Not If, But When

When Prime Minister Indira Gandhi returned home from her three-week tour of Western nations last week, one of the first things she did was to go before her hawkish Parliament and plead for patience toward her handling of the crisis with Pakistan. The urgent need for a solution was all too apparent. Officials in New Delhi said that the biggest frontier battle yet between Indians and Pakistanis occurred when 2,800 Pakistani regulars crossed the border into West Bengal. Defense Minister Jagjivan Ram rose in Parliament to say that if India was attacked, it would "carry the war into Pakistan." Indians across the country, meanwhile, were placing bets on when--not if--war with Pakistan would take place.

Nonetheless, Mrs. Gandhi was evidently hopeful that the civil war between West and East Pakistan would be resolved. "Solutions have been found even to seemingly insoluble problems," she said. She added that India would take no independent action until Western leaders have had a chance to defuse the crisis. The hope: that they would pressure Pakistan President Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan's military regime into finding a political solution acceptable to the East Pakistanis.

Though Indira's Western trip is credited with bringing in several sizable do nations from abroad for Bengali refugee relief (see chart), India is still faced with a financial burden that is expected to reach $830 million by the end of the fiscal year next March. With a 1970 gross national product of only $50 billion and a population of 560 million, India can scarcely afford such a drain on its economy.

Communal Tensions. Beyond the financial cost, the presence of 9,700,000 refugees threatens to create social turmoil and revive communal tensions. There are 7,000,000 in West Bengal alone, and still they come. The Indian government, moreover, is fearful that many of the refugees, particularly the Hindus who were singled out for persecution by Pakistan's Moslem military, will refuse to return to their homes.

Last March, when the exodus began, thousands of Indians living in the border areas rushed forward to offer assistance. Today the torrent of men. women and children has so exacerbated tensions that armed guards have been placed at the camps, and West Bengal officials are securing relief camps with barbed-wire fencing.

The tensions are caused mainly by the competition for scarce commodities and even scarcer jobs. Inside the camps, to discourage refugees from seeking work, loudspeakers daily warn them not to go into the villages. It is perhaps the sorest point with local residents, who say that the refugees will work for one rupee (130) a day when the local rate is between 21 and three rupees. Farm laborers, shop assistants and other workers recently demonstrated in the farming district of Nadia, asking local employers not to hire refugees. Residents also complain that the price of kerosene, vegetables and other foods has nearly doubled.

Numerous incidents indicate that impoverished local people find it hard to accept even the minimal care given the refugees. Says Farmer Jogen Mandal: "These people are crooks. Each of them has three ration cards. Part of the ration they consume and the rest they sell. They get free medical treatment, and they are much better off than most of us." Replies Bhabendra Nath Roy, former vice principal of Manirampur College in East Pakistan and now a refugee: "We know local people do not like our presence here, and clashes are taking place every day. Camp officials deprive us of rations, and if you go to complain, officials get help from local people to beat us up."

The Big Problem. While there has so far been a noticeable lack of the bitter Hindu-Moslem religious tensions that resulted in widespread massacres at the time of the 1947 partition, the economic and population strains on West Bengal have become extremely acute. Already suffering from overcrowding and underemployment, the state has never fully recovered economically from the influx of some 4,000,000 predominantly Hindu refugees, who fled to West Bengal when East Bengal chose to become part of Moslem Pakistan in 1947. Ever since, the area has been a fertile ground for political turmoil among terrorist groups, criminals masquerading under political banners, and countless university graduates with no prospect of jobs. But officials, faced with the urgency of caring for so many additional millions, have necessarily shifted other problems into the background. Says Siddhartha Shankar Ray, Mrs. Gandhi's Minister of West Bengal affairs: "My big problem is how to reopen the 2,500 schools that have been closed to house the refugees."

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