India: 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...