Word: desh
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...civil war that began in late March continues to rage in East Pakistan, renamed Bangla Desh by the rebels. Using modern weaponry, much of it American supplied, the West Pakistani army and air force rain death on Bangla Death guerrillas and non-combatents alike. Accurate casualty figures are impossible to come by, but informed sources place the death toll at close to 500,000. Nine million refuges have fled across the border to India, while the number of homeless within Bangla Desh is astronomical but impossible to ascertain. As the food supply runs out in Bangla Desh, the increasing prospects...
...blend in with the peasants, who feed them, and serve as lookouts, scouts and hit-and-run saboteurs. Twice the guerrillas have knocked out power in Dacca, and they have kept the Dacca-Chittagong railway line severed for weeks. Wherever possible they raise the green, red and gold Bangla Desh flag. They claim to have killed 25,000 Pakistani troops, though the figure may well be closer to 2,500 plus 10,000 wounded (according to a reliable Western estimate). Resistance fighters already control the countryside at night and much of it in the daytime...
...feel that before the conflict is over, the present moderate leadership will give way to more radical men. So far the conflict is nonideological. But that could change. "If the democracies do not put pressure on the Pakistanis to resolve this question in the near future," says a Bangla Desh official, "I fear for the consequences. If the fight for liberation is prolonged too long, the democratic elements will be eliminated and the Communists will prevail. Up till now the Communists do not have a strong position. But if we fail to deliver the goods to our people, they will...
Typically, Bangla Desh chose as its national anthem not a revolutionary song but a poem by the Nobel-prizewinning Bengali Poet Rabindranath Tagore, "Golden Bengal...
...over with, as some high-level Indians openly suggest. Hours after Indian troops marched into East Pakistan, Pakistani tanks and troops could be expected to roll over India's western borders. Moreover, fighting could spread over the entire subcontinent. For all of India's commitment "to Bangla Desh democracy and those who are fighting for their rights," in the words of Mrs. Gandhi, New Delhi is not at all interested in taking on the burden of East Bengal's economic problems. The only answer, as New Delhi sees it, is a political solution that would enable refugees to return...