The Bengali Refugees – A Surfeit of Woe – Monday, 21 June, 1971 – Time Magazine

A CYCLONE that killed as many as 500,000 people. A civil war that claimed perhaps 200,000 more. An exodus that already totals 5,000,000 and is still growing. A cholera epidemic that has barely begun, yet has already taken some 5,000 lives. It is an almost biblical catalogue of woe, rivaling if not surpassing the plagues visited upon the Egyptians of Mosaic days. And yet it is virtually certain that the list will grow even longer for the bedeviled people of East Pakistan. Last week, as fresh waves of refugees poured across the Indian border at the rate of 100,000 a day, they brought tales of pogrom against Hindus by the predominantly Moslem Pakistanis. And over the stinking, teeming refugee camps that scar the border areas of five Indian states hovered the growing threat of famine and pestilence.

The first onrush of refugees followed the outburst of civil war in March, when West Pakistan decided to crush East Pakistan’s drive for Bangla Desh (an independent Bengali State). Immediately after fighting broke out between the fierce Pathans and Punjabis of the Pakistani army and the Bengali liberation forces, 1,500,000 terrified East Pakistanis—Moslems and Hindus alike —crossed into the Indian states of West Bengal, Tripura, Assam, Meghalaya and Bihar. Now the escapees are mostly Hindu, and they bring tales of torture, rape and massacre. According to the new arrivals, the Pakistani government is blaming the 10 million Hindus of East Pakistan (population 78 million) for being the principal supporters of the now-outlawed Awami League of Sheik Mujibur Rahman. The Hindus did in fact overwhelmingly support “Mujib,” who at last word was under house arrest in Karachi, the principal city of West Pakistan. But so did the Moslems, for the Awami League won 167 of the 169 seats at stake in East Pakistan during last December’s elections. But the Hindus, because they are a minority, are an easier target.

Battered to Death. A Hindu building contractor told of how Pakistani troops at a tea estate asked people whom they voted for in the election. “They shot 200 who admitted voting for the Awami League.” In a hospital in Agartala, Indian doctors reported that a number of the refugees came in badly burned. The doctors explained that the refugees were shoved into huts by Pak army men, who then set the huts on fire. The hospital has also treated 370 men, women and children for bullet wounds, 27 of whom died.

In the refugee camp at Patrapole on the West Bengal-East Pakistan border, a 16-year-old Bengali girl recalled how she and her parents were in bed “when we heard the tread of feet outside. The door burst open and several soldiers entered. They pointed their bayonets at the three of us and before my eyes killed my mother and father—battering them to death with the butts of their rifles. They flung me on the floor, and three of them raped me.” Another teen-age girl in a Tripura camp told how she was raped by 13 West Pakistani soldiers before escaping. Other girls have reportedly been taken from fleeing families to be sold as prostitutes to the soldiers, particularly if their fathers could not pay a ransom for them.

According to an official who has toured the border, Pakistani troops and their anti-Hindu supporters are demanding $140 a person before letting family members leave East Pakistan. Lacking only $25 of the ransom for his wife, one man pleaded: “Beat me for the rest.” They let his wife go after he was beaten on the temple with a bamboo stick until he lost an eye.

Those who manage to escape could be models for Goya’s Disasters of War. The lucky ones get into already overfilled tent camps that reek of caustic soda disinfectant and human excrement, and are ankle deep in filthy water from the first monsoons. Most huddle under trees or bushes trying to avoid the heavy rains. Some find cramped quarters on the verandas of now closed schoolhouses. Others near Calcutta have found large open drainpipes to live in. Around them is always the stench of garbage, polluted water, sickness and death.

Token Cremation. The polluted drinking water, the lack of sanitation and the officials’ inability to inoculate the millions of refugees have contributed to the spread of cholera, particularly in West Bengal. A bacterial disease common to India and Pakistan, cholera causes severe vomiting and diarrhea, which bring dehydration and death. Those afflicted can usually be saved by replenishing the bodily fluids through intravenous injections or drinking large doses of a solution of salts, baking soda and glucose. But the flood of refugees is just too great to be handled by beleaguered medical teams.

The roads the refugees travel are littered not only with clothes and discarded household goods, but with bodies of cholera victims left by those too frightened of the disease to bury their own dead. Although Hindus practice cremation, many of the bodies are merely singed with two burning sticks and then left for the hovering vultures or wild dogs to pick apart. Even when the corpses are buried, they are often dug up by carrion eaters. Police have their hands full trying to prevent refugees from tossing corpses into the rivers. In the overcrowded hospitals, the sick and dying are jammed together on the floor, and the dead continue to lie among the living for hours before the overworked hospital staffs can cart the bodies off.

At one of West Bengal’s overflowing health centers, a 45-year-old rice farmer watched his infant son continue to suckle after his mother had died of cholera. “My wife is dead,” the man said numbly. “Three of my children are dead. What else can happen?” With the refugees spreading through the Indian states, carrying the disease with them, the epidemic could rapidly afflict hundreds of thousands of Indians. For this reason, Indian authorities are trying to prevent the East Pakistanis from entering Calcutta, where uncounted millions already live on the streets in squalid conditions that guarantee an annual cholera epidemic there.

Unbalanced Exchange. While India has temporarily accepted the refugees and is doing its best to help them, the government of Indira Gandhi sees only economic and political disaster in the massive influx of impoverished peoples. The refugee problem has chronically troubled India since the August 1947 partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan. In northern India there was a fairly balanced exchange, with 6,000,000 Moslems fleeing to Pakistan and 6,500,000 Hindus and Sikhs entering India. But since partition, 4,300,000 Hindus from East Pakistan have fled to India, for the most part into West Bengal. There has been no comparable flight of Moslems. This imbalance has created the social, political and economic problems that have plagued the state and turned its capital, Calcutta, into a sinkhole of human misery.

The cost of feeding and attempting to house the refugees is currently $1,330,000 a day—an expense that Mrs. Gandhi’s government can ill afford if it is going to fulfill the campaign promise of garibi hatao (eradicate poverty) made last March. The food required by the refugees is rapidly depleting existing food stockpiles, and threatens to create a famine for the Indians themselves. The refugees are also taking work away from the Indians; in West Bengal, refugee peasants are hiring out as agricultural labor for a quarter of the wages local labor is paid.

No Room. Faced with these problems, the Indian government calls the refugees “evacuees” or “escapees” and hopes for their return to their homeland. “Being a poor country ourselves,” Mrs. Gandhi told refugees at a camp in eastern India, “we cannot afford to keep you here forever, even if we wished to do so.” Their return to their homeland is not likely in the foreseeable future, with the pogrom under way in East Pakistan and the probability of a protracted guerrilla war there. Moreover, because of the war and the exodus, the planting of crops in East Pakistan was at a disastrously low level before the rains began. Famine is almost certain to strike, and when it does, millions more will pack their modest belongings and seek refuge in a country that has no room for them.