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."
