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Bengali Hindus in Muslim-majority Bangladesh

GARGA CHATTERJEE

T ODAY'S PAPER » OPINION January 1 6, 2014

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The ‘Partition’ was swift and vicious in the Punjabs and Sindh where religious minoritieshave ceased to exist for all practical purposes. This is not so in the Bengals, where manystill live on their ancestral land 

Few moments in the past century have evoked as

much hope in its stakeholders as the emergence

of the secular nation-state of Bangladesh in the

eastern part of the subcontinent. That nation is in

serious turmoil. In the last two years, the

Opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party –

Jamaat-e-Islami combine has been partially 

successful in using its massive economic clout

and propaganda apparatus to portray itself as a

 victim of state-sponsored witch-hunting.

The ‘witch-hunting’ boils down to two things that

can finish off the Jamaat as a viable political

force. The first is the de-registration of the

Jamaat as an electoral force as per a Supreme

court order that bars any party that “puts God

 before the democratic pro cess”. The second is

the war crimes trial of those who committed crimes against humanity during 1971. Much of the present

Jamaat leadership was heavily involved in murder, rape, arson and forced conversions. In a

subcontinent where politics thrives on the erasure of public memory, this episode has stubbornly 

refused to disappear. A dilly-dallying Awami League government was almost forced by the youth

movement in Shahbag to pursue the war crimes trial seriously. Facing the prospect of political

annihilation, the Jamaat responded by a three-pronged offensive. It marshalled its cadres and young

Madrassa students and use them for blockading Dhaka. It lent its activ ists to a BNP in disarray to act as

 boots on the ground. It carried out targeted attacks on the homes, businesses and places of worship of 

Hindus, the nation’s largest religious minority.

In 2001, after the BNP-led alliance won the elections, the usual pattern of murder, rape and arson

targeting Hindus happened on a very large scale. Hindus have traditionally voted for the Awami

League. The guarantee for ‘ jaan and maal  ’ (life and property) is important for the survival of any people. In the Awami League regime, although property and homestead have been regularly taken

away by the powerful persons of the party, systematic attacks on minorities are not part of the party’s

policy. The same cannot be said of the BNP-Jamaat partnership, which regularly threatened both  jaan

and maal  . It is not hard to see why Hindus chose the dev il over the deep sea. T his time, Hindus seemed

to be out of favour from both sides. While they were targeted by the BNP-Jamaat for coming out to

 vote at all, in other areas they were targeted by Awami League rebels for coming out to vote for the

offic ial Awami League candidate who happened to be of the Hindu faith. T here have been disturbing

signs over the past few years that at the local level, the difference between the ‘secular’ Awami League

and the communal-fundamentalist BNP-Jamaat is beginning to disappear, though publicly the former

does not tire in parroting the staunchly secular ideals of 1971.

 A throwback to 1971

The violence unleashed against the Hindus this time, before and after the January 5 polls, have been

 worst in Jessore, Dinajpur and Satkhira, though many other places like Thakurgaon, Rangpur, Bogra,

Lalmonirhat, Gaibandha, Rajshahi and Chittagong have been affected. Malopara in Abhay nagar,Jessore, inhabited by Bengali Dalit castes, has been attacked repeatedly. Large-scale attacks on

 villages, businesses and places of worship, able-bodied men being on night vigils, women huddling

together in one place — all these things brought back memories of 1971 for many of the inhabitants.

In Hazrail Rishipara of Jessore, women were raped at gunpoint for the crime that their families had

 voted in the election. Dinajpur has been badly hit with cases of beatings, arson on homes, shops,

haystacks and crops. Both Jessore and Dinajpur being areas bordering West Bengal, crossing the

Jan 2014

politics of propagand a:The Jamaat-e-Islami, many ofwhose leaders are charged with war crimes andthreatening thelife and property of Bengali Hindus, hasused its propaganda apparatus to portray itself as a victimof witch-hunting.— Photo: AP

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 border in self-preservation is a sad trek that many have undergone. It creates an environment that

forces the remaining Hindus to ask the question ‘Why am I still here?’ ‘Partition’ continues.

The ‘Partition’ was swift and vicious in the Punjabs and Sindh where religious minorities have ceased to

exist for all practical purposes. This is not so in the Bengals, where many still live on the ancestral land

claimed by nations whose legitimacies are much more recent than people’s ancestral claims over their

homestead. More than 25 per cent of Bengal’s western half’s population is Mohammeddan (the figure

 was 19.46 per cent in 1951 , after the 1947 Partition). In the eastern half, 8.5 per cent of the population

is Hindu (it was 22 per cent in 1951). In Bengal, secularism has political currency. It was one of the

foundational principles of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War.

How did things come to be this way? The autocratic years of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s BAKSAL, the

long years of army rule when the barracks used Islam to create a veneer of political legitimacy beyondthe Awami League and pro-liberation forc es, the ov ertures by mainstream parties to fundamentalist

groupings — all these have given religion-based politics a front-row seat in the nation. Religiopolitical

organisations have not been immune to the violent turn of this brand of politics internationally in the

last two decades. Pro-Pakistan forces, which looked to faith-unity as the basis of statehood, did not

disappear after the Liberation War. They were broadly and transiently (as it increasingly seems) de-

legitimised due to their role in the atrocities of 1971.

But what about the project — that religion marks a nation? What about the splinters of such an idea

stuck deep in political and societal structures? That trend has persisted, even expanded. In the

imagination of all the ruling factions since 194 7 during East Bengal, East Pakistan and Bangladesh

periods, there has been a tacit understanding of the normative citizen — a Mohameddan Bengali male

or a Bengali Mohameddan male. Hindus there are a living reminder of an identity that is not fully 

coterminous with ideas that conflate Bengaliness (or ‘Bangladeshiness’) with that normative citizen.

Their progressive numerical marginality makes this conflation project easier. Such projects often live

in the underside of mindscapes that can be ‘secular’ in very many declarations. Thus, they can be

marginalised without being actively targeted, in ‘innocuous’ everyday dealings.

The majority can decide to be whatever it wants and the minority has to follow suit in a modern nation-

state. So, Bengali Hindus were expected to become ‘Pakistanis’ overnight in 1947 just as others

elsewhere were expected to suddenly become ‘Indians’. While Bengali Muslim politicians have the

autonomous agency to de-Pakistanise themselves at will, East Bengali Hindus could only publicly do so

upon an explicit cue from their Bengali Muslim brethren. Just like other minorities, “extra-territorial

loyalty” is the slur that is bandied about. A nd this is also what makes minorities cautious, anxious and

lesser citizens in a polity where they cannot critique their state in all the ways a majority community 

person can.

Still one cannot but hope that the People’s Republic of Bangladesh would live up to some of its original

ideals. Minorities have fled the nation-state for want of security in large numbers, year after year.

There is significant presence of minorities in the bureaucracy and local administration. Even during the

recent spate of violence, the state has transferred police officials for failing to provide security. This

reality exists too. It is this reality that partly prevents a mass exodus of Hindus beyond the levels seen

at present. For many, they have too much to lose to be able to leave. And that is a problem for areligious majoritarian nation-state.

(The writer is a researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Overtures to fundamentalist groupings gave religion-based politics a fillip in

 Bangladesh

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