It was Biblical,” remembers Sydney Schanberg, who reported on the refugees for the New York Times.
Schanberg, steeped in the worst horrors of war from Vietnam and Cambodia, goes quiet at the memory of the desperate millions who fled into India. “You don’t tune out,” he says, “but there’s a numbness. Either that or you feel like crying. There was a tremendous loss of life on those treks out.” He remembers, “Their bodies have adjusted to those germs in their water, but suddenly they’re drinking different water with different germs. Suddenly they’ve got cholera. People were dying all around us. You’d see that someone had left a body on the side of the road, wrapped in pieces of bamboo, and there’d be a vulture trying to get inside to eat the body. You would come into a schoolyard, and a mother was losing her child. He was in her lap. He coughed and coughed and then died.” He pauses and composes himself. “They went through holy hell and back.”
Major General Jacob-Farj-Rafael Jacob, the gruff, battle-hardened chief of staff of the Indian army’s Eastern Command, went to the border to watch the refugees streaming in. “It was terrible, pathetic,” he recalls. The displaced throngs inescapably called to mind nightmare memories of Partition in 1947, not so long before. “It’s a terrible human agony,” says Jaswant Singh, a former Indian foreign minister. “It was as if we were reliving the Partition.”1
The mounting demands of providing food, shelter, and medical care were more than an impoverished country like India—which could not cope with the needs of millions of its own desperately poor and sick citizens—could possibly handle. By late April, with the monsoons looming, the rush of refugees became a public health disaster. India frantically built refugee camps, each one holding some forty thousand people. Indira Gandhi’s government quietly tried to link these camps to the Awami League authorities, and even did some social engineering, mixing Hindus and Muslims together in the Indian secular way. While it was almost impossible to count the refugees precisely, by the middle of May, India estimated that it was sheltering almost two million souls, with about fifty thousand more arriving daily.2
From Tripura, a hard-hit border state, the lieutenant governor warned Gandhi of the massive scale of it: “It is clear now that the Pak Army’s objective is to push across our borders as many people as possible with a view to disrupt completely life here.” The Tripura government was housing exiles in camps in school buildings and haphazard temporary shelters. They could handle at best fifty thousand refugees, but already had over twice that many. The roads and railways could not bring in enough supplies. And commodities prices were soaring, with awful consequences for poor Indians.3
These displaced masses greatly ratcheted up the popular pressure on India’s democratic government. Indian reporters raced to the borders, shocking their readership with gruesome coverage of the refugees’ harrowing ordeals. From Tripura, one newspaper showed the individual faces in the human tide: desperately poor peasants selling their utensils, because it was all they had left; privileged, well-educated lawyers and architects who suddenly found themselves dodging soldiers; and a movie actress with deals inked for a dozen films who slogged through the mud for two days seeking safety, just like everyone else.4
At every rank, Indians seethed. Swaran Singh, the ordinarily unflappable foreign minister, indignantly told his diplomats, “Artillery, tanks, automatic weapons, mortars, aeroplanes, everything which is normally used against invading armed forces, were utilised and very large-scale killings took place; selective killings of individuals, acts of molestation and rape against the university students, girls, picking out the Awami League leaders, their supporters and later on especially concentrating on the localities in which Hindus predominated.” P. N. Haksar anxiously wrote that “our people have been deeply stirred by the carnage in East Bengal. Government of India have endeavoured to contain the emotions which have been aroused in our country, but we find it increasingly difficult to do this because of the systematic effort on the part of Pakistan to force millions of people to leave their hearths and homes taking shelter in our territory.”5
Worse, Haksar noted, the refugees would cause social tension and spark religious strife in volatile West Bengal, Assam, and Tripura. These border states, which had absorbed waves of refugees after Partition, were already poverty-stricken and notoriously unstable, and the Indian government dreaded the fiery leftist revolutionaries and Naxalites there. Since the people’s will was being stifled in East Bengal, Haksar secretly wrote that “extremist political elements will inevitably gain ground. With our own difficulties in West Bengal, the dangers of a link-up between the extremists in the two Bengals are real.”6
The Indian government, from Indira Gandhi on down, worked hard to hide an ugly reality from its own people: by an official reckoning, as many as 90 percent of the refugees were Hindus.7
This skew was the inevitable consequence of Pakistani targeting of Hindus in East Pakistan—what Archer Blood and his staffers had condemned as genocide. The population of East Pakistan was only 16 or 17 percent Hindu, but this minority comprised the overwhelming bulk of the refugees. India secretly recorded that by the middle of June, there were some 5,330,000 Hindus, as against 443,000 Muslims and 150,000 from other groups. Many Indian diplomats believed that the Hindus would be too afraid ever to go back.8
The first wave of refugees was made up of a great many Bengali Muslims, but as early as mid-April, one of Gandhi’s top officials noted, India decided that Pakistan was systematically expelling the Hindus. The Indian government privately believed, as this aide noted, that Pakistan, by “driving out Hindus in their millions,” hoped to reduce the number of Bengalis so they were no longer the majority in Pakistan, and to destroy the Awami League as a political force by getting rid of “the ‘wily Hindu’ who was supposed to have misled simple Bengali Muslims into demanding autonomy.”9
But the Indian government assiduously hid this stark fact from Indians. “In India we have tried to cover that up,” Swaran Singh candidly told a meeting of Indian diplomats in London, “but we have no hesitation in stating the figure to foreigners.” (Sydney Schanberg and John Kenneth Galbraith, the Kennedy administration’s ambassador to India, separately highlighted the fact in the New York Times.) Singh instructed his staff to distort for their country: “We should avoid making this into an Indo-Pakistan or Hindu[-]Muslim conflict. We should point out that there are Buddhists and Christians besides the Muslims among the refugees, who had felt the brunt of repression.” In a major speech, Gandhi misleadingly described refugees of “every religious persuasion—Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist and Christian.”10
The Indian government feared that the plain truth would splinter its own country between Hindus and Muslims. India had almost seventy million Muslim citizens, and as Singh told his diplomats, the government’s worst fear was vengeful sectarian confrontations. By not mentioning the Bengali Hindus, India also avoided hinting to Pakistan that it might be willing to accept them permanently. And Indian officials did not want to provide further ammunition to the irate Hindu nationalists in the Jana Sangh party. From Moscow, D. P. Dhar, India’s ambassador there, decried the Pakistan army’s “preplanned policy of selecting Hindus for butchery,” but, fearing inflammatory politicking from “rightist reactionary Hindu chauvinist parties like Jana Sangh,” he wrote, “We were doing our best not to allow this aspect of the matter to be publicised in India.”11
Gandhi’s officials freely accused Pakistan of genocide—Indian diplomats in Islamabad secretly wrote of “the holocaust in East Bengal,” and Dhar blasted Pakistan’s campaign of “carnage and genocide”—but not in the same way that Blood did. Rather than basing this accusation primarily on the victimization of Hindus, India tended to focus on the decimation of the Bengalis as a group. The Indian foreign ministry argued that Pakistan’s generals, having lost an election because their country had too many Bengalis, were now slaughtering their way to “a wholesale reduction in the population of East Bengal” so that it would no longer comprise a majority in Pakistan.12
India, supporting this Bengali rebellion, faced an awkward ideological problem. Since Nehru’s day, a core doctrine of Indian foreign policy was refusing to meddle in the internal affairs of other countries. This pervasive Nehruvian attitude was supremely protective of India’s own national sovereignty, wrested from the British Empire at such a terrible cost. So how could India possibly justify intervening inside part of sovereign Pakistan?13
Soon after the crackdown started, Haksar—as steeped in Nehruvian thinking as anyone—wrote, “While our sympathy for the people of Bangla Desh is natural, India, as a State, has to walk warily. Pakistan is a State. It is a Member of the U.N. and, therefore, outside interference in events internal to Pakistan will not earn us either understanding or goodwill from the majority of nation-States.”14
There was a less elevated motive: it was embarrassing for India to cheer on secession in East Pakistan while stifling it in Kashmir. India had long accused Pakistan of trying to stir up separatism among Muslims in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. In the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir, as Haksar uncomfortably reminded Gandhi, it was “unlawful to preach secession.” Secessionist organizations were outlawed and would not be allowed to take part in elections. So Haksar privately argued, “We have also got to be careful that we do not publicly say or do anything which will cast any shadow on the stand we have consistently taken in respect of Kashmir that we cannot allow its secession and that whatever happens there is a matter of domestic concern to India and that we shall not tolerate any outside interference.” Dhar feared being “exposed to the counter charge of suppressing, by force, the people in Kashmir.”15
With the bullets flying in East Pakistan, Indian officials found they could not hew to Nehruvian pieties. It would be impossible as a practical matter and disastrous in domestic politics. In its fury, the Indian public shrugged off the impropriety of criticizing what Pakistan did inside its own borders. The firebrand activist Jayaprakash Narayan quickly declared that “what is happening in Pakistan is surely not that country’s internal matter alone.” Just a few days into the slaughter, India’s ambassador at the United Nations intoned, “The scale of human sufferings is such that it ceases to be a matter of the domestic concern of Pakistan alone.” India brought a complaint against Pakistan’s violations of human rights to a United Nations body, which Pakistan promptly denounced as outside meddling.16
For months, the Indian government cast about in search of a serviceable ideological justification for resisting what it called genocide. Haksar tried and failed to get Gandhi to declare, “For countries situated far away, it is natural to argue that events in East Bengal are, legally and juridically, matters pertaining to the internal affairs of Pakistan. For us in India this mood of calm detachment cannot be sustained. There is a vast revulsion of feeling in India against the atrocities which are being daily perpetrated.” Narayan, going further, dismissed the whole concept of noninterference as a “fiction,” since the great powers were constantly intervening in weaker countries. Unlike the coldhearted superpowers, he argued, India would be “interfering … in the interest of humanity, freedom, democracy and justice.” “It depends on how you describe national sovereignty,” says K. C. Pant, who was then a minister of state for home affairs. “National sovereignty in a country where people reject the system is different from the people’s acceptance of a government and a political system.”17
There was a possible precedent. The young Mahatma Gandhi had famously campaigned against white supremacy in South Africa; Nehru later championed that cause at the United Nations; and Indira Gandhi’s government crusaded against South African apartheid. India went even further against the racist regime in Rhodesia (today Zimbabwe): promoting economic sanctions and asking Britain, the colonial power there, to take military action. “India and other nations have repeatedly urged Britain to use force against Rhodesian regime in defence of the rights of majority of Rhodesians,” the strategist K. Subrahmanyam bluntly wrote in his secret report. “The U.N. has been calling for sanctions against South Africa to compel the white minority regime to give up the oppression against the majority.… There is no need for India to feel guilty of having interfered in the affairs of another nation.” India’s foreign ministry urged the United Nations to show “the same kind of concern about the actions of Yahya Khan in East Bengal as they have done about racialism and colonialism in South Africa, Portuguese colonies and Rhodesia.”18
Whatever compunctions the Indian government had left about Pakistan’s sovereignty, they cracked as the refugees poured across the border. Haksar wrote, “Even if the international community concedes to the military rulers of Pakistan the right to decimate their own people, I cannot see how that right could be extended to the throwing of unconscionable burden on us by forcible eviction of millions of Pakistani citizens.” The refugee crisis afforded India a devastating riposte: what Pakistan did within its borders was having a massive impact outside its borders.19
In public, Indian officials such as Swaran Singh would impeccably speak up for sovereignty. But behind closed doors, he coached his officials to take the opposite line: “repression internally has resulted in the uprooting of six million refugees. With what stretch of the imagination is this an internal matter?” Upending the argument, he accused the United States of meddling in Pakistan’s internal affairs by helping a military junta to slaughter the Bengali majority: supporting Yahya was “truly interference in the internal affairs.” He instructed his diplomats, “You can use your genius for the purpose of thinking of other such arguments.”20
Indira Gandhi’s loyalists have emphasized the heroic and levelheaded leadership of her government in this crisis. Still, India’s leaders were prey to the usual range of human failings: self-doubt, stress, and exhaustion.21
The prime minister’s secretariat roiled with confusion, inundated with harebrained schemes. Some people pragmatically argued that the refugees would never go back and that India should concentrate on winning international aid for looking after them; others demanded that India let only Hindus in, shutting out Muslims; some wanted to seal the borders outright; there were even suggestions of population exchanges.22
Haksar, the impresario of much of the government’s policy, privately despaired. He confided to Dhar, a close friend, “As far as I am capable of knowing about myself, all that I can say at this stage is that I feel, physically and mentally, stretched beyond the breaking point. I feel that I just cannot carry on.” He needed “a little rest and time to think.” He knew that the crisis was escalating, possibly in terrifying ways, and could not bear the responsibility: “My present assessment is that for the new phase which has begun I am not the man.”23
For two days, Gandhi went to West Bengal, Assam, and Tripura to see the refugees herself. She and her staff were shaken. After sitting in South Block dealing with abstract statistics of refugees and rupees, they came face-to-face with real people, hearing their stories of terror. What they witnessed, as one of the prime minister’s senior aides wrote later, “assaulted our moral sensibility.”24
Gandhi was overwhelmed. She visited slapdash camps, where thousands of tents had been hastily pitched. Any functional local building had been requisitioned. People urgently needed clean water. Many of the refugees were wounded, beyond what local hospitals could handle, needing special teams of doctors and public health workers. She impatiently interrogated an Indian camp commander, who later snapped to one of her senior aides, “Sir, please tell the prime minister that even hurry takes time.” By the end of the tour, when she was supposed to deliver some remarks, she was so overcome that she could barely speak. When she and her team got back to Calcutta, a senior aide later recalled, she said that “we cannot let Pakistan continue this holocaust.”25
After this, she was determined that India could not absorb the refugees. They would have to go home. This, in turn, would require the Pakistani government to make a generous political deal with the Bengalis to end the civil war. She was scheduled to make a major speech to the Lok Sabha, and Haksar, despite his exhaustion, junked a more cautiously diplomatic draft from the foreign ministry, persuading her instead to tell Indians and the whole world exactly how grave the situation was.26
She did so thunderously. “Has Pakistan the right to compel at bayonet-point not hundreds, not thousands, not hundreds of thousands, but millions of its citizens to flee their homes?” she asked the lawmakers. In front of some of the same legislators whom she had just briefed about India’s clandestine support for the rebels in East Pakistan, she falsely declared that “we have never tried to interfere with the internal affairs of Pakistan.” Then, using Haksar’s language, she inverted Pakistan’s insistence on its own national sovereignty: “What was claimed to be an internal problem of Pakistan, has also become an internal problem for India. We are, therefore, entitled to ask Pakistan to desist immediately from all actions which it is taking in the name of domestic jurisdiction, and which vitally affect the peace and well-being of millions of our own citizens. Pakistan cannot be allowed to seek a solution of its political or other problems at the expense of India and on Indian soil.” This became her government’s core argument for why India was entitled to ask Pakistan to stop killing its own citizens and instead make peace with them.27
Gandhi demanded that the refugees be allowed to return in safety. She made a plea to the “conscience of the world,” even though it was “unconscionably” slow to react. She warned, “this suppression of human rights, the uprooting of people, and the continued homelessness of vast numbers of human beings will threaten peace.” Without foreign succor, she said, India would have to “take all measures as may be necessary”—an unsubtle threat of war.28
These unequivocal Indian demands, which Pakistan would surely not meet, posed the manifest prospect of war. Indian officials simply did not believe that Yahya would do anything serious to bring the refugees home. Pakistan’s government, they said, was still systematically driving them out, while providing soothing speeches that the United States could use as propaganda. The foreign ministry dismissed the Pakistani government’s weak proposals for finding some new civilian authorities as dictatorial puppetry. India would only be satisfied with a government formed by Mujib.
In private, Swaran Singh argued that Yahya’s dictatorship had to fall. He told a meeting of his diplomats that since the refugees would never return home while Pakistan’s military government was in power, “this regime must be replaced by a regime which is responsible to the people.” He said flatly, “Our ultimate objective is that this military regime should give way to a regime which is truly representative of the Awami League.”
Singh instructed his officials to make their threats of war implicitly, telling foreigners that India did not want to be left alone to face the storm. But he frankly told his staff to be ready for an Indian attack: “when war comes even if it is our action, we should be able to make a case that it has been forced on us.” Gandhi, Haksar, and Singh stayed resolutely on their path, knowing it was inexorably leading them toward war.29
Of all the Indians speaking out for the Bengalis, the most striking name to protest was Jayaprakash Narayan. He was an elder statesman of India’s independence struggle against the British Empire, who had been uneasily won over to a tactical kind of nonviolence by Mahatma Gandhi. Narayan—known as J.P.—was a close friend of Jawaharlal Nehru, but his name is eternally linked to Indira Gandhi’s for a more tragic reason. In 1975, Narayan would challenge her rule with a mass mobilization of his supporters, and she would in response declare her notorious Emergency, suspending India’s democracy.30
When Yahya’s onslaught began, Indira Gandhi later recalled, Narayan argued that “we should have gone to war right at the beginning.” Haksar noted, “Even a pacifist like Jayaprakash and his co-workers demand recognition of Bangla Desh.” (This exaggerated Narayan’s commitment to nonviolence, which did reluctantly allow armed resistance in desperate cases.) According to Gandhi’s closest friend, he urged Gandhi to swiftly invade East Pakistan. She listened intently but did not reply.31
Narayan fierily supported the Bengali guerrillas, meeting with Bengali political leaders and Mukti Bahini officers, and taking a particular interest in supplying them with arms and artillery. He demanded the defense of the “political and human rights” of the Bengalis, and decried a “holocaust” carried out by a “Hitlerian junta in power in Islamabad.” In early June, Narayan raced around the globe, from Jakarta to Moscow to Cairo, denouncing genocide to everyone from Tito to the pope to the Council on Foreign Relations. (His Burmese contact of choice was Ne Win, the vicious military dictator.) In Washington, he met with Henry Kissinger and told a senior State Department official that he remembered from his own days struggling against British colonial rule in India what it meant “to be an irreconcilable.” He had accepted nothing less than independence, and neither would the leaders of Bangladesh.32
Still, even in this dire moment, Indira Gandhi and Jayaprakash Narayan could not get along. They squabbled with petty fury. According to her close friend, she did not want to let him become India’s main voice on Bangladesh. When he held a conference in Delhi to condemn the atrocities, she had her political party avoid it. “I was shocked,” he wrote to her. “Does she think she can ignore me?” he exploded, according to one account. “I have seen her as a child in frocks.” When she got wind of that outburst, she froze him out. The sourness in their relations would linger for years.33
Inside India, Bengalis were anything but an alien, unfamiliar people. They composed a major part of society: Bengali was one of the most commonly spoken languages in India, and its culture was celebrated. “Bangladesh was part of India less than a quarter century back,” remembers Jaswant Singh, a former Indian foreign minister. “It was all one country. It was part of India. It didn’t feel like a separate land. They were kith and kin.”34
In 1947, in Partition, the British Empire had finally severed what had once been a united Bengal. After massive dislocations of populations and terrible violence, the mostly Hindu people in the west found themselves in India’s state of West Bengal, and the mostly Muslim people in the east in what was known alternately as East Bengal or East Pakistan. So India’s own Bengali citizens, in West Bengal and other parts of the country, were particularly horrified by what was happening to people who spoke their language and shared their customs across the border in East Pakistan.35
One of these Bengali Indians was Arundhati Ghose, a protégée of Haksar, who, while raised in Bombay in a prominent Bengali family, had ancestors from East Bengal. Ghose talks fast, cracks wise, chain-smokes. She would eventually rise to be ambassador to South Korea and Egypt, and would fiercely lead India’s diplomatic campaign against the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. But in 1971 she was only an undersecretary in the Indian diplomatic service, on what she cheerfully calls the bottom rung.36
She remembers how proud Bengali Indians were at the Awami League’s electoral triumph. They glorified Mujib, she says, overjoyed to see their fellow Bengalis standing up for their language and their rights. Then, when the shooting started, there was an intense revulsion. Bengali Indians rallied for the cause. “I’m Bengali,” she says. “It was an emotional thing. We were raising funds. Delhi was full of that.” Since she was a government staffer, she quickly adds, “Nothing officially. Officially I had nothing to do with it.” She recalls, “Initially it was just Bengalis, and I think that’s why I got swept in. But then it was just people who were against the crackdown, because they were killing civilians. You’re powerless. There’s nothing you can do. Raising money is all right when you’re talking about Bengalis singing Bengali songs, but it’s not so hot when people are being shot and burned.”
Ghose remembers the strain on the government caused by seething Bengali Indians. Haksar worried that in “our own part of Bengal,” there was “an impetuous demand that hundreds of thousands of volunteers be allowed to go and fight alongside the East Bengalis”—and that such pressures would only increase. “As Bengalis,” wrote an eminent former Indian minister, on behalf of India’s Bengal Association, “we feel all the more indignant” at “the wanton bestiality of genocide” against “our brothers and sisters of Bangla Desh.” When the killing started, he urged, “The freedom fighters of Bangla Desh must be allowed the free use of our border territory for the purpose of sanctuary or for organising their liberation struggle.”37
Some might have found this touching. Not Haksar. He loathed this kind of identity politics among Indians. Like other Congress mandarins, he insisted on putting India itself above any ethnic, regional, or national loyalties. (He overlooked that many Bengali Hindus were standing up for Bengali Muslims.) “I am reduced to a state of despair and dark forebodings about our country,” wrote Haksar, who enjoyed a little melodrama. Asking the prime minister to dress down this unfortunate ex-minister personally, he loftily insisted that this Bengali Indian should “have the sensitiveness to see that what is happening in East Pakistan is a matter of national concern and that Bengalis, as Bengalis, especially those who claim to be Indians, have no special responsibility, any more than Tamilians should have a say in fashioning our relations with Ceylon or with Malaysia, or Gujaratis should have a say in how we conduct our relations with East Africa.”38
But the pressure from West Bengali public opinion proved too intense, and in early April, Haksar proposed appointing a special officer in the foreign ministry to handle India’s outraged Bengali citizens, hearing out their ideas and proposals. For the rest of the crisis, he had to accustom himself to handpicking Bengali Indians for key jobs, lauding one official as “a balanced Bengali.”39
Ghose was one of them. Posted in Nepal when Yahya’s crackdown began, she had never been to East Pakistan and knew precious little about the place. “They went through the foreign service to find everyone who spoke Bengali,” she remembers. “Unfortunately they had to take the girl.” They asked several men, who demurred, not wanting to risk their careers. “But I was too junior, and I thought it’d be good fun.” In April or May, she was summoned and “told, not asked, that I had to go to Calcutta.” Her job was to help set up a secretariat to work with the Bangladesh exile government. She arrived amid chaos and fresh hopes. “The refugees, we didn’t feel that in Delhi,” she says. “In Calcutta it started very much as, these are great things for Bengali culture, Bengali language, and they’re willing to fight for it.”
In June, a reporter for Life, among the teeming crowds in West Bengal, was struck by the thriving of the vultures: “The flesh-eaters were glossy, repulsively replete.” The correspondent moved past “the corpse of a baby, the clean-picked skeleton of a young child, and then dead refugees wrapped in mats and saris and looking like parcels fallen from a speeding truck.” The living were packed together, exhausted, baked by the sun. People vomited. Those who were not too far gone begged for spaces on a truck. An overworked Indian administrator felt physically ill from watching children dying. He asked, “Can we cope? The civil administration ceased to be able to cope long ago.” As cholera and other diseases spread, the lucky ones made it to a hospital, carried by rickshaw or oxcart: “Hollow-eyed and only semi-conscious in the listless torpor of total exhaustion, they lay and retched. Relatives fanned the black fog of flies from their faces.”40
It was all too easy for Schanberg to fill the pages of the New York Times with horror. At a railway station, he was overcome by the sight of some five thousand refugees pressed together on the concrete floor: “someone vomits, someone moans. A baby wails. An old man lies writhing on his back on the floor, delirious, dying. Emaciated, fly-covered infants thrash and roll.” Filing from a border town in West Bengal, Schanberg reported the unclean sounds of the cholera epidemic: “coughing, vomiting, groaning and weeping.” An emaciated seventy-year-old man had just died. His son and granddaughter sat sobbing beside the body, as flies gathered. When a young mother died of cholera, her baby continued to nurse until a doctor pulled the infant away. The husband of that dead woman, a rice farmer, cried to Schanberg that the family had fled Pakistani soldiers who burned down their house. “My wife is dead,” he wailed. “Three of my children are dead. What else can happen?”41
To reach the relative safety of India, Bengalis endured a terrifying and grueling trek, hiking through thick jungles in the deluges of the monsoons. One reputable Indian government official, himself a Bengali, relied on his local sources to remind Haksar what the refugees were fleeing: with encouragement from the Pakistan army, volunteers deliberately killed the Hindu men. He darkly wrote that it was not hard to imagine what had happened to the women. There were some Hindu families hidden in the granaries of “kind hearted Muslims who are against these deliberate atrocities but who find themselves entirely helpless.”42
These kinds of stories were echoed six million times—the number of refugees that India officially estimated it was now sheltering. That number was, the Indian foreign ministry claimed, unparalleled in the world’s history. Gandhi’s government hoped to confine them to the refugee camps, but millions slipped off into the cities and villages, finding their way into informal labor markets and sweatshops, or simply ending up as beggars.43
India’s sympathy for the refugees had limits. Some Indian officials worried that Pakistan was planting agents among the crowds. And the Indian government was ambivalent about having to shelter Biharis. One of Gandhi’s top officials accused these Urdu-speaking Muslims of being stalwart supporters of the Pakistan army and of organizing groups of fanatics to help crush the Bengalis’ autonomy movement. They were now fleeing reprisals from the Bengalis, and this official did not hide his resentment at having to look after them.44
As the numbers of refugees mounted, Yahya himself seemed to be in denial. He assured foreign governments that normalcy had been restored and declared that there was “no slaughter going on.” When a visiting U.S. diplomat told him that he had seen with his own eyes refugees streaming out of East Pakistan into India, and had heard their tales of terror and dispossession, Yahya flatly refused to believe it. Since Bengalis “look alike,” outsiders might be fooled by people “claiming to be refugees.”45
But when Yahya’s government allowed a World Bank team of seasoned development specialists to tour East Pakistan, their secret report found an “all-pervasive fear.” The infrastructure was devastated, largely because of army campaigns in the big cities and towns. “In all cities visited there are areas that have been razed; and in all districts visited there are villages which have simply ceased to exist.” There were ongoing military strikes, which, even when targeting “Awami Leaguers, students or Hindus,” frightened the whole population. There was a “trail of devastation running from Khulna to Jessore to Kushtia to Pabna, Bogra, Rangpur and Dinajpur.”46
This refugee population in India was far beyond the capabilities of a government that strained to lift its own citizens out of poverty. In a June survey, Indian observers were staggered by the conditions in refugee camps in the border states of Assam and Tripura. The temporary housing was “pitiable”; without sanitation, the Indians were horrified by “the stinking foul-smell”; and due to an unchecked cholera epidemic, on average thirty to forty people were dying every day. In a brief visit of a few hours in one camp, they saw several dead bodies being hauled out for cremation.47
India’s relief work was shot through with failures. Gandhi herself complained that efforts to prevent cholera were “dragging on for far too long.” There were not enough doctors; angry young men sat around idly; Hindu nationalists spread resentment of Muslims; women had to give birth without even the shelter of a tent. According to this Indian report, corrupt contractors reportedly pocketed fees for tarpaulin sheets, but never supplied them. Other contractors would not allow Bengali youths to help build up their own camps. When a cholera epidemic broke out in one camp, there was outright panic and a near-total breakdown of operations. The contractors, police, and some civilian officials abandoned their posts, leaving the refugees without rations for two weeks. “From one of these camps some 3–4 thousands evacuees returned to Bangla Desh in sheer disgust.”48
The burden fell on some of the poorest people in India. K. C. Pant, the minister of state for home affairs whose portfolio included the eastern border, remembers, “Among the common people, there was an understanding that a lot of things are happening in East Pakistan which they found highly offensive. It was a natural kind of reaction, to people being driven out of their homes, carrying with them stories of what had happened.” There was, he recalls from a visit to the border areas, lots of sympathy. Still, it would be too much to expect a purely high-minded public response. Some local officials in Assam seemed outright hostile. According to this Indian report, the impoverished Indians in the border states did not welcome the refugees. The sheer numbers instantly turned the locals into minorities in their own home villages: in Bagmara, for instance, four thousand locals were vastly outnumbered by more than seventy-two thousand refugees. “In all the places we visited the local population did not appear very favourably inclined towards the evacuees. In Meghalaya the local people were not only passively hostile but had even started an active campaign against the helpless evacuees.” The Indian team heard accounts of “evacuees having been mercilessly beaten by the local people. There were case of even attempted rape.”49
By September, India would record almost six thousand deaths from cholera alone. As the state governments reeled, they turned to Gandhi’s central government for help. In Assam, state officials were convinced that the refugees—particularly the Hindus—would not return without some drastic action by Gandhi’s government. The refugee crisis was driving India toward war.50