 "‘A quiet case of ethnic cleansing’: Why we don’t care enough for minorities in Bangladesh – and Pakistan")
Being a Hindu in Bangladesh is a difficult situation. Till the other day, he aroused anger, especially among the people of jihadi kind, for being seen as a collaborator who schemed enough to become a Sheikh Hasina supporter. He indeed was a loyal Hasina supporter. Still, that doesn’t guarantee him safety. As per a 2021 human rights report, Bangladesh saw more than 3,600 attacks on Hindus in Bangladesh since 2013. Hasina had been in power since 2009.
Minorities in Bangladesh had been ardent Hasina supporters not because the killing of Hindus, the destruction and looting of their property, including temples, and the wanton discrimination regularly meted out to them had stopped completely. Every now and then, on one pretext or the other, there would be violence where only one particular community would be targeted. The last “great killing” took place in 2021 when a copy of the Quran was found at a Durga Puja pandal. It later turned out to be the handiwork of a Muslim man, but the damage was done. As a result, if The Daily Star, the largest-circulating daily English-language newspaper in Bangladesh, is to be believed, “117 Hindu temples or puja pandals and 301 shops/homes were also damaged”.
The Hindu-Muslim violence in Bangladesh is starkly different from that in Bharat. One tends to loosely use the term riot to describe it. But then they are not riots. There can never be a riot in a Muslim-majority state. Remember that line from Taslima Nasrin’s Lajja, where Suronjon is caught in an argument with his father, Sudhamoy Datta: When the father defends his stay in violence-prone Bangladesh, saying there “are riots in all countries. Aren’t there riots in India?”, the son responds: “Riots are good, Baba. But here we don’t have riots. Here Muslims are killing Hindus!”
Still Hindus supported Hasina. Because she ensured there was a semblance of order, a sense of normalcy in their lives. They had seen much worse, so much violence that Hasina’s ‘controlled chaos’ was something they grasped with both hands.
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More ShortsBut as the saying goes, ‘good’ things don’t last long. And they ended this Tuesday, August 6, when Sheikh Hasina was given the 45-minute ultimatum to pack her bags and leave the country. The chaos soon descended on the streets of Bangladesh and even the statue of Bangbandhu — the man who got the country’s freedom in 1971 — was not left alone.
For Hindus in Bangladesh, the era of a jhatka-type of execution was back in action. One can grasp the seriousness of the situation from the fact that the head of Bharat’s Ministry of External Affairs, which is instinctively prone to take a less alarmist position, informed Parliament that “properties of individuals associated with the (Hasina) regime were torched across the country. What was particularly worrying was that minorities, their businesses and temples also came under attack at multiple locations”.
Within 24 hours, there were reports of Hindus being attacked, their houses and temples ransacked, and their valuables looted in as many as 27 districts of Bangladesh. Even an ISKCON temple wasn’t spared. Orchestrated by Jamaat-led Islamist outfits, one saw the resumption of ethnic cleansing that Sheikh Hasina had put a lid on 15 years ago. One can gauge the scale and nature of violence from a harrowing video in circulation these days when Islamist fundamentalists are seen inspecting the genitals of a lynched man, and expressing happiness that he is a Hindu!
The othering of Hindus was always normal in Bangladesh. But now, the genie of jihad, which Hasina had kept inside the bottle for 15 years, is out in the open. Unfortunately, at a time when the minorities of Bangladesh deserved care, empathy and support, there is a tendency, especially among Hindu ‘liberals’, to look the other way, if not completely discount their sufferings. One editor of a New Delhi-based website who carries an American passport, in an interview recently, dismissed the possibility of Hindus being attacked in Bangladesh. Ironically, the same gentleman is never tired of raising the spectre of Hindu fundamentalism and Muslim victimhood in Bharat.
The said editor is merely the grotesque manifestation of a so-called liberal’s innate tendency to submit to the Islamist violence in the name of secularism. These people have chosen to be blind to the deliberate othering of minorities in Islamic states, and Bangladesh is no exception. They don’t care to see that Hindu population in Bangladesh has dwindled to a third from 22 per cent in 1952 to less than 8 per cent today. Such is the scale of Hindu decimation in Bangladesh that “30 years from now, no Hindus will be left in Bangladesh should the current rate of exodus continue”, Dr Abul Barkat, a Dhaka University professor, was quoted as saying by Deep Halder and Avishek Biswas in their 2023 book, Being Hindu in Bangladesh.
If the current situation in Bangladesh is alarmingly grim, the Hindu reaction in Bharat is hardly reassuring. As in the past, there has been a sense of disconnect, if not disinterest, for what is happening to minorities on the other side of the border. What most of these people fail to comprehend is that while they see no connection with their coreligionists in Bangladesh, the Islamists never fail to miss this civilisational/religious link.
But then, why just blame the Left-‘librals’ when, in the deeper analysis, this has long been a failing of Hindu society, whether in Bharat or outside? Nasrin explains this Hindu psyche well in Lajja. In the scene, Suronjon is caught in an argument with a boy named Khaled, who calls him names like “son of a pig” and “bastard”. Suronjoy gives him back in equal measure. Nasrin writes further:
Khaled: ‘Offspring of a dog!’
Suronjon: ‘You are the son of the dog.’
Khaled: ‘Hindu!’
Suronjon: ‘You are a Hindu!’
Suronjon thought that ‘Hindu’ too was a swear word. For quite a few years, he had thought that Hindu was a pejorative, mocking term. It was only when he grew up a bit that he understood that there was a community of people called Hindus and he belonged to that community. After some time, he began to believe that he belonged to the human race and a community called Bengali. The Bengali community had not been created by any religion. He wanted to believe that it was non-communal and inclusive.
Towards the end of the novel, Suronjon’s make-believe world shatters as he pleads to his father to migrate to Bharat because “here (in Bangladesh) Muslims are killing Hindus”. Narsin enacts the drama poignantly:
‘You are calling yourself a Hindu?’ asked Sudhamoy excitedly. He wanted to jump out of bed.
‘We might be atheists and humanists,’ said Suronjon, restraining his father, ‘but people call us Hindus. They call us infidels.’
In the end, Sudhamoy relents and the Datta family prepares to “go away” to Bharat.
This is the story of Hindus in Bangladesh. Their tragedy is three-fold. First, they were convinced to stay put in Pakistan and Bangladesh by their own leaders led by Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. As for the Hindus of Bangladesh, they faced double jeopardy: Most Hindus who stayed back in Bangladesh after Partition belonged to the outcaste community of Namasudras. Before Independence, these people were politically very active and had a charismatic leader in Jogendranath Mandal who believed in the façade of Dalit-Muslim unity. Mandal convinced his people not to migrate to Bharat. But when most of the upper caste Hindus migrated from Bangladesh (then East Pakistan), these Dalits came in direct confrontation with Islamists. With their departure, the very raison d’etre of Dalit-Muslim alliance was gone. Things became so bad that Mandal, who was Pakistan’s first law minister, had to migrate to Bharat in 1950. His followers, being too poor and downtrodden, were not that lucky.
Second, Hindus left behind — like the fictional Sudhmoy of Lajja — convinced themselves that they were not Hindus: They were Bengalis, humanists, atheists, et al. What they failed to realise was that in the eyes of Islamists, they remained Hindus, kafirs!
Third, to their misfortune, their coreligionists in Bharat, especially the dominant Left-‘liberal’ brigade, give two hoots to their plight in Bangladesh. They look for explanations, often mischievously inventing them, to explain how all’s well with minorities in Bangladesh — and in Pakistan. Such has been the dubious character of this class of people that they swear by Ambedkar, but work overtime to deny any relief to the children of Ambedkar desperately stuck in Bangladesh and Pakistan. These “Left-‘liberals’ have been in the forefront to agitate against the CAA introduced by the current government to help the persecuted Hindus of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh get the citizenship of Bharat.
Postscript: The level of Hindu indifference to the plight of minorities can be gauged from the fact that it needed an American activist, Richard L Benkin, to bring out the sufferings of minorities in Bangladesh and Pakistan. In his sentinel book, A Quiet Case of Ethnic Cleansing: The Murder of Bangladesh’s Hindus, Benkin recalls an interaction with his mother. He writes:
When I was a youngster and began understanding what was done to my people (Jews) by the Nazis, I once asked my mother, ‘Mom, why didn’t American Jews do something about this?’ She responded that ‘we really had no idea what was happening’.
Later when I started making these trips to South Asia to stop the murder of Pakistani and Bangladeshi Hindus, she and other loved ones often were concerned for my safety. She asked me if the things happening were really that bad, why we never read about it in our papers or hear about it in the media.
‘Good question,’ I responded. ‘You remember what you said when I asked you why American Jews never did anything to help stop the Holocaust? You said that you just had no idea that it was happening.’
‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘We didn’t.’
‘But that didn’t mean the murders weren’t happening. Just because the papers never reported, it didn’t mean that our families weren’t killed, did it? Same thing now.’
The Jews learnt their lessons during World War II. They never forgot the Holocaust. And they ensured the world never forgets that either. The same can hardly be said about the Hindus — of Bharat, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
The views expressed in the above article are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
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