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 11 - 15


minorities, proved to be a source of friction as nationally guaranteed rights came to be equated with
rights guaranteed only to “nationals,” or the majority community. And the Hindu minority in Pakistan
and the Muslims in India came to be perceived as political misfits or worse--enemies of the state.
The minorities in Western Punjab have known at their cost
what partition means, and if there is any such thing as
political experience, we should be under no illusions
about our future. ...there is a fundamental flaw in the
policy of the Government of India. The division has been
accepted on the basis of the two-nation theory which
obviously implies the elimination of non-nationals from
each state... That being so, the minorities of East Bengal
have a right to demand a place in India. ...We are tired of
the platitudinous effusions of leaders who in most cases do
not even live here among us (A.B.Chaudhuri of Dacca,
Amrita Bazar Patrika, 12 March 1948).
There was a creeping awareness of fear among us, as if we
were criminals of some sort ...Our position was like
that of a servant suspected of theft. Even if he is innocent,
he has no way of asserting that. He has to submit to being
beaten up, and often has to lose his job. The misconceptions
of a few leaders turned millions of people into servants.
(Gangopadhyay 1987:49)
After Partition the babus of the village left. The shastras (holy
texts) say that the upper castes are the head of Hindu society and
we Namasudras7 are the hands and feet. How long does a headless
body survive? In our village in Khulna, we bit the earth and clung on.
But the Muslims stole our land, cut our paddy, refused to pay for fish
we caught. The police called us kafir when we went to complain and
beat us. They told us we were sitting on land which was rightfully theirs,
eating food that was theirs. (Prafulla Gharami of Khulna, who left with
his family after the riots of 1964 in East Pakistan.)
The Muslims became very arrogant after Partition. They said, Charaler
po (son of an untouchable), come eat with us. Let your girls marry
our sons. Then the son of the President of the village union--he was
Muslim--molested one of our Namasudra girls. Someone from our side
could not take that and the president’s house burnt down. Of course
after that we were finished. The Muslims told us they would teach
us how to enjoy ourselves in Pakistan and attacked the Hindu
neighbourhood. Many were murdered. Some of us hid in the canal
7Low caste peasants and fishermen.
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holding water hyacinth over our heads. We heard one woman drowned
her crying baby because she did not want her other children to be
found and killed. That night we left. We managed to escape to Narayanganj
where there were more Hindus and then to India. This was five years after
Pakistan (Interview with Jadunath Mondal from Bariba, Dacca, 1988).
We came after Joi Bangla8.You may ask why we stayed so long.
Bangladesh is my homeland. I come from a family of schoolmasters.
I was determined to prove their two-nation theory wrong. We
withstood every riot and humiliation. I worked in the language
movement because I believed that Muslim or Hindu, we are
Bengalis. My son worked for the Awami League9. He was killed
by Pakistani soldiers. They castrated his dead body. So many
people were slaughtered. We became refugees in India but I
went back after Mujib became leader of free Bangladesh. I
could not stay. The Pakistanis are gone but the maulavis (religious
teachers) have poisoned the minds of Bengali Muslims. Bangladesh
is an Islamic state. The two-nation theory was right. (Interview with
Nirmal Chandra Sarkar of Faridpur, 1989).
From the available public “evidence” it seems East Bengal Hindus left their ancestral homes for
contingencies of varying compulsions and at different times because of riots, the fear of riots,
economic privation, political targeting, insecurity about the maintenance of their cultural lives, an
attrition in their numbers, the existence of pre-partition family and business connections in India--
because they felt they had no choice.
8The term means “Hail Bangladesh!” and refers to Bangladeshi independence from West
Pakistan.
9The Awami League was the Bengali party which led the nationalist movement for an
independent Bangladesh, and included Muslims and Hindus among its members.
Their recourse to Partition as the historical explanation for their victimhood as a minority and
then a displaced population has to be seen as partially determined by their experience of migration
laws which created a hierarchy of acceptable causes for migration in order to determine aid-worthy
“authentic” refugees and by which logic, Partition, was represented as the definitive instance of
sectarian violence. By linking themselves to this paradigmatic “communal incident”--the refugees
constructed themselves as “involuntary” political refugees, dramatized and legitimized their condition.
They were also responding to the strand of public scepticism they encountered in West Bengal which
dismissed their accounts of Partition-related displacement as exaggerated, and unreliable. According
to this mode of thinking, the reason for the migration of East Bengalis was not life-threatening
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violence. It was in this vein of distrust that a prominent Calcutta intellectual wrote “Exodus” to
disabuse Hindus of the widely held belief, “that most of the Muslims in Pakistan are communal
fanatics and that all Hindus were forced to leave East Pakistan due to riots” (Maitreye Devi 1974: ii).
After the 1964 riots in Dhaka and Narayanganj, she visited the refugee resettlement site at
Dandakaranya in central India in search of people who had been “directly involved” in a riot. She
reported a “typical” exchange in which an elderly refugee woman answered her question “Why did
you come to India?” by saying, “For fear of the mian (Muslim men), what else?” Maitreyee Devi's
next query was “What did they do?” and the answer, “They kidnap our daughters, burn our homes, stab
us, kill us”--the response particularly remarkable for the use of the present tense. She continued,
“Were any of your relations’ or friends’ houses burnt?” and was told, “No, nothing happened in our
village, but in other villages there was trouble.” Maitreye Devi concluded that “socio-economic
reasons were the real cause of the exodus, more than riots” (ibid). In rejecting the migrants’ claim to
be victims of violence as symptomatic of extreme prejudice, and untrue, the writer was not only
minimizing the gravity of their predicament in Pakistan but in effect, questioning their eligibility to
refugee status.
The refugees, for their part, insisted that Partition set in motion a telos of annihilation of the
Hindu minority community in Muslim East Pakistan (and in Bangladesh). The president of the
revolutionary nationalist organization Anusilan Samiti10, an East Bengali, wrote in the Ananda Bazar
Patrika:
Ever since independence on the basis of partitioned rather
than a united India, the condition of the minorities of
Pakistan is becoming unbearable with every passing day. If
something is not done soon the minorities of East Pakistan
will cease to exist (astittwa bilop) The wealth, lives and
honour (dhon, pran, man) of the minority community in East
Pakistan are endangered in every way. (Nalini Ranjan
Bhattacharya, 2 January 1948)
This attribution of a sort of murderous intentionality to the Muslim majority was, as critics
contended, contradicted by accounts of Hindu-Muslim friendship, of aid and succour, of political
solidarity during the anti-Urdu language movement in East Pakistan and the struggle for the liberation
of Bangladesh. In other words, inter-community relationships which depended on bonds other than
those of religious affiliation, and identities which encompassed religion but were not reduced to it.
But since the characterization of the political effects of Partition as physical obliteration and cultural
erasure, a planned and certain assault on the wealth, life and honour of the Hindu community was a
recurrent one, it is necessary to examine the key elements of this narrative of victimhood.
(I)Threat to dhon (wealth)
In the years immediately after Partition there was a movement toward redressing the stark
10At the turn of the century in Bengal, anti-colonial organizations with a terroristnationalist
agenda such as Jugantar and Anusilan Samiti emerged as an militant alternative to the
moderate politics of the Congress. They were ultimately absorbed into the Congress as radical
cells, or formed Left parties outside it like the Revolutionary Socialist Party.
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inequalities of wealth in East Pakistan--though the Muslim underclasses may not have benefitted as
much as the West Pakistani and to a smaller extent, the emerging Bengali Muslim middleclasses. As
part of its programme of national reconstruction, the Pakistan government took steps to abolish
landlordism without compensation, to review the process of granting licenses for industries and
commercial ventures, raise income tax, and requisition houses for refugees--all of which hit the Hindu
propertied classes the hardest and not unexpectedly, drew strong complaints of discrimination. The
minority community also felt itself to be singled out for routine attacks on their property and economic
security by the majority community--which the perpetrators might have described as redistributive
justice--the non-payment of rent, boycott of Hindu businessmen and professionals, and larceny. The
minority's attempts at obtaining redress were apparently less than successful and only reinforced their
conviction that the “criminals” were backed by the authority of the state.
In his speech to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on 28 March 1952, Bhupendra Kumar
Dutta, a “Minority member” stated the “basic problem” to be one of “livelihood”:
Practically all sources of livelihood have been ...closed to
them. Government jobs, jobs in private firms, they are
not to have. In the professions there has been a silent
campaign of boycott.. Control shops, licenses for motor
buses and taxis the Hindus have been quickly deprived of.
Formerly, some of them had agencies for various oil companies,
The Imperial Tobacco Company ...and such other firms. They
have almost all changed hands. If they are professors or school
masters, as soon as a fresh graduate is available to replace an
experienced M.A., some fault is found with the latter, in the long
run he would be accused of anti-State propensities. If he does not
get into other troubles, he must, give up his job and run for safety
across the border.
Even the poorer folk, the peasant, the fisherman, prove no exceptions.
A peasant is busy ploughing by a riverside, a constable appears and
asks him to ferry him across, the peasant points to a bamboo
bridge nearby, the peasant gets a sound drubbing not only there
but subsequently in the police camp. A constable asks a fisherman
for some fish for the Havildar and when somebody takes up
the fisherman’s case for payment the intermediary is taken to the
thana on a false charge and given such a beating he is rendered
disabled for the rest of his life. A villager’s paddy is attempted to be
reaped by some neighbours of the other community. For resisting
them, he is falsely charged by a sub-inspector, not produced before
any court but assaulted severely. None of these are merely imaginary
instances. They are all concerned with the Scheduled Castes11 and
happened in recent months around various Police camps near
11Name given to low castes and “untouchables” in India following their inclusion in a
schedule or classificatory list.
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Gopalganj inspite of the Delhi agreement. (Indian Commission of Jurists,
1965: 13-14.)
The deliberate inclusion of lower caste Hindus in the constituency of injured minority is interesting
because a class-based analysis of anti-Hindu sentiment is sought to be deflected by positing the
conflict in purely religious terms. In the early phase of the migrations--through the 1950s, the majority
of the refugees were upper and middleclass in origin--landlords, a wide range of rentier interests,
people in the services, large entrepreneurs and to a lesser extent petty traders and artisans. Peasants
made up the bulk of migrants after 1964. And while some workingclass refugees remembered their
displacement as driven by the migration of the babus--on whom they were dependent for patronage,
others attributed it to their experience of plunder by Muslims who coveted their property--the product
of their industriousness.
(II) Threat to pran (life)
These accounts were primarily tied to Hindu-Muslim riots in East Bengal in 1946, 1949-50,
1964 and the war of 1970-7, as well as routine and random acts of violence. East Bengali refugees
for the most part were very aware of the retaliatory character of the cycles of violence on either side
of the border but in many tellings the aggression attributed to Muslims in Pakistan was described as
opportunistic, incited by baseless propaganda and fueled by communal exclusionism. According to
Prafulla Kumar Chowdhury of Dacca, an East Bengali journalist,
The Muslims wanted an Islamic state all along right from the time
of the League. They formed the provincial government in 1946
when the Great Calcutta Killing took place and thousands of
Hindus were massacred. Then again in Noakhali. In 1950, after
they got Pakistan, they claimed that Muslims were being murdered
in India and began to murder the Hindus in Barisal, Dacca, Chittagong.
I remember papers like the Azad saying that Hindus cannot
be trusted, they would kill their mothers and fathers. They would
throttle Muslims to death if not watched. Our family left then but
the genocide continued. In 1964, they used the excuse of the
theft of a relic from Kashmir to incite communal violence in Khulna.
And of course during the war of independence of Bangladesh, the
West Pakistani army targeted Hindus as anti-nationals. Even after
the Awami League’s victory, Muslim communalists have gained
the upper hand and Hindus are still under suspicion (Interview
with Prafulla Kumar Chowdhury, 1988).
Other commentators were more nuanced in their analysis of violence against the Hindu minority in
East Pakistan, arguing that non-Bengali Muslims were the actual perpetrators of such violence, or that
“reactionaries” used the “weapon of communalism” to destroy East Bengali unity and the struggles
for social justice. But in general, Muslim nationalism and mobilization for statehood--such that led
to the birth of Pakistan and Bangladesh--was perceived as having disastrous consequences for
Hindus.In the refugees’ narratives of victimhood, the violence they were subjected to was the work
of outsiders to the local community, raging mobs, criminals, representatives of the state, and