An infructuous visit
By Sankar Ghosh, The Prime Minister has come and gone. The specific purpose of her visit was not known; it will perhaps be never known. She said she had come for consultation–a purpose which hardly justifies a trip to Calcutta. Sitting in New Delhi, she could get all the information she wanted if it had not already been sent to her by the State Government in the course of its numerous frantic appeals for succor.
Some purpose would have been added to her visit had she toured some evacuee camps to find out for herself the conditions in which the evacuees are living. Neither official notes nor newspaper reports are harrowing enough; they give only a part of the truth, not the whole truth. But she had no time to visit the camps, for she had a tight schedule; and when bad weather forced her to stay in the city overnight, it was already evening.
Her discussions at Raj Bhavan with ministers and officials of the West Bengal Government might have given her some idea of the enormity and the complexity of the evacuee problem; but it is unlikely that she got a complete picture of the context, which is the developing situation in West Bengal, in which this massive problem is building up. Had it been so the visit would not have yielded some perfunctory, halfhearted measures which will at most, touch only a fringe of the problem; there would have been serious efforts to find a solution, to evolve a policy to tackle the problem on a national scale. Evidently, few realize that West Bengal is a powder-keg which can be ignited any day by the exodus from Bangladesh.
If her main purpose was to assuage ministerial feelings in West Bengal, the visit has been a roaring success. The Prime Minister has, according to reports, turned down every suggestion of the State Cabinet, yet ministerial spokesmen are on record that they are satisfied with the outcome of the discussions. If this is their real feeling, they are indeed men who are satisfied with very little. This may be a virtue in private life but is certainly a drawback for men in charge of public affairs.
The main demand of the West Bengal Government was that the Centre should take over the responsibility for administering relief to the evacuees and West Bengal should be allowed to serve as a transit camp of a sort with a constant evacuee population of about five lakhs. The suggestion has been rejected once again. It is difficult to believe that the Centre is unable to take this load off West Bengal’s back; it can share the burden with other States. Obviously, the Center is reluctant to displease other States to relieve West Bengal; for the sake of West Bengal it is not going to risk its relations with other States, though the stakes in West Bengal are much higher.
Instead the Center is reported to have agreed to shift about eight lakh evacuees from West Bengal to centrally administered camps in some other States. Even if this number goes up to one million, West Bengal will be left with three million of its present evacuee population; and by the time the Center is able to remove this one million evacuees from the State a few millions more will have come.
For the problem is not setting up camps alone. The evacuees have to be moved to the camp sites. Air-lifting of evacuees on a large scale is out of the question, and the bulk of them will have to travel by train. It is reported that the railways are not in a position to run more than eight special trains a day; which means that only about 10,000 evacuees can be moved daily out of the State by train. Even if the railways are able to maintain this schedule, it will take more than three months to disperse one million evacuees from West Bengal. By the time the last of them has been moved out it will be time to bring the first batch back to West Bengal so that all of them may be at hand on the border for repatriation at the end of six months by which period the Center hopes it will be possible for them to go back to Bangladesh!
The State Government’s alternative suggestion is that if the Center is unable to take over the entire responsibility of the evacuees, their care should be given over to the army. It is stated that the possibility of Pakistan or China trying to hot up the border to add to the difficulties of India cannot be ruled out and there can be no question of relaxation on the border. At a rough estimate, about 70,000 troops will have to be deployed if camps to accommodate four million evacuees are to be run according to army standards. For the army to take up relief work will, therefore, involve an enormous security risk.
Even the marginal assistance sought by the State Government in the shape of guarding of camps by jawans may not be available. All that the army can do at the moment to lighten the burden of the State Government is to place the services of some officers and medical teams at its disposal.
It is reported that some CRP units may be made available to the State Government to look after law and order in the camps. Whether in lieu of that the troops still deployed in the State to aid the civil authorities in maintaining law and order will be recalled is not clear yet; but it is known that the State Government is still under pressure to release the troops.
The upshot of the week-end discussions appears to be that West Bengal will have to bear the responsibility for accommodating and organizing relief for millions of evacuees till conditions are created in Bangladesh to make their return possible. Whatever little relief has been promised by the Centre will be largely offset by problems of logistics.
It is difficult to understand why the West Bengal Government should have created such a furore over the issue of dispersal when it was ready to take the Center’s “no” without demur. On the eve of the Prime Minister’s visit it had been reported that the Cabinet would make it clear to her that it would quit if the State was not relieved of the bulk of the problem.
Evidently, the Prime Minister has been able to make the Cabinet change its mind – and with little effort. Suspicion will naturally arise that the purpose of the threat was to bring pressure to bear on the Prime Minister so that she might meet the State Government’s demand at least half-way. She has seen through the bluff.
Yet it would perhaps have been wise If the State Government had forced a showdown. The responsibility for evacuee relief would have devolved automatically to the Centre had the State Cabinet stuck fast to its decision to resign. The Centre might have been more responsive to the State’s demands had the alternative to indifference been so drastic.
Acquiescence in the Center’s proposal will not save the State Government from the gathering crisis. The political consequence of its failure to act in time may be far more disastrous than what the leaders of the Democratic Coalition imagine.
Reference: Hindustan Standard, 09.06.1971