Still No End To Bengal Flight
By PETER GILL who has spent the last two months reporting on the crisis in East Bengal.
After two months with the Bengalis, you become pretty good at sorting out the refugees from the rest. Without so much as winding down the car window to the warm monsoon rain, you can tell who’s who and quite a bit besides.
Sheer numbers are a guide of course. As a Time magazine correspondent and I drove the 12 miles from Bangaon near Calcutta, over the East Bengal border to Bogra last Wednesday, an endless sodden column tramped silently past the steamy windows. They will still be marching during the British Sunday break- fast, the British Sunday lunch and the Sunday evening snack in front of the television feature film.
Hindus and Moslems mingled, their only sin being that they were Bengali Hindus and Bengali Moslems.
Moslem men wear lungi, a strip of cloth that is wound round the waist and falls free to the calf. Hindus are more likely to wear the dhoti, the complicated Gandhians garment that also falls loose and free to the ground. There were both Hindu and Moslem men on the tramp for survival that day.
Widows in the column could also be distinguished. Instead of the coloured saris worn by pretty girls and married women, they dress in plain white ones manufactured of the cheapest fabric in the markets of East Bengal. Many are old and frail and lame, but they too have to be led through the mud and the rain from East Bengal to the camps in India.
Refugees carry everything and nothing, all tied up in dirty sacking and old saris. One old man in Bogra sat listless on his hunches dabbling his fingers in a stone jar of little fish brought from over the border. A nutritionist from abroad-and there are one or two doing the rounds-could have told him that those fish were the last protein he would be getting.
Our route through the refugees led to a corner of East Bengal that had once been Pakistan and is now independent BanglaDesh.
Two men from the Bangladesh mission in Calcutta were with us. One had a little tape recorder with which he was going to record the sentiments of the liberated peasantry and the other quoted several appropriate lines from Sir. Walter Raleigh on patriotism.
The local guerrilla commander came to meet us. “You’ve already- seen how high the morale is of the people here, be sad.
To be honest, I hadn’t. They were not on the march to the refugee camps of India, and that was something. But their enthusiasm for the Bangladesh cause appeared about as limited as their enthusiasm for a united Pakistan. If the guerrillas would go away, and if the Pakistan Army would keep its distance, they could then carry on growing their crops and selling them in peace.
It was, in fact, a market day in the village of Bangsha. The guerrilla commander’s map of the area said: “Bangah-markets on Wednesday and Saturday.” The man with the tape recorder fixed up his microphone and then men from the local guerrilla force- soldiers proper and student volunteers- waited for the cheers to begin.
“Sheik Mujibur Rahman ”, yelled the man with the mike. “Zindabad ” (live forever.) came the response in unison.
For the refugees filing slowly past us and those they will join in India the grandiloquence of Governments has done little in two months. India has tried, but her accomplishments are small. Pakistan has enticed, but has offered nothing; the West has condemned and deplored, but has largely stood aloof.
Even the well-intentioned relief efforts of the West have become bogged down in the monsoon mud. The sterling from London, the dollars from Washington and the tonnages from Geneva look fine on paper. It is simply that there is not a Bengali refugee in India who is better fed, marc adequately sheltered or healthier than he was two months ago
Reference: Peter Gill, Sunday Telegraph, July 25, 1971