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 people. The refugee problem has chronically troubled India since the August 1947 partition of the sub-continent into India and Pakistan. In Northern
India there was fairly balanced exchange, with 6.000,000 Moslems fleeing to Pakistan 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 of West Bengal and turned its capital, Calcutta, into a sink-hole of human misery.
The cost of feeding and attempting to house the refugees is currently $1,330,000 dollies 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 Indian themselves. The refugees are also taking work away from the Indians; in West Bengal the refugee peasants are hiring out as agricultural laborer for a quarter of the wages local laborer 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 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 pogroms 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 belongings and seek refuge in a country that has no room for them.
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