Malda Training Diary - Administrative Training Institute

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had brought along my father’s camp-bed and rigged it up—mosquito net and all—and went
to sleep. Next morning I found a young man stretching himself on the verandah. He was the
sole occupant of the largest room and introduced himself as the local probationer from the
West Bengal Civil Service, S.N. Roy Chowdhury. Noticing my obvious bewilderment at the
state of affairs, he kindly offered to take me along to meet the District Magistrate. Attiring
myself in the proper formal dress of ‘bund gala’ (buttoned-up) black coat and trousers, I
walked with him to the DM’s bungalow. Not a word from him about the lack of transport at
the station and accommodation at the Circuit House, as I had hoped. Instead, he promptly
prostrated me with the casual announcement that I was to “take over charge” of Kutubsahar
Camp and repatriate 30,000 evacuees to Bangladesh. This I managed to achieve satisfactorily
thanks largely to his unobtrusively affectionate guidance. As a ‘bonus’ he gave me
permission to proceed to Rajshahi with 5 truck-loads of blankets on 31 st January, the day on
which the last evacuees left Malda. That is how I got linked-up with Bangladesh Relief work.
In Rajshahi our Liaison Officer, Sri T.K. Das, IAS, showed me the notorious Goalia
Club, which had been the Officers’ Mess for the Tikka Khan Army. Prisoners used to be
brought here and, after the officers had had their ‘fun’, the bodies used to be dumped into pits
dug in the adjoining banks of the Padma. I saw one of these mass graves with pieces of rope,
torn clothes, skulls and bones still lying in it. Sri Das told me that for tackling the crucial
problem of raped and pregnant women, our government had arranged facilities for abortions
as this was still illegal in Bangladesh. Unfortunately, only a few women had come forward.
What was required was a dedicated band of social workers who would help these women to
overcome their natural reluctance to come out into the open. Luckily, it seemed that so far no
social stigma had been attached to their condition.
The Indian Army was being used extensively in cordoning operations involving the
Bihari population who had been isolated and squeezed into tiny pockets. At times as many as
3000 had been packed into a small primary school without any sanitary facilities whatsoever.
In one cordoning operation the Indian Army officer had to rush out of one such school,
unable to endure the stench and the filth. Sri Das told me that there was practically an inchthick
layer of flies over the whole area. It was a miracle how the Biharis survived in such
conditions.
This situation was further aggravated in February. I gathered that after liberating
Dinajpur, the Mukti Fouj had killed off around 4000 Biharis who had sided with the Khan
Army and summarily forced some 75000 into trains leaving the district. These people had got
off at Nawabganj utterly destitute and starving. In Nawabganj I was frankly told that they saw
no reason why the new government should feed people who had sided against it, and so no
relief doles were given to these refugees. The situation assumed such proportions that people
began to go up to the hitherto sacrosanct chamber of the SDO with corpses, begging for
money to cover burial expenses. He would fling some coins to them—this much was not
refused.
The two major needs of Rajshahi District were shelters for returning evacuees and
food grains. Initially the evacuees were being housed in schools, but on one of my visits to
Sibganj I came across the unbelievable phenomenon of boys gherao-ing the local Relief
Committee with the demand that the schools reopen immediately. To meet this crisis, we
began dismantling the camps we had set up for the evacuees and sent these bamboo structures
by trucks to the afflicted areas. These areas were on two broad fronts: Sibganj and Bholahat
police-stations to the south of Malda; Porsha and Niamatpur police-stations due east of
Malda. My first assignment, after returning from the 31 st January trip to Rajshahi, had been to
investigate the possibilities of sending relief materials to the eastern border of Malda, the
river Punarbhava demarcating the international border.