পাতা:বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র (ত্রয়োদশ খণ্ড).pdf/৮০

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52 ংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ ত্রয়োদশ খন্ড 1 .42 p.m. Mr. John Stonehouse (Wednesbury): The House is grateful to my Hon. Friend the Member for Kensington, North (Mr. Douglas-Mann) for initiating the debate and for the moderate way in which he introduced the subject. I wish to deal with some of the observations which were made by the Hon. Member for Croydon, South (Sir R. Thompson) and to deal with some of the political points which were raised by the Hon. Member for Chigwell (Mr. Biggs Davison). I shall be delighted in that part of my speech to support almost everything that the Hon. Member for Cornwall, North (Mr. Pardoe) said. First, I think the House must agree that it is a matter of great concern that we have had to wait nearly seven weeks for this debate and have had to depend on the food fortune of my Hon. Friend the Member for Kensington, North in winning a ballot. It is rather depressing that our parliamentary procedures do not allow for Government or Opposition to allocate time to discuss a subject which is of overwhelming world concern. However, we are having the debate today and I am glad that we have this chance. It is proving a most important and historic debate. The contributions from both sides have been extremely interesting, many of them coming from a great depth of experience. I want first to speak of my recent association with the relief organizations and my visit to India and the West Bengal-East Bengal border some three weeks ago, and tell the House, in confirmation of what my Hon. Friend the Member for Kensington, North said, about the conditions in the camps as I saw them. The conditions at that time were appallgin-refugees pouring over the frontier at the rate of tens of thousands a day. The interesting fact then-I am sure it has been Confirmed since that the overwhelming majority of the refugees were Muslim and not Hindu. This is quite different from the situation that applied at the time of partition and has applied since partition when there have been several waves of people fleeing from the East. The situation was that the majority were Hindu, if not all Hindu, fleeing from a Muslim State where they feared that they would be repressed. The situation now is that the overwhelming majority of the refugees are Muslim fleeing from a Muslim State where they were then majority of the population. In these circumstances, it is wholly to the credit of the Indian Government and the Indian authorities that they have freely accepted these hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people into their already overcrowded country and, without any hesitation, have provided them with comfort and food to the best of their resources, The Indian authorities deserve to be congratulated on this humanitarian act. It would have been so easy for them to have sealed off the frontier, and to have said, "This is not our problem". Prime Minister Nehru, at the time of partition, had given a guarantee that any member of a minority community in Pakistan would have the right to go to India. Clearly that guarantee did not apply to the members of the majority community in East Bengal. India would, indeed, have been within her rights to seal off the frontier and to prevent the influx of refugees who not only added to the economic problems in over-populated West Bengal but could have given cause for great communal unrest, as the Hindu majority in the area