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Rights or Charity?
Relief and Rehabilitation in West Bengal
[This is an abridged version of an essay published in the volume,
Partition of Memory, ed., Suvir Kaul, Permanent Black, 2001. Thanks are
to the publisher and editor of the volume-Ed.]
In the half-century since India was partitioned, more than twenty-five
million refugees have crossed the frontier between East Pakistan and the
state of West Bengal in India. The migration out of East Bengal, and the
way the refugees were received by India was very different from West
Pakistan. Unlike those from the west, the refugees from the east did not
flood into India in one huge wave; they came sometimes in surges but
often in trickles over five decades of independence.
The elemental violence of partition in the Punjab explains why millions
crossed its plains in 1947. By contrast, the, causes of the much larger
migration out o East Bengal over a longer time span are more complex
That migration was caused by many different factors minorities found
their fortunes rapidly declining as avenues of advancement and
livelihood were foreclosed; they also experienced social harassment,
whether open and fierce or covert and subtle, usually set against a
backcloth o communal hostility which, in Hindu perception at least, was
sometimes banked but always burning. Another critical factor was the ups
and downs in India's relationship with Pakistan which powerfully
influenced why and when the refugees fled to West Bengal.
Given this context, the strikingly different way in which the Government
of India viewed the refugee problem in the east and in the west is not
altogether surprising. The crisis in Punjab was seen as a national
emergency, to be tackled on a war footing. From the start, government
accepted that a transfer of population with Pakistan was inevitable and
irreversible. So it readily committed itself to the view that refugees
from the west would have to be fully and permanently rehabilitated. It
also quickly decided that Muslim evacuee property would be given to the
refugees as the cornerstone of its programmes of rehabilitating them.
The influx of refugees into Bengal, on the other hand, was seen in a
very different light. In Nehru's view, and this was typical of the
Congress High Command, conditions in East Bengal did not constitute a
grave danger to its Hindu minorities. Delhi regarded their flight as the
product of imaginary fears and baseless rumours, rather than the
consequence of palpable threats to life, limb and property. Well after
it had begun, Nehru continued to believe that the exodus could be
halted, even reversed, provided government in Dacca could be persuaded
to deploy 'psychological measures' to restore confidence among the Hindu
minorities. The Inter-Dominion Agreement of April 1948 was designed,
Canute-like, to prevent the tide coming in. In the meantime, government
gave relief to refugees from East Bengal as a stop-gap measure since
permanent rehabilitation was thought unnecessary; indeed it was to be
discouraged.
So it set itself against the redistribution of the property of Muslim
evacuees from Bengal to incoming Hindu refugees; the policy was to hold
it in trust for the Muslims until they too returned home. The official
line was grounded in the belief that Bengali refugees crossing the
border in either direction could, and indeed should, be persuaded to
return home. Even after the number of refugees in Bengal had outstripped
those from Punjab, such relief and rehabilitation measures as government
put into place still bore the mark of its unwillingness to accept that
the problem would not simply go away.
This was what led the refugees to demand that government give them what
they regarded as their 'rights'. Their movement of protest embroiled
refugees and government in a bitter, long-drawn-out battle over what
legitimately could be expected from the state. The nub of the matter was
quite simple: did the refugees have rights to relief and permanent
rehabilitation, and did government have a responsibility to satisfy
these rights? In examining what divided the government and the refugees,
I wish to assess how far apart the positions of the refugees and the
government were and how different the premises on which they were based.
In the process I shall try to locate the role that marginal groups,
notably the refugees, have played in creating notions of legitimacy and
citizenship that came to challenge India's new orthodoxies.
The construction of
relief as charity
Campaigns by refugees against government diktat were a persistent
feature of political life in West Bengal well into the nineteen?sixties,
but the formative period coincided with the initial wave of migration
between 1947 and 1950. The issues began to crystallise after the
Government of West Bengal decided td deny relief to 'able-bodied males'
and to phase out relief camps. As soon as refugees demanded a say in
their rehabilitation, the battle lines were drawn. Stopping free relief
to able-bodied males was the first of a series of measures to limit
government's liability towards the refugees. The essence of the policy
was to whittle down, by one device or another, the numbers eligible for
help from the state. By November 1948, as soon as the surge in migration
caused largely by events in Hyderabad began to tail off, government was
quick to claim that the worst was over; some officials, adding their
two-annas' bit, even argued that the lure of handouts was itself
attracting migrants.
In late 1948, the government began to put a new and harsher policy into
place. On 25 November 1948, Cakift announced that only refugees, defined
as persons ordinarily resident in East Bengal who entered West Bengal
between 1 June 1947 and 25 June 1948, "on account of civil disturbances
or fear of such disturbances or the partition of India, would be
entitled to relief and rehabilitation. A second order in December 1948
declared that no more refugees would be registered after 15 January
1949, further cutting back the official definition of a "refugee". A
month earlier, on 22 November 1948, the Government of West Bengal had
decreed that no 'able-bodied male immigrant' capable of earning a living
would be given gratuitous relief for himself or his family for more than
a week. After that, relief would be conditional only against works.
It was all very well for government to offer relief against works, but
there weren't any such "works" and government gave no assurance that it
would create them. Instead, the official line was that the immigrant
"through his own effort" must find suitable work. Male refugees capable
of working had somehow instantly and miraculously to find for themselves
jobs, sufficiently remunerative to feed, clothe and house themselves and
their families, within seven days of crossing the border. Furthermore,
government urged refugees go anywhere in West Bengal except Calcutta and
its suburbs, where casual employment was most easily to be found.
To begin with, government had allowed camp officers discretion to make
exceptions in those cases where they felt that free relief (or "doles",
as they were called in terminology unattractively reminiscent of the
Poor Law) was "essential for preservation of life". Put bluntly,
government realised that it would not look good if people starved to
death in its camps. Two months later, however, in the wake of refugee
hunger strikes against its directives, it hardened its heart.
On 15 February 1949 the new national government decreed that "such able
bodied immigrants as do not accept offers of employment or
rehabilitation facilities without justification should be denied
gratuitous relief even if they may be found starving" (Memo No. 800 (14)
R.R., Secretary, Relief and Rehabilitation Department, Government of
West Bengal, to all District Officers, 15 February 1949; emphasis
added). This decision was reiterated towards the end of March 1949.
In a directive aimed at "soft" camp superintendents suspected of being
susceptible to pressures from refugees, it laid down that free relief
must not be given to anyone merely because he was found starving once,
the underlying principle being that an able bodied male must earn his
own living, and should not be made to feel, under any circumstances,
that he can at any time be a charge on the state" (Memo No. 1745 (10)
R.R.,/18R-18/49, from the Secretary, Relief and Rehabilitation
Department, Government of West Bengal, to all District Officers, dated
29 March 1949).
In July 1949, Calcutta announced that all relief camps in West Bengal
must be closed down by 31 October 1949, and ordered that rehabilitation
of the inmates be completed by that date. From now on it would only
rehabilitate those few persons it chose to define as refugees, Refugees
should expect no further relief and would be entitled only to whatever
crumbs by way of rehabilitation government decided to offer them. This
was the first in a series of official announcements by which it was made
unequivocally clear that refugees had no choice in the matter. They had
to take what was offered or get nothing at all.
What government set out to do, at least in the prospectus, was to
encourage refugees to be self employed. Categorised by their social
background and training, refugees were to be offered soft loans of
varying amounts to enable them to buy appropriate equipment, tools or
supplies in order to set themselves up as entrepreneurs. Those who felt
they had neither the training nor the talent for entrepreneurship but
wanted 'proper jobs' instead, those who preferred to stay on in camps or
'deserted' 'rehabilitation colonies' were given no choice. They had to
do as they were told or lose all claim to the meagre benefits on offer.
These directives give an insight into the government's view of its
responsibilities towards the refugees. By attempting repeatedly to
restrict the definition of who could claim to be a 'refugee', government
showed that it had to accept, however grudgingly, that it could not
altogether avoid responsibility for those displaced by partition. The
fine platitude, frequently voiced in the documents of the Rehabilitation
Department, was that "to succour and rehabilitate the victims of
communal passion [was] an obligation the country [was] solemnly pledged
to honour". (Quotation from Bhaskar Rao, The Story of Rehabilitation, p.
229)
In practice, however, government strove to limit its liability by
cutting its definition of the term 'refugee' to the bone. A refugee,
Calcutta declared, was a person who had migrated before the end of June
1948 and registered himself as such before January 1949 - a key device
by which government sought to achieve this objective to limit its
definition of "partition" itself. By its edict, partition was defined as
occurrences, which began in June 1947 (or six months earlier in December
1946 if the refugee had happened to live in Noakhali or Tippera) and
abruptly came to an end one year later in June 1948. That partition was
a process which began in 1947, but whose impact continued to unfold long
after June 1948 was obvious to everyone outside the Writers Building.
But by adopting these myopic, self-serving definitions, Bengal's new
rulers lost the ability to anticipate and effectively react to the
ongoing problems caused by partition. Not surprisingly, they were caught
off guard by each new crisis.
In a similar vein, 'the government strictly defined what could be deemed
to be the effects of partition. According to its taxonomy, "civil
disturbances" alone -that is communal violence or discrimination against
minorities - were accepted as genuine "effects" of partition. Only those
who had fled communal violence were regarded as "genuine" victims of
partition and therefore as refugees entitled to protection from the
Indian state.
But economic hardship in East Bengal - wfiere famine stalked the land
and where food cost much more than anywhere else in India - was not
accepted as a consequence of partition. It may have been obvious to
others that partition had directly and disastrously affected the
livelihoods of millions of people, Hindus and Muslims, in both Bengals,
but migrants tossed across borders by the pitchfork of necessity were
not deemed by government to be genuine victims of partition or as "true"
refugees.
So it followed that they were not in any sense the responsibility of the
Indian state. This helps to explain why the Government of India treated
the refugees from Punjab, where communal violence came close to being
genocide, so differently from the refugees from East Bengal, where the
violence was never remotely on this scale. The Prime Minister justified
to the Chief Minister of West Bengal the striking difference in
expenditure per capita on refugees in the West and East by arguing that
while 'there was something elemental' about the situation in West
Pakistan, "where practically all Hindus and Sikhs have been driven out",
whereas in the East it was more gradual, and many Hindus had been able
to remain. (Jawaharlal Nehru to B.C. Roy, 2 December 1949, cited in
Saroj Chakrabarti, With Dr. B.C. Roy, p. 143).
The official definition of the refugee as victim deserves closer
scrutiny, as it provides another key to assess the tenuous morality
behind government's attitude. Only bona-fide victims were entitled to
relief and rehabilitation. To be eligible for relief, the victims had to
register themselves. In December 1948, when government made public its
decision to shut down registration offices by 15 January 1949, it
justified the edict by arguing that refugees who were "genuinely
interested" had been given "ample time" to register (Relief and
Rehabilitation Department, Government of West Bengal, Memo, 20 December
1948, in GB IB 1838/48).
This introduced a new refinement to the horrors of partition - a
"desperation index" in the procedures by which a refugee was prevented
from claiming benefits. If a refugee was truly desperate, government
argued, he would have found his way to a registration office by
mid-January 1949. It he didn't, that was the proof positive that the
person claiming refugee status could not have been sufficiently
desperate to require relief. In this way, government at a stroke cut
down a huge problem to a size it felt it could handle.
This had far-reaching implications for the way in which government
responded to 'refugee demands once they came to be voiced in an
organised way. By definition, victims are not commanders of their own
destiny; victims are not agents. Rather they are the "innocent",
passive, objects of persecution, casualties of fate. Significantly, the
state's favourite euphemism for refugees was "displaced persons", with
connotations of innocent victims dislocated by events in whose shaping
they had played no part. This helped government to justify treating the
refugees from West Pakistan and East Bengal with such an uneven hand.
Nehru's point was that the Punjabis had been driven out from their
homes. Bengalis, by contrast, by migrating in fits and starts, proved
that they had the option of staying or of leaving. According to the
official line, a true refugee or victim had no choice and was not a free
agent. He could therefore not be expected to exercise volition, or have
any choice over how or when he was to leave the country he lived, and
where, when and how he sought refuge in the country he now lived in. By
defining refugees in this way, government could argue that it helped
refugees not because of any obligation but voluntarily, out of the
goodness of its heart. In effect, what the refugee received was charity.
Since the recipient of charity has no right over how much or what he is
given, so too the refugee had no moral right to relief, nor any say over
what was doled out to him.
This construction of relief and rehabilitation as charity is seen most
explicitly when government decided at a stroke to stop "doles" for
able-bodied males and to shut down its camps. In its defence, government
insisted that doles were simply a form of official charity. If
able-bodied men accepted these handouts, this would erode their moral
bier and get them accustomed to a culture of dependency. "Living on the
permanent charity of doles" would, it was argued, make them "sink into a
state of hopeless demoralisation". Camps, likewise, were seen as
"symbols of permanent dependence" (The Story of Rehabilitation, p. 160).
So while the refugees survived on the barest rations, government was
able to represent its relief to the refugees as "charity" (and to
congratulate itself for being so charitable), and at the same time
reprimand the refugees for daring to expect its charity. This
double-edged policy of charity so dominated official thinking that it
suggests that it was the very touchstone of rehabilitation policy. In
official pronouncements, the notion that charity bred a demoralising
"dependence" inconsistent with manly self-respect was seen as an obvious
truth, alluding to what was considered as common currency of Indian
culture.
But was this view of charity the generally accepted one in a social
milieu where dana, dakshina and bhjksha had long been vital elements of
religious and social life, and where the renouncer who lived on alms was
venerated at least as much as the house-holder? It is by no means clear
that it was. By all accounts, this view was of recent origin, even in
Europe, where "in the old days, -the beggar who knocked at the rich
man's door was regarded as a messenger from God, and might even be
Christ in disguise". By the late eighteenth century, accepting charity
had already begun to attract social odium; a century later, the wheel
had come full circle and charity was seen as "injuring" those it was
intended to aid. Likewise it was only in industrial Europe that
'dependency' came to denote a stigmatised condition, appropriate only
for women, children and the infirm.
When England put its New Poor Law onto the statute book in 1834, this
attitude informed the amendment which aimed broth to deter the poor from
resorting to public assistance and to stigmatise those who did. By the
early twentieth century, dependency had come to be taken as a mark of
debility of character rather than a function of poverty. So an
able-bodied male who came to be dependent was seen as the epitome of the
'undeserving poor', since it was not poverty, but a man's lack of
self-respect, that caused his dependence. And because it was only
acceptable for women and children to be dependent, an able-bodied
dependent man was seen to have the perceived attributes of women and
children: weakness, idleness, passivity and irresponsibility.
These imported European attitudes towards charity and dependency were
deployed with such great effect by India's policy-makers because in
their passage to Bengal, they assumed highly charged local inflections
and particular resonances of their own. In one of the deeper ironies of
Bengal's modern history, this way of thinking happened to fit neatly
with a pre-existing tradition among its colonial masters about the
flawed character of the Bengali Hindu male. In the nineteenth century,
British officials had conventionally regarded physical weakness and lack
of vigour, lethargy, effeminacy and an absence of moral backbone as the
very essence of the Bengali babu's being. By the mid-twentieth century,
the Bengali Hindu male was thus seen by his imperial critic as a
deplorable combination of the worst feminine and childish qualities.
Writing on rehabilitation by officers in Delhi and Calcutta
unconsciously aped the prejudices of their erstwhile masters, thus
bringing together two borrowed traditions-one from Europe and the other
from colonial India's recent past - to produce a new and potent
stereotype of the Bengali refugee. This characterisation was drawn in
counter-point an equally hackneyed, but far more flattering, picture of
the Punjabi refugee, whose 'toughness ... sturdy sense of
self-reliance... [and] pride' never let them 'submit to the indignity of
living on doles and charity'.
The Punjabi refugee, heir of the material races who were the darlings of
the post-Mutiny Raj, was thus held up by independent Indian officialdom
as the model of the 'deserving poor'. (The outrageousness of this
statement is apparent given that Government allocated many thousand
acres of land to the Punjabis, disbursed Rs 11 million among them for
the purchase of livestock, and a gave them a further Rs 44 million in
grants, loans and advances).
The contrast drawn by the officials between the Punjabi and the Bengali
refugee could hardly have been sharper. The "character of the refugees
themselves" was blamed for the failings of the rehabilitation effort in
West Bengal. The official view was that his very disposition rendered
the Bengali male refugee prone to fall into a state f dependency and
therefore incapable of breaking out of it. Whereas "in the West, the
refugee matched government efforts on his behalf with an overwhelming
passion to be absorbed into the normal routine of living", in Bengal,
"the government had to supply the initiative as well as the motive
power. To overcome the apathy, even the sullenness, of the displaced
person was itself no small task. It called for patience and tact,
endless sympathy joined to occasional firmness..."
Here, the thesis brought together two different lines f argument. The
first was that their qualities of character included a psychological
dependency amongst Bengali ales, which rendered them incapable of making
rational decisions for themselves. Because they were dependent, any
judgment of their own about themselves and their lives and times had no
value: it was as feeble and untrustworthy s the judgment of women and
children.
The second line of argument, again borrowed from the vocabulary of the
Raj, was that the state's relation to this dross of humankind was that
of, surrogate patar families or benevolent despot. Because the refugees
had placed themselves in its care, government had a duty to decide what
was best for them. Government saw itself as standing in for the male
breadwinner in relation to these unfortunates and therefore entitled to
assert all the moral authority over them that a male breadwinner enjoys
over his dependants.
Yet the refugees never made an issue of these contradictions. One reason
might be that the impact of both constructions on their rights tended to
be much the same in practice. If refugees were to be seen as dependent
members of the national family, they could claim rights to maintenance
only by virtue of their dependent status, and as dependants they were
denied any other rights. If they were represented as recipients of
voluntary charity, they had no claims whatever over the source of the
charity. Indeed the very fact that they took charity showed them, in the
official view, to be so 'psychologically dependent' that they were not
fit to determine their own destinies. So the net effect of both
positions-however mutually inconsistent-on refugees rights, could be
seen as not being significantly different.
But it was also possible that the refugees chose not to make much of
this inconsistency because they saw opportunities in exploiting the grey
areas in the official position to their advantage. If they had forced
government to take a consistent line, it might have been so tightly
drawn that the state could have disclaimed responsibility of the refugee
altogether. By leaving the ambiguity unchallenged, the refugee movement,
whether by accident or by design, kept some room for manoeuvre in
constructing its own definition of refugee claims as "rights", and this
eventually enabled it to wrest significant concessions from a reluctant
government.
Refugee claims: the notion of 'rights'
Perhaps because the first wave of East Bengal refugees were largely
drawn from the bhadralok, with their lively traditions of political
activism, they were quick to organise themselves into pressure groups.
Middle-class refugees from the east who had neither homes nor jobs in
Calcutta were particularly hard hit by partition. In East Bengal they
had been respectable people, with homes, land, secure jobs and a
distinctive way of life, even if its advantages were rapidly being
eroded.
Now as refugees, they often had no more than the clothes in which they
stood. They were forced to jostle cheek by jowl with other destitutes of
lesser status on the filthy platforms of Sealdah Station, where they
waited to be transported to squalid, overcrowded camps. There, herded
into barracks that robbed them of any semblance of privacy; they
survived on dry rations of stinking, inedible rice, or were left to die
without dignity. It is small wonder that they began so swiftly to
orgariise themselves in protest against these appalling conditions.
To begin with, these organised groupings were a very mixed bag,
heterogeneous in leadership and in political affiliation. Each camp
tended to set up its own Bastuhara Samiti (Refugee Committee) or
Parishad (Council). By the middle of 1949, these numerous camp
committees had begun to form themselves into larger umbrella
organisations. Two such organisati6ns, rivals to each other, were formed
in 1950- the United Central Refugee Council (UCRC) and the Refugee
Central Rehabilitation Council (RCRC). Although the Communist Party of
India (CPI) and the Revolutionary Socialist party (RSP) quickly tried
establish their respective influence over these organisations, in 1950
they were still far from being party fronts. The parties which claimed
support from the refugees, moreover, were ranged across th6 entire
political spectrum from the Hindu Mahasabha on the right to the
Revolutionary Communist Party of India on the left.
So it would be wrong to suggest1hat the refugees had a united and
homogeneous programme. Nevertheless, out of the refugee movement there
emerged a distinguishable stance on the questions of relief and
rehabilitation. Their position, which evolved during the course of many
campaigns, was quite simple - as refugees they claimed a right to relief
and full rehabilitation and to decide what form of rehabilitation they
preferred. In the early days of the refugee movement, its claim to
rights was usually defined in a limited and rather sectional way. Their
rights were seen as deriving from a specific if unwritten bargain made
before partition between the Hindu leaders of western Bengal and the
Hindu minorities of eastern Bengal.
The refugees argued they were owed a special debt, because the Hindu
minorities of eastern Bengal had unselfishly sacrificed their own
well-being to help create a separate province of West Bengal from which
their brethren n the Hindu-majority districts had mainly benefited. In
this, construction, the Government of West Bengal owed the refugees
relief and full rehabilitation as compensation. By ailing to fulfill its
side of the bargain, government was in breach of contract, no more and
no less, even though the contract was unenforceable except in terms of a
moral commitment.
This line, whatever its emotional appeal, was hardly a sufficient
foundation upon which to base a secure claim to rights, since it could
be seen as special pleading that gave the state scope to avoid accepting
a general responsibility towards all refugees. In this sense, this was
an even narrower definition of its liabilities than the government
itself accepted.
The portrayal of refugee rights as a sectional claim was never entirely
abandoned by its protagonists. But as the movement gained momentum, it
gradually came to be overlaid with other, more open-ended, meanings. The
cutback in the grants of doles to able-bodied male refugees provided a
context in which refugee activists were forced to think afresh on the
question of rights. The cut-back created two classes of camp refugees,
those entitled to some benefits and those who were not.
Those who resisted the government order insisted that dividing refugees
into 'haves' and 'have-nots' was wrong, and challenged it with a wave of
hunger-strikes and hartals in camps all over West Bengal. But they soon.
discovered the difficulty in carrying the 'haves' along with the
'have-nots' in a unified campaign. The refugee leaders found themselves
waging war on two fronts, one against the government for creating two
classes of refugees and the other against their own dole-receiving
brothers who took what they could and looked the other way.
The series of government orders which followed presented similar
problems for the refugee activists. The thrust of the governments
rehabilitation measures was to lump refugees into several different
categories - able-bodied males, widows, the handicapped, government
servants, medical practitioners, lawyers - and to offer each category a
different rehabilitation package by way of help. Inevitably, some
refugee families preferred to take whatever was on offer rather than to
fight for more. This forced the refugee activists to recognise the
strategic necessity of arguing that the rights they claimed were held
equally by all refugees and that they were absolute and indivisible. At
the same time, the argument that these rights derived from a specific
contract came gradually to be replaced by the claim that these were
'fundamental rights'. Inevitably, it became increasingly untenable for
refugee organisations to insist that only refugees were entitled to
these 'fundamental rights', and not every citizen.
In turn, these began to be interpreted more and more broadly. As time
passed, a perceptible shift can be seen from the assertion of specific,
exclusive, sectional, entitlements to more general, inclusive, rights.
The list of demands put forward at various meetings and during
successive campaigns varied little and included both political and
economic rights. Amongst the political rights claimed, two were common
to every agitation by refugees. The first was their right to organise
themselves politically. This was a response to the growing
high-handedness of camp superintendents who punished those they saw as
"ring-leaders" of the agitations.
As the refugee movement became increasingly closely associated with the
left-wing political opposition, this developed into a more general
protest against the constraints against political freedom in independent
West Bengal, particularly the Security Act and the Special Powers Act-
which hurt all citizens, not refugees alone. So refugee pamphlets
continued to make specific demands for the removal of a particular camp
superintendent or the release of particular refugee cletenue, but
increasingly these demands were linked with the broader campaign for the
repeal of the so-called 'Black Acts'. Particularly after they fought
pitched street battles with the police during Nehru's visit to Calcutta
in January 1949, refugees formed increasingly visible and vocal
contingents at protest marches in the city which denounced 'police zulum'
and raised the slogan- Yeh azadi jhootha hai ('this Independence is a
sham').
So on 15 August 1950, "a procession of about 500 refugees from different
refugee colonies such as Jadabpur, Tollygunj, Garia etc.,... converged
at Deshapriya Park where two meetings were hold in succession under the
auspices of the two factions of the Forward Bloc - Marxist and
nonMarxist - to decry the Congress Government for the allegedly fake
Independence achieved... On the same day, another refugee procession
ended up at Hazra park to celebrate Anti-Independence Day" (RPAR W/E
20.8.1950, GB IB File No. 1838-48 /KW).
The second demand made by practically every refugee organisation was the
right to determine how, when and where they were to be rehabilitated.
They demanded that families be given adequate notice before they were
moved to rehabilitation colonies, and more importantly, that refugees
should not be sent there against their will. This eventually hardened
into the demand that all refugees be rehabilitated within West Bengal.
But here too, a trend towards expansion and inclusion can be detected in
the way refugee campaigns linked their demand for rehabilitation in West
Bengal with a call for a state-driven programme to achieve economic
reform and greater equality in West Bengal society as a whole.
The same trend towards greater inclusiveness can be seen in the demand
for specifically economic rights. Every meeting reiterated the demand
for certain basic economic rights: the provision of relief to all
refugees, full rehabilitation, and entitlement to relief grants until
full rehabilitation had been achieved. In their view, relief not only
meant doles for all, but also free education for refugee children, free
medical care and clothing, and clean camps. Rehabilitation meant a
brick-built 'pucca' house for each refugee household and regular, paid
employment. This particular demand went diametrically against government
policy on rehabilitation, since its central purpose was to encourage
refugees to find self-employment, and not look to the Sarkar for jobs.
But here too, the refugee movement asserted that these were not
specifically refugee rights but the rights of all members of society.
Similarly, the demand for free rations for refugees was increasingly
linked to a more general critique of the government's food policy and
its failure to guarantee security of rations for the public.
In these ways, the construct of rights which evolved out of successive
refugee campaigns came-to be part of an increasingly broad-based and
inclusive political programme in a welfarist and even socialist mode.
This was partly a consequence of the refugee movement gradually coming
under the influence of left-wing political parties. However, this trend
predates the "capture" of the refugee movement by the left, which only
began in earnest after 1951 and was not achieved in full measure until
1959 (Prafulla Chakrabarti, The Marginal Men, p. 407). So the
explanation has rather to be sought in the internal dynamics and logic
of the refugee movement itself. In part, this logic was semantic since
the very notion of 'rights' is based on the premise that all men are
equal, so it is hard to sustain a claim to rights without claiming them
equally for all.
The refugee movement also soon realised that its own demands took it
down the egalitarian path. Many of the 'rights' claimed were material in
nature: food, clothes, medicine, housing, education and jobs. It would
have been difficult to justify the argument that refugees had an
entitlement to these economic 'rights' whereas other-and equally
destitute-Indians, did not.
Practical considerations also encouraged the refugees to link their
demands with a call for wider social change. If they had fought alone
for their own particular demands, they would have found themselves
politically isolated and socially vulnerable. More to the point, a
social and political transformation in Bengal was the necessary
precondition for the realisation of some of the refugees' most basic and
un-negotiable demands, for example, their insistence that they be
rehabilitated in West Bengal.
The government claimed the state simply did not have enough uninhabited
land to accommodate millions of refugees. If there was to be more land
available for redistribution to the dispossessed that could only come as
the result of land reforms. So it is not surprising that refugees called
for radical land reform, for the abolition of the zarnindaris and for
more equitable laws which imposed ceilings on the amount of urban land
which the privileged could own.
Similarly, the campaign against the eviction of refugee squatters
brought the movement into a head-on collision with entrenched rights to
private property. From late September 1949, when government ordered
camps to be shut down, groups of refugees began to occupy vacant plots
and garden houses in Calcutta's suburbs. They would stealthily enter
these plots at night and under cover of darkness rapidly put up
makeshift shelters. They would then refuse to leave, while offering in
many instances to pay a fair price for the land. To evict them from
these patently unused plots would have been embarrassing for a
government which had loudly proclaimed that there was no land available
for r6distribution. And when it tried to, it led to ugly incidents.
One incident which attracted wide publicity took place at Mahesh in
Hooghly, where police were summoned to help a landlord repossess his
vacant land which had been occupied by refugees. Characteristically, the
police were brutal in enforcing the landlord's right of access but
turned a blind eye when the landlord used thugs to oust the squatters.
The contrast between the alacrity with which the state and its
law-enforcement machinery responded to defend the rights of property
owners, and its denial that refugees had any rights at all, was all too
clear. Inevitably, refugees who had initially acknowledged that
landlords should be paid for plots they had occupied ended up taking a
more jaundiced view of the right to private property. Confrontations of
this sort, which began with limited aims -often simply for a little
space within the system in which individuals could survive -thus often
rapidly developed into passionate indictments of the established order.
The battle against eviction became fiercer after the public found out,
through a leak in March 1951, about the secretly drafted clauses of the
Eviction Bill. The Bill, as the Chief Minister admitted, was essential
if his government was to have the power to deal with squatter colonies
which violated the right to private property enshrined in the Indian
Constitution. But faced with a sustained campaign against the Eviction
Bill the Government of West Bengal was forced to retreat. The Bill was
re-drafted to include a pledge that a "displaced person" in unauthorised
occupation of land would not be disturbed "until the Government provides
for him other land or house... in an area which... enables the person to
carry on such occupation as he may be engaged in for earning his
livelihood at the time of the order" (West Bengal Act XVI of 1951 -The
Rehabilitation of Displaced Persons and Eviction of Persons in
unauthorised Occupation of land Act. 1951.
This represented a major victory for the refugee movement, because it
acknowledged that refugees had an absolute, inalienable, right to
shelter, and that the government had a duty to provide it. It was also
an admission that there were circumstances in which the right to private
property could not be enforced. It was also a great victory for West
Bengal's left-wing opposition. The Left parties (particularly the CPI)
refined the tactic of using refugee demands as the thin end of the wedge
in their wider struggles. First they would press the case for the rights
of refugees, whether to food, shelter or employment. And once the
government (which acknowledged that it had some special obligations
towards refugees) had been forced to accept that the refugees did indeed
have these rights the left-wing parties would demand the same rights for
everybody.
This also explains why the sectional basis for the claim to refugee
rights was never wholly given up. It allowed a convenient ambiguity upon
which the left-wing leadership could, and did, capitalise, first asking
for the fulfilment of the special obligation, and then quickly changing
tack to demand the same treatment for all citizens. The refugee movement
was thus the Trojan horse in the siege laid by the left around the
bastions of government in its battle to achieve a broader, more
egalitarian, definition of citizenship.
In the chronicles of political science it is E commonplace that the
refugees from East Bengal played key role in the development of
left-wing politics in Wes Bengal. Yet the relationship between the
refugees and the communist parties has usually been described in purely
instrumentalist terms. The communists are accused of having used the
refugees as mere cannon fodder in their campaigns. I have tried to show
crucially important was the role was that these movements served as a
test-case for the whole question of rights. It was precisely because
government admitted, albeit in as narrow a way as possible, that it had
some special obligations towards refugees, that the Left-wing opposition
was able to push forward so many of their general claims for the
citizens of Indian as a whole.
This was the very ground on which the refugees stood when they
successfully campaigned for their "rights". Once government had conceded
the justice of s6me of their claims, the same claims were extended
further and further by the Left-wing allies. In the process, more
concessions were wrested from a reluctant government. And upon this
ground, the communists and radicals would skillfully erect the claim
that everybody had the same rights and entitlements.
It follows that the relationship between the refugee movements and the
wider politics of the Left in West Bengal was more complex and
dialectical than the 'cannon-fodder' metaphor would suggest. It will
certainly not do to argue that the refugee movement was simply subsumed
and exploited by the Left. The shift in their politics towards the Left
was, to a substantial degree, a considered response by refugees to their
distinctive experience as they organised their fight for survival.
It was this experience, the public spectacle of their wretchedness and
their incessant campaigns for rehabilitation and to be given back a
measure of human dignity - and not some unthinking adherence to a
borrowed communist ideology - which persuaded them to articulate their
demands in the particular ways that they did. (Joya Chatterji)
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