Migrants, Refugees and the Stateless in South Asia by Ghosh Partha S;

Author:Ghosh, Partha S;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SAGE Publications

4

Relief and

Rehabilitation

Unfortunately humanitarianism has been the mark of an inhuman time.

—G.K. Chesterton

Introduction

A region that has experienced hosting millions of migrants and refugees that too without a proper legal framework in place (discussed in Chapter 5) must have handled a huge task at hand to provide relief, if not rehabilitation too, to this massive mass of people. How has this task been achieved, through national efforts, or through bilateral efforts, or through regional efforts? As we will see in Chapter 5, regional efforts towards building a regional refugee regime have not made any headway. Some bilateral efforts have been there, but essentially it has been the individual state’s effort that is responsible to take care of the refugees to whatever extent possible. In this chapter, we will discuss four national relief efforts as experienced by India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. The remaining four states, namely, Afghanistan, Bhutan, Maldives and Sri Lanka, are not relevant in this context as none of them is a refugee-receiving country.1

I

Indian Experience

The Partition Refugees

The two regions that mattered most for India in this regard were, one, Delhi and its neighbouring regions, and two, Calcutta and its neighbouring regions. Besides, the refugees had to be settled in many other parts of India as well. Sometimes they themselves chose the places for their resettlement; the Sindhis chose Bombay, for example. A study of the Delhi and Calcutta experiences shows how the two respective state responses differed and why. In the case of Delhi, the Central Government was clear about its mission, but in the case of the West Bengal government the mission was not that clear. The primary reason for this differentiated outlook was that while the migrants from West Pakistan had come to India for good, without any doubts in their minds that they would not return, but in the case of West Bengal the migrants were not sure about that. It was true for the Bengali Muslim migrants as well who had left for East Pakistan. Even Nehru and the West Bengal government used to think that the phenomena in Bengal were temporary and as the situation would normalize the refugees would return to their respective homes. The ground realties tended to suggest that they were not completely off the mark. In early 1950 the Bengali refugee flow peaked at 3.5 million, but following the Nehru–Liaquat Pact on minorities signed on 8 April 1950, 1.2 million Hindu refugees returned to East Pakistan.2 Before long, however, a large number of them migrated back to India. By any measure it was a fluid situation and no one was sure about the exact numbers. For example, while the West Bengal government said that by 1954, 2.7 million refugees had arrived, the central government put the figure at 2.8 million by 1951, and then at 4 million by 1956 (Bandyopadhyay 2000: 32). Besides, while in the case of Punjabi refugees in Delhi the Central Government was directly involved because Delhi was the capital city under its administrative jurisdiction, for West Bengal it was the state government which was the nodal agency.

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