Dacca, East Pakistan. President Yahya Khan’s attempt to stem by armed force the rising tide of separatist feeling among the Bengalis of East Pakistan conceals a much older struggle between the Hindu and Muslim communities of the Indian subcontinent whose history has been terribly disfigured by their often murderous rivalry. There is no longer any serious dispute that the Hindus of East Pakistan, who account for about 12 per cent of a total population of 70 million have been the most consistent targets of army action in the past three months. Viable evidence for this is to be found wherever the army has been. There is also much hearsay evidence which by its nature is no longer capable of proof or disproof, but of which much can reasonably be supposed to have basis in truth.

From the outset, amid much general bullying, the army showed a certain ruthless discrimination in its selection of targets among Bengali Muslims. These included not only prominent Awami League officials but also professors, students, lawyers and Government servants such as the police who had thrown in their lot with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his followers. Hindus on the other hand, were the victims of an altogether indiscriminate and unrestrained brutality. There is room for speculation about the precise orders under which junior officers were operating. But there can be no doubt that the army’s conduct, even in its excesses, reflected conviction at the highest levels that the Hindus were the malign force behind the secessionist movement and had to be taught a savage lesson.

The damage to Hindu property in almost all towns where the army left its marks is disproportionately severe. This can be seen in the systematic burning and looting of Hindu shops and homes. In some cases the non- Hindu population is said to have been compelled at gun point to do the work of pillage. Towns with large Hindu communities, particularly in the border regions, are visibly depleted. In the countryside, Hindu or predominantly Hindu, villages often seen to have been selected by the army for destruction on the slenderest evidence of provocation or even simply in retaliation for acts of sabotage such as the dynamiting of bridges by Bengali guerrillas operating in the main from sanctuaries in India.

Reports of raping and looting - neither of which can be said to have any obvious relevance to the restoration of law and order are persistent and widespread. At least 80 per cent, perhaps 90 per cent, of the refugees now in India are Hindus. Fear has been the spur - fear not only of the army but also of the vengeance of Bihari non-Bengali Muslims, who were victimized and in some places butchered by Bengali fanatics during the two or three weeks it took the army to secure control of the province. These same Biharis, a substantial minority of between four and six million which came to East Pakistan at the time of partition, are being recruited in considerable numbers by the military authority to replace Bengalis in the civil service and the police. They are also prominent in the “peace committees” set up by the army in an effort to encourage civilian cooperation at the local level.

Under these circumstances it is unrealistic to imagine that anything more than a fraction of the Hindu refugees in India can be persuaded to return. Up to now no more than a trickle has passed through the reception centres established for this purpose in East Pakistan by the martial law administration. A total of 50,000 “returnees” is claimed by the authorities. But it is admitted that no more than a third of these, whose number is in any case certainly much exaggerated, have returned by “recognized routes”. The rest, it is alleged are filtering back unseen at unauthorized crossing points. The Indians, it is further claimed, are forcibly preventing the return of refugees for their own evil design.

It is unrealistic to expect Hindus to put faith in President Yahya’s public assurances of security and protection. Many West Pakistan officials admit privately that they would consider it “good riddance” if the Hindus who have fled to India were to remain there. The Hindu community in their view is the advance guard of Indian imperialism, the breeding ground of sedition and unrest. The roots of these antipathies go back way beyond the foundation of Pakistan. In the six centuries before British domination in India, Muslim soldiers and administrators ruled over much of a population in which Hindus formed a numerical majority, though mass conversions to Islam in economically backward areas like East Bengal produced local Muslim majorities.

The British replaced Muslim domination with their own. The Muslim furthermore were regarded after the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 with suspicion by the British as the instigators of rebellion, while Hindus of the educated and commercial classes began to play an increasing role in public life. With the approach of independence, partition seemed to be the right answer to Muslims fears of domination by Hindu majority they had been accustomed historically to regard as subjects rather than rulers. Yet it was a solution that was to bring little satisfaction. For, in the view of West Pakistan, neither Delhi nor London has ever fully accepted the division of the subcontinent to which both were parties.

There are, admissibly, some elements of truths in the interpretation of Indian and British attitudes towards Pakistan. Its correspondence with reality, however, matters less than that. It is deeply embedded in the consciousness of senior government officials and army officers, and thus represents a well- nigh insuperable obstacles in the way of rational assessment by Islamabad of the situation with which it is confronted in the Eastern wing. The rulers in West Pakistan are immovably convinced that separatist aspirations among the Bengalis are without genuine foundation. They see them as the product of purely ephemeral agitation artificially incited by a few extremists in the Awami League “working hand in glove” with Hindus, Indian infiltrators and malicious propagandists in the pay of All-India Radio, the BBC and the British press. The fact that Bengali units in the armed forces mutinied almost to a man is not allowed to disturb this prevailing conviction. The attitude is that a dose of harsh medicine, firmly administered, will soon bring the fickle and volatile Bengalis back into line once the rest of the world goes away and minds its own business.

No one - with the exception of a few clear sighted people on the periphery of political life - seems able to recognize that continued repression of the Bengalis by the army can in the long run only make more inevitable what its intervention was designed to prevent the secession of East Pakistan.