TENS OF THOUSANDS PAKISTANI
Refugees Enter India Daily
Gandhi Calls for National and Intn’I Help
NEW DELHI,- Prime Minister Mrs. Indian Gandhi said here Saturday East Pakistani refugees daily entering India in tens of thousands had become “heavy and crushing burden”.
Calling for national and international efforts to help the refugess, Mrs. Gandhi said : “What was an internal affair of Pakistan has become our internal problem”.
She told members of her ruling Congress Party that the influx would cause problems not only in eastern border states but throughout this vast poverty-stricken country.
In some there might be attempts to stir up communal troubles out of the refugee problem, she warned.
Latest official figures show that 3,200,000 refugees have crossed from East
Pakistan since the martial law crackedown there last March 25. About 40 percent of these are Moslems.
Mrs. Gandhi said it was necessary for India to arouse world sympathy to mitigate the suffering of people in East Pakistan without being afraid of the dangers or the reaction of others.
“The only point of view we have is the interest in our hearts to help the people of Bangla Desh (Bengal nation)”, she said.
Observers here said Mrs. Gandhi seemed to be expressing growing Indian anxiety that other nations have not grasped full reality and magnitude of the refugee problem.
The Prime Minister asked her party members to work at all levels to heal the physical and mental wounds of the refugees.
“We must not forget that one day they have to return to their country.”
“World attention has to be focussed on the creation of conditions in which their lives would be safe on return. We cannot send them back to be slaughtered”, she added.
The Press Trust of India reported that three people were injured Saturday when Pakistani troops opened fire on a group of refugees entering India at Shikarpur, 185 kilometres (115 miles) north of Calcutta.
Indian border security forces returned the Pakistani fire, said P.T.I.
Passive Onlooker
Meanwhile, Defence Minister Jagjivan Ram, visiting a refugee camp at Haldibari in the north of West Bengla state, said India would not be “a passive onlooker to the frequent unprovoked Pakistani firings on Indian territories”.
The situation in East Pakistan which has brought a flood of three million refugees into India is expected to dominate the opening days of the Parliament session which begins here on Monday.
Recognition of Bangladesh
The Prime Minister, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, will face demands for recognition of “Bangla Desh” as the East Pakistani secessionists call the province, She is also likely to be questioned about the impasse in the repatriation of Indian diplomats from Dacca and their Pakistani counterparts from Calcutta.
Pakistani Government troops.
According to accounts given by association members in touch with, East Pakistan, troops shot all the university members they could find “as a calculated process” the associations’ General. Secretary Laurie Sapper said here.
He told the association’s summer conference : “The act that here was an academic community deliberately decimated as a wanton act deserves to be condemned by the association”.
Bangla Desh Struggle
DPA correspondent Georg Spicker said the freedom fighters of “Bangla Desh” have given up hope being able to drive the troops of the Islamabad millitary regime from East Pakistan within a short time.
Instead, the resistance movement is preparing for a protracted guerrilla War, according to members of the “Mukti Fauj” (liberation army) and East Pakistan refugees in India.
What are the changes for the Bangla Desh guerrilas? according to Maos famous formula, a guerrilla must be able to move like a fish in the sea of the people, which benefits from any traditional army’s humannitarian considerations.
But the soldiers from West Pakistan have already shown that they will move with utmost brutality even against their Moslem kin in East Pakistan in order to crush any flicker of opposition.
The guerillas therefore have to fall back mainly on the strategically unimportant villages, which have so far been spared from army attacks.But this raises the question of whether the impoverished population of these villages is willing to give material support to the guerrillas and risk drawing the army’s attention. An alternative would be for the guerrillas to use the Indo Pakistani border area- in this “sea” they could be relatively secure for the time being.
Reference : The Djakarta Times, 25.05.1971