Ethnic Cleansing of Hindus from Bangladesh?
Ramesh N. Rao ~ Nov 18, 2001
Two years ago I had a Bangladeshi Muslim student in my intercultural communication class. We do an exercise in class, early on, called the ‘Family Tree’ exercise. I ask my students to tell the class about when and from where their ancestors came to the U.S., what were the reasons for their move, what languages did they speak, etc. This is to provide context and perspective about the multi-cultural, nation of immigrants status of the U.S.
My American students tell the class about their German, French, Native American, Black, Irish or other background. Most of my international students, and there is usually a sprinkle of them, simply tell the class about their religious, national, ethnic background, what languages they speak at home, and point out to the mostly provincial American students a little bit about their country. When it was the turn for my Bangladeshi student, he said that his family spoke Urdu at home, that most probably his ancestors had moved into Bangladesh from Central Asia and the Middle East, and that therefore he was ethnically more Central Asian than South Asian. As the class instructor I did not want to challenge his claims, but simply pointed out that just like many Americans, people in other regions and countries of the world too wanted to distance themselves from certain pasts.
Then there was a Hindu Bangladeshi student in my public speaking class. He told me that while there were quite a few Bangladeshi students on campus he felt lonely and ignored because he was the only Hindu Bangladeshi and was shunned by his Muslim countrymen.
Now put this in the context of the events of the past year in Bangladesh. First there was the torture and killing of a dozen or so men of the Indian Border Security Force. It was reported that their skins were scalded by boiling water, that their eyes had been gouged out, and that there were many other indications of torture of those hapless men. There was even a photograph in The New York Times that showed Bangladeshi villagers carrying a dead Indian soldier trussed up like a live goat being taken out to slaughter on the day of the Bakrid. The New York Times India correspondent, Celia Dugger, said the soldier was trussed up like a tiger! May be you now understand why Prime Minister Vajpayee gave an interview to the Washington Post and why Musharraf was interviewed by the New York Times this week! Fancy diplomatic dance, the Indian government plays, don’t you think? What better way to pay the New York Times back than having the weak at the knees, stapled at the lips Prime Minister of India send “written responses” to “written questions” asked by the editorial board of the Washington Post!
Yes, you are right. It seems that the BJP-led government, like any other previous government in India, is good at the merely coy, the minimally clever, and the patently stupid. For what else could explain the Indian government’s “quiet diplomacy” to both hush up the torture and murder of Indian soldiers, and their now even more spineless and impotent response to the rape, torture and murder of Hindus after the assumption of power by Khaleda Zia?
Brajesh Mishra, the “most powerful man” in Delhi (forget Vajpayee, they say, for he is merely fed regurgitated news by his Man-Friday, Mr. Mishra), went again to Dhaka to do some more quiet diplomacy. At a time when thousands of Hindu Bangladeshis are fleeing their country after being targeted by Muslim fundamentalists belonging to Begum Zia’s party, when seven and ten-year-old girls are being raped in front of their horror-stricken parents, and when Hindus’ properties are being looted, and when they are being shamed, humiliated, tortured and killed, and at a time when they are fleeing for their lives to the nearest Indian border post, all that the impotent Indian government can do is send a tired, old, incompetent man to “negotiate” with a harridan who leads a Mullah-backed, Hindu-hating party.
And these ungrateful neighbors, who owe their nationhood to India, claim India always acts like the “big brother.” And our Leftist, secular, minority-loving, Hindu-bashing academics, politicians, and the media accept this caricature and peddle it around the world in lectures, conferences, and books. For what else could explain the BJP-led government’s response to this crisis? As one angry, bitter Hindu Bangladeshi complained: “After more than one month of mass torture of Bangladesh Hindus, the BJP has given one memorandum to the Bangladeshi High Commission and one to West Bengal’s Marxist Chief Minister.” What an achievement! No rallies, no mass meetings, no hunger strikes, no street-corner protests, no attempt to bring this to the notice of international organizations. What an achievement!
This man, frustrated as he is, is not advocating any real challenge to the Muslim Fundamentalist rule in Bangladesh. It was left to Francois Gautier, in his column on Rediff On The Net (rediff.com: Francois Gautier on a topsy-turvy world), to suggest that raising the gates of the dams on rivers that flow to Bangladesh and thus stopping the water supply for three days would bring the Bangladeshis to heel. Oooh! How horrible! How against international norms! How really, really, sick for anyone to propose such a thing. Genocidal, wouldn’t we call it, us good secularists?
The BJP-led government, so hounded by the Left/Muslim/secular brigade, is so wary of making any moves that could put a single strand of hair out of place in Sitaram Yechuri’s eyebrows or Surjeet Singh’s beard, or make Madam Gandhi a little miffed, that they have come to be like the centipede that suddenly realizes it has a hundred legs and wonders how it should coordinate them. It lies there frozen by the revelation and dies. The BJP-led government is not yet frozen in its lugubrious tracks, but I wager that it is on its way out. For what else could explain its mindless, spineless, stupid moves in this latest crisis with one of our “friendly neighbors”?
The government’s spokespersons could not open their mouths a little to complain about the influx of Muslim Bangladeshis into India. They were so hounded by the secularists who complained that it would be inhuman to send the “poor” Bangladeshis back home, because after all they were coming in the millions to escape the poverty and lack of economic opportunities in their country. The secularists shrilly abused the then Maharashtra government for trying to send back a handful of illegal Bangladeshi immigrants.
Now, after India has been flooded by at least ten million Muslim Bangladeshis (a very, very conservative estimate) over a period of twenty plus years, the government has, according to a report from Zee News (November 11, 2001), “hurriedly resumed fencing its border with Bangladesh amid reports of a large-scale influx of refugees from the neighboring country. Fencing of the international border has begun in West Bengal’s Nadia district, through which hundreds of Hindus are fleeing Muslim-dominated Bangladesh, a top official in the Border Security Force said.”
So incompetent, so mindless, so slow, and so stupid has been the government’s response that the BSF is now shooting and killing the desperate and the damned! As this report by Probir Pramanik of The Telegraph (November 10) graphically describes: “The policy muddle on telling between ‘infiltrators’ and ‘refugees’ lay stained in blood today as a 12-year-old girl fleeing persecutors in Bangladesh fell to BSF bullets after crossing over to India. Daya Rani Khatri was killed and her 15-year-old brother, Shanto, injured when BSF soldiers, unable to ascertain whether they are intruders or refugees, opened fire.” He goes on to note the geriatric moves of the hobbled-at-the-knees Central government: “A steady stream of Bangladeshis has been escaping to Bengal since a change of government in Dhaka triggered a violent backlash on minorities. However, in the absence of clear-cut government guidelines, officials in India have been unable to define a ‘refugee’ and an ‘infiltrator’, a sensitive issue in power politics.”
Thus, when Hindus are raped, tortured, and brutalized and try to flee to India, they will be stopped. Ethnic cleansing of Hindus is fine, either in Bangladesh or in Kashmir. When Muslims, trying to find jobs, squat on someone else’s land, and add to the vote banks on the border districts, cross the border, they are welcome!
If the Central government’s response is dull and clueless, what about the response of the CPI (M) government of West Bengal, and the Congress party nipping at the heels of Shri. Vajpayee-ji? The Chief Minister of West Bengal, Buddhadeb B (what a travesty of the fair name of the Man from Maithili!) said that those entering West Bengal from Bangladesh without valid papers will be considered simple intruders and pushed back. Asked about their fate, the redoubtable Communist apparatchik said: “We can’t help it. Those who don’t have papers must be treated as intruders and pushed back.”
The Ananda Bazar Patrika (the largest selling Indian language newspaper in India, whose publications also have a large readership in Bangladesh) is trying to whitewash the persecution of Hindus by calling it a reaction of the BNP against Awami League bigwigs who had so long lorded it over them. They are trying to peddle some kind of politically correct half-truth that both Hindus and Muslims are affected with the coming to power of Khaleda Zia.
The Times of India reported that this is what they could decipher from the ordinarily undecipherable “veteran” Congressman, West Bengal Pradesh Congress Committee president Pranab Mukherjee: The man with the most atrocious accent is against declaring those Hindus as refugees who are now arriving from Bangladesh for shelter after facing religious and political persecution in the wake of the election victory of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). “This is likely to aggravate the problem,” he said in Kolkata on November 4. Mukherjee, according to the paper, “feared that this would worsen further the problem already prevailing in West Bengal, Assam and Tripura. Besides, the arrival of a large number of refugees could create communal tension.” Mukherjee was in favor of “nipping the problem in the bud” through requests to the Bangladesh government to do something about it! So much fancy footwork to hide their ugly politics!
A Muslim-Majority Secular State?
After the birth of Bangladesh in 1971, the people adopted a Constitution with its basic structure ensuring “Nationalism, Secularism, Socialism, and Democracy.” But on 23rd April, 1977, the Constitution was amended (Fifth Amendment) at the behest of the then President General Zia-ur Rahman and through the Proclamation Order Number 1 secular it no longer was, and the Constitution was re-adopted in the name of Allah. The phrase “Bismillah-al-Rahman-al-Rahim” was inserted and a new clause was tagged on: “The state shall endeavor to consolidate, preserve and strengthen fraternal relations among Muslim countries based on Islamic solidarity.”
On June 9, 1988, the Constitution was amended for the eighth time. The President, General H. M. Ershad, signed and approved the amendment. With this amendment the state religion became Islam and Clause 8 (1) prescribed that the principle of absolute trust and faith in Allah would be the basis of all action. So, Bangla nationalism, socialism and secularism were shown the door, and although democracy, as prescribed in Article 11 was not formally abandoned, messy and manipulative politics, and military dictatorships have shown once again that democracy and Islam are mutually incompatible.
The war between Pakistan and India ended in 17 days. The Pakistanis had an ugly law on the books: The Enemy Property Act. After the liberation of Bangladesh the purpose therefore of vesting “enemy property” with a custodian (government) should have come to an end. The “enemy property” act that was promulgated by the communal and sectarian government of Pakistan was now retained by the newly independent Bangladesh. The deleterious effect of this act was mostly on the minority Hindus. This “black law” has become a woe to the minority community. In the course of the past thirty years, millions of Hindus have been evicted from their hearths and homes. With this law the population has been divided into two classes: the majority and the minority.
Although suggestions were made to abrogate the Enemy Property Act by the Hindu community in Bangladesh, the governments of Bangladesh have been recalcitrant to do anything about it. A bill was passed this year (Vested Property Return Bill, 2001) full of errors and omissions and with a view to blackmail the Hindu community. After the passage of the bill, the then State Minister, Hajee Rashed Mosharaff, at a press conference on April 9th said that the Vested Property Return Law was passed only for the benefit of Muslims.
Under the new law the original owner and his/her inheritors or the successor would get back only those vested properties which are at the disposal of the government. The properties which the government has already handed over or leased to organizations or persons for 99 years will not be considered vested property eligible for returning to the original owner. Besides, the government will return property only to those who are co-inheritors of certain vested property. If the brother of a Muslim dies out of Bangladesh then his relatives will be the owner of the property in the absence of his family, but if a Hindu dies outside the country his family will not be entitled to own his property and that property will go to the government.
According to some sources, the bill provides that property legally vested under the ownership of the government and those declared to be enemy or vested property after 16th February 1969 will not be considered as vested property after the said period. Most of the Hindu property, however, was declared vested property after that date. Furthermore, no citizen of Bangladesh can challenge the bill in a court of law
(See the Human Rights Congress for Bangladesh Minorities website at http://www.hrcbm.org/ for more details).