“All major migrations are a great human tragedy,” said M.K. Narayanan, former Governor of West Bengal, former National Security Advisor to the Indian government and erstwhile director of the Intelligence Bureau, at a public conversation on the ‘Future of Sri Lankan Tamil Refugees in India’, held at the Music Academy in Chennai on November 4. Recalling his days in Calcutta (now Kolkata) when Mujib Nagar (the provisional government of Bangladesh during its liberation struggle) was being run from there, he said that he was privy to the great human crisis of over a million refugees coming in and living in abysmal conditions.