CALCUTTA—Sasa Dhar Mandal is only dimly aware that some of the world's most highpowered diplomacy is being exerted ostensibly on his behalf. Moreover, the 70-year-old carpenter scarcely cares anymore.
"I'm not going back, no matter what the outcome is," Mandal said recently, in a reference to his former home in East Pakistan. "I have lost all hope in human nature and promise."
Mandal is one of the 9.5 million East Pakistani refugees who have fled into India in the past seven months in the wake of a political crisis that triggered an outburst of violence between the civilian population and the Pakistan army.
The refugees' presence in India is severely pinching this country's economy and had helped provoke a continuing and serious threat of war between India and Pakistan.
American, Soviet, British and other diplomats are reliably reported to be engaged in efforts to head off a military conflict between the two countries by seeking a political solution that will promote a return of the refugees to East Pakistan within a few months.
Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi is lobbying intensively on her current trip to Europe and the United States for increased Western pressure on Pakistan to create conditions to draw all the refugees out of the sprawling and squalid camps where they now live, largely at India's expense, and back to East Pakistan.
Mandal is one of those who say that no such conditions exist, despite the extreme hardship and filthy conditions that surround him and 250,000 other refugees in the camp that has grown up at the edge of Calcutta.
He says that he was so thoroughly frightened by what he saw in East Pakistan before he fled four months ago that he and the 17 members of his immediate family who fled with him intended never to return.

HUMAN TRAGEDY

This decision, if repeated by enough others, would represent not only a measure of enormous human tragedy that has struck East Pakistan, but also a serious threat to India's own stability, in view of a number of highly qualified analysts here.
Part of the threat arises from what appears to be India's failure—some economists outside the government term it a refusal—to lay contingency plans for the possibility that millions of the refugees may still be in India a year from now, or longer.
That idea is politically unacceptable to India, which estimates that it will cost $700 million to feed and shelter the refugees through the end of next March. Some Indian leaders are saying privately that the refugees must, and will, be gone by the end of the year.
But a political solution that would make that possible seems nowhere in sight to most observers here, many of whom fear that a painful prolonging of the crisis will make it increasingly difficult to get many of refugees to go back at all.
According to most estimates, between 10 and 20 per cent of the refugee population is composed of Moslems, the predominant religious group in Pakistan.
Most of them are expected to go back without much delay if a settlement is reached in East Pakistan. But whether all of the 8 to 9 million Hindus who have fled here will return is more problematical. They appear to feel much more exposed to what may continue to be a continuing instability in this area for some time to come.

REFUGEE EXODUS

The families of the 10 million Hindus who lived in East Pakistan before the refugee exodus began had declined to move to India when the two countries voted for partitioning in 1947, to allow Hindus to migrate to India and Moslems to Pakistan for safety.
Communal riots have flared in both countries periodically since then, but there has been no violence approaching the scale of the present crisis, which was precipitated by the election last year of a national parliamentary majority of the Awami League, the East Pakistan-based party that favored more autonomy for the divided country's eastern wing.
Charging the Awami League with plotting secession, military ruler Yahya Khan effectively overturned the election results on March 25 by arresting the charismatic Awami League leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and unleashing a brutal military campaign against the civilian population of East Pakistan.
The Hindu community had solidly supported the Awami League and became the primary target for reprisals.
The people who live in West Bengal State around Calcutta are coreligionists and are of the same ethnic and linguistic group as the Bengalis.
This makes it easier for the refugees to blend into the area, but it also means that they will have to be largely absorbed by the already poverty stricken and politically unstable West Bengal, which does not begin to have enough land or lobs available for its own 44.5 million people.
Mandal, the carpenter, has a major advantage over most of the refugees, who are landless farmers or cultivators of tiny strips of land. He has a skill which is in demand in Calcutta, and should be able to earn a living there.
But like many of the 50 refugees this correspondent interviewed in three days, he feels he has little to go back to in any event. He owned 1% acres of land on which he grew rice, but his house has been sacked and his land occupied by East Pakistani loyalists who are not likely to give it up without a fight.

BLOOD KINSMEN

Monoranjan Talukdar had seven acres of land that he tilled before he fled. He knows that almost every one of his 225 blood kinsmen have also left East Pakistan.
and scattered in camps in India. "My house was burned, my crops were looted and my family is all here now."
Gopal Biswas, a 38-year-old farmer who had to rent a plow and a bullock each year to cultivate his two-thirds of an acre of land in rice and jute, replied when asked about returning: "I am eating here. That is better than being shot there."
Few of those interviewed would state as flatly as Mandal that they had no intention of returning. Most said that they would return only after East Pakistan became an independent country.
Others said they would return if Sheikh Mujibur were released and issued a call to return coupled with a personal pledge of safety for them. They would not accept such a call from any other East or West Pakistani leader, most said.
Although the sampling is far too small to provide much insight into the larger problem of getting the refugees to return, one pattern it disclosed has also been noticed by missionaries and relief workers who spend much time in the refugee camps.
Those interviewed who had been in the camps for the longest periods of time held the most dogmatic and politicized views about conditions for returning, while newcomers were more flexible.
The Rev. John Hastings, a Methodist minister who is deeply involved in refugee work here, says "after three months of living in the camps, people tend to lose hope in the future and have to reach out for a faith in something," even it that hope seems immediately unrealistic.