linguistic:paraphrasing, information:filtering, structural:summarization, structural:scholar_edition, linguistic:translation
Criticism of government response

We have a large army, but it is left to the British Marines to bury our dead.

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman

Political leaders in East Pakistan were deeply critical of the central government's initial response to the disaster. A statement released by eleven East Pakistan politicians ten days after the storm charged the government with "gross neglect, callous indifference and utter indifference". They also accused President Khan of playing down the news coverage. On November 19, students held a march in Dhaka in protest of the speed of the government response, and Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani addressed a rally of 50,000 people on November 24, when he accused the president of inefficiency and demanded his resignation. Khan's political opponents in West Pakistan accused him of bungling the efforts and some demanded his resignation. Awami League leader Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman described the destruction caused by the cyclone akin to a " Holocaust " and condemned the military junta's response as "criminal negligence".

The Pakistan Red Crescent began to operate independently of the central government as the result of a dispute that arose after the Red Crescent took possession of twenty rafts donated by the British Red Cross. A pesticide company had to wait two days before it received permission for two of its crop dusters, which were already in the country, to carry out supply drops in the affected regions. The central government only deployed a single helicopter to relief operations, with Khan later stating that there was no point deploying any helicopters from West Pakistan as they were unable to carry supplies.

A reporter for the Pakistan Observer spent a week in the worst hit areas in early January 1971 and saw none of the tents supplied by relief agencies being used to house survivors and commented that the grants for building new houses were insufficient. The Observer regularly carried front-page stories with headlines like, "No Relief Coordination", while publishing government statements saying, "Relief operations are going smoothly." In January, the coldest period of the year in East Pakistan, the National Relief and Rehabilitation Committee, headed by the editor of Ittefaq, said thousands of survivors from the storm were "passing their days under open sky". A spokesman said families who were made homeless by the cyclone were receiving up to 250 rupees (US$55 in 1971; equivalent to $341 in 2018) to rebuild, but that resources were scarce and he feared the survivors would "eat the cash".