THE WESTERN MAIL (CARDIFF), SEPTEMBER 24, 1971
WORLD HAS NOT KEPT FAITH WITH EAST BENGAL REFUGEES
By Sunanda Dana Ray
As the six-month period set by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi for the return of the East Bengal refugees draws to an end. India’s harassed relief officials are battling desperately against world indifference and heavy monsoon floods. Five and a half million of the official total of nine million refugees have been cut off from all supplies of food medicines and clothes. Even the distribution of rapidly vanishing local stocks is becoming almost impossible in the waterlogged terrain. There is desperation in the stench that envelops the refugee camps in the helplessness of 8(X) young doctors and their 2,000 medical assistants who complain that dispensaries are running out of drugs for the two most prevalent diseases gastro-enteritis and scabies; and in the forced reduction of the rice dole from 500 grammes to 350 grammes. Thousands of skeletal shacks of bamboo are without tarpaulin or polythene covering.
Famine is not an immediate danger but officials fear another outbreak of cholera which affected 60.000 people in May and June taking nearly 9,000 lives. The new danger arises less from insanitary camp conditions than from a fresh influx: Pakistani reprisals after attacks by the Mukti Bahini guerrilla fighting for the independence of East Bengal have brought an additional 16,000 refugees from the Sylhet district to the hills of India’s Meghalaya state. Many of them arrived stricken with cholera-the incubation period is a week-but relief headquarters in Calcutta is unable to fly out a much needed cargo of vaccines to Gauhati in Assam which is the main dispersal point for the north-east. The traditional river route from Calcutta to Gauhati was closed by Pakistan during the 1965 war with India.
The world has not kepi faith with the refugees. The actual aids received are less than a tenth of the amount promised by the nations of the world. Though the daily influx of the refugees dropped from 34,000 in August to 26.000 in September, planners who had earlier expected-somewhat optimistically as it turns out that the problem would disappear by the end of the month are now busy drawing up a budget and a programme of action for the next six months. That the relief effort has survived at all against such tremendous odds is a miracle. But there is a newfound hope in camps that is totally at variance with the squalid surroundings. Only wrinkled old men. womenfolk and the children remain: young men are leaving refugee camps in droves to join the Mukti Bahini. In a camp for 5,000 people I saw rows of neat little shops with pathetic little fish and lotus stalks-which the local people eat-laid out for sale. Young boys were busy weaving fishing nets and a bent old woman chased us insisting, with the true village hospitality, that we have a nibble of the malt-flavoured milk biscuit given her by Oxfam, the British charity.
This is refugee life al its most constructive. There are schools, weekly singsongs and cleaning operation by groups of volunteers from among the refugees. But. in those districts where camps have been cut off, life could not be more hazardous. Overflowing canals, turbulent rivers and lashing rain have in the past few weeks converted the West Bengal landscape into an angry sea of swirling brown water. The crumbling masonry of provincial towns has given way; streets are inundated; bridges have been wrenched from their supports and flung aside; roads and railway tracks swept away. West Bengal’s flood death toll totals many thousands. Communications arc the single most important problem that faces the relief effort. West Bengal’s five northern districts-West Dinajpur, Jalpaiguri, Cooch Bihar, Darjeeling and Malda; accounting for nearly 3,500,000 refugees-have been totally cut off by the angrily swelling Ganges at Farakka, 200 miles north of Calcutta. This was also the main route to the three northeastern stales of Assam, Meghalaya and Tripura, which have together received nearly two million refugees. Calcutta is the principal supply base for all these areas and, unless communications are quickly restored, the 400 refugee camps there (out of a total of 940 in five states) will soon run out of stocks of food medicines, clothes and building materials.
The desperation of the situation has forced Oxfam-five of whose trucks are stranded by water-to charter an aero plane to airlift essential drugs, but the one company that enjoys a monopoly of this route-flying ramshackle old Dakotas, many of which are relics of World War has callously taken advantage of the crisis to raise its charter rate to Agartala, Tripura’s capital. Indian Air Force planes have already made a dozen sorties on missions of mercy to Gauhati but this is not enough. Oxfam’s regional director, Julian Francis, says that he expects to spend about £634,000 by the end of this year on East Bengal refugees. But Oxfam is also embarking on a £42,000 relief project for Hoods in Bihar and to keep costs down Francis sent out three vehicles last week, each laden with nine tons, of high-protein food, medicines and clothes on an experimental and circuitous route to avoid the floods.
Time is running out. The worst phase of the monsoons may now be over but storage facilities have always been inadequate in the north and north- east and supplies arc running dangerously low. Nearly 230 Japanese trucks given by the United Nations have been lying idle with their distinctive markings in a Calcutta street for the past 20 days because of the condition of the roads. It has become impossible amid such widespread misery to tell the newcomer from the native peasant. Draped in the same grimy rags, both are equally homeless. Where the raised tarmac of a road still winds its way through the Hood waters they have camped on it. huddled in a mass of hungry, rain-sodden humanity along the 40 miles to the town of Bongaon on the Pakistan border.
An Indian Roman Catholic priest. Father Joe d’Souza” says that he can now visit only three out of the 17 refugee camps that he was looking after; the others have either been completely submerged or are inaccessible. The Catholic voluntary organisation, Caritas. has promised Father d’Souza some money and he is trying to buy a fleet of country boats to re-establish contact with his uprooted and dispossessed parish. The main relief effort continue in spile of these draw backs and Colonel P.N. Luthra, the Indian officer in charge of operations, claims that relief has emerged from its earlier haphazard work into a coherent pattern. There is a swift efficiency nowadays about at least the first stages of the process. Refugees are inoculated, vaccinated, cross examined for possible Pakistani agents, registered and given their dole and other cards within three days of arrival in India. The second step is to gel together the inmates of small and scattered camps and consolidate them in large shanty towns, each housing about 100,000 people. Jalpajguri’s 54 original camps have already been reduced to 22 and the target is to regroup all the district’s refugees in only 12 camps. Col. Luthra’s argument for large establishment on high ground away from main roads is that they will reduce overheads and make medical care and distribution of supplies simpler. The snag is that there will be neither food nor medicines to hand out unless foreign aid is more substantial. Even more uncertain is the projected third phase of the process, which is the evacuation of the big consolidated camps now coming into being for return to East Bengal: by the present look of things Col. Luthra, who is still a comparatively young man, will have retired from the service before the refugees return.