VIEWPOINT
Romit Bagchi
When the persecution of Hindus in Muslim-dominated Eastern Bengal, which later became East Pakistan and then Bangladesh, began, I do not know. In my limited knowledge of history, it started when the Viceroy of East India Company government Lord Curzon enforced the partition of Bengal in 1905. This well-thought-out move to rob the Hindu Bengalis of their rebellious fire by dividing the race on the communal lines rather helped ignite a full-blooded nationalist movement.
The partition plan divided Bengal into the two provinces: one included what are now West Bengal, Odisha and Bihar and the other, Eastern Bengal and Assam. While the former was a Hindu-majority province the other had the majority of the Muslims. Aurobindo Ghosh penned robust articles in the nationalist daily Bande Mataram on the desecration of the Hindu temples and atrocities perpetrated on the Hindus in Eastern Bengal who were up in arms against the partition plan. This continued with varying intensity till the macabre Noakhali riots closely following the Great Calcutta Killing.
What happened in Noakhali was more prolonged than the Calcutta riots. The Noakhali pogrom forced Mahatma Gandhi to camp there for many days on a peace mission to douse the communal inferno. About 5000 Hindus were massacred during these riots, thousands were forcibly converted and hundreds of women were raped. Property was ransacked; houses and shops were looted and torched; temples were desecrated.
Unlike the partition of Punjab, the partition of Bengal was marked by absence of any major communal incidents. Things, however, resumed with a vengeance in Khulna district of East Pakistan on December 20, 1950. What followed is horrible. The fire- fanned by the vicious propaganda unleashed by the Pakistan government- spread thick and fast, engulfing district after district in East Pakistan and resulting in exodus of lakhs of Hindus to West Bengal. Citing just one instance will suffice to make clear what happened there. In February 1950, a train carrying mostly the Hindus fleeing to West Bengal was stopped while it was moving over the Meghna river by armed gangs. The Hindus were singled out, killed with their throats slit and then thrown into the river.
The unabated carnage happening with the full governmental patronage forced then Union Industry Minister Syama Prasad Mookerjee to quit the Nehru government, angry as he was with the latter’s wishy-washy attitude towards the Pakistan government. After resigning, he formed the Bharatiya Jana Sangh. But that is a different history altogether. What is important for this piece is the fact that such State-sponsored riots targeting the Hindus in erstwhile East Pakistan and then in Bangladesh continued. Perhaps the most gruesome of these is what followed the Babri Masjid demolition on December 6, 1992.
But if we seek to explain this majoritarian paranoia vis-à-vis the Hindus objectively we cannot gloss over factors other than the communal divide. We must look at the complex socio-economic and political factors, which, coupled with the community-based consciousness forged and bolstered by the communal propaganda unleashed by the Muslim League in the 1940s, generated the fierce anti-Hindu sentiment which culminated in a series of pogroms.
During the creation of Pakistan, there were 13.5 million Hindus in East Pakistan, constituting 29 per cent of its total population. But this figure does not reveal all. The Hindus owned nearly 80 per cent of its national wealth and financed 95 per cent of the educational institutions. According to Syama Prasad’s biographer Tathagata Roy, they owned nearly 75 per cent of the land and properties in the capital Dacca. The majority of the zamindars were Hindus. They dominated the economic and academic landscape in all the towns. The Muslims, mostly the farmers, held sway only over the countryside. Many historians, particularly those with the Marxist leaning, sought to view what happened in Noakhali and afterwards in East Pakistan from the angle of the peasant-zamindar antagonism-the class conflict whipped up further by the feeling of superiority among the Hindus and their elitist affectation.
Coming to the present unrest, we may say that the identity crisis which has been haunting Bangladesh since its creation has come back again with an ominous punch. Two mighty forces-the exclusive Islamic identity and the inclusive Bengali identity-are again staring at each other.
This is Bangladesh’s history. This nation keeps swinging like a pendulum between these two ends, making it restless groping in vain for a solid ideological/cultural anchorage. While the majority of the elite section of its society gravitates towards the Bengali identity-based syncretic culture the educationally unprivileged feel an irresistible pull towards fundamentalism.
But this is perhaps an oversimplification of reality which is quite messy and complex. Even during the Liberation War, while a great number of the people participated in it the number of those who stayed out was not small either. The latter viewed it as the Indian scheme to split Pakistan and weaken the Islamic State whose creation India had never acquiesced. They feared that India’s success would end up reducing Bangladesh to its colony. Moreover, many who fought the war as members of the Mukti Bahini (liberation force) were unhappy with the Indian authorities usurping all the credits of the victory while portraying it as a mere Indo-Pak war, belittling the enormous sacrifice the people of Bangladesh made. They affirm that India was merely an ally in Bangladesh’s Liberation War. Not surprisingly, the iconic photograph of the surrender ceremony is absent in the national museum at Dhaka.
On the top of everything else, there is a fear conscious or unconscious in the Muslim psyche across the sub-continent: a chilling fear of dissolving in the all-absorbing, elastic genius of Indian culture stripped of their separate Islamic identity. This is more so as most of them have a Hindu ancestry.
Now the question is: how will this hardened contradiction be resolved? While I was thinking of this, Rabindranath Tagore’s essay on the Hindu-Muslim distemper in the restive Indian sub-continent came to my mind. Asked how this deeply ingrained communal antipathy could be resolved in a syncretic synthesis, he wrote that the Time alone could hammer it out through the transformation of the Mind. As far as Bangladesh’s edginess is concerned, the same seems to be the solution: evolution of the collective mind from its bigoted exclusivity into an all-in inclusivity. That time seems still far-off. And if this monumental change is to happen, India as the privileged custodian of the spiritual knowledge of the One in the All and the All in the One must play a pivotal role, shedding her self-involved obsession and waking up the humanity to supra-religious Spirituality, making it the dominant note of human life. She has been striving now to attain Shakti. The time may come when she will rise up to the call of her destiny and fulfil the mission which she alone can accomplish.
