EDITORIAL: New Influx

In his statement on the question of the influx of refugees from Bangladesh into north-east India in the Rajya Sabha last Monday, Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee has taken a far more optimistic view of the situation than MPs from the region. He has said that 2,191 out of 4,000 refugees from the Chittagong hill tracts have returned to Bangladesh and Dacca is prepared to take back the remaining ones. By this reckoning, there is not much cause for undue concern. But it may be useful to note that a correspondent of The Observer, London, has brought a different impression from the area after a visit. He has written that “in the past two months alone some 20,000 tribal people are reported to have fled into India.” Apparently his informants have exaggerated the figure. That often happens in the kind of tense atmosphere that obviously prevails in the Chittagong hill tracts. But that cannot vitiate his account of what he has seen in the area. It is a hair-raising account. It says: “Bangladesh security forces are waging a terror campaign against the non-Bengali tribes… which threatens the very existence of the Buddhist minority of half-a-million people… The killings and rapes are said to run into hundreds, the arrests and detentions into thousands. In some areas villagers are being herded into strategic ‘villages’ which they call concentration camps… One army division, four battalions of infantry, armed police reserves and several thousand officers and men of the paramilitary Bangladesh Rifles have been committed to the hill tracts… Ostensibly the campaign is directed against a resistance organization known as Shanti Bahini accused by Dacca of trying to break away from Bangladesh. The Shanti Bahini deny this … The only able-bodied civilians whom I saw during my visit to the region were two who were being dragged, roped together, through the town bazaar at Kuptai, 30 miles east of Chittagong.”