Making Of India , Pakistan and Bangladesh and the Plights of East Bengal Rfugees and Muslims in India

 Making Of India , Pakistan and Bangladesh and the Plights of East Bengal Rfugees and Muslims in India

Palash Biswas

Contact: Palash C Biswas, C/O Mrs Arati Roy, Gosto Kanan, Sodepur, Kolkata- 700110, India. Phone: 91-033-25659551
Email: palashbiswaskl@gmail.com
“In the post-World War II period refugee problem emerged out to be one of the biggest problems before the international community. India has also experienced it at a large scale. Factors such as rise of religious nationalism, ethnicisation of politics, state terrorism, anarchic majoritarianism and above all state’s refusal to conform to norms set by the international refugee regime, rendered the refugees stateless and subjects for inhuman treatment. On the other hand, historical forces like religious, linguistic or ethnic nationalism and regional economic disparity continue to generate refugees in the eastern and north-eastern regions of India. Faced with unfriendly state, both in the country of origin and the country of adoption, the refugees struggle to find the ways and means for a healthy living, and wherever possible they make efforts to put up an organised movement for their ‘human rights’.

Politics of Demography in India may be well explained with case studies in West Bengal and Gujrat. Sharing the state power by enslaved communities in North India under leadership of the likes Mayawati, Mulayam,Nitish Kumar, Lalu yadav and Mulayam is also a classical example of Demography politics. In every case ,the Muslim Vote Bank and minority psyche plays the key role. In West Bengal, after Modi`s charishma in Gujrat and BJP in the helms in Himachal it is near impossible to dislodge the ruling Left Front despite violent and vigourous War cry by Mamata Bannerjee. Thus, capitalist marxist Chief minister of West Bengal Buddhadeb defying ideology, party, history and culture , follows the dictates of MNCs and Corporate Finance capital. Bengal has become the free hunting ground for Ruling Hegemony. The regemented Gestapo won`t allow you to breathe until you surrender! The North India type change in political scenerio in Bengal is impossible because of Demography. Marxist have hijacked Muslim vote Bank for ever. Muslims may not ally with SC and ST and OBC as the allied before independence. Majority of SC, ST and OBC from the subaltern base East Bengal have been uprooted and scattered all over this bloody sub continent. Even the rfugee influx has not stopped at all. Mrs Indira Gandhi might have pondered over the option of annexing East Bengal like Sikkim later, had she opted for it, Bengali Elites would have resisted as the Polpulation of East and North East India including bangladesh establishes dominance of Muslims.

Bengali SC and St aborigin peple are being persecuted in Bangladesh, we know well. We know all about the Genocide of 1971. But, in fact, the East Bengal partition Victim refugees resettled in different parts of India including homeland Bengal are persecuted much more.

Citizen Amendment Act happens to be Death warrant for all East Bengal Refugees. In context to Partition and great Population Transfer, Dalit Bengalies were never treated as par as the West Pakistan refugges. They got War Level Resettlement with compensation while East Bengal Fellows lived on Dole. They were ejected from their homeland and dumped in unfriendly landscape as well as humanscape. East Bengal refugges have been used as Vote Bank in every state of India. They have been used against tribals as well as Muslims for further demographic readjustment. Now, Pranab Mukherjee and Buddhadeb lead a deportation drive against them. A refugee Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh leads the drive.Another refugee from sindh, Lalkrishna Adwani as the deputy prime minister plus Home Minister in NDA goverrnment enacted the anti bengali Citizenship act with active help of Parnab Mukherjee who chaired the Parilamentary committe. Marxist and all SC, ST and OBC Mps supported.
Manmohan is the Comrador Prime Minister of Zionist Brahmincal White Post Modern Galaxy Order neoliberal MNC Corporate Colony that Shining India has become losing Freedom, Sovereignity and Democratic institutions as well as Productio n System and cultural roots. But remote control happnes to be in the hands of Italian born white woman Mrs sonia gandhi. Pranab Mukherjee works as De Facto Prime minister and he heads 39 parliamentary committees instrumental to kill huaman and civil rights, finsh higher education and reservation. Not only reservation or Citizenship, the Brute Ruling Hegemeony is working Up the Hills to kill the Constitution of India to nullify the Empowerment of enslaved Indian majorty Eighty Five percent People.

Taslima Nasrin and dead Rizwan are the examples of West Bengal politics. In Nandigram, no caste Hindu is killed. Every victim happens to be either Muslim or SC OBC marginalised people deprived of life and livelihood. Nadigram is a Muslim majority area. Nandigram Insurrection would have been impossible withot the particiaption of Muslims. Women also played key role to mobilise in resistance. They were killed, gangraped. Intlligentsia, NGOs and Opposition could not defend the victims neither they could stop the capitalist annihilation of peasants. Under this scenerio, CPIM made an issue of Taslima Nasri to subvert Nandigram Insurrection. Ration riots were also tamed in between. Ant American Campaign in the light of War against terrorism also helped the Marxist. Muslims overlooked the meeting of Buddhadeb with Henry Kissinger. Nuclear Deal Dram had been played nationally and Taslima was used for locaised agenda, which eventually became national as well as international. CPIM also encashed the Rizwan Love Tragedy in its favour to mobilise Muslim Vote Bank.

What happened at last?

In a new twist to the Rizwanur Rehman case, the CBI says that Rizwanur, a graphic designer who was found dead along the railway tracks in Kolkata on September 21, committed suicide.

According to reports available to NDTV, the investigating agency has found that the Todis abetted 30-year-old Rizwanur’s suicide.

The agency will tell the Kolkata High Court on Tuesday that it has established through scientific and electronic evidence that it was not a case of murder.

It says that Rizwan was driven to suicide after being separated from his wife Priyanka Todi, the daughter of rich industrialist Ashok Todi.

But, NDTV’s sources have said that the agency will chargesheet all those persons who were involved in separating Priyanka and Rizwanur soon after their wedding in August.

The CBI feels that the separation and attempts to intimidate him had a ‘cumulative effect’ that led to his suicide.

Those likely to be charged are Priyanka’s uncle and her father, Ashok Todi, against whom the CBI had initially registered a murder case.

But the charge will now be a lesser abetment to suicide charge carrying the maximum penalty of imprisonment upto 10 years.

The CBI has also found that senior police officers considered close to the Todis acted improperly in this case and will also be recommending action against them.

Due to the extremely sensitive nature of this case, the agency is still finalising exactly what action to take against whom.

For instance, they are looking at each police officer’s role separately and deciding action. But one thing they claim is indisputable that when Rizwanur went to dumdum railway tracks on September 21, he wanted to end his life.

For his family, this may be hard to digest but they will have to wait for the full report in the high court on Tuesday, where the CBI is expected to explain in detail what it has found.
The partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 was followed by the forced uprooting of an estimated 18 million people. This paper focuses on the predicament of the minority communities in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) who were uprooted and forced to seek shelter in the Indian province of West Bengal. It 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.

Refugees and Displaced Persons

Who
A refugee is someone with a well-founded fear of persecution on the basis of his or her race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion, who is outside of his or her country of nationality and unable or unwilling to return. Refugees are forced from their countries by war, civil conflict, political strife or gross human rights abuses. There were an estimated 14.9 million refugees in the world in 2001 – people who had crossed an international border to seek safety – and at least 22 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) who had been uprooted within their own countries.

What
Enshrined in Article 14 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the right “to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.” This principle recognizes that victims of human rights abuse must be able to leave their country freely and to seek refuge elsewhere. Governments frequently see refugees as a threat or a burden, refusing to respect this core principle of human rights and refugee protection.

Where
The global refugee crisis affects every continent and almost every country. In 2001, 78 percent of all refugees came from 10 areas: Afghanistan, Angola, Burma, Burundi, Congo-Kinshasa, Eritrea, Iraq, the Palestinian territories, Somalia and Sudan. Palestinians are the world’s oldest and largest refugee population, and make up more than one fourth of all refugees. Asia hosts 45 percent of all refugees, followed by Africa (30 percent), Europe (19 percent) and North America (5 percent).

When
Throughout history, people have fled their homes to escape persecution. In the aftermath of World War II, the international community included the right to asylum in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In 1950, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was created to protect and assist refugees, and, in 1951, the United Nations adopted the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, a legally binding treaty that, by February 2002, had been ratified by 140 countries.

Why
In the past 50 years, states have largely regressed in their commitment to protect refugees, with the wealthy industrialized states of Europe, North America and Australia – which first established the international refugee protection system – adopting particularly hostile and restrictive policies. Governments have subjected refugees to arbitrary arrest, detention, denial of social and economic rights and closed borders. In the worst cases, the most fundamental principle of refugee protection, nonrefoulement, is violated, and refugees are forcibly returned to countries where they face persecution. Since September 11, many countries have pushed through emergency anti-terrorism legislation that curtails the rights of refugees.

How
Human Rights Watch believes the right to asylum is a matter of life and death and cannot be compromised. In our work to stop human rights abuses in countries around the world, we seek to address the root causes that force people to flee. We also advocate for greater protection for refugees and IDPs and for an end to the abuses they suffer when they reach supposed safety. Human Rights Watch calls on the United Nations and on governments everywhere to uphold their obligations to protect refugees and to respect their rights – regardless of where they are from or where they seek refuge.
Refugees

Every year millions of people around the world are displaced by war, famine, and civil and political unrest. Others are forced to flee their countries in order to escape the risk of death and torture at the hands of persecutors. The United States (U.S.) works with other governmental, international, and private organizations to provide food, health care, and shelter to millions of refugees throughout the world. In addition, the United States considers persons for resettlement to the U.S. as refugees. Those admitted must be of special humanitarian concern and demonstrate that they were persecuted, or have a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group.

Each year, the State Department prepares a Report to Congress on proposed refugee admissions, then the U.S. President consults with Congress and establishes the proposed ceilings for refugee admissions for the fiscal year. For the 2005 fiscal year (i.e. October 1, 2004 – September 30, 2005), the total ceiling is set at 70,000 admissions and is allocated to six geographic regions: Africa (20,000 admissions), East Asia (13,000 admissions), Europe and Central Asia (9,500 admissions), Latin America/Caribbean (5,000 admissions), Near East/South Asia (2,500 admissions) and 20,000 reserve.
Joining a civilisation

Nayanjot Lahiri
January 04, 2008
http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?id=f48f1d97-7457-403c-8a5d-37d4303f09dc&&Headline=Joining+a+civilisation

New Delhi’s National Museum houses an outstanding Harappan gallery, one that unfailingly attracts visitors. Not many, though, stop to wonder about the objects from Mohenjodaro and Harappa displayed there. If India — as we have been told — had lost her Indus heritage because most Indus sites in 1947 fell within the national boundaries of Pakistan, how has she retained such a superb collection of Indus artefacts from those ‘lost’ cities?

An answer to this can be excavated out of the treasure trove of files in the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). This is because the ASI was centrally involved in tortuous negotiations through which undivided India’s past was partitioned.

Why, though, were these negotiations so twisted and prolonged? The Partition Council itself, in October 1947, had resolved that museums would be divided on a territorial basis. This Council had been set up to deal with the administrative consequences of Partition, and decided on a wide range of issues, from revenue and domicile to records and museums. In addition to its decision concerning a territorial division of museums, the council also stipulated that when the territory of a province was partitioned, the museum exhibits of the provincial museums would also be physically divided. On this basis, the exhibits in the Lahore Museum which belonged to the united Province of Punjab before Partition, were to be split between East Punjab and West Punjab. This was straightforward enough.

More complicated though was the fate of objects that had been sent on temporary loan to places which, on August 15, 1947, happened to be on the wrong side of the border, far away from the original museums to which they belonged. On that date, we know that there were objects from Harappa, Taxila and Mohenjodaro in India, and in London as well. These were on loan to the Royal Academy of Arts. In its wisdom, therefore, the Partition Council ruled that all objects that had been removed for temporary display after January 1, 1947, were to be returned to the original museums.

For Pakistan, this did not pose any problems in relation to most museums, since nothing had been removed from their precincts after January 1. At Harappa, some antiquities had been taken out of its site museum in July and September 1946, and these they were willing to treat as belonging to India. The real problem, though, revolved around the antiquities of Mohenjodaro.

This is because, on the day of Partition, as many as 12,000 objects from Mohenjodaro were in Delhi. Since Mohenjodaro fell within the territory of Pakistan, the objects should have fallen in their share. However, India’s negotiators maintained that these rightfully belonged to India because they had not been removed for after January 1, 1947 from the original museum (which was at Mohenjodaro) but came from Lahore. Similarly, they had not been removed for the purposes of temporary display but because, as early as 1944, the Director General of Archaeology, Mortimer Wheeler, had wanted to concentrate all the best Indus objects in a Central National Museum. It was in the absence of such a museum that it had been decided that Lahore Museum would act as a substitute, pending the establishment of a Central National Museum. Wheeler had continued to reiterate that “all objects from Mohenjodaro now on exhibition at Lahore are deposited by the Central Government on loan, and the Punjab Government has no lien upon them.”

It was this — the question of intention about the future disposal of the objects in a Central National Museum — that was central to the contentious dispute around how the antiquities were to be divided. Several formulae were suggested and rejected, pressure tactics were used by both parties. In order to make things difficult, the West Punjab government postponed the actual handing over of East Punjab’s share of the Lahore Museum holdings till such time that India had handed over to Pakistan their share from the central museums. And a final decision on the central museums remained pending till the Mohenjodaro matter was sorted out.

That India considered Indus objects to be an integral part of its own heritage was equally an issue. N.P. Chakravarti, who succeeded Wheeler as Director General in 1948, said it in so many

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Interrogating Victimhood: East Bengali Refugee Narratives of Communal Violence

Nilanjana Chatterjee

Department of Anthropology

University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

Introduction

In this paper I am interested in analyzing the self-representation of Hindu East Bengali

refugees as victims of Partition violence so as to historicize and politicize their claims to inclusion

within India and their entitlement to humanitarian assistance in the face of state and public disavowal.

I focus on the main components of their narratives of victimhood, which tend to be framed in an

essentializing rhetoric of Hindu-Muslim difference and involve the demonization of “the Muslim.” I

conclude with a brief consideration of the implications of this structure of prejudice for relations

between the two communities in West Bengal and the rise of Hindu fundamentalism nationwide. A

story I was told while researching East Bengali refugee agency and self-settlement strategies in West

Bengal bring these issues together for me in a very useful way.

Dr. Shantimoy Ray, professor of history and East Bengali refugee activist had been sketching

the history of the refugee squatter colony Santoshpur, referred to the enduring sense of betrayal, loss

and anger felt by East Bengalis after the partition of Bengal in 1947: becoming strangers in their own

land which constituted part of the Muslim nation of Pakistan, being forced to leave and rebuild their

lives in West Bengal in India, a “nation” that was nominally theirs but where they were faced with

dwindling public sympathy and institutional apathy. Spurred by their bastuhara (homeless) condition–

a term which gained political significance and which referred to their Partition victimhood, groups

of middle and working class refugees began to “grab” land and resettle themselves in West Bengal.

Santoshpur was one such colony which was founded on the outskirts of Calcutta in 1950. Dr. Ray had

not mentioned anti-Muslim sentiment in the colony although India’s Partition is synonymous with

sectarian violence.

Then he began to speak of an incident in 1964. A relic of the Prophet Muhammad was

rumoured to have been stolen from a shrine in Kashmir and this was followed by attacks on Hindus

in East Pakistan, and rioting against Muslims in India. Thousands of Hindu East Bengalis began to

seek refuge in West Bengal.

Some local Muslim families who still lived scattered around

the colony–they were mostly agricultural labourers, carpenters

–poor people, came to our compound in terror. Colony youth

had destroyed their huts and were out to slaughter them. I let

them in and locked our gate. Our household was overwhelmed.

We had over forty people in our care–bereft, wounded, fearing

for their lives. And then I saw the boys approaching. I knew them

well. We all knew each other in those days. I had seen them

grow up here. Kanu, Romesh, Madhab–they were unrecognizable

in their hatred. They were armed with sticks and knives and screaming

about avenging the murder of Hindus in East Pakistan. Slaughter

them as they slaughtered us, they shouted. I was stunned by

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the insanity of their words. But I knew that if I did nothing,

they would kill the Muslims cowering behind my flimsy walls.

I opened the gate and shouted for quiet. I did not know if they

would strike me down but something made those boys hesitate.

Perhaps they were still a little in awe of an old schoolmaster.

I told Kanu to come forward and asked him when he had come

to this country. He looked bewildered and said impatiently, You

know it was 1950–during the riots in Barisal. Yes, I said and

did you lose any members of your family during your journey here?

No he replied, but others did. Those Muslim pigs made the rivers

of Bengal run with Hindu blood. And now they are doing it again.

Except this time we’ll take care of them. His eyes were red and I

could see he would not humour me much longer. Quietly I asked

him how he had come to Calcutta. By boat, by bullock cart, on foot,

he shouted, what does that matter? And who drove the cart? Who

ferried the boat? I shouted out for the first time. His belligerent glare

wavered as he said, I remember one– Rahimchacha (uncle). So

Rahimchacha saved your lives, did he? And now you have come to

repay him? Well, come in then. I stood back with the gate open.

Silence. One of the boys began to weep. Kanu stood still as stone

and then dropped to my feet. Forgive me, he mumbled. It is not my

forgiveness you need, I replied. Go home and let these poor people

go home as well. Gradually the crowd dispersed and the Muslims were

able to return to their neighbourhood (Interview with Shantimoy Ray,

June 1994).

One of the reasons Dr. Ray told me this was to explain the successful role of Communist

activists–mostly East Bengali refugees themselves–in blunting anti-Muslim sentiment among refugees

and directing their sense of victimhood away from the “communal” towards mobilization as “havenots”

for rehabilitation in keeping with their Marxist politics. But while he saw the youths’ hesitation

as acknowledgment of the resilience of local bonds between Hindus and Muslims in East Bengal, I

was struck by the strong hostility toward Muslims evinced by these East Bengali refugees and their

selective memory. The fact that they had “forgotten” individual Muslim saviours speaks to the erasure

of the Muslim in their nostalgic conceptualization of East Bengal. Dr. Ray’s appeal to their memories

and their consciences worked this time, but memories are sites of construction and contestation, and

in this case the refugees’ attitudes about Muslims were structured as much by experience as by a

hegemonic discourse about “bad” Muslims in Bengali culture. In what follows I will deal with the

East Bengali refugees’ construction of the image of Partition victimhood–the self-conscious

insistence on the historicity of their predicament as patriots and subjects of “communal” persecution,

which challenged their marginalization after Partition and legitimized their demand for restitution.

First a note on communalism. Unlike its Anglo-American sense which conveys community

feeling and obligation, in its Indian usage has a specific history. It refers to collective identity defined

by religious identification and expressed in chauvinist, exclusivist and oppositional terms vis-a-vis

other communities seen to be similarly defined. “Communalism not only produces an identification

with a religious community but also with its political, economic, social and cultural interests and

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aspirations” (Kakar 1996: 13). The category “communalism” was a product of British Orientalist

ideology and practice which “systematically institutionalized a nation of communities, above all what

were deemed to be the two great communities of Hindus and Muslims” (Metcalf 1995: 951, Pandey

1990) through enumeration and classification which in turn shaped the emergence of interest groups,

their demands for political representation, employment quotas and so on, in the colonial period. In

addition to the reification of “Hindu” and “Muslim” as ahistorical essences, “communal strife–

conflict between people of different religious persuasions–was represented by the British colonial

regime in India as one of the most distinctive features of Indian society, past and present (Pandey

1990: 94) and attributed to instinctive difference and animosity. In postcolonial liberal-left discourse,

communal ideology and action is cast in negative terms and associated with intolerance.

This paper locates itself within two sets of ongoing academic discussions: one, which focuses

on the lived and remembered experiences of Partition as distinct from what might be called its “high

politics”(Sen 1990); and a second, more general one, which involves the exploration of refugee

agency and questions hegemonic representations of them as victims and passive objects of

intervention. While a review of gendered, subaltern and partial or fragmentary perspectives on

Partition history is beyond the scope of this paper, it is important to note that these intellectual

approaches are productive in several ways: they challenge official nationalist history and examine the

operation of power/knowledge in postcolonial context, seek to recover the voices and silences of the

subordinated, prioritize the particular, and seek to develop a new language for understanding ethnic

and sectarian violence. While much of the new work in this vein is oriented to Punjab and North India

(Butalia 1998, Das 1990) Menon and Bhasin 1998, Pandey 1992), it has gradually expanded to

include perspectives on Bengal (Bose et al 2000, Chakrabarti 1990, Chakrabarty 1995, Chatterjee

1992, Ghosh 1998) and Assam (Dasgupta 2001), and is not merely confined to the experience of the

bhadralok1. Another crucial referent for me is the anthropological literature on refugees which makes

central the linkage of displacement to national belonging and exclusion, and refugee identity to

hegemonic nationalist ideologies; the construction of refugees not only through the languages of law

and humanitarianism but by the institutional management of “the refugee problem”; the silencing of

refugees by humanitarian rhetoric and practice as dehistoricized victims so that their own assessment

as historical actors is bypassed (Malkki 1996); and most importantly, the agency of the displaced–

appropriating, transforming and contesting hegemonic discourse and interventions.

Mistrusting refugees

1 The Bengali word bhadralok means a respectable person of middleclass background–

landowners or professionals, usually but not exclusively upper caste, and distinguished socially by

education, non-manual labour and a refined lifestyle.

The partition of British India and the emergence of the independent states of India and Pakistan

in 1947, is linked to the largest recorded population dislocation in history. The two-nation solution

negotiated by the competing nationalist movements led by the Congress Party and the Muslim League

produced a territorial settlement linked to the principle of religious majoritarianism. Pakistan came

to consist of the North West Frontier Provinces, Baluchistan, Sind, and West Punjab, separated by

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nearly thousand miles from East Bengal and the Sylhet district of Assam. Though two-third of India’s

Muslims became Pakistanis, both nations included numerically large yet vulnerable minorities. In

Punjab, nearly 12 million Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus were displaced and 1 million lost their lives

(Zolberg et al 1989) during the so-called “exchange of populations”. In the case of Bengal however,

Partition was predated by sectarian violence in 1946 which spurred the initial two-way movement of

Hindus to West Bengal and Muslims to East Pakistan, and unlike the situation in Punjab, the flight of

Hindu refugees eventually overtook that of Muslims and has continued sporadically through the brutal

civil war in Pakistan in 1971 and the birth of Bangladesh into the present. Not only is Partition

associated with national and personal trauma for many Bengalis, the presence of over 8 million

refugees from former East Bengal irrevocably shaped West Bengal’s political economy and popular

imagination and is seen to be symptomatic of Bengali decline.

The Government of India’s conservative and disputed schematization of population dislocation

from East Pakistan over nearly a quarter century helps situate the refugees’ own assessment of their

predicament. Among other things, it does not include the 9 million Hindu and Muslim refugees from

the war of 1970-71 in East Pakistan (Luthra 1971)2. The United Nations estimated that the majority

of these refugees returned home–an assessment disputed by the Government of West Bengal with

regard to the displaced Hindus (Goverment of West Bengal 1980).

Initially, the Government of India attempted to discourage the migration of East Bengalis to

India by exhorting them to pledge their allegiance to Pakistan, offering temporary and limited relief

rather than permanent rehabilitation, and signing a series of agreements with Pakistan aimed at

assuring the minorities of security and preventing mass migration. But as the migrations became a

persistent and irreversible reality, the state attempted to regulate them. The border in the east was left

open until 1952 to give people time to decide on their citizenship, and then passports were introduced

to reduce further migration from East Pakistan. As the population movement continued, an additional

barrier of permits and migration certificates was instituted in 1956. Then from 1958-64, the Indian

government tried to deter East Bengali Hindu migrants by refusing to recognize them as “refugees” and

thereby making them ineligible for relief and rehabilitation assistance. This changed with the riots of

1964 in East Pakistan, and the displaced were given permanent refuge in India through the civil war

of 1970-71 in Pakistan after which East Pakistan seceded as the independent state of Bangladesh.

Post-1971 migrants were declared ineligible for settlement assistance in India, a “deterrence” that

seems not to have affected migration in subsequent decades. Border watchers seem agreed that

displacement in the 1980s was mainly due to economic privation in Bangladesh and included Hindus

and Muslims, while the early 1990s saw a rise in the numbers of East Bengali Hindu victims of

communal violence following the demolition of the medieval Babri mosque in India by Hindu

nationalists. The chart is interesting, not only because it reflects the Indian state’s failure to stop the

migration of East Bengalis, but a cursory reading of the causes of displacement indexes the latter to

diplomatic ruptures in Indo-Pakistan relations, tensions between East and West Pakistan which finally

culminated in the east’s separatist movement for Bangladesh, and conflicts between Hindus and

Muslims in each nation which sparked retaliatory violence in the neighbouring country. This is a

representation of events which while not disputed in its details by the East Bengali Hindus refugees,

is linked by them to one originary cause–Partition on religious lines–which, they contend, made all

2Muslims who