Refugees haemorrhage into India. These are the headlines. Translated they mean over seven million people in India, and untold numbers in East Pakistan, in misery and fear: a tragedy so vast that even to witness it is not enough to comprehend it. This is an eyewitness account which captures as far as cold print can at least part of the terrible reality. In the second article, Harji Malik looks at its inevitable concomitant - the impact caring for the refugees must have on India's whole development. If, as was said, the Kashmir War set both combatants back three years, the cost of Yahya Khan's repression of the eastern wing must be measured in even more dramatic terms. The problem of Pakistan is internal; but, through no fault of its own, India must pay the price of sheltering the victims in the name of humanity. No country, however rich, could shoulder such a burden easily. And India is already frighteningly poor.

THE exodus continues - 40,000 a day is the estimate - along every escape route from East Pakistan. A miles- long train of uprooted, fear-stricken humanity trekking up to 200 miles in drenching rain or blazing sun on roads the monsoon has transformed into rivers of mud, or down the many rivers of East Bengal.

India's refugee camps are full. "We announce a camp for 10,000 is ready," says a district magistrate in West Bengal, "and suddenly 40,000 appear to occupy it." Increasing numbers have nowhere to go, and shuffle between one district and another for shelter. Local officials give them rations, but no land is available for new camps. They huddle under black umbrellas, bits of polythene, or pieces of matting held over their heads. Cholera is under control, but pneumonia and bronchitis, the new killers, are spreading.

Every road between the border and the camps has become a vast refugee camp. Every tree has its families; every inch of space in verandahs and every public building - including schools - is crammed with people. As the refugees are transferred to proper camps, hundreds more swarm into the space left vacant - Hindus, Moslems, farmers, fishermen, landlords and landless. President Yahya Khan's army, like death, is a great leveller. All East Bengalis are one.

Some have nothing - just a piece of rolled-up matting, a battered black kerosene lantern with the glass smashed, a pathetically small bundle of sodden clothing for an entire family. Others carry ramshackle tin trunks, a few utensils tied to their bundles. Always there is the precious lantern, the guiding eye for the flight in darkness, the pitiful defence against the terrors of night. Many tell a story of looting, assault or death on the way.

There is a strange silence along the road. Those who walk it have no strength to talk. As new arrivals squat down, there are no greetings, no questions. The shock, the bewilderment, the pain are a physical presence, as all along the road they wait - one wonders what for. There seems to be no curiosity about the next stop, no hope. They have survived. They are here. That is the one reality. Many show no desire to find food or shelter. The stricken faces, the staring eyes, the emptiness of the gaze are intolerable, the inadequacy of any outsider in the face of this massive suffering, humiliating.

Why do they come, when there is no roof and camp conditions are so frightful? Because privation is heaven after the horrors they have left behind? A naked four- year-old boy, waiting his turn in the ration queue at Agartala airport transit camp, ran away howling with fear when I pointed my camera at him. "He thinks it's a gun," explained an old man standing by. Two women fell at my feet begging, not for charity - nobody begs in this sad world but a few professionals - but for reassurance. Their husbands were killed by the West Pakistani army; their village razed.

Others, often nursing newborn babies, had no ration cards yet. Most had had nothing to do with politics and had left behind everything, often including members of their families unburied. In a stifling reception centre in Agartala a gentle old woman, sick with fever, lay on the ground. But she smiled and folded her hands in greeting, happy to be safe, and asked for nothing when I spoke to her.

In the inevitable feminine gesture, a young woman, beautiful despite the ordeal reflected in the gauntness of her face, her sleeping baby in her arms, raised a hand to adjust the sari on her head, as I focused the camera. But the human, everyday gestures are rare.

People sit like automatons. The children, even the youngest, are deprived of childishness, infants are skull faces on skeleton bodies, the adults paralysed in resignation - bodies defeated by the physical ordeal, minds and hearts by terror.

For those who have been allotted camp-space, life of a sort begins again after a while. There is shelter from the rain, something to do, rations to collect, food to cook, clothes to wash and hang out. All along the roadside are bamboo shelters, built by the more enterprising. Women are busy inside, or sitting at the door preparing the next meal. A mother sits combing out her daughter's hair. A man completes the roof of his hut with the children helping.

But in this monsoon weather the low-lying Bengal countryside is flooded, and even in the camps the water often is several inches deep. Sometimes people must stand for hours, ankle-deep in water, waiting for it to subside. Few have beds. They sleep in the muddy ground. Still there is a roof over the head, a pot on the fire. Most important, there are no soldiers, no Razakars - the local Yahya supporters armed by the Pakistan army.

In the camps of Assam and Tripura, built on high ground in the hilly, undulating countryside, there is adequate drainage. Each family has separate living space and a little privacy, instead of the mass barracks existence of many West Bengal camps which had to be constructed as rapidly as possible. For many the will to live has been rekindled. Children laugh and shout and surround the visitor, pestering and noisy, children once more. A little camp market sells vegetables, baskets, local cigarettes, some of the stalls manned by refugees. A refugee barber plies his trade. In the medical unit a nurse from Bangla Desh has her hands full and in all the camps refugee doctors tend their fellow victims.

But the past is ever present. In Chandranathpur camp near Silchar in Assam, sad-faced Nikury Chakravarty holds her youngest baby close. In an expressionless voice she tells how in May her husband and two sons went to attend a "peace committee" meeting in their village in Ballaganj district. They and others were fired on in the committee hall, her husband and 1 6-year-old son killed on the spot. Her elder son, 21, escaped and is still in Silchar hospital. Her tears have dried, but the pain survives in her widowed eyes.

Chandu Chandra, a young man from Borlakha in Sylhet District recalls how the army came to his village. First they called ail the men out of their homes, then the women. "They forced our mothers, our sisters, the young and the old to sit down and stand up repeatedly, as they ordered. When they tired of watching this humiliation, they took their jewellery. We were helpless. They had guns. Then they tied us up, took our ladies inside, and we could hear them screaming."

It is the familiar story of rape and savagery which accompanies all accounts of the Pakistan army's actions. Chandu's uncle was shot and everything was looted in the village, which was then razed. Homeless anyway, they fled before the next visit. We asked If we could meet the women in the family. Chandu looked embarrassed. They were reluctant to come, and we did not insist. Camp officers explained that in other similar cases women were hesitant to relate their experiences. Again as outsiders we felt intrusive and wretchedly inadequate.

Every camp, every roadside, has such stories. Abdul Subhan was sitting in his home in Casba, when the soldiers came. They took hold of him and shot him twice in the leg. He doesn't know why. They took five rupees from his brother and left. His brother carried him across the border, but his leg had to be amputated once he reached Agartala hospital - where a young doctor, one of the first refugees, explained: "Almost everyday we receive new bullet or shell injuries." One patient, Mohammad Chaddmiah, schoolteacher in Chandla village, told how on July 11 the army came. They called him out of the house, asked if he was a member of the Mukti Fauj (liberation army). Despite his denial they shot him and two other people in his house. His neighbour, a government employee who had joined the Mukti Fauj and had come home the night before after a guerilla operation, was killed before the soldiers set fire to the houses in the village in reprisal for the killing of a Pakistani soldier the day before. "But we will go on helping the Mukti Fauj," said Chaddmiah. "With bullets they cannot rule Bangla Desh for long." He will return only when East Pakistan is free.

Two brothers sat on their pallet in the corridor outside the surgical ward, the eldest, seven, holding his three- year-old brother's hand. The little one's foot was bandaged, a bullet injury. Their parents were killed and they are kept in the hospital because the foot must be dressed, and there is no one else to care for them. Behind a screen nearby was a dead baby nine days old, the pitifully small head swathed in an enormous bandage, miniature fists clenched tight. The mother, fleeing two days before, was killed instantly by a bullet. The baby, shot in the head, was carried to India by its grandfather and survived a day and a half.

A boy of 13, blinded in both eyes, is still under treatment. He had gone to deliver food to his father, a worker on a tea estate, when bombs fell from the air. He has no idea where his parents are. The doctors worked hard to try to save one eye, but the injury was too deep. These were only a handful. The roster of children dead, maimed physically and psychologically, orphaned, homeless, runs into millions. When cholera strikes, it is the infants, the children who succumb quickly. The number of victims will never be known.

Each camp and roadside has children by the thousand of all ages. Unchildlike because they don't complain, cry or demand despite empty stomachs; eyes still haunted by the terror of flight, of cowering in fear, or startled with pain of memories of things no child should ever see and which, uncomprehending, they perhaps can never forget, their existence and their plight are West Pakistan's accusers.

"Life is cheap in Pakistan," explained a member of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's Awami League who spends his time between Bangla Desh and India, acting as a civilian reconnaissance link for the Mukti Fauj. This goes for Moslems and Hindus alike.

Debu Chakravarty left Dacca, where he worked in a good business, in April with his parents and sister. For weeks they wandered in East Pakistan, sheltering with relatives and friends. "But it was impossible to stay there," he said. Behind him the family sat on little bundles of cloth sheltering from the rain on the Jessore road. Debu's story came out falteringly, though his English was fluent. He smiled; but every few words he would swallow, hesitating, remembering. "We have come now because they were making life too difficult for us."

"They" are the Razakars, of which each village has a committee of 12, many of them members of the Moslem League or the Jamiat-i-Islam, rightwing opponents of the Awami League, routed by it in the elections and now Yahya's enthusiastic and armed aides in the eastern wing.

"They make everything difficult. They make lists of all the boys and girls aged 14-20, and give these lists to the army." There is a long pause, as he remembers. "If one of our boys went out-to buy anything, he might never come back. We never knew. At any time they could come and take our girls, and we might never see them again. How long can you keep young people in the house, like prisoners? They make life impossible. They have taken everything from me, so I have nothing to live on. But if I tried to go out and sell anything, just to have enough money to eat, I could not, because I am a Hindu. So we have run away."

Debu's sister was to have sat examinations at Dacca University. "But how can she go back?" he asked - as if the reality had still not dawned. He and his family lived a good life in Dacca. The thought of nothing now, and no future, is hard to assimilate. "I have come to India. What am I to do?" He sought the solution to his dilemma. A man listening to his story offered to take him to the registration spot to get his ration card. But to his real question, I had no answer - could only mumble I hoped things would turn out all right and turn away.

A mile from the border we met Iqbal Anrul Islam, an Awami League Moslem member of the ill-fated new Pakistan legislative assembly, which has met only in secret in Bangla Desh. He described with tears in his eyes how the elected representatives of the people, his friends, were killed by the army in the first days of the massacres. "They have taken our young men, drained them of their blood for the soldiers, and thrown them away, half dead, to die. They have taken our young women into the army barracks. They give no saris, no blouses, no clothes, just blankets. They play with our women, like their playthings, like toys! You must tell the world what is happening. They killed my two sons. Because they were my sons. That was their only crime." His voice rises in anger, then breaks in sorrow.

His bushy white beard neatly combed, his grey hair worn low on the neck, 83-year-old Abdul Jabber, a Moslem from Comilla district, crossed over into Tripura 15 days before we met. "I try my level best to stay there but I cannot." His mobile face is a patriarch's; the expressive hand gestures to emphasise the broken English he prefers to speak, rather than use an interpreter for Bengali. "All my village of 17 families come here. We leave all things. With our life we come to India. The Punjabis came, killed, took our women. My sister was beaten, my wife, aged 65 years, robbed. First they raped the ladies in front of us; even dogs cannot do what they did in the open field.

"In front of me more than 50 ladies were attacked. Ten to 15 soldiers did this at separate times. I can't express it but these young girls were taken away and worse than raped.

Even my sister. I was second officer in the district judge's court in Comilla." Asked how he explained Moslem soldiers behaving like this to their "brothers in Islam", he replied with anger. "This is one sort of Moslem we can't understand. They are not Moslems!" Abdul Jabber had voted for Mujib, and had told the soldiers so. "Why should I tell them false? A Moslem who votes for Mujib is a bad man they say. I was chairman of the Awami League in my village, so the Moslem League and Jamiat-i-Islam had spotted me." But he was confident the Mukti Fauj would triumph. "Since force of God is force of mind. Sure enough they will win. I tell my son to go away and join the Mukti Fauj." He points his finger to emphasise his next words "Rabindranath Tagore once said: You will win and win and win in the last; This world is not for demons and robbers, This is the world of men; And these men will win in the last."

An American correspondent calls his interview with refugees "his notebook of horror". And still the atrocities continue with a brutality, almost unbelievable, almost perverted. Eyewitnesses reported seeing three bodies, naked young women, lying along the road-side near the border just a few days before. They had been raped and killed, one of them shot through the female organs. Others tell of women raped and bayoneted in the same way. A Bangla Desh doctor described West Pakistan soldiers ripping open the stomach of pregnant women, pulling out the unborn bodies, and holding them in the air while they forced the people to shout: "Long live Bengal." A young Bengali Pakistan air force officer, who has deserted to India, cried during his interrogation, unable to continue his recital of atrocities he had witnessed. As a foreign journalist commented: "There is something sick in these people."

But comment is inadequate.

Last week, Yahya returned to the charge that India was trying to stop refugees returning. US Senator Edward Kennedy, who toured the camps in India earlier this month, wished to go to East Pakistan to see what conditions for the refugees' return are like. Presumably because he expressed some of the horror all who have seen the camps must feel, Islamabad denied him a visa on the ground of "prejudice". But nobody flees his country, on foot, for nothing. If they do not go back, their own stories are the clear proofs why they dare not.