Flight Into Suffering
ABU
At the Circuit House in Agartala last week my bedroom windows rattled every night as Pakistani shells burst along the border. Agartala is the capital of Tripura state. which has a common border with five districts of East Pakistan. The shelling goes on during the day as well. though with less regularity. It is probably aimed at the guerrilla forces operating from the border, but it is also, no doubr, a way of terrorizing the villagers in these areas and forcing them to leave.
In the past few days, as Pakistani troops have been spreading out along the boundary, the flow of refugees has steadily increased into the Indian states of Tripura, Assam and West Bengal. There are about three million 1’efugees from East Bengal in India today. Tripura’s population, which was 1.5 millions two months ago, has increased by almost half.
Shelters
There are more than 500,000 registered refugees in Tripura, and perhaps 100,000 unregistered and living with relatives and friends. The situation has created a serious food problem and retarded development projects in the state. About half the refuges, it is estimated, have been provided with temporary shelter. Many schools and some temples have been turned into camps, but thousands live in huts made of plaited bamboo screens and grass thatching. The huts look pretty and neat, but they can be blown down in a storm. They will be poor protection when the heavy rains begin in mid-June. Thousands of families now live in the open, under trees, and many babies and children are likely to die in the coming weeks.
Sabrum, 70 miles south of Agartala, is one of the biggest camps in Tripura. A town with a normal population of 2,000 now has several times that number. About 80,000 people have passed through Sabrum in the past month. A few thousand yards from the camp is the river Feni marking the boundary with East Bengal. A tapering, hooded Bengali boat lay moored on the Indian bank. A group of children were peering across to the other side. “There!” said one in a hushed voice. “There they go.” Two Pakistani officers were marching in step in the compound of what was once a post office, now turned into an army camp. This was the town of Ramgarh. There was not another sound in sight. Beyond the post office were wide open spaces. Next to it, a partly damaged school building and a half-destroyed mosque. Nearby, the charred remains of a few houses.
Bangaon, about 60 miles from Calcutta and two miles within the Indian side of the border, presents horrifying spectacles, with thousands of mothers with little children and babies in arms living along the roadside, cooking food or resting in the shade. Despair is written on their faces. Long columns of people wait at different places for their rations of 400 grams of rice a day. A large proportion of the refugees are children. Emaciated, silent, cheerless, they are a heart-rending sight and a stark indictment of the kind of world they have been born into.
But, if the children depress, their grown-up brothers in the Mukti Fauj (Liberation Army), inspire. On the border, some miles from Agartala, on the fringe of a forest, I spent an hour at a training camp of the Mukti Fouj. Past the armed guard in lungi and shirt, I was led to an old wooden house, where I was met by a young boy who looked hardly 18. He introduced himself as the commander. He was a former cadet of the military academy in Dacca. He introduced some of his fellow fighters, all of student age, and wearing lungis and shirts. As I sketched one of them sitting guarding a stack of rifles, the commander talked about the daily exploits of his boys, about their regular encounter with Pakistani troops. He was confident of victory. “The morale of the boys is very high.”He said repeatedly. When I had finished the drawing, he came over and had a look. “Don’t show him afraid,” the commander said. “You must put some courage in his eyes. Our morale is very high.” The buy in fact looked just as I had drawn him. Perhaps he was thinking of his mother.
Reference: The Guardian, 5 lune, 1971