পাতা:বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র (চতুর্দশ খণ্ড).pdf/২৪৭

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বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ চতুর্দশ খন্ড শিরোনাম সূত্র তারিখ ৮৯। তারা কি থাকবে না ফিরে যাবে? সানডে ষ্টার ৩ অক্টোবর, ১৯৭১ THE SUNDAYSTAR (WASHINGTON) OCTOBER 3, 1971 IN INDIA, THEY"RE SAFE AND STAYING WILL THEY GO BACK OR STAYo By John E. Frazer From New Delhi It is now six months since the first column of frightened refugees from East Pakistan trudged into India. After six months, said Indira in March, they will go back"they must go back" But the reality now is different. The 8.3 million refugees, except for 150,000 of them, are not going back, and they are unlikely to go back for another six months or far longer. In fact, still others are crossing by land and water into India at the current rate of 14,000 a day, as hunger, fear, and guerrilla warfare drive them out. Recently I watched from a rise of land in India overlooking a little river in East Pakistan as new arrivals came in. From a grassy marsh, not 300 yards away, a long country boat moved on the water paddled by a Pakistani boatman. In the unpainted craft huddled a Hindu household of 10 or 12- women, children, two men, their clothes in tin trunks, few utensils dangling, and the saris of the women wet almost to the waist from walking in marshes while escaping. "We are not thinking of keeping a single one." Siddartha Sankar Ray, Union Minister for Education and West Bengal Affairs, had said in an interview a few days earlier in Calcutta. But that Hindu household and millions of other refugees lodged in thatched huts alongside verdant rice fields or in tents shielded from rain by polyethylene sheets, are thinking otherwise; they will stay. They are hardly comfortable; they are packed in camps like sardiness: sanitation is deplorable. But they have enough to eat (except the protein-hungry babies and nursing mothers)-more food, actually, than 50 million Indians eat- and they are safe. This is really, why they will stay: in India, they are safe. But India scarcely dares to face the consequences of 8.3 million foreigners living indefinitely under such conditions. The money cost alone (though shared in part by the United States, the United Nations, and other sources) will be roughly $1 billion a year simply beyond India's resources. And government work almost everywhere in the four invaded states, West Bengal. Assam, Tripura and Meghalaya, has come to a halt,