London again

It was a great relief to have made it to London. I was, though, very surprised to be greeted as soon as I walked into the terminal building by a cameraman and interviewer from ITN who had been alerted to my arrival. So as I walked down the corridor towards immigration there was a cameraman walking backwards shining a very bright light towards me while someone walked beside me waving a microphone in my face and asking me how it felt to be free, and what the experience was like, and did I think that India was doing a good thing in helping to liberate East Pakistan. I answered as best I could and I learned later that I had appeared on News at 10 for about 30 seconds.

 I collected my small amount of baggage and when I went through into the arrivals hall I was very pleasantly surprised to be warmly greeted by Anna and several of the Omega people from London. I was taken for a meal, asked lots of questions, sat next to Anna who held my hand, and then at the end we went back togetherto her same bedsitter.

Two days after my arrival in London, on 16 December, the Pakistan Army in the East surrendered to the joint forces of the Indian army and the Mukti Bahini in Dacca, and the state of Bangladesh was proclaimed. The war had lasted only 14 days. I had been released from imprisonment on the fourth day, as the first major town of Bangladesh had fallen to the joint forces. While I was celebrating freedom, getting a new passport, dining at the Consulate in Calcutta, travelling across India by train, exploring Bombay and flying out in the early hours, being delayed in Cairo, and arriving in London, the inevitable fate of the Pakistan Army in the east had become increasingly clear. Despite a UN General Assembly resolution calling for a ceasefire in the second week of the war, resulting from a Soviet veto on a similar resolution in the Security Council, and strong words from the United States about India’s ‘aggression’, the wheels of history were turning inexorably.

THE Nixon Administration drew a fusillade of criticism last week for its policy on India and Pakistan. Two weeks ago, when war broke out between the two traditional enemies, a State Department spokesman issued an unusually blunt statement, placing the burden of blame on India. Soon after that, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations George Bush branded the Indian action as “aggression”—a word that Washington subsequently but lamely explained had not been “authorized.”

Senator Edward Kennedy declared that the Administration had turned a deaf ear for eight months to “the brutal and systematic repression of East Bengal by the Pakistani army,” and now was condemning “the response of India toward an increasingly desperate situation on its eastern borders.” Senators Edmund Muskie and Hubert Humphrey echoed Kennedy’s charges.

The critics were by no means limited to ambitious politicians. In the New York Times, John P. Lewis, onetime U.S. A.I.D. director in India (1964-69) and now dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton, wrote: “We have managed to align ourselves with the wrong side of about as big and simple a moral issue as the world has seen lately; and we have sided with a minor military dictatorship against the world’s second largest nation.” In Britain, the conservative London Daily Telegraph accused Washington of “a blundering diplomatic performance which can have few parallels.”

{….}

Because of blunders in both substance and tone, the U.S. has, 1) destroyed whatever chance it had to be neutral in the East Asian conflict; 2) tended to reinforce the Russia-India, China-Pakistan lineup; 3) seemingly placed itself morally and politically on the side of a particularly brutal regime, which, moreover, is an almost certain loser; and 4) made a shambles of its position on the subcontinent.

Time Magazine 20 December 1971

With the exception of a deeply embarrassed United States, most countries of the world, once it was clear that India had no intention of annexing East Pakistan into India, celebrated a people, very poor, certainly, but with a fiercely burning national sense of self and worth, gain their rightful place in the world. 

 JAI Bangla! Jai Bangla!” From the banks of the great Ganges and the broad Brahmaputra, from the emerald rice fields and mustard-colored hills of the countryside, from the countless squares of countless villages came the cry. “Victory to Bengal! Victory to Bengal!” They danced on the roofs of buses and marched down city streets singing their anthem Golden Bengal. They brought the green, red and gold banner of Bengal out of secret hiding places to flutter freely from buildings, while huge pictures of their imprisoned leader, Sheik Mujibur Rahman, sprang up overnight on trucks, houses and signposts. As Indian troops advanced first to Jessore, then to Comilla, then to the outskirts of the capital of Dacca, small children clambered over their trucks and Bengalis everywhere cheered and greeted the soldiers as liberators.

{….}

The first city to fall was Jessore. TIME’S William Stewart, who rode into the key railroad junction with the Indian troops, cabled: “Jessore, India’s first strategic prize, fell as easily as a mango ripened by a long Bengal summer. It shows no damage from fighting. In fact, the Pakistani 9th Division headquarters had quit Jessore days before the Indian advance, and only four battalions were left to face the onslaught.

“Nevertheless, two Pakistani battalions slipped away, while the other two were badly cut up. The Indian army was everywhere wildly cheered by the Bengalis, who shouted: ‘Jai Bangla!’ and ‘Indira Gandhi Zindabad! [Long Live Indira Gandhi!].’ In Jhingergacha, a half-deserted city of about 5,000 nearby, people gather to tell of their ordeal. The Pakistanis shot us when we didn’t understand,’ said one old man. ‘But they spoke Urdu and we speak Bengali.’ ”

{….}

In New Delhi, the mood was not so much jingoism as jubilation that India’s main goal — the establishment of a government in East Bengal that would en sure the return of the refugees — was accomplished so quickly. There was little surprise when Prime Minister Gandhi announced to both houses of Parliament early last week that India would become the first government to recognize Bangladesh. Still, members thumped their desks, cheered loudly and jumped in the aisles to express their delight. “The valiant struggle of the people of Bangladesh in the face of tremendous odds has opened a new chapter of heroism in the history of freedom movements,” Mrs. Gandhi said. “The whole world is now aware that [Bangladesh] reflects the will of an overwhelming majority of the people, which not many governments can claim to represent.”

{….}

As a Bangladesh official put it at the opening of the new nation’s first diplomatic mission in New Delhi last week: “It is a dream come true, but you must also remember that we went through a nightmare.”

Time Magazine 20 December 1971

 The new nation of Bangladesh became the 8^th most populous in the world. The new government, by April 1972 led by Sheik Mujibur Rahman, struggled with the fundamental problems of the country, including increasing corruption. In the aftermath of a famine in 1974, he banned all opposition parties and declared himself president in a one party state. Seven months later, on 15 August 1975 (ironically Indian Independence Day), he, and most of his family, were assassinated. After the 1971 war, the Military regime of Yahya Khan fell immediately and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto became Prime Minister in the Pakistan that remained. He was hanged by a different military dictator, Zia al Huq, in 1979. His daughter, Benazir, died in a bombing in 2007.  General Tikka Khan, ‘The Butcher of Bengal’, mastermind and leader of the repression in the east, became, a few years later, the head of the section which developed Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.

 And so my adventure ended. There was still an interview on the Today programme, an interview with Radio London, several print paper interviews, the meeting with Lord Brockway, an several visits to the Hospital for Tropical Diseases. And then it was Christmas and New Year with Anna and some friends,  and then it was 1972, and my year of living dangerously had ended, and I was ready to face a new one.

8-14 December Calcutta again, and then onward…

By about 8 o’clock in the morning  the Brigadier called my companion and I into his tent where he introduced us to an Army captain who was going to return with us to Calcutta. He dismissed our profusive thanks, and mutual wishes for success in our endeavours, we parted. By lunchtime we were indeed back in Calcutta, my companion was reunited with her husband, and I was put into a hotel, which had a bed with white sheets and a soft mattress. My Omega colleagues arranged immediate interviews for me with a number of journalists and I gave an live radio interview to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on what I had been doing, and what was happening ‘at the front’. I also spoke to members of the British print press.  

I do not remember much of those two or three days in Calcutta. The British Consulate arranged for a new passport for me, and that evening, or perhaps the following evening, I was invited to a dinner at the home of a member of the Consulate staff. It was a very kind gesture, but I did feel very much out of place with my dishevelled appearance, limited-clothing and flip flops, not to mention limited conversation, among the sophisticated Calcutta intelligentsia. The white-gloved, white jacketed, impeccably mannered stewards who brought round the drinks and hors d’oeuvres, before sitting us all down to the silver service dinner, were beyond my ken. The evening was no doubt intended to make me feel at home and among friends, but as it bore no relation to any aspect of my life, ever, never mind the last few months, the evening provided me with significant culture shock.

 Because of the war, Dum Dum airport in Calcutta was closed, and the only airport that was still operational for civilian, and international flights, was in Bombay, on the other side of the country. It was agreed that I should take a train from Calcutta to Bombay and catch a flight from there to London. So on my second, or third, day back in Calcutta, shiny new passport and an airline ticket from Bombay to London in my pocket, and a second-class train ticket from Calcutta to Bombay in my hand, I boarded a train with fond farewells from my erstwhile colleagues, and set off across India. The journey was long and slow, 60 hours, but generally uneventful. I spoke and listened to people on the train about the war, about politics, about my experiences, which were, I think,  mainly taken as the exaggeration of an overindulged western hippy.  I bought food from vendors at stations along the way. I bought a small book about Guru Nanak, and one about Gandhi, and eventually got to Bombay. I had 24 hours to spend there, so I checked into a very cheap hotel.  Bombay was busy and crowded, but compared with the ordered chaos of Calcutta, seemed to be more ordered, and less chaotic.   I ate at a vegetarian restaurant that evening, close to the hotel, as the entire city was under blackout restrictions and it was difficult to see where one was going. Despite the reminder that this was still a country at war, that evening I felt that I was beginning to learn how to live in society again.

 The western part of India is on full wartime alert. All cities are completely blacked out at night, fulfilling, as it were, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s warning that it would be a “long, dark  December.” Air raid sirens wail almost continuously. During one 15-hour period in the Punjab, there were eleven airraid alerts. One all-clear was sounded by the jittery control room before the warning blast was given. The nervousness, though, was justified: two towns in the area had been bombed with a large loss of life as Pakistani air force planes zipped repeatedly across the border. Included in their attacks was the city of Amritsar, whose Golden Temple is the holiest of holies to all Sikhs. At Agra, which was bombed in the Pakistanis’ first blitz, the Taj Mahal was camouflaged with a forest of twigs and leaves and draped with burlap because its marble glowed like a white beacon in the moonlight.

Time Magazine 20 December 1971

 The following afternoon I set off for Santa Cruz airport arriving there at 4 PM ready to catch my anticipated 8 PMAir India  flight. I managed to check-in and go through immigration to the heavily curtained, dimly lit, departure lounge. But at 6 PM I learned that my plane, along with all others, was going to be delayed. They did not say why, or for how long, but it was easy to guess why.  I, together with great number of other people for my, and other flights, began to make ourselves comfortable for the night. At 0230 in the morning my flight was called, and we were hurried aboard the plane. Sometime around 0330 in the morning we took off. It was a strange and rather frightening takeoff,  as there were no lights on the runway, or indeed visible from the airport itself, and the aeroplane did not show any lights either. We hurtled through the dark along the runway,  taking off before the end and flying up very steeply up and then immediately veering South West.

 Six hours later, we landed in Cairo, but were not allowed off the plane. There was some concern that we would not be allowed to take off again, as Egypt was not a supporter of India in the conflict. There had, I learned much later, been a diplomatic incident a few days previously, when two large Soviet military transports had stopped over in Cairo, filled with war materiele for India. The planes were eventually allowed to proceed, at the cost of a great deal of goodwill between Egypt and the Soviet Union. We were kept on the plane for more than four hours before it was agreed that we could be refuelled and take off again. Which we did, arriving in London in the early evening of 14 December.

7 December(2): Jessore under new management

At about five o’clock in the evening my prison officer friend shouted from the bottom of my stairwell,

‘They are here! The Indian Army is here! They will take you away!’

I gathered my few possessions and waited downstairs. My friend had gone to the women’s section to collect my colleague and soon we were together in the Governor’s office in the gatehouse. There, sitting with the prison governor, were three Indian army officers and a fourth man who was not in uniform. Brigadier Salik was the commanding officer of the Armoured Regiment of the Ninth Infantry Division of the Second Army Corps, and had with him a major and a lieutenant. The prison governor had explained to him who we were and why we were here and as we entered the room, the Brigadier and his companions rose, shook us both by the hand, and the Brigadier said jovially,

“I bet you’re jolly glad to see us! Well, you’re free now, we just need to do some paperwork. You can come back with me to India tonight and then we can sort you out and get you back to Calcutta tomorrow.”

We learnt that he had been told of our presence when he had visited the good priests at the Mission Hospital: he had been unaware that there were any other foreigners in Jessore. The fourth man, the one not in uniform, turned out to be the liaison officer for the Mukti Bahini, the Bengali Liberation Army. Pulling out a sheet of headed notepaper with a Bangladesh flag and Bengali script at the top of the page from his briefcase, he went into the next office, with the Governor. Using a typewriter, he typed out two letters, one for my colleague, and one for myself. With a dateline “in the field”, and the date, 7th December, the letters stated that the Provisional Government of Bangladesh held no charges against us and that we were free to leave the country. While he was doing that, the Brigadier was explaining that he had come ahead into Jessore but that his armoured regiment was on the road approaching the town. The Pakistani army had withdrawn completely and he was slightly disappointed that there had as yet been no fighting in this sector of the war zone. He did note that 7 December is the date of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and that  

‘…today is the 30th anniversary. That will make it easy to remember the day you were released from prison in Jessore.’

It so proved.

The Brigadier gave some instructions to the governor of the prison and left the major to act as temporary Martial Law Administrator, together with the Mukti Bahini official as Civil Administrator, on behalf of the Provisional Government of Bangladesh. He and his two now ex-prisoners left the prison for good. Outside the gates was a small crowd, surrounding two open jeeps each flying a small regimental flag at the top of the rather long flex radio antenna. One jeep had a mounted machine gun in the back, and was fully occupied by three heavily armed Indian soldiers with a driver.  The other jeep was empty. We were escorted to the empty jeep and climbed into the back, along with the lieutenant. The Brigadier got into the front with the driver,  and the second jeep, obviously the escort, pulled in front of us and led the way out of the town. By now it was getting dark and the two jeeps, with the flags flying, set off at speed along the metalled road back towards India. This was the same road that we had been brought into Jessore in the back of a lorry from Shamilia mission, nine weeks previously.

 The journey to the Indian border was not far, about 30 km,  but it took us almost four hours to get to the large Army Corps Command base at Khrishnagore.  Our rapid speed out of Jessore was soon abated as we began to meet the Armoured regiment, coming the other way along the narrow road, with few passing places. There were armoured cars and armoured vehicles, there were trucks carrying tanks, there were heavy field artillery pieces being pulled by lorries, and there were truckloads of soldiers, and more truckloads of soldiers. The going was very slow, and the brigadier stopped on a number of occasions to talk to his troops and officers and give instructions. Knowing we were on our way to safety and freedom, the presence of a large armoured regiment  was not only reassuring, but I certainly saw it as an army on a mission of justice. It was a memorable evening and journey.

 By about 10 PM we had reached the Indian border, crossed it at Krishnagore, and made our way to the Indian Army encampment. It was a cold December evening, and while I had put on trousers and a shirt to face my freedom, the long cold journey in an open jeep, and the fact I had only flip-flop sandals on my feet meant that I was very cold. My colleague was given a tent to herself to sleep in, and I was shown to a tent where there were four Beds made up. I went straight to bed and slept through most of the night wondering before I did so whether this was real, and whether I was really out of prison and on my way to freedom. I woke before dawn, my feet still deeply chilled, so I went for a walk around the camp, ending up by a field kitchen, and a huge, warm coal-fired stove. I was offered a cup of sweet milky tea in a tin mug, and I gulped my first mouthful too quickly, burning my lip on the tin mug, and my tongue with the boiling hot tea. But it was worth it. It warmed me up, and as the sky lightened and the sun began to appear in the East I finally felt the exhilaration that it was all real, I was back in India, I was among friends, and soon I would be going back to London.

7 December (1): no mans land

It was soon after dawn the following morning, 7 December, that my cell mate woke me in excitement. There was a lot of noise throughout the prison.

‘They have gone! The Army is gone! The prison is open!’

I dressed quickly, as my cell mate ‘packed’ his meagre possessions.

‘I am going home,’ he said.

I walked with him to the gate, where the warders and officers, all dressed in civilian clothes, stood by the wide open double gates, smoking and shaking hands with the prisoners as they left through the gates. I bid Mohamed a fond farewell, wishing him success in getting home, and telling him to avoid embezzlement in the future. He suggested, very sensibly, that I stay where I am,

 ‘…so the Indian Army can find you easily,’

and then he went out into the no-man’s land that was the town of Jessore that day. I hope he made it back to his home and family. 

The prison governor and my friendly officer both seconded Mohamed’s advice, to stay within the prison until such time it was clear who was in charge.  I went to the women’s quarters and called my companion to the (still) locked gate, and she agreed that we would be better off staying where we were for the moment. With large (though rapidly decreasing) numbers of excited prisoners running around the prison, I suggested that she remain within the women’s quarters, and I would keep her updated on any news.

 The day was a strange one. The prison itself grew eerily quiet and empty. Outside, in the streets, there was some evidence of celebration, distant choral shouts of ‘Jai Bangla’, and occasional sporadic gunfire, whether in earnest or celebration, I do not know. For the most part, after an early tour of the rapidly emptying prison, I remained in my cell. I was too excited/apprehensive/anticipatory to read or do very much except pace the cell, look out the window to the invisibly changed outside world, and make occasional forays to the gate, to see if there was any news, and pass on any news to my colleague through the locked gate.

 Members of the gaol staff were present but dressed in civilian clothes. One of the guards, a chubby man who was generally very jolly, but today was grey with worry, moved into the prison with his entire family. He had brought them here because he and his family were not Bengalis, they were from Bihar, in India, and he had come as a small child at partition. As a Muslim, who believed in Pakistan, he was very fearful of Bengali nationalism, and of his own family’s safety. And had therefore brought his family to the comparatively safe domains of the prison where some degree of authority still existed.

5/6 December: breath bated

There was another bombing raid the following morning, 5^th December, with more concentrated anti aircraft fire, but the bombers did their duty, and they, and their fighter escorts, flew off without incident. Well, without incident in the air, anyway.  The skyline over the cantonment, showed many plumes of smoke. I had counted at least 20 explosions.

After that, all was quiet, and there was a collective bating of breath, no-one yet sure what would happen next. Would the Indian Army arrive? Undoubtedly, but when? What would the Pakistan forces do? Would they initiate a scorched earth policy? Would they kill all the prisoners? Would they destroy Jessore?  Would they dig in, and turn Jessore into a battlefield? Would we be in the middle of that battlefield?

For the next 24 hours there were no answers. By the afternoon of 6 December, rumours spread around the prison.

‘The army is leaving!’

Others said this was a false rumour to flush out Mukti Buhini collaborators, and the army would kill anyone who celebrated the news of withdrawal.  I went to bed that night apprehensive, but also exhilarated: something would happen soon. The quiet night was disturbed by an ongoing series of unexplained explosions coming from the Military cantonment.

The beginning of the end: war begins

As November progressed, it became clear that war was drawing ever nearer. It began with the small things:  the fact that our lawyer did not return; news that the daily flight to Dacca had been suspended, which in turn meant that the government-run propaganda paper in English, which I received regularly from my cellmate, no longer arrived.  Local rumour replaced centrally devised propaganda as our source of news.

 The general atmosphere in the gaol changed as well. There seemed to be a greater tension in the air, and perhaps some anticipation. Within the jail there were mixed views and feelings. For the large number of detained prisoners, the idea that the Mukti Bahini would soon liberate Jessore, and therefore them, was exciting and positive.  For the staff at the jail the feelings were more mixed: while they personally might welcome liberation forces, it was less clear how the liberation forces would receive them.  For a few members of staff the future was very uncertain.  These were the Biharis, Muslims who came from India at the time of partition during the great disturbances that that involved. As non-Bengalis, committed to the idea of Pakistan, the rise of a nationalist Bengali nation was not an attractive prospect.

 By the end of November Indian fighter planes were flying over Jessore, too fast and high to be a target for anyone, though war had not yet been officially declared.  On the morning of 3 December we learned that India and Pakistan were now officially at war and it was clear that, unlike in earlier wars, there would be an Eastern front to this one.  Later that morning a trio of Indian Mig-21 fighter planes flew low over Jessore and the military cantonment, circling twice before flying off at a great speed.  This caused considerable excitement in the prison, particularly among the prisoners. Later that afternoon the sound of aircraft once more filled the air. I went to stand on the roof of the spiral stair to see what was happening. Two large, lumbering, Vulcan bombers were flying through the air towards the military cantonment.  Flying considerably faster, in protective circles around the bombers, were three Mig-21s. Only seconds later, the bombers’ payload landed in the cantonment in a series of crumping explosions. A short time after the last bomb explosion there was a much louder explosion and towards the horizon large plumes of smoke began to rise. The war had reached Jessore. The level of tension in the prison rose. There was a sense of bated breath. Would there be more bombing? Ground fighting?   

 The following day three Mig-21s returned, without the bombers, I assume on a reconnaissance mission.  I was standing on the roof of the stairwell, barechested in my lungi, shading my eyes as I watched them fly by.  One of the fighters broke off from its position and swung down towards the prison. I was convinced that it was the sight of my long-haired, almost naked pale body, that attracted the pilot’s attention.  He certainly seemed to fly almost directly towards me. The plane flew close enough for me to see the Sikh pilot, complete with turban, radio headphones and microphone, turning and staring out the window at me. I would claim later that it was the downdraught from the fighter, but the reality was pure fear of this howling high-tech machine bearing down on me with a fierce, bearded and turbaned pilot staring intently  at me, that made me leap from the roof, into the stairs below me, as the plane flew over me, barely 20metres above my head, and leaving, indeed, a strong downdraft of wind. I climbed up again, hearing the muffled ‘pumfs’ of fruitless anti-aircraft fire from the cantonment, and listening to the fighter jets powering away again.

 That moment of intimacy with the fighter pilot has stayed with me through the years: for its personalisation of a machine driven conflict, for the very mixed feelings aroused by enthusiasm for the purpose of the fighter planes, and the knowledge that their success would be of personal benefit to me. Provided, yes, very much provided, that I did not become a contingent casualty in their success.  My friendly prison officer sought me out immediately afterwards. He had seen me on the roof, and seen the plane pass so closely over me. It was he that I told the wind had pushed me down. He was greatly excited, and in muted tones told me why. 

‘Soon you will be free, the Indian Air Force is looking for you! Soon Bangladesh will be free! Jai Bangla! ‘

I was sure that the pilot’s interest in me was momentary, but shared the officer’s enthusiasm for the possibility that the Pakistan army might soon be leaving. That moment, and that conversation, brought me the realisation that the world can change, and very quickly. Which is very unsettling when you are content with life as it is, but equally exhilarating when life is not as you would prefer it.

Not forgotten

Somewhere around the middle of November, there was a visit to the gaol by a group of international journalists, on an army tour of the border regions, to demonstrate how peaceful they were.  I was called (though my companion was not) to meet with them.  There were four of them, one from the UK, and the others from European papers.  I cannot remember where any of them were from, though I was told.  They were accompanied by a Pakistani army officer, whom I did not recognise. The prison governor also sat in on the meeting, looking uncomfortable. Our conversation was very limited, They learned from the officer that I was being well treated, despite being a criminal, and going through an appeal process, ‘because the legal system in Pakistan works’.  I was asked a couple of questions by the journalists, but apart from confirming who I was, and the reason I was there, all other questions were answered by their army escort. As they left, after about 30 minutes, the British journalist quietly asked if he could tell anyone he had seen me. I asked him to contact Operation Omega, on behalf of both of us. I believe that he did so. Though the visit was brief and very contrived, it was quietly cheering that the outside world was taking interest in the situation in the country, and indeed in my colleague’s and my welfare. My friendly guard later told me that the Governor had told him that it was the journalists who had asked to see us, and the army had agreed only grudgingly. This explained the control of the meeting exerted by the army officer.

 PAKISTAN: IMPRISONMENT OF MR. GORDON SLAVEN

375

§ LORD BROCKWAY

My Lords, I beg leave to ask the first question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.

§ [The Question was as follows:

§ To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they will make representations to the Government of Pakistan for the release of Gordon Slaven, a British citizen, who has been sentenced to two years' imprisonment for relief activity in East Bengal in circumstances which contravened regulations regarding entry.]

§ THE PARLIAMENTARY UNDERSECRETARY OF STATE, FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH OFFICE (THE MARQUESS OF LOTHIAN)

My Lords, Mr. Gordon Slaven, who pleaded guilty to the charges made against him under the Foreigners’ Act 1946 for entering East Pakistan by a route not authorised for entry by foreigners, has appealed against the sentence. A British firm of solicitors has been appointed to act on his behalf, 376 and lawyers have been briefed in East Pakistan. In present circumstances there are no grounds for representations by Her Majesty’s Government.

§ LORD BROCKWAY

My Lords, while appreciating the assistance which has been given, may I ask whether the noble Marquess is aware that this man is a sincere young pacifist; that he went with a young American pacifist for relief work; that as a pacifist he declined a military escort and that it was because of that that he was arrested—because of his convictions?

§ THE MARQUESS OF LOTHIAN

My Lords, I think that the House certainly appreciates the idealistic motives behind Mr. Slaven’s and his companion’s wish to enter East Pakistan, but of course it must be for these people to obey the laws of the country. As I said, although I appreciate the noble Lord’s kind remarks in regard to the interest we have taken in this case, there is really nothing that Her Majesty’s Government can do at the moment.

HL Deb 10 November 1971 vol 325 cc375-6   Hansard 10 November 1970

 Another question in the house: House of Lords this time. Question raised by Lord (Fenner) Brockway, and batted away elegantly by the Marquess of Lothian.  Later, when I was released, I went to meet Lord Brockway briefly in the House of Lords. He was, of course, charming, and I was clumsily grateful for his intervention, and told him my story, at which he expressed interest and thanked me for my non-violent approach. I am still slightly embarrassed at how ignorant I was.  I knew he was an old man (he was actually 84 when I met him), and well respected, but had no real idea of who he was.

Who he was, of course, was the doyen of the British peace movement. Born in Calcutta in 1888, he started work as a journalist, and became a member of the Independent Labour Party in 1907. By 1913 he was a committed pacifist, and during World War 1 he was arrested three times for pacifist activity, spending 2 months in Pentonville for distributing anti-war pamphlets, and later served two years under the Military Service Act   (including a night in the Tower of London), being released long after the end of the war. He joined the India League, promoting Indian independence. He was the first  chair of War Resisters International in 1926. He first became a Labour MP in 1929 for Leyton, but lost his seat in 1931 because he opposed the cross-party National Government

He moved away from pacifism in the 1930’s, realising that fascism needed to be fought, brought home particularly in the Spanish Civil War.  He sent a letter of recommendation for Eric Blair (aka George Orwell) to join the International Brigade in Spain.  After spending time in Spain he wrote “”There is no doubt that the society resulting from an anarchist victory (during the Spanish Civil War) would have far greater liberty and equality than the society resulting from a fascist victory. Thus I came to see that it is not the amount of violence used which determines good or evil results, but the ideas, the sense of human values, and above all the social forces behind its use. With this realisation, although my nature revolted against the killing of human beings just as did the nature of those Catalonian peasants, the fundamental basis of my old philosophy disappeared.“  

After Fascism was essentially defeated in the Second World War, he reiterated his belief ina slightly less purist pacifism. He rejoined the Labour Party, and won the unlikely constituency of Eton and Slough in the 1950 election. He was defeated, narrowly, in the 1964 election. He then accepted a life peerage as Baron Brockway. 

Fenner Brockway was also one of the four founders of the charity War on Want in 1951, one of the six founding members (others included Bertrand Russell J.B. Priestley and Michael Foot) of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and was a pioneer in steering the first legislation on racial discrimination through parliament in the late 1950’s. He died in 1988, just before his 100^th birthday. There is a statue of him in Red Lion Square in London. A ‘Fennerfest’ is still celebrated annually in Slough, and among its friends on Myspace, is one Michael Meacher, who asked the earlier question in the House of Commons.…

In other news, November 1971 saw Mariner 9 become the first spacecraft from Earth to enter Mars orbit.  Doing something that had a profoundly more lasting effect on the way we live: Intel launched the world’s first  microprocessor. And finally, this was the month that a man leapt from a plane he had hijacked, somewhere over Colorado, with a parachute and $200,000 ransom money, and was never seen again.

Days in the life…

My days in my new cell soon developed their own routine. I woke around dawn, when the gate at the bottom of the stairs was unlocked and opened with a clang. I stayed in bed, out of the way, while Azziz did his morning ablutions downstairs, and then dressed, and left for the office. Once he had gone, I went downstairs and had a cold shower in my lunghi, though on particularly chilly mornings I restricted myself to a comprehensive wash. I then went back upstairs, and the rest of the day was at my leisure.

 The food given to a Category A prisoner was not, unfortunately, any improvement on the food I had previously received. Breakfast was a bowl with thin dahl, or lentil soup, and a chapatti. Lunch was the same, and dinner substituted rice for chapatti. Sometimes the rice appeared at lunchtime instead of dinner, just to add variety to the meals.  Although it was Ramadan from late October, and breakfast and dinner were provided in the dark, I was still served my lunch each day, as were other non-Muslim, usually Hindu, prisoners.   I received a banana on three occasions. One of those occasions was the feast of Eid el Fit’r, at the end of Ramadan, on 21 November. I had a front row view of the preparations for the feast for the first half of the day. On the ground below my cell, between our building and the prison wall, soon after dawn three goats were brought, and tethered. At about 10am, someone came to the goats, obviously not a member of the Gaol staff, for he was accompanied by a warder. I later learned that he was not, as I had initially thought, a prisoner, but was a halal butcher brought in especially.  He pulled out a very sharp knife, and approached the first goat, and after a brief ritual, he slit its throat, and held it tight, until he could lay it on the ground, and let its blood flow until it expired. It was interesting to watch, if somewhat gory, but the real surprise to me was the complete indifference of the other goats to the quick and bloody death of their companion. Similarly when the second goat was dispatched, the last goat showed little interest, and even when it was its turn, it seemed to accept its fate without demur.  I could not but think that this could be a metaphor for humanity’s ability to ignore the fate of our neighbours, not realising that it will be our fate next… Or perhaps goats are just particularly stupid. Once dead, the goats were skinned, and butchered, the lumps of meat were piled onto large basins and taken away. That evening, I, and all prisoners, got some goat meat and a hard-boiled egg with our dahl and rice, as well as a banana, as a celebratory treat. It was good.

The days were long and mainly empty. Apart from looking out over the wall to the fields, and daydreaming about flying away, I spent time drawing my pack of cards as I smoked my cigarettes, and created three new cards as I finished each pack of 10 from my benefactors, the priests. In less than three weeks,  by early November, I had my full pack, and was able to play patience whenever the mood took me, which was fairly regularly. 

 When not playing patience, I gazed in wonderment at the advertisements in the Esquire magazine, and read the articles, many times, with ongoing puzzlement at the importance attached to the minutiae of domestic US politics; to estoteric (to me)  cultural issues; and to the importance of appropriate sartorial style.  Of course, there were also the mystery novels, that also evoked an England, or an America, that I had never known, but which was comfortingly familiar, nonetheless.

To keep myself fit, I did pull-ups, using the top of the spiral staircase to grip on, and pulling myself up from a way down the stairs. I also did push-ups on the floor of the cell. Sometimes, I even went for runs around the cell, or played wall touch: running from one side of the cell to the other, as fast as I could, until I wore myself out. Nonetheless, as the weeks passed by, the water, and monotonous diet, began to have a deleterious effect on me, I had constant diarrhoea, and developed ringworm on many parts of my body, and the spectre of ‘general debility’ loomed ever larger. A visit to the depressing doctor let me know that I ‘probably’ had dysentery, but he had no medicine for it. I ‘definitely’ had ringworm, but he had no medicine for that either, but ‘it might go away by itself.’ I began to wonder if I would last for two years.

 In the evening the electric light went out at eight, and so that was when we went to sleep. The bed, while not exactly comfortable, was considerably better than lying on the floor, and the mosquito net made a great deal of difference to my comfort.  The nights were not always peaceful. The windows were glass-free, and bats flew in and through the room, freely. Only once did one fly into my mosquito net, and, apart from giving me a start, as it fell to the floor with a scream, but it quickly recovered and flew off again. Not all the bats were as fortunate, however. As well as the nocturnal bats, we had other nocturnal visitors: cats.  I never knew where they came from, but at least three feral cats seemed to find our room a congenial habitat after dark. They sometimes fought each other, noisily; sometimes they seemed much more friendly, but that was equally noisy; and sometimes they were lucky enough to catch a bat. On these occasions, the lucky hunter retreated to under my bed, and, growling to keep their caterwauling companions away from the feast, they crunched their way through their treat. Sleeping on nights like these was intermittent, and a momento mori.

Jessore Gaol: improved circumstances

Although we never saw our high-powered lawyer again, there was a positive result from his visit. Our petition to be upgraded to Category A prisoners continued to be processed, and at the end of October the prison Governor called us both in to tell us that he was very pleased to inform us that our petitions had been granted, though I’m still not sure by whom. I am fairly sure it was not the military authorities. My companion and I were both immediately, that very day, upgraded to Category A prisoners. I later learned that, for her, it meant little change, but for me it was a very significant change in my circumstances.

I was moved from my basic first floor cell, with the view of the block for disturbed prisoners,  to a different first-floor cell, about four times the size, with two barred windows, which I shared with one other prisoner. This large room was accessed by an enclosed spiral staircase at the side, with a flat open space at the top.  The cell ‘gate’, was at the bottom of the stairs, which was locked at night, and there was a normal door at the top which we could close or leave open as we saw fit. There were other wonderful things about my new accommodation. Firstly I had a wooden bed, with three blankets: one for underneath me, one on top of me, and the third blanket acting as a pillow. More importantly, there were posts at each corner of the bed and overhanging the whole thing was a mosquito net. Luxury! 

The cell was relatively close to the prison wall, and from my bed, I could see out of the window, and if I lay down low enough, I could avoid seeing any of the prison grounds, and see over the wall, and see a world that was not gaol, but a world of fields, and palm trees, and a world of people going about their daily business of farming. This view of a normal, if different, world, did wonders for my disposition. Even though the people I saw were farmers and labourers, their (comparative) ability to go where they pleased, and to go home at the end of their day, and to talk to friends and companions of their choosing, cheered me enormously.  I was not envious of them, but rather grateful to be able to observe normal life, and whenever anyone was working in the fields, or walking along the paths, I watched them,  a hungry voyeur of another normality. 

That is not to say that I did not have long and complicated fantasies of escape. With a leap I was over the wall of the Gaol, and making my wary way across the flooded, war-torn land to Calcutta… No, that would not work, I would not be able to blend in with the local people, there were too many armed people around, it would be too dangerous. No, there was nothing else for it. I would have to learn to fly, circling higher and higher above the gaol, like the raptors I watched when not watching the farmers, until I caught the jet stream (now, which way does that blow?), and cruised back to London,  sustaining myself on miraculously appearing Mars Bars.

 My new cellmate, Azziz, was very welcoming, considering that he had had this vast space to himself before my arrival. Azziz was the only other Category A prisoner in the gaol. He was about 40: short dapper, well groomed with fastidiously oiled and combed hair, laundered white shirt and lunghi, well-educated, with very good English, and very cheerful. He had a full-time job working within the prison office, doing the accounts and other administrative tasks. He was a key part of the prison administration, despite being a prisoner. He told me all this information (that I could not observe for myself) in the first 30 minutes of our meeting. He, of course, knew all about me already. He told me that he had been in jail for slightly more than two years, with about another two years to go, or less if he got time off for good behaviour, and he was hoping that  would be the case. He could possibly be out in less than nine months, he whispered, not wanting to jeopardize his chances by saying it too loudly. He lived in a small town not far from Jessore, where his wife still lived with his two children. They did not come to visit him in gaol. It took me some days  to work up to asking him why he was in jail. When I finally did, he replied ” embezzlement” and quickly changed the subject to the joys of mosquito nets, and the importance of hanging them right. 

Later, from my friendly prison officer, I learned that Azziz had been a school headteacher who had embezzled government funds for his school, and skimmed parents’ fees for himself. ‘But he was a very good teacher and headteacher,’ my informant concluded. By the time I had learned of this dubious part of his character, his cheerful, helpful  and undemanding companionship had already made him  someone I was happy to share a cell with. As he was out of the cell at work for the whole day, most days, there was no opportunity to be irritated by him nor, I hope, him by me.

 

 

Meanwhile in the world…

In the outside world, things were moving along apace, and the likelihood of war between India and Pakistan was growing. The situation in East Pakistan, and the 10 million refugees crowded into West Bengal, was pushing India’s, and the world’s, resources to the limits.

IN New Delhi last week, one member of Prime the Indira Gandhi’s Cabinet was heard to remark: “War is inevitable.” In Islamabad, President Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan spent the better part of a 40-minute television speech railing against the Indians, whom he accused of “whipping up a war frenzy.” Along their borders, east and west, both India and Pakistan massed troops. Both defended the action as precautionary, but there was a real danger that a minor border incident could suddenly engulf the subcontinent in all-out war. {…}

The current dispute has grown out of the Pakistani army’s harsh repression of a Bengali movement demanding greater autonomy for the much-exploited eastern sector of the divided nation. The resulting flood of impoverished East Pakistani refugees has placed an intolerable strain on India’s already overburdened economy. New Delhi has insisted from the first that the refugees, who now number well over 9,000,000 by official estimates, must be allowed to return safely to their homes in East Pakistan. {….}

Though Islamabad has ordered the military command to ease off on its repressive tactics, refugees are still trekking into India at the rate of about 30,000 a day, telling of villages burned, residents shot, and prominent figures carried off and never heard from again. One of the more horrible revelations concerns 563 young Bengali women, some only 18, who have been held captive inside Dacca’s dingy military cantonment since the first days of the fighting. Seized from Dacca University and private homes and forced into military brothels, the girls are all three to five months pregnant. The army is reported to have enlisted Bengali gynecologists to abort girls held at military installations. But for those at the Dacca cantonment it is too late for abortion. The military has begun freeing the girls a few at a time, still carrying the babies of Pakistani soldiers.

No one knows how many have died in the seven-month-old civil war. But in Karachi, a source with close connections to Yahya’s military regime concedes: “The generals say the figure is at least 1,000,000.” Punitive raids by the Pakistani army against villages near sites sabotaged by the Mukti Bahini, the Bengali liberation army, are an everyday occurrence. The fighting is expected to increase sharply in the next few weeks, with the end of the monsoon rains. Both the Pakistani army, most of whose 80,000 troops are bunkered down along the Indian border, and the Mukti Bahini, with as many as 60,000 guerrilla fighters, have said that they will soon open major new military offensives.

On a recent trip deep into Mukti Bahini territory, TIME Correspondent Dan Coggin found an almost surreal scene. He cabled:

“Leaving the road behind, I entered a strange world where water is seasonal king and the only transport is a large, cane-covered canoe known as the country boat. For seven hours we plied deeper into Gopalganj subdivision in southern Faridpur district. The two wiry oarsmen found their way by taking note of such landmarks as a forlornly decaying maharajah’s palace and giant butterfly nets hovering like outsized flamingos on stilt legs at water’s edge.

“As darkness approached, we were able to visit two neighboring villages, with about 25 guerrillas living among the local folk in each. The guerrillas were mostly men in their 20s, some ex-college students, others former soldiers, militiamen and police. Their arms were various but plentiful, and they had ammunition, mines and grenades.

“A Mukti Bahini captain told me that the Bengali rebels are following the three-stage guerrilla warfare strategy of the Viet Cong, and are now in the first phase of organization and staging hit-and-run attacks. So far the guerrillas in the captain’s area of operations have lost about 50 men, and larger army attacks are expected. But the Mukti Bahini plan to mount ambushes and avoid meeting army firepower headon. {…}

 As conditions within East Pakistan have worsened, so have those of the refugees in India. The stench from poor sanitation facilities hangs heavy in the air. Rajinder Kumar, 32, formerly a clerk in Dacca, says he is “always hungry” on his daily grain ration of 300 grams (about 1½ cups). His three children each get half that much. “They cry for more,” he says, “but there isn’t any more.”

Malnutrition has reached desperate proportions among the children. Dr. John Seamon, a British doctor with the Save the Children Fund who has traveled extensively among the 1,000 or so scattered refugee camps estimates that 150,000 children between the ages of one and eight have died, and that 500,000 more are suffering from serious malnutrition and related diseases. {…}

Observers doubt that the situation would ease even if Yahya were to release Mujib and lift a ban on the Awami League. Where the Bengalis once were merely demanding greater autonomy, they now seem determined to fight for outright independence.

In his speech last week, Yahya also announced that the National Assembly would be convened in December, immediately following by-elections in the East to fill the Assembly seats vacated by disqualified Awami Leaguers. With the main party banned from participation, however, the election is likely to provoke more violence. Already the Mukti Bahini have vowed to treat candidates as dalals (“collaborators”).

Nonetheless, Yahya may find himself compelled to put his government at least partly in civilian hands. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, leader of West Pakistan’s majority Pakistan People’s Party and Yahya’s most probable choice for Prime Minister, has become more and more outspoken about “the rule of the generals.” Recently he said: “The long night of terror must end. The people of Pakistan must take their destiny in their own hands.” Formerly that sort of talk would have landed him in jail. Now even Yahya seems to have recognized that unless the military allows some sort of civilian rule it may face trouble in the West as well as in the ravaged East Time Magazine  Oct. 25, 1971

In other news, during October, the People’s Republic of China took over China’s permanent seat on the UN Security Council, displacing the Republic of China (Taiwan), and bringing China back to the top table of international powers. The Democratic Republic of Congo was renamed Zaire, which it remained for 26 years, before reverting back to its old name. And in the UK, the House of Commons voted in favour of joining the European Economic Community. The Vietnam war continued, though the number of US troops dropped below 200,000 for the first time since the beginning of 1966.

Contact with the world

A few days after the visit from the lawyer, we received the first of what were to become more regular visits, from the three Catholic priests at the Jessore Mission Hospital. These were good, jolly, practical men, informed of our plight by their colleagues at Shimulia,and  who took it on themselves to visit us in gaol. We were both very grateful,  for it was not only very good to talk to someone from ‘outside’, it was also the only opportunity that my colleague and I had of seeing each other. On the first visit, the priests, in response to our anxious enquiries, told us that Shimulia mission was still operating, but closely watched by both the Pakistan army, who had made two more ‘visits’ to the mission in the previous three weeks, but also by ‘others’, who had now agreed to stay away for a period. We did not have to enquire who the others were: they were the Mukti Bahini, the Bangladeshi nationalist guerrillas, supported by India, who were claiming control over ever larger areas of the border regions, and harrying the Pakistani troops whenever it was deemed sensible to do so, i.e. when encountered in small enough numbers. We were reassured by this news of Shimulia, and asked our visitors to pass on our deepest apologies and good wishes to their colleagues at the mission, and to tell them that we were well.

 More practically,  on  this first visit they also bought some paper, envelopes and ballpoint pens for us, to write letters home, and also some magazines and novels to read. They offered me some cigarettes, which I accepted gratefully: small packets of Players No 5 with 10 cigarettes in each. These were the old fashioned kind: boxes that had an outside cover made of stiff card, with a sliding internal panel that you pulled up to extract a cigarette. By the time I had consumed the first packet I realised that, within each packet there was three blank surfaces, which I could use to make playing cards. By smoking less than 200 cigarettes, I would have an entire set of playing cards, and could entertain myself by playing patience. I had a purpose again. I did in fact continue smoking thanks to the gifts of the priests, and by early November, I had successfully hand- drawn a set of playing cards. And I did indeed play patience with them. Often. I was very proud of my achievement. I still had them many years later.

 With the writing paper I wrote letters to my parents and to my sometime girlfriend in London, and they were received. By early November, I was receiving responses, from my parents, my girlfriend, and also from a number of unknown people expressing their support and good wishes for my health and early release.  My colleague also received both personal letters and other letters as well.  All had been through the prison’s censors. It was later that we learned that our names had been put on the list of Prisoners of Conscience by Amnesty International, and that the unsolicited letters were from people who were members of Amnesty International.  The letters, though very short and uncontroversial, were very pleasing to receive, and it was always reassuring to know that the world continued, outside the confines of prison. However, the political and security situation deteriorated, and by the middle of November, there was no further mail from the outside world.  Nevertheless,  as I later discovered, questions were being asked:  one by a young left-wing labour MP, called Michael.

 § Mr. Meacher

asked the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what action he proposes to take following the arrest and imprisonment in East Pakistan of the unarmed relief worker, Gordon Slaven, a British subject.

§ Mr. Anthony Royle

Mr. Slaven who is a member of the Organisation known as Operation Omega was arrested on 4th October and charged under Section 3(2)A of the Foreigners Act of 1946 with entering Pakistan by a route not authorised for entry by foreigners. He pleaded guilty, and was sentenced on 12th October to two years’ imprisonment. A member of the Deputy High Commission in Dacca attended Mr. Slaven’s trial.

HC Deb 22 October 1971 vol 823 c207W

Hansard 22 October

The eminently Christian priests also gave us paperbacks:  mysteries by Agatha Christie or the like; and also some magazines. My colleague received some Australian women’s magazines, and I was fortunate enough to be given copies of the American magazine Esquire. I received two copies of this at different visits. I have no idea how Catholic priests in a comparatively remote part of East Pakistan had obtained copies of Australian women’s magazines, and of Esquire, but I was very glad that they had. The paperbacks I devoured rapidly, re-read often, and at the next meeting with the priests I would swap the paperbacks I had read with my colleague, though we did not swap our magazines. The Esquire magazine was like a window onto a different world. It was a world of which I had no real understanding, even in my real life. And it seemed even more remote and fantastical when sitting in a cell in East Pakistan. The articles on American politics, on US social mores, and on the burning fashion issues of the day, I read with anthropological interest, but little understanding or connection. The advertisements, on the other hand, I pored over with a deep interest and some sense of loss. Advertisements for cars I would never be able to afford; for Scotch whisky, which was only a dream from where I was sitting; and for the glamorous lifestyle that could be mine, if only I smoked the right cigarette. Shallow as I undoubtedly was, it was the enticing dream of these adverts that kept me aware that there was a world beyond my current experience. I became a voyeur of rampant consumerism.

 The priests visited us regularly, at least every two weeks, and each time they brought us more gifts. more cigarettes, and we could offer them nothing in return. When things became difficult in the middle of November, they were no longer allowed to come and visit us. But it was they, at the end, who were instrumental in our release.

Jessore Gaol: Week one as a convict

Despite the sympathy and empathy of my fellow prisoners and prison staff on the day of my incarceration, and the very memorable gift of a banana that was brought to my cell by a warder a few days later, the next few days were fairly depressing. I had no contact with my colleague who was in the women’s section of the prison.  I understood from her later that there was far greater ‘sisterhood’ among them, than I had in my single, isolated cell. I continued to read and reread Titus Groan; I paced the bounds of my cell and the balcony; I tried to ignore the disturbed prisoners in my line of sight; and I thought of things that I missed, and would miss, over two years. Apart from the obvious lack of congenial human company, and my concern about how my family and friends would react to the fact of my two-year imprisonment, it was small things that I really missed. That week I had a particular craving for a Mars Bar, and spent a considerable amount of time considering tearing at its black and red wrapper, nibbling at the thick chocolate, and releasing the creamy caramel within…

 At the end of the first week as a convict, we were both called to the office in the gatehouse. There we met the promised lawyer from Dacca, who had been commissioned by the UK and US missions to deal with our case. He was charming, sleek, and worldly, having studied in the UK, and visited the US, and he put us very quickly at our ease. He explained that he had great confidence in our appeal being successful. The article of law under which we had been sentenced was not part of the statutory law, but an enabling law that had never entered the statutes. While I did not really understand what that meant, we understood that we were, therefore, wrongly imprisoned, even under Pakistani law. This was very cheering for us, and the lawyer was confident that within a month, or, at most, two months, we would have an appeal hearing, be released, and, he said with a laugh, be home in time for Christmas. He left us in the meeting room while he went to speak with the Governor of the gaol.  My friendly prison officer remained with us, and assured us that we had a very famous lawyer, who would ensure that we were released on appeal, as, of course, we should be, and indeed we should never have been put into jail in the first place.

 Our lawyer returned, about 30 minutes later, with some forms for us to fill in. These were the petitions to upgrade our level of prisoner, with greater privileges. I bridled somewhat at the language we were expected to use in order to put the petition forward. “I humbly petition … assuring you I will not take advantage of your generosity … I remain, your obedient servant …” but our lawyer was having none of my posturing.

  ”You’re in gaol. You know, and I know, and most of the people in this gaol know, that you should not be here. I will get you out of here as soon as I possibly can. But the reality is that, until I do, you are a prisoner of the system. And while you are a prisoner of the system, you use that system in the most appropriate way to make your life more comfortable. It will not be comfortable, even if you get upgraded. But there is absolutely no moral, legal or any other reason why you should not petition to be upgraded. Now, fill in the form and sign it please”.

 We both meekly did as he told us to do. After a final pep talk on how we should keep our spirits up, and that he would be working extremely hard to ensure our earliest possible release, he shook our hands warmly wiht both of his, said some words to the gaol officials, and left to catch his plane back to Dacca. As we were walked back to our respective cells, my colleague and I both agreed that this was a good sign, and that we could look forward to a comparatively early release. That night, I, for one, went to sleep, more confident that I expected to be, that there was an end in sight… even if the road to it was a little misty.

 We never did see our top lawyer again.

 

11 October: the trial, part 2

“ Guilty.”

“Two years simple imprisonment.”

These words the judge surrounded with many others, but it was these few devastating sounds that  resonated loudly around my head. My mind was flooded, first with disbelief, and then with a rising tide of despair.  I looked around, still refusing to accept what I heard, hoping to find contrary indicators in others’ faces. I saw that my fellow accused, Ellen; and the representative of the British High Commission, present to observe; had similar reactions to me, their faces a mixture of shock, confusion, and a hope that they had misheard. Many of the mainly military spectators in the crowded courtroom appeared to be equally surprised, and perhaps even shocked, by the unexpectedly severe sentence. The windows in the elderly British Raj-built courtroom were all open but there was little breeze, and two overhead fans stirred the thick, monsoon-humid air desultorily, but these did little to cool the crowded room.  Nonetheless, my sweat seemed to turn cold, and I had to suppress a shiver.

The diminutive civilian Bengali judge, in his open necked shirt, lungi, and sandals, sat in his place, dwarfed by the two very tall, smartly uniformed, severe West Pakistani officers sitting on each side of him, and looked at us seriously.  After banging his gavel once more to silence the murmuring, he asked, in Bengali, whether the accused had anything to say.  The interpreter repeated the question in English. My mind, emerging from its frozen disbelief;  ignored an insistent , ‘You should have had a lawyer,’ from the ‘should have’ part of my brain;  and rolodexed possible options for an appropriate thing to say that would not extend the sentence even further. From my ‘courtroom drama’ schema, I brought to the front of my mind a potential way forward.

 “Can we appeal?” I asked shortly.

 Following interpretation (though the judge and military assessors clearly understood English), the judge consulted quietly with the officers for some time, and with some apparent disagreement.  The military assessors appeared to finally bow to legal precedent, and, when the decision was agreed among them,  the judge responded flatly that we could appeal, declared the session closed, banged his gavel, and the court rose.

 He and his assessors stood and left the room, and the spectators, talking in hushed tones, filed out of the back of the courtroom. The armed soldiers around the edges of the room remained, and two of them took me and my fellow prisoner back to the anteroom off the side of the court room.  There, the Third Secretary of the British High Commission, and for this visit, representative of the American Consulate as well, came in to see us again.  He was obviously more than a little shocked by the severity of the sentence.  He had expected to be instructed to take us back to Dacca, and be responsible for seeing us out of the country as personae non grata.  Instead, in a very kind, if token, gesture, he passed me two bars of Imperial leather soap, and gave my American companion a small towel from his briefcase. He told us that he would get a lawyer onto an appeal as soon as he got back to Dacca; would make sure our organisation, and our families, learned what had happened; and wished us well, before, with a firm military handshake, he left us and set off for his plane back to Dacca.

 My older companion, whose husband was still in Calcutta, was, like me, in a state of some shock, but we kept up positive fronts for each other.  As we sat in the room, alone apart from the silent soldiers, waiting to be taken back to gaol, we agreed that two years in jail was very unlikely, and that the Pakistan government would be far better off getting rid of us, than having us stick around and become a political  irritant. We still had an unrealistically optimistic view of our own importance in the scheme of things. 

 A short time after the Third Secretary left, following a shouted order from outside, the soldiers took us out to a waiting three-tonne army lorry, loaded us into the tarpaulin covered back, where we sat at the dark end of the bench, with the four armed soldiers sitting at the back of the truck, by the opening. The back flap was lowered, and we were driven in khaki and oiled-tarpaulin seclusion the short distance back to the main gate of Jessore Gaol. When we had left from here earlier that morning, we had hoped it would be the last time we saw it.

 Once in the gatehouse, we were signed over to the Bengali prison Governor and his warders, who had been telephoned in advance to warn them of the imminent return of their new long term prisoners.  The Governor signed to confirm our delivery in good condition, and once the Pakistan army had departed the officials at the jail could not have been nicer. They appeared as shocked as we were when we were returned to the gaol with a two-year sentence. Their reaction, as the registration forms were being completed in the office in the gatehouse, was to bring us sweet milky tea, and sweet pastries to eat, which we accepted gratefully. The Governor advised us that we could petition to improve our category of prisoner, and get benefits likes a bed and mosquito net, provided we entered a suitable plea. We held off from that on the first day, both agreeing to await advice from our lawyer on whether that would impact on our appeal.

 The re-registration as convicts was completed, and we were then taken, once again, to the doctor. This time the examination was perfunctory, as it was less than a week since we had last been checked on our first arrival in the prison. My colleague was taken back to the women’s section after her examination. The young prison officer, who had accompanied me to the doctor’s office, did not take me directly back to my cell, but instead walked me around the prison. Obviously the news was already around the gaol. A number of the other warders and officers, and some of the prisoners who spoke English, shook my hand. Some merely said sorry, and others expressed their gratitude for what we had done, and their deep regret that that we had ended up in the predicament we now were. From prisoners who had been held, without charge, for up to six months with no clear indication of when their  incarceration might end, on even when they might be in a position to defend themselves in a court of law, this seemed generosity indeed.   When we were in a quiet and isolated part of the prison, the officer accompanying me stopped and told me that all the Bengalis were grateful for what we had tried to do, and that when the history of the “birth of independent and great Bangladesh” ‘amar sonar Bangla’ (which was undoubtedly coming soon)  was written, our names would be written in golden letters.

 Though I was still in a state of shock about our sentence, his words, together with the goodwill towards us expressed by almost all the staff and prisoners in the prison, reassured me that while I could not be happy with the result of the day’s proceedings, it had allowed the people with us in the gaol, both staff and prisoners, to freely state their own views on the issue. Without downplaying my ignorance and naivety, the feeling that I had foolishly interfered in complex matters where I had no business, was replaced by some reassurance that I was, after all, on the right side of history, and the reception from all the staff and prisoners in the jail on our return, made it clear that they had little sympathy with the martial law authorities, who had handed down the sentence.

 Even so, at the end of the day,  as the sun sank between the palm trees on the other side of the barbed-wire crested prison wall, and the cheerful warder delivered my evening meal of a chapatti and a ladleful of lukewarm watery dahl,  the adrenalin that had kept me going through the day subsided. The reality of my situation permeated my being, and my spirits sank with the sun. How had I ended up here, facing two years in an East Pakistan prison?

 

11 October: the trial, part 1

On the morning of the trial I woke early, and if I had anything to pack, I would have packed all my belongings. I was confident that my jail time was coming to an end, and that I would be deported as a result of the trial. It may mean a further night or two in this cell, or perhaps a night or two in jail in Dacca, but the end of my adventure was at hand, I believed. I was taken to the gatehouse where I met my companion for the first time since the day we were put into jail. She, like me, was optimistic that we would be deported and soon on our way to… somewhere better.   An army Lieutenant and six armed soldiers appeared and we were signed into their care, were taken outside the gate of the jail, and loaded onto the back of an army lorry very similar to the one in which we arrived at the jail five days previously. Four armed soldiers sat in the back with us, and the Lieutenant and two others were in the front. We drove the short distance to the courthouse. We were placed into an anteroom, along with two armed soldiers.

 Soon after, a representative of the British High Commission from Dacca appeared and introduced himself. He was here to observe the trial, he told us, and had authority to act on behalf of the United States Embassy as well. And if we were to be deported he would take us into his custody and back to Dacca, the same day. This sounded very promising and very exciting. I expressed my gratitude for his presence, and asked him how he had got this particular consular task to deal with. He said he was the only person that was free, and I asked him how he had come to this position. “Oh, the usual route,” he said, “20 years in the army and on retirement I joined the Foreign Office. And now I have ended up here.” To an American Quaker, and a wild colonial boy, it did not sound like a usual route to either of us. However, we were pleased that he was there, and appreciated the effort that had been taken to at least keep an eye open for us and our fate.  Soon we were called into the courtroom, where we sat at a table, with our two armed soldiers sitting at the side of the room, and a Bengali in a not very smart army uniform sat behind us.

 The room was full, and, although we did not have any lawyer, and sat alone at our desk, the prosecution desk had both a civilian and an army major sitting at it. When the judge, a diminutive Bengali in a white shirt and lungi, came in, the room stood. He was accompanied by two very large, very smartly uniformed, West Pakistani military officers. One of whom was the Colonel who had received us on the first day. This did not bode well. The judge told us, in English, that the proceedings would be conducted in Bengali, and that the person sitting behind us was our interpreter. We had noted his presence, but he had made no effort to speak to us until this point. The judge then explained what he had just said in Bengali, and before the proceedings got underway he asked as in English how we pleaded to the charge of illegal entry by an unauthorised route at odd hours of the night. On behalf of both of us, I told him that we did not recognise the authority of the court to stand between people in need and people who have the means to help them. The judge merely told the clerk to note that, but following whispered consultation from one of the military men at his side, he changed his instructions in Bengali. I suspect it was to scratch it from the record.

 Then proceeded a series of witnesses, none of whom I had knowingly seen before, who answered a series of questions in Bengali. When I asked the interpreter what an exchange, that had lasted several minutes, was about, his response was usually some version of “he said he saw you on the night of 3 October.” Or “he said he saw you at the mission on the morning of 4 October.” Since we had no idea of context in which this conclusion was reached, nor any reason to doubt that it was in fact true, there was very little that we could say about it.  After six witnesses had testified to the fact that we had been seen in East Pakistan, on the night of 3 October and the morning of 4 October with no proper papers, and not having had come through a legitimate border point, we were obviously guilty of the charge of illegal entry. The prosecuting lawyer summed it up by saying that we were clearly guilty of the charge. But, in addition to that, our contempt of court and sinister arrival, in the middle of the night, in a zone of active military deployment, meant that we were clearly up to no good, far beyond what we said we were here to do. Or at least this is what I worked out he had said from the rather more limited interpretation we received.

 The judge and his military colleagues then conferred for a few moments. The courtroom erupted into a muted hum of whispering. Finally, the judge banged his gavel. The room was silent once again,

 ”I find the defendants guilty of the charge of illegal entry to East Pakistan, by an unauthorised route, at odd hours of night. I sentence them to two years simple imprisonment.” He said this first in Bengali and then again for our benefit, in English.

 There was a stunned silence in the room.

 

5-10 October: Jessore Gaol: first impressions

The first night in the cell was miserable. It was not the sleeping on the floor that was the problem, nor the incessant buzzing of mosquitos. It was not even the harsh light of the single bulb that burned throughout the night from the ceiling, though it did have its role in my misery. The light attracted clouds of small midges, probably a local version of Africa’s flying ants. These insects were everywhere: on your body, on your face, in your ears, up your nose as you breathed, in your mouth as you tried to expel them from your nose. By about four am I had found the answer. I covered myself completely with my blanket, leaving a small space for my nose and mouth, so I could breathe. This space I covered with a handkerchief, which I could breathe through, but which did not let the insects through. Then, once I had dealt with the insects caught inside my cocoon, I slept. Until 6am when I was wakened by the clanging of the gates on the stairs, and my cell gates, being opened, and my first full day in prison beginning.

 Later that morning they allowed me out of the cell to take a shower outside in the yard. The shower was a tap at head height, which poured water over me. I stripped off, and tried to clean myself, sans soap, under the shower. I attracted an audience of warders, who were by turns laughing, and shaking their heads. When I switched the tap off, and attempted to dry myself with my tee shirt, one of them approached me. ‘Please put shorts on. ’ 

‘I will,’ I said, ‘when I am dry.’

‘No clothes, no good. ‘ He shook his head. ‘You should wear lungi, when washing.’

 A lungi is a Bengali sarong, which most men, not in uniform, wore. I realised the cause of his concern. I was naked, it was a Muslim country. He, and his colleagues, were shocked and embarrassed. I quickly dressed, and was led back to my cell. A short while later I was brought a prison issue lungi, so that I would never have to embarrass them again. In my remaining two weeks in that cell, I showered twice more, wearing a lungi each time. I had, in the meantime been instructed in the knotting of a lungi so that it was secure, a skill which remains with me to this day.    

 The same day, I was taken to see the prison doctor, a harassed, distant man, who went through the motions of measuring my height, weight, blood pressure, skin elasticity and other measures, the results of which he wrote without comment in his ledger. He asked me about my bowel movements, tapped my chest, tapped my knees, and asked me to cough while he held parts of me I would rather he did not. Finally he told me I was healthy, but should eat good food, and he giggled nervously. I, in turn, laughed humourlessly. I visited to doctor on two more occasions: the first,  about a week later, was an occasion when I was left alone for a sufficient period to review the records of deaths in the prison, an open ledger on the doctor’s desk. The numbers were rather frightening: an average of two deaths a day over the previous six months, with the cause of death varying: malaria a significant killer, but the majority of the causes of death being ‘general debility’. Which you might expect for people over seventy, but these were mainly people in their twenties, thirties and occasionally forties. The fear of catching ‘general debility’ began to haunt me, and sometimes still does. My final visit to the doctor was seven weeks later. With my growing fear of encroaching ‘general debility’, the doctor informed me that I had ringworm, and an unidentified strain (or perhaps several strains) of dysentery. He had no medicine for me, and told me that it would ‘probably’ go away by itself after a couple of weeks.

 From the vantage point of my second floor cell, I could see into the single storey row of 10 cells in the next block.  These had a separate gate, which was always kept locked, and the prisoners were always kept in their cells.  The reason for this was that they were all mentally disturbed. It might have been debatable which came first: the disturbance or the incarceration.  Mostly they were quiet, and undemanding, staying somewhere deep inside themselves that did not have to interact with their external realities.  Others spent most of their waking time shouting loudly, pacing up and down in their cells. Others paced up and down in their cells without shouting, sometimes rattling the bars of their cells.  The sight of me, a fair-haired westerner in their line of sight caused some disturbance for the first few days. On one later occasion, a particularly noisy prisoner was dealt with in a fairly brutal way.  Four warders went together into his cell armed with lathis, large, long, heavy sticks. The warders used these to beat him for a period of about 10 minutes within which time he moved from being a loud and shouting person facing them off, to being a whimpering wreck, curled up on the floor of his cell. Which is when they left him until the next day. I later learned that he had been shouting ‘inappropriate’ slogans. On several other occasions, they brought hoses, and hosed down, with powerful  streams of cold water, particularly noisy or bothersome prisoners.  It was not a good view.

 The five days that were spent before the trial were uncomfortable and difficult, but I remained confident that my sojourn in jail would soon be over and that I would be deported, following the trial. The only company I had in the cell, apart from the insects and the smell and the noisy inhabitants of the block in front of me, and occasional visits from a warder, was the book that they had brought me at the end of the day that I arrived in jail. This was a penguin paperback of Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake. I was about a quarter of the way through it before my arrest, and once I put my mind to it, I read the whole thing with in about a day and a half. It was still the only book that I had, so I read it again, and then again. Fortunately, there were a number of poems in the book, and I learned several of them off by heart. There is only one I can still remember, the beginning of which I write, from memory, here.

 A freckled and frivolous cake there was

that sailed on a pointless sea.

Or any lugubrious lake there was

in a manner emphatic and free.

How jointlessly and how jointlessly.

The frivolous cake did fly.

On the waves of the ocean pointlessly

threw fish at the lilac sky

 

4 October: The morning, arrested.

At 6 a.m. I was wakened by the same priest who, after a peremptory knock, came into my room, very nervous, to tell me that there was trouble, and that the Pakistan army had surrounded the mission and were closing in. He suggested I stayed where I was, in my room. This I did, taking the precaution of getting dressed, putting my very few belongings in my small bag, ready to move quickly if required to do so. It was an edgy time. After some activity downstairs immediately after I had been visited, it becameunnaturally quiet. Initial hopes that he might have been mistaken, soon faded into the obvious seriousness of the situation. The reassuring thought that the army may be coming, but it had little to do with us, also soon evaporated as cold reality began to intrude.   After about 20 minutes of silence I heard some shouting and distant shots.  Reality kicked in. It was the army. They were coming.  And if not principally for us, then we would be a clear additional benefit.   The shooting stopped, and the shouting sounded closer,probably  within the mission area.  And then all went quiet once again. I had kept away from the window, but I now stole a glance. The yard in my view held about 10 fully armed military personnel. Yup. This was real.  About 10 minutes later, a soldier armed with an FN rifle, with which I was familiar, wearing a full jungle uniform draped with ammunition, and incongruously, but sensibly, long black Wellington boots, burst into my room, and waved his rifle in my direction.

‘Come with me,’  he said sharply, in English.

I did not argue the point, and I was taken downstairs to the room where tea and biscuits had been served  a few hours earlier, and where my American colleague was already sitting.  The Italian priests, three of them now, were also sitting in the room, looking very concerned.  Two army officers, a lieutenant and a major, were also sitting down. Two soldiers, the one that brought me down, and, presumably, the one who  brought my colleague down, stood by the door.  The Lieutenant briefly interrogated us on our reasons for being there, to which we gave our inadequate replies, as the major sat in silence, watching us. Both of us emphasised that we had come of our own accord, and that the priests and mission staff were unaware of, and had no part in our activities. We had brought the blankets to the mission in the hope that they would be able to distribute
them.  The lieutenant told us that we had illegally crossed the border, which obviously meant that we were up to no good.  We responded, saying that we did not believe human borders should stand between people in need and people who can help .  He wanted to know how we knew people were in need, and what right we had to come into his country without permission to ‘create mischief’.   We were obviously arrogant and disrespectful, if not something worse, perhaps  agents provocateur.  We then both stayed quiet, because it was suddenly clear, to me at least,  that he was essentially right, though I had never quite seen it like that until this point.  While the behaviour of the Pakistan army in East Pakistan over the previous several months was unacceptable in almost any terms of human rights,she shallowness of  our arrogant assumption that our high ideals, and our direct non-violent action, would have any positive effect on the situation, was now very apparent. I looked at the frightened missionaries, doing far more good than we could ever hope to, and whose work, and possibly the lives of people they worked with, had been put in jeopardy  by our thoughtless, and  unheralded presence in their fragile political and social ecosystem.  Even if there was no direct punishment inflicted on the mission and its inhabitants, their lives would be changed by our presence, and not for the better.

When the lieutenant had run out of venom and harangue, we were taken outside, not before all three priests embraced both of us, and blessed us, and wished us well. The major stayed in the room with the priests, no doubt to deal with the meddlesome priests. I felt very bad, both for myself and my colleague, our fate unclear, but more for the unthinking, and inestimable, trouble we had caused to good people doing good work. We were loaded onto the back of a three tonne army truck, along with three young and very frightened looking local boys in their late teens, and six armed soldiers. There were three other trucks, and about forty troops altogether.   My guilt level rose further, fearing for the fate of the young men.   We drove out of the mission, along the flooded road, surrounded by the flooded fields that had appeared so romantic the previous night.  Now they just looked flooded, another calamity for this over-stressed country and its long-suffering people.  When we reached the junction at the main road, the truck stopped and the Lieutenant got out from the cab and stood at the edge of the road, above the flooded fields, and emptied an entire magazine of his automatic rifle into the water, in a number of sharp bursts.  The young men in the truck with us trembled with fear, and the reality of our situation sunk in further with each burst of fire.  This was the law here, and our lives were in the hands of this man.  Would his military training and discipline hold firm, or would he choose to let us try to escape, and gun us down?  Why was he firing? As if reading my thoughts, he came to the back of the truck, looked in with what may have been intended to be an ironic smile, but to me was just a frightening smirk.

‘ To let the people know who is in charge,’ he said to us, before giving some instructions to the soldiers in Urdu.

Two of them got out of the truck, and waited at the junction, as he got into the cab again, and we drove off.

About 40 minutes later we arrived at Jessore, the nearby garrison town and district capital. We were driven to the military cantonment, and then taken straight in to the commanding officer’s office for questioning.  There the Colonel reiterated most of what the Lieutenant had already accused us of, and was generally unpleasant.  All our personal belongings were taken from us, including my notebook, which I never saw again.  Though what sense the intelligence people might have made of it is impossible to tell. A 20 year old’s philosophical musings rarely stand up to intense scrutiny, even by the 20 year old himself.  After the Colonel had told us that martial law was in place, and our future was in his hands (very worrying), he told us that we would be charged with illegal entry, would be tried, and that we were in serious trouble. While that was obvious, I was slightly reassured that at least there would be a trial.

After about two hours, we were taken from the Colonel’s office in another truck, and taken straight to Jessore Gaol, as it said in stark black relief letters above the gate.  Built, I suspect, by the British in the 19^th century, the Gaol has two sets of double gates, with turrets on each side of the gate; a 4m, or probably 12 foot, highbarbed-wire topped wall around the whole Gaol compound, with watch towers on each corner. We were signed over to the prison authorities, in the space between the outer and inner gates, and after being processed, briefly, in the attached gatehouse office,  my colleague was taken off to the woman’s section of the jail, and I was taken to my own cell.  It was early afternoon by this stage, and I was extremely tired, from lack of sleep, and a reaction to the adrenalin rush of the last 6 hours. But at least I now knew that little would happen for the rest of the day, and I could, in some sense of the word, relax a little.

I was installed in a cell on the upper floor of a double storey cell block with four cells at each level. There was a barred verandah at the bottom, and a barred balcony on the first floor. A staircase, with barred gates at the top and bottom, at the end of the block, joined the two levels.  There was a further yard wall around the block, with a gate which always remained open.  My cell itself was very simple:  three walls and ceiling with a
single bulb hanging from it. The front wall consisted only of bars, with a barred door built into it, opening to the corridor balcony, which had a waist height wall, and bars to the roof. Inside the cell I was given a blanket, and a bucket of water. The blanket was for sleeping, and the water was for cleaning my hands after I had used the hole in the corner of the floor, which was my latrine.  There were two prisoners installed on the ground floor of the block, but I was the only person in the upper floor. At the end of the day, a junior prison officer came to my cell to return to me my book,  taken with my other things by the colonel. Perhaps not the book I would have chosen if I had known that it would be my ‘desert island’ book, and my only reading material for a month. It was Mervyn Peake’s ‘Titus Groan’.

 

3 October: the night voyage

Because of the widespread monsoon flooding, and additional flooding from the heavy rain associated with the cyclone, by the time we were out of Calcutta itself, about midday, the roads were less than reliable. The road to the border varied from being above the water level, to being slightly awash with floodwater, to being deeply covered in water. Though it was not raining, the skies were dark and heavy. Families were sheltering on the few areas of higher ground, usually at
the edge of the metalled road, raised from the surrounding fields. There was evidence, on the lake-like water surrounding the road, of many flooded homes, and businesses; the water reaching, in some cases, almost two metres up their walls. It all had a terrible, destructive beauty: a palmtree-fringed, endless lake: humanity’s efforts put in their place, swamped and overwhelmed by the
power of nature. I, for the first time, understood why the Hindu goddess Kali: the destroyer, was a deity of choice in this part of India.

As the afternoon progressed, we slowly got closer to the border, and the flooding became more severe. On several occasions we had to drive our large ex-British army ambulance through waist-depth floods:   two of us wading through the water at each edge of the road, marking the edges of the metalled road, so the driver would know to drive in the space between us.  This was the ambulance that has set off to drive to India in a press-friendly farewell from St Martin’s-in-the-Fields in June.  They had actually driven it as far as Basra in Iraq, as the only land route to India would have taken them through Pakistan, which was, perhaps, tempting fate, and bringing the inevitable confrontation with Pakistan authorities too early, and in the wrong place. The ambulance and drivers had then come by boat from Basra to Bombay, and driven across India to Calcutta. Before I had reached India, it had been involved in a confrontation in August at the border of East Pakistan, and (literally) pushed back to India, in the first non-violent challenge to the Pakistan authorities. But today the ambulance and its four occupants were trying to get the cargo of four bales of blankets, purchased from a Calcutta blanket factory, to the border village of Bangoan, where we believed we had arranged two boats to take the blankets, and two accompanying people, Ellen and I, across the border for distribution inside East Pakistan.

We arrived at Bangoan, all of 100 km from Calcutta, shortly before dusk. The town itself was flooded, and the metalled road formed the only area clear of the water, and so was the centre of activity. A strip of the road, and its high lying edges, was crowded with people, and shacks and tents, a few neon- lit by petrol generators, but mostly lit with paraffin Tilley lamps. This formed the temporary commercial hub of Bangaon: a series of general and specialist dealers; from rice and biscuits to soft drinks and fishing apparatus, and someone was doing a very good trade in waterproof tarpaulins. While our Bengali colleague went to find the boatmen, we three westerners were left on low plastic stools in an open ‘restaurant’, where we drank milky brewed tea and ate dahl with chapattis, after washing our hands in the flood waters, and rinsing them in a well-used bowl of boiled floodwater.  Before we had finished our meal, our colleague returned, the deal done. We waited for him to rapidly eat his dinner before we drove the ambulance, with his guidance, to the far edge of the commercial area, where, in a more subdued light, a large number of boats were moored.  We loaded our two chartered flat bottomed boats with the four  token bales of blankets, two to each boat, that we were taking across, and then, with farewells, and the firm  expectation of returning within 36 hours, we set off, me in one boat with a boatman, and Ellen in the other.

We were heading for the Catholic mission, Shimulia, about 15 kilometres distant. We intended arriving in the early hours of the morning, and spending the following day there:  watching the distribution of the blankets;  taking photographs of the place, the people, and the distribution for the press (my companion’s role); learning about what was happening at the mission, and its surroundings to report back; and then returning by boat across the border the following night.  The journey would be across monsoon-flooded paddies, and would have been impossible if not for the floods.

We set off in almost total darkness at about 9pm.  Early in the journey, an almost full moon rose: huge and close and yellow, fading and shrinking to a shining silver disc as the journey progressed, lending a magical light to the waters and sharp shadow contrasts to the land and waterscapes.  We had to keep very quiet during the five-hour journey: sound travels far on water, and this countryside was disputed. Though the Bangladeshi militia, the Mukti Bahini, claimed control of the area, there was also a strong Pakistan Army presence, and either of these combatants might mistake us for being with the other. Occasionally we had to get out of the boats to push them over particularly shallow parts, at the edge of fields, where the ground was higher, which was managed with gesticulation, and the minimum possible noise. The paddy fields were bounded by rows of palms, harshly lit by the moon with vivid moonshadows, and moon reflections in the water. The combination of the silence, apart from the quiet spashes of the boatmen’s punting poles; the moon, and its silver reflection in the still waters; the sharply shadowed palm trees reflected in the flooded fields;  all made the journey an intense, and privileged, experience.

Five hours spent in silence in beautiful, and yet potentially dangerous, surroundings, gave me time to think about myself,  how I had got to this place,  and what I would choose to do with the rest of  my life. And it was then that I concluded that I should return to Africa, become a teacher, and aim to use whatever skills I may have to offer to make positive change, in a place where I had long term commitment.  That, for me, was a level of presumption that seemed possible, even if rather limited compared with the presumptuousness of what I was undertaking at the time: crossing a border illegally, bringing in a token amount of goods which would be of limited benefit to a few people; but presuming that the act itself might draw global attention to a dire situation.  And not thinking at all that my actions may be potentially placing myself and other people in mortal danger, because of my lack of understanding of a complex situation, and lack of thinking through the implications of something going wrong.  In those circumstances, perhaps deciding to become a teacher was a recognition of my own limitations in being able to change the world.

We arrived, silently, at the mission soon after 2 a.m. Our boatmen, assisted by us, pulled the boats ashore, and one of them went off to alert someone at the mission to our presence, while the other helped us to unload the bales of blankets, and on the other’s return, they departed very rapidly on a journey back across the border into India, promising to return by midnight the following night.

 An Italian priest, accompanied by a local member of the mission staff, came to meet us.  He was very shocked by our sudden appearance in his world, and could not disguise his worry about the danger we presented by being there: both to ourselves and to him and to the people he felt  responsible for.  But he was, nonetheless, the epitome of hospitality.  He arranged for the blankets to be put away, and informed us several times how very dangerous it was for us to be here, as the Pakistan army was very active in the area. Then, realising we could not go anywhere, as our boats had left,  he took us inside the mission to a  dining room and fed us tea and biscuits. He explained the work that the mission did, and the difficulties of the last six months, and listened to our explanation of the purpose of our visit, (which, I have to say, was less convincing to me now than it had been before we set off).  Eventually he showed us to separate rooms so that we could sleep, and then in the morning discuss what was the best thing to do.

It was only much later that I learned that one of his fellow priests had been killed in April 1971, protecting people who had taken refuge in the church in Jessore.

Father Mario Veronesi was one of the many victims of the civil war. On April 4, 1971, Palm Sunday, he was in the mission of Jessore, helping as much as he could the poor suffering people. Soldiers appeared and he stood in front of them, his arms spread wide in a gesture of defense of his people. He was shot in the chest and killed. He died at the beginning of Holy Week, his arms spread like the crucified Christ. He was 58 years old, and had been a religious for 28 years, 19 of which he had spent in Bangladesh. He was buried initially in Jessore then, later, his body was moved to Shimulia, where he was buried alongside Father Valerian Cobbe, who had been killed three years after him. The Muslim student Ismail Hossain wrote to Father Cobbe some months after the death of Veronesi and the independence of Bangladesh: “At last we have achieved independence and freedom! We rejoice and thank God and ask Him to help our nation progress and live in tranquility. The memory of so many victims is the thing that saddens us most and gives us great pain. The best members of our society have died. Father Mario Veronesi is among these martyrs of our independence. We feel very proud of him: he paid the highest price for our independence!”. ¹

Another priest, Valerian Cobbe, who had been Father Veronesi’s colleague, was left alone after the death of Fr Valarian. The months following Fr Valarian’s death were described as follows:

Father Mario Veronesi was among the victims of the war, killed by soldiers in Jessore on Palm Sunday, April 4, 1971. Father Cobbe, who had lived with him for more than four years, wrote to the Superior General: “I have cried so much that I now have an eye infection, but we press ahead with the harvest and the Holy Week celebrations. Father Mario was a giant among us, thanks to his spiritual stature and his charity”.

He was alone now. The problems caused by the war added to his other concerns. Father Ceci, who was with him during those months, describes the situation: “Shimulia was among the most difficult places. The 1,500 Christians wondered whether they should flee, perhaps seek refuge in India. Father Cobbe told them to stay. Thus began the most dangerous commuting from one place to another, back and forth, that I have ever witnessed. Almost every night we had to open our house to the guerrillas; almost every day we had to convince some Pakistan official that the village did not harbor any guilty people. The school functioned as usual (perhaps it was the only one in the entire country), the wells continued to supply water. Unfortunately, the regular soldiers caused some trouble and there was a fight in the village which left two soldiers dead. They accused the mission of connivance and came back and killed one of the mission’s helpers in revenge. The incident shook Father Cobbe and made him more nervous. News arrived of the destruction of villages and reprisals that left hundreds of people dead. I think that Father Cobbe was in danger dozens of times without ever realizing it. Some soldiers, offended by his reaction, used to lie in wait for him along the road where his jeep often passed”. ¹

Fr Cobbe was recalled to Rome in  October 1971 (returning in July 1972), soon after our unexpected arrival, and I do not know whether he was there at the time of our arrival, indeed whether it was he who greeted us.   Whoever it was that greeted us, the above story clearly explains the nervous reception we got at the mission. Fr Cobbe was shot dead by an assassin a few years later, also at Shimulia.

¹ http://www.xaviermissionaries.org/M_Stories/Martyrs/Veronesi.htm

On the move

After I had been in Calcutta for slightly less than two weeks, we had the opportunity to purchase a Toyota Land Cruiser, from an organisation that was leaving the business of dealing with refugees. It was a comparatively new machine, but they were prepared to give it to us for the equivalent of £300, donated to a local organisation working with refugees.  I now therefore drove the Land Rover regularly through the streets of Calcutta, the Land Cruiser once or twice, though I did not ever attempt to drive large ambulance. I had already received a scrape on the back of the Land Rover from not quite winning a close-run  battle with a large truck to fill an empty space on the road. I mention this because on one occasion when we were driving out of town towards the border on an investigatory visit, the dashboard of the Land Rover began to emit clouds of smoke, and then all of the electrics in the vehicle stopped working. I wondered what I had done. I pulled over to the side of the road, opened the bonnet, where more smoke had gathered for safety. We disconnected the battery and, with the bonnet open, the smoke began to clear. There was a separate, strange smell in the car, which we could not identify. A mechanic came to see us from the side of the road (there was always someone useful nearby) and examined the car. He traced the wiring from the engine into the dashboard and then went inside the car. With a screwdriver, he removed the front panel of the dashboard. A puff of smoke came out, and when that cleared, we could see the wires burned black that were causing the trouble. What none of us were expecting to see was the badly burned body of a small mouse that had been chewing at the wires, before the wires took their revenge. Our new-found mechanic, with a raucous laugh, grasped hold of the mouse by the tail, waved its blackened, hairless body before us and said, in Bengali,

‘This is the problem!’

He threw the mouse away, and proceeded to repair the damaged wires, and the front of the dashboard.  We replaced the battery connection and the vehicle worked again, and we  continued on our journey, after providing our rescuer with a suitable reward.

The outside geopolitical world moved on. In Mid September India signed a defence collaboration pact with the Soviet Union, causing Pakistani and United States outrage. Pakistan declared a state of emergency on 21 September, saying India had aggressive intent towards it. East Pakistan was morphing in newspapers and our talk into East Bengal, and sometimes into Bangladesh.

We were now working in separate teams. There were people crossing the border regularly taking small amounts of medicines, biscuits, or blankets to different villages. While the support provided was minimal (though useful), it was an extremely good way of learning about conditions in the areas we visited. I went on one of these journeys, by boat, for it was the monsoon flooding season, not far across the border, where we delivered anti-diarrhoea tablets to a village. The village was perched on a small piece of raised land, while the rest of the surroundings were flooded. The village head than was pleased to see us and through interpreters told us that they had not seen the Pakistan army since the end of March. But the  stories from nearby towns were not good, with many dead, and a breakdown in the system.

He said that for him to get to Jessore, the biggest town, about 30 km away, he would have to pass through about five military checkpoints. This meant that the normal trade of small traders bringing goods to the village, and delivery of village crops into the markets of Jessore had become impossible, and the village was suffering from not having a market for its goods, nor to be able to import the other requirements it needed.

As well as crossing the border regularly, we also visited a number of Catholic missions in West Bengal. There we learned about the missions on the other side of the border from whom they had heard nothing since March, when cross border contact had broken down. But they did know that a Italian missionary had been shot dead by the Pakistan army in Jessore in April, though the circumstances of his death were unclear. We were told of a large mission, with school and hospital, at Shimalia.  We determined that we should take some blankets to this mission, 12 miles on the other side of the border and the deepest foray that we had yet undertaken. This was to be undertaken by myself and by Ellen, the American activist, and the only woman in our group. While Allen and James were off on a patrol with the Mukti Bahini, the Bengali guerrilla militia that was fighting the Pakistan army, we prepared for our journey. However, our original date was delayed because of a cyclone on 29 September which missed Calcutta in its direct effect, but which killed 10000 people in neighbouring Orissa State. The torrential rain around the edges of the cyclone closed Calcutta for a day because of extensive flooding. On the second day after the rain stopped, we set off towards the border.

Refugees

So, using the considerable amount of buying power we had achieved from £1000 in travellers cheques, and the ongoing transfer of funds into India from London, (which had to be exchanged at the official rate), we sought ways to deliver manageable and significant amounts of aid in a way that would enable us to understand what was going on inside East Bengal, and tell the world about it. This approach would involve us entering East Pakistan, illegally, for rapid distribution of aid and increased learning of what was happening in the places that we visited, and transmitting what we learned to the world.

We visited the pharmaceutical factories and the blanket factories and the concentrated high protein food factories on the other side of the Hooghly river over the amazingly crowded Howrah Bridge in order to purchase goods to carry, and to find out what was being used in the refugee camps that surrounded Calcutta. The factory salespeople were broadly sympathetic to our intentions, but we did not receive any notably good deals from them, nor any free samples. On one very memorable occasion we headed out of Calcutta, a short distance past the airport, where one of the refugee camps for escapees from East Pakistan was situated. It was a sobering experience.

The camp had about 50,000 inhabitants. It was well laid out with rows of tents, standpipes with water at regular intervals, and established latrines at the end of each row of tents. Despite the clean design that place was teeming with people, and when we went to the clinic in the middle of the camp, there were several hundred people waiting to be seen.  One harassed doctor who was dealing with these people was kind enough to give us 15 minutes of his time, to explain what the major issues were (malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea), and what the remedies were (high protein biscuits and other high protein food, quinine, and saline drips respectively). My American colleague wanted more information from him, but he very rightly said that he had more urgent things to do than to talk to us, pointing to the line of people awaiting attention. I was in awe of the dedication and compassion with which he (and his colleagues), went about their business, clearly grossly overworked and with very limited resources. It made me feel slightly inadequate: that we were, for our part, not really doing enough to address the massive scale of the issues.

At the edge of the clinic area was a large tent, with air-conditioning machines, running from a mobile generator. This was the temporary morgue, where people who died in the camp were placed before being taken off for cremation. It was about three o’clock in the afternoon. When we walked past, a covered body was being taken inside on a stretcher by two men. As the flap of the door opened, I saw inside. I could only see part of the interior, but in the part I could see, there were about 60 shrouded bodies lying on three levels of stainless steel ‘shelves’. A large proportion of these seemed to be small and on some shelves there were three small separate lumps as opposed to one under the sheet.  I asked the official who was holding the door open, how often the bodies were removed. He said that the tent was emptied between midnight and 4 AM each day. So, the bodies that I saw, and the other bodies that I did not see in the morgue, were deaths that had occurred in the camp in less than 12 hours. We were all very quiet in the car back to town.

September on Jessore Road (extract)

Millions of babies watching the skies

Bellies swollen, with big round eyes

On Jessore Road–long bamboo huts

Noplace to shit but sand channel ruts

 

Millions of fathers in rain

Millions of mothers in pain

Millions of brothers in woe

Millions of sisters nowhere to go

 

One Million aunts are dying for bread

One Million uncles lamenting the dead

Grandfather millions homeless and sad

Grandmother millions silently mad

 

Millions of daughters walk in the mud

Millions of children wash in the flood

A Million girls vomit & groan

Millions of families hopeless alone

 

Millions of souls nineteenseventyone

homeless on Jessore road under grey sun

A million are dead, the million who can

Walk toward Calcutta from East Pakistan

 

(….)

 

September Jessore   Road rickshaw

50,000 souls   in one camp I saw

Rows of bamboo    huts in the flood

Open drains, & wet families waiting for food

(….)

 

How many souls    walk through Maya in pain

How many babes    in illusory pain?

How many families   hollow eyed lost?

How many grandmothers    turning to ghost?

 

How many loves who never get bread?

How many Aunts with holes in their head?

How many sisters skulls on the ground?

How many grandfathers   make no more sound?

 

How many fathers   in woe

How many sons   nowhere to go?

How many daughters    nothing to eat?

How many uncles   with swollen sick feet?

 

Millions of babies in pain

Millions of mothers in rain

Millions of brothers in woe

Millions of children    nowhere to go

Allan Ginsberg                                     November 14-16, 1971

Copied with respect but without overt permission. Copyright of the estate of Allan Ginsberg

Life in Calcutta

Our meals consisted of regular Calcutta street food. This broadly comprised fresh fruit, chapattis (a very flat bread), vegetable curry and occasional western style bread to have with hard-boiled eggs for breakfast. This was nutritious enough, but all rather boring after a few weeks. Although it was still fairly novel for me, most of the others had been living on it for over a month. That evening we decided that, given our successful foray into the financial markets, with a significant return on investment, it was time to have a more interesting meal. We set off for the Golden Palace, a very large and grandiose Chinese restaurant close to Dalhousie Square. When we all piled out of the LandRover, a group of about eight young children gathered around us, begging for money and for sweets. We told them that, if they looked after the LandRover, they could have something when we came back to the car. The eight young men of about 12 years old positioned themselves protectively around the vehicle and we set off to the restaurant. The meal was interesting and certainly different from our daily fare, and we all enjoyed it, some of us even drinking beer. It was a good opportunity for us to discuss strategies and tactics with the new resources available to us, in the lap of comparative luxury.

At the end of the meal we made sure that all the leftovers were packed up for us, in eight mixed boxes each containing a variety of food. When we reached the still guarded LandRover, the soldier in David lined up all the boys and gave them each a box of Chinese food and a few rupees. They took their treat with great enthusiasm and each ran off in different directions to finish their feast alone.

Life on the streets in Calcutta at that time meant exactly that. There were hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, who had no homes and who slept and lived and carried out their life on the pavement, usually with the acquiescence of the storeowner in front of whom they were squatting. Patches would be jealously guarded by the people who lived there. And if they were alone, it was difficult for them to move very far from that spot, without danger of someone squatting on their home. Walking along the pavement, even in the most prosperous parts of downtown, meant avoiding the people sleeping, lying or sitting on the pavement, living their lives in their home on the same patch of pavement that you were trying to walk along. And of course it was not just you that was trying to walk along the  pavement. There were always large numbers of people, on the pavement and on the street, dodging the lorries and buses and cars and bicycles and trishaws and rickshaws. And other pedestrians. Any excursion was an exposure to an intense conglomeration of humanity such as I had never experienced before. Beneath our apartment on Simla Street, 12 families lived on the street in the distance between our entrance and the end of the street, about 30 m away. This is in addition to the shop owners, the room holders, the apartment occupiers, and other people who lived on that small side street, in a very respectable part of town. And that intensity of humanity was replicated throughout the city.

The city, and West Bengal, was a hotbed of political unrest at this time. The state was still run by the Congress party, as most of India had been since independence, but the two Communist parties, the Communist Party of India ( Marxist) and the Communist Party of India  (Marxist-Leninist) who took their
inspiration from the Russian and Chinese models respectively, were vying for the soul of Bengal. Politics was volatile, violent and active. A few years earlier, in 1967, a ‘rebellion’ in a small West Bengal village of Naxalburi had created an active Maoist guerrilla ‘army’, who attacked police stations, stealing their weapons, killed ‘wicked’ landlords and proselytised revolution to generally bemused but often receptive villagers. These were known as Naxalites, and were seen as a growing threat to India’s integrity, or as the vanguard of the coming revolution, depending on your standpoint. Forty years on, a slightly evolved Naxalite militia roams, not only in West Bengal, but in half a dozen states down the eastern side of India, still killing policemen, still proselytising revolution. And still seen as a threat to India’s integrity, and obviously, by some, as a vanguard of the coming revolution.  But in the city of Calcutta, the growing Communist threat was not one of violence, but one of impressive organisation. The CPI (M) took over the government of district after district in Calcutta, sometimes in uneasy coalition with the CPI (M-L), or other Leftist groups, but never with the Congress party. A few years later, their efforts were rewarded, and West Bengal became the first (and possibly the only, or at least the most populous) state to vote a Communist party into power. The Left Front remained the governing party of West Bengal, regularly voted back in by the electorate for 34 years, until 2011, when they were voted out of power in favour of  the Trinamool Congress, led by Mamata Bannerjee, a populist Railways Minister in the national government.

But we were not in Calcutta to admire the city, understand local politics, eat in the luxury of Chinese restaurants, or even to explore the shadow economy in the markets. We were here to deliver small amounts of aid to people within East Bengal and to do it in a loud and non-violent way, to bring to the world’s attention to a situation that was horrific, and one that should have been unacceptable to the rest of humanity. To demand attention to the horror of the March genocide, to the indifference of much of the world to it and its aftermath, to the unquestioning support by the United States of the military regime in Pakistan, to the pressure put upon India by the 10 million refugees that had crossed the border from East Pakistan by early September. The refugees, at least, were being dealt with by the United Nations, international aid agencies, and the Government of India.  But there were still more than 60 million people inside the country, living under martial law, with no access to international aid, with a civil war going on around them, and a demonstrably brutal regime in charge of their country and their lives. It was these people’s plight that we needed the world to pay attention to.

Financial matters

One of my first jobs when I arrived in Calcutta was to exchange into local currency the travellers cheques that I had brought with me. This was a time of strict exchange control both in India and the United Kingdom, and there was a clear black market in Calcutta for strong international currencies like US dollars and pounds Sterling. There was some discussion among us about the morality or otherwise of changing the travellers cheques on the black market, and getting between two and three times the official exchange rate; or whether we should stick to the rules and exchange them officially at a bank and get considerably less local money for them. The argument came down in the end to the buying power that we would have with more local currency, and the additional stimulus we would be putting into the local economy by spreading more rupees around our suppliers, and the more goods we would have to take across the border.  James and Allen, experienced in this sort of exchange activity, were confident that there would be no problem in getting at least twice the official exchange rate for the travellers cheques, but it was agreed that I would have to go as a private person, with no connection to Operation Omega. And if I were to fail, I would claim that I was doing it with my own money, not the organisation’s. With these ground rules cleared, three of us set off on our mission.

Alan drove us through the always busy streets of Calcutta, and dropped us at a corner just off Chowringgi, arranging to pick us up at the same place in two hours time. If we were not there, he would come again every 30 minutes, though James was confident that we would be able to get the business done within two hours. We left the vehicle and walked through the teeming streets until we came to a market that James knew, selling all kinds of goods. James approached a stallholder that he had obviously used before, for
the stall holder took us straight through the general goods on sale and into the very small room in the back, where we perched on stools on the carpeted floor, and were served tea. When the courtesies were over, James explained that he wanted to exchange some travellers cheques. The stallholder was rather taken
aback when we explained the scale of the transaction we were proposing. He told us that this was too big for him to manage on his own and he would have to bring in some of his friends at the market. So if we would please relax, take it easy, drink some more tea, he would go and see what could be done. He asked
to take one of the travellers cheques with him to demonstrate that this was a sound deal. I was slightly dubious about doing that, but James convinced me that it would be alright as I had not signed the second part of the travellers cheque. The stallholder took a £20 travellers cheques, smiled, and left. and we waited. And we waited. And we waited.  The stallholder’s assistant kept returning, smiling, offering us more tea and then retreating back to the front of the store. There did not seem to be a great deal of business being done out there. Or indeed back here.

After about 45 minutes, someone else, not the stallholder nor his assistant, came into the back room and sat with us, smiling and drinking tea he poured himself. Five minutes later a second person joined him. Not long after, a third joined him and then a fourth. We had been waiting now for about an hour and a quarter. I was getting slightly nervous about the number of people joining us in our tiny room. But James was quiet and phlegmatic, telling me to be patient. After another 15 minutes, our host returned with another four men. It was getting extremely crowded in the small back room, and the effects of a great deal of tea were beginning to make themselves felt. I asked if I could use some facilities. There was some discussion and it was agreed that I could. James was to stay in the store and the four men who arrived before the host would accompany me to the bathroom. My entourage and I set off across the market to a adequate, if not exquisite, facility where I rid myself of several gallons of tea. My guardians waited patiently outside the door and when I was done, we walked back together through the crowd to the back room. This time though, the four men waited in the main store and there were a mere seven of us in the small back room. James had not  been idle while I had been away, and had been negotiating a rate with the five  principals in the room. We knew what the official rate was and knew that the black market rate was approximately twice the official rate. By the time I came back James’ impressive negotiating skills had struck a deal at 2.25 times the official rate. With our host, and then another, using an abacus; and me, using long multiplication (for htese were the days before calculators) ; we worked out how much in rupees that would be. Surprisingly, we all agreed on the rupee amount on first calculation.

There was some discussion among the principals about how this would be divided up between them. At least I think that that was what the discussion was about.  When their discussion concluded, the four men waiting outside were called in and given instructions and set off, presumably back to the principals’ own market stalls. We waited some more, drank more tea. Our two hours were just about up.

‘ Would you like to now sign the travellers’ cheques while we are waiting, since the matter is agreed?’ Our host asked with a smile.

‘Thank you, but no,’  I replied, returning his smile,  ‘I would rather wait until we are exchanging the funds.’

He smiled again, and we waited some more ,and drank some more tea.

After another 15 minutes, the first of the men returned, and within 10 minutes after that, they had all returned, and the counting of the cash began. Again, James managed this very well, counting a pile of money, writing on a slip of paper how much that was, and putting that pile of money separately on the floor. I then signed the requisite number of travellers cheques for that amount of money. And so on until I had signed all the travellers cheques and there was a reasonable pile of Indian rupees on the floor beside James. More tea was called for, and two large brown paper bags were given to James to put cash into. He did so, and then, in turn, put those full bags into a sports bag he was carrying and zipped it up. We drank a last token cup of tea to celebrate good business. Then we stood up, shook everyone’s hand, with everyone smiling broadly. We left the stall, the four men waiting outside, acompanying us to the entrance of the market, where they also smilingly shook our hands. We left, walking rapidly down the street to the appointed meeting place.

We had missed the 2 1/2 hour rendezvous and would have to wait for about 20 minutes before Alan returned again. There was a degree of nervousness in both of us about the amount of cash we were now  carrying around, and we were still not very far from the market. To ease our nerves, and to get off the street, we went into a small tea stall and sat again on stools and drank some tea. I still associate changing money with drinking tea. Before the three hours were up, we wandered back to the rendezvous where  Alan was already waiting for us. He was very pleased to see us, and demanded an explanation for our tardiness. He was even more pleased to learn that our operation had generated a significant amount of unmarked rupees. We set off back to Simla Street in high spirits.

more history and back to Calcutta

By the middle of June 1971, Pakistani sources were acknowledging that West Pakistan had a clear policy of intimidating the Bengalis, ‘re-educating’ them in Islam, expelling Hindus from East Pakistan, confiscating their property, and ‘buying’ the support of a future Bengali administrative class with the proceeds. India had stepped up its pressure on Pakistan in the international community, but with limited buy in from the Soviet Union, the US, or China.

“…..The Government’s policy for East Bengal was spelled out to me in the Eastern Command headquarters at Dacca. It has three elements: The Bengalis have proved themselves unreliable and must be ruled by West Pakistanis; The Bengalis will have to be re-educated along proper Islamic lines. The – Islamization of the masses – this is the official jargon – is intended to eliminate secessionist tendencies and provide a strong religious bond with West Pakistan; When the Hindus have been eliminated by death and fight, their property will be used as a golden carrot to win over the under privileged Muslim middle-class. This will provide the base for erecting administrative and political structures in the future.

The Sunday Times London, 6/13/71

As the number of refugees flooding across the borders from East Pakistan into India reached 6 million by the end of June, western journalists had new sources of information of what was happening within the borders. The outrage, and helplessness, they felt is exemplified in the report from Newsweek magazine below.

 The Terrible Blood Bath of Tikka Khan

Anyone who goes to the camps and hospitals along India’s border with Pakistan comes away believing the Punjabi Army capable of any atrocity. I have seen babies who’ve been shot, men who have had their backs whipped raw. I’ve seen people literally struck dumb by the horror of seeing their children murdered in front of them or their daughters dragged off into sexual slavery. I have no doubt at all that there have been a hundred My Lais and Lidices in East Pakistan-and I think there will be more. My personal reaction is one of wonder more than anything else. I’ve seen too many bodies to be horrified by anything much any more. But I find myself standing still again and again, wondering how any man can work himself into such a murderous frenzy.

The story of one shy little girl in a torn pink dress with red and green Bows has a peculiar horror. She could not have been a danger to anyone. Yet I met her in a hospital at Krishnanagar, hanging nervously back among the other patients, her hand covering the livid scar on her neck where a Pakistani soldier had cut her throat with his bayonet. “I am Ismatar, the daughter of the late Ishague Ali,” she told me formally. “My father was a businessman in Khustia. About two months ago he left our house and went to his shop and I never saw him again. That same night after I went to bed I heard shouts and screaming, and when I went to see what was happening, the Punjabi soldiers were there. My four sisters were lying dead on the floor, and I saw that they had killed my mother. While I was there they shot my brother-he was a bachelor of science. Then a soldier saw me and stabbed me with his knife. I fell to the floor and played dead. When the soldiers left I ran and a man picked me up on his bicycle and I was brought here.”

Suddenly, as if she could no longer bear to think about her ordeal, the girl left the room. The hospital doctor was explaining to me that she was brought to the hospital literally soaked in her own blood, when she pushed her way back through the patients and stood directly in front of me. “What am I to do?” she asked. “Once I had five sisters and a brother and a father and a mother. Now I have no family. I am an orphan. Where can I go? What will happen to me?”

“You’ll be all right,” I said stupidly. “You’re safe here.” But what will happen to her and to the thousands of boys and girls and men and women who have managed to drag themselves away from the burning villages whose flames I saw lighting up the East Pakistani sky each night? The hospital in Agartala, the capital city of Tripura, is just half a mile from the border, and it is already overcrowded with the victims of the rampaging Pakistani Army. There is a boy of 4 who survived a bullet through his stomach, and a woman who listlessly relates how the soldiers murdered two of her children in front of her eyes, and then shot her as she held her youngest child in her arms. “The bullet passed through the baby’s buttocks and then through her left arm,” Dr. R. Datta, the medical superintendent, explains. “But she regained consciousness and dragged herself and the baby to the border.” Another woman, the bones in her upper leg shattered by bullets, cradles an infant in her arms. She had given birth prematurely in a paddy field alter she was shot. Yet, holding her newborn child in one hand and pulling herself along with the other, she finally reached the border.

New Jersey Congressman Cornelius Gallagher, who visited the Agartala hospital, says he came to india thinking the atrocity stories were exaggerated. But when he actually saw the wounded he began to believe that; if anything, the reports had been toned down. A much-decorated officer with Patton in Europe during World War II, Gallagher told me: “In the war, I saw the worst areas of France-the killing grounds in Normandy-but I never saw anything like that. It took all of my strength to keep from breaking down and crying.”

Other foreigners, too, were dubious about the atrocities at first, but the endless repetition of stories from different sources convinced them.

 ….

All this savagery suggests that the Pakistani Army is either crazed by blood lust or, more likely, is carrying out a calculated policy of terror amounting to genocide against the whole Bengali population.

The architect appears to be Lt. Gen. Tikka Khan, the military governor of East Pakistan. Presumably, Pakistan’s President knows something about what is going on, but he may not realize that babies are being burned alive, girls sold into virtual slavery and whole families murdered. He told the military governor to put down a rebellion, and Tikka Khan has done it efficiently and ruthlessly. As a result, East Pakistan is still nominally part of Pakistan. But the brutality inflicted by West on East in the last three months has made it certain that it will only be a matter of time before Pakistan becomes two countries. And those two countries will be irreparably split-at least until the last of today’s maimed and brutalized children grow old and die with their memories of what happened when Yahya Khan decided to preserve their country.

Newsweek [June 28, 1971; pp. 43-44]

Sometime in June 1971 in London, I became aware of Operation Omega, one of the numerous charitable organizations focused on the man-made humanitarian disaster in Bangladesh. I was not very familiar with what had happened, apart from a general awareness picked up from occasional TV news, and from newspapers, which was, at best, partial. The people in the office of Operation Omega, in the office of War Resisters International, next door to the offices of Peace News, on Caledonian Road, were very welcoming to my offer of voluntary assistance, and made immediate use of my financial and arithmetical expertise. I was set the task of recording the income from donors, mainly small amounts from individuals, and analyzing patterns of where it was coming from, and the type of people that were donating. I felt as if I was doing something useful, and my colleagues clearly valued my ‘expertise’. Within a few weeks, I was spending most of my time in the offices, taking on ever more complex financial tasks: analyzing income patterns, agreeing expenditures on purchases for relief, though it was clear, even then, that Operation Omega was more about statements and examples rather than a major relief effort.

In early July, we purchased an ex-military ambulance, loaded it with medical supplies and saw it off in a flurry of publicity and press coverage from outside St Martins-in-the-Fields to travel overland to Calcutta, where it would begin its relief work. No-one thought it odd that someone would drive a vehicle from England to India to deliver relief materials, though it would obviously have been more cost effective to buy a vehicle and supplies in India. But these were days before globalization, and when transferring money out of the UK was a cumbersome, and very bureaucratic process.

Bangladesh guerrillas have reoccupied an area of 150 square miles in the Jessore district of East Pakistan near the frontier with India. They were earlier driven from these positions to take refuge in India when Pakistani Army reinforcements move from Jessore cantonment in April to obliterate pockets of Bengali resistance in the border regions.

The Daily Telegraph London July 23, 1971

The fate of Bangladesh was becoming a bigger issue in the West and at the beginning of August George Harrison and Ravi Shankar convened the ‘Concert for Bangladesh’ in Madison square Garden in New York, attracting rock luminaries like Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan to perform. This was the first large scale benefit concert with both a humanitarian and political purpose, followed 15 years later on a more global scale by Live Aid. The concert itself raised about $400,000 and the income from the album and film, and much later by the DVD, still provides funding for UNICEF’s activity in Bangladesh.

I slowly became more aware of Operation Omega’s political agenda; which was a mixture of Quakerism and Gandhi-inspired non-violent action to face down power. The direct benefits of our actions, in terms of providing relief supplies to the needy, were in fact designed to be side benefits, rather that the core purpose. Whether I was really fully aware of that in July and August, I am not sure, but then I did not have a lot of experience of charity work, and even Oxfam was still a young and learning organization at that time. But I could also, with my idealistic concepts of fairness and goodwill to all men, recognize the importance of challenging clearly ‘wrong’ military action against unarmed civilians.

The geo-political stakes were getting higher. On 9 August, India signed a ‘treaty of peace, friendship and co-operation’ with the Soviet Union, which left the United States, along with the People’s Republic of China, as the most prominent supporters of Pakistan and its ‘internal problem’ of East Pakistan.  In late August, as the monsoon floods began once more, bringing yet more misery to Bangladesh, the Operation Omega people already in Calcutta expressed the need for someone to manage their finances, and I was their someone of choice, as most of them already knew me. The proposal was put to me, I agreed, and at the end of August I checked in at the Victoria air terminal, went to Heathrow, and boarded a BOAC 707 plane heading for Bangkok, with an onward ticket to Calcutta, stopping in Beirut and Lahore before it got there. As we banked before landing in Bangkok, the polarized window glass created rainbows over the green fields, flooded paddies, and buffalo grazing, and I realized that I was about to enter a new world, that I really was a long way from home, and I felt a powerful surge of excitement.

My colleagues in Simla Street were a mixed bunch. There was an American couple, Ellen and Paul, who had been non-violent activists in the US during the Biafra war a few years previously. They, together with Martin, a peace activist from London, were our policy, strategy and guiding principles people. There was David, the ex-military-police warrant officer, who had driven the ambulance from London, who was our logistics and practical person,and James and Alan, also in the ambulance, two young public-school educated adventurers, who, while obviously supporting the work we were doing, were more in it for the adventure than the principles. And now there was me, primarily there for the management of finances, but also backstop for almost everything else as well, except perhaps the non-violent activist strategy work.

 Non-violent activism was very distinct from pacifism, or passive-ism. Actively challenging power, oppression, and injustice, without resort to weapons and violence, was what non-violent activism was about. It drew on Quaker principles, and Gandhi’s principle of satyagraha, or non-violent resistance. This had proved very successful against the British in the Indian independence movement, and it seemed that we were using this against a similarly militarily powerful opponent. Over my few weeks in Calcutta, I learned a great deal about Gandhi and his methods. I also learned about Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengalis poet, and muse, and Nobel laureate for literature in 1913. He was the composer of the Indian National anthem, and the song that was to become the Bangladesh National anthem ‘Amar Shoner Bangla’, My Golden Bengal, a phrase that I heard regularly over the next few months.

The other inspiration for our work was the Jesuit palaeontologist (one of the finders of Peking Man),  geologist and mystic, and occasional heretic to the Catholic Church, Pere Teilhard De Chardin. In his book,’ The Phenomenon of Man’, he attempts to link his scientific understanding of evolution with his spiritual belief in God. He envisages a continuing refinement of human evolution, until it reaches a level of supreme complexity and consciousness, or, the ‘Omega Point’. The Omega Point is always existing, in potential at least; it is personal, that is within a person; it is transcendent, that is outwith the physical universe; it is autonomous, that is outside the limitations of space and time: and it is irreversible, that is, it must happen and cannot be undone. It was this complex concept which inspired the name of Operation Omega.

I was less than confident that I could live up to the expectation of achieving, or even approaching, the Omega Point in our work,  or perhaps I felt that these expectations were rather high for a group of seven people in a city of several million, and attempting to influence a country of 70 million souls.

Some history…

The country of Pakistan, created as the Muslim majority nation out of British India through a bloody partition in 1947, was, by 1970, not in very good shape. Under military rule (with a light cloak of democracy) since a coup by the Commander in Chief of the army, Ayub Khan in 1958, who ruled as president until 1969, Pakistan got a comparatively secular constitution, got development support from the West, but also built a very strong relationship with China, particularly after the Sino-Indian war of 1962. A war between India and Pakistan in 1965 in Kashmir, ended inconclusively, but lost Ayub Khan a lot of popularity in Pakistan. By 1969 his position was no longer tenable, and on 25 March 1969 he resigned and handed over the presidency to a loyal lieutenant: General Yahya Khan.

Yahya Khan had an unenviable task when he took over. His first act was to impose martial law, in order to address the many problems the country faced, not least the discontent in the East part of the country. In July 1969 he announced the restoration of  the original provinces of Pakistan as political and administrative units, and his intention to provide a universal franchise election throughout the country, based on ‘one man one vote’, the first since before the country’s formation in 1947. The elections were planned to take place in mid November 1970, but were delayed because of  disastrous floods from Cyclone Bhola along the coast of East Pakistan. The cyclone, on the 12/13 November, was the deadliest ever in the region, and the estimated death toll was between 300,000 and 500 000, though as entire communities were washed into the sea, accurate numbers will never be known.

When the elections took place later in November, 300 seats in the National Assembly were at stake. East Pakistan’s Awami League, under the leadership of Sheik Mujiber Rahman “Sheik Majib’ won 160 seats, all in the East, but no seats in the West. The Pakistan Peoples’ Party, under the leadership of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, won 81 seats, all in the West, and none in the East. Another 59 seats, mostly in the West, went to other parties, and to independent candidates. The inadequate preparation and slow response of the Pakistan Government to the disaster of the  cyclone, was probably a contributing, but not decisive, factor in the overwhelming victory of the Awami League in the East.

Full democracy had brought to a head the contradictions of Pakistan. The more populous East, had voted overwhelmingly for a party that represented its own interests. The West had similarly, if less single -mindedly, voted for parties that represented its interests. While the Pakistan Peoples’ Party might claim to represent the whole of Pakistan, its total lack of success in the East belied that notion. The Awami League’s goal was to use its power as the leading party in the Pakistani National Assembly to push for greater decentralisation of power, so that the East had greater control over its economic and political affairs. This was anathema to the parties representing the West, and thus a problem not easily solvable. Negotiations continued until 1 March 1971, when the Pakistan President, General Yahya Khan indefinitely postponed the overdue Pakistan National Assembly session, after threats ofa  boycott from Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, leader of the Pakistan Peoples’ Party, the most successful party in the West.

The decision to postpone the sitting of the National Assembly, robbing Sheik Mujib of his ‘right ‘ to become Pakistan’s Prime Minister precipitated  massive civil disobedience in East Pakistan, 1500 km away from West Pakistan, on the other side of India. Bengali nationalist fervour was high: Sheik Mujib called for a general strike a ’hartel’ on 3 March, leading to a military curfew in Dacca that night. There was scattered violence across the country, with some reports of Bengalis attacking non-Bengali Pakistanis, notably Biharis, Muslims from the Indian state of Bihar who had settled in Pakistan at the time of partition.  By March 5^th the Pakistani Army had declared martial law throughout East Pakistan, but withdrew from the streets and stayed in their cantonments.  On  March 7,  Sheik Mujib, established a parallel government in the East and called on the Bengali masses to be prepared to fight for national independence: ‘Since we have given blood, we will give more of it.  But, Insha’ Allah, we will free the people of this land! The struggle this time is for emancipation! The struggle this time is for independence!

The same day, the Pakistan Army Commander and Military Governor in East Pakistan, General Yaqub Khan resigned. He was replaced by General Tikka Khan, the President’s ‘hard man’. From about 5-25 March the de facto ruler of East Pakistan was Sheik Mujib and the Awami League. President Yahya Khan flew to Dacca on 15^th March, to try to save the day, followed by leaders of other Pakistani political parties. Progress on a constitutional restructuring appeared to have been made by 20^th March, and the President called Mr Bhutto, head of the Pakistan Peoples’ Party, to Dacca. He arrived on 21 March, but could find no areas of agreement with Sheik Mujib.

By 23 March, the dark green and red flags of ‘Bangladesh’ were flying in many parts of the country instead of the Pakistan flag. The same day, the President (possibly unwisely) requested the Awami League to propose a first draft of a new constitution for Pakistan. The Awami League, possibly reacting to lack of compromise from Mr Bhutto, reiterated their negotiating position and proposed an independent state for Bangladesh. Whether this was an ultimatum, or a starting point for negotiation, is unclear, but it was seen by Mr Bhutto, and other political leaders from the West as unacceptable, and presumably President Yahya Khan agreed. The President and the other party leaders flew out of Dacca on the 25^th , when it became clear to all that no agreement was going to be reached, and that a military solution would have to be resorted to. [1]

On the night of March 25th the  Pakistani army, under General Tikka Khan, took decisive, and brutal, action. It could be described as a bloody but selective genocide, targeting students, intellectuals and political activists, or anyone who stood against them. It is estimated that in the 24 hours after the crackdown started, 10 000 were killed in Dacca alone.  Foreign correspondents were restricted to their hotels, and later expelled from the country, after  having notes and photographs confiscated.  But the contemporary accounts exemplify some of the horror.

From our windows in Dacca’s modern Intercontinental Hotel, we watched a jeepful of soldiers roll up to a  shopping center and, taking aim with a heavy machine gun, open fire on a crowd. While the firing was still going on, some fifteen young Bengalis appeared in the street about 200 yards away and shouted defiantly at the soldiers. The youths seemed to be empty-handed, but the soldiers turned the machine gun on them anyway. Then, the federal soldiers moved down an adjacent alley leading to the office of a pro-Mujib daily newspaper that had strongly denounced the army. The troops shouted in Urdu-a language which few Bengalis understand-warning anyone inside to surrender or be shot. No one emerged. So they blasted the building and set it afire. And when they emerged, they waved their hands in triumph and shouted “Pakistan Zindabad” ( “Long Live Pakistan”).

By late in the week, firing throughout the city was heavy and flashes of 105-mm. howitzers in the night preceded the heavy crump of incoming shells which seemed to be landing on the new campus of Dacca University. I woke up one morning to the sound of six Chinese-made T-54 light tanks clanging down Airport Road. A gray pall of smoke hung low over the muggy sky. Soon new artillery blasts were heard and new fires were seen in the region of Old Dacca, a warren of narrow, open-sewered streets where most of the capital’s population lives in  cramped one-room homes.  

The West Pakistani troops in Dacca showed all the signs of having the jitters. Many shot off random bursts  of automatic weapons fire at the slightest noise. And when some of the reporters in the Intercontinental Hotel ventured outside – and asked to tour the city, an army captain stationed in front of the hotel threatened to shoot
us. Ordering us back inside, he shouted angrily: “If I can kill my own people, I can kill you.”

Loren Jenkins Newsweek [April 5, 1971; pp.31-34]

Government workers were ordered back to work, on pain of military prison, the green and red Bangladeshi flags were removed from homes and offices, and once the initial terror was over, a frightened calm hung over the city.

THERE is no doubt,” said a foreign diplomat in East Pakistan last week,” ‘that the word massacre applies to the situation.” Said another Western official: “It’s a veritable bloodbath. The troops have been utterly merciless.”

As Round 1 of Pakistan’s bitter civil war ended last week, the winner-predictably-was the tough West Pakistan army, which has a powerful force of 80,000 Punjabi and Pathan soldiers on duty in rebellious East Pakistan. Reports coming out of the East (via diplomats, frightened refugees and clandestine broadcasts) varied wildly.  Estimates of the total dead ran as high as 300,000. A figure of 10,000 to 15,000 is accepted by several Western governments, but no one can be sure of anything except that untold thousands perished.

Opposed only by bands of Bengali peasants armed with stones and bamboo sticks, tanks rolled through Dacca, the East’s capital, blowing houses to bits. At the university, soldiers slaughtered students inside the British Council building. ..It was like Genghis Khan,’ said  a shocked Western official who witnessed the scene. Near Dacca’s marketplace, Urdu-speaking government soldiers ordered Bengali-speaking towns-people to surrender, then gunned them down when they failed to comply. Bodies lay in mass graves at the university, in the Old City, and near the municipal dump.
TIME [April 12, 1971; pp. 23-24]

On 26 March, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) was declared independent, by the Awami League from a radio station in Chittagong, the second city, in the south of the country/province and again repeatedly over the following day until the (West) Pakistani army occupied the station, and silenced it, with many casualties. The Pakistan Army over the next two weeks re-established clear control over the cities and towns of East Pakistan, but at the cost of huge numbers of casualties, and the ending of any possible compromise between the two parts of Pakistan. Sheik Mujib was captured by the army in late March and rapidly transferred to a prison in the West.

 By the middle of April the extent of the clampdown by the Pakistani army in East Pakistan was increasingly known and reported in the west. The news was not good. Stories coming out of the country from people fortunate enough to escape, told of shocking incidents, indications of a deeper horror.

 Pakistan: Reign of Terror
The Americans evacuated from Chittagong told NEWSWEEK’S Tony Clifton that the bitter fighting there had reduced East Pakistan’s largest port to a ghost town. “In the first few days,” recalled Neil O’Toole, a New Yorker working for a private charitable organization, “I actually saw Awami League people [supporters of Bengali nationalist leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman] patrolling the streets with bows and arrows, and I wondered how they could possibly hold off the army with things like that.” Four days later, the reinforced Pakistani Army  gained full control of the city and launched a reign of terror. “Some Punjabi soldiers called a kid over and hit him around the head and in the groin and then forced him to his knees,” said Fritz Blankenship, a crane operator who had been employed by an American construction firm. “The kid was crying, begging and the soldiers just watched him for a minute.” Finally, according to Blankenship, “they just shot him out of hand and walked on.”

A similar wave of atrocities was reported by the Americans who had been in Dacca. As soon as the curfew was lifted, they said, at least a half-dozen Americans were met by nearly hysterical Bengali friends who told of a massacre at Dacca University. When three young Americans agreed to investigate the story, they found a staircase in a faculty building splattered with the bloodshed when five teachers were dragged out and coldly mowed down by gunfire. Still more shattering was the experience of Victor Chen, who had been visiting Dacca as a tourist when the war broke out and was led by a group of excited Bengalis to a shantytown set in the middle of Dacca’s sprawling racetrack. “The houses were burned down, and some were still smoldering,” he told  NEWSWEEK’S Milan J. Kubic. “Literally dozens of dead bodies were strewn all over the place, many of them small kids, all of them riddled by bullets.” …

 An American businessman who was evacuated from Dacca last week recalled asking a Punjabi major why the army was killing so many people. “There are millions of them, and only thousands of us,” the major replied. “The only way we can control these people is by making them scared stiff.” And from what he saw, the American said, “it looked as if the army went berserk. I can’t help feeling sorry about the poor Bengalis in that hell.”      Newsweek [April 19, 1971; p. 52-54]

 Other countries were slow to react to the clampdown in East Pakistan.  In the post-colonial era, there was a deep antipathy to the changing of borders of countries, and, from a number of countries, an antipathy to interfering in
‘internal affairs’ of other countries, in case, one day, the country with internal problems was themselves. India was outspoken in condemning the action. This was another stick to beat Pakistan, a traditional enemy; there was common ethnicity of Indian Bengalis; and a very justifiable fear of contagion of Bengali nationalism and involvement of their own Maoist rebels (the Naxalites) in West Bengal. The Soviet Union, an ally of India, moved towards criticizing Pakistan. China, with its own querulous border regions, and its need for Pakistan’s support as an ally against India (and its Soviet backers) leaned towards Pakistan. The leader of the free world, champion of democracy, and armer of Pakistan until 1965, found itself in a difficult position.

The reality on the ground was that the Pakistan army had taken back most of the towns and cities, but, in their methods of doing so, had established themselves as an external occupying power, rather than a national government restoring its administrative control over a rebellious province. There was a fundamental difference in world view between the Pakistan troops: martial peoples from a culture based in mountainous and arid lands, and the Bengalis: agrarian and mercantile, living in a low lying, super-fertile (if temperamental) delta land.

 By May, more news came out of East Pakistan, as foreign journalists found ways back into the country to assess the situation. The news was still not good, indeed the more the world learned about what had happened, and what was still happening, the worst it became. Non-Bengali Muslims were being targeted by Bengali Nationalists,  Bengalis were being targeted by the Pakistan army, Bengali Hindus were being targeted for killing, or hounded from their homes, by the Pakistan army, and were crossing the borders to India in ever increasing numbers. By the end of May, India had clearly come down on the side of the Bengalis’ right to self determination, and begun to support and arm the resistance to the occupation, and  heavy handed oppression, of East Bengal by the Pakistan army.

---

[1] Main points of this history taken from the International Commission of Jurists report on ‘The Events in East Pakistan 1971.  http://www.globalwebpost.com/genocide1971/docs/jurists/3_events_march.htm

September 1971: Calcutta 1

After a short flight from Bangkok, we circled over Calcutta, before landing.  Looking down at the seemingly unending city, brown river, brown dusty fields, brown/green dusty trees,  and brown dusty houses and brown dusty roads, this was a different landscape to that surrounding Bangkok. We landed at Dum Dum airport, named after the fort and ammunition factory which in the 19^th century had first produced the hollow headed, very destructive bullet of the same name.  I descended the ladder from the plane and walked across the tarmac towards immigration. The heat and humidity felt like a physical force, hindering progress, and I was sweating profusely before I reached the building.

 Immigration was reasonably painless, for this was when a British passport got one into most countries without a visa. From there, I made my way through to the very hot, tin-roofed shed where the baggage would arrive. The lethargic ceilings fans were ineffectual. There seemed to be a large number of men milling around, who were obviously not passengers from our plane. The baggage arrived in small trailers pulled by rather thin and wiry men, obviously strong enough to pull a trolley filled with probably 50 suitcases. (Which, if we assume 20kg a case, amounts to a tonne). They began unloading the suitcases onto a table, where passengers were to pick them up. However, each suitcase was immediately claimed, and held on to, by one of the legion of men hanging  around. I quickly realised that their job, whether self appointed or not,   was to carry the luggage through customs to the taxi or the bus, or to wherever the case’s owner was going, for a small reward. They were, I suppose, just porters.  I spotted my backpack before it reached the table, and manoeuvred myself to the spot. I was able to get hold of it with a minimal amount of wrestling with a man who looked very put out that I planned to carry my own luggage. But once I had wrested it from him, he gave up and went to seek a different and more understanding piece of luggage and owner.

After passing through a desultory customs inspection, I entered the arrivals hall. I did not realise it at the time, in the shock of it, but it was a microcosm of Calcutta itself: a seething mass of humanity, in constant motion. I had never seen so many people in one place, all appearing to be purposefully going about their business, but it was difficult to imagine what that purpose, or business, was. My two colleagues stood out as an island of paleness and stillness in an ever moving sea of humanity. I waded through the crowd to where they were standing, and they seemed pleased to see me, and welcomed me on behalf of the team in Calcutta. After handshakes and brief conversation, we set off, and moved together through the crowd to the entrance of the airport, and thence to the carpark where the ambulance waited, along with half a dozen boys aged about 12, perched around the vehicle. The sergeant major gave them a sprinkling of coins which they grasped and ran off.  We climbed into the vehicle and set off into what was then the most populous city in the world.

I thought that I was, comparatively, a person of the world: with experience of Africa, Europe and very recent experience of Southeast Asia. Nothing, surely, could surprise me any more. But the drive in from the airport powerfully demonstrated that the world still held surprises for me. Calcutta was like nothing I had ever seen, or even imagined. Because it was far beyond both my experience and my imagination. It was visibly overcrowded, overpopulated with vast numbers of people living on the streets, alongside exceedingly wealthy merchants and businessmen living in large mansions, and a large population of people who were not rich in any sense, but successful enough to stay off the streets. The route in from the airport shattered any images I had of India. The traffic on the road was astonishing both in its variety, and in the way it worked.  Traffic appeared to work on the principle that, if there is a space in the road -anywhere on the road, everyone must ensure that it does not remain a space for long, and all vehicles should do their utmost to fill it before anyone else did. The variety of vehicles was also overwhelming. There were large, colourfully painted trucks with exceedingly loud air horns. There were buses that liked to show off their prowess and muscles by kicking sand (or at least billowing black exhaust smoke) in the faces of smaller vehicles There were dozens of black and yellow Ambassador cars, modelled on a 1950s Austin Westminster, with their shiny carapace and rounded beetle shape, that scuttled between the bigger vehicles like cockroaches. There were rickshaws pulled by men. There were trishaws, pulled by men on bicycles. There were bicycles with trailers, heavily weighed down with cardboard boxes of indeterminate contents. There were pedestrians wandering all over the road, and some of them appeared to have set up home in the central reservation.  Cows and dogs seemed to understand how to navigate the stream of noisy, smelly, smoky vehicles without concern. It seemed that, although the traffic was moving steadily through the streets, there was no distinction between vehicular traffic and pedestrian traffic. Motorcycles rode along the pavement, pedestrians wandered among the traffic on the road. “Fill all spaces, fill all spaces …” seemed to be the mantra.

After about 45 minutes drive we got to Simla Street, which is where the team was staying, in three rooms on the second  floor of a small residential building. This space had been lent to us by a Bengali supporter of the work we were doing. There were three interlinking rooms facing onto Simla Street. Outside, on the same floor, was a cooking area, and a tap. There was a water closet, with water provided from a large jug, which was filled from the tap. This was to be my home, along with 6 other  people for a month. Simla Street was a mixed residential and commercial street, perched between a major north-south artery, Vivekananda Road, and Raja Dinendra street, going east to west.  Vivekananda was a 19th century Bengali mystic, a follower of Ramakrishna, a Hindu guru, and was the founder of the Ramakrishna Mission which took Ramakrishna’s teachings  to the West and in particular to the United States in the 1890s. I never did learn who Raja Dinendra was.

To anyone acquainted with the character of the Bengalis, it seemed almost inevitable that some day they would try to form their own independent nation. Despite their incorporation into India and Pakistan when the British raj left the subcontinent in 1947, some 120 million Bengalis (70 million of whom live in East Pakistan and most of the rest in India’s West Bengal) still consider themselves a race apart from-and above-their neighbors. Emotional and talkative, the dark-skinned Bengalis have more in common with each other than with their co-religionists, Hindu or Moslem, or with their compatriots, Indian or Pakistani. Says one Western expert; “They consider themselves to be ‘Bengalis first, Moslems or Hindus second and Pakistanis or Indians a poor third.”

Culturally, ethnically, linguistically and spiritually, the Bengalis are different from their countrymen in Pakistan and India. For one thing, as Bengali scholars will inform all who pause to listen, the name Bengal is derived from the ancient kingdom of Banga, which goes back at least to the third century B.C. One of the oldest literary streams in Asia also flows in  Bengal, whose Indo-Aryan language and recorded history date back at least a thousand years, Boastful of this long literary heritage, intellectual Bengalis are most eloquent on the subject of Rabindranath Tagore, their greatest modern  literary figure. In his combination of mysticism and lyricism, Tagore may have been the quintessential Bengali. Poet, novelist and dramatist, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913.

(….]

A people who have suffered hundreds of invasions and conquests, including that of the British in the eighteenth century, the Bengalis long ago learned to cultivate the arts of accommodation. Unlike the proud Punjabi, his opponent in the current strife, the Bengali knew how to bow and scrape. Dressed in his dhoti, spouting flowery language, armed only with an umbrella, the Bengali was regarded by all as a reliable, efficient clerk. Fighting was best left to more martial people.

The other main cliche about the Bengalis portrays them as crafty fellows ready to outsmart you if given half a chance. “Watch it,” a merchant might say. “He’s a Bengali.” The message is that the person in question is not only clever but possibly also capable of a little sharp practice.

And yet, despite their reputation as a guileful, docile people, the Bengalis have more than once demonstrated a dark, explosive side. The most ruthless, dedicated terrorists during the fighting against the British came from Bengal. And since partition, the Bengali regions of both India and Pakistan have been the scene of constant political turmoil and near revolution. “They may seem docile,” says one American scholar. “But they are capable of violence when sparked the wrong way.” And then, in words that may prove to be all too perceptive, he adds: “There is a side to the Bengali mentality
that thrives on chaos.”

From Newsweek, 5 April 1971

Late August 1971: Bangkok 2

Returning to our room for passports, and other necessities. we set off for our day of tourism. But there were two items of business that had to be done before we dedicated ourselves to exploring the city.

We both had to change money, and we walked down the road to a large square building, the nearest bank. Although it was early in the day, it was still extremely warm, and the shock of the air conditioning when we walked through the glass door was very chilling. My useful companion explained our requirements to one of the young assistants. There was a long counter about 10% into the big square high-ceilinged room. At each end of the counter were two cages, which held the person with the cash. A number of people stood on our side of the counter, and a few young assistants, dressed in black skirts and white blouses dealt with their enquiries and acted as messengers between the front desk and the serried rows of desks that filled the rest of the room. I counted the desks, as I waited for my piece of paper and travellers cheques to be dealt with by the gentleman in the fourth desk of the third row. There were five rows of desks, and each row had ten desks in it. Fifty bank employees, all with their own desks. At the back of the floor, each desk in the back row was raised above the rest, which hosted someone whose job appeared to be to ensure that their row was working effectively. The women in white blouses and black skirts, the men in white shirts and black trousers, an atmosphere of hushed efficiency.  It was slightly surreal. When the business had been completed by the gentleman at the fourth desk in the third row, the tray containing my travellers’ cheque and the associated paperwork was taken by a young woman to one of the caged enclosures at the end of the counter, and the
man with the money. He dealt with his tasks in a relaxed, but competent way and I admired the way he picked the tray from the back of his enclosure, dealt with whatever needed to be done in the paperwork, used an abacus to do some calculations, and then called out the names of people to collect their proceeds. Because Greg was changing US dollars cash, his process was much sooner completed than my sterling travellers cheque, but 45 minutes after entering the bank, we were on our way out again, flush with ready cash to spend on whatever took our fancy.

Next stop was  the Thai International Airline office, the address of which I had from the airport transfer desk. Gregory hailed a tuk-tuk, negotiated a price, and we  careered down the road, swerving past buses and cars and motorcycles, suffering from blasts of diesel exhaust from trucks and buses. It was probably the most exhilarating and intense ride I had ever had in a public service vehicle, or any other vehicle, for that matter. After 15 minutes of death-defying excitement and a rapidly increasing understanding of how Bangkok traffic works, our driver pulled into the side of the road, turned back with a grin and, Greg tells me, said,

‘You should pay double for speed’.

To which Greg replied, ‘You should pay us not to tell the police what a bad driver you are.’

They both laughed and we paid him the originally agreed amount.

The airline office was icy cold and frighteningly efficient. Within 10 minutes my ticket had been changed for a flight leaving for Calcutta early the following morning. They had taken note of the telephone number in Calcutta, to inform my colleagues of the flight I would be arriving on, in a telex to their Calcutta office. And I had been given a complimentary taxi to the airport, which would pick me up at my hotel at seven o’clock the following morning. I was dumbfounded and Greg was amused by my bemusement.

‘ Wonderful city, isn’t it. ‘

I could not but agree.  We went to the nearby PanAm office for him to do something similar, and, our forward travel confirmed, we were ready to become tourists. For me it was a day of information, cultural and sensation overload: pearls of tourist wonderment joined together with a string of tuktuk and boat journeys. Smart efficiency, a laid back, friendly attitude, an underlying calmness beneath the frenetic micro-capitalist activity, and a cornucopia of exotic foods and fruits and other commodities on the street. Small shrines in every store, and a practical Buddhist piety that was uplifting and exhilarating.

We made our swerving- tuk-tuk way across the growing city of Bangkok to the edge of the river where we visited the Grand Palace. The Palace had not been restored at that stage, and the temple of the Emerald Buddha was in a state of comfortable, cared for, unkempt splendour. I took some black and white photos of the Mosaiced stupas and beautiful buildings and was impressed, for this was a living temple, by the saffron-robed monks who in a calm and serene way kept things moving. What I didn’t appreciate then was how empty the Palace and the Temple were. There were perhaps a dozen other
independent tourists and while we were there, one busload of Japanese tourists, following their flag carrier, worked their way through, but it did not disturb the calm and wonder of the place. Outside the palace, in the everyday world again, we sat at a street stall and had a bowl of Pad Thai, hot, spicy and remarkably delicious. This was followed by a fresh green coconut drink, sliced open by machete in a highly skilled and very dangerous- looking process. My first drink of coconut juice, and fresh from the coconut. I bought some postcards, wrote effusively of the wonders of the city, and queued up in the very organised post office, where an official in a starched white uniform, like an admiral on a job swap, provided me with the stamps to post them to family in Rhodesia and friends in London.

I was still wondering at my good fortune in being able to spend even a small amount of time in this magical land. Greg was, I think, enjoying being able to show me around, in my wide-eyed naive wonder and astonishment. He, too, was obviously enjoying being back in Bangkok and enjoying its simple but exotic  pleasures. Postcards dispatched by the admiral, Greg had another surprise for me, and we walked down to the vastly wide, chocolate-coloured, sluggishly-flowing river where we joined the crowd clambering on to the ferry going down the river. Only one stop later on this river bus service, we got off.  Greg walked along the wharf lined with longtailed boats and negotiated with one of the owners  to take us for a ride on the river. Longtailed boats are long, thin, high-prowed, almost canoe- like boats, which are powered by a car engine mounted inboard on a pole, which allows 180 degrees of movement. From the back of the engine,  a long drive shaft extends into the water with a propeller at the end. The pilot holds on to a pole extending from the other end of the engine into the boat, which acts as a rudder, and which  directs the propeller to varying degrees of depth and direction in the water, giving the boat remarkable manoeuvrability and extremely high-speed.

We set off across the river at high speed, avoiding the myriad of craft on this major Bangkok highway: other longtailed boats, some ferries, and one large cargo vessel powering upstream, to get to the other side of the river. We headed down one of the klongs, or canals, which gave Bangkok its name of the Venice of the East. We slowed down, along the klongs, senses assailed by the sights, sounds and smells of life on the water: watching life in the homes perched on stilts above the water. Men sitting  and repairing fishing nets: women washing dishes and clothes in the klong; their children diving off verandas into the murky klong water and swimming around, and lots of friendly waves for the two young foreign men passing through their neighbourhood. Further down, we came to a water market, with dozens of boats, containing a seemingly infinite range of fruits and vegetables, recognisable and not, fish and meat, and other commodities. Small boats, canoes and the occasional longtailed boat, passed through, buying ingredients for dinner in their home or for sale in stalls or restaurants, after the appropriate amount of good natured noisy haggling. It was magical, and I realised somewhere on that klong journey, that this part of Asia was fundamentally different to any part of the world I was familiar with. Some more klong travel and then traffic dodging back across the river, where we were dropped off.

Another ferry ride further down the river and we disembarked at Chinatown, wandering through the market, which was of a scale and variety that was beyond my comprehension, had all commodities I could think of, and many more besides. From tee-shirts to baths, from hammers to Chinese medicine, all the world’s commodities were available here, it seemed. It was another example of the abundance that seemed to be the defining characteristic of Bangkok.  Another light meal at a street cafe, and as darkness fell, Greg told me we had to go, even if very briefly, to see Pat Pong, the famously decadent area
of Bangkok. Another breathtaking tuk-tuk journey dropped us at the edge of the bar area that is Pat Pong. We walked through the small brightly lit area, filled with bars and attractive young women offering us a wide range of eye-popping facilities and mind-expanding exotic pleasures. We politely avoided them all, but stopped in one comparatively tame bar and sat, looking out at the busy and seemingly endless stream of exotic people coming from, or going to, exotic activities that 15 minutes previously had not even existed in my imagination. We drank our beers in contemplative silence. Breaking out of
his hypnotic trance, Greg told me more about the complexities of Thai society and the effect that large numbers of wealthy American soldiers with ‘needs’ had had on the economy of parts of Bangkok like this. And indeed had the effect of
drawing large numbers of rural women into the city. This process is still ongoing today with a different clientele.

I was fading once again, with my jetlag and a surfeit of experience from the day. Greg, the consummate gentleman, accompanied me on another hair raising tuktuk ride back to the hotel, before he went off to meet friends once more. I passed through the hotel lobby, where the never changing group of young Americans and young Thai girls, with ever-changing participants, were still playing their designated roles. I retired to the room, checked the balcony for any young women, but it was too early for that, got undressed and fell immediately asleep, overwhelmed by jetlag and the impact of the tumult of new experiences I had had during the day. I woke again at 5 AM, and after sitting on the balcony for some minutes recalling the wonders of the previous day,  I vowed that, if the opportunity ever presented itself in the future, though I could think of no conceivable way that it would, I would return to Bangkok. It took me almost 20 years to do so. When the sky lightened, I went indoors, showered, packed, got dressed, shook Greg awake to thank him sincerely for his hospitality, wished him luck in his future, as he did in mine,  and went downstairs where the Thai International airline’s car was waiting to take me to the airport. The driver had no menu of services to offer me but he did ask me whether I had enjoyed my stay in Bangkok.

‘ I did, ‘ I smiled, ‘Bangkok is indeed a wonderful city. Very friendly.’