বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ ত্রয়োদশ খণ্ড
The Indian Government is constrained to act as if the refugees are to be on Indian soil for only a brief period, so this question has not been raised in its sharpest form. Yet even if we assume Bangladesh independence within the next couple of yearswhich is going well beyond what India is prepared to talk about-there are many who believe that large numbers of the refugees will never go back. Perhaps fifty per cent are landless peasants with absolutely nothing to go back to. The more enterprising are already trying to obtain Indian documentation which will enable them to pose as Indian citizens.
If the costs of the refugee operation could genuinely be regarded as a once and for all expenditure, the wealthy countries might allow themselves, without too bad a conscience, to contribute only a fifth or a quarter. But this is not a problem which will be liquidated by Bangladesh independence or by a political settlement in East Bengal.
Before the influx of refugees started, many observers felt reasonably sanguine about India's short term economic prospects. Food output has gone up, thanks to the green revolution. National income has been growing by about five percent a year, industrial production has also been creeping up, and foreign exchange reserves are in a reasonably healthy state.
Making India at once more productive, more profitable, and more labourintensive should be the first aim, India needs to create millions of new jobs. And even in the short term, the diversion of resources by the refugee costs amounts to a dangerous juggling with lives. What has been gained if East Bengali refugee children are kept alive by Indian efforts, when the diversion of resources may well mean, indirectly and over a period of time, the deaths of children elsewhere in India?
We have seen
(These are the testimonies of people, drawn from many nations, from journalists, relief workers, and Members of Parliament. All are eye-witnesses to the situation in India or Pakistan. With one accord, they plead for action.)
JOHN PILGER, DAILY MIRROR
The life, or death, of Bangladesh is the single most important issue the world has had to face since the decision to use nuclear weaponry as a means of political blackmail. It is that, because never before have the world's poor confronted the world's rich with such a mighty mirror of Man's Inhumanity.
Usually we in the West, who are the rich, can dismiss or rationalize famine, unexpected disaster and even mass extermination by simply nothing that the poor, who are characterized by the people of Bangladesh, are numerous and ought to be pruned. If only, we say, they could organize their own resources and subscribe to decent, Western politics. Surely they are expendable. We even allow ourselves a good Snigger at places crying out against odds we cannot comprehend places like the Congo and the ravaged republics of the Americans. None has followed the Western wisdom of democracy, and so they must suffer. A pity.
