New Yorker

LETTER FROM WEST BENGAL

On December 3rd, India and Pakistan began a full-scale
war. Whatever the immediate provocation's, it is
generally agreed that the cause of the war is rooted in
the fact that since March of this year-in the biggest
single forced migration in the world's history-nine
million men, women and children have fled from East
Pakistan to India, where all they appear to have left
now is their classification: "refugees." Yet the world
at large does not seem even to have become interested in
their plight. For someone accustomed to a society in
which people are concerned with nutrition, not
starvation, with the quality of life, not mere survival,
in which people think of life in terms of liberty
justice, equality, and human dignity, it is difficult to
imagine what it must mean to be one of these refugees.

Although some of them were doctors, lawyers, professors,
students, businessmen, or landowners, most of them never
had much in the way of worldly possessions and, like
their forefathers, would have died as poor as they were
born, leaving no mark on the world. Family ties,
associations, and memories must have been everything to
them, and now the families of most of them have been
killed, scattered, or shamed by unspeakable indignities;
the few objects that had associations for them have been
torn from them- and their memories have been dimmed by
who knows what deprivation and anguish. Until their
migration, these people were bound by their caste and
occupations to a particular place, with nothing special
to look forward to, nothing special to hope for-even,
perhaps, nothing special to live for. Now they have
still less. Is there anything, then, that distinguishes
them from animals? Gandhi once said of their parents'
generation, "The more I penetrate the villages the
greater is the shock delivered as I perceive the blank
stare in the eyes of the villagers I meet. Having
nothing else to do but to work as labourers side by side
with their bullocks, they have become almost like them."

If the refugees had all died in a single natural
catastrophe, would that have been easier for the rest of
the world to face? The conditions they are living under
seem to drag the entire human species down in a sort of
reverse evolution. Yet the fact remains that each of
these nine million refugees has his private history of
human agony.

Hundreds of thousands of the refugees are now in
Calcutta, where, as Kipling wrote, "The cholera, the
cyclone, and the crow/ Come and go." He also described
it as a city "BY the sewage rendered fetid, by the
sewer/Made impure," and said, "As the fungus sprouts
chaotic from its bed,/So it spread ., . And, above the
packed and pestilential town/ Death looked down." Since
Kipling wrote these lines, eighty years ago, the city
has spread and spread, and the dominion of death as
well, until today Calcutta encompasses over seven
million wretched people-not counting the refugees. Now
all of eastern India, where refugees are camped in more
than a thousand settlements, threatens to become a
sprawling outgrowth of Calcutta; it is predicted that if
the refugees remain, their number will swell in ten
years to thirty million. A third of India's population
already lives in this region, where the worst famines,
pestilences, and cyclones always strike, and this third
includes the poorest of the Indian poor; the refugees,
having nothing more to lose, and having no stake in the
political system under which they find themselves
living, are ready tinder for ally political movement and
have made eastern India more nearly ungovernable than
ever, casting the stability of the entire country in
doubt.

Sending to learn for whom the bell tolls, I went to
visit several refugee camps in West Bengal. The misery
that paralyzes its victims does not spare its observers,
and it is with a great emotional reluctance that I
attempt to describe what I found there. No two camps are
alike. Some camps have as many &S a hundred and sixty
thousand people, while others have only ten thousand;
some have tube wells, while others have no water supply
of any kind; some have structures of tarpaulin and
thatch, and trench latrines, while others have no
structures or latrines at all; some are knee-deep in
water, while others are choked with dust.

In one camp I went to, which has over a hundred thousand
people living in an area of about a square mile, old
men, old women, and young children, all looking wasted
and weak, were sitting dully on a strip of ground
between makeshift shelters and a long open drain
brimming with brown sludge. The stench was so
overpowering that the camp official who took me around
kept a handkerchief over his nose.

"There appear to be no young men or young women," I
remarked.

"Young women never seem to get through, he said. "The
soldiers rape them and keep them for themselves or carry
them off to the military brothels. As for the young men,
we Indians train them for guerrilla warfare and send
them back to fight in the Mukti Bahini, the liberation
army."

We passed some elderly women squatting over the open
drain and defecating, with a total lack of self-
consciousness. A few steps beyond them, some other women
were washing clothes and utensils in the drain. I
wondered whether these women were too ignorant to know
any better, or too weak to go searching for clean water,
or whether there was no clean water to be had in the
vicinity, or whether they were not allowed to leave the
camp, but when I put these questions to the women, they
seemed dazed and uncomprehending, and it was hard to get
even the slightest response from them. As for the
official, he merely waved the questions aside as
unpleasant reminders of the way things were or had to
be.

"They all have dysentery," he said, moving on.

"Why don't you at least get them to dig some latrines?"
I asked.

"We would have a riot on our hands," he said. "That
would be taking work away from the local laborers. We've
already had a lot of trouble with the local people over
the refugees."

"And the tube wells?"

"We've given out the contracts. The contractor should
get around to this camp soon."

We passed some children sitting listless and still by
the open drain. I had already noticed that the usual
train of curious children and beggars who attach
themselves to visitors in the bazaars and streets was
missing here.

Another camp I visited was full of commotion. It has a
population of about twenty thousand, and it is encircled
by security guards and has a fence of barbed wire. As I
drove up to it, children closed in around the car and
followed me. Inside the camp, a few enterprising men
were sitting hawking baskets of rotten fruit and
vegetables. A security guard escorted me to the camp
headquarters-a tarpaulin structure. It was surrounded by
a noisy group of men shaking their fists. The security
guard carefully made his way through them, and I with
him. Inside was the commandant of the camp, a small,
elderly Bengali with his head bandaged. Three or four
men were shouting at him, but he sat bowed over an empty
desk, saying nothing. As soon as the men noticed our
arrival, they fell silent.

I asked the commandant what the trouble was.

"The ration has been delayed by a day. There is nothing
I can do about it. They know that. But the Naxalites
were here this morning, and they stir up trouble
wherever they go." The Naxalites are an organization of
Maoist terrorists. "Because of them, the refugees now
think the daily ration is their right, not a gift that
the government has to work hard to get to them."

"You actually allow political activists to come into the
camp?"

'What can I do? My superior is a Naxalite sympathizer,
and he has given me orders not to interfere with their
activities. But I went out this morning to plead with
them anyway and ask them to leave our camp alone. They
fell upon me. They would have killed me if I hadn't got
away. The police, the civil service, the entire West
Bengal government have abdicated. They don't know which
party is going to end up in power, so no one wants to
risk taking sides or making any decisions. The Naxalites
are now the biggest force in West Bengal, and all they
believe in is terrorism and anarchy."

Refugees have been coming to India in waves since 1947,
the time of Independence, when the country was
partitioned to create the Muslim state of Pakistan.
Muslims, fearing that they would be discriminated
against as a minority in a predominantly Hindu
independent India, had demanded a separate country, and
they were given West Punjab and East Bengal-areas that
were a thousand miles apart but in which they made up a
majority. The religious riots and massacres that
accompanied the partition not only resulted in the death
of more than a million people but also brought into
being, in effect, a third nation-a nation of displaced
persons. During the first two or three years of the
turmoil, about six million Hindus and Sikhs fled to
India, and about the same number of Muslims fled to
Pakistan. But this cross-migration, staggering though it
was, still left ten million Hindus in Pakistan-almost
all of them in East Pakistan- and several times as many
Muslims in India. With the passing of the years, and the
deepening of the enmity between India and Pakistan, the
fate of these minorities became increasingly precarious.

The original refugee populations were somehow partly
dispersed through the two countries and partly
assimilated. The flow of refugees continued, at varying
rates, through the nineteen-fifties and nineteen-
sixties-much of it in the direction of India. The
additional refugees in India, all of them Hindus, have
been estimated to total between three and four million,
and they were still living in West Bengal-unemployed and
unassimilated, managing to subsist with the help of
relatives or in refugee camps-when West Bengal and the
neighboring states were inundated by the new exodus of
nine million.

And refugees are still coming, twenty or thirty thousand
of them a day. And there are between two and three
million Hindus still holding out in East Pakistan, like
hostages to fortune. There are no fewer than seventy
million Muslims in India today, who might as well be so
many return pledges, since they are sitting targets for
the Hindu resentment that has been simmering all these
years and has been stirred up anew by the latest tide of
refugees-a resentment that the Indian government has so
far been able to keep under control by the deflection of
Hindu revanchists and by judicious management of the
news. But the pressure of religious, or so-called
"communal," tension is building all the time, and some
people privately fear that the seventy million Indian
Muslims may become innocent victims of Hindu
retaliation. If that should ever happen, the burden of
all the Hindu refugees that India is carrying would seem
nothing compared to what Pakistan would have to bear.

Since, in the long run, Pakistan has so much more to
lose than India has, many observers have been asking
whether Pakistan might not have been able to prevent the
latest exodus, especially since it was a consequence of
what was essentially an internal quarrel between the two
wings of Pakistan. The Punjabis of West Pakistan and the
Bengalis of East Pakistan have much more in common with
the Punjabis and Bengalis across the border in India
than with each other; they are divided not only by
geography but also by differences in language, in
economic and social systems, in dress. and in diet. In
fact, the only real bond between East Pakistan and West
Pakistan in Islam but, as other Muslim countries have
discovered, religion alone cannot bind together
politically disparate entities. From the start, the
Punjabis, who were much more prosperous than the
Bengalis, ran Pakistan's Army, civil service, and
industry. They strengthened and extended their advantage
through the years until the nation's power and wealth
became concentrated almost entirely in the west. The
enmity with India, which had a negligible influence on
the economy of West Pakistan, all but crippled the
economy of East Pakistan, which, unlike West Pakistan
depended on India for trade, The Bengalis who had come
to feel exploited and subjugated, grew more and more
restive, their predicament being particularly galling
because they constituted a majority of Pakistan's
population. It was an attempt by the President, General
Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan-who, of course, is from West
Pakistan-to deal With some of these problems that
precipitated the present calamity. Apparently hoping
mollify the majority and to defuse what he regarded as a
threat to the union of Pakistan, he decided, in 1969, to
hand over his military government to civilian control,
and in December of 1970 he allowed Pakistanis, for the
first time in their twenty three-year history, to vote-
on the basis of universal male suffrage-for
representatives to a constituent assembly. In the
election the Awami League, led by the Bengali pacifist
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman-or Mujib-campaigned openly for
political and economic autonomy for East Pakistan, and
Won almost all the Bengali seats, while the Pakistan
People's Party, led by the Punjabi militant Zulfikar Ali
Bhutto, was returned with a bare majority in West
Pakistan.

Once the election results had made it clear that the
Awami League would dominate the constituent assembly-
and, no doubt, the civilian government that emerged from
it- Bhutto let it be known that he would not participate
in any assembly or government in which West Pakistan and
the Pakistan People's Party Were not equal partners With
East Pakistan and the Awami League, Mujib saw in
Bhutto's stand only a design for perpetuating the
"colonial subjugation" of East Pakistan by West
Pakistan. General Yahya seemed to be caught off guard by
the strength of the democratic forces he had released.

The election had unexpectedly turned into a referendum
on East Pakistani autonomy, and now that General Yahya
was actually confronted with the possibility that
control might pass to the eager Bengali majority, he,
like Bhutto, seemed unable to countenance any change in
the relationship between East Pakistan and West
Pakistan, which might be the beginning of the end of the
union. He therefore tried to get Mujib to moderate his
demands, and, when he failed, temporized by first
delaying and then indefinitely postponing the inaugural
session of the constituent assembly. This tactic aroused
protest in East Pakistan in early March of this year,
and he ordered his troops to shoot demonstrators; the
shooting, in turn, led to an all-out Bengali civil-
disobedience movement later in the month, and he gave
his troops free rein, thus causing the death of perhaps
as many as two hundred thousand Muslims and Hindus in
the space of a few months- and the night of the
refugees.

As I moved through the camps I thought of all the
discussion I had heard and read of how General Yahya
came to choose a military solution to a political
problem. Some people here condemn the truculence of
Bhutto and his clamorous followers, who had wide support
in the Army; others condemn the intransigence of Mujib
and his impatient supporters, who, giddy with their new
freedom and heedless of the examples made of the
Hungarians in 1956 and the Czechs in 1968, dismissed the
power of a modern state too lightly and assumed
themselves to be immune from military action-partly
because in their case the action would have to be
sustained from a base a thousand miles away, across
Indian territory. Some say it was unrealistic ever to
suppose that West Pakistan would yield its preeminent
position without a fight.

Others say the history of Bengali grievances was so long
that East Pakistan was in no mood to capitulate,
especially since a cyclone that struck a month before
the election had drowned two hundred and fifty thousand
people. Still others blame General Yahya for completely
misjudging the commitment of the Bengalis to their
cause, and for not playing for more time by, for
instance, drawing out the talks and blunting the issue
of Bengali autonomy. Having lost political control,
however, he perhaps had no choice but to fall back on
his real constituency, which was, after all, the
military. Whatever the reasons for the military action-
and all the speculations are based on hearsay or on
public statements put out by the various sides as
propaganda-Indians now think that it made the eventual
breakup of Pakistan inevitable, not only because it
transformed a bid for autonomy into an outright demand
for a separate, independent Bangla Desh (Bengal Nation)
but also because the Bengali guerrillas are bound to win
the war they have been waging for Bangla Desh ever
since. The East Pakistan terrain, being a network of
streams and rivers, with poor communications, provides
excellent cover; General Yahya's military operation can
therefore consist only of frequent punitive expeditions
launched from fortified military strongholds-expeditions
that may devastate the countryside and decimate the
population but cannot conquer the one or subdue the
other. Moreover, the guerrillas have easy access to
India and can count on support from across the border
for an indefinite period.

Clearly, it had always been only a matter of time before
India would be officially involved, because the brunt of
the Pakistan Army's initial attack fell, naturally, on
the Hindus, turning what was originally a war between
the two Muslim factions into a Muslim persecution of
Hindus, and so foisting Pakistan's greatest internal
problem upon India. About ninety per cent of the nine
million refugees in India today are Hindus. (Hindus and
Muslims in East Pakistan were often indistinguishable,
and in those cases the only way the Army could tell them
apart was by making them strip, for Muslims are
circumcised and Hindus are not. A few of the Hindus,
however, were easily identified, they were small-time
businessmen or petty landowners, and were therefore
natural scapegoats in their communities, much as Jews
had been in Europe in the nineteen-thirties . )

There was no dearth of escape points for the fleeing
Hindus, since India shares a thirteen-hundred-and-fifty-
mile border with East Pakistan. It has been seriously
suggested in some quarters that India could have avoided
the whole refugee problem by turning back the first
onrush of fugitives at gunpoint, on the theory that the
boundaries of a country are sacrosanct and no country is
obliged to receive an alien population. In fact, some
people here say that the Indian Prime Minister, Mrs.
Indira Gandhi, should at once have made a lightning
attack on Pakistan, for such an attack would certainly
have stopped the refugees at the border, and in the
bargain, dismembered Pakistan-gains that would have
offset any price she might have had to pay in western
India, such as the loss of Kashmir, Some even deem her
failure to go to war immediately-for in the eyes of the
world the approaching blight of refugees, they think,
would have been justification enough for all attack--to
be not only her greatest mistake but also one of those
historic moments, like Munich, on which the fate of
nations turns. Mrs. Gandhi's government, however,
instead of trying to stop the refugees, mobilized one of
the smoothest bureaucratic reception organizations ever
known, which registered and vaccinated them, supplied
them with rations, settled them in campsites, and
furnished them with blankets and tents. It is said that
as word of this hospitality got about, it encouraged
more refugees to flee, compounding the tragedy.

No doubt the impulse to help was humanitarian, but a few
believe that it had no other source; the urge to destroy
Pakistan- perhaps even to unite India as it was before
partition-must, it is thought, have played some part in
Indian political calculations. According to this
argument, the Hindus in Pakistan had been living on
borrowed time, and, in a sense, the Indian government
had always expected to be saddled with them sooner or
later. Now the presence of the refugees, in destitution,
gave India the opportunity to expose and dramatize to
the world the theocratic nature of Pakistan- whose
creation had been forced upon India, and whose existence
the Indians had never accepted-and to place the blame
for their exodus on the Pakistani military junta. (The
Pakistanis, who claim that the Indians have inflated the
figures on refugees, partly by misstatement and partly
by adding to the camps' population the riffraff of the
Indian streets, put the number of refugees at two and a
half million, but all world relief organizations accept
the Indian figures as accurate . )

Whatever India's motives, it certainly seems that
concern for the welfare of the refugees, which should
have been the primary consideration, has not had much to
do with the policies adopted by the United States, the
Soviet Union, or China-the big powers caught up in the
situation. The American government, possibly taking its
cue from the old State Department dictum that in the
underdeveloped world the only reliable allies are
military governments, not only has never publicly
censured General Yahya's military government but had
continued to supply arms to it until Mrs. Gandhi's state
visit to the United States last month.

The monetary value of this material was relatively
insignificant, but, consisting, as it did, of spare
parts for imported equipment, it must have been Of
considerable military value to Pakistan, and, being
sent, as it was, in full knowledge Of the effects of
General Yahya's policy, it had an alienating effect on
the Indians which cannot be underestimated. The State
Department's view-even if it were plausible-that it is
best to be on the right side Of General Yahya so as to
be better able to influence his policy has been
maintained only at the expense of moral leadership, and
even so, has borne no visible fruit. The main
significance of the much heralded Indo-Soviet friendship
treaty of, last summer-which was concluded at a time of
rampant anti-Americanism in India-is also military. The
Russians' real purpose must have been to tip Indian
"neutrality" toward the Soviet Union, and to do so on
the cheap, at that, because it is generally thought that
India must have given assurances that it would not be
the first to go to war and so drag the Soviet Union into
the conflict. No one knows what the Chinese have
promised the Pakistanis, because so far there have been
only certain gestures to go on-Kissinger's flying from
Pakistan to China last summer, China's playing host to
Bhutto this autumn, China's issuing veiled warnings to
India in the United Nations.

Although India, Pakistan, the United States, the Soviet
Union, and China all profess solicitude for the
refugees, the refugees, whose suffering increases each
day, have become irrelevant to the political and
diplomatic negotiations that are being carried on in
their name, and, even in the debates in the Security
Council, have received little attention.

The Indian government has recently let it be known that
the human aspect of the tragedy must be de-emphasized,
declaring that an outpouring of sympathy, pity, and aid,
however welcome, is no substitute for a political
solution, which, in the government's view, involves the
repatriation Or the refugees-a solution that must
ultimately lead to the establishment of Bangla Desh. The
government insists that the disaffection in East
Pakistan with General Yahya and the military is so deep
and wide that the refugees could not feel safe if they
returned home unless General Yahya released Mujib-who is
thought to be in prison and to be undergoing a secret
trial for treason-and negotiated the question of Bangla
Desh with him. But even if Mujib were released, it is
doubtful whether he could now be a moderating influence
on the Bangla Desh issue without being repudiated by the
East Pakistanis in favor of the extremist leaders who
have emerged in the liberation struggle. In any event,
some observers wonder whether Bangla Desh would ever
welcome the refugees back, even if this new nation could
somehow be brought into being. And even if the refugees
were somehow repatriated to Bangla Desh (or to Pakistan
as it is at present constituted, since General Yahya has
repeatedly said they are welcome to return), could they
ever hope to recover their old homes and old
occupations, or would they simply be moving their
campsites? In either case, they would remain a small,
helpless Hindu minority within a Muslim state, living
under the threat Or a second exodus, or extermination.

And, supposing that any rate for the refugees, after
they returned to their homes, were preferable to their
continued presence in India, wouldn't Bangla Desh one
day serve as a magnet for West Bengal? After all, what
would a Bengal nation be with more than a third of the
Bengalis living outside it, in India?

As for the use Of force to achieve political ends, that
may result in India's acquisition Of territory that
could be used to settle the refugees (or even in the
reabsorption of East Pakistan by India), but it will
also poison relations with a truncated Pakistan or with
any future Bangla Desh. Some oil these speculations must
have entered into the thinking Or the Indian government,
and that only raises another question: Why has the
Indian government made the establishment Of Bangla Desh
the crux of its refugee policy? The only answer anyone
can come up with here is that the problems a poor
country faces are so mind-boggling-they so often defeat
all attempts at a political, not to mention a humane,
solution-that the government sooner or later resorts to
force to win it a temporary reprieve. In any case, the
prospect of permanently supporting the nine million
refugees is so inconceivable-according to the World
Bank, the minimum cost would be seven hundred million
dollars a year, or a sixth of India's total budget-that,
in the absence of any real alternative, the government
has taken shelter in the illusion that Bangla Desh would
solve the refugee problem.

Before going to the refugee camps, I had allowed myself
to hope that the conditions there would not be worse
than those to be found in Calcutta. I had imagined that
there must be some limit to human suffering and to the
ability to survive. I was wrong. The Calcutta poor still
evince some hope that tomorrow will bring a slight
improvement in their ration or their luck. The Calcutta
lepers, even on their deathbeds, cry out in pain-which
is at least a form of human expression-and the people
found working among the poor and the lepers manage to
feel and communicate some sense of purpose. But the
refugees could convey only an abysmal, hopeless silence.