How Hindus became minority in East Bengal turned Bangladesh?
By Rabindranath Trivedi
Mahatma Gandhiji’s Noakhali Diary gives us many woeful details. His peace mission has not yet fulfilled. M A Jinnah’s Pakistan is now a utopia and turned to Quid to al-Quida and Bangabandhu’s Sonar Bangla is struggling for democracy, rule of law social justice, and principles of war of liberation.
Bangladesh, the youngest nation in South Asia, tore itself apart from the Islamic Republic of Pakistan in 1971 by the fire of her freedom fighters, under the leadership of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, founding father of Bangladesh.
Mahatma M K Gandhi, Quid-e-Azam M A Jinnah and Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman did not totally succeed, besides achieving partition and nationhood. Bangladesh, which was born as a democratic and secular state, switched over again to an Islamic ideology of erstwhile Muslim League regime is perplexing because the fierce fight against the two nation theory based on religious fundamentalism was the core of the Bangladeshis liberation movement.
It is our introspection that the same Bangladeshis, who fought for 25 years, sacrificed over three million people and achieved liberation in December 1971.’While India steadfastly adhered to democracy in a complex and vast social setting, Pakistan, for most part of its existence, reeled under military rule, with patches of democratic dispensation, more as an exception than rule, during the last 60 years. The two countries have also had adversarial relations almost since 1947 that at times degenerated into full-blown hostilities.’ (BBC 14 Aug.07)
“The birth of Pakistan on the basis of separate nationhood has been rejected through the violent emergence of the Peoples' Republic of Bangladesh. One could ask as why the partition of India on the basis of faith, Hindu and Muslim, did not resolve the communal discord and usher in an era of lasting peace as hoped by some idealistic leaders. The reality is that instead of being left with unending peace, the subcontinent got endowed with constant tension and conflicts. The great divide could simply not bring any peace in its wake. Initially, it compartmentalized and then tightly sealed Hindu-Muslim animosities, cementing festering grudges into near permanent hostilities.…
Why? The difficulty is how to satisfactorily address the grievances of the minority in a democracy when the break-up of the country on the basis of faith has rendered them so complex and so infinitely intimidating. It is not clear what issues have been satisfactorily resolved by the momentous episode of partition. The minority syndrome has given rise to new vicious sectarian designs in Pakistan. One could only hope that the leaders in the sub-continent would not be under any promise to travel permanently in combative compartments of separateness.” (Pangs of partition, Nurul Huq, The daily star, 12 June 2014).
Partition is a recurring theme in Indian writing in English. Much of the literature focuses on the experiences of partition on the Punjab border. Amite Ghosh stands out in his choice to write about the aftermath of Pakistan on the Bengal border, and his novels demonstrate a continuing engagement with the motif of migration and refugees settlement in West Bengal, Rituparna Roy takes Ghosh’s 2004 Novel, “ The Hungry Tide” and examines how it traces the rejectory of Bengali Hindu refugees in the sub-continent. In fact, well after it had begun, Nehru continued to believe that the exodus in the East could be halted, even reversed, provided government in Dacca could be persuaded to deploy ‘psychological measures’ to restore confidence among the Hindu minorities. This difference in attitude and perception of the Central government regarding the nature of the crisis facing the two borders translated itself strikingly into the expenditure on refugees in the West and the East.
Mahatma Gandhiji stayed at Noakhali for about four months and left for Calcutta on 2 March 1947. Direct Action had entered its historic importance not because Pakistan was achieved on that day but because on its corpses was laid the edifice of Bengal Partition. From what happened in Calcutta and Noakhali in 1946 it had to be separated from the Muslim League and Muslims.
Jinnah and the Exchange of Population:
Muslim League leaders, Jinnah included, had long advocated exchange of population between Muslim and non-Muslim India. All those, who advocated the establishment of a Muslim State – Pakistan, also advocated as its necessary corollary the exchange of population. Mr. Jinnah said, referring to the driving out of Hindus from Noakhali in 1946 that it was already transfer of population in action, and some machinery should be devised for affecting it peacefully and on a large scale. At a press conference in Karachi on November 25, 1946, Jinnah had appealed to the central as well as provincial governments to take up the question of ‘exchange of population’ between future Pakistan and India based on religion.
The Dawn, then edited by Jinnah himself, in December 3, 1946 published a statement, entitled `Exchanged of Population’ a most practicable solution`, by Khan Iftikhar Hussain Khan of Mamdot, President of Punjab Muslim League. The Dawn, on December 4, 1946, said, the Muslim League demanded exchange of population and Sind Premier Ghulam Hussain Hidayatullah had offered ‘land for the Muslims of northern India’. Sir Feroze Khan Noon, who later rose to be Prime Minister of Pakistan, while addressing Muslim League legislators in Patna, had gone to the extent of threatening ‘re-enactment of the murderous orgies of Chengez Khan and Halagu Khan’ if non-Muslims did not agree to an exchange of population. Shaukat Hayat Khan, son of the more famous Sir Sikander Hayat Khan, had also given out threats to support transfer of population".
In the last sixty eight years (1947-2014), more than fifteen million of the country's Hindu's have fled to India in the face of sustained persecution and periodic riots with its poverty and frequent cyclones, Bangladesh are major news each year. But the unfolding fate of Hindus in the country rarely makes headlines in Indian media. The divided nature of the Bangladeshi polity has its roots in the very history of its creation and the events in the first years of its independence. This division is, then, largely, a hangover from the past and recent issues are viewed through the prism of the past... The major issues dividing the Bangladeshi polity are the questions of acceptability of the Jamaat for its anti-liberation and genocidal role during the Bangladesh War of Liberation in 1971 and its extremist Islamic position and the question of the acceptability in the changes made since the bloody August 1975 coup and overthrow of Sheikh Mujib and his AL from power are there too total Islamisation started and the Hindus felt betrayed.
According to voter enrolment in the 9th parliamentary elections in 2008, the census was deliberately undercounting Hindus in Bangladesh, who, by his estimate, constitute about 16 per cent of the population even today. The government does this on purpose to deflect the charge of large scale Hindu migration due to state oppression. "With a low percentage to start off with, there can be no declining population due to migration. In reality, there is continuous migration of Hindus from Bangladesh because of torture and humiliation. But there are other, equally compelling, reasons for the demographic shift. India's long and porous borders with Bangladesh, old family ties and ethnic similarity coupled with better economic opportunities have resulted in continuous illegal migration of poor Hindus and — not to forget — a considerable number of Muslims. In fact, the Indian home ministry concedes its inability to fix a number to the volume of Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants coming into India.
We learn from history that we do not learn from history
Pre-Partition, Hindus in Bangladesh constituted 30 per cent of the population. Their numbers have been steadily declining since then. Most of this drastic demographic shift was during the Partition and the two decades of East Pakistan. Yet, the minority in the country that Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman built has a different story to tell.
Are Hindus in Bangladesh quietly giving up on their country? Has the deep brotherhood forged by a shared language, culture and history caved in? Is the country's biggest minority group being forced to migrate in large numbers due to persecution? Though no one can deny that the Hindu population of Bangladesh, the second largest population of the world, has been slowly declining over the years since it got independence in December 1971, questions of how much it has declined and why it has happened generates heated debate among both the communities, Muslims and Hindus. Many believed that the agony of the Hindus would be over and they would regain their lost honor with the liberation of Bangladesh in December 1971. It was entirely a mistaken notion.
By and large, the successive Governments in liberated Bangladesh have followed the same policy as was pursued and practised by Pakistan towards her Hindu and other minorities Dr Akbar Ali Khan, a retired secretary, GoB, who witnessed the birth of Bangladesh, wrote a book titled “Discovery of Bangladesh-Exploration into Dynamics of a Hidden Nation” (UPL,2001) has explained ,” Bangladesh ‘s birth was not only late but also sudden. She is neither a distinct geographical entity nor a well-defined historical unit. Her political boundaries were demarcated in 1947 by a British arbitrator who was selected primarily because of his ignorance about south Asia..The traumatic partition of 1947 did not, however, resolved the dilemma of her nationhood. Bangladesh is the product of double secessions. Here is a nation that changed its statehood twice in less than a quarter of a century. (Dr Akbar Ali Khan, book, P -1).
I knew Kuldip Nayar, a senior journalist of India in 2000 while I was the press sectary in Bangabhaban, he writes, “Pakistan Founder Mohammad Ali Jinnah went on plugging that Hindus and Muslims were two separate nations, and this made them increasingly distant from each other. For those who still regret the division, I can only say that the British could have probably kept the subcontinent united if they had been willing to ladle out more power in 1942 when Sir Stafford Cripps tried to reconcile the aspirations of people in India with his limited brief.” (The idea of partition recedes in shadows , Kuldip Nayar, The daily star, 7 Aug 2014 )
‘The present boundaries of Bangladesh were drawn in pursuance of the two -nation theory’. (Badruddin Umar1987). A one-man boundary commission, consisting of the British jurist, Sir Cyril Radcliff, drew up a boundary line across undivided Bengal, which had a total area of 203,028 sq kms, to create two separate entities-Easts and west Bengal, which formed the eastern wing of Pakistan, and West Bengal which became a province of independent India. The resulting 2,736 kms long boundary line cut across Jessore, Nadia, Malda, Dinajpur, and Jalpaiguri districts of Bengal and Sylhet district of Assam.This arbitrary boundary line mostly ignored factors such as communications and railway links, water channels, cultural and pilgrimage sites, location of industries and vital strategic factors.
Although the international boundary of India as an independent country has not undergone any significant modification since 1947, the status of the former two wings or the provinces of Pakistan was changed. The eastern wing of Pakistan, following a civil war in 1971, was separated from the western wing and emerged as an independent country, with the new name of Bangladesh. The western wing retained its former name of Pakistan. The partition plan was declared on June 3, 1947, and was implemented on August 14, 1947. The mass exodus of Hindu, Muslim and Sikh populations began immediately after the declaration of the plan. As far as East Bengal was concerned, the Radcliff award gave it an area of 141,158 sq kms and a population of 41.8 million people (based on the 1941 census) which represented only 40 per cent of the area, but almost 60 per cent of the population of the pre-partition Bengal and Assam provinces. (from “The Legacy of Religious Minority and Politic in East Bengal turned Bangladesh,“ Rabindranath Trivedi’s manuscript to be published in 2014)
.Nationalism in Bangladesh was shaped by interplay of faith and habitat, religion and language and extra-territorial and territorial loyalties. Both linguistic and religious strands constitute inseparable ingredients of nationalism in Bangladesh.
Dr. Akbar Ali Khan opined “If Islam is considered as an essential component of Bangladeshi nationalism, the role of the minority community in the political life of Bangladesh needs to be delineated. Bangladesh contains more than 14.5(fourteen and half) million Hindus and 1.5 (one point five) million Buddhists and Christians. Total Hindu population in Bangladesh exceeds the population of Muslim majority countries like Yemen Republic, Jordan, Tajikistan, Syrian Arab Republic, Tunisia, Oman etc. Politicians in Bangladesh must, therefore, come to grips with this inescapable reality."(Discovery of Bangladesh, UPI, p151-52).
Rabindranath Trivedi is a retired civil servant , freedom fighter, author and columnist.
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