in India
Palash Biswas
(contact: c/o Mrs Arati Roy, gosto Kanan, Sodepur,
Kolata-700110, India.Phone-033-2565-9551-R)
They are partition victims and were welcome by the
nation in the greatest population transfer in the
history.The partition of the Indian subcontinent in
1947 was followed by the forced uprooting of an
estimated 18 million people. The minority communities
in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) who were uprooted
and forced to seek shelter in the Indian province of
West Bengal.Jawahar Lal Nehru and his government
failed to stop the carnage of minorities accross the
border. Hence, the East Bengal partition victims,
stripped of citizenship, human and civil rights,
dislodged from history and geography and deprived of
motherlanguage and employment have to pay the price
after almost sixty years of Indian Independence.
They are being persecuted in every part of India just
because they speak in Bengali and ninty percent of
them are dalits. Speaking in Bengali has become the
only criteria to identify Bangladeshi nationals
outside Bengal. Because the partition victim
Bengalies, even settled in foties and fifties belong
to underclasses, they are unable to protect themselves
agnaist atrocities including deprtation drive.
Hopefully, resistance agnaist persecution of East
Bengal refugees is getting momentum. In Uttaranchal
and Orrissa, the local people, political parties and
media stand united with the refugees. Uttaranchal
refugees have launched nonstop mass movement since
they were denied Indian citizenship in 2003 by then
Bjp government. The chief minister of Uttaranchal
Narayan Dutta Tiwari raised the issue thrice in the
parliament. In Orrissa, a farther step ahead the
agitation is led by the Utkal Bangiay Surakshya
Samiti. Left MPs belonging to cpim and forward block
visited refugee areas in Uttaranchal and Orrissa. Left
front chairman in West Bengal, comrade Biman Bose
visted village to village in Uttaranchal. Basudev
Acharya, cpim MP has visited Kendarapara on last 10 th
October where 1575 Bengali refugees have been served
quit India notice. They could not be deported because
the people of Orrissa, political parties and media
support them. But the notice is still live. Orrissa
government of Bjp Bjd combine has alredy managed 21
Bengali refugees settled in Navrangpur. Kendra Para
was targeted as second attempt which failed. In
retaliation , the Orrissa government stopped no less
than two hundred refugee children to sit in high
school examination. Birth certificats are being denied
to newborn babies. BPL card, ration Card, PAN, etc
have been stalled. Names of refugees in the voters`
list have been deleted enmasse.
Mulnivasi Bamcef is leading the movement to save the
dalit refugees in Maharashtra, where 250 Bengali
refugees have been arrested and released after paying
ten thousandruppees and submitting a personal bond to
prove their Indian citizenship with adequate documents
within one month in Bhandara district. All Maharashtra
DMs have notified the resttled partition victim
Bengali refugees to submint documents to prove Indian
citizenship within a month.
In Kolkata, on Friday, 27th october a seminar was
organised by SAHMARMEE and Dalit Samanyaya Samiti to
protest the persecution of Bengali Refugees in
different parts of India. The seminar was presided
over by the ex Vice Chancellor of Kalayani University
and now a cpim Loksabha member Dr. Basudev Barman.
Sahmarmmee general secretary Dr Nitish Biswas, deputy
registrar of Calcutta university introduced the topic
and gave garphic details of persecution of Bengali
refugees on grounds like citizenship, human rights ,
civil rights, reservation, employment and mother
language.
All India forward Block general secretary and
rajyasabha member Debbrata Biswas was the main speaker
and he gave the graphic details statewise. He Said,
outside Bengal the refugees are being persecuted,
deported, put behind bars and descriminated just they
speak in Bengali. He also presented his experience of
visits in refugee colonies in different parts of
india. He said , refugees may not survive in
Uttaranchal, UP, MP, Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgargh,
Assam, Maharashtra, Gujrat, Andhra, Tamilnadu,
Rajsthanand elsewhere in these circumstances. He
called for a nonstop left movemenyt in parliament and
outside parliament to protect the Dalit Bengali
refugees.
Ex education minister of West Bengal kanti Biswas,
acpim MLA and ideologue supported the plea. He further
elaboarated the issue.
Convenor of All India Refugee Coordination committee,
Dr Subodh Biswas came fro Nagpur and reported the
situation and updates.
JM Bhowmic and Ujjwal Biswas from dacca also
particiapted in the seminar.
Indian nationalist leadership chose to hold on to
this Muslim-majority state to prove that minorities
could thrive in a plural, secular polity. But the
government of India could not secure the saftey of
Hindus and other minorities in erswhile East Pakistan
and now in bangladesh either politically
ordiplomatically. The situation is that the refugee
influx from Bangladesh has never to stop. Any internal
turmoil In Bangldesh creates waves of exodus. It is
happening once againas the ruling classes fight on
streets doggedly to have the riegn of power, the
security and safety of minorities are once again at
the stake. Government of India may not help it. West
Bengal chief minister is concerned and a high alert is
declare by Border Security Forces in border areas of
West Bengal. Is this a solution?
In fact, a delegation of Hindu minorities recently met
The Indian High Commissioner in Dacca and demanded
that either the two corore Hindus still sustaing
themselves in Bangladesh, should be allowed to cross
over Indian border and be granted Indian citizenship
enmasses - or India should ensure the saftey of life ,
property and respect for the Hindus there.
Population exchanges
Massive population exchanges occurred between the two
newly-formed nations in the months immediately
following Partition. Once the lines were established,
about 14.5 million people crossed the borders to what
they hoped was the relative safety of religious
majority. Based on 1951 Census of displaced persons,
7.226 million Muslims went to Pakistan from India
while 7.249 million Hindus and Sikhs moved to India
from Pakistan immediately after partition. About 11.2
million or 78% of the population transfer took place
in the west, with Punjab accounting for most of it;
5.3 million Muslims moved from India to West Punjab in
Pakistan, 3.4 million Hindus and Sikhs moved from
Pakistan to East Punjab in India; elsewhere in the
west 1.2 million moved in each direction to and from
Sind. The initial population transfer on the east
involved 3.5 million Hindus moving from East Bengal to
India and only 0.7 million Muslims moving the other
way. [citation needed]
Massive violence and slaughter occurred on both sides
of the border as the newly formed governments were
completely unequipped to deal with migrations of such
staggering magnitude. Estimates of the number of
deaths vary from two hundred thousand to a million.[1]
[edit] The present-day religious demographics of India
proper and former East and West Pakistan
Despite the huge migrations during and after
Partition, secular and federal India is still home to
the third largest Muslim population in the world
(after Indonesia and Pakistan). The current estimates
for India (see Demographics of India) are as shown
below. Islamic Pakistan, the former West Pakistan, has
a smaller minority population. Its religious
distribution is below (see Demographics of Pakistan).
As for Bangladesh, the former East Pakistan, the
non-Muslim share is somewhat larger (see Demographics
of Bangladesh):
India (2005 Est. 1,080 million vs. 1951 Census 361
million)
81.69% Hindu (839 million)
12.20% Muslims (135 million)
2.32% Christians (25 million)
1.85% Sikhs (20 million)
1.94% Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and others (21 million)
Pakistan (2005 Est. 162 vs. 1951 Census 34 million)
98.0% Muslims (159 million)
1.0% Christians (1.62 million)
1.0% Hindus, Sikhs and others (1.62 million)
Bangladesh (2005 Est. 144 vs. 1951 Census 42 million)
86% Muslims (124 million)
13% Hindus (18 million)
1% Christians, Buddhists and Animists (1.44 million)
We Indians, perhaps, have forgot the hard facts.
Gyanesh Kudaisya in his research article`DIVIDED
LANDSCAPES, FRAGMENTED IDENTITIES: EAST BENGAL
REFUGEES AND THEIR REHABILITATION IN INDIA, 1947–79 '
considers the responses of Indian federal and
provincial governments to the challenge of refugee
rehabilitation. A study is made of the Dandakaranya
scheme which was undertaken after 1958 to resettle the
refugees by colonising forest land: the project was
sited in a peninsular region marked by plateaus and
hill ranges which the refugees, originally from the
riverine and deltaic landscape of Bengal, found hard
to accept. Despite substantial official rehabilitation
efforts, the refugees demanded to be resettled back in
their "natural habitat" of Indian Bengal. However,
this was resisted by the state. Notwithstanding this
opposition, a large number of East Bengal refugees
moved back into regions which formed a part of
erstwhile undivided Bengal where, without any
government aid and planning, they colonised lands and
created their own habitats. Many preferred to become
squatters in the slums that sprawled in and around
Calcutta. The complex interplay of identity and
landscape, of dependence and self-help, that informed
the choices which the refugees made in rebuilding
their lives is analysed in the paper.
This is an abridged version of an essay published in
the volume, Partition of Memory, ed., Suvir Kaul,
Permanent Black, 2001. Thanks are to the publisher and
editor of the volume.
Rights or Charity?
Relief and Rehabilitation in West Bengal
In the half-century since India was partitioned, more
than twenty-five million refugees have crossed the
frontier between East Pakistan and the state of West
Bengal in India. The migration out of East Bengal, and
the way the refugees were received by India was very
different from West Pakistan. Unlike those from the
west, the refugees from the east did not flood into
India in one huge wave; they came sometimes in surges
but often in trickles over five decades of
independence.
The elemental violence of partition in the Punjab
explains why millions crossed its plains in 1947. By
contrast, the, causes of the much larger migration out
o East Bengal over a longer time span are more complex
That migration was caused by many different factors
minorities found their fortunes rapidly declining as
avenues of advancement and livelihood were foreclosed;
they also experienced social harassment, whether open
and fierce or covert and subtle, usually set against a
backcloth o communal hostility which, in Hindu
perception at least, was sometimes banked but always
burning. Another critical factor was the ups and downs
in India's relationship with Pakistan which powerfully
influenced why and when the refugees fled to West
Bengal.
Given this context, the strikingly different way in
which the Government of India viewed the refugee
problem in the east and in the west is not altogether
surprising. The crisis in Punjab was seen as a
national emergency, to be tackled on a war footing.
>From the start, government accepted that a transfer of
population with Pakistan was inevitable and
irreversible. So it readily committed itself to the
view that refugees from the west would have to be
fully and permanently rehabilitated. It also quickly
decided that Muslim evacuee property would be given to
the refugees as the cornerstone of its programmes of
rehabilitating them.
The influx of refugees into Bengal, on the other hand,
was seen in a very different light. In Nehru's view,
and this was typical of the Congress High Command,
conditions in East Bengal did not constitute a grave
danger to its Hindu minorities. Delhi regarded their
flight as the product of imaginary fears and baseless
rumours, rather than the consequence of palpable
threats to life, limb and property. Well after it had
begun, Nehru continued to believe that the exodus
could be halted, even reversed, provided government in
Dacca could be persuaded to deploy 'psychological
measures' to restore confidence among the Hindu
minorities. The Inter-Dominion Agreement of April 1948
was designed, Canute-like, to prevent the tide coming
in. In the meantime, government gave relief to
refugees from East Bengal as a stop-gap measure since
permanent rehabilitation was thought unnecessary;
indeed it was to be discouraged.
So it set itself against the redistribution of the
property of Muslim evacuees from Bengal to incoming
Hindu refugees; the policy was to hold it in trust for
the Muslims until they too returned home. The official
line was grounded in the belief that Bengali refugees
crossing the border in either direction could, and
indeed should, be persuaded to return home. Even after
the number of refugees in Bengal had outstripped those
from Punjab, such relief and rehabilitation measures
as government put into place still bore the mark of
its unwillingness to accept that the problem would not
simply go away.
This was what led the refugees to demand that
government give them what they regarded as their
'rights'. Their movement of protest embroiled refugees
and government in a bitter, long-drawn-out battle over
what legitimately could be expected from the state.
The nub of the matter was quite simple: did the
refugees have rights to relief and permanent
rehabilitation, and did government have a
responsibility to satisfy these rights? In examining
what divided the government and the refugees, I wish
to assess how far apart the positions of the refugees
and the government were and how different the premises
on which they were based. In the process I shall try
to locate the role that marginal groups, notably the
refugees, have played in creating notions of
legitimacy and citizenship that came to challenge
India's new orthodoxies.
The construction of relief as charity
Campaigns by refugees against government diktat were a
persistent feature of political life in West Bengal
well into the nineteen?sixties, but the formative
period coincided with the initial wave of migration
between 1947 and 1950. The issues began to crystallise
after the Government of West Bengal decided td deny
relief to 'able-bodied males' and to phase out relief
camps. As soon as refugees demanded a say in their
rehabilitation, the battle lines were drawn. Stopping
free relief to able-bodied males was the first of a
series of measures to limit government's liability
towards the refugees. The essence of the policy was to
whittle down, by one device or another, the numbers
eligible for help from the state. By November 1948, as
soon as the surge in migration caused largely by
events in Hyderabad began to tail off, government was
quick to claim that the worst was over; some
officials, adding their two-annas' bit, even argued
that the lure of handouts was itself attracting
migrants.
In late 1948, the government began to put a new and
harsher policy into place. On 25 November 1948, Cakift
announced that only refugees, defined as persons
ordinarily resident in East Bengal who entered West
Bengal between 1 June 1947 and 25 June 1948, "on
account of civil disturbances or fear of such
disturbances or the partition of India, would be
entitled to relief and rehabilitation. A second order
in December 1948 declared that no more refugees would
be registered after 15 January 1949, further cutting
back the official definition of a "refugee". A month
earlier, on 22 November 1948, the Government of West
Bengal had decreed that no 'able-bodied male
immigrant' capable of earning a living would be given
gratuitous relief for himself or his family for more
than a week. After that, relief would be conditional
only against works.
It was all very well for government to offer relief
against works, but there weren't any such "works" and
government gave no assurance that it would create
them. Instead, the official line was that the
immigrant "through his own effort" must find suitable
work. Male refugees capable of working had somehow
instantly and miraculously to find for themselves
jobs, sufficiently remunerative to feed, clothe and
house themselves and their families, within seven days
of crossing the border. Furthermore, government urged
refugees go anywhere in West Bengal except Calcutta
and its suburbs, where casual employment was most
easily to be found.
To begin with, government had allowed camp officers
discretion to make exceptions in those cases where
they felt that free relief (or "doles", as they were
called in terminology unattractively reminiscent of
the Poor Law) was "essential for preservation of
life". Put bluntly, government realised that it would
not look good if people starved to death in its camps.
Two months later, however, in the wake of refugee
hunger strikes against its directives, it hardened its
heart.
On 15 February 1949 the new national government
decreed that "such able bodied immigrants as do not
accept offers of employment or rehabilitation
facilities without justification should be denied
gratuitous relief even if they may be found starving"
(Memo No. 800 (14) R.R., Secretary, Relief and
Rehabilitation Department, Government of West Bengal,
to all District Officers, 15 February 1949; emphasis
added). This decision was reiterated towards the end
of March 1949.
In a directive aimed at "soft" camp superintendents
suspected of being susceptible to pressures from
refugees, it laid down that free relief must not be
given to anyone merely because he was found starving
once, the underlying principle being that an able
bodied male must earn his own living, and should not
be made to feel, under any circumstances, that he can
at any time be a charge on the state" (Memo No. 1745
(10) R.R.,/18R-18/49, from the Secretary, Relief and
Rehabilitation Department, Government of West Bengal,
to all District Officers, dated 29 March 1949).
In July 1949, Calcutta announced that all relief camps
in West Bengal must be closed down by 31 October 1949,
and ordered that rehabilitation of the inmates be
completed by that date. From now on it would only
rehabilitate those few persons it chose to define as
refugees, Refugees should expect no further relief and
would be entitled only to whatever crumbs by way of
rehabilitation government decided to offer them. This
was the first in a series of official announcements by
which it was made unequivocally clear that refugees
had no choice in the matter. They had to take what was
offered or get nothing at all.
What government set out to do, at least in the
prospectus, was to encourage refugees to be self
employed. Categorised by their social background and
training, refugees were to be offered soft loans of
varying amounts to enable them to buy appropriate
equipment, tools or supplies in order to set
themselves up as entrepreneurs. Those who felt they
had neither the training nor the talent for
entrepreneurship but wanted 'proper jobs' instead,
those who preferred to stay on in camps or 'deserted'
'rehabilitation colonies' were given no choice. They
had to do as they were told or lose all claim to the
meagre benefits on offer.
These directives give an insight into the government's
view of its responsibilities towards the refugees. By
attempting repeatedly to restrict the definition of
who could claim to be a 'refugee', government showed
that it had to accept, however grudgingly, that it
could not altogether avoid responsibility for those
displaced by partition. The fine platitude, frequently
voiced in the documents of the Rehabilitation
Department, was that "to succour and rehabilitate the
victims of communal passion [was] an obligation the
country [was] solemnly pledged to honour". (Quotation
from Bhaskar Rao, The Story of Rehabilitation, p. 229)
In practice, however, government strove to limit its
liability by cutting its definition of the term
'refugee' to the bone. A refugee, Calcutta declared,
was a person who had migrated before the end of June
1948 and registered himself as such before January
1949 - a key device by which government sought to
achieve this objective to limit its definition of
"partition" itself. By its edict, partition was
defined as occurrences, which began in June 1947 (or
six months earlier in December 1946 if the refugee had
happened to live in Noakhali or Tippera) and abruptly
came to an end one year later in June 1948. That
partition was a process which began in 1947, but whose
impact continued to unfold long after June 1948 was
obvious to everyone outside the Writers Building. But
by adopting these myopic, self-serving definitions,
Bengal's new rulers lost the ability to anticipate and
effectively react to the ongoing problems caused by
partition. Not surprisingly, they were caught off
guard by each new crisis.
In a similar vein, 'the government strictly defined
what could be deemed to be the effects of partition.
According to its taxonomy, "civil disturbances" alone
-that is communal violence or discrimination against
minorities - were accepted as genuine "effects" of
partition. Only those who had fled communal violence
were regarded as "genuine" victims of partition and
therefore as refugees entitled to protection from the
Indian state.
But economic hardship in East Bengal - wfiere famine
stalked the land and where food cost much more than
anywhere else in India - was not accepted as a
consequence of partition. It may have been obvious to
others that partition had directly and disastrously
affected the livelihoods of millions of people, Hindus
and Muslims, in both Bengals, but migrants tossed
across borders by the pitchfork of necessity were not
deemed by government to be genuine victims of
partition or as "true" refugees.
So it followed that they were not in any sense the
responsibility of the Indian state. This helps to
explain why the Government of India treated the
refugees from Punjab, where communal violence came
close to being genocide, so differently from the
refugees from East Bengal, where the violence was
never remotely on this scale. The Prime Minister
justified to the Chief Minister of West Bengal the
striking difference in expenditure per capita on
refugees in the West and East by arguing that while
'there was something elemental' about the situation in
West Pakistan, "where practically all Hindus and Sikhs
have been driven out", whereas in the East it was more
gradual, and many Hindus had been able to remain.
(Jawaharlal Nehru to B.C. Roy, 2 December 1949, cited
in Saroj Chakrabarti, With Dr. B.C. Roy, p. 143).
The official definition of the refugee as victim
deserves closer scrutiny, as it provides another key
to assess the tenuous morality behind government's
attitude. Only bona-fide victims were entitled to
relief and rehabilitation. To be eligible for relief,
the victims had to register themselves. In December
1948, when government made public its decision to shut
down registration offices by 15 January 1949, it
justified the edict by arguing that refugees who were
"genuinely interested" had been given "ample time" to
register (Relief and Rehabilitation Department,
Government of West Bengal, Memo, 20 December 1948, in
GB IB 1838/48).
This introduced a new refinement to the horrors of
partition - a "desperation index" in the procedures by
which a refugee was prevented from claiming benefits.
If a refugee was truly desperate, government argued,
he would have found his way to a registration office
by mid-January 1949. It he didn't, that was the proof
positive that the person claiming refugee status could
not have been sufficiently desperate to require
relief. In this way, government at a stroke cut down a
huge problem to a size it felt it could handle.
This had far-reaching implications for the way in
which government responded to 'refugee demands once
they came to be voiced in an organised way. By
definition, victims are not commanders of their own
destiny; victims are not agents. Rather they are the
"innocent", passive, objects of persecution,
casualties of fate. Significantly, the state's
favourite euphemism for refugees was "displaced
persons", with connotations of innocent victims
dislocated by events in whose shaping they had played
no part. This helped government to justify treating
the refugees from West Pakistan and East Bengal with
such an uneven hand.
Nehru's point was that the Punjabis had been driven
out from their homes. Bengalis, by contrast, by
migrating in fits and starts, proved that they had the
option of staying or of leaving. According to the
official line, a true refugee or victim had no choice
and was not a free agent. He could therefore not be
expected to exercise volition, or have any choice over
how or when he was to leave the country he lived, and
where, when and how he sought refuge in the country he
now lived in. By defining refugees in this way,
government could argue that it helped refugees not
because of any obligation but voluntarily, out of the
goodness of its heart. In effect, what the refugee
received was charity. Since the recipient of charity
has no right over how much or what he is given, so too
the refugee had no moral right to relief, nor any say
over what was doled out to him.
This construction of relief and rehabilitation as
charity is seen most explicitly when government
decided at a stroke to stop "doles" for able-bodied
males and to shut down its camps. In its defence,
government insisted that doles were simply a form of
official charity. If able-bodied men accepted these
handouts, this would erode their moral bier and get
them accustomed to a culture of dependency. "Living on
the permanent charity of doles" would, it was argued,
make them "sink into a state of hopeless
demoralisation". Camps, likewise, were seen as
"symbols of permanent dependence" (The Story of
Rehabilitation, p. 160).
So while the refugees survived on the barest rations,
government was able to represent its relief to the
refugees as "charity" (and to congratulate itself for
being so charitable), and at the same time reprimand
the refugees for daring to expect its charity. This
double-edged policy of charity so dominated official
thinking that it suggests that it was the very
touchstone of rehabilitation policy. In official
pronouncements, the notion that charity bred a
demoralising "dependence" inconsistent with manly
self-respect was seen as an obvious truth, alluding to
what was considered as common currency of Indian
culture.
But was this view of charity the generally accepted
one in a social milieu where dana, dakshina and
bhjksha had long been vital elements of religious and
social life, and where the renouncer who lived on alms
was venerated at least as much as the house-holder? It
is by no means clear that it was. By all accounts,
this view was of recent origin, even in Europe, where
"in the old days, -the beggar who knocked at the rich
man's door was regarded as a messenger from God, and
might even be Christ in disguise". By the late
eighteenth century, accepting charity had already
begun to attract social odium; a century later, the
wheel had come full circle and charity was seen as
"injuring" those it was intended to aid. Likewise it
was only in industrial Europe that 'dependency' came
to denote a stigmatised condition, appropriate only
for women, children and the infirm.
When England put its New Poor Law onto the statute
book in 1834, this attitude informed the amendment
which aimed broth to deter the poor from resorting to
public assistance and to stigmatise those who did. By
the early twentieth century, dependency had come to be
taken as a mark of debility of character rather than a
function of poverty. So an able-bodied male who came
to be dependent was seen as the epitome of the
'undeserving poor', since it was not poverty, but a
man's lack of self-respect, that caused his
dependence. And because it was only acceptable for
women and children to be dependent, an able-bodied
dependent man was seen to have the perceived
attributes of women and children: weakness, idleness,
passivity and irresponsibility.
These imported European attitudes towards charity and
dependency were deployed with such great effect by
India's policy-makers because in their passage to
Bengal, they assumed highly charged local inflections
and particular resonances of their own. In one of the
deeper ironies of Bengal's modern history, this way of
thinking happened to fit neatly with a pre-existing
tradition among its colonial masters about the flawed
character of the Bengali Hindu male. In the nineteenth
century, British officials had conventionally regarded
physical weakness and lack of vigour, lethargy,
effeminacy and an absence of moral backbone as the
very essence of the Bengali babu's being. By the
mid-twentieth century, the Bengali Hindu male was thus
seen by his imperial critic as a deplorable
combination of the worst feminine and childish
qualities.
Writing on rehabilitation by officers in Delhi and
Calcutta unconsciously aped the prejudices of their
erstwhile masters, thus bringing together two borrowed
traditions-one from Europe and the other from colonial
India's recent past - to produce a new and potent
stereotype of the Bengali refugee. This
characterisation was drawn in counter-point an equally
hackneyed, but far more flattering, picture of the
Punjabi refugee, whose 'toughness ... sturdy sense of
self-reliance... [and] pride' never let them 'submit
to the indignity of living on doles and charity'.
The Punjabi refugee, heir of the material races who
were the darlings of the post-Mutiny Raj, was thus
held up by independent Indian officialdom as the model
of the 'deserving poor'. (The outrageousness of this
statement is apparent given that Government allocated
many thousand acres of land to the Punjabis, disbursed
Rs 11 million among them for the purchase of
livestock, and a gave them a further Rs 44 million in
grants, loans and advances).
The contrast drawn by the officials between the
Punjabi and the Bengali refugee could hardly have been
sharper. The "character of the refugees themselves"
was blamed for the failings of the rehabilitation
effort in West Bengal. The official view was that his
very disposition rendered the Bengali male refugee
prone to fall into a state f dependency and therefore
incapable of breaking out of it. Whereas "in the West,
the refugee matched government efforts on his behalf
with an overwhelming passion to be absorbed into the
normal routine of living", in Bengal, "the government
had to supply the initiative as well as the motive
power. To overcome the apathy, even the sullenness, of
the displaced person was itself no small task. It
called for patience and tact, endless sympathy joined
to occasional firmness..."
Here, the thesis brought together two different lines
f argument. The first was that their qualities of
character included a psychological dependency amongst
Bengali ales, which rendered them incapable of making
rational decisions for themselves. Because they were
dependent, any judgment of their own about themselves
and their lives and times had no value: it was as
feeble and untrustworthy s the judgment of women and
children.
The second line of argument, again borrowed from the
vocabulary of the Raj, was that the state's relation
to this dross of humankind was that of, surrogate
patar families or benevolent despot. Because the
refugees had placed themselves in its care, government
had a duty to decide what was best for them.
Government saw itself as standing in for the male
breadwinner in relation to these unfortunates and
therefore entitled to assert all the moral authority
over them that a male breadwinner enjoys over his
dependants.
Yet the refugees never made an issue of these
contradictions. One reason might be that the impact of
both constructions on their rights tended to be much
the same in practice. If refugees were to be seen as
dependent members of the national family, they could
claim rights to maintenance only by virtue of their
dependent status, and as dependants they were denied
any other rights. If they were represented as
recipients of voluntary charity, they had no claims
whatever over the source of the charity. Indeed the
very fact that they took charity showed them, in the
official view, to be so 'psychologically dependent'
that they were not fit to determine their own destinies.
palashcbiswas,
gostokanan, sodepur, kolkata-700110 phone:033-25659551
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