THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 11, 1971
LETTER FROM WEST BENGAL
On December 3rd, India and Pakistan begin a full scale war. Whatever the immediate provocations, it is generally agreed that the cause of the war is rooted in the fact that since March of this year-in the biggest single forced migration in the world’s history-nine million men, women, and children have fled from East Pakistan to India, where ail they appear to have left now is their classification: “refugees.” Yet the world at large does not seem even to have become interested in their plight. For someone accustomed to a society which people are concerned with nutrition, not starvation, with the quality of life, not mere survival, in which people think of life in terms of liberty, justice, equality, and human dignity, it is difficult to imagine what it must mean to be one of their refugees. Although some of them were doctors, lawyers, professors, students, businessmen, or most of them never had much in the way of worldly possessions and like their forefathers, would have died as poor as they were born leaving 110 mark on the world. Family ties associations, and memories must have been everything to them and now the families of most of them have been killed, scattered, or shamed by unspeakable indignities; the few objects that have associations or them have been torn from them; and their memories have been dimmed by who knows what deprivation and anguish. Until their migration, these people were bound by their caste and occupation to a particular place, with nothing special to look forward to nothing special to hope for -even, perhaps, nothing special to live for. Now they have still less. Is there anything, then, that distinguishes them from animals? Gandhi once said of their parents generation, “The more I penetrate the villages, the greater is the shock delivered as I perceive the blank stare in the eyes of the villagers I meet. Having nothing else to do but to work as laborers side by side with their bullocks they have become almost like them.” If the refugees had all died in a single natural catastrophe, would that have been easier for the rest of the world to face? The conditions they are living under seem to drag the entire human species down in a sort of reverse evolution. Yet the fact remains that each gees are now in Calcutta, where, as Kipling wrote, “The cholera, the cyclone, and the crow come and go.” He also described it as a city “By the sewage rendered fetid by the sewer/Made impure,” and said, “As the fungus sprouts chaotic from its bed. so it spread And, above the packed and pestilential town/ Death looked down.” Since Kipling wrote these lines, eighty years ago, the city has spread and speared, and the dominion of death as well, until today Calcutta encompasses over seven million wretched people-not counting the refugees. Now all of eastern India, where refugees are camped in more than a thousand settlements, threatens to become a sprawling outgrowth of Calcutta; it is predicted that if the refugees remain, their number will swell in ten years to thirty million. A third of India’s population already lives in this region, where the worst famines, pestilences, and cyclones always strike, and this third includes the poorest of the Indian poor; the refugees, having nothing more to lose, and having no stake in the political system under which they find themselves living, are ready tinder for any political movement and have made eastern India more nearly ungovernable than ever, casting the stability of the entire country in doubt.
Sending to learn for whom the bell tolls, I went to visit several refugee camps in West Bengal. The misery that paralyzes its victims does not spare its observers, and it is with a great emotional reluctance that I attempt to describe what I found there. No two camps are alike. Some camps have as many a hundred and sixty thousand people, while others have only ten thousand; some have tube wells, while others have no water supply of any kind; some have structures of tarpaulin and thatch, and trench latrines, while others have no structures or latrines at all; some are knee-deep in water, while others are choked with dust.
In one camp I went to, which has over a hundred thousand people living in an area of about a square mile, old men, old women and young children, all looking wasted and weak, were sitting dully on a strip of ground between makeshift shelters and a long open drain brimming with brown sludge. The stench was so overpowered.
“There appear to be no young men or young women,” I remarked.
“Young women never seem to get through,” he said. “The soldiers rape them and keep them for themselves or carry them off to the military brothels. As for the young men, we Indians train them for guerrilla warfare and send them back to fight in the Mukti Bahini, the liberation army.”
We passed some elderly women squatting over the open drain and defecating, with a total lack of self-consciousness. A few steps beyond them, some other women were washing clothes and utensils in the drain. I wondered whether these women were too ignorant to know any better, or too weak to go searching for clean water, or whether there was no clean water to be had in the vicinity, or whether they were not allowed to leave the camp, but when I put these questions to the women, they seemed dazed and uncomprehending, and it was hard to get even the slightest response from them. As for the official, he merely waved the questions aside as unpleasant reminders of the way things were or bad to be.
“They all have dysentery,” he said, moving on. “Why don’t you at least get them to dig some latrines?” I asked.
“We would have a riot on our hands” he said. “That would be taking work away from the local laborers. We’ve already had a Jot of trouble with the local people over the refugees.”
“And the tube wells ?”
“We’ve given out the contracts. The contractor should get around to this camp soon.”
We passed some children sitting listless and stilt by the open drain I had already noticed that the usual train of curious children and beggars who attach themselves to visitors in the bazaars and streets was missing here.
Another camp I visited was full of commotion. . It has a population of about twenty thousand, and it is encircled by security guards and has a fence of barbed wire. As I drove up to it, children closed in around the car and followed me. Inside the camp, a few enterprising men were sitting hawking baskets of rotten fruit and vegetables. A security guard escorted me to the camp headquarters -a tarpaulin structure.lt was surrounded by a noisy group of men shaking their fists. The security guard carefully made his way through them, and I with him. Inside was the commandant, of the camp, an empty desk, saying nothing. As soon as the men noticed arrival, they fell silent.
I asked the commandant what the trouble was.
‘The ration has been delayed by a day. There is nothing I can do about it. They know that. But the Naxalites were here this moming, and they stir up trouble wherever they go.” The Naxalites are an organization of Maoist terrorists. ‘Because of them, the refugees now think the daily ration is their right, not a gift that the government has to work hard to get to them.”
“You actually allow political activists to come into the camp?”
“What can I do? My superior is a Naxalite sympathizer, and he has given me orders not to interfere with their activities. But I went out this moming to plead with them anyway and ask them to leave our camp alone. They feel upon me. They would have killed me if I hadn’t got away The police, the civil service, the entire West Bengal government have abdicated. They don’t know which party is going to end up in power, so no one wants to risk taking sides or making any decisions. The Naxalites are now the biggest force in West Bengal, and all they believe in is terrorism and anarchy.”
Refugees have been coming to India waves since 1947, the time of independence,, when the country was partitioned to create the Muslim, state of Pakistan. Muslims, fearing that they would be discriminated against as a minority in a predominantly Hindu independent India, had demanded a separate country, and they were given West Punjab and East Bengal areas that were a thousand miles apart but in which they made up a majority. The religious riots and massacres that accompanied the partition not only resulted in the death of more than a million people but also brought into being in effect a third nation -a nation of displaced persons. During the first two or three years of the turmoil, -about six million Hindus and Sikhs fled to India and about the same number of Muslims fled to Pakistan. But this crossing nation, staggering though it was, still left ten million Hindus in Pakistan almost all of them in East Pakistan-and several times as many Muslims in India. With the passing of the years, and the deepening of the enmity between India and Pakistan, the fate of these minorities became increasingly precarious. The original refugee population assimilated. The flow of refugees continued, at varying rates, through the nineteen fifties and nineteen-sixties much of it in the direction of India. The additional refugees in India, all of them Hindus, have been estimated to total between three and four million, and they were still living in West Bengal unemployed and unassimilated, managing to subsist with the help of relatives or in refugee camps-when West Bengal and the neighboring states were inundated by the new exodus of nine million. And refugees arc still coming twenty or thirty thousand of them a day. And there are between two and three million Hindus still holding out in East Pakistan, like hostages fortune. There are no fewer than seventy million Muslims in India today, who might as well be so many return pledges, since they are sitting targets for the Hindu resentment that has been simmering all these years and has been stirred up anew by the latest tide of refugees-a resentment that the Indian government has so far been able to keep under control by the deflection of Hindu revanchists and by judicious management of the news but the pressure of religious, or so-called “communal,” tension is building all the lime, and some people privately fear that the seventy million Indian Muslims may become innocent victims or Hindu retaliation. If that should ever happen, the burden of all the Hindu refugees that India is carrying would seem nothing compared to what Pakistan would have to bear.
Since, in the long run. Pakistan has so much more to lose than India has, manyobservers have been asking whether Pakistan might not have been able to prevent the latest exodus, especially since it was a consequence of what was essentially an internal quarrel between the two wings of Pakistan. The Punjabis of West Pakistan and the Bengalis of East Pakistan have much more in common with the Punjabis and Bengalis across the border in India than with each other; they are divided not only by geography but also by differences in language, in economic and social systems, in dress, and in diet. In fact, the only real bond between East Pakistan and West Pakistan is Islam, but, as other Muslim countries have discovered, religion alone cannot bind together politically disparate entities. From the start, the Punjabis, who were much more prosperous than the Bengalis, ran Pakistan’s Army, civil service, and industry. Their operation can therefore consist only of frequent punitive expeditions launched from fortified military strongholds expeditions that may devastate the countryside and decimate the population but cannot conquer the one or studue the other. Moreover, the guerrillas have easy access to India and can come on support from across the border for an indefinite period.
Clearly, it had always been only a matter of time before India would be officially involved, because the brunt of the Pakistan Army’s initial attack few. naturally, on the Hindus turning what was originally a war between the two Muslim factions into a Muslim persecution of Hindus, and so foisting Pakistan’s greatest internal problem upon India. About ninety per cent of the nine million refugees in India today are Hindus. (Hindus and Muslims in East Pakistan were often indistinguishable, and in those cases the only way the Army could tell them apart was by making them strip, for Muslims are circumcised and Hindus arc not. A few of the Hindus, however, were easily identified; they were small time businessmen or petty landowners, and were therefore natural scope- goats in their communities, much as Jews had been in Europe in the nineteen-thirties.) There was no dearth of escape point for the fleeing Hindus, since India shares a thirteen hundred and fifty-mile border with East Pakistan. It has been seriously suggested in some quarters that India could have avoided the whole refugee problem by turning back the first onrush of fugitives at gunpoint, on the theory that the boundaries of a country arc sacrosanct and no country is obliged to receive an alien population. In fact, some people here say that the Indian Prime Minister, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, should at once have made lightning attack on Pakistan, for such an attack would certainly have stopped the refugees at the border, and, in the bargain, dismembered Pakistan -gain that would have offset any price fix might have had to pay in western India, such as the loss of Kashmir. Some even deem her failure to go to war immediately. It is said that as word of this hospitality got about, it encouraged more refugees to flee, compounding tragedy.
No doubt the impulse to help was humanitarian, but few believe that it had no other source; the urge to destroy Pakistan-perhaps even to unite India as it was before partition-must, it is thought, have played some part in Indian political calculations. According to this argument, the Hindus in Pakistan had been living on borrowed time, and, in a sense, the Indian government had always expected to be saddled with them sooner or later. Now the presence of the refugees, in destitution, gave India the opportunity to expose and dramatize to the world the theocratic nature of Pakistanwhose creation had been forced upon India, and whose existence the Indians had never accepted-and to place the blame for their exodus on the Pakistani military junta. (The Pakistanis who claim that the Indians have inflated the figures on refugees, partly by misstatement and partly by adding to the camps’ population the riffraff of the Indian streets, put the number of refugees at two and a half million but all would relief organizations accept the Indian figures as accurate.)
Whatever India’s motives, it certainly seems that concern for the welfare of the refugees, which should have been the primary consideration has not had much to do with the policies adopted by the United States, the Soviet Union or China-the big powers caught up in the situation. The American government, possibly taking its cue from the old State Department dictum that in the underdeveloped world the only reliable allies are military governments not only has never publicly censured General Yahya’s military government but had continued to supply arms to it until Mrs. Gandhi’s state visit to the United States last month. The monetary value of this material was relatively insignificant, but, consisting, as it did, of spare parts for imported equipment, it must have been of considerable military value to Pakistan, and, being sent, as it was in full knowledge of the effects of General Yahya’s policy, it had an alienating effect on the Indians which cannot be underestimated. The State Department’s view-even if it were plausible- that it is best to be on the right side of General Yahya so as to be better able to influence his policy has been maintained only at the expense of moral leadership, and, even so, has borne on visible fruit. The main significance of the much heralded Indo-Soviet friendship treaty of last summer-which was concluded at a time of rampant anti-Americanism in India-is also military. The Russians, real purpose much have been to tip Indian “neutrality” toward the Soviet Union, and to do so on the cheap, as that, because it is generally thought that India must have given assurances that it would not be the first to go to war and so drag the Soviet Union into the conflict. No one knows what the Chinese have promised the Pakistanis, because so far there have been only certain gestures to go on- Kissinger’s flying from Pakistan lo China last summer. China’s playing host to Bhutto this autumn. China’s issuing veiled warnings to India in the United Nations.
Although India, Pakistan, the United States, the Soviet Union and China all profess solicitude for the refugees, whose suffering increases each day, have become irrelevant to the political and diplomatic negotiations that are being carried on in their name, and, even in the debates in the Security Council, have received little attention. The Indian government has recently let it be known that the human aspect of the tragedy must be deemphasized, declaring that an outpouring of sympathy, pity, and aid, however welcome, is no substitute for a political solution, which, in the governments view, involves the repatriation of the refugees-a solution that must ultimately lead to the establishment of Bangladesh. The government insists that the disaffection in East Pakistan with General Yahya and the military is so deep and wide that the refugees could not feel safe if they returned home unless General Yahya released Mujib-who is thought to be in prison and to be undergoing a secret trial for treason-and negotiated the question of Bangladesh with him. But even if Mujib were released, it is doubtful whether he could now be a moderating influence on the Bangladesh issue without being repudiated by the East Pakistanis in favor of the extremist leaders who have emerged in the liberation struggle. In any event, some observers wonder whether Bangladesh would ever welcome the refugees back even if this new nation could somehow be brought into being. In either case, they would remain a small, helpless Hindu minority within a Muslim state, living under the threat of a second exodus, or extermination. And, supposing that any fate for the refugees, after they returned to their homes, were preferable to their continued presence in India, wouldn’t Bangladesh one day serve as a magnet for West Bengali? After all, what would a Bengal nation be with more than a third of the Bengalis living outside it. in India? As for the use pf force to achieve political ends, that may result in India’s acquisition of territory that could be used to settle the refugees (or even in the re- absorption of East Pakistan by India), but it will also poison relations with, a truncated Pakistan or with any future Bangladesh. Some of these speculations must have entered into the thinking of the Indian government, and that only raises another question: Why has the Indian government made the establishment of Bangladesh the crux of its refugee policy? The only answer anyone can come up with here is that the problems a poor country faces are so mind-boggling-they so often defeat all attempts at a political, not to mention a humane, solution-that the government sooner or later resorts to force to win it, a temporary reprieve. In any case, the prospect of permanently supporting the nine million refugees is so inconceivable-according to the World Bank, the minimum cost would be seven hundred million dollars a year, or a sixth of India’s total budgetthat, in the absence of any real alternative, the government has taken shelter in the illusion that Bangladesh would solve the refugee problem.
Before going to the refugee camps, I had allowed myself to hope that the conditions there would not be worse than those to be found in Calcutta. I had imagined, that there must be some limit to human’ suffering and to the ability to survive. I was wrong. The Calcutta poor still evince some hope that tomorrow will bring a slight improvement in their ration or their luck. The Calcutta lepers, even on their deathbeds cry out in pain- which is at least a form of human expression-and the people found working among the poor and the lepers manage to feel and communicate some power and wealth became concentrated almost entirely in the west. The enmity with India which had a negligible influence economy of west Pakistan, all but crippled the economy of East Pakistan, which, unlike West Pakistan, depended on India for trade. The Bengalis, who had come to feel exploited and subjugated, grew more and more restive, their predicament being particularly galling because they constituted a majority of Pakistan’s population. It was an attempt by the President General Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan-who, of course, is from West Pakistan-to deal with some of these problems that precipitated the present calamity. Apparently hoping to mollify the majority and to defuse what he regarded as a threat to the union of Pakistan, he decided, in 1969, to hand over his military government to civilian control, and in December of 1970 he allowed Pakistanis, for the first time in their twenty-three-year history, to vote – on the basis of universal male suffrage-for representatives to a constituent assembly. In the election, the Awami league, led by the Bengali pacifist Sheikh Mujibur Rahman or Mujib — campaigned openly for political and economic autonomy for East Pakistan, and own almost all the Bengal seats, while the Pakistan People’s Party led by the Punjabi military Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was returned with a bare majority in West Pakistan. Once the election results had made it clear that the Awami League would dominate the constituent assembly-and no doubt, the civilian government that emerged from itBhutto let it be known that he would not participate in any assembly or government in which West Pakistan and the Pakistan People party were not equal partners with East Pakistan and the Awami League. Mujib saw in Bhutto’s stand only a design for perpetuating the “colonial subjugation” of East Pakistan by West Pakistan General Yahya seemed to be caught or guard by the strength of the democratic forces he had released. The election had unexpectedly turned into a reference on East Pakistan autonomy, and now that General Yahya was actually confronted with the possibility that control might pass to the eager Bengali majority, he, like Bhutto, seemed unable to countenance any change in the relationship between East Pakistan and West Pakistan, which might be the beginning of the end of the union. He/therefore/tried to get Mujib to moderate his demands, and, when he failed, temporized by fisting the inaugural session of the constituent assembly. This tactic aroused protest in East Pakistan in early March of this year, and he ordered his troops to shoot demonstrators; the shooting, in turn, led to an all-out Bengali civil disobedience movement later in the month, and he gave his troops, free rein, thus causing the death of perhaps as many as two hundred thousand Muslims and Hindus in the space of a few months-and the flight of the refugees.
As I moved through the camps. I thought of all the discussion I had heard and read of how General Yahya came to chose a military solution to a political problem. Some people here condemn the truculence of Bhutto and his clamorous followers, who had wide support in the Army; others condemn the intransigence of Mujib and his impatient supporters, who, giddy with their new freedom and heedless of the examples made of the Hungarians in 1956 and the Czechs in 1968, dismissed the power of a modern state too lightly and assumed themselves to be immune from military action -partly because in their case the action would have to be sustained from a base a thousand miles away across Indian territory. Some say it was unrealistic ever to suppose that West Pakistan would yield its preeminent position without a fight. Others say the history of Bengali grievances was so long that East Pakistan was in no mood to capitulate, especially since a cyclone that struck a month before the election had drowned two hundred and fifty thousand people. Still others blame General Yahya for completely misjudging the commitment of the Bengalis to their cause, and for not playing for more time by, for instance, drawing out the talks and blunting the issue of Bengali autonomy. Having lost political control, however, he perhaps had no choice but to fall back on his real constituency, which was, after all, the military. Whatever the reasons for the military’ action-and all the speculations are based on hearsay or on public statements put out by the various sides as propaganda Indians now think that it made the eventual breakup of Pakistan inevitable, not only because it transformed a bid for autonomy into an outright demand for a separate, independent Bangladesh (Bengal Nation, but also because the Bengali guerrillas are bound to win the war they have been waging for Bangladesh ever since….