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

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treacherous neighbours--the impression conveyed was that no Muslim could be trusted. Thus the Muslim who helped the Hindu was cast as an exceptional figure--isolated and inexplicable, implying survival to be an exceptional outcome as well. A deposition to a “fact-finding” committee by a refugee named Mohendra Dhali conveys this impression. I witnessed the terrible mass killing by Muslim rioters at Khulna Launch Ghat on 3rd January 1964 when I arrived there in a launch from the village. .I was with Sushil Kumar Biswas, a doctor...and Faik Mia, a locally well-known person. It was dark in town, which frightened us. ..We saw at least fifty men dressed in black with daggers in hand waiting on the jetty to start killing Hindus. We were about sixty among three to four hundred Muslim passengers...We wore lungis for it was unthinkable to move in public in Khulna in Hindu attire. We begged Faik Mia to save our lives..We were on the deck from where I saw a few Muslims drag one Hindu on to the jetty where they butchered him with a dagger... there were innumerable dead bodies. Then came two notorious goondas (criminals) of Khulna--and Faik too lost all hope for us. ..one cut me on the left side of the neck with a dagger. Had it not been for Faik again who caught the dagger in motion, I would have been slain. Dr. Biswas and I jumped into the river ..hiding ourselves behind water plants for two miles. We saw villages burning. I believe that night on the Khulna Launch Ghat alone Hindus numbering two to three hundred were killed. The river water turned red..@
He pointed out the cut on his neck to the investigator. (Indian Commission of Jurists 1965: 68).
The refugees tales are of rivers reeking of rotting corpses; factories bolted from the outside to prevent the escape of panic-stricken workers and set ablaze; faceless, marauding Muslim mobs screaming that they would make shoes out of the skins of Hindus; the “disappearance” of radical Hindu student activists who were involved in the Bangladeshi nationalist movement; of men and
women bayonetted to death in front of their families during the civil war and of attacks on trains and river as terrified Hindus sought to flee to India. The image of the Muslim as aggressor is leached of historicity and particularity, reified as a Hindu-hating barbarian--a knife-wielding, blood-thirsty “butcher.” A typical example of this was an account, which with minor variations, involved a Muslim’s physical assault on a Hindu woman--her helplessness signified by her pregnancy or the infant at her breast, which also identify her as a Hindu man's property and means of reproduction, followed by the slashing off of her breasts, and the act of placing the foetus or child at the dead woman's mutilated nipple. This was taken to be a cruel travesty of the nurturing implication of a “normal” maternal gesture, as the woman and the dead or dying infant were converted to symbols of
the physical, generational annihilation of the Hindu “race” or jati. Only one ex-refugee admitted to actually having witnessed such a scene, others ascribed it to hearsay--but in choosing to retell it to me, most insisted that the attack was an established practice. The narratives of physical violence against East Bengali Hindus were not only a register of the refugees’ cultural prejudice, of the effects of political mobilization on sectarian lines during the anti-colonial, nationalist movement, but also an 17 index of their insecurity as a minority. And the reiteration that their predicament was one of lifethreatening insecurity--a historical correlate of Muslim communalism--constructed the refugees as political sufferers.
(III) Threat to maan (honour)
In his semi-autobiographical chronicle of refugee rehabilitation, the Indian Commissioner of Rehabilitation, Hironmoy Bandyopadhyay described an encounter with an East Bengali refugee while touring a relief camp in Jalpaiguri in 1948. He asked the man why he left East Bengal when there were no outward signs of unrest. The man burst out: “It is true we have experienced no beatings or murder,
but all people do not have the same degree of endurance.” He then recounted his reason for leaving East Bengal. One evening, he had heard a loud call outside his house, “Ho korta (master of the house)! Are you home?” Thinking it was a neighbour or distinguished member of the village he stepped out and was surprised to see a Muslim tenant. The man smiled, “Korta, the English have left, the country is free, and we have our Pakistan. So I came to make friends with you.” Angered by his tenant’s loud tone of voice and familiar manner, the man remembered how, not too long ago, these very same people would have stood ten yards away to pay their respects. But it was “the time of Pakistan,” so he pretended pleasure. The tenant proceeded to walk right in to the man’s home “as if the house was his own property--and not to the sitting room outside, but right inside to the sleeping quarters.” Sitting down on the man’s bed without his permission he said in an unmistakeable tone of threat, “Korta, this is Pakistan. Don’t forget (and he no longer used the respectful apni but the familiar tumi) we are no longer your inferiors (chhoto). Remember, from now on we have to be friends as equals.” The refugee exclaimed accusingly to Bandyopadhyay, “After all this, how can you still expect us to stay in Pakistan!” (Bandopadhyay 1970: 13-4).
For the bhadralok, escape to West Bengal seemed the only way to “keep face”--avoid assimilation and humiliation by those they had considered their social inferiors. This was also partially true of the gentry of smaller means, and even of the Namasudras who had their own stories of Muslim “insolence”: Muslims proposing inter-community marriages; contravening pollution laws by “accidentally” touching the Hindus’ bodies, their food and water, or entering their homes or ritual spaces; “tricking” them into eating proscribed food (beef); speaking without deference--all these turned out to be common complaints. Minority organizations repeatedly drew the Pakistani administration's attention to threats’ to the Hindu community’s religious integrity. An example of such
a “threat” was the text of an anonymous letter sent to the residents of Newa village from Bare Bara-Id, both in the Narayanganj subdivision of Dacca and published in the Ananda Bazar Patrika, 4 January 1948 at the urging of the Dacca District Minority Association. Become Musalman and perform namaz12 ...There are many educated Musalman amongst us who wish to marry your girls. Become Musalman and eat beef. It is very tasty. Let us know whether you will vacate your houses soon. If you do not, come to our League office to accept the faith of Islam and eat beef. We will take your women, you may have ours. We will visit your houses, 12The formal prayer Muslims are required to perform five times a day.
18 you will come to ours. Signed--your well wishers. The destruction and defiling of temples and shrines and threats of conversion, were seen as attacks on the very core of Hindu identity and integrity, and there was a heightened sensitivity to the experience of religious minorityhood or “second-class citizenship” in an Islamic state. The obsession with this compromised condition are evident from the many comparisons of the Jinnah Fund--to which all Pakistani citizens were expected to donate as part of the effort to rehabilitate the refugees from India--with the jizya or poll tax which used to be paid by non-Muslims in medieval times to the Islamic state for the privilege of living under its protection. The Hindus also emphasized their sense of religious subordination by referring to themselves as zimmis--to denote subjecthood, and to communal riots as jehad. According to a pamphlet issued on behalf of the refugees from Noakhali in India, “Repeated declarations that Pakistan is an Islamic State make both the Hindus and the Muslims
think alike that Pakistan is ultimately meant exclusively for the Muslims” (Amrita Bazar Patrika, 21 December 1948).The implication of this was that the migration of the East Bengali Hindus was constructed as inevitable.
Besides religion, the other elements of their identity that the East Bengali Hindus said they were anxious to protect from Islamic influence were their historical and cultural achievements. Pakistan was seen as a betrayal of secular and/or Hindu nationalist aspirations and labelled a “theocratic” state bound to destroy and deny Bengali Hindu culture and nationalism, and to celebrate Muslim victories. Thus Dhirendranath Roy Chowdhury told me, “The Barisal town hall had been named in the memory of Aswini Kumar Dutta whose leadership in the nationalist movement forced the British to revoke the first partition of Bengal in 1911. After 1947, the Pakistani authorities made that glorious symbol of Bengali nationalism into an office for the Muslim National Guard and the Ansars13. They butchered a cow in the courtyard” (Interview with Dhirendranath Roy Chowdhury, 1988).There was no doubt in his mind that the choice of that space was deliberate and the act a brutal
reminder that the Muslims of East Bengal had won the struggle for independence. The refugees boasted that East Bengal once had the most advanced and numerous institutions of learning in India--
a pre-eminence that they feared would be dismantled with the introduction of Islamic education, the supercession of traditional Hindu teachers, and the marginalization of the Bengali language in favour of Urdu. A story that is symptomatic of their cultural and nationalist anxiety concerns the rewriting of history books. In keeping with the new post-independence syllabus students in Pakistan were apparently asked the following examination question: “What role did the kafirs (non-believers) play in helping the British gain an empire in India?” (Interview with Rasaraj Goswami, 1988). The imputation of “treacherous” collaboration with British imperialists was perceived as a calculated slur on their “nationalist” heritage. The “chastity” of married and unmarried Hindu women seemed to symbolize most potently, the honour, exclusivity and continuity of the community--and to represent its site of transgression.
Violence against women featured widely in the Hindu minority's complaints of ill-treatment in Pakistan and as a matter of concern in West Bengal--the sexual possession of Hindu women by Muslim men being seen to stand for Muslim domination, “miscegenation,” the loss and humiliation of the (male) Hindu self. Such acts compromised the “purity” of the community, contravening prescriptions
enjoining endogamy. When Suresh Chandra Banerjee, President of the West Bengal Provincial 13Muslim para-police made up of volunteers and constituted after the birth of Pakistan.
19 Congress Committee apprised party activists in the state on the condition of Hindus in East Bengal, he claimed that as an East Bengali himself--albeit one who had been living in Calcutta for twenty years--he could vouch that they were leaving because they “prized their self respect and the honour of their women above everything else” (Amrita Bazar Patrika, 18 October 1948).The violent acts
commonly referred to were rape, abductions, forced marriages and the deliberate flouting of rules of seclusion. For example much was made of rumours that Muslim boys were taking photographs of Hindu girls on their way to school--the appropriation of the image by the camera's lens being construed as violation by the gaze. The “outraging of female modesty” was described by the refugees
as an attack on the individual Hindu and the community as a whole, since women were “responsible for the continuity of tradition and the race” (Interview with Prafulla Kumar Chowdhury, 1988). It bears noting here, that the rhetoric of sexual assault was not so much concerned with the plight of the women in question--who were usually abandoned if they returned to the Hindu community--as with
the protection of patriarchal Hindu society. The dissolution of social barriers in a classist-casteist, denominationally segregated world ostensibly in favour of the erstwhile underprivileged--was life-threatening for some and disquieting for others. In explaining why his father left their home, Anil Sinha, a veteran Communist activist, said simply, “It was sheer thin-skinnedness.” His father had been incensed when the local Muslim cobbler offered to “protect” him should there be any communal trouble in their neighbourhood, and announced his refusal to live in a country where he was beholden to the charity of chhotolok (lower classes). The
upper and middle castes' inability to command deference was a painful indication of their disempowerment, while being hailed as “charaler po” or “son of an untouchable” by Muslims they considered lower in the caste hierarchy was interpreted by Namasudras, as a sign of their relative decline. According to Anil Sinha the tragedy was that though many East Bengali migrants justified
their escape as the preservation of “Hindu” identity, the experience of refugeehood forced them not only to “turn their backs on caste rules”--his father was forced to live cheek by jowl with “untouchables” in refugee colony--but even to forgo their much vaunted “Bengaliness” as they were dispersed all over India (Interview with Anil Sinha, 1989). The East Bengali Hindus’ discourse of Partition victimhood reflected their acute sense of insecurity with regard to life, livelihood and honour as a numerically and politically subordinate group in a Muslim-majority nation, as much as it reflected entrenched anti-Muslim prejudice. Since the selfimage
of Hindus in East Bengal was founded on a racialized asymmetry with the Muslim
conceptualized as the opposite and inferior of the Hindu--even progressives reacted negatively to becoming a “minority”--with its connotations of secondariness. As inheritors of a colonial revisionist-nationalist historiography that denigrated the medieval or “Muslim period” of Bengal’s history as the “dark ages,” the East Bengali Hindus were in agreement with their supporter, the
eminent Bengali historian Jadunath Sarkar, who asserted that East Bengal was “lapsing into barbarism”—“going the way of Palestine without the Jews” (Amrita Bazar Patrika, 18 August 1948).
By representing Pakistan as an icon of ossified backwardness and fundamentalism, East Bengali Hindus were being told that they owed it to their national and cultural heritage to save themselves from cultural annihilation. The East Bengal they left behind was depicted in commemorative literature as “dead without a vibrant community of Hindus. ..The villages, markets, settlements of East Bengal are
today speechless and without life, their consciousness wiped out by the horrors of the end of time... mice and cockroaches have probably built their world in the leather drums of the Harisabha 20 devotees”14 (Chakrabarty 1995: 128).
Migration to India was therefore an imperative--the realization of East Bengali Hindus aspirations for postcolonial national reconstruction. In his speech at the University Institute Hall in Calcutta in 1948 referred to earlier, Sarkar told his audience that like the Jews--paradigmatic refugees--who would convert Palestine to “a spark of light in the midst of the mess of Muslim misgovernment and stagnation,” the East Bengali refugees would vivify WestBengal's moribund culture and economy. Drawing positive parallels between the East Bengali diaspora and the migration of English Puritans to Holland and France, and then to Massachusetts; and of the French Huguenots to Holland and England, he declared that their going was a loss to their native countries and a boon for their countries of asylum. “However crushed and benumbed they may look when they are unloaded from their third class wagons at Sealdah Station yard, the refugees are the most valuable elements of the population of East Bengal,” he said, and urged West Bengalis “...to engraft this rich racial branch upon its old decaying trunk and rise to a new era of prosperity and power” (Amrita Bazar Patrika, 18 August 1948).
14Meeting place for Hindu devotional singing.
The Communal East Bengali refugee?
I have tried to show that East Bengali claims to victimhood used the language of Muslim communal violence--to life, property and honour--to legitimize their claim to be political refugees and to gain public sympathy in India. But it also revealed deep antagonism toward Muslims in general and Bengali Muslims in particular. Drawing on his reading of Chere Asha Gram, a compilation of essays written by East Bengali refugees in a nostalgic vein, Dipesh Chakrabarty suggests that the
home/homeland remembered was a Hindu one. Bengali Hindu nationalism “had created a sense of home that combined sacredness with beauty. This sacred was not intolerant of the Muslim. The Muslim Bengali had a place created through the idea of kinship . But the home was Hindu which the non-Muslim League Hindu was a valued guest...What had never been thought about was how the Hindu might live in a home that embodied the Islamic sacred” (Chakrabarty 1995: 129). Herein lay
the unexamined structure of prejudice evident in this public discourse which ostensibly avoids a “low language of prejudice” (128). In an autobiographical essay on growing up in a refugee colony Manas Ray refers to this prejudice, “The Muslims were a constant presence in ...stories but only in the figure of the eternal peasant, hardworking, obliging, happy with his marginality, part of Hindu domestic
imagery. No space was allowed to his rituals, his universe of beliefs nor did the middleclass Muslim ever figure” (Ray 2000: 168).