Le Monde (Weekly English Edition)

By the most reliable count, 4 million East Pakistanis have fled their homeland and taken refuge in neighbouring India following the large-scale military operations initiated by the Pakistan Army last April.

The situation in East Pakistan itself is calm, but tense. In a series of swift, bloody moves the army crushed the embryonic Bengal independence movement (Bangla Desh) and proceeded to sow death and desolation among the population.

On the Indian side, however, the situation is extremely dangerous. The millions of refugees are straining India's already heavily overburdened finances, adding to the authorities' difficulties in West Bengal, where irresolute minority governments had almost led to a breakdown of law and order. Worse still a cholera epidemic - so far contained with the help of abundant aid from abroad - is complicating the problem of dealing with the world's most recent flood of refugees.

For many of the East Pakistanis who are today being moved from refugee camps near the border into less crowded regions within India, this is not the first such experience. The 1947 partition of the Indian sub- continent was just as bloody and cruel as today's events in East Pakistan. And it too produced its victims - millions of refugees and countless deaths.

In the first of a two-part series, Gilbert Etienne examines the historical backdrop against which the new refugee drama is being played out.


In the era of the great Mogul emperors, spanning the 16th and 18th centuries, Bengal conjured up visions of a prosperous land, alive with economic activity and a flourishing trade with the outside world.

Bengal's natural beauty is still a symbol of the joy of living - the endless rice fields, the plain spotted with dark green patches, waving coconut fronds, the slender stalks or the betel nut and the huts with their daintily curved thatch roofs huddling in the shadow of bamboo clumps

Streams crisscross the fields everywhere, and peasant life is inextricably linked with that of the Ganges, the passage of barges and sailboats and boatmen singing their ageless shanties.

But behind this apparently unchanged facade, Bengal has gradually degenerated into a vast reservoir of poverty. On June 23, 1757, at the Battle of Plassey, on the plains of Bengal, Britain took the first step in its conquest of India, a conquest which was to lead to perpetration of some of the darkest deeds in colonial history.

The "United Company of Merchants trading to the East Indies" and its employees, the former in its official capacity as the virtual rulers, the latter as private individuals, battered on the land, bled it dry of its gold and silver first before breaking down its trade and local cottage industry structure with imports of manufactured goods.

BRITISH RAJ RESENTED

The brazen exploitation ended when, in the middle of the 19th century, the Crown took control of the Company's possessions in India and administered them more efficiently. But the British Raj's presence was still resented by the Bengalis.

It was however thanks to the British that tea and jute - the market is still controlled by British companies - achieved such prominent positions in Bengal's commerce. It was the British again who later opened coal mines in the western part of Bengal and helped Calcutta, with its banks, business houses, and factories, and especially its jute mills, to become the opulent capital of the Crown's Indian possessions.

But what about the Bengalis? In 1874, the British agent in charge of the Comilla district heeded the complaint of the big landlords - a shortage of labour to clear the jungle and plant rice. Less than a hundred years later his Pakistani successor recorded a population density of 650 per square mile in the same region. All the land had been cleared, and there has been a constant increase in the volume of hired hands and small landowners. And by the turn of the century, agriculture in Bengal, where population growth outstripped the land's productivity, was past its peak, and in this domain the region was lagging behind the rest of India.

The picture is somewhat different in the other sectors of Bengal's economic and social life. The quick-witted and intelligent Bengalis constitute the hard core of the Indian intelligentsia; they predominate at the Calcutta bar, in education and the public service, including the elite Indian Civil Service .

By contrast, they have made little impact in the world of business, banking or industry. The dominant role played by the British business houses does not itself explain this phenomenon.

When Indian businessmen began to gain a foothold in Calcutta during World War I and the Great Depression of the late Twenties and early Thirties, firms were run for the most part by Marwaris from Rajasthan in the West, Chettiars from Madras Province (now Tamilnadu) and other communities outside Bengal.

Poverty affected Hindu and Moslem masses indiscriminately, but there were rarely any Moslems among the bhadraloks, or "respectable folk" - lawyers, businessmen and public service employees. When India was partitioned into two states in 1947 by the departing British Raj, the area that went to form East Pakistan was particularly under-developed, and this in a Bengal Province which was itself already on the downhill path. An overwhelming majority of educated Hindus chose to move into West Bengal, on the Indian side of the newly drawn frontier. East Pakistan found it could easily push through a programme of agrarian reform because most of the big landowners were Hindus.

It was however in the industrial, banking and commercial sectors that the newly created east wing of Pakistan felt the pinch. There was nobody to run the abandoned offices except for a few departmental bosses and messenger boys hanging about offices in Dacca and Chittagong.

In the public services the result of the migration was even more telling: of the eighty-four members of the Indian Civil Service who opted to go over to the Pakistani half of Bengal, only two were Bengali.

For countless years the expanse between Lahore and the western boundary of Pakistan presented an arid, depressing vista. The rivers of the Punjab flowed between sandy banks, through a land covered with prickly bushes and rare patches of grass which only goats and camels found congenial.

Towards the east and the southeast --Agra and Delhi - the soil was richer, but what it produced hardly met the needs of the great Mogul cities. But it was Bengal which sent its surplus of rice, sugar and textiles to these centres .

The wheel of fortune was given a turn in 1894 when Lord Dalhousie annexed the Punjab to British India. By this time the United Company had reformed after its shameless plunder of Bengal. In any case, the new province offered fewer temptations....

There then followed one of the most remarkable engineering feats of British colonial rule. The Punjab's five rivers were linked by a vast network of canals, and the British subsequently introduced a comprehensive system of irrigation to water the arid Sind.

Working the soil became that much easier since the British had at their command a highly competent peasant mass. Hindus, Moslems and Sikhs living in the Punjab moved westwards, where with hard work and great initiative they made the best use of the land given them.

Lahore soon recovered the prosperity and brilliance it had enjoyed in the golden age of the Mogul emperors: gardens flowered, a university was built and trade flourished. Other cities began to rise, benefiting from a sound road-and-rail infrastructure. The population, sparse to begin with, never did reach the density found in Bengal. Towards the end of British rule in India, the Punjab had become one of the proudest achievements of the empire, in marked contrast to a Bengal in rapid decline.

EXODUS AFTER PARTITION

Partition touched off a two-way exodus in the Punjab, similar to that in Bengal. Whatever, their religion, the Punjabis quickly found a place in the new social structure, adapting to the changed situation in no time. This was not the case of the Bengalis. There was also another difference in the Punjab: a good many of the positions left vacant by departing Hindus were rapidly filled by senior Moslem civil servants, merchants from Bombay and members of the well-to-do classes in the north of India.

From the moment it was created, the government of Pakistan included prospective Bengali politicians. But the total absence of senior executives in the eastern wing of the country created conditions in which Punjabis and Sindhis, fleeing India, could step into the vacuum. As soon they began to settle down, the big banks in Karachi - most of them largely created by people who had come from Bombay - opened branches in Dacca and Chittagong, thus taking up the slack created by the departing Hindus. In 1964, for instance, of the four or five big jewellers in Dacca, only one was a Bengal-born Moslem, all the others having come from elsewhere. And his business was the least prosperous of them all. Excessive influence or domination: whatever the term user, the essential is to understand the inevitability of the process - at least in its earliest stages - which led to the present situation .

The Bengali Pakistanis may have been liberated by a demographic upheaval from their former masters among the Hindu gentry. But it was only to have it brought home to them that they were still not masters in their own home.