Early Days Of East Pakistan

[G.Subramaniam]

How the commies brainwashed the east bengal hindu refugees to prevent reprisals against west bengal muslims

The following is a commie viewpoint of the hindu refugee flow from east bengal

http://www.pstc.brown.edu/chatterjee.PDF

Page 1 - 5

Interrogating Victimhood: East Bengali Refugee Narratives of Communal Violence
Nilanjana Chatterjee
Department of Anthropology
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Introduction
In this paper I am interested in analyzing the self-representation of Hindu East Bengali
refugees as victims of Partition violence so as to historicize and politicize their claims to inclusion
within India and their entitlement to humanitarian assistance in the face of state and public disavowal.
I focus on the main components of their narratives of victimhood, which tend to be framed in an
essentializing rhetoric of Hindu-Muslim difference and involve the demonization of “the Muslim.” I
conclude with a brief consideration of the implications of this structure of prejudice for relations
between the two communities in West Bengal and the rise of Hindu fundamentalism nationwide. A
story I was told while researching East Bengali refugee agency and self-settlement strategies in West
Bengal bring these issues together for me in a very useful way.
Dr. Shantimoy Ray, professor of history and East Bengali refugee activist had been sketching
the history of the refugee squatter colony Santoshpur, referred to the enduring sense of betrayal, loss
and anger felt by East Bengalis after the partition of Bengal in 1947: becoming strangers in their own
land which constituted part of the Muslim nation of Pakistan, being forced to leave and rebuild their
lives in West Bengal in India, a “nation” that was nominally theirs but where they were faced with
dwindling public sympathy and institutional apathy. Spurred by their bastuhara (homeless) condition--
a term which gained political significance and which referred to their Partition victimhood, groups
of middle and working class refugees began to “grab” land and resettle themselves in West Bengal.
Santoshpur was one such colony which was founded on the outskirts of Calcutta in 1950. Dr. Ray had
not mentioned anti-Muslim sentiment in the colony although India’s Partition is synonymous with
sectarian violence.
Then he began to speak of an incident in 1964. A relic of the Prophet Muhammad was
rumoured to have been stolen from a shrine in Kashmir and this was followed by attacks on Hindus
in East Pakistan, and rioting against Muslims in India. Thousands of Hindu East Bengalis began to
seek refuge in West Bengal.
Some local Muslim families who still lived scattered around
the colony--they were mostly agricultural labourers, carpenters
--poor people, came to our compound in terror. Colony youth
had destroyed their huts and were out to slaughter them. I let
them in and locked our gate. Our household was overwhelmed.
We had over forty people in our care--bereft, wounded, fearing
for their lives. And then I saw the boys approaching. I knew them
well. We all knew each other in those days. I had seen them
grow up here. Kanu, Romesh, Madhab--they were unrecognizable
in their hatred. They were armed with sticks and knives and screaming
about avenging the murder of Hindus in East Pakistan. Slaughter
them as they slaughtered us, they shouted. I was stunned by
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the insanity of their words. But I knew that if I did nothing,
they would kill the Muslims cowering behind my flimsy walls.
I opened the gate and shouted for quiet. I did not know if they
would strike me down but something made those boys hesitate.
Perhaps they were still a little in awe of an old schoolmaster.
I told Kanu to come forward and asked him when he had come
to this country. He looked bewildered and said impatiently, You
know it was 1950--during the riots in Barisal. Yes, I said and
did you lose any members of your family during your journey here?
No he replied, but others did. Those Muslim pigs made the rivers
of Bengal run with Hindu blood. And now they are doing it again.
Except this time we’ll take care of them. His eyes were red and I
could see he would not humour me much longer. Quietly I asked
him how he had come to Calcutta. By boat, by bullock cart, on foot,
he shouted, what does that matter? And who drove the cart? Who
ferried the boat? I shouted out for the first time. His belligerent glare
wavered as he said, I remember one-- Rahimchacha (uncle). So
Rahimchacha saved your lives, did he? And now you have come to
repay him? Well, come in then. I stood back with the gate open.
Silence. One of the boys began to weep. Kanu stood still as stone
and then dropped to my feet. Forgive me, he mumbled. It is not my
forgiveness you need, I replied. Go home and let these poor people
go home as well. Gradually the crowd dispersed and the Muslims were
able to return to their neighbourhood (Interview with Shantimoy Ray,
June 1994).
One of the reasons Dr. Ray told me this was to explain the successful role of Communist
activists--mostly East Bengali refugees themselves--in blunting anti-Muslim sentiment among refugees
and directing their sense of victimhood away from the “communal” towards mobilization as “havenots”
for rehabilitation in keeping with their Marxist politics. But while he saw the youths’ hesitation
as acknowledgment of the resilience of local bonds between Hindus and Muslims in East Bengal, I
was struck by the strong hostility toward Muslims evinced by these East Bengali refugees and their
selective memory. The fact that they had “forgotten” individual Muslim saviours speaks to the erasure
of the Muslim in their nostalgic conceptualization of East Bengal. Dr. Ray’s appeal to their memories
and their consciences worked this time, but memories are sites of construction and contestation, and
in this case the refugees’ attitudes about Muslims were structured as much by experience as by a
hegemonic discourse about “bad” Muslims in Bengali culture. In what follows I will deal with the
East Bengali refugees’ construction of the image of Partition victimhood--the self-conscious
insistence on the historicity of their predicament as patriots and subjects of “communal” persecution,
which challenged their marginalization after Partition and legitimized their demand for restitution.
First a note on communalism. Unlike its Anglo-American sense which conveys community
feeling and obligation, in its Indian usage has a specific history. It refers to collective identity defined
by religious identification and expressed in chauvinist, exclusivist and oppositional terms vis-a-vis
other communities seen to be similarly defined. “Communalism not only produces an identification
with a religious community but also with its political, economic, social and cultural interests and
3
aspirations” (Kakar 1996: 13). The category “communalism” was a product of British Orientalist
ideology and practice which “systematically institutionalized a nation of communities, above all what
were deemed to be the two great communities of Hindus and Muslims” (Metcalf 1995: 951, Pandey
1990) through enumeration and classification which in turn shaped the emergence of interest groups,
their demands for political representation, employment quotas and so on, in the colonial period. In
addition to the reification of “Hindu” and “Muslim” as ahistorical essences, “communal strife--
conflict between people of different religious persuasions--was represented by the British colonial
regime in India as one of the most distinctive features of Indian society, past and present (Pandey
1990: 94) and attributed to instinctive difference and animosity. In postcolonial liberal-left discourse,
communal ideology and action is cast in negative terms and associated with intolerance.
This paper locates itself within two sets of ongoing academic discussions: one, which focuses
on the lived and remembered experiences of Partition as distinct from what might be called its “high
politics”(Sen 1990); and a second, more general one, which involves the exploration of refugee
agency and questions hegemonic representations of them as victims and passive objects of
intervention. While a review of gendered, subaltern and partial or fragmentary perspectives on
Partition history is beyond the scope of this paper, it is important to note that these intellectual
approaches are productive in several ways: they challenge official nationalist history and examine the
operation of power/knowledge in postcolonial context, seek to recover the voices and silences of the
subordinated, prioritize the particular, and seek to develop a new language for understanding ethnic
and sectarian violence. While much of the new work in this vein is oriented to Punjab and North India
(Butalia 1998, Das 1990) Menon and Bhasin 1998, Pandey 1992), it has gradually expanded to
include perspectives on Bengal (Bose et al 2000, Chakrabarti 1990, Chakrabarty 1995, Chatterjee
1992, Ghosh 1998) and Assam (Dasgupta 2001), and is not merely confined to the experience of the
bhadralok1. Another crucial referent for me is the anthropological literature on refugees which makes
central the linkage of displacement to national belonging and exclusion, and refugee identity to
hegemonic nationalist ideologies; the construction of refugees not only through the languages of law
and humanitarianism but by the institutional management of “the refugee problem”; the silencing of
refugees by humanitarian rhetoric and practice as dehistoricized victims so that their own assessment
as historical actors is bypassed (Malkki 1996); and most importantly, the agency of the displaced--
appropriating, transforming and contesting hegemonic discourse and interventions.
Mistrusting refugees
1 The Bengali word bhadralok means a respectable person of middleclass background--
landowners or professionals, usually but not exclusively upper caste, and distinguished socially by
education, non-manual labour and a refined lifestyle.
The partition of British India and the emergence of the independent states of India and Pakistan
in 1947, is linked to the largest recorded population dislocation in history. The two-nation solution
negotiated by the competing nationalist movements led by the Congress Party and the Muslim League
produced a territorial settlement linked to the principle of religious majoritarianism. Pakistan came
to consist of the North West Frontier Provinces, Baluchistan, Sind, and West Punjab, separated by
4
nearly thousand miles from East Bengal and the Sylhet district of Assam. Though two-third of India’s
Muslims became Pakistanis, both nations included numerically large yet vulnerable minorities. In
Punjab, nearly 12 million Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus were displaced and 1 million lost their lives
(Zolberg et al 1989) during the so-called “exchange of populations”. In the case of Bengal however,
Partition was predated by sectarian violence in 1946 which spurred the initial two-way movement of
Hindus to West Bengal and Muslims to East Pakistan, and unlike the situation in Punjab, the flight of
Hindu refugees eventually overtook that of Muslims and has continued sporadically through the brutal
civil war in Pakistan in 1971 and the birth of Bangladesh into the present. Not only is Partition
associated with national and personal trauma for many Bengalis, the presence of over 8 million
refugees from former East Bengal irrevocably shaped West Bengal’s political economy and popular
imagination and is seen to be symptomatic of Bengali decline.
The Government of India’s conservative and disputed schematization of population dislocation
from East Pakistan over nearly a quarter century helps situate the refugees’ own assessment of their
predicament. Among other things, it does not include the 9 million Hindu and Muslim refugees from
the war of 1970-71 in East Pakistan (Luthra 1971)2. The United Nations estimated that the majority
of these refugees returned home--an assessment disputed by the Government of West Bengal with
regard to the displaced Hindus (Goverment of West Bengal 1980).
Initially, the Government of India attempted to discourage the migration of East Bengalis to
India by exhorting them to pledge their allegiance to Pakistan, offering temporary and limited relief
rather than permanent rehabilitation, and signing a series of agreements with Pakistan aimed at
assuring the minorities of security and preventing mass migration. But as the migrations became a
persistent and irreversible reality, the state attempted to regulate them. The border in the east was left
open until 1952 to give people time to decide on their citizenship, and then passports were introduced
to reduce further migration from East Pakistan. As the population movement continued, an additional
barrier of permits and migration certificates was instituted in 1956. Then from 1958-64, the Indian
government tried to deter East Bengali Hindu migrants by refusing to recognize them as “refugees” and
thereby making them ineligible for relief and rehabilitation assistance. This changed with the riots of
1964 in East Pakistan, and the displaced were given permanent refuge in India through the civil war
of 1970-71 in Pakistan after which East Pakistan seceded as the independent state of Bangladesh.
Post-1971 migrants were declared ineligible for settlement assistance in India, a “deterrence” that
seems not to have affected migration in subsequent decades. Border watchers seem agreed that
displacement in the 1980s was mainly due to economic privation in Bangladesh and included Hindus
and Muslims, while the early 1990s saw a rise in the numbers of East Bengali Hindu victims of
communal violence following the demolition of the medieval Babri mosque in India by Hindu
nationalists. The chart is interesting, not only because it reflects the Indian state’s failure to stop the
migration of East Bengalis, but a cursory reading of the causes of displacement indexes the latter to
diplomatic ruptures in Indo-Pakistan relations, tensions between East and West Pakistan which finally
culminated in the east’s separatist movement for Bangladesh, and conflicts between Hindus and
Muslims in each nation which sparked retaliatory violence in the neighbouring country. This is a
representation of events which while not disputed in its details by the East Bengali Hindus refugees,
is linked by them to one originary cause--Partition on religious lines--which, they contend, made all
2Muslims who migrate to India from Bangladesh are labeled “infiltrators” by the Indian
state.
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East Bengali Hindus homeless in a Muslim dominated nation.
Refugee rehabilitation was designated a national responsibility by the postcolonial Indian
government and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru explained in a public speech that this was not
merely a humanitarian act on the part of the state for the welfare of the displaced alone, but a
pragmatic one
Refugee Influx from East Pakistan, 1946-70
Year Reason for Influx Total
1946
1947
1948
1949
1950
1951
1952
1953
1954
1955
1956
1957
1958
1959
1960
1961
1962
1963
1964
1965
1966
1967
1968
1969
1970
Noakhali riots
Partition
Police action in Hyderabad
Khulna, Barisal riots
idem
Agitation over Kashmir
Economic conditions, passport scare
Unrest over Urdu in E. Pakistan
Pakistan's Islamic constitution
Hazrat Bal incident in Kashmir
Elections in Pakistan
19,000
334,000
786,000
213,000
1,575,000
187,000
227,000
76,000
118,000
240,000
320,000
11,000
1,000
10,000
10,000
11,000
14,000
16,000
693,000
108,000
8,000
24,000
12,000
10,000
250,000
Total 5,283,000
on which the future and welfare of India depended (The Statesman, 25 January 1948). But the primary
object of this early initiative was the resettlement of refugees from West Pakistan. The national
leadership was ambivalent regarding its responsibilities toward East Bengalis--unwilling and unable
to block migration altogether, but afraid of “inviting” millions of East Bengali Hindus into the country