Bengal Refugees Won’t Budge
Gavin Young
Calcutta. 27 November. A simple hand-painted sign near Bangaon, two hours’ drive from Calcutta, reads: “To the Pak Border.’ It doesn’t seem to mean much now, for this particular bit of the frontier between Indian West Bengal and East Pakistan might not exist any more.
I saw Mongoloid soldiers of an Indian mountain brigade straddling the bumpy. tree-lined road to Jessore, 10 miles inside East Pakistan. Soldiers and tanks have plunged into the vivid green flatness of East Bengal at various times during the last 10 days. Indian troops are also said by objective sources to be 20 miles down the road to Chittagong in the extreme east of East Pakistan. Gurkha troops have been sent in near Sylhet
In Calcutta. It is still claimed that all the fighting is done by the Mukti Bahini – Bengali guerrillas – but the soldiers near Bongaon are from the regular Indian Army all right. Just behind them, in the trees, are the neat camps of thousands of refugees. The Indian commanders say they are fighting to restore them to their homes, but out of 10 million refugees, some four to five million have no intention of going back, come rain or shine. Now they are under curfew after six o’clock in the evening, so that the Army can drive up empty roads to East Pakistan. The refugees watch the trucks and guns go by and say nothing. If Bangladesh officials in Calcutta are serious. Jessore is to be captured from the Pakistan Army in a day or two. Then the ‘Government of Bangladesh. composed of the imprisoned Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League colleagues, will go there India will recognize Bangladesh. And the Bangladesh people will ‘legally’ invite the Indian Army to come and take over East Pakistan.
This scenario would inevitably lead to full-scale war in East Pakistan, and perhaps in West Pakistan as well. It is impossible to say how much of it was a bluff designed to make Yahya Khan’s flesh creep. It is certain, however, that of Mrs. Gandhi has accepted it, she has not done so under pressure, popular war fever in India. I have seldom, if ever, seen martial newspaper headlines so out of tune with the public mood. Calcutta, that huge shamefully fascinating city, sprawls apathetically on the Hooghly river will every light blazing. The wretched millions jog about indifferently, thinking not of war but of the next handful of rice. The loudest sound in Calcutta is not a war cry, but the screaming of the jackals in the English cemetery.
Calcutta feels no threat. Nor do the Indian authorities there. The Pakistan planes shot down this week were not on their way to bomb the city. They were over East Pakistan’s Jessore airport, which has been under fire from both Mukti Bahini and the Indian Army. This week the Indians have been warning refugees to be ready to move away from the border – as it something nasty is imminent. Foreign Press and television people, packed listlessly in a hotel in Calcutta, are finding it almost impossible to get out and around the border. Even with a permit, I found myself brusquely ordered into a police station in a small frontier town. The police chief, a tubby and. ungracious Bengali called Mr. Biswas, took an hour and a half to decide whether he could safely accept the signature of the Chief Secretary of Bengal on my permit.
The Bangladesh leaders are elusive even in Calcutta. Their claim to have their radio based on ‘liberated’ East Bengal territory seems unreal. It is most likely in Calcutta. In a Delhi suburb, Mr. Choudhury, formerly Pakistan’ Deputy High Commissioner in New Delhi and now representing Bangladesh there, receives journalists and surreptitious diplomats. His son was at Rugby; his daughter at Roedean. He is confident and bellicose. “We shall start forcing down Pakistani civilian planes very soon,” he said. What with? ‘Oh, we will have the means, you’ll see.’
| Not every official of the Bangladesh set-up in Calcutta welcomes the Indian intervention without misgivings. One of the brightest of them, a London law student, said: ‘I think the Indians want to go all the way to Dacca. That’s fine for us in a way. But it’s worrying, I think. Will we be able to get rid of them? In any case, we don’t want our children to grow up being told that they owe their independence to the Indian Army and not to our own efforts.’
Senior Indian officials like Mr. Jagjivan Ram, the Defense Minister, vigorously deny any intention of staying on as an occupying army. They say: ‘Our only concern is to get those 10 million refugees out of here and into there. After that, our responsibility- for law and order, for the prevention of massacres of revenge, for resolving economic tribulation completely ends.’ But here in West Bengal one discovers something of immense importance for this whole catastrophic muddle. About 80 percent of the 10 million refugees are Hindus (some relief workers put the figure higher) – and at least 50 per cent of these Hindus say they are in West Bengal for good.
Mrs. Gandhi says the object of the shooting is simply to create the right conditions for getting the refugees back to East Bengal, all 10 million of them. But suppose the fighting does not achieve that? “They will be put into trains by force if necessary, and the doors closed,’ said one straight- talking Bengali official. Four or five million of them moved by force? There is no feeling of West Bengal solidarity with Bangladesh here. ‘I am exaggerating of course, to make my point,” said a levelheaded West Bengal administrator chuckling, but in a way we hate them.
Reference: The Observer, 28 November, 1971