| শিরোনাম | সূত্র | তারিখ |
| ১২৮। পশ্চিম বঙ্গের চিঠি | দি নিউজ ইয়র্কার | ১১ ডিসেম্বর, ১৯৭১ |
THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 11, 1971
LETTER FROM WEST BENGAL
On December 3rd, India and Pakistan begin a full scale war. Whatever the immediate provocations, it is generally agreed that the cause of the war is rooted in the fact that since March of this year-in the biggest single forced migration in the world's history-nine million men. women, and children have fled from East Pakistan to India, where ail they appear to have left now is their classification: “refugees." Yet the world at large does not seem even to have become interested in their plight. For someone accustomed to a society which people are concerned with nutrition, not starvation, with the quality of life, not mere survival, in which people think of life in terms of liberty, justice, equality, and human dignity, it is difficult to imagine what it must mean to be one of their refugees. Although some of them were doctors, lawyers, professors, students, businessmen, or most of them never had much in the way of worldly possessions and like their forefathers, would have died as poor as they were born leaving 110 mark on the world. Family ties associations, and memories must have been everything to them and now the families of most of them have been killed, scattered, or shamed by unspeakable indignities; the few objects that have associations or them have been torn from them; and their memories have been dimmed by who knows what deprivation and anguish. Until their migration, these people were bound by their caste and occupation to a particular place, with nothing special to look forward to nothing special to hope for -even, perhaps, nothing special to live for. Now they have still less. Is there anything, then, that distinguishes them from animals? Gandhi once said of their parents generation, “The more I penetrate the villages, the greater is the shock delivered as I perceive the blank stare in the eyes of the villagers I meet. Having nothing else to do but to work as laborers side by side with their bullocks they have become almost like them." If the refugees had all died in a single natural catastrophe, would that have been easier for the rest of the world to face? The conditions they are living under seem to drag the entire human species down in a sort of reverse evolution. Yet the fact remains that each gees are now in Calcutta, where, as Kipling wrote, “The cholera, the cyclone, and the crow come and go." He also described it as a city “By the sewage rendered fetid by the sewer/Made impure,” and said, “As the fungus sprouts chaotic from its bed. So it spread And, above the packed and pestilential town/ Death looked down." Since Kipling wrote these lines, eighty years ago, the city has spread and speared, and the dominion of death as well, until today Calcutta encompasses over seven million wretched people-not counting the refugees. Now all of eastern India, where refugees are camped in more than a thousand settlements, threatens to become a sprawling outgrowth of Calcutta; it is predicted that if the refugees remain, their number will swell in ten years to thirty million. A third of India's population already lives in this region, where the worst famines, pestilences, and cyclones always strike, and this third includes the poorest of the Indian poor; the refugees, having nothing more to lose, and having no stake in the political system under which they find themselves living, are ready
