SSC English – Test 16

Read the passage carefully and choose best answer to each question out of four alternatives. The 1971 Bangladesh genocide is little remembered, although it was almost as bad as Rwanda. It turned the Cold War story of freedom-loving US versus the oppressive Soviet Union on its head. The land of the free was in a shameful alliance with the killers, while the evil empire was on the side of the angels. Yet this 'good versus bad' battle was very sharply etched. In 1970 the Avami League, dominated by the Bengalis of East Pakistan, won the country's first truly democratic election. The outraged Punjabis of West Pakistan, who had ruled the country since its birth in 1947, unleashed a brutal crackdown killing a quarter of a million Bengalis, possibly a million, with ten million refugees fleeing to neighbouring India. Thousands of women were raped and there was also a ferocious ethnic cleansing of the minority Hindu population. The Pakistani military went round forcing men to lift their lungis, the cloth that men in that part of the world drape round their waist, aware that Hindus, unlike Muslims, were not circumcised. And, like Jews in Nazi Germany, some Hindus were forced to wear a cloth to identify themselves. This was much worse than the trauma of Partition, with Archer Blood, the US consul general in Dhaka, in a graphic telegram to the State Department, calling it 'Selective Genocide'. This telegram gives the book its title. Blood sent many chilling reports documenting the genocide but Richard Nixon dismissed him as another wretched liberal and humanitarian relief came low down Nixon's priorities. Keen to pursue his opening to Mao's China, he was using Yahya Khan, the Pakistani military dictator, to send messages to the Chinese and readily accepted Yahya's view that there was no genocide, just an Indian plot to destroy Pakistan.

Which could be a suitable title for the passage?

Read the passage carefully and choose best answer to each question out of four alternatives. The 1971 Bangladesh genocide is little remembered, although it was almost as bad as Rwanda. It turned the Cold War story of freedom-loving US versus the oppressive Soviet Union on its head. The land of the free was in a shameful alliance with the killers, while the evil empire was on the side of the angels. Yet this 'good versus bad' battle was very sharply etched. In 1970 the Avami League, dominated by the Bengalis of East Pakistan, won the country's first truly democratic election. The outraged Punjabis of West Pakistan, who had ruled the country since its birth in 1947, unleashed a brutal crackdown killing a quarter of a million Bengalis, possibly a million, with ten million refugees fleeing to neighbouring India. Thousands of women were raped and there was also a ferocious ethnic cleansing of the minority Hindu population. The Pakistani military went round forcing men to lift their lungis, the cloth that men in that part of the world drape round their waist, aware that Hindus, unlike Muslims, were not circumcised. And, like Jews in Nazi Germany, some Hindus were forced to wear a cloth to identify themselves. This was much worse than the trauma of Partition, with Archer Blood, the US consul general in Dhaka, in a graphic telegram to the State Department, calling it 'Selective Genocide'. This telegram gives the book its title. Blood sent many chilling reports documenting the genocide but Richard Nixon dismissed him as another wretched liberal and humanitarian relief came low down Nixon's priorities. Keen to pursue his opening to Mao's China, he was using Yahya Khan, the Pakistani military dictator, to send messages to the Chinese and readily accepted Yahya's view that there was no genocide, just an Indian plot to destroy Pakistan.

What did the US consul general call 1971 war?

Read the passage carefully and choose best answer to each question out of four alternatives. The 1971 Bangladesh genocide is little remembered, although it was almost as bad as Rwanda. It turned the Cold War story of freedom-loving US versus the oppressive Soviet Union on its head. The land of the free was in a shameful alliance with the killers, while the evil empire was on the side of the angels. Yet this 'good versus bad' battle was very sharply etched. In 1970 the Avami League, dominated by the Bengalis of East Pakistan, won the country's first truly democratic election. The outraged Punjabis of West Pakistan, who had ruled the country since its birth in 1947, unleashed a brutal crackdown killing a quarter of a million Bengalis, possibly a million, with ten million refugees fleeing to neighbouring India. Thousands of women were raped and there was also a ferocious ethnic cleansing of the minority Hindu population. The Pakistani military went round forcing men to lift their lungis, the cloth that men in that part of the world drape round their waist, aware that Hindus, unlike Muslims, were not circumcised. And, like Jews in Nazi Germany, some Hindus were forced to wear a cloth to identify themselves. This was much worse than the trauma of Partition, with Archer Blood, the US consul general in Dhaka, in a graphic telegram to the State Department, calling it 'Selective Genocide'. This telegram gives the book its title. Blood sent many chilling reports documenting the genocide but Richard Nixon dismissed him as another wretched liberal and humanitarian relief came low down Nixon's priorities. Keen to pursue his opening to Mao's China, he was using Yahya Khan, the Pakistani military dictator, to send messages to the Chinese and readily accepted Yahya's view that there was no genocide, just an Indian plot to destroy Pakistan.

Which political party won first democratic election in Bangladesh?