THE SUNDAY STAR (WASHINGTON) OCTOBER 3, 1971
IN INDIA, THEY’RE SAFE AND STAYING
WILL THEY GO BACK OR STAY?
By John E. Frazer From New Delhi
It is now six months since the first column of frightened refugees from East Pakistan trudged into India. After six months, said Indira in March, they will go back”they must go back” But the reality now is different. The 8.3 million refugees, except for 150,000 of them, are not going back, and they are unlikely to go back for another six months or far longer.
In fact, still others are crossing by land and water into India at the current rale of 14,000 a day, as hunger, fear, and guerrilla warfare drive them out.
Recently I watched from a rise of land in India overlooking a little river in East Pakistan as new arrivals came in.
From a grassy marsh, not 300 yards away, a long country boat moved on the water paddled by a Pakistani boatman. In the unpainted craft huddled a Hindu household of 10 or 12- women, children, two men, their clothes in tin trunks, few utensils dangling, and the saris of the women wet almost to the waist from walking in marshes while escaping.
“We are not thinking of keeping a single one.” Siddartha Sankar Ray, Union Minister for Education and West Bengal Affairs, had said in an interview a few days earlier in Calcutta.
But that Hindu household and millions of other refugees lodged in thatched huts alongside verdant rice fields or in tents shielded from rain by polyethylene sheets, are thinking otherwise; they will stay.
They are hardly comfortable; they are packed in camps like sardiness: sanitation is deplorable. But they have enough to eat (except the protein-hungry babies and nursing mothers)-more food, actually, than 50 million Indians eat- and they are safe.
This is really, why they will stay: in India, they are safe.
But India scarcely dares to face the consequences of 8.3 million foreigners living indefinitely under such conditions. The money cost alone (though shared in part by the United States, the United Nations, and other sources) will be roughly $1 billion a year simply beyond India’s resources. And government work almost everywhere in the four invaded states, West Bengal. Assam, Tripura and Meghalaya, has come to a halt.
“Our 1971-72 development has not started at all, said N.C. Gupta, chief secretary of the West Bengal government. “Everybody is working on the refugees.”
Sooner or later, therefore, India must make a hard choice.
The first is to accept the shirk, unwelcome fact that Pakistan has succeeded in forcing up on India some 8 million people, 90 percent of them Hindus; that most of them will never go back, and like the Poles and the White Russians of years past in Europe, they had best be absorbed and dispersed throughout India’s 28 states and federal territories.
Publicly, India refuses even to entertain this solution.
A second possibility is for India covertly to help the Mukti Bahini-the Liberation Army-to overthrow the Pakistan army in East Pakistan, establish an independent nation, and thus clear the way for the prompt return of the refugees.
Again, publicly no one will state that this is India’s objective. Nevertheless, signs are not wanting that India is turning to such a solution.
It is an open secret that arms and training for the Mukti Bahini comes, in part, from India. In New Delhi, on September 3, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi said that it is, not possible for any power to crush or suppress the movement for Bangladesh (the Bengal nation).
Private voices are bolder. Said R.K. Nehru, vice-chancellor of Alahabad University and former secretary-general of the Ministry of External Affairs, early this month, “the situation in Bangladesh provides an ideal opportunity for us to bring about a break-up of Pakistan.”
Naturally, Pakistan will not sit still for such an alternative. The greater the thrust of the Mukti Bahini, the greater the chance of a Vietnam-type guerrilla war, and the larger the influx of new refugees into India.
There is still a third possibility. “I could see a settlement short of total independence.” an official in India’s External Affairs Ministry, said quietly two months ago.
Sometime, perhaps before chaos, it may come to this. But even then, will the refugees go back? At this point, no one knows.