We have finally started taking notice of the ethnic cleansing of the Hindus in Bangladesh. The steady but silent depletion of the non-Muslim population in Bangladesh is not the handiwork of some Taliban-style fanaticism. It is the signature achievement of the amalgamation of Islamism and constitutional politics
Cold War veteran Henry Kissinger speaks of different kinds of world orders, i.e., systems of state, in his recent book titled, not quite imaginatively, World Order. He speaks of the western world order (consisting of the US and western European countries), of Islamic world order (consisting of Saudi Arabia, Iran and the likes), and also speaks of the Chinese world order (consisting of China and its growing chain of satellite nations). We may note that such world orders are not mere political systems; they are a whole worldview, a complete system of faith, a total set of philosophies guiding one from the cradle to the grave.
The Indian system does not feature prominently in Kissinger’s study, probably because India was never properly decolonised and continues to operate on the western model to this day. However, there is a more serious omission in that study: Kissinger completely overlooks the political system, which is the product of the intermarriage of western order and Islamism, an alliance that has given birth to our very own subcontinental Islamic state(s) in the 20th century. We want to point out that a different, and more original, concept of Islamic state existed prior to the rise of the current band of terrorists called Islamic State (ISIS) and that idea originated in India. It was a strange complex of Islamism and western idea of polity and state.
One may argue that the first Islamic state of modernity was established when Muslim league was formed in Dacca with active patronage of the British, some 110 years ago. Here was a western-style political party, married to the basic tenets of Islamism, later to be exemplarily illustrated in the charismatic figure of Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Suave, educated, westernised, and some even call him secular, and it was he who was the architect of Pakistan. Islamic state that we are talking of is a hybrid dyad of two disparate principles: western state polity and Islam.
This Islamic state propagates a systematic jehad against its minorities by legal, constitutional and political means. They abide by the holy responsibility of Islamism to annihilate the unbeliever, but operate within a political system borrowed from the West, which is secular in the sense that it is not a direct theocratic rule of the sharia, but is a sharia-influenced constitutional framework. The result is very often a failed state, like that of Pakistan, but such failure is perhaps inevitable given the sheer tension with which two completely diverse worldviews are held together. Western system (the so-called Westphalian sovereignty Kissinger talks of) hypothetically believes in a plural community of nations and nationalities based on equal rights, but Islamism holds a different view on that. Karl Marx interestingly observed the following in his 1854 article, titled On the Eastern Question:
“The Koran and the Mussulman legislation emanating from it reduce the geography and ethnography of the various people to the simple and convenient distinction of two nations and of two countries; those of the Faithful and of the Infidels. The Infidel is ‘harby,’ i.e., the enemy. Islamism proscribes the nation of the Infidels, constituting a state of permanent hostility between the Mussulman and the unbeliever.” One can see that numerous contemporary witnesses bear testimony to several crimes (which ranged from arson, assault and pilfering to mass rapes and genocides) committed against the minority Hindus in undivided Bengal at the behest of Muslim league. Nirad C Chaudhuri in The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian gives several accounts of such violence, where the Hindus were always at the receiving end.
British colonial administration, having suffered at the hands of Bengal’s Hindus (who were at the forefront of armed freedom struggle in India; it was a Bengali named Jatin Das who mentored the likes of Bhagat Singh while Bengal’s Rashbehari Bose and Subhash Bose were at the helm of INA, to quote a few examples from a vast ocean of martyrs) decided that promoting Muslim politics in Bengal was in the best interests of the Raj. Census reports were strategically used (some commentators alleged that they were deliberately inflated in favour of the Muslims and many contemporary accounts registered a protest in this regard) in order to establish a divided electorate (the so-called communal award of 1932) where Hindus will remain perpetually marginal. In the first elections held in India under Dominion status, unleashing Muslim political forces paid rich dividends to the British and that was glaringly evident in Bengal.
In spite of all secular attempts at suppression of that period in the history of Bengal, we still have sufficient accounts from contemporary literature to show us how Hindus were victimised, how governmental policies enforced anti-Hindu discrimination, how police was used to terrorise the Hindus, and how fairness in recruitment was sacrificed in order to stop deserving Hindus from getting jobs in crucial sectors of civil administration and police. This scenario continued throughout the 1930s and 1940s, finally leading to the point of no return — namely, the Partition of Bengal. We touched upon that in our previous article on Syama Prasad Mukherjee.
Tathagata Roy in his My People, Uprooted: A Saga of the Hindus of Eastern Bengal painstakingly gives an account of the massacre, uprooting, rape, loot, arson, forced conversion and other forms of violence carried out against the Hindus of Bengal since the rise of organised Islamist politics. Take for example the infamous Noakhali genocide. It was spearheaded not by some obscure fanatics uttering illegible prayers in Arabic, or sword-wielding Ghazis in true ISIS style (for that matter, the Talibans also are inseparable from the clerics; the word ‘Taliban’ literally means one who is learned in Islamic theology), but was launched by a Muslim league politician named Golam Sarwar, who rapidly rose to prominence after successfully engineering mass rapes and massacres of Hindus in Noakhali district of East Bengal.
This process gained further momentum in East Bengal after 1947. There was a state-sponsored, constitutionally sanctioned offensive, targeting the non-Muslim population. The Enemy Properties Act of East Pakistan, which continued unabated in independent Bangladesh, albeit with a different name (Vested Properties Act), bears a glaring testimony to what can be called a constitutional jehad on the Hindus, who were forced to evacuate.
Roughly speaking, under this Act, if you are a Bangladesh/East Pakistani national and a Hindu, and if any of your family members migrate to India, then your property becomes enemy property/vested property, with you summarily losing all rights to it. This Act forced more and more Hindus to evacuate and leave for India. Interestingly, a few years ago Amartya Sen praised this brutal process of forced Hindu evacuation, hailing it for having automatically brought land reforms in Bangladesh without much fuss and ado about any political initiative for land reform movements. But our secularists’ version of the history of the subcontinent is not something we are focusing on here, so let us return to the question of the Islamic state.
Hilly region of Chittagong was a tribal-dominated area and yet it was given to Pakistan. like numerous other tribes of Bangladesh, the plight of the tribals of Chittagong was horrible, as the Bangladesh government systematically enforced a policy of settling Muslims in the tribal areas, effectively making the indigenous population a minority in their own homeland. Since then, both the Army and police have been mobilised in a state-sponsored attack on the tribals. Chittagong also has a sizeable Buddhist population that has repeatedly suffered. In neighbouring Myanmar, Muslim settlers from the British era, called Rohingiyas (in a replica of the Assam scenario, where during British rule Muslim settlers from Bengal were strategically encouraged to inhabit Assam, thus, initiating a tilt in demography) sometime back entered into conflict with the Burmese Buddhists and then as a fallout, Chittagong’s Buddhists paid with their blood, again the state conveniently looking the other way. The last major anti-Buddhist violence occurred at Ramu, Chittagong few years ago, but the tribals were freshly assaulted again only a few days ago.
The city of Dhaka had a towering, legendary landmark at its centre, the Dhakeshwari temple, where Goddess Dhakeshwari, considered a form of Ma Durga was worshipped. The city purportedly derived its name from this temple. It was partially destroyed by the Pakistani army in 1971. Independent Bangladesh under Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, instead of restoring it, actually bulldozed the remaining structure. That temple has not been rebuilt to this day.
It has been observed by Gary Bass, an American journalist, in his well-researched and well-documented book The Blood Telegram that 90 per cent of the casualties in the Pakistani crackdown in 1971 comprised Hindus. Bangladesh is a country that literally bought its freedom with the blood of Hindus. And yet the decimation of the Hindu population went on unchallenged in Bangladesh. Awami league, born out of Muslim league (thus, bearing a legacy of constitutional Islamic polity that characterises the Islamic state we are talking of) was headed by the likes of Mujibur, who began his political career as a henchman of Suhrawardy, who was called the Butcher of Calcutta owing to his role in the Great Calcutta Killing of 1945). In fact, a joke circulates in Bangladesh: the Awami politician will say Hindu thakle vote amar, Hindu gele jomi amar (which means, if the Hindu stays, I get his vote, if the Hindu leaves, I get his land).
A few years after Bangladesh became an independent country, more committed fundamentalists with little qualms about maintaining a façade of hypocrisy came to power dislodging the Awami league. Soon enough, the constitution began with the phrase Bismillah’ir Rahman’ur Rahim and Islam became the state religion (thus, giving official sanction to the marginalisation of all non-Muslims). We have finally started taking notice of the ethnic cleansing of the Hindus in Bangladesh. But most of us are still missing the basic modus operandi which builds an Islamic state, the peculiar synthesis of Islamism with the western notion of state. The steady but silent depletion of the non-Muslim population in Bangladesh is not the handiwork of some Taliban-style fanaticism. It is the signature achievement of the amalgamation of Islamism and constitutional politics. This often generates in the West a mistaken outlook, which even paves the way for such ludicrous thinking that because Bangladesh Islamists wear T-shirts, they essentially represent moderate and soft voices (overheard that from the lament of a Hindu activist, who has been trying to sensitise US Senate and Congress about Islamist atrocities in Bangladesh).
All that the West wants from this Islamic state that we are talking of, is to be shown a magic mirror in order to affirm its own cultural norms, to assuage its wounded ideological supremacy and allay its deep-rooted apprehensions about the possible clash of civilisations. But as direct victims, the Hindus of the subcontinent can have a different take on this matter.
(Both writers are founder-members of Shoptodina Foundation and teach Economics and English respectively at Delhi University)