Another camp I visited was full of commotion. . It has a population of about twenty thousand, and it is encircled by security guards and has a fence of barbed wire. As I drove up to it, children closed in around the car and followed me. Inside the camp, a few enterprising men were sitting hawking baskets of rotten fruit and vegetables. A security guard escorted me to the camp headquarters -a tarpaulin structure.it was surrounded by a noisy group of men shaking their fists. The security guard carefully made his way through them, and I with him. Inside was the commandant, of the camp, an empty desk, saying nothing. As soon as the men noticed arrival, they fell silent.
I asked the commandant what the trouble was.
The ration has been delayed by a day. There is nothing I can do about it. They know that. But the Naxalites were here this moming, and they stir up trouble wherever they go." The Naxalites are an organization of Maoist terrorists. 'Because of them, the refugees now think the daily ration is their right, not a gift that the government has to work hard to get to them."
"You actually allow political activists to come into the camp?”
"What can I do? My superior is a Naxalite sympathizer, and he has given me orders not to interfere with their activities. But I went out this moming to plead with them anyway and ask them to leave our camp alone. They feel upon me. They would have killed me if I hadn't got away The police, the civil service, the entire West Bengal government have abdicated. They don't know which party is going to end up in power, so no one wants to risk taking sides or making any decisions. The Naxalites are now the biggest force in West Bengal, and all they believe in is terrorism and anarchy."
Refugees have been coming to India waves since 1947, the time of independence, when the country was partitioned to create the Muslim, state of Pakistan. Muslims, fearing that they would be discriminated against as a minority in a predominantly Hindu independent India, had demanded a separate country, and they were given West Punjab and East Bengal areas that were a thousand miles apart but in which they made up a majority. The religious riots and massacres that accompanied the partition not only resulted in the death of more than a million people but also brought into being in effect a third nation -a nation of displaced persons. During the first two or three years of the turmoil, -about six million Hindus and Sikhs fled to India and about the same number of Muslims fled to Pakistan. But this crossing nation, staggering though it was, still left ten million Hindus in Pakistan almost all of them in East Pakistan-and several times as many Muslims in India. With the passing of the years, and the deepening of the enmity between India and Pakistan, the fate of these minorities became increasingly precarious. The original refugee population assimilated. The flow of refugees continued, at varying rates, through the nineteen fifties and nineteen-sixties much of it in the direction of India. The additional refugees in India, all of them Hindus, have been estimated to total between three and four million, and they were still living in West Bengal unemployed and unassimilated, managing to subsist with the help of relatives or in refugee camps-when West Bengal and the neighboring states were inundated by the new exodus of nine
