Rehabilitation and Resettlement of Refugees

The people displaced by partition were ‘refugees’ in the sense that they had not left their homes voluntarily. The two new governments did not organise an orderly exchange of population. Refugee resettlement became the immediate challenge for both governments (India and Pakistan). The Indian government established an emergency committee of the cabinet to deal with the crisis in Delhi, and a Ministry of Relief and Rehabilitation to look after the refugees. In view of large-scale influx of displaced people, the notion of ‘evacuee property’ to be protected by government, for any future return of those who had left for Pakistan, became an empty rhetoric because it was almost impossible to force the refugees who settled in the empty houses of Muslims. (This, at a later time, made the return of the refugees impossible).