Sangh Pariwar also Wants Partition Victim Bengali Resettled Untouchable Hindus with its Bangldeshi Anti Muslim Bogey!Assam Firm to Inflict Rest of the Nation sooner or later.

Sangh Pariwar also Wants Partition Victim Bengali Resettled Untouchable Hindus with its Bangldeshi Anti Muslim Bogey!Assam Firm to Inflict Rest of the Nation sooner or later.

Palash Biswas
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Sangh Pariwar also Wants Partition Victim Bengali Resettled Untouchable Hindus with its Bangldeshi Anti Muslim Bogey!Assam Firm to Inflict Rest of the Nation sooner or later.

In 2001, the BJP government in Uttaranchal had denied domicile certificates to the Bengali Hindu refugees settled in the state since early fifties. Some moneylenders turned land mafia even grabbed their land with the help of police and officials. After demonstrations by some social organization, Mass Movement by local communities and refugees,the state government reluctantly started investigation and made some arrests and dismissed few officials. This was not an isolated incident against the Bengali refugees who were victims of the division of Bengal in 1947. In 2004, twenty-one such persons , the Noakhali Partition Victims resettled, were deported from Navrangpur district in Orissa. The BJD-BJP combine government also served deportation notices to more than fifteen hundred people in Kendrapara district of the state. A strong protest by the Utkal Bagiya Surakshya Committee forced the Patniak government to keep its order in abeyance. But eventually the Refugee as well as Tribal Population situated near sea coastline and Bhitarkanika Abhayaranya have to be displaced as the area has to be a part of mega SEZ. The same story moves to Maharashtra where recently in Arsha Tehseel of Bhandara district fifty-two Bengali refugees were arrested but later released with a fine and personal bond to submit all documents relating to the citizenship rights. All district collectors in Maharashtra have been instructed to collect the data of the Bengali refugees residing in the state. The collectors in turn have issued a circular that all such persons to submit their citizenship documents within a month, failing which they would be liable for deportation. This has created anxiety among number of Bengali refugees that had settled in Bhandara, Chandrapur and Gadchirauli districts of Maharastra since fifties.

As in 2001, while the first BJP Government snatched citizenship of Bengali Partition victim untouchable refugees resettled in Uttarakhand since 1952 who crossed the border just after the partition and were stranded in between in different transit refugee camps countrywide, BJP has launched yet another Anti Refuge campaign afresh with its Bangladeshi bogey in Uttarakhand as well as in Himachal Pradesh.In 2001, then Uttarakhand BJP government headed by Nityanand swami made permanent residential certificates for job and the cretificate had a clause of Citizenship. All bengali resettled refugees were dubbed as NON Indian.The Refugees supported by local communities in Hills and plains resisted the move with great mass movement and eventually the government had to withdraw the citizenship clause. The campaign suspended is resurrected once again with Assam Riots.

The 1955 Indian Citizens Act clearly states that all those who migrated to India in wake of country's partition are entitled for citizenship and their children would become natural citizens of the country. This raises the question why such persons have been denied the citizenship rights in the country? The clause promising citizenship to all partition victims Indian citizenship is intact even to this date, but Sangh pariwar managed excellent floor management to pass the Citizenship Amendment Act in 2003 breaking the frame of the Constitution. Dr Manmoha Singh was the only person beside General shankar roy Chowdhury to demand citizenship. Later  Manmohan became the Prime Minster and forgot his stance and rather modified the amendment further in 2005 to help RSS in ousting Muslims as well as Hindu refugees along with displacing tribals and slum dwellers.

My late father,an associate of Jogendra Nath Mandal who played key role to get DR BR Ambedkar elected to the constituent Assembly from East Bengal,the President of All India Udvastu Samiti was aware of the RSS agenda long before citizenship act amended or UID project launched to deprive refugees of citizenship. civic and human rights.He convened an all India refugee conference in Dineshpur and warned that the Assam movement is not only against the Muslims, it is also against the Hindu Bengali refugees resettled countrywide. He had been working in the riots tornAsam in sixxties aong with his brother, a medical practitioner during sixties and knew very well the hypocricy of the Hindutva.As Hindu Mahasabha leaders like Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherjee and NC Chatterjee, father of ex Loksabha speaker NC Chatterjee ceated the grounds for riots in Assam. Mukherjee openly declared that should India divided or not, Bengal must be divided as ` we may not tolerate the dominance of converted Muslims who are ex untouchables, the Bottom of Hindu society. Eventually, caste Hindu dominated west Bengal, which fought so violently against the Partition move in 1905,voted for partition with majority , even the communists led by Comrade Jyoti Basu absented while Muslim dominated East Bengal rejected the proposal with majority. It is ironical, that the Bengali intelligentsia holds Gandhi and Nehru responsible for partition. My father was well aware of the hatred practiced by West Bengal bhadralok Political class and opposed Marichjhanpi movement warning Marxist betrayal which  came to be true with Marichjhanpi Genocide in 1979.

Mind you, Government of India led by Nehru and  West Bengal government led by Dr Bidhan Chandra Roy refused partition victim status to the refugees coming from East Bengal as the refugees from West Pakistan were granted.On humanitarian ground they were dumped in transit camps with deportation suspended. The Bengali untouchable refugees ejected out of Hindu Majority areas of Jaissore, khulna, Barishal, Faridpur areas which consisted the constituency of Dr BR Ambedkar and had been included in Pakistan without any survey whatsoever by Redcliff Mission and it did nullified Dr Ambedkar`s election to the constituent assembly and he had to be re elected in by election supported by Congress from Maharashtra, were scattered all over the country to fix the Demography of West Bengal as Undivided Bengal had all the three  interim governments headed by Muslims with adequate representation of Scheduled Castes. Bengal had to be partitioned and refugees had to be sent out of Bengal to deny untouchables every opportunity in any sphere of life and society. It is sustained even today as the Bhadralok Bengali Community, the micro minority kills any opportunity to the untouchables anywhere in India.

The problem of the West Pakistan Refugees, which was more acute was solved with war level activity as the Sikh and Punjabi Community as a UNIT did face the holocaust and got over it. They were granted citizenship instantly with refugee registration. They were paid compensation. But the Bengal Ruling class was up against the untouchable refugees who were denied representation and lost its political might, degenerated, disorganised, disintegrated could not assert to get citizenship, compensation, reservation or right to study mother language. The had to live with the support of local communities where they have been resettled and converted as mobile Vote bank of Political Hegemonies which inspired Political Parties to sustain the Problem for infinite time. It generated the Assam Problem for which the refugees are not responsible anyway.

Baring the Bhadarlok or the upper caste Hindus who were all adjusted in West Bengal, the rest was shunted to remote and undeveloped areas of the country. Since such people did not matter in the vote bank politics; no one came to put their names in the register and gave them citizenship rights. LK Adwani, then Home Minister of India, claimed that No bengali Representative ever demanded citizenship for the Partition victims from East Bengal while asked about the discrimination against the Bengali Untouchable refugees and it is true.Their children who all were born on the Indian soil too were denied any such rights. Most of such people were poor and uneducated and did not hanker for a piece of paper that would testify them to be Indians. Now such persons are being clubbed as Bangladeshi infiltrators and faces specter of deportation from India.

It is no coincidence that now, President of India. Pranab Mukherjee as Opposition leader as well as De facto Prime minister heading almost all policy making committees played key role to legislate Citizenship Amendment Act and launching UID project.The Citizenship Amendment Bill passed by the Parliament in 2003 has further weakened the case of the Bengali Partition refugees to acquire the citizenship rights. The bill clearly states that under no circumstance the Bengali refugees can get citizenship rights in India and even their children would be treated as illegal migrants.

Since the  untouchable Bengali refugees  were resettled in Tribal areas everywhere and specifically in Dandakaranya, to get breakthrough avenues in previleged Scheduled Tribe Areas, they have to be ejected out of those areas as they proved to be too rich in natural resources and are targets of Indian incs and MNCs.Narendra Modi did deschedule scheduled tribal area in kandhla and elsewhere in Gujarat  converting ST castes in OBC to acquire land for SEZ. In Assam, the hidden third Party is working to scrap the BDO Tribal autonomous council to opne the pandora`s box in the best interest of the MNCs and Corporate India. In Uttarakhand, the Refugees colonies are situated near SIDKUL areas in Sitarganj and Rudrapur. The RSS Motto is quite clear. Anti Muslim Campaign polarises the SC, ST and OBC communities as foot soldiers of Hindutva, hence it has launched the campaign and got unprecedented success since Babri Mosque demolition. But it should sound rather amusing that RSS and the Sangh parivar invoking so violently the Blind Nationalism is Hindutva, has to do nothing with Hindutva as it is up against the Partition victim Hindu refugees. The strategy is all about to deny material empowerment to the excluded excommunicated communities engaged in  suicidal identity politics forgetting Ambedkar Economics as well as the ECONOMICS of Caste Discrimination, the Manusmriti.

They are partition victims and were welcome by the nation in the greatest population transfer in the history.The partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 was followed by the forced uprooting of an estimated 18 million people. The minority communities in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) who were uprooted and forced to seek shelter in the Indian province of West Bengal.Jawahar Lal Nehru and his government failed to stop the carnage of minorities across the border. Hence, the East Bengal partition victims, stripped of citizenship, human and civil rights, dislodged from history and geography and deprived of mother language and employment have to pay the price after almost sixty years of Indian Independence. They are being persecuted in every part of India just because they speak in Bengali and ninety percent of them are dalits. Speaking in Bengali has become the only criteria to identify Bangladeshi nationals outside Bengal. Because the partition victim Bengalies, even settled in forties and fifties belong to underclasses, they are unable to protect themselves against atrocities including deportation drive.Hopefully, resistance against persecution of East Bengal refugees is getting momentum. In Uttaranchal and Orrissa, the local people, political parties and media stand united with the refugees. Uttaranchal refugees have launched nonstop mass movement since they were denied Indian citizenship in 2003 by then Bjp government. The twice chief minister of Uttaranchal Narayan Dutta Tiwari raised the issue thrice in the parliament. In Orrissa, a farther step ahead the agitation is led by the Utkal Bangiay Surakshya Samiti. Left MPs belonging to cpim and forward block visited refugee areas in Uttaranchal and Orrissa. Left front chairman in West Bengal, comrade Biman Bose visited village to village in Uttaranchal. Basudev Acharya, cpim MP has visited Kendarapara on last 10 th October where 1575 Bengali refugees have been served quit India notice. They could not be deported because the people of Orrissa, political parties and media support them. But the notice is still live. Orrissa government of Bjp Bjd combine has alredy managed 21 Bengali refugees settled in Navrangpur. Kendra Para was targeted as second attempt which failed. In retaliation , the Orrissa government stopped no less than two hundred refugee children to sit in high school examination. Birth certificats are being denied to newborn babies. BPL card, ration Card, PAN, etc have been stalled. Names of refugees in the voters` list have been deleted enmasse.

The situation is that the refugee influx from Bangladesh has never to stop. Any internal turmoil In Bangldesh creates waves of exodus. It is happening once again as the ruling classes fight on streets doggedly to have the riegn of power, the security and safety of minorities are once again at the stake. Government of India may not help it. West Bengal chief minister is concerned and a high alert is declare by Border Security Forces in border areas of West Bengal. Is this a solution?In fact, a delegation of Hindu minorities met The Indian High Commissioner in Dacca and demanded that either the two corore Hindus still sustaing themselves in Bangladesh, should be allowed to cross over Indian border and be granted Indian citizenship enmasse - or India should ensure the safetey of life , property and respect for the Hindus there.Population exchanges Massive population exchanges occurred between the two newly-formed nations in the months immediately following Partition. Once the lines were established, about 14.5 million people crossed the borders to what they hoped was the relative safety of religious majority. Based on 1951 Census of displaced persons, 7.226 million Muslims went to Pakistan from India while 7.249 million Hindus and Sikhs moved to India from Pakistan immediately after partition. About 11.2 million or 78% of the population transfer took place in the west, with Punjab accounting for most of it; 5.3 million Muslims moved from India to West Punjab in Pakistan, 3.4 million Hindus and Sikhs moved from Pakistan to East Punjab in India; elsewhere in the west 1.2 million moved in each direction to and from Sind. The initial population transfer on the east involved 3.5 million Hindus moving from East Bengal to India and only 0.7 million Muslims moving the other way.

Gyanesh Kudaisya in his research article`DIVIDED LANDSCAPES, FRAGMENTED IDENTITIES: EAST BENGAL REFUGEES AND THEIR REHABILITATION IN INDIA, 1947?79 ? considers the responses of Indian federal and provincial governments to the challenge of refugee rehabilitation. A study is made of the Dandakaranya scheme which was undertaken after 1958 to resettle the refugees by colonising forest land: the project was sited in a peninsular region marked by plateaus and hill ranges which the refugees, originally from the riverine and deltaic landscape of Bengal, found hard to accept. Despite substantial official rehabilitation efforts, the refugees demanded to be resettled back in their "natural habitat" of Indian Bengal. However, this was resisted by the state. Notwithstanding this opposition, a large number of East Bengal refugees moved back into regions which formed a part of erstwhile undivided Bengal where, without any government aid and planning, they colonised lands and created their own habitats. Many preferred to become squatters in the slums that sprawled in and around Calcutta. The complex interplay of identity and landscape, of dependence and self-help, that informed the choices which the refugees made in rebuilding their lives is analysed in the paper.

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.Rights or Charity? Relief and Rehabilitation in West BengalIn 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 charityCampaigns 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.