I agree.. Thats the only thing Pakistan would be missing for the years to come. Bengalis would never let Pakistan to get involved in proxy war with Soviets neither it allowed extremism.
Then you should not had separated from India in the first place.
2nd Bengalis are Bengalis, Hindus or Muslim would not make any difference. They all will do the same.
Can you name 10 Hindu name who formed core of Mukti Bahini. No offence to any of my country men. Hindus had very little to say in any political party even within AL.
He was forced to spread them thin. His opponents were way too smart.
Dont understand what you talking about???
The problem is that most of those commenting so wisely about those years were not even born. I was there, a volunteer in the camps; many who played leading roles played those roles in close proximity. Mukti Joddhas were never mixed up with the refugee camps; if someone took a decision to join the MB, he would leave, and while we saw some faces back, very briefly, they had their own places, quite separate from the refugees. The refugee camps were horrible places, marked by daily death, mainly of women and children. There could have been no resistance operations from them. But I saw - we all saw - who were going out.
I have news for my Pakistani friends. It wasn't the Hindus.
They were completely out of it, defeated by terror and exhaustion and the loss of the meagre little that they owned. Men, women and children - they crossed the border, and the moment they realised they were safe, they needn't keep walking, they just lay down, wherever they were. Many died there, on the road, on the fields next to the border; many more in the camps. Nobody counted. The first few weeks (I wasn't there then, other volunteers told me later) were terrifying; it looked as if it was to be mass-scale death, on an unimaginable scale. It wasn't possible even to inoculate the hordes coming in. There were no tents, it was the monsoon, a Bengal monsoon where the water comes down in solid sheets. The worst time was after Searchlight, the months of April, May, June, a bit of July. By then, the flood had stopped; only trickles of people were still coming through. Western organisations came forward to help; some of the doctors carried new-fangled syringes which could deliver inoculations in seconds, and clean, without need to change needles. They looked like paint-guns and we thought the doctors holding them were angels; it was the first clue we had that we could hold on to the refugees.
It was largely the Muslims who turned, although I can't give you proof, nothing beyond anecdotes. Some of us who had turned up at these camps without permission from home were soon tracked down and yanked out and ruthlessly sent back; probably just as well, we were probably breaking down and getting in the way of the professional workers. But if I saw rage and anger, it was when people had had a few days to take stock, to realise that they were alive, to realise what had happened to them, to listen to the recruiters, to listen to the rallies and the songs and the pep talks; Nazrul's songs were sung every day, Mujib's Ramna Maidan talk was played every day, these were the two great recruitment drivers, besides the quiet, earnest young man in khakis, sometimes (very rarely) an EPR guy to stir things up with his stories of resistance, mostly Bangladeshi government people in semi-civilian clothes and rubber sandals cut out of tyre treads. There was a constant trickle leaving camp. Someone losing his woman and children was an almost automatic recruit.
I keep hearing stories, mainly Pakistani stories, about how the refugees were systematically grouped and recruitment done among them. Whoever believes that should have been in the camps. It didn't work like that. It worked nothing like that. Those camps were hell. You didn't have time to identify who was which religion, you just got their inoculations in, their gruel in, got them a brick plinth and tarpaulin and hoped like hell they'd survive the first week. They were usually OK after that.
Most of us lasted a very short while before we were chased out, if we had no good, effective NGO backing. I wasn't in that NGO crowd and lasted less than two months before my father's policemen caught me and hauled me back to Calcutta. At the time, I yelled and shouted and wept trying to stay back, but I realise now I hated the camps.
Sometimes I read these weird stories about Machiavellian Indian planning and I smile when I think of what was happening on the ground then. Machiavelli was at some other camp, not the one I was at.
