Rajshahi, East Pakistan, July 11
The badly damaged town of Santahar north-east of here on the border between Rajshahi and Bogra districts, is one of the places—the others are Chittagong, Nasirabad, and Dinajpur—most frequently mentioned as having been the scene of mass killings of non-Bengaiis during the period before the army gained control of the eastern Wing from the rebels.

On the outskirts of Dacca a group of Bihari Muslims, members of a community of three to four million who settled in East Pakistan after partition, run what journalists have come to call the “atrocity factory”, Here, the widows and orphans of non-Bengalis alleged to have been killed by Bengali fanatics, as well as the horribly mutilated survivors of such killings, are paraded as though they were prize exhibits at a cattle market.

Visitors are also treated to a venomous, almost hysterical, tirade about the wickedness of Indians, Hindus and Bengalis and a lecture on the staunch patriotism of the Biharis and their heroic resistance to the demands for secession and independence being voiced by the Awami League before the army intervened on March 25.

The falsity of this presentation does little service to the Bihari cause. Most journalists—and I include myself among them— accept that substantial numbers of non-Bengali men. women and children were butchered in an often bestial fashion. Both the timing and scale, however, remain very much open to question.

This is where Santahar comes in. The Biharis in Dacca claim that oat of a population of some 22,000 non-Bengalis there, only seven families survived massacre at the hands of the East Pakistan Rifles rebels, the Awami League and Indian infiltrators. Pregnant women, they say, were cut to pieces with bayonets and small children roasted alive.

A rather different version of what happened emerged from information supplied by a reliable independent source, with no communal axe to grind, whose identity must for obvious reasons remain concealed.

It was the Biharis, according to this information, who began the killing, probably on March 26. the day after the army moved on Dacca. They shot about 60 Bengalis with rifles given them by Punjabi officers from the mutinous East Pakistan Rifles. The Bengalis, in terrible vengeance, killed possibly as many as 6,000 Biharis.
The army, when it arrived in the middle of April, took its own revenge, destroying much of the town and killing any Bengali it could find. Most had fled and none will now ever return. Bengali signs on Shops and elsewhere have already been replaced with Urdu and English.

A consideragle propaganda effort has been made by the Pakistan Government to suggest not only that the army action was necessary to prevent the mass slaughter of Biharis but also that killings of non-Bengalis took place on a substantial scale even before the army moved. The Government, it is claimed, made no mention of this at the time for fear of provoking reprisals against the small Bengali minority in the west wing.

It is a pretty thin explanation. It is inconceivable, had there been killings on the scale claimed, that these would not have come to the eyes and ears of the many foreign journalists in East Pakistan until their expulsion en masse on March 25.

There was, certainly, looting and arson of Bihari property, as well as harassment of Biharis themselves, during the early part of March by Bengalis enraged at the postponement of the meeting of the Constituent Assembly by President Yahya Khan. The meeting had already been boycotted by Mr Bhutto, the leader in the west wing of the Pakistan People’s Party.

Only in Chittagong is it thought that there may have been some isolated killings before March 25. There is absolutely no doubt that in general the slaughter of non-Bengalis, often horrible in the methods used, was triggered by the intervention of the army. This does not justify it but it does help to explain it.