Of Pakistan Army’s Betrayal and Slaughter of the Marwaris

Nijhu Kumar Agarwal stands just like the final of the Mohicans to inform the tales of his folks to mankind.

Fifty years again, he together with the women and men of this group have been deceived by the Pakistan Army into believing that they might be despatched again to their motherland India by a prepare and spared a genocide unleashed on Bengalis.

The group of Marwari folks with some Bengalis, numbered round 450, caught a glimmer of hope pondering that their ordeal beneath the federal government of Pakistan on their jap wing (then East Pakistan and now Bangladesh) was coming to an finish.

As introduced on loudspeakers that they needed to board the final prepare again dwelling to India, they acquired on it previous midnight from Saidpur in Nilphamari, the place that they had settled for enterprise through the years.

The prepare, believed to be heading for Jalpaiguri in West Bengal by the Chilahati border, rolled on slowly and got here to a halt close to railway culvert No. 338 within the Golahat space, solely two kilometers away from the place that they had began. All the compartments have been shut from the skin. Peeping by a gap, they might see Muslim Biharis, geared up with weapons, and Pakistan armymen, who would quickly butcher them to dying.

All hell broke unfastened as girls, who had been put in a separate compartment, have been whisked outdoors the prepare and swooped on by the captors like a pack of wolves. The apprehension ran so deep by each cell of the victims’ family that none might utter a single phrase.

Men, who pleaded to be shot as an alternative of being hacked, have been stabbed indiscriminately. Their request was reciprocated with hostile phrases from the occupation military that Pakistan’s bullets weren’t so low-cost to be wasted on them.

The evening turned darker and the 2 sides of the railway became a mass grave. Only round eight to 10 boys managed to expire of hell with the darkness conspiring of their favour to dodge the bullets.

Today, Nijhu Kumar Agarwal, one of many survivors of his group, stands like a mountain of despair, pointing to the spot the place his folks witnessed the Doomsday.

Before that evening of June 6 in 1971, the Marwari group was gripped by horror as over 100 males amongst them had been picked up by the Pakistan Army to assemble an airport. They have been whipped like middle-age barbarians to toil day in and time out.

The genocide, orchestrated and masterminded by Pakistan, started on the evening of March 25, 1971. The horror intensified additional and the deception methodology, employed by the Pakistan Army to kill them, labored as deliberate.

This incident is among the numerous ones the place the racial hatred in opposition to Hindus and Bengalis, killing three million folks and violating 200,000 to 300,000 girls, culminated in probably the most diabolic ethnic cleaning because the days of the Holocaust.

The Pakistan Army, nonetheless, continues to be in a state of denial, rejecting all of the claims in regards to the genocide, now recognised by the US Lemkin Institute. The outgoing Pakistan Army Chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa even had the audacity to say that it was a political failure that seceded Bangladesh from Pakistan and never a army failure. But, the tearful eyes of the survivors communicate volumes in regards to the pogrom, with muted sighs.