Bengali refugees have not just been hounded out of their lands, they have been hounded out of cognition, knowledge and discourse as well. It is the height of intellectual dishonesty to pretend that those Islamist forces — who can make the Communist Government throw Taslima out of Kolkata by carrying out rampage in broad daylight on the streets of Kolkata, and compel the organisers of Kolkata International Book fair under the TMC regime to refuse entry to Salman Rushdie — will behave in a benign manner
A Bengali anthology of writings exists about the infamous massacre of Marichjhapi titled Morichjhapi: Chhinno Desh, Chhinno Itihash (Morichjhnapi: Torn Counrty, Torn History). Marichjhapi, a remote locality in the mangrove forests of Sundarbans, is the place where Jyoti Basu’s police and CPM cadres opened fire on Bangladeshi Hindu refugees who fled from the camps of central India. The story goes like this — the left always made an electoral promise that once voted to power, it would ensure that all Bengali refugees who had been settled in the Dandakaranya area of central India would be allowed to relocate in Bengal. But once the left came to power in 1977, it very conveniently forgot about the promise.
When some refugees actually tried coming back, they were forcibly prevented. When some of them went to the extent of settling at Marichjhapi, Sundarbans without caring for the approval of Jyoti Basu’s Government and party, they were brutally killed, as if to set an example. This anthology we are talking of records that Jyoti Basu, just prior to that massacre, on 8 May 1979, spoke with some satisfaction at an Indian Chamber of Commerce gathering held at Kolkata’s Grand Hotel that the left Front Government’s assuming power had resulted in many exiled Muslims (who earlier migrated to east Pakistan) coming back to West Bengal, thus setting a supreme example of Indian secularism.
We are not going to discuss in this article Basu’s policy of killing Hindu refugees and welcoming Bangladeshi Muslims in West Bengal, and its resultant implication for West Bengal’s demography. We shall instead focus on an interesting aspect of our subcontinent’s history. What we are talking about is a muted and mutilated history of the dispersal, dislocation and dismemberment of the Bengali refugees from East Pakistan/Bangladesh.
Noted Kolkata actor of yesteryear, Bhanu Banerjee, produced a play titled Notun Ihudi (The New Jews) which spoke about the experience of the Hindu refugees from East Pakistan. The play became hugely popular, but it was soon pushed out by the new breed of internationalist theatre dominated by left-liberal prejudice, and was later heard of no more. The comparison might not be precise, for the Bengalis lack any equivalent of Zionism, given the cultural-intellectual dominance of the internationalist left since the 1940s. But Jews too have remained disorganised for a sizeable period of their history, and indeed the tortuous history of the disempowerment of the Bengalis, uprooted from their own lands, closely mirrors a large part of the Jewish history of persecution.
The parallel does not end there. Permanent liability Camp was a name given to a kind of concentration camp of Bengali refugees in independent India. The refugees in such camps were not allowed to settle outside, and their movements were carefully monitored so that the tortuous history to which they could bear testimony did not spill out. Even today it is said that there are people in the Dandakaranya area who have witnessed such brutality (like a baby was beheaded and then returned to the mother, asking her to breastfeed) that still no journalists are allowed to talk to them.
Given the internationalist nirvana of the left-leaning bhadraloks of Kolkata, there was practically no force to take up the refugee cause, and as a result all sorts of licences were taken with the Bengali refugees. Because the Bengali intellectuals and politicians remained callously indifferent to them, almost nobody ever enquired about the plight of these Bengali refugees who were being forced to settle outside West Bengal, in unknown (and often unfriendly) terrains, citing the (absurd) reason of lack of space in West Bengal. The central objective was to further decimate the Bengali people, a Nehruvian legacy from the days of Nehru-liaquat Pact. A retired IAS officer notes in the said anthology that in Orissa, the refugee rehabilitation fund was diverted in a very ingenious manner. Some refugees were made to settle in a remote village, at a distance of, say, some 25 km from another small group of refugees settled in another remote village, and then a road was constructed, the money for the road being spent from rehabilitation package. Bengali refugees were the last people to benefit from such manoeuvrings.
One who goes without a name and without a definition suffers from the ultimate kind of silencing and suppression. The Bengali refugees from East Pakistan/Bangladesh are actually an undefined multitude, because India is not a signatory to the United Nations’ Geneva Convention on refugees. As a result there is a continuous attempt from the left-liberal quarters to blur the demarcation between refugees and infiltrators. Taslima Nasrin, otherwise known to be sympathetic to the Hindus of Bangladesh, once commented on her facebook status that Bangladeshi Muslims should be considered as economic refugees and should be given the humanitarian benefits which refugees normally are given.
However, such a concept of refugees is completely contrary to the UN definition of refugees. Unless persecuted and forced to evacuate for political, ethnic, religious, social and cultural oppression, one cannot claim to be a refugee. Migrating for economic reasons cannot make one a refugee; besides the law & order problem created by Bangladeshi infiltrators cannot be simply overlooked. Extending Taslima’s logic, an outlaw can be called a social refugee, and a rapist can also be called a sexual refugee. But this farce continues precisely because Bengali speaking Hindus could never take a strong stand on this issue, due to lack of leadership.
We are routinely told by Bengal’s left-liberal-secular intelligentsia that there is no such thing as a demographic shift in Bengal, believed to be owing to infiltration from Bangladesh, that it is just a propaganda by Hindutva forces. This is funny for two reasons. First, the census reports indeed show that the Hindu share of population is continually on the wane in Bengal (and if this trend continues Hindus will become a minority in a few decades from now), which is simultaneous with a rapid growth of Muslim population. A comparison between the 1951 census and the 2011 census will establish this point. We pledge to explore this population shift in another article. All we can say now is that it takes an ostrich-like attitude to deny this sand-storm of a growing Islamisation of West Bengal.
Secondly, collecting data at the ground level has its own perils, as people whoever had attempted to undertake a sample survey in the border regions of West Bengal will tell you. Again, it is the height of intellectual dishonesty to pretend that those Islamist forces who can make the Communist Government throw Taslima out of Kolkata by carrying out rampage in broad daylight on the streets of Kolkata, and compel the organisers of Kolkata international book fair under TMC regime to refuse entry to Salman Rushdie will behave in a benign manner in the remote corners of the State. Indeed, there are areas in West Bengal from where Hindus are becoming refugees once again.
The East Pakistan refugees since the partition of Bengal were forced by the left into a blind lane. It must be admitted that the growing influence of the communists among the East Bengal refugees partly owed to the fact that the Communist party extensively worked among them. No other force did the same amount of work, undoubtedly. Syama Prasad was dead in 1953, and Jan Sangh became practically defunct in Bengal. Congress instead of addressing the issue in most cases aggravated the problem (the root cause of Bengali refugee problem was the Nehru-liaquat Pact, as a protest against which Syamaprasad resigned from the all party Cabinet).
Filling in the vacuum, Communist party soon rallied the refugees under its red banner. Mohit Roy in one of his articles gives a very interesting picture of a charter of demands by the UCRC (United Central Refugee Council) dominated by the left. This charter is from the early 1950s. It included all sorts of international concerns (like US imperialism must stop attacking Korea and Vietnam) and curiously demanded a return of all the Muslims to West Bengal who had previously migrated to East Pakistan following partition. The UCRC, however, made no demand for a return of the displaced Hindus to East Pakistan, knowing well that they could not survive there. But what was most glaringly typical of Indian secularism was this: the said document is absolutely silent about the atrocities which compelled the Hindus to be uprooted in the first place.
This tradition continues to this day, as a result of which no comprehensive analysis of the Bengali refugee question has taken place till now. We lack documentation, we lack precise data, we lack access to the victims who are still alive and can leave invaluable testimony for posterity, we lack a detailed account of the population dispersal following this slow holocaust of the Bangla-speaking Hindus. This is what the secularist suppression has done to this immense human tragedy. Bengali refugees have not just been hounded out of their lands, they have been hounded out of cognition, knowledge and discourse as well.
(Both Anish Gupta and Tamal Dasgupta are founder-members of Shoptodina Foundation, and teach Economics and English respectively at Delhi University)