Chuadanga, East Pakistan, April 16.—The battered and demoralized forces of Bangla Desh — breakaway East Pakistan — abandoned their provisional capital almost without a fight today and thousands of refugees streamed out of the town towards the Indian border.

Pakistan Government troops captured Kushtia, 30 miles to the north, and Bangla Desh resistance everywhere appeared to be crumbling.

The Indian Government radio, which has consistently been partisan, spoke for the first time of a Bangla Desh retreat and reported that the followers of Shaikh Mujibur Rahman were resorting to guerrilla warfare.

When foreign newspapermen entered Chuadanga, they found it shuttered and empty. Green, red and white Bangla Desh flags hung limply from deserted buildings. The headquarters of Major Muhammad Osman. The commander-in-chief, were abandoned.

The reporters reached the town in a lorry which was carrying food to a police station. It was escorted by a Bangla Desh soldier carrying a Second World War rifle.

He stopped at every hamlet and at gunpoint ordered a handful of men to board the truck. Most of them had slipped away before the next halt. The object of the exercise was utterly incomprehensible.

At a command post close to the border, the officer in charge dozed in a canvas armchair, waking occasionally to denounce the United States for having failed to come to the assistance of Bangla Desh. His jeep stood outside, ready for a quick escape.

Troops milled around, listless and demoralized.

Officials in Calcutta reported that 100,000 refugees have reached India so far. Makeshift camps have been set up on the border and the refugees are being provided with food paid for by the Government.

The refugees are going on foot and by mule and bullock cart, on bicycles and cycle rickshaw. All of them carry their few belongings in bundles on their heads or slung from bamboo poles across their shoulders. They carry their cooking pots and oil lamps and their rush sleeping mats.

One old Bengali, too weary to go any further. sat by the roadside. staring into the distance. His family went on without him. --A.P.

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Michael Hornsby writes from Darsana. East Pakistan :-
Chuadanga, supposedly the headquarters of the recently proclaimed government of an independent East Bengal (Bangla Desh), was attacked by Sabre jets of the Pakistan Air Force this morning. According to Bangla Desh officials in this small town, a few miles from the Indian border. Army units were also reported to be converging on Chuadanga.

This seems to indicate that open resistance to the military intervention of the kind witnessed in the past three weeks or more is now virtually at an end. Kushtia district, a triangular piece of territory of which the Indian border forms the base. was the one remaining area where the resistance forces exercised any real control.

Two Pakistan aircraft, I was told here, made several runs over Chuadanga this morning, dropping 20 "bombs" (more probably rockets) and causing an undisclosed number of casualties. Members of the rebel government alleged to have been using Chuadanga as their headquarters were said to have moved farther north to the small border town of Meherpur.

There was no sign of panic here.

But all along the road from the border there was a marked absence of the high spirits of even a week ago.

Even more noticeable was a deep bewilderment and bitterness, about the indifference, as the Bengalis see it, of the rest of the world to their plight.

Mr. Muhammad Eunus Ali, a member of the provincial assembly, asked us: "Why do you do nothing to help us? Why do you give us no arms? The outside world says that this is an internal affair. How can they say this when thousands of people are being killed? This is not an internal affair. This is a pogrom."


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Peter Hazelhurst writes from Delhi: Radio Pakistan announced today that the army had cleared all remaining pockets of resistance in the north-west of the eastern province and reluctantly conceded that the 75 million Bengalis are in revolt.

But the official radio station attempted to blame Indian infiltrators and "miscreants" for the trouble.
Leading article, page 15