India’s Citizenship (Amendment) Act initially prompted by the arrest of suspected communists, took on a communal angle and spread across the border to produce the largest migration on the eastern frontier to date. Initially, the provincial governments of East and West Bengal tried to manage the situation. 95 Nevertheless, on the first day of the first session of the Provisional Parliament of India (constituted by almost all of the members of the Constituent Assembly after the Constitution was drafted), Pandit LK Maitra sought permission to move a motion on the ‘ruthless persecution of the Hindu minority in East Bengal’. 96 As the situation deteriorated following rioting in Calcutta a week later, both governments started to correspond directly with each other. Nehru himself proposed a joint tour of East Bengal to Liaquat Ali Khan, as well as a ‘visit in his private capacity’; 97 Liaquat summarily refused both proposals. 98 By April 1950, 2,934,065 people had moved to India from East Bengal, while approximately 550,000 people had crossed from India to East Bengal. 99 This migration had not gone unnoticed. Through February and March 1950, Deputy High Commissioners in both states sent urgent missives to their governments about the fates of minorities. Strident voices, first in the press, 100 and then even in Parliament, called for either an exchange of populations or, more ominously, war. 101 On the floor of the House, Nehru was compelled to state that minorities in East Pakistan, though citizens of Pakistan, ‘were certainly [India’s] concern to the extent they had security; if not, measures have to be devised to give them security’. 102 By now, it was clear that, unlike the alleged ‘influx’ from Pakistan in 1948, this migration was a ‘two-way traffic’, though the proportion of Hindus migrating into India was higher than Muslims migrating to Pakistan. 103 Hard economics again undergirded India’s approach to the matter — if a complete population exchange were to take place in Bengal, West Bengal would be compelled to accept 3 million additional citizens in a truncated, already overcrowded and fooddeficient province. Pakistan itself was rattled at the violence spiralling out of control and, by April 1950, Liaquat Ali Khan proved amenable to a joint effort to restore confidence to minorities of both dominions. On a visit to Delhi, he signed 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 Indeed, a major outbreak of violence against Hindus in East Bengal happened when the West Bengal Chief Secretary was in Dhaka, outside the secretariat where he was conducting discussions, owing to a rumour that Fazlul Haque, a Premier of undivided Bengal and soon to be Premier of East Bengal, had been killed in Calcutta. India, Parliamentary Debates, Provisional Parliament, 1st session, 27–28. Letter from Jawaharlal Nehru to Liaquat Ali Khan, 17 February 1950, followed by an offer to privately tour East Bengal on 23 February 1950, reproduced in Bhasin (n 66) 7218–20. Letter from Liaquat Ali Khan to Jawaharlal Nehru, 1 March 1950, reproduced in Bhasin (n 66) 8237. Ministry of Rehabilitation, Comments by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru on the Note Of the Cabinet Committee on ‘Displaced Persons from East Bengal’ (Archived at National Archives of India, 4 August 1950). A Gallup Poll conducted by the Amrita Bazar Patrika, a leading Bengali newspaper in West Bengal, showed that 87% of the readership was in favour of war: Dawn (Karachi, 12 March 1950). The Provincial Government of East Pakistan referred to this in a Press Note on 10 March 1950, calling it ‘bellicose Bharati propaganda’. Srinath Raghavan, War And Peace in Modern India (Palgrave Macmillan 2009) 168–70. India, Parliamentary Debates, 17 March 1950, 1704 (Jawaharlal Nehru). ibid. In the course of this, Nehru, while deploring the ‘libellious’ allegations in the Pakistani press, admitted that he was unable to congratulate India’s press on its restraint. 223