CALCUTTA, Oct. 25.—The line begins at Bangaon and stretches intermittently back 25 miles to the East Pakistan border. A human torrent continues to rush down India's narrow country roads seven months after the Pakistani army unleashed its brutal strike in the Bengal area.
Clutching naked children in their arms, the women are often clad in rough burlap cloth, the sheer and colorful saris they usually wear left behind in the suddenness of their flight or destroyed on the 10-to-20-day march that many of them have made. The women also carry the vaccination certificates they have received at the border crossing in Bangaon, a district headquarters. They will receive a food rations card and be assigned to one of the still swelling 877 refugee camps along the Indian-Pakistan border.
Many of the men carry their families' belongings in cardboard suitcases, small trunks, or just bundled in a cloth. But others carry nothing. East Pakistani refugees are still pouring into India at a rate of 15,000 to 20,000 persons a day, according to official Indian estimates.
The continuing flow not only adds to India's already staggering burden in feeding and sheltering 9.3 million Pakistani refugees, but also seems to push back the chances for repatriating those already living in the squalor and desolation of the camps.

ATROCITIES RECOUNTED

For, despite official Pakistani assurances to the outside world that it is now safe for the refugees to begin returning and resume normal life, many of the new arrivals bring out with them the same kind of atrocity stories that were chronicled in detail in the world press when the crisis began on March 25.
"The army and local sympathizers looted and burned my shop last week," Radhashan Banik, a 40-year-old grocer from Faridpur district said in Bagda, an Indian village three miles from the border. Mohammed Azul Rahman, a school teacher in Kushtia broke down in tears as he tried to tell a missionary, at another border crossing point, about the beating that soldiers had inflicted upon him two weeks earlier. "It is too terrible to remember," he sobbed.
The newcomers' "vivid accounts," which cannot be verified from this side of the heavily armed border, reinforce the fears and bitterness of the refugees already here and thus raise the tensions in the Asian subcontinent to an even higher level.
For if the war that India and Pakistan appear to have teetered on the edge of for the past two weeks does come it will largely be because of the intractability of the refugee problem, in the view of well-informed analysts here.

ARGUMENT FOR WAR

Some Indian leaders have argued strongly in private that Indian forces must move into East Pakistan and secure an area to which the refugees can return in the next few weeks.
Otherwise, the strain they exert on India's already huge economic and social problems will supposedly produce irreparable harm. Thus far, this argument has been resisted in New Delhi.
Pakistan, on the other hand, may calculate that a military conflict with India would bring enough international involvement to provide more of a chance for a graceful exit from the continuing bitter civil strife in its eastern wing, according to a widely held view here.
Indian officials in Calcutta and at the relief camps scattered throughout West Bengal assert that there is no immediate prospect of food shortage for the refugees.
But they express mounting concern about India's ability to continue paying for the great majority of the expenses involved in caring for the refugees. Each new arrival costs the Indian government about three rupees, or 22 cents, for every day that they remain for food, shelter, and health care.
"We can procure enough food locally to provide minimal feeding for the refugees," said V. K. Sinha, one of the top administrators in the ministry of rehabilitation, which is channeling relief to the refugees. "But it is difficult to say how long we can go on paying for this. We are spending about $3 million a day in refugees' needs and aids and this is an almost intolerable burden on our meager shoulders.
"We have received and spent only about $40 million in foreign aid so far, and only about $100 million more has been promised. That is a very small drop in the bucket of what is needed."

SITUATION STILL GRIM

There is enough locally grown rice and wheat on hand to go around for the next two to three months, thanks to two good consecutive harvests in India, Officials say, and no prospect of famine.
The outbreaks of cholera and other diseases that earlier killed thousands in the camps appear to have been brought under control. But a two-day tour of refugee camps around the border area indicates that the situation is still grim, especially for those who have just arrived. Malnutrition is pronounced among children under three years, whose reserves have been depleted on the journey across the border.
At Bagda Saturday, more than 350 people were camped in an open field without any shelter. Two babies had been born there within the last two weeks, and the others had still not seen a doctor. A few miles down the road, two dogs were ripping apart a human corpse lying 20 feet from the side of the road.
"We can only worry about how we will continue to live, and do not have the strength to worry about the dead," one refugee explained apologetically.

MOSLEMS ALSO LEAVING

Missionaries, local administrators, and other sources who have been interviewing the new arrivals report several changes in the pattern of those who are now escaping across the border into India. One of the most Significant is that a much higher percentage of those now fleeing are Moslems, whereas the exodus until now has been largely made up of Hindus.
Pakistan has a predominantly Moslem population, with a Hindu minority. The reverse is true in West Bengal and for India as a whole.
"The Moslems realize that they are coming into hostile territory by coming into India," said a European missionary. "So what they are leaving behind must he even worse. We are now getting the people who thought they could hold on to the last minute, either because they were geographically isolated, or because they thought, they would be spared because of their religion. Well, it looks like we're reaching the last moment."
Ali Ahmed, a 25-year-old farmer who crossed the border from the Kushtia district last week, said yesterday that "the Pakistani soldiers said it did not matter
that we were Moslems, that we belonged to the Bengali nation and they threatened us, too. So I left."
This change could add to what some observers here see as the threat of growing social tensions within India, between the local people and the refugees. Relations so far have been remarkably good, these sources say, but in the past few weeks there have been isolated outbreaks of strife.