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Missing in a war the world forgot

Missing in a war the world forgot

Author: Dan McDougall
Publication: The Observer
Date: August 18, 2007
URL: http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/missing-in-a-war-the-world-forgot/2007/08/17/1186857768498.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap2

Sixty years after independence, India still ignores thousands of people no one wants.

We first came here as refugees in 1947; we used cow dung for fuel then, as we do now. Nothing has really changed for us." Kajal Royzz's eyes are watering from the smoke that fills his bamboo and mud home.

"When we fled from East Bengal to West Bengal 60 years ago, our land in the camp was marked out by a few pebbles: 20 square feet a head. The pebbles are still there, dug into the ground."

The 85-year-old inhales heavily on a hand-rolled bedi cigarette and looks out over the marshland, mostly jute and paddy fields, stretching east towards the 2000-kilometre-long border with Bangladesh.

Kajal is part of a world history forgot. For the past 60 years he has lived in Coopers Camp, a place largely ignored by modern India. With a population of more than 7000, each resident is related to those who escaped from Pakistan amid the horrors of British India's partition, out of which emerged the states of Muslim West and East Pakistan (1600 kilometres apart) and mainly Hindu India.

"India was a dream for us when we left everything behind during partition in 1947," Kajal says. "I was 15. We had lands near present-day Dhaka [in East Pakistan, which after a civil war became Bangladesh in 1971]. But as Hindus, my parents were threatened unless they handed over their home to Muslims. So we escaped. We hoped for a new life, for land, for homes.

"But 60 years on, India has given us nothing, not even a nationality. My parents, like I will, died here in the same temporary camp they fled to. I sit here before you a refugee now as I was when I crossed the Bay of Bengal. I never had the option to leave and I have been unable to give my children and my grandchildren the education they need. It is my biggest regret."

In Coopers Camp stories of the flight in 1947 are rarely shared with outsiders.

Sitting with her grandson in one of the most rundown corners of the camp, Visaka Das, 84, who is now blind, says: "We came across to India from Dhaka in 1947. Our house was burnt down and my parents' lands were seized. I was a newlywed. I wore my wedding sari on the freighter we took across the Bay of Bengal. There were thousands of people on the boat; people were falling off into the water and drowning as we crossed to India at night.

"Along the coast we could see houses being burnt. As we fled Dhaka, I remember dead bodies being burnt by the roadside. I remember the screams of a Hindu family, our neighbours, being burnt alive in their home.

"I don't remember much about my wedding. I can recall being crushed on the boat … and seeing the fear in my husband's eyes. To escape from that, we thought God would reward us, but the life we have had since has been no life.

"My husband died in 1984, a refugee. I am a widow, but my family have to survive on daily labour. My grandson had no schooling and his prospects are poor. Unlike me, he has an Indian permit but it is stamped with Coopers Camp. He is still a refugee; he can't get work. His future is my biggest worry."

Coopers Camp is the subcontinent's oldest and least-known refugee camp. A hangover from another era, it represents a serious embarrassment for the progressive West Bengal state government, which remains focused on industrial development around Kolkata.

As India has grown from strength to strength amid economic resurgence, life seems to have passed by the people of "Partition Camp 17", 200 kilometres north of India's famous City of Joy. Few Indians even know of the camp's existence.

It is a reminder of the largest human movement in history, which began on the stroke of midnight on August 14, 1947.

Partition was the culmination of the slow fracturing of British India under sectarian pressure, as the Muslim League, fearful that Muslims would be submerged in a new Hindu-dominated independent India, pushed for division. The alternative, warned the league's leader, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, would be huge bloodshed. It was a move that was opposed by the secular Congress party, made up largely of Hindus, and by the political and spiritual leader Mahatma Gandhi, who believed Hindus and Muslims should be able to coexist.

But the lethal riots that broke out in 1946 during pro-division protests by the Muslim League put paid to even the idea of a loose federation. Instead, it was agreed that British India would be divided into two states, as defined in a plan drawn up by the last Viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten, along a border set by Britain. The consequence was the flight of about 10 million refugees, Hindus from Pakistan and Muslims from India, amid terrifying bloodshed.

More than 1 million people on both sides of the divide became the victims of murderous sectarian assaults. Few people were ever prosecuted for the deaths, known as the sub-continent's hidden genocide.

In a concession to the powerful Muslim League, India was in effect split in two by the British, creating East and West Pakistan. Thus on August 14 every year Pakistan celebrates its creation, while India celebrates independence from the British.

For the older generation like Kajal Roy, memories of 1947 are largely a cause for grief. It was a time when he lost his home, his future and his family was ripped apart.

The Indian historian Prafulla K. Chakrabarty says the true horrors of partition were underplayed at the time, a trend that continues today with the marginalisation of thousands of existing refugees from 1947.

"It is probably beyond the comprehension of most people that refugees could exist from partition 60 years ago, but it is one of the bitterest present-day truths of India's split with Pakistan," he says.

"For those outside India the horrors of partition, the slaughter of over a million people, simply came too soon after World War II and the Holocaust; the collective mind of the West could absorb no more.

"In India the outlook was different: the murderers cut across social and religious lines, so many were implicated that no one was brought to trial, and that sense of injustice still remains but is largely suppressed."

For those in Coopers Camp, the injustices of partition continue in a more palpable economic sense. They still live on government handouts and have to fight tooth and nail to get Indian nationality. Even those born here struggle to get recognition. Most of the original refugees have remained stateless for the past six decades.

Many of the older residents are still too frightened to leave the camp for fear of being deported. It is the elderly, above all, who feel responsible for the suffering of their children and grandchildren who continue to fight to survive in the camp.

The millions of Indians living in Punjab and Bengal bore the brunt of partition in a way that still defines their existence. For Punjab, partition brought an exchange of population - the Hindus coming from western Punjab to India and the Muslims moving from eastern Punjab into Pakistan - that was primarily a once-for-all affair. But for West Bengal the influx continued for many years after partition, and continues in different forms today with the exodus of economic migrants from Bangladesh.

Although still technically a refugee camp, the boundary fence that once surrounded Coopers Camp is long gone. An established community, the camp has its own market, small clinic and two schools. Most of the camp-dwellers, including the women, rely on daily labour to keep their heads above water. Most earn less than 150 rupees ($4.50) a day.

According to Lakshmi Venkat, who runs an adult education program for the Coopers Camp residents, empowering the third and fourth generation of camp dwellers to leave is the hardest task of all.

"To cope with the huge influx of refugees into West Bengal in 1947, the Indian government decided to send the 'excess' refugees in the region, 100,000 of them, to outposts like the Andaman and Nicobar Islands," she says.

"Those who refused to go, including most of the Coopers refugees, quickly found themselves disenfranchised …

"Sixty years on, trapped by circumstance, a lack of education and prejudice against them, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the original refugees still have no faith in India and nowhere else to go. There is no longer any excuse for ignoring them."


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