Always the Twain Shall Flee

In West Bengal, on the Indian side of the border, trains from East Pakistan these days bring pitiful loads of Hindu refugees clutching all their worldly goods in a few thin knapsacks. On the Pakistani side, exhausted, tattered Moslems from India trudge endlessly toward a refugee camp in Jessore.

On both sides, Indian and Pakistani exiles are pawns in a vast, vengeful diaspora unequaled since the migrations that followed the 1947 partitioning of the subcontinent between Hindu India and Moslem Pakistan. The two-way exodus was restarted this year by a savage, three-month wave of Hindu-Moslem rioting, mostly in eastern India and East Pakistan; the conflict has already taken untold hundreds of lives in two countries. India claims that some 200,000 Hindus have been forced to flee Pakistan. Pakistan claims that some 200,000 Moslems have been forced to flee India. For all their indignation, neither side has yet found the way or the will to end the vicious circle of death and flight.

Like Flies. Arriving last week in West Bengal's Cede station, Mrs. Nipubala Nag, a Hindu from Pakistan, dabbed tears from her eyes as she told of a Moslem mob that burst in on terrified Hindu mill workers in Dacca, East Pakistan's capital, with daggers, axes and steel bars. Among the dead were her husband and 19-year-old son. At Jessore, grey-bearded, shirtless Osman Ghani talked wistfully of his home and stationery shop in Calcutta, both burned to the ground by Hindu mobs. After weeks in an Indian relief camp, Ghani, his wife and three children had just made their way to Pakistan, arriving without a rupee to their name.

The migrations are a perplexing problem for both governments. At India's biggest refugee camp, in Madhya Pradesh state, 500 miles west of the East Pakistan border, 50,000 Pakistani Hindus are crammed into makeshift tents and huts. There are only six doctors for the entire camp, and in the suffocating heat (110DEG in the shade) children die like flies. East Pakistan has erected dozens of its own refugee camps. To hasten integration of the newcomers, some local officials have ordered villages to absorb a fixed quota of the refugees, who come in relentless hundreds each day.

Pious Gloss. Moslem and Hindu fugitives all tell strikingly similar tales of persecution. Alike, they say that border police systematically relieve them of whatever money and jewels they have left. On both sides, fugitives protest that the only safe way across the frontier is by greasing the palms of unscrupulous fixers. Yet their governments piously gloss over the fact that the exodus is in both directions. India talks only of Hindus fleeing Pakistani atrocities, Pakistan of Moslems fleeing Indian hordes.

Finally jolted by the seriousness of the situation, India and Pakistan agreed to discuss the problem in New Delhi this week. Yet there was little hope that either nation would make any real attempt to guarantee the rights of religious minorities--a measure that both governments have consistently promised since independence.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.