Human rights in India Quotes

“If we open the door [to the Bengali Hindu refugees], we all will sink.”

“There was not an inch of space to spare in West Bengal for the refugees from East Bengal.”

“Someone is saying we are contemplating sending aid to help the Pakistani refugees. I hope to hell we’re not.”

“Wikipedia: Human rights in India”

“One should never do that to another which one regards as injurious to one's self. This, in brief, is the rule of dharma.”

“Wikicommons: Human rights in India”

“You must make a difference between Hindu refugees and Muslim immigrants and the country must take responsibility of the refugees.”

“Most Westerners have never heard about the Hindu refugee problem, for most journalists including reputed India hands have simply kept it out of the picture.”

“These kinds of stories were echoed six million times—the number of refugees that India officially estimated it was now sheltering. That number was, the Indian foreign ministry claimed, unparalleled in the world’s history.”

“I refuse the fact that we should not care about the Hindus of Pakistan since they are Pakistani citizens. Irrespective of citizenship of Pakistan’s Hindus, it is our duty to protect them like we protect Indian Muslims and Hindus.”

“Kennedy earned his hero status with fervent speeches ripping into Pakistan’s repression. Jabbing at the Nixon administration’s underbelly, he said that Yahya’s terror had generated more refugees in less than two hundred days than the total from the entire Vietnam War.”

“Sanjay Hazarika had pleaded: [A]s for the new exodus of Hindus from Bangladesh, they are true refugees, they are not migrants. They are as traumatised, frightened and brutalised as refugees in any other part of the world and this has been seen especially since the new government in Bangladesh took over.”

“Consider also the numbers: of thirty million Muslims in truncated India, four million moved to Pakistan, or less than one in seven; of twenty million Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan, seven million fled to India, or more than one in three. Moreover, in the next decade, another four million Hindus fled East Pakistan.”

“Anyway, the donations were, as Haksar told Gandhi, “very disappointing.” India would need some $400 million to look after these refugees for half a year, and more were coming every day. By the White House’s reckoning, the Indians netted merely about $20 million from the whole world, as well as roughly $12 million from the Soviet Union.”

“Needless to say that most of the refugees into Assam from East Pakistan were Bengali Hindus – the persecuted religious minority in Islamic Pakistan ruled by modern and politicised armed forces. The partition made their position extremely vulnerable. ...[T]heir existence with dignity, both actual and perceptional, propelled their movement across the border.”

“Western human rights activists and non-Westerners trained and funded by them, go around the world creating new categories of ‘victims’ that can be used in divide-and-conquer strategies against other cultures. In India’s case, the largest funding of this type goes to middlemen who can deliver narratives about ‘abused’ Dalits and native (especially Hindu) women.”

“By September, India estimated it had taken in some eight million refugees, with no end in sight. This represented as much as a tenth of the overall population of East Pakistan, by the CIA’s estimation. The economic and political consequences were dire... And as a result of the Pakistan army’s onslaught against Hindus, seven million out of over eight million refugees were Hindus.”

“The attack on Bangladeshi Hindus is a crime against humanity. In and of itself, it is severe enough to spur our moral outrage and cause us to take action to stop it. But to make matters worse, it has been spreading across that open border into West Bengal, India. One would think these Hindu victims of Islamist terror would find a safe haven in the largest Hindu nation on earth, but they have not.”

“The Indian prime minister’s secretariat knew that there was sure to be a rush of refugees, likely to overwhelm the local authorities in West Bengal. But the actual scale was a shock: the lieutenant governor of Tripura, an Indian state jutting deep into East Pakistan, alerted Gandhi to “the unexpectedly large influx of refugees.” As one of Gandhi’s senior aides remembered, her government now really began to worry. The expulsions seemed massive and systematic.”

“Major General Jacob-Farj-Rafael Jacob, the gruff, battle-hardened chief of staff of the Indian army’s Eastern Command, went to the border to watch the refugees streaming in. “It was terrible, pathetic,” he recalls. The displaced throngs inescapably called to mind nightmare memories of Partition in 1947, not so long before. “It’s a terrible human agony,” says Jaswant Singh, a former Indian foreign minister. “It was as if we were reliving the Partition.””