Mrs. Gandhi’s visit made no impact on Assam, Meghalaya
From our Gauhati Office, June 16 – Those who expected that the Prime Minister during her second visit to the Bangladesh evacuees in Assam and Meghalaya would make some historical announcement must have severely been jolted Mrs. Gandhi has returned to the capital after her two-day sojourn but what was expected to clatter did not click.
Besides the interval of one month, there was some change also in the situation apropos of Bangladesh between the Prime Minister’s first and second visits to the evacuee camps in this north-eastern State. In the early part of May the evacuees – broadly speaking – had just started arriving and there was a fund of goodwill for them among the people of the host territory. The harrowing tales of atrocities that the evacuees carried moved everybody at that time on this side of the international border. That dour exigency called for an unreserved compassion for the oppressed humanity providing for its immediate shelter and food and immunizing the migrants from pestilence and the whole of India seemed to have risen to the occasion under the leader-ship of its popular Government.
Nobody would say that the Center has since vacillated from its policy of benevolence towards the evacuees who were till a few years back an integral part of the Indian community. It has been indeed a great relief to the Government of several border States that New Delhi is shouldering the full burden of housing and feeding the evacuees wherever they may be living in camps and until such time as normal conditions return to their battered homeland.
But meanwhile continued influx of evacuees has raised a number of queer problems, economic and political which have again generated a sense of apathy among many people in the border States towards the evacuees commodity prices have spiralled up epidemics are around the corner, racial and linguistic tensions have been raked up in important cities and thanks to the Pakistani spies and agents provocateur masquerading as evacuees as also to the wanton aggressive lust of the · Khan army – the security of the border regions has been endangered.
What is the way-out of all these predicaments? – The people of Assam and Meghalaya urgently wanted to know about it from the Prime Minister. Despaired and distraught under the weight of ever-widening influx they on their behalf proposed certain measures – dispersal of the bulk of evacuees for instance. And if this would not solve the problem squarely, they expected the Government of India to articulate any other effective and immediate measures. Precisely a large number of people in Assam and Meghalaya expected the Prime Minister to declare during her visit. India’s decision to recognize Bangladesh and help stave off the present crisis by driving away the blood-thirst Yahya hordes.
But Mrs. Gandhi who came and has returned did not make that declaration nor did she indicate any equally instant and effective alternative that her Government might be contemplating. Her assurance that some concrete decision would be taken after Mr. Swaran Singh returned from his current odyssey abroad did not inspire much hope and relief simply because the external Affairs Minister did not appear to have succeeded so far to break the pro-Pakistani iceberg in the West.
Pointing to India Government’s current anxiety for a “political settlement” between the military junta and the leaders of Bangladesh some people here express their “genuine” doubts if that would at all come about, especially since the Bangladesh leaders are not agreeable to it at these late hours. Besides, how can the common people of Bangladesh be oblivious so soon of the “macabre tragedy” which has parched their silvan homes, taken a toll of innumerable human lives and subjected them to extreme indignity? On the other hand many are astonished that instead of asking the Defence personnel at least to force the Pakistani hordes to abide by the international ground rules the Prime Minister should simply remark that the hostile and salves should be met with courage and fortitude.
Mrs. Gandhi’s last visit could not therefore make any new impact on the twin border State of Assam and Meghalaya which means that all the anxieties and anguishes of the border people and the evacuees will still prevail if not aggravate. That unfortunately the Prime Minister herself did not care much to assuage the feelings of the local people is borne out by the fact that she finally dropped the evacuee camps in the Khasi Hills from her itinerary. The plea of a foul weather which did not prevent her from going to the Garo Hills was hardly convincing. Possibly it was because of an agitation launched there by the Tribal Youth Welfare Association. that the Prime Minister abandoned her Upper Shillong programme.
Nonetheless when a reporter at Silchar drew her attention to these agitations the Prime Minister reportedly appreciated the cause of such local reaction but “felt confident that the people would gradually understand the developments across the border in their proper perspective!”
Now the question may be asked was it exclusively bad weather or something else to boot that stalled the Prime Minister’s scheduled visit on Saturday to the Puntung evacuees camp in the Khasi Hills for Mrs. Gandhi patiently waited at the Gauhati Airport to get the weather’s green signal to keep her engagements at Tura and two transit camps in the Garo Hills.
And this she did even after once canceling her trip thus creating confusion among security and police officials, local leaders and Pressmen and no less to the evacuees themselves. At the evacuee camps at Dimapur and Mechangpani, Mrs. Gandhi arrived late by which time many had returned to Tura about 30 miles away.
One reason of her reclaiming the Garo Hills programme might be that this was to be her first visit to that far-flung, long-neglected district of Meghalaya. But was the district’s quieter political atmosphere another ? The Prime Minister must have been moved by the grand disciplined and warm reception that the Garo people at Tura accorded her.
The Meghalaya Chief Minister Capt. W. A. Sangma, himself hails from the Garo Hills and his APHLC is the ruling party also in the Garo Hills District Council. Yet this district too has a number of political parties – HSPDP Congress and CPI – opposed to the APHLC and thus not unmindful to agitate on an issue which may embarrass the ruling party in next year’s poll. But happily no political party in the Garo Hills – not even the APHLC’s formidable rival, HSPDP – has so far tried to use the problem of evacuee influx as a cudgel to beat the ruling party with.
Nonetheless there is a simmering discontent among the Garo people over the evacuee influx mainly on two counts. Firstly, they are afraid that the continued flow of evacuees would turn them into a minority in their own land. Secondly, occasional intrusion by the Pakistani Army has forced a few hundreds of border villagers to flee their homesteads abandoning cultivation and other pursuits of life.
The issue was specifically raised in the Garo Hills central Relief Committee’s 1000 word memorandum in which the Prime Minister was requested to move the bulk of evacuees from that district. The Relief Committee, which condemned the Pak army’s atrocities on the unarmed people of East Bengal and its “naked aggregation on our own borders” also said that following the happenings in Bangladesh. “a different” situation has arisen more recently in our district. An along the Garo Hills 144 miles border with East Bengal there has been a continued influx of evacuees thus “Swelling the district’s population of about four lakhs to six”.
This swelling of the population, it said, imposed a severe strain on the people and the administration. “The lack of flat land to pitch tents of put up temporary shelters for the evacuees the difficult communications posed by a poor road system the fact that our district is deficit in food requiring a very large part of its normal requirements to be brought from outside and the occurrence of floods and landslides in the monsoon cutting off communications makes the presence of an evacuee population equal to half the population of the district as immensely difficult problem.”
“The continued temporary stay of such a large number of evacuees has created many social, economic and other problems. To this was added the repeated aggression by the Pak army into our territory foreign our border village, to flee abandoning their cultivation and other means of livelihood and making them evacuees in their own land.”
Even though the Meghalaya Government was also understood to have made a similar plea earlier in its own memorandum, the Prime Minister, however, raised the question of shifting the evacuees in her address at the Tura public meeting. Mrs. Gandhi instead referred to India’s appeal to other countries to create conditions so that the evacuees could return home with safety and honor adding “Meanwhile, we have to help them and also to tackle our own problems.”
In fact, it somehow appeared to me that due to their characteristic compassion for the oppressed and of course owing to the Prime Minister’s expectation that a situation would soon be created in Bangladesh so that the evacuees could return, the Garo leaders were not insistent upon immediate removal of the evacuees from their district.
During a chat with this correspondent the Deputy Commissioner of Garo Hills who himself comes from a respectable Khasi family told me that all the political parties and social organizations of the district, except a handful of people, were very helpful to the Government in providing relief to the evacuees.
In the absence of any real social tension the Deputy Commissioner did not feel that the Centre was planning any dispersal of the evacuees from his district. In the existing evacuee camps in the Garo Hills there were nearly 1,56,000 refugees and the Government had decided to construct more camps for housing them at the ratio of 5,000 evacuees per camp.
The Deputy Commissioner, Mr. Cajee, disclosed that no epidemic had so far broken out in any of the camps and that elaborate arrangements had been made to give the evacuees necessary medical aid. At each of the camps as this correspondent found later, there is a medical relief center where the people suffering from minor diseases are treated. Serious patients are however to be sent to Dalu or Tura. Ring wells have been sunk to provide drinking water. All the evacuees we were told were inoculated.
The only inadequate thing according to Mr. Cajee, was the quantum of ration supplied to the evacuees. They are getting only 400 grams of rice per head per day, 200 grams of pulses, 10 millimeters of mustard oil and 10 grams of salt and no cash dole.
The relief authorities are however supplying no kerosene to the evacuees. Hence those who cannot purchase it from the market have to live in darkness throughout the night. Many evacuees especially at the Machangpani camp, related their inconveniences due to non supply of kerosene. And their grievance seemed genuine especially in view of the fact that several families, irrespective of caste or creed have to live within the four walls of a hutment, males and females with their modest belongings huddled together.
Reference: Hindustan Standard, 17.06.1971