East Pakistan to gain economic advantages.

There are some sparse reports of Bengali Muslims risking their lives to shelter Hindu fugitives and by returning looted property. But these isolated acts offer little hope of a return to peaceful coexistence. I am ready to believe that Sheikh Mujib almost succeeded in removing the mistrust which has lain like a drawn sword for so long between 65 million Muslims and 10 million Hindus. Because of his secular liberalism, the Hindu community turned out en masse in December to vote for the Awami League. Eleven Hindus were elected on the League ticket to the still-born provincial assembly.

Even more eloquent of the forlorn but rising hopes of the Hindus was the story told to me by the young District Commissioner of Pabna, on the western side of East Pakistan, an economics graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, called Nurul Kader. He was negotiating for some Hindu land when, just before the December election, the vendor began to drag his feet. When Sheikh Mujib won his landslide victory the Hindu owner called the deal off, because he meant to stay in the country after all. The young man from Cambridge is now organizing a field secretariat for the Government- in-exile of Bangladesh. But this Government is no more than a national entity. None of its leaders has the charisma of Sheikh Mujib. But Kader remains passionately convinced that there can be no reconciliation between the two wings of Pakistan. Murder, looting and arson have left too deep a scar. And these activities have now given way to sexual assaults on a massive scale, says Kader, who has reports of even upper-middle-class girls being dragged off to officers’ messes in the Army cantonments.

‘If only 15 per cent of the people wanted an independent Bangladesh before the Army went into action,’ said a bearded young travel agent who has packed his wife and children off to London, ‘now only 15 per cent will consent to any form of union with West Pakistan.’ But if a united Pakistan no longer has a future, East Bengal has all the time in the world to plan ahead. The first phase of resistance has been crushed. It was spontaneous, sporadic and carried along only by an emotional momentum that did not last. It made many mistakes; it was excessively optimistic. Used to be baffling the British with passive disobedience, Bengalis thought they could use the same weapon against tough soldiers from the Punjab and the North-West Frontier, headed by ruthless officers from the same martial regions.

The second phase of resistance is evidently now beginning. It is said that more than 20,000 men of the East Bengal Regiment, the East Pakistan Rifles and the police have been integrated under a single command. There are reports of 8,000 teenage boys being trained in guerrilla fighting. Killer squads are being formed to liquidate collaborators. One Bangladesh leader told me he was confident of ultimate success, ‘If we are left to ourselves.’ By this he means a denial of foreign aid to Pakistan, now spending 10 million rupees a day on maintaining its four military divisions in the East. Economic troubles for Pakistan would certainly mean less pressure from the Pakistan Army, for whom 300 tons of supplies have to be transported 2,500 miles from West Pakistan everyday.

A hopeful sign for Bangladesh adherents is that disaffection no longer seems to be confined to East Pakistan, but has spread to Wali Khan, the towering Pathan leader on the North-West Frontier. Mr. Bhutto himself is telling the Army that political problems can be solved by politicians alone and is calling for an immediate transfer of power. The loss of East Pakistan as a captive market is being keenly felt by West Pakistan’s notorious 21 families of rich businessmen. Yahya Khan may find that now, as in the past, the power elite in Pakistan can be ruthless with failure. The President may turn out to have trapped himself in a dead end of extremism. He is now hinting at political solutions once suggested by the emerging democratic forces in Dacca. The difference is that Dacca is no longer willing to listen.

But though Bangladesh may one day emerge, the dormant communal bitterness successfully rearoused by the Pakistan Army and the irrevocable flight of the Hindus will make it a Bangladesh for Muslims only. Even now there is not a single Hindu in Tajuddin Ahmed’s exiled Cabinet. And in the midst of this present vast upsurge of Indian sympathy for the cause of Bangladesh, it is the sad fact that Hindus who left East Pakistan years ago to settle and prosper in India are refusing point-blank to support any Bangladesh charity.