The Great Migration of 1971 III Return

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The Great Migration of 1971: III: ReturnAuthor(s): Partha N. MukherjiReviewed work(s):Source: Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 9, No. 11 (Mar. 16, 1974), pp. 449-451Published by: Economic and Political WeeklyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4363497 .Accessed: 28/11/2011 03:44

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T h e G r e a t Migration o f 1 9 7 1

III- ReturnPartha N Mukherji

This is an exploratory tudy of the evacuees who left East Bengal after the imposition of martiallaw on March 25, 1971, and sought refuge in India. According to official statistics, by the second weekof December 1971 about 6.8 million evacuees had been housed in camps and another 3.1 million werestaying with friends and relatives. As many as 827 state camps and 19 Central camps accommodatedone of the largest migrant movements in history.

This three-part study concentrates on those who were temporarily settled at the Chandpara andBokchora camps in the district of 24-Parganas n West Bengal. Part Ill looks at the migration of the eva-cuees back to Bangladesh and the manner n which it was achieved. It also discusses some theoreticalformulations regarding the refugees. Part II had examined the organisational set-up of the camps, therelations between hosts and guests in and around the camps and the adoptive capacities of the evacueesin their new environment. Part I had dealt with the socio-ecotnomic backgrotund of the evacuees, theevents leading to their uprootment and the trek to sanctuary.

WE have observed the circumstances

unider whiclh the exodus took place fromtw-o regions of East Bengal. WVe havealso examined the pattern of resettle-ment and social interaction in India be-t\ween the host systemn and the guests.It is of considerable interest to stuidy,even though briefly, the return of theevacuees to an independent Bangladeshafter the victory of the Indo-Bangla-desh armed forces.

Almost immediately after the cessa-tion of hostilities there Nwas much mo-vement back and forth across the bor-der. Within a period of less than twoweeks several small groups from eachof the two camps had gone into Ban-gladesh, made a quick survey of theconditions in their regions and report-ed back to the camps. Their reportswere surprisingly uniform. These groupswere accorded a red carpet welcomeby their Bengali Muslim neighbours,-who showed considerable sympathy forthem and eagerly enquired about theirconditions across the border. The neigh-bours assured them that the propertyof the evacuiees was safe, that is, theirlanded property. These 'explorer'

grouLps also found evidence of theMukti Bahini taking strong retaliatorymeasures against betrayers of theBangladesh nationalist movement. ManyRazakars and influential members ofPeace Committees were reported tohave been killed; the Mukti Bahini waspoised to clispense rough and readyjustice.

With astonishing rapidity the eva-cuee also came to know about the ex-tent of damage to his house and pro-perty, the chances of recovery of hislooted goods and many other minutedetails of information in which he wasinterested. All these were further fa-

cilitated ljy frequent visits of the Ben-

gali Muslim neighbours from across theborder who were equally curious to see

'how their Hindu neighbours had faredduring the nine month period.

The increased interactions across theborder coupled with the glory of thevictorious operations by Indian armyand the Mukti Bahini generated an un-mistakable urge for the evacuees to re-turn to their native country. The emer-gence of Bangladesh viewed as com-pletely free ;fmom the oppresslions ofPakistan presented a solution to theirproblems. In comparison to the pros-

pects of a free life in a newly indepen-(lent country, camp life appeared to belike a bondage xvhich had suddenlybecome intolerable. The impatiencewith which they awaited release fromthe camps was notable. Another factorwhich made them feel restless to gowas the approaching (leadline for thenext sowing of paddy which had to bedone preferably by January 15.

It is true that they were also con-cerned about the uncertainties of shel-ter and food in their own land. Butthe urge to return was unmistakably

stronger and the assurances made bythe Indian and Bangladesh governmentsto provide all that they could to re-settle them had the expected impact.

It was utterly fascinating to see in-numerable truck- and train-loads of eva-cuees returning home wvith joyousshouts of "Joi Bangla" (Victory toBangladesh). I had the privilege oftravelling with a group on a truck toJessore from where I wvent to a villageon the outskirts of Chchianobboi Gramand stayed for nearly a week.

The reception in Jessore district hadacquired a procedural system. Collegeteachers and students in the townsand school teachers and volunteers in

the villages were receiving evacuees attheir centres and canalising them totheir respective destinations. Usuallyat such centres there was provision forrations and for an overnight halt forthose in transit. The entire civil ad-m-iinistration eemed to be alive to theneed for solving this almost unmanage-able problem. All available buses andtrucks were ceaselessly engaged intransportation of the evacuees.

But the initial enthusiasm withwvhich he evacuees left India and withwhich they reached their homes didnot requlire much time to be eroded.

Faced with the reality of destroyed andvacant homes, the returnee was imme-diately faced with a situation whoseimplications he had not been able tocalculate far away fromn home. Thedestruction of houses could broadly beclassified into three categories: housesw-ith rooftops and walls but practicallynothing else, houses with completelyburnt out roots with just the wallsstanding, and completely gutted hou-ses. Of the three categories, the se-cond predominated in the villages Isaw. Some of the returnees I could

see had managed to put a roof of sortsover one of their rooms and so start anew life in their own homes.

The pattern of recovery of goods isextremely interesting. it was certainlvnot uniform in all regions. I shalltherefore confine myself to the villagew-here I stayed and to what I saw du-ring a 20-mile trip on a bicycle. Theprocess of recovery was initiated byappeals from the Mukti Bahini com-miiand tationed in the village and afew dynamic Muslimn eaders. The si-tuLation was extremely embarrassing and

paradoxical. For the 'custodians' ofsuch goods to openly return them totheir rightful owners was to acknow-

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March 16, 1974 ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL WEEKLY

ledge having played a highly deviantrole. At the same time their collectiverole in this matter was no secret toanybody. This presented a problemeven for those who had had no inten-tion of enjoying their destitute neigh-bours' goods.

Faced with this kind of predica-ment some responded to the appeal anddeposited the goods with the MuktiBahini command. A few returned themdirectly to the owners trying their bestto explain away or just keep quiet asto why they had taken them. Therewere others who showed reluctance torespond to the appeal. However, thereturnees were able to identify and getinformation about the whereabouts oftheir goods with remarkable speed andaccuracy. This was only possible be-cause of the co-operation of their Mus-

lims neighbours who were tryingto

make amends for their conduct. Pur-suing such information the returneewould send a message, generally indi-rectly, to the custodian of his goodsand request him to return it. If thecustodian failed to respond, a com-plaint would be lodged with the MuktiBahini command, which would expedi-tiously investigate and recover thegoods.

In a neighbouring village, the MuktiBahini had demarcated an area wherethe custodians of others' goods were re-

quested to dump them and the returneeswere requested to identify their proper-ty and take it home. This was sup-posed to avoid a lot of embarrassmentfor both the custodians and the re-turnees,. This demarcated area waslittered with all kinds of thingsbeds, almirahs, doors and windows,wooden beams, etc. This proceduremet with reasonable success as the ex-tent of recovery was placed roughly at30 per cent which was considered goodwithin that time span.

In other villages, cartloads of goods

being taken from a custodian's houseto a returnee's house were not an in-frequent sight. However, this patternwas not followed in some villages inthe predominantly Hindu populatedareas. The Hindus having returned totheir original strongholds were force-fully demanding back their goods fromtheir Muslim neighbours. In at leastone village an old Muslim was literallyin tears describing how in spite of hisbest efforts in helping recover the loot-ed goods he was being insulted andabused. He complained that one ofthe returnees had pluckeed his beard andon another occasion his child was slap-ped and told that his father was a

lowN-down ooter. This old Muslimfrankly expressed fear that his life wasnot safe and he was thinking of mov-ing to some other place.

In this context it has to be notedthat the Mukti Bahini was not operat-ing in this area and there was no ef-

fective alternative mechanismn or theresolution of such problems. This in-dicates that the Mukti Babini, in theabsence of any of the institutions oflaw and order, served as a very impor-tant agency of social control. And sothe Mukti Bahini's absence from anarea generated tensions.

In a sense the Mukti Bahini, symbo-lised as liberators of the country, wasplaying a role which even normal in-stitutions of social control Nere pre-sumably not in a position to play.Clear evidence of this could be seensoon after the Prime Minister of Ban-gladesh appealed to the Mukti Bahinito lay down arms voluntarily and de-clared that those who did not heed theappeal would be identified or labelledas Al Badr s (the infamous maskedgroup which engaged in the massslaughter of intellectuals on the eve ofthe liberation of Bangladesh). Therole of the Mukti Bahini then imme-diately received a check and the vo-luntary return of goods from custo-dians registered a sharp decline. Thisshows the status and power the MuktiBahini enjoyed in the village cornmuni-ty where I saw it operate.

TOWARDS A THEORETICAL INTEGRATION

This exploratory study raises cer-tain theoretical problems. One mightpose the main question very general-ly: What is the social response to cri-ses? Certainly, there are likely to bevarieties of responses just as one canidentify a variety of crises. The socialresponse to crises emanating from na-tural causes is likely to be vastly diffe-rent from crises emanating from socialand political causes. Thus a commu-nity may face challenges from earth-quakes, floods, tidal waves or tornadoes- crisis which have beenl better label-led as disasters. It can also face a cri-sis of an extremely different nature -where the crisis is not over with thedisaster, but in fact is a continuing one.In the former type of crisis, the com-unimity mobilises its resources to makeup for the losses. If the community isin an earthquake zone or tornado-prone area, it develops certain mechan-isms by which it can face the recurrenceof such crises and their aftermath. Thelatter type of crises, in which completeuprootment of a very large group from

its soil to an alien country is the mostextreme form, is distinctive in that thecausal generating factor being socio-political is much more complex and forthe uprooted people there is no fami-liar precedent to fall back upon.

Uprooted fromn his native soil, torn

from his national identity, the eva-cuee is forced to accept an unstable,uincertain future for himself and hisfamily. The experiences of post-warrefugees have shown that neurosis isa conimon condition amiiong hem and"quite apart from symptoms of a de-finitely pathological character, there isevery justification for speaking of a'refugee complex'."'0 It would be ex-pected that an idle group, forced intoapathy, would manifest serious syirlm-tonms of personal disorganisation. Butthis was not so among the refugees Iwas

with. As indicated earlier, neitherthe doctor visiting the two camps northe camp inmates reported a singlecase of hysteria or any abnormal be-haviour. There were many persons re-porting how shattered their nerves wereon account of their shocking experi-ences in East Pakistan, but they di(dnot show any signs of neurosis. What,therefore, explains the social and psy-chological stability of this group insuch circumstances?

One may infer that either the causesof such tension were successfully re-

solved or that a tension-managementmechanism had come into operationwhich, in spite of the continuing tenseobjective situation, nevertheless helpedto retain the balance of the individual.It is clear that by denying the thernEast Pakistan nationals Indian co-na-tionality and by imposing On them aforced idleness, the situation the eva-cuees were placed in wras conducive toproblems of personal disorganisationi.

In this context, three processes can beidentified which performed he all impor-tant function of tension-management.

They are: (a) the reactivation of theevacuees' rural community structures;(b) the emergence of the camp com-munity on a model close to that of thevillage; (c) deviant behaviour whichacted as a safety valve. The first twoprocesses (especially the first) enabledthe individual to retain or regain hisidentity in the institutionalised systemof status and role in which he had ope-rated. If the evacuee had lost hisstatus vi.s-a-vis the social environmentaround him, he still retained his socialposition in the system of social inter-action and social solidarity. The indi-vidual evacuee was not suffering in iso-lation torn out of his group. The en-

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ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL WEEKLY March 16, 1974

tire collectivity was sharing a crisisthe challenge was not faced only by theindividual but by the entire group.

Here one might refer to the Dur-kheimnian hypothesis which posits thatan increase in the integration of a group'which faces a crisis causes a reduc-

tion in the rate of egotistic suicides.Durkheim states that "great social dis-tLrbances and popular wars rouse col-lective sentiments, stimulate partisanspirit and patriotism, political and na-tional faith, alike, and concentratingactivity toward a single end, at leasttemporarily cause a stronger integra-tion of society".11 This prompts himto postulate that "Suicide varies inver-sely with the degree of integrationof political society."'2 With a permis-sible extension of this hypothesis onecan see in the instance of the Bangla-desh evacuees the reactivated mechani-cal solidarity functioning as a tension-management mechanism and minimisingthe occurrence of neurosis and personalclisorganisation.

The theoretical irnplications of thesafety-valve mechanism of the devi-ant infrastructures are far from super-ficial. While the social system of thecommunity was transferred across theborder and new camp communitiesemerged, it found itself operating orexisting in an economic vacuum. This

raises the following problem: Whathappens to a social system which has asocial structure but which suddenly isfaced with the loss of its economicsubsystem? There could be three pos-sible results; (1) the social system maydissolve itself into another socio-cultu-ral system

and get integrated with theeconomic system of the latter; (2) thesocial system will generate anew itsown economic subsvstem; (.3) the socialsystem will face serious problems ofdisorganisation and perish, if it is notin a position for possibilities (1) and/or(2).

In the present context, possibility (1)could have resulted from granting co-nationality and rehabilitating the eva-cuee. This the evacuee was legally de-nied. Possibility (2) was also legallydenied. The third possibility was theone which the evacuee was forced toaccept, with the difference that thephysical survival and security of theevacuee was ensured. In such a situa-tion, the institutionalised and emergingsocial structures generated their owndeviant economic infrastructures tocompensate for the lost economic sub-system.

This study, therefore, provides animportant insight into the understand-ing of the primacy of the economicsulbsystem for the survival of a social

system and its individual members.The superstructures were 'compelled'to generate a base of economic activity,without which the social system wasthreatened with possible disaster.

As for the speedy departure of theevacuees from the camps, there were

important 'pull' and 'push' factorswhich expedited it. Once the originalcausal generating factor identified withthe crisis was satisfactorily removed,the social systems with their fragmentedecological base strove to regain theirecological unity. The guests' unequalrelationship wvith their hosts - witha vertical one-way movement of obliga-tions defining a low status for theevacuees in the stratification scheme -wvas a klind of anl 'oppression' charac-terised by severe deprivation, restric-tions and humiliations. The liberation

of Bangladesh provided an opportunityto 'liberate' oneself from this low-status position and to regain one's statusin one's own total social setting.

Notes10 Jacques Vernant, "The Refugee

in the Post-War World", GeorgeAllen and Unwin, London, 1953.

11 Emile Durkheim, "Suicide" (trans-lated by J A Spaulding and GeorgeSwipson), Routledge and KeganPaul, London, 1953, p 208.

12 Ibid, p 208.

FROM THE CHAIR

Aibright, M o r ar ji a n d P a n d i t L i m i t e d

Speech of the Chairman, Shri N Dandeker, ICS (Retd)THE following is the Speech deliveredby Shri N Dandeker, ICS (Retd),Chairman, Albright, Morarji and PanditLimited, at the Eighth Annual GeneralMeeting of the Members held on Wed-nesday, March 6, 1974:

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,

I have great pleasure in welcomingyou to this EIGHTH ANNUAL GENE-RAL MEETING.

The Audited Statements of Accountfor the year ended 31st October, 1973,and the Directors' Report thereon havebeen with you for sometime now. Withyour permission, I shall take them asread.

The results of the year's operationshave been very disappointing indeed,compared with those of the previousyear. There were two principal reasonsfor this.

Firstly, there were sharp increases in

all costs. Rock Phosphate which is themajor raw material for the Company'sproduction is imported from Morocco;and because of the very tight freightmarket and the congestion in the Bom-bay Docks, the freight on shipmentshas been sky-rocketing. The otherimportant raw material, namely SodaAsh, being greatly in short supply theCompany had to import some of itsrequirement at a price very muchhigher than that of indigenous SodaAsh. There has also been continuingincrease in the cost of power, furnaceoil, kerosene oil and engineering stores.In addition, some ad hoc benefits badto be granted to the Company's em-ployees. In the result. the cost ofgoods produced by the Company asreflected in the Accounts is dispropor-tionately higher than the corresponcl-ing cost in the previous year. Never-theless, your Board quite rightly

thought it proper that the Companyshould for some time endeavour toabsorb these cost increases instead ofpassing them on to our customers.

Secondly, even while the Companywas thus making every effort to holdthe price line while maximising produc-tion to meet the ever-increasing demandsfrom the manufacturers of non-soapydetergents and also other users ofSodium Tripolyphosphate, the workersstruck work for eight days in Apriland indulged in a prolonged "sit-in"strike from 12th October, raising cer-tain wholly illegal and untenabledemands. This strike continued intothe current accounting year until, final-ly, the management was reluctantlycompelled to declare a partial closureof the company's plant from 3rd Decem-I)er 1973. Work at the factory wasfinally resumed only on 30th December1973.

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The Great Migration of 1971 III Return