Jogen Mandal was the Mulayam / Lalloo of the 1940s
He was responsible for the loss of east bengal
He was a Dalit casteist who believed in Dalit-Muslim unity against the bad brahmins
Jogen Mandal allied with Jinnah and was eventually rewarded with a minister's post
After Direct Action Day, he prevented the dismissal of Suhrawardy
He wanted to give all of bengal to Pakistan
When Partition became inevitable,
Jogen Mandal wanted to give all of Bengal to Pakistan
Shyama Prasad Mukerji fought to divide bengal to salvage west bengal
Once Pakistan was formed and secure, the muslims had no further use for
Dalit Jogen Mandal and he got ethnic cleansed to India
I shall post Jogen Mandals resignation letter
Gail Omvedt, the commie-dalitist laments that muslim insistence on conversion lost them the opportunity for permanent unity with dalits
In 1949, Sardar Patel threatened to annex 33% of east bengal to resettle the hindus
The pakistanis panicked and sent in Liquat Ali Khan to Delhi to sign a mutual minority protection pact with Nehru
Shyama Prasad Mukerji resigned since this pact had no enforcing mechanism
I shall also post Shyama Prasad Mukerji's resignation letter
I shall try to find a post which shows how the commies prevented hindu retaliation in west bengal
Resignation letter of Shyama Prasad Mukerji
http://www.mayerdak.com/spmookerjee.htm
Excerpts from the resignation statement by Dr. Shyama Prasad Mookerjee as Minister of Industry and Supply on the floor of the Indian Parliament protesting the treatment of minorities in Pakistan on April 8, 1950
I have never felt happy about our attitude towards Pakistan. It has been weak, halting and inconsistent. Our goodness or inaction has been interpreted as weakness by Pakistan. It has made Pakistan more and more intransigent and has made us suffer all the greater and even lowered us in the estimation of our own people. On every important occasion we have remained on the defensive and failed to expose or counteract the designs of Pakistan aimed at us. I am not, however, dealing today with general India-Pakistan relationship, for the circumstances that have led to my resignation are primarily concerned with the treatment of minorities in Pakistan, especially in East Bengal. Let me say at once the Bengal problem is not a provincial one. It raises issues of an all-India character and on its proper solution will depend the peace and prosperity, both economic and political, of the entire nation. There is an important difference in the approach to the problem of minorities in India and Pakistan. The vast majority of Muslims in India wanted the partition of the country on a communal basis, although I gladly recognise there has been a small section of patriotic Muslims who consistently have identified themselves with national interests and suffered for it. The Hindus on the other hand were almost to a man definitely opposed to partition. When the partition of India became inevitable, I played a very large part in creating public opinion in favour of the partition of Bengal, for I felt that if that was not done, the whole of Bengal and also perhaps Assam would fall into Pakistan. At that time little knowing that I would join the first Central Cabinet, I along with others, gave assurances to the Hindus of East Bengal, stating that if they suffered at the hands of the future Pakistan Government, if they were denied elementary rights of citizenship, if their lives and honour were jeopardised or attacked, Free India would not remain an idle spectator and their just cause would be boldly taken up by the Government and people of India. During the last 2 1/2 years their sufferings have been of a sufficiently tragic character. Today I have no hesitation in acknowledging that in spite f all efforts on my part, I have not been able to redeem by pledge and on this ground alone - if on no other - I have no moral right to be associated with Government any longer. Recent happenings in East Bengal have however overshadowed all their past woes and humiliation. Let us not forget that the Hindus of East Bengal are entitled to the protection of India, not on humanitarian considerations alone, but by virtue of their sufferings and sacrifices, made cheerfully for generations, not for advancing their own parochial interests, but for laying the foundations of India's political freedom and intellectual progress. It is the united voice of the leaders that are dead and of the youth that smilingly walked upto the gallows for India's cause that calls for justice and fairplay at the hands of Free India of today.
The recent Agreement, to my mind, offers no solution to the basic problem. The evil is far deeper and no patchwork can lead to peace. The establishment of a homogenous Islamic state is Pakistan's creed and a planned extermination of Hindus and Sikhs and expropriation of their properties constitute its settled policy. As a result of this policy, life for the minorities in Pakistan has become "nasty, brutish and short". Let us not be forgetful of the lessons of history. We will do so at our own peril. I am not talking of by-gone times; but if anyone analyses the course of events in Pakistan since its creation, it will be manifest that there is no honourable place for Hindus within that State. The problem is not communal. It is essentially political. The Agreement unfortunately tries to ignore the implications of an Islamic State. But anyone, who refers carefully to the Objectives Resolution passed by the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan and to the speech of its Prime Minister, will find that while talking in one place of protection of minority rights, the Resolution in another place emphatically declares " that the principles of democracy, freedom, equality, tolerance and special justice as enunciated by Islam shall be fully observed". The Prime Minister of Pakistan while moving the Resolution thus spoke :
"You would also notice that the State is not to play the part of a neutral observer wherein the Muslims may be merely free to profess and practice their religion, because such an attitude on the part of the State would be the very negation of the ideals which prompted the demand of Pakistan and it is these ideals which should be the corner stone of the State which we want to build. The State will create such conditions as are conducive to the building up of a truly Islamic Society which means that the State will have to play a positive part in this effort. You would remember that the Quaid-e-Azam and other leaders of the Muslim League always made unequivocal declarations that the Muslim demand for Pakistan was based upon the fact that the Muslims had their own way of life and a code of conduct. Indeed, Islam lays down specific directions for social behaviour and seeks to guide society in its attitude towards the problems which confront it day to day. Islam is not just a matter of private beliefs and conduct."
In such a Society, let me ask in all seriousness, can any Hindu expect to live with any sense of security in respect of his cultural, religious, economic and political rights. Indeed our Prime Minister analysed the basic difference between India and Pakistan only a few weeks ago on the floor of the House and his words will bear repetition.
"The people of Pakistan are of the same stock as we are and have the same virtues and failings. But the basic difficulty of the situation is that the policy of a religious and communal State followed by the Pakistan Government ineviitably produces a sense of lack of full citizenship and a continuous insecurity among those who do not belong to the majority community."
It is not the ideology preached by Pakistan that is the only disturbing factor. Its performances have been in full accord with its ideology and the minorities have had bitter experiences times without number of the true character and functioning of an Islamic State. The Agreement has totally failed to deal with this basic problem.
Public memory is sometimes very short. There is an impression in many quarters that the Agreement recently made is the first great attempt of its kind to solve the problem of minorities. I am leaving aside for the time being the disaster that took place in the Punjab; in spite of all assurances and undertakings there was a complete collapse of the administration and the problem was solved in a most brutal fashion. Afterwards we saw the gradual extermination of Hindus from North Western Frontier Province and Baluchistan and latterly from Sind as well. In East Bengal about 13 millions of Hindus were squeezed out of East Bengal. There were no major incidents as such; but circumstances so shaped themselves that they got no protection from the Government of Pakistan and were forced to come away to West Bengal for shelter. During that period there was no question of any provocation given by India where normal conditions had settled down; there was no question of Muslims being coerced t go away from India to Pakistan. In April, 1948, the First Inter-Dominion Agreement was reached in Calcutta, dealing specially with the problems of Bengal. If anyone analyses and compares the provisions of that Agreement with the recent one it will appear that in all essential matters they are similar to each other. This Agreement, however, did not produce any effective result. India generally observed its terms but the exodus from East Bengal continued unabated. It was a one-way traffic, just as Pakistan wished for. There were exchanges of correspondence; there were meetings of officials and Chief Ministers; there were consultations between Dominion Ministers. But judged by actual results Pakistan's attitude continued unchanged. There was a second Inter-Dominion Conference in Delhi, in December, 1948, and another Agreement was signed, sealed and delivered. It dealt with the same problem - the rights of minorities specially in Bengal. This also was a virtual repetition of the first Agreement. In the course of 1949 we witnessed a further deterioration of conditions in East Bengal and an exodus of a far larger number of helpless people, who were uprooted from their hearth and home and were thrown into India in a most miserable condition. The fact thus remains that inspite of two Inter Dominion Agreements as many as 16 to 20 lakhs of Hindus were sent away to India from East Bengal. About a million of uprooted Hindus had also to come away from Sind. During this period a large number of Muslims also came away from Pakistan mainly influenced by economic considerations. The economy of West Bengal received a rude shock and we continued as helpless spectators of a grim tragedy.
Resignation letter of muslim loving casteist Jogen Mandal
http://www.hvk.org/specialarts/mandal/mandal.html
Protesting Dalit Hindu Persecution:
Pakistanâs First Law & Labour Ministerâs Resignation Letter
May 2, 2002
Full TEXT OF THE RESIGNATION LETTER BY:
Mr. J.N. Mandal,
Minister for Law and Labour,
Government of Pakistan
On 8th October, 1950
My Dear Prime Minister,
It is with a heavy heart and a sense of utter frustration at the failure of my life-long mission to uplift the backward Hindu masses of East Bengal that I feel compelled to tender resignation of my membership of your Cabinet. It is proper that I should set forth in detail the reasons, which have prompted me to take this decision in this important juncture of the history of Indo-Pakistan Sub-continent.
(1) Before I narrate the remote and immediate causes of my resignation, it may be useful to give a short background of important events that have taken place during the period of my co-operation with the League, Having been approached by a few prominent League leaders of Bengal in February 1943, I agreed to work with them in the Bengal Legislative Assembly. After the fall of the Fazlul Haque Ministry in March 1943, with a party of 21 Scheduled Caste M.L.As, I agreed to co-operate with Khwaja Nazimuddin, the then leader of the Muslim League Parliamentary party who formed the Cabinet in April 1943. Our co-operation was conditional on some specific terms in the such as the inclusion of three Scheduled Caste Ministers in the Cabinet, sanctioning of a sum of Rupees five lakhs (Rs. 500,000) as annual recurring grant for the education of the Scheduled Castes, and unqualified implementation of the communal ratio rules in the matter of appointment to Government services.
(2) Apart from those terms, the principal objectives that prompted me to work in co-operation with Muslim League was, first that the economic interests of the Muslim in Bengal generally were identical with those of the Scheduled Castes. Muslims were mostly cultivators and labourers, so were members of the Scheduled Castes. One section of Muslims was fishermen, so was a section of Scheduled Castes as well and, secondly, that the Scheduled Castes and Muslims were both educationally backward. I was persuaded that my co-operation with the League and its Ministry would lead to the undertaking on a wide scale of legislative and administrative measures which, while promoting the mutual welfare of the vast bulk of Bengal's population and undermining the foundations of vested interest and privilege, would further the cause of communal peace and harmony. It may be mentioned here that Khwaja Nazimuddin took three Scheduled Caste Ministers in this Cabinet and appointed three Parliamentary Secretaries from amongst the members of my community.
SUHRAWARDY MINISTRY
(3) After the general election held in March 1946, Mr. H.S. Suhrawardy became the leader of the League Parliamentary Party and formed the League Ministry in April 1946. I was the only Scheduled Caste member returned to the Federation ticket. I was included in Mr. Suhrawardy's cabinet. The 16th day of August of that year was observed as "The Direct Action Day" by the Muslim League. It resulted, in a holocaust.. Hindus demanded my resignation from the League ministry. My life was in peril. I began to receive threatening letters almost every day. But I remained steadfast to my policy. Moreover, I issued an appeal through our journal "Jagaran" to the Scheduled Caste people to keep themselves aloof from the bloody feud between the Congress and the Muslim League even at the risk of my life. I cannot but gratefully acknowledge the fact that I was saved from the wrath of infuriated Hindu mobs by my Caste Hindu neighbours. The "Noakhali Riot" followed the Calcutta carnage in October 1946. There, Hindus including Scheduled Castes were killed and hundreds were converted to Islam. Hindu women were raped and abducted. Members of my community also suffered loss of life and property. Immediately after these happenings, I visited Tipperah and Feni and saw some riot-affected areas. The terrible sufferings of Hindus overwhelmed me with grief, but still I continued the policy of co-operation with the Muslim League. Immediately after the massive Calcutta Killing, a no-confidence motion was moved against the Suhrawardy Ministry. It was only due to my efforts that the support of four Anglo-Indian Members and four Scheduled Caste members of the Assembly who had hitherto been with the Congress could be secured, but for which the Ministry would have been defeated.
(4) In October 1946, most unexpectedly came to me through Mr. Suhrawardy the offer of a seat in the Interim Government of India. After a good deal of hesitation and being given only one hour's time to take my final decision, I consented to accept the offer subject to the condition only that I should be permitted to resign if my leader, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar disapproved of my action. Fortunately, however, I received his approval in a telegram sent from London. Before I left for Delhi to take over as Law Member, I persuaded Mr. Suhrawardy, the then Chief Minister of Bengal, to agree to take two Ministers in his Cabinet in my place and to appoint two Parliamentary Secretaries from the Scheduled Caste Federation Group.
(5) I joined the Interim Government on November 1, 1946. After about a month when I paid a visit to Calcutta, Mr. Suhrawardy apprised me of the communal tension in some parts of East Bengal, especially in Gopalganj Sub-division, where the Namasudras were in majority, being very high. He requested me to visit those areas and address meetings of Muslims and Namasudras. The fact was that Namasudras in those areas had made preparations for retaliation. I addressed about a dozen of largely attended meetings. The result was that Namasudras gave up the idea of retaliation. Thus an inevitable dangerous communal disturbance was averted.
(6) After a few months, the British Government made their June 3 Statement (1947) embodying certain proposals for the partition of India. The whole country, especially the entire non-Muslim India, was startled. For the sake of truth I must admit that I had always considered the demand of Pakistan by the Muslim League as a bargaining counter. Although I honestly felt that in the context India as a whole Muslims had legitimate cause for grievance against upper class Hindu chauvinism, I held the view very strongly indeed that the creation of Pakistan would never solve the communal problem. On the contrary, it would aggravate communal hatred and bitterness. Besides, I maintained that it would not ameliorate the condition of Muslims in Pakistan. The inevitable result of the partition of the country would be to prolong, if not perpetuate, the poverty, illiteracy and miserable condition of the toiling masses of both the States. I further apprehended that Pakistan might turn to be one of the most backward and undeveloped countries of the South East Asia region.
LAHORE RESOLLUTION
(7) I must make it clear that I have thought that an attempt would be made, as is being done at present, to develop Pakistan as a purely 'Islamic' State based on the Shariat and the injunctions and formularies of Islam. I presumed that it would be set up in all essentials after the pattern contemplated in the Muslim League resolution adopted at Lahore on March 23, 1940. That resolution stated inter alia that (1) "geographically contiguous areas are demarcated into regions which should be constituted with such territorial readjustments as may be necessary, that the areas in which the Muslims are numerically in majority as in the north- Western and eastern zones of India, should be grouped to constitute independent States in which the Constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign " and (2) " adequate, effective and mandatory safeguards should be specifically provided in the Constitution for minorities in these units and in these regions for the protection of their religious, cultural, economic, political, administrative and other rights and interests in consultation with them." Implicit in this formula were (a) that North western and eastern Muslim zones should be constituted into two Independent States, (b) that the constituent units of these States should be autonomous and sovereign, © that minorities guarantee should be in respect of rights as well as of interest and extend to every sphere of their lives, and (d) that Constitutional provisions should be made in these regards in consultation with the minorities themselves. I was fortified in my faith in this resolution and the professions of the League Leadership by the statement Quaid-e-Azam Mohammed Ali Jonah was pleased to make on the 11th August 1947 as the President of the Constituent Assembly giving solemn assurance of equal treatment for Hindus & Muslims alike and calling upon them to remember that they were all Pakistanis. There was then no question of dividing the people on the basis of religion into full- fledged Muslim citizens and gummies being under the perpetual custody of the Islamic State and its Muslim citizens. Every one of these pledges is being flagrantly violated apparently to your knowledge and with your approval in complete disregard of the Quaid-e-Azam's wishes and sentiments and to the detriment and humiliation of the minorities.
PARTITION OF BENGAL
(8) It may also be mentioned in this connection that I was opposed to the partition of Bengal. In launching a campaign in this regard I had to face not only tremendous resistance from all quarters but also unspeakable abuse, insult and dishonour. With great regret, I recollect those days when 32 crores of Hinduism opposed my cations, but I remained undaunted and unmoved in my loyalty to Pakistan. It is a matter of gratitude that my appeal to 7 million Scheduled Caste people of Pakistan evoked a ready and enthusiastic response from them. They lent me their unstinted support sympathy and encouragement.
(9) After the establishment of Pakistan on August 14, 1947 you formed the Cabinet, in which I was included and Khwaja Nazimuddin formed a provisional Cabinet for East Bengal. On August 10, I had spoken to Khwaja Nazimuddin at Karachi and requested him to take 2 Scheduled Caste Ministers in the East Bengal Cabinet. He promised to do the same sometime later.
What happened subsequently in this regard was a record of unpleasant and disappointing negotiations with you, Khwaja Nazimuddin and Mr. Nurul Amin, the present Chief Minister of East Bengal. When I realised that Khwaja Nazimuddin was avoiding the issue on this or that excuse, I became almost impatient and exasperated, I further discussed the matter with the Presidents of the Pakistan Muslim League and its East Bengal Branch. Ultimately, I brought the matter to your notice. You were pleased to discuss the subject with Khwaja Nazimuddin in my presence at your residence. Khwaja Nazimuddin agreed to take one Scheduled Caste Minister on his return to Dacca. As I had already become skeptic about the assurance of Khwaja Nazimuddin, I wanted to be definite about the time limit. I insisted that he must act in this regard within a month, failing which I should be at liberty to resign. Both you and Khwaja Nazimuddin agreed to the condition. But, alas! You did not perhaps mean what you said. Khwaja Nazimuddin did not keep his promise. After Mr. Nurul Amin had become the Chief Minister of East Bengal, I again took up the matter with him. He also followed the same old familiar tactics of evasion. When I again called your attention to his matter prior to your visit to Dance in 1949, you were pleased to assure me that a Minority Minister would be appointed in East Bengal, and you asked 2-3 names from me for consideration. In stat deference to your wish, I sent you a note stating the Federation Group in the East Bengal Assembly and suggesting three names. When I made enquiries as to what had happened on your return from Dacca, you appeared to be very cold and only remarked: "Let Nurul Amin return from Delhi". After a few days I again pressed the matter.
ANTI-HINDU POLICY
(10) When the question of partition of Bengal arose, the Scheduled Caste people were alarmed at the anticipated dangerous result of partition. Representation on their behalf were made to Mr. Suhrawardy, the then Chief Minister of Bengal who was pleased to issue a statement to the press declaring that none of the rights and privileges hitherto enjoyed by the Scheduled Caste people would be curtailed after partition and that they would not only continue to enjoy the existing rights and privileges but also receive additional advantages. This assurance was given by Mr. Suhrawardy not only in his personal capacity but also in his capacity as a Chief Minister of the League Ministry. To my utter regret it is to be stated that after partition, particularly after the death of Quaid-e-Azam, the Scheduled Castes have not received a fair deal in any matter. You will recollect that from time to time I brought the grievances of the Scheduled Castes to your notice. I explained to you on several occasions the nature of inefficient administration in East Bengal. I made serious charges against the police administration. I brought to your notice incidents of barbarous atrocities perpetrated by the police on frivolous grounds. I did not hesitate to bring to your notice the anti-Hindu policy pursued by the East Bengal government especially the police administration and a section of Muslim League leaders.
SOME INCIDENTS
(11) The first incident that shocked me took place at a village called Digharkul near Gopalganj where on the false complaint of a Muslim, brutal atrocities were committed on the local Namasudras. The fact was that a Muslim who was going in a boat attempted to throw his net to catch fish. A Namasudra who was already there for the same purpose opposed to throwing of the net in his front. This was followed by some altercations and the Muslim got annoyed who went to a nearby Muslim village and made a false complaint that he and a woman in his boat had been assaulted by the Namasudras. At the time, the S.D.O. of Gopalganj was passing in a boat through the canal who without making any enquiry accepted the complaint as true and sent armed police to the spot to punish the Namasudra. The armed police came and the local Muslims also joined them. They not only raided some houses of the Namasudras but mercilessly beat both men and women, destroyed their properties and took away valuables. The merciless beating of a pregnant woman resulted in abortion on the spot. This brutal action on the part of the local authority created panic over a large area.
(12) The second incident of police repression took place in early part of 1949 under P.S. Gournadi in the district of Barisal. Here a quarrel took place between two groups of members of a Union Board. One Group which was in the good book of the Police conspired to punish the opponents on the plea of attack on the Police Station, the O.C., Gournadi requisitioned armed forces from headquarters. The Police, helped by the armed forces, then raided a large number of houses in the area, took away valuable properties, even from the houses of absentee-owners who were never in politics, far less in the Communist Party. A large number of students of many High English Schools were Communist suspects and unnecessarily harassed. This area being very near to my native village, I was informed of the incident. I wrote to the District Magistrate and the S.P. for an enquiry. A section of the local people also prayed for an enquiry by the S.D.O. But no enquiry was held. Even my letters to the District authorities were not acknowledged. I then brought this matter to the notice of the highest Authority in Pakistan, including yourself but to no avail.
WOMEN FOR MILITARY
(13) The atrocities perpetrated by the police and military on the innocent Hindus, especially the Scheduled Caste of Harbinger in the Dist. of Sleet deserve description. Innocent men and women were brutally tortured, some women ravished, their houses raided and properties looted by the police and the local Muslims. Military pickets were posted in the area. The military not only oppressed these people and took away stuffs forcibly from Hindus houses, but also forced Hindus to send their women-folk at night to the camp to satisfy the carnal desire of the military. This fact also I brought to your notice. You assured me of a report on the matter, but unfortunately no report was forthcoming.
(14) Then occurred the incident at Nachole in the District of Rajshahi where in the name of suppression of Communists not only the police but also the local Muslims in collaboration with the police oppressed the Hindus and looted their properties. The Santhals then crossed the border and came over to West Bengal. They narrated the stories of atrocities wantonly committed by the Muslims and the police.
(15) An instance of callous and cold-blooded brutality is furnished by the incident that took place on December 20, 1949 in Kalshira under P.S. Mollarhat in the District of Khulna. What happened was that late at night four constables raided the house of one Joydev Brahma in village Kalshira in search of some alleged Communists. At the scent of the police, half a dozen of young men, some of whom might have been Communists, escaped from the house. The police constable entered into the house and assaulted the wife of Joydev Brahma whose cry attracted her husband and a few companions who escaped from the house. They became desperate, re-entered the house, found 4 constables with one gun only. That perhaps might have encouraged the young men who struck a blow on an armed constable who died on the spot. The young men then attacked another constable when the other two ran away and raised alarm which attracted some neighbouring people who came to their rescue. As the incident took place before sunrise when it was dark, the assailants fled with dead body before the villagers could come. The S.P. of Khulna with a contingent of military and armed police appeared on the scene in the afternoon of the following day. In the meantime, the assailants fled and the intelligent neighbours also fled away. But the bulk of the villagers remained in their houses, as they were absolutely innocent and failed to realise the consequence of the happening. Subsequently the innocents of the entire village encouraged the neighbouring Muslims to take away their properties. A number of persons were killed and men and women were forcibly converted. House- hold deities were broken and places of worship desecrated and destroyed. Several women were raped by the police, military and local Muslims. Thus a veritable hell was let loose not only in the village of Kalshira which is half miles in length with a large population, but also in a number of neighbouring Namasudra villages. The village Kalshira was never suspected by the authority to be a place of Communist activities. Another village called Jhalardanga, which was at a distance of 3 miles from Kalshira, was known to be a centre of Communist activities. This village was raided by a large contingent of police on that day for hunt of the alleged Communists, a number of whom fled away and took shelter in the aforesaid house of village Kalshira which was considered to be a safe place for them.
(16) I visited Kalashira and one or two neighboring villages on the 28th February 1950. The S.P., Khulna and some of the prominent League leaders of the district were with me. When I came to the village Kalshira, I found the place desolate and in ruins. I was told in the presence of S.P.that there were 350 homesteads in this village; of these, only three had been spared and the rest had been demolished. Country boats and heads of cattle belonging to the Namasudras had been all taken away. I reported these facts to the Chief Minster, Chief Secretary and Inspector General of Police of East Bengal and to you.
(17) It may be mentioned in this connection that the news of this incident was published in West Bengal Press and this created some unrest among the Hindus there. A number of sufferers of Kalshira, both men and women, homeless and destitute had also come to Calcutta and narrated the stories of their sufferings which resulted in some communal disturbances in West Bengal in the last part of January.
CAUSES OF THE FEBRUARY DISTURBANCE
(18) It must be noted that stories of a few incidents of communal disturbance that took place in West Bengal as a sort of repercussion of the incidents at Kalshira were published in exaggerated form in the east Bengal press. In the second week of February 1950 when the Budget Session of the East Bengal Assembly commenced, the Congress Members sought permission to move two-adjournment motion to discuss the situation created at Kalshira and Nachole. But the motions were disallowed. The congress Member walked out of the Assembly in protest. This action of the Hindu Members of the Assembly annoyed and enraged not only the Ministers but also the Muslim leaders and officials of the Province. This was perhaps one of the principal reasons for Dacca and East Bengal riots in February 1950.
(19) It is significant that on February 10, 1950 at about 10 O'clock in the morning a woman was painted with red to show that her breast was cut off in Calcutta riot, and was taken round that East Bengal Secretariat at Dacca. Immediately, the Government servants of the Secretariat struck work and came out in procession raising slogans of revenge against the Hindus. The procession began to swell as it passed over a distance of more than a mile. It ended in a meeting at Victoria Park at about 12O'clock in the noon where violent speeches against the Hindus were delivered by several speakers, including officials. The fun of the whole show was that while the employees of the Secretariat went out in procession, the chief Secretary of the East Bengal Government was holding a conference with his West Bengal counterpart in the same building to find out ways and means to stop communal disturbances in the two Bengals.
OFFICIALS HELPED LOOTERS
(20) The riot started at about 1 p.m. simultaneously all over the city. Arson, looting of Hindu shops and houses and killing of Hindus, wherever they were found, commenced in full swing in all parts of the city. I got evidence even from the Muslims that arson and looting were committed even in the presence of high police officials. Jewellery shops belonging to the Hindus were looted in the presence of police officers. They not only did not attempt to stop loot, but also helped the looters with advice and direction. Unfortunately for me, I reached Dacca at 5 O'clock in the afternoon on the same day, in Feb.10,1950.To my utter dismay, I had occasion to see and know things from close quarters. What I saw and learnt from first hand information was simply staggering and heart-rending.
BACKGROUND OF THE RIOT
(21) The reasons for the Dacca riot were mainly five:
(i) To punish the Hindus for the daring action of their representatives in the Assembly in their expression of protest by walking out of the Assembly when two adjournment motions on Kashira and Nachole affairs were disallowed;
(ii) Dissensions and difference between the Suhrawardy Group and the Nazimuddin in the Parliamentary Party were becoming acute;
(iii) Apprehension of launching of a movement for re-union of East and West Bengal by both Hindu and Muslim leaders made the East Bengal Ministry and the Muslim League nervous. They wanted to prevent such a move. They thought that any large scale communal riot in East Bengal was sure to produce reactions in West Bengal were Muslims might be killed. The result of such riot in both East and East Bengal, it was believed, would prevent any movement for re-union of Bengals.
(iv) Feeling of Antagonism between the Bengalee Muslim and non-Bengalee Muslim in East Bengal was gaining ground. This could only be prevented by creating hatred between Hindus and Muslims of East Bengal. The language question was also connected with it and
(v) The consequences of non-devaluation and Indo-Pakistan trade deadlock to the economy of East Bengal were being felt most acutely first in urban and rural areas and the Muslim League members and officials wanted to divert the attention of the Muslim masses from the impending economic breakdown by some sort of jehad against Hindus.
STAGGERING DETAILS - NEARLY 10,000 KILLED
(22) During my nine days' stay at Dacca , I visited most of the riot- affected areas of the city and suburbs. I visited Mirpur also under P.S.Tejgaon. The news of the killing of hundreds of innocent Hindus in trains, on railway lines between Dacca and Narayanganj, and Dacca and Chittagong gave me the rudest shock. on the second day of Dacca riot, I met the Chief Minister of east Bengal and requested him to issue immediate instructions to the District authorities to take all precautionary measures to prevent spreading of the riot in district towns and rural areas. On the 20th February 1950, I reached Barisal town and was astounded to know of the happenings in Barisal. In the District of Hindus killed. I visited almost all riot-affected areas in the District. I was simply puzzled to find the havoc wrought by the Muslim rioters even at places like Kasipur, Madhabpasha and Lakutia, which were within a radius of six miles from the District town and were connected with motor able roads. At the Madhabpasha Zaminder's house, about 200 people were killed and 40 injured. A Place, called Muladi, witnessed a dreadful hell. At Muladi Bandar alone, the number killed would total more than three hundred, as was reported tome by the local Muslims including some officers. I visited Muladi village also, where I found skeletons of dead bodies at some places. I found dogs and vultures eating corpses on the riverside. I got the information there that after the whole-scale killing of all adult males, all the young girls were distributed among the ringleaders of the miscreants. At a place told Kaibartakhali under P.S. Rajapur, 63 persons were killed. Hindu houses within a stone's throw distance from the said Thana office were looted, burnt and inmates killed. All Hindu shops of Babuganj Bazar were looted and then burnt and a large number of Hindus were killed. From detailed information received, the conservative estimate of casualties was placed at 2,500 killed in the District of Barisal alone. Total casualties of Dacca and East Bengal riot were estimated to be in the neighbourhood of 10,000 killed. I was really overwhelmed with grief. The lamentation of women and children who had lost their all including near and dear ones melted my hearts. I only asked myself. "What was coming to Pakistan in the name of lslam".
NO EARNEST DESIRE TO IMPLEMENT DELHI PACT
(23) The large-scale exodus of Hindus from Bengal commenced in the latter part of March. It appeared that within a short time all the Hindus would migrate to India. Aware cry was raised in India. The situation became extremely critical. A national calamity appeared to be inevitable. The apprehended disaster, however, was avoided by the Delhi Agreement of April 8. With a view to reviving the already lost morale of the panicky Hindus, I undertook an extensive tour of East Bengal. I visited a number of places in the districts of Dacca, Barisal, Faridpur, Khulna and Jessore. I addressed dozens of largely attended meeting and asked the Hindus to take courage and not to leave their ancestral hearths and homes. I had this expectation that the East Bengal Govt. and Muslim League leaders would implement the terms of the Delhi Agreement. But with the lapse of time, I began to realise that neither the East Bengal Govt. nor the Muslim League leaders were really earnest in the matter of implementation of the Delhi Agreement. The East Bengal Govt. was not only much to set up a machinery as envisaged in the Delhi Agreement, but also was not willing it take effective steps for the purpose. A number of Hindus who returned to native village immediately after the Delhi Agreement were not given possession of their homes and lands, which were occupied in the meantime by the Muslims.
MOULANA AKRAM KHAN'S INCITATIONS
(24) My suspicion about the intention of League leaders was confirmed when I read editorial comments by Moulana Akram Khan, the President of the Provincial Muslim League in the "Baisak" issue of a monthly journal called Mahammadi. In commenting on the first radio-broadcast of Dr. A.M. Malik, Minister for Minority Affairs of Pakistan, from Dacca Radio Station, wherein he said, "Even Prophet Mahammed had given religious freedom to the Jews in Arabia", Moulana Akram Khan said, "Dr. Malik would have done well had he not made any reference in his speech to the Jews of Arabia. It is true that Jews in Arabia had been given religious freedom by Prophet Mahammed; but it was the first chapter of the history. The last chapter contains the definite direction of prophet Mahammed which runs as follows :-"Drive away all the Jews out of Arabia". Even despite this editorial comment of a person who held a very high position in the political, social and spiritual life of the Muslim community, I entertained some expectation that the Nurul Amin Ministry might not be so insincere. But that expectation of mine was totally shattered when Mr. Nurul Amin selected D.N. Barari as a Minister to represent the minorities in terms of the Delhi Agreement which clearly states that to restore confidence in the mind of the minorities one of their representatives will be taken in the Ministry of East Bengal and West Bengal Govt.
NURUL AMIN GOVT'S. INSINCERITY
(25) In one of my public statement , I expressed the view that appointment of D.N. Barari as a Minister representing the minorities not only did not help restore any confidence, but, on the contrary, destroyed all expectations or illusion, if there was any in the minds of the minorities about the sincerity of Mr. Nurul Amin Govt. my own reaction was that Mr. Nurul Amin's Govt. was not only insincere but also wanted to defeat the principal objectives of the Delhi Agreement. I again repeat that D.N. Barari does not represent anybody except himself. He was returned to the Bengal Legislative Assembly on the Congress ticket with the money and organisation of the Congress. He opposed the Scheduled Caste Federation candidates. Some time after his election, he betrayed the Congress and joined the Federation. When he was appointed a Minister he had ceased to be a member of the Federation too. I know that East Bengal Hindus agree with me that by antecedents, character and intellectual attainments Barari is not qualified to hold the position of a Minister as envisaged in the Delhi Agreement.
(26) I recommended three names to Mr. Nurul Amin for this office. One of the persons I recommended was an M.A., LL.B., Advocate, Dacca High Court. He was Minister for more than 4 years in the first Fazlul Huq Ministry in Bengal. He was chairman of the Coal Mines Stowing Board, Calcutta, for about 6 years. He was the senior Vice-President of the Scheduled Caste Federation. My second nominee was a B.A.,LL.B. He was a member of the Legislative Council for 7 years in the pre-reform regime. I would like to know what earthly reasons there might be for Mr. Nurul Amin in not selecting any of these two gentlemen and appointing instead a person whose appointment as Minister I strongly objected to for very rightly considerations. Without any fear of contradiction I can say that this action of Mr. Nurul Amin in selecting Barari as a Minister in terms of the Delhi Agreement is conclusive proof that East Bengal Govt. was neither serious nor sincere in its profession about the terms of the Delhi Agreement whose main purpose is to create such conditions as would enable the Hindus to continue to live in East Bengal with a sense of security to their life, property, honour and religion.
GOVT. PLAN TO SOUEEZE OUT HINDUS
(27) I would like to reiterate in this connection my firm conviction that East Bengal Govt. is still following the well-planned policy of squeezing Hindus out of the Province. In my discussion with you on more than one occasion, I gave expression to this view of mine. I must say that this policy of driving out Hindus from Pakistan has succeeded completely in West Pakistan and is nearing completion in East Pakistan too. The appointment of D.N. Barari as a Minister and the East Bengal Government's unceremonious objection to my recommendation in this regard strictly conform to name of what they call an Islamic State. Pakistan has not given the Hindus entire satisfaction and a full sense of security. They now want to get rid of the Hindu intelligentsia so that the political, economic and social life of Pakistan may not in any way be influenced by them.
EVASIVE TACTICS TO SHELVE JOINT ELECTORATE
(28) I have failed to understand why the question of electorate has not yet been decided. It is now three years that the minority Sub-Committee has been appointed. It sat on three occasions. The question of having joint or separate electorate came up for consideration at a meeting of the Committee held in December last when all the representatives of recognised minorities in Pakistan expressed their view in support of joint Electorate with reservation of seats for backward minorities. We, on behalf of the Scheduled Castes think this matter again came up for consideration at a meeting called in August last. But without any discussion whatsoever on this point, the meeting was adjourned sine die. It is not difficult to understand what the motive is behind this kind of evasive tactics in regard to such a vital matter on the part of Pakistan's rulers.
DISMAL FUTURE FOR HINDUS
(29) Coming now to the present condition and the future of Hindus in East Bengal as a result of the Delhi Agreement, I should say that the present condition is not only unsatisfactory but absolutely hopeless and that the future completely dark and dismal Confidence of Hindus in East Bengal has not been restored in the least. The Agreement is treated as a mere scrap of paper alike by the East Bengal Government and the Muslim League.
That a pretty large number of Hindu migrants, mostly Scheduled Caste cultivators are returning to East Bengal is no indication that confidence has been restored. It only indicates that their stay and rehabilitation in West Bengal, or elsewhere in the Indian Union have not been possible. The sufferings of refugee life are compelling them to go back to their homes. Besides, many of them are going back to bring movable articles and settle or dispose of immovable properties. That no serious communal disturbance has recently taken place in East Bengal is not to be attributed to the Delhi Agreement. It could not simply continue even if there were no Agreement or Pact.
(30) It must be admitted that the Delhi Pact was not an end in itself. It was intended that such conditions would be created as might effectively help resolve so many disputes and conflict existing between India and Pakistan. But during this period of six months after the Agreement, no dispute or conflict has readily been resolved. On the contrary, communal propaganda and anti-India propaganda by Pakistan both at home and abroad are continuing in full swing. The observance of Kashmir Day by the Muslim League all over Pakistan is an eloquent proof of communal anti-India propaganda by Pakistan. The recent speech of the Governor of Punjab (Pak) saying that Pakistan needed a strong Army for the security of Indian Muslims has betrayed the real attitude of Pakistan towards India. It will only increase the tensions between the two countries.
WHAT IS HAPPENING IN E. BENGAL TODAY
(31) What is to the condition in East Bengal? About fifty lakhs of Hindus have left since the partition of the country. Apart from the East Bengal riot of last February, the reasons for such a large-scale exodus of Hindus are many. The boycott by the Muslims of Hindu lawyers, medical practitioners, shopkeepers, traders and merchants has compelled Hindus to migrate to West Bengal in search of their means of livelihood. Wholesale requisition of Hindu houses even without following due process of law in many and non-payment of any rent whatsoever to the owners have compelled them to seek for Indian Shelter, Payments rent to Hindu landlords was stopped long before. Beside, the Ansars against whom I received complaints all over are a standing menace to the safety and security of Hindus. Interference in matters of education and methods adopted by the Educational Authority for Islamisation frightened the teaching staff of Secondary Schools and Colleges out of their old familiar moorings. They have left East Bengal. As a result, most of the educational institutions ago the Educational Authority issued circular to Secondary Schools enjoining compulsory participation of teachers and student of all communities in recitation from the Holy Koran before the school work commenced, Another circular requires Headmasters of schools to name the different blocks of the premises after 12 distinguished Muslims, such as, Jinnah, Iqbal, Liaquat Ali, Nazimuddin, etc. Only very recently in an educational conference held at Dacca, the President disclosed that out of 1,500 High English Schools in East Bengal, only 500 were working. Owing to the migration of medical practitioners there is hardly any means of proper treatment of patients. Almost all the priests who used to worship the household deities at Hindu houses have left. Important places of worship have been abandoned. The result is that the Hindus of East Bengal have got now hardly any means to follow religious pursuits and perform social ceremonies like marriage where the services of a priest are essential. Artisans who made images of goddesses have also left. Muslims have replaced Hindu Presidents of Union Boards by coercive measures with the active help and connivance of the police and Circle Officers. Muslims have replaced Hindu Headmasters and Secretaries of Schools. The life of the few Hindu Govt. servants has been made extremely miserable as many of them have either been superseded by junior Muslims or dismissed without sufficient or any cause. Only very recently a Hindu Public Prosecutor of Chittagong was arbitrarily removed from service as has been made clear in a statement made by Srijukta Nellie Sengupta against whom at least no charge of anti-Muslim bias prejudice or malice can be leveled.
HINDUS VIRTUALLY OUTLAWED
(32) Commission of thefts and dacoities even with murder is going on as before. Thana office seldom record half the complaints made by the Hindus. That the abduction and rape of Hindu girls have been reduced to a certain extent is due only to the fact that there is no Caste Hindu girl between the ages of 12 and 30 living in East Bengal at present. The few depressed class girls who live in rural areas with their parents are not even spared by Muslim goondas. I have received information about a number of incidents of rape of Scheduled Castes Girls by Muslims.
Full payment is seldom made by Muslim buyers for the price of jute and other agricultural commodities sold by Hindus in market places. As a matter of fact, there is no operation of law, justice or fair play in Pakistan, so far as Hindus are concerned.
FORCED CONVERSIONS IN WEST PAKISTAN
(33) Leaving aside the question of East Pakistan, let me now refer to west Pakistan, especially Sind. The West Punjab had after partition about a lakh of Scheduled Castes people. It may be noted that a large number of them were converted to Islam. Only 4 out of a dozen Scheduled Castes girls abducted by Muslims have yet been recovered in spite of repeated petitions to the Authority. Names of those girls with names of their abductors were supplied to the government. The last reply recently given by the office-in- Charge of recovery of abducted girls said that "his function was to recover Hindu girls and stat "Achuts" (Scheduled Castes) were not Hindus". The condition of the small number of Hindus that are still living in Sind and Karachi, the capital of Pakistan, is simply deplorable. I have got a list of 363 Hindu temples and gurudwaras of Karachi and Sind (which is by no means an exhaustive list) which are still in possession of Muslims. Some of the temples have been converted into cobbler's shops, slaughterhouses and hotels. None of the Hindus has got back.
Possession of their landed properties were taken away from them without any notice and disturbed amongst refugees and local Muslims. I personally know that the Custodian declared 200 to 300 Hindus non- evacuees a pretty long time ago. But up till now properties have not been restored to any one of them. Even the possession of Karachi Pinjra Pole has not been restored to the trustees, although it was declared non-evacuee property some time ago. In Karachi I had received petitions from many unfortunate fathers and husbands of abducted Hindu girls, mostly Scheduled Castes. I Drew the attention of the 2nd Provisional Government to this fact. There was little or no effect. To my extreme regret I received information that a large number of Scheduled Castes who are still living in Sind have been forcibly converted to Islam.
PAKISTAN 'ACCURSED' FOR HINDUS
(34) Now this being in brief the overall picture of Pakistan so far as the Hindus are concerned, I shall not be unjustified in stating that Hindus of Pakistan have to all intents and purposes been rendered " Stateless " in their own houses. They have no other fault than that they profess Hindu religion. Muslim League leaders that Pakistan is and shall be an Islamic State are repeatedly making declarations. Islam is being offered as the sovereign remedy for all earthly evils. In the matchless dialectics of capitalism and socialism you present the exhilarating democratic synthesis of Islamic equality and fraternity. In that grand setting of the Shariat Muslims alone are rulers while Hindus and other minorities are jimmies who are entitled to protection at a price, and you know more than anybody else Mr. Prime Minister, what that price is. After anxious and prolonged struggle I have come to the conclusion that Pakistan is no place for Hindus to live in and that their future is darkened by the ominous shadow of conversion or liquidation. The bulk of the upper class Hindus and politically conscious scheduled castes have left East Bengal. Those Hindus who will continue to stay accursed promise and for that matter in Pakistan will, I am afraid, by gradual stages and in a planned manner be either converted to Islam or completely exterminated. It is really amazing that a man of your education, culture and experience should be an exponent of a doctrine fraught with so great a danger to humanity and subversive of all principles of equality and good sense. I may tell you and your fellow workers that Hindus will allow themselves, whatever the threat or temptation, to be treated as Jimmies in the land of their birth. Today they may, as indeed many of them have already done, abandon their hearths and home in sorrow but in panic. Tomorrow they strive for their rightful place in the economy of life. Who knows what is in the womb of the future? When I am convinced that my continuance in office in the Pakistan Central Government is not of any help to Hindus I should not with a clear conscience, create the false impression in the minds of the Hindus of Pakistan and peoples abroad that Hindus can live there with honour and with a sense of security in respect of their life, property and religion. This is about Hindus.
NO CIVIL LIBERTY EVEN FOR MUSLIMS
(35) And what about the Muslims who are outside the charmed circle of the League rulers and their corrupt and inefficient bureaucracy? There is hardly anything called civil liberty in Pakistan. Witness for example, the fate of Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan then whom a more devout Muslim had not walked this earth for many years and of his gallant patriotic brother Dr. Khan Sahib. A large number of erstwhile League leaders of the Northwest and also of the Eastern belt of Pakistan are in detention without trial. Mr. Suhrawardy to whom is due in a large measure the League's triumph in Bengal is for practical purposes a Pakistan prisoner who has to move under permit and can't open his lips under orders. Mr. Fazzul Huq, that dearly loved grand old man of Bengal, who was the author of that now famous Lahore resolution, is ploughing his lonely furrow in the precincts of the Dacca High Court of Judicature, and the so called Islamic planning is as ruthless as it is complete. About the East Bengal Muslims generally, the less said the better. They were promised at Lahore of an independent State. They were promised of autonomous and sovereign units of the independent State. What have they got instead? East Bengal has been transformed into a colony of the western belt of Pakistan, although it contained a population, which is larger than that of all the units of Pakistan put together. It is a pale ineffective adjunct of Karachi doing the latte's bidding and carrying out its orders. East Bengal Muslims in their enthusiasm wanted bread and they have by the mysterious working of the Islamic state and the Shariat got stone instead from the arid deserts of Sind and the Punjab.
MY OWN SAD AND BITTER EXPERIENCE
(36) Leaving aside the overall picture of Pakistan and the callous and cruel injustice done to others, my own personal experience is no less sad, bitter and revealing. You used your position as the Prime Minister and leader of the Parliamentary Party to ask me to issue a statement, which I did on the 8th September last. You know that I was not willing to make a statement containing untruths and half-truths, which were worse those untruths. It was not possible for me to reject your request so long as I was there working as a Minister with you and under your leadership. But I can no longer afford to carry this load of false pretensions and untruth on my conscience and I have decided to offer my resignation as your Minister, which I am hereby placing in your hands and which, I hope, you will accept without delay. You are of course at liberty to dispense with that office or dispose of it in such a manner as may suit adequately and effectively the objectives of your Islamic State.
8th Oct. 1950
Yours Sincerely,
J. N. Mandal
URL: http://www.mayerdak.com/jnmandal.htm
Another excerpt of Shyama Prasad Mukerji's resignation letter
http://www.indpride.com/drshyamaprasadmukherjee.html
Dr. Shyama Prasad Mookerjee
"I have never felt happy about our attitude towards Pakistan. It has been weak, halting and inconsistent. Our goodness or inaction has been interpreted as weakness by Pakistan."
Excerpts from convocation address by Dr. Shyama Prasad Mookerjee at Benares Hindu University (1st December, 1940)
A good deal of confusion prevails today about the ethical doctrine of Ahimsa. There is no doubt Ahimsa is one of the cardinal virtues taught by Indian thinkers of all denominations throughout the ages. Dharma consists in Ahimsa, proclaims the Mahabharat. "Ahimsa confers immortality", declares the Code of Manu. The doctrine of Ahimsa is a necessary corollary to the Hindu belief that the supreme spirit pervades the universe, that everything is strung on the Blessed Lord as rows of gems upon a thread, and that welfare of all beings is a sacred duty. Ahimsa doubtless implies abstention from selfish and aggressive violence. But does it signify inertia and pacifism under all circumstances? Did not Sree Ramchandra, so kind to righteous men and women, including even Nishadas and Savaras, wage a war to punish the arrogant evil-doer who insulted woman-hood and violated the sanctity of the peaceful hermitage? Were not "Pachajanyasya nirghosho Gandivasya cha nisvanah" meant to strike terror into the hearts of those whose pride and conceit would not allow them to do justice and repair wrongs? Did not Sree Chaitanya roar like Narasimha to restrain the bigot and the oppressor? Did not the great Asoka himself lay as much stress on 'parakrama' (prowess) as on 'ahimsa' and declare in one of his Rock Edicts that there was a limit to his forbearance? "Should any one do him wrong, that must be borne with by His Sacred Majesty so far as it can possibly be borne with". Even Buddhist Theologians prescribed condign punishment for treachery and mischief-making, typified by the career of Devadatta. Readers of the Chachnama need not be told what pusillanimity masquerading as religious quietism may do to endanger the life and liberty of a people and destroy its morale.
If I have understood the history of my country aright, a pacifism that refuses to take up arms against injustice and makes one a passive spectator of oppression and aggression, does not represent the real teaching of India. Let us not forget that valour was greatly esteemed by the sages and free rulers of India in olden times. When valour languished, the entire polity weakened. When the sword and the book of knowledge kept together, justice, equity and liberty ruled the affairs of the state. We want to see the reappearance of the ancient spirit of valour tempered with a spiritual wisdom consistent with our genius and present needs, which alone can recover civilization out of the chaotic condition of the modern age.
We live in an age when the need of 'parakrama', ceaseless exertion, courage and valour, in all spheres of activity affecting the public weal, is more imperative than ever. The menace of invasion from without is within the bounds of possibility. Disruptive forces are at work within the country itself. A nation can only save itself by its own energy. But energy and strength hardly come to a people that does not enjoy the blessings of unity and freedom. Unity need not imply uniformity is not to be encouraged. India is traditionally a land of village republics, and local autonomy has had many noble champions whose patriotism and public spirit are beyond question. But accentuation of differences can not make for strength. A divided India was always a prey to the foreign invader from the days of Alexander and Mahmud of Ghazni to those of Vasco da Gama, Dupleix and Clive. There is much disharmony and disunity in India today. Communal differences have taken such an acute turn that fanatic claims for the vivisection of our Motherland are widely asserted, backed by tacit encouragement of the powers that rule the destinies of India today.
Excerpts from statement by Dr. Shyama Prasad Mookerjee on his resignation as Minister of Industry and Supply (8th April, 1950)
I have never felt happy about our attitude towards Pakistan. It has been weak, halting and inconsistent. Our goodness or inaction has been interpreted as weakness by Pakistan. It has made Pakistan more and more intransigent and has made us suffer all the greater and even lowered us in the estimation of our own people. On every important occasion we have remained on the defensive and failed to expose or counteract the designs of Pakistan aimed at us. I am not, however, dealing today with general India-Pakistan relationship, for the circumstances that have led to my resignation are primarily concerned with the treatment of minorities in Pakistan, especially in East Bengal. Let me say at once the Bengal problem is not a provincial one. It raises issues of an all-India character and on its proper solution will depend the peace and prosperity, both economic and political, of the entire nation. There is an important difference in the approach to the problem of minorities in India and Pakistan. The vast majority of Muslims in India wanted the partition of the country on a communal basis, although I gladly recognise there has been a small section of patriotic Muslims who consistently have identified themselves with national interests and suffered for it. The Hindus on the other hand were almost to a man definitely opposed to partition. When the partition of India became inevitable, I played a very large part in creating public opinion in favour of the partition of Bengal, for I felt that if that was not done, the whole of Bengal and also perhaps Assam would fall into Pakistan. At that time little knowing that I would join the first Central Cabinet, I along with others, gave assurances to the Hindus of East Bengal, stating that if they suffered at the hands of the future Pakistan Government, if they were denied elementary rights of citizenship, if their lives and honour were jeopardised or attacked, Free India would not remain an idle spectator and their just cause would be boldly taken up by the Government and people of India. During the last 2 1/2 years their sufferings have been of a sufficiently tragic character. Today I have no hesitation in acknowledging that in spite f all efforts on my part, I have not been able to redeem by pledge and on this ground alone - if on no other - I have no moral right to be associated with Government any longer. Recent happenings in East Bengal have however overshadowed all their past woes and humiliation. Let us not forget that the Hindus of East Bengal are entitled to the protection of India, not on humanitarian considerations alone, but by virtue of their sufferings and sacrifices, made cheerfully for generations, not for advancing their own parochial interests, but for laying the foundations of India's political freedom and intellectual progress. It is the united voice of the leaders that are dead and of the youth that smilingly walked upto the gallows for India's cause that calls for justice and fairplay at the hands of Free India of today.
The recent Agreement, to my mind, offers no solution to the basic problem. The evil is far deeper and no patchwork can lead to peace. The establishment of a homogenous Islamic state is Pakistan's creed and a planned extermination of Hindus and Sikhs and expropriation of their properties constitute its settled policy. As a result of this policy, life for the minorities in Pakistan has become "nasty, brutish and short". Let us not be forgetful of the lessons of history. We will do so at our own peril. I am not talking of by-gone times; but if anyone analyses the course of events in Pakistan since its creation, it will be manifest that there is no honourable place for Hindus within that State. The problem is not communal. It is essentially political. The Agreement unfortunately tries to ignore the implications of an Islamic State. But anyone, who refers carefully to the Objectives Resolution passed by the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan and to the speech of its Prime Minister, will find that while talking in one place of protection of minority rights, the Resolution in another place emphatically declares " that the principles of democracy, freedom, equality, tolerance and special justice as enunciated by Islam shall be fully observed". The Prime Minister of Pakistan while moving the Resolution thus spoke :
"You would also notice that the State is not to play the part of a neutral observer wherein the Muslims may be merely free to profess and practice their religion, because such an attitude on the part of the State would be the very negation of the ideals which prompted the demand of Pakistan and it is these ideals which should be the corner stone of the State which we want to build. The State will create such conditions as are conducive to the building up of a truly Islamic Society which means that the State will have to play a positive part in this effort. You would remember that the Quaid-e-Azam and other leaders of the Muslim League always made unequivocal declarations that the Muslim demand for Pakistan was based upon the fact that the Muslims had their own way of life and a code of conduct. Indeed, Islam lays down specific directions for social behaviour and seeks to guide society in its attitude towards the problems which confront it day to day. Islam is not just a matter of private beliefs and conduct."
In such a Society, let me ask in all seriousness, can any Hindu expect to live with any sense of security in respect of his cultural, religious, economic and political rights. Indeed our Prime Minister analysed the basic difference between India and Pakistan only a few weeks ago on the floor of the House and his words will bear repetition.
"The people of Pakistan are of the same stock as we are and have the same virtues and failings. But the basic difficulty of the situation is that the policy of a religious and communal State followed by the Pakistan Government ineviitably produces a sense of lack of full citizenship and a continuous insecurity among those who do not belong to the majority community."
It is not the ideology preached by Pakistan that is the only disturbing factor. Its performances have been in full accord with its ideology and the minorities have had bitter experiences times without number of the true character and functioning of an Islamic State. The Agreement has totally failed to deal with this basic problem.
Public memory is sometimes very short. There is an impression in many quarters that the Agreement recently made is the first great attempt of its kind to solve the problem of minorities. I am leaving aside for the time being the disaster that took place in the Punjab; in spite of all assurances and undertakings there was a complete collapse of the administration and the problem was solved in a most brutal fashion. Afterwards we saw the gradual extermination of Hindus from North Western Frontier Province and Baluchistan and latterly from Sind as well. In East Bengal about 13 millions of Hindus were squeezed out of East Bengal. There were no major incidents as such; but circumstances so shaped themselves that they got no protection from the Government of Pakistan and were forced to come away to West Bengal for shelter. During that period there was no question of any provocation given by India where normal conditions had settled down; there was no question of Muslims being coerced t go away from India to Pakistan. In April, 1948, the First Inter-Dominion Agreement was reached in Calcutta, dealing specially with the problems of Bengal. If anyone analyses and compares the provisions of that Agreement with the recent one it will appear that in all essential matters they are similar to each other. This Agreement, however, did not produce any effective result. India generally observed its terms but the exodus from East Bengal continued unabated. It was a one-way traffic, just as Pakistan wished for. There were exchanges of correspondence; there were meetings of officials and Chief Ministers; there were consultations between Dominion Ministers. But judged by actual results Pakistan's attitude continued unchanged. There was a second Inter-Dominion Conference in Delhi, in December, 1948, and another Agreement was signed, sealed and delivered. It dealt with the same problem - the rights of minorities specially in Bengal. This also was a virtual repetition of the first Agreement. In the course of 1949 we witnessed a further deterioration of conditions in East Bengal and an exodus of a far larger number of helpless people, who were uprooted from their hearth and home and were thrown into India in a most miserable condition. The fact thus remains that inspite of two Inter Dominion Agreements as many as 16 to 20 lakhs of Hindus were sent away to India from East Bengal. About a million of uprooted Hindus had also to come away from Sind. During this period a large number of Muslims also came away from Pakistan mainly influenced by economic considerations. The economy of West Bengal received a rude shock and we continued as helpless spectators of a grim tragedy.
Today there is a general impression that there has been failure both on the part of India and Pakistan to protect their minorities. The fact however is just the reverse of it. A hostile propaganda has been also carried on in some sections of the foreign press. This is a libel on India and truth must be made known to all who desire to know it. The Indian Government - both at the Centre and in the Provinces and States - generally maintained peace and security throughout the land after Punjab and Delhi disturbances had quietened down, in spite of grave and persistent provocations from Pakistan by reason of its failure to create conditions in Sind and East Bengal whereby minorities could live there peacefully and honourably. It should not be forgotten here that the people who came away from East Bengal or Sind were not those who had decided to migrate to India out of imaginary fear at the time of partition. These were people who were bent on staying in Pakistan, if only they were given a chance to live decent and peaceful lives.
Towards the end of 1949, fresh events of a violent character started happening in East Bengal. On account of the iron curtain in that area, news did not at first arrive in India. When about 15000 refugees came to West Bengal in January 1950, stories of brutal atrocities and persecutions came to light. This time the attack was directed both against middle class urban people and selected sections of rural people who were strong, virile and united; to strike terror into their hearts was a part of Pakistan's policy. These startling reports led to some repercussions of a comparatively minor character in certain parts of West Bengal. Although these were checked quickly and effectively, false and highly exaggerated reports of so-called occurrences in West Bengal were circulated in many parts of East Bengal. This was clearly done with official backing and with a sinister motive. In the course of two to three weeks events of a most tragic character, which no civilized Government could ever tolerate, almost simultaneously broke out in numerous parts of East Bengal, causing not only wanton loss of lives and properties, but resulting also in forcible conversion of a large number of helpless people, abduction of women and shocking outrages on them. Reports which have now reached our hands clearly indicate that all these could not have happened as stray sporadic incidents. They formed part of a deliberate and cold planning to exterminate minorities from East Bengal; to ignore this is to forget hard realities. During that period our publicity both here and abroad became hopelessly weak and ineffective. This was partly done in order to prevent repercussions within India. Pakistan however followed exactly the opposite course of action. The result was that we were dubbed as aggressors while the truth was the reverse of it. During these critical weeks - although there were people who were swayed by passions and prejudices - vast sections of India's population were prepared to leave matters in the hands of Government and expected it to take stubborn measures to check the brutalities perpetrated in Pakistan. At that hour of crisis we failed to rise equal to the occasion. Where days - if not hours - counted, we allowed weeks to go by and we could not decide what was the right course of action. The whole nation was in agony and expected promptness and firmness, but we followed a policy of drift and indecision. The result was that in some areas of West Bengal and other parts of India, people became restive and exasperated and took the law into their own hands. Let me say without hesitation that private retaliation on innocent people in India for brutalities committed in Pakistan offers us no remedy whatsoever. It creates a vicious circle which may be worse than the disease; it brutalizes the race and lets loose forces which may become difficult to control at a later stage. We must function as a civilised State and all citizens who are loyal to the State must have equal rights and protection, irrespective of their religion or faith. The only effective remedy in a moment of such national crisis can and must be taken by the Government of the country and if Government moves quickly, consistent with the legitimate wishes of the people and with a full sense of national honour and prestige, there is not the least doubt that the people will stand behind the government. In any case, Government acted promptly to re-establish peace and order throughout India. Meanwhile Muslims, though in much lesser numbers, had also started leaving India, a good number of whom belonged to East Bengal and had come to West Bengal for service or occupation. Pakistan realised the gravity of the situation only when it found that on this occasion, unlike previous ones, there was no question of one-way traffic. Since January last at least 10 lakhs of people have come out of East Bengal to West Bengal. Several lakhs have gone to Tripura and Assam. Reports indicate that thousands are on their march to India today and they represent all classes and communities of people.
The supreme question of the hour is, can the minorities continue to live with any sense of security in Pakistan? The test of any Agreement is not its reaction within India or in foreign lands, but on the minds of the unfortunate minorities living in Pakistan or those who have been forced to come away already. It is not how a few top-ranking individuals in Pakistan think or desire to act. It is the entire set-up of that State, the mentality of the official circles - high and low - the attitude of the people at large and the activities of organisations such as 'Ansars' which all operate together and make it impossible for Hindus to live. It may be that for some months no major occurrences may take place. Meanwhile we may on our generosity supply them with essential commodities which will give them added strength. That has been Pakistan's technique. Perhaps the next attack may come during the rainy season when communications are virtually cut off.
I have found myself unable to be party to the Agreement for the following main reasons:
First - we had two such Agreements since Partition for solving the Bengal problem and they were violated by Pakistan without any remedy open to us. Any Agreement which has no sanction will not offer any solution.
Secondly - the crux of the problem is Pakistan's concept of an Islamic State and the ultra-communal administration based on it. The Agreement side-tracks this cardinal issue and we are today exactly where we were previous to the Agreement.
Thirdly - India and Pakistan are made to appear equally guilty, while Pakistan was clearly the aggressor. The Agreement provides that no propaganda will be permitted against the territorial integrity of the two countries and there will be no incitement to war between them. This almost sounds farcical so long as Pakistan troops occupy a portion of our territory of Kashmir and warlike preparations on its part are in active operation.
Fourthly - events have proved that Hindus cannot live in East Bengal on the assurances of security given by Pakistan. We should accept this as a basic proposition. The present Agreement on the other hand calls upon minorities to look upon Pakistan Government for their safety and honour which is adding insult to injury and is contrary to assurances given by us previously.
Fifthly - there is no proposal to compensate those who have suffered nor will the guilty be ever punished, because no one will dare give evidence before a Pakistan Court. This is in accordance with bitter experience in the past.
Sixthly - Hindus will continue to come away in large numbers and those who have come will not be prepared to go back. On the other hand, Muslims who had gone away will now return and in our determination to implement the Agreement Muslims will not leave India. Our economy will thus be shattered and possible conflict within our country will be greater.
Seventhly - in the garb of protecting minorities in India, the Agreement has reopened the problem of Muslim minority in India, thus seeking to revive those disruptive forces that created Pakistan itself. This principle carried to its logical conclusions, will create fresh problems for us which, strictly speaking, are against our very Constitution.
This is not the time nor the occasion for me to discuss alternative lines of action. This must obviously wait until the results of the policy now adopted by Government are known. I do not question the motives of those who have accepted the Agreement. I only hope that the Agreement must not be unilaterally observed. If the Agreement succeeds, nothing will make me happier. If it fails, it will indeed be a very costly and tragic experiment. I would only respectfully urge those who believe in the Agreement to discharge their responsibility by going to East Bengal - not alone, but accompanied by their wives, sisters and daughters and bravely share the burden of joint living with the unfortunate Hindu minorities of East Bengal. That would be a real test of their faith. While I have differed from the line of approach adopted by our Government to solve a malady which perhaps has no parallel in history, let me assure the House that I fully agree that the supreme need of the hour is the maintenance of peace and security in India. While utmost pressure can and must be put upon the Government of the day to act rightly, firmly and timely to prevent the baneful effects of appeasement and to guard against the adoption of a policy of repression, no encouragement should be given to create chaos and confusion within our land. If Government is anxious to have another chance - and let us understand clearly that this is the last chance that it is asking for - by all means, let Government have it. But let not the critics of Government policy be silenced or muzzled. To our misfortune, one of the parties to the Agreement has systematically broken its pledges and promises and we have no faith in its capacity to fulfill its future pledges, unless it shows by actual action that it is capable of so doing. This note of warning sounded by us should not be unwelcome to Government, for it will then act with more keenness and alertness and not permit the legitimate interests of India to be sacrificed or sabotaged in any way.
While dealing with the problem of refugees, we will have to consider also the stupendous task of rehabilitation. The present truncated province of West Bengal cannot simply bear this colossal burden. It is a mighty task where both official and non-official elements can work together for the larger good of the country and between Government and its critics there will always be ample room for co-operation in facing a problem which concerns the peace and happiness of millions of people and of the advancement of the entire nation.
03-26-2005, 10:13 AM
(This post was last modified: 03-26-2005, 10:20 AM by 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 âthe Muslim.â 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 ânationâ 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 âgrabâ 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 Indiaâs 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
2
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 weâll 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 âcommunalâ towards mobilization as âhavenotsâ
for rehabilitation in keeping with their Marxist politics. But while he saw the youthsâ 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 âforgottenâ individual Muslim saviours speaks to the erasure
of the Muslim in their nostalgic conceptualization of East Bengal. Dr. Rayâs appeal to their memories
and their consciences worked this time, but memories are sites of construction and contestation, and
in this case the refugeesâ attitudes about Muslims were structured as much by experience as by a
hegemonic discourse about âbadâ Muslims in Bengali culture. In what follows I will deal with the
East Bengali refugeesâ construction of the image of Partition victimhood--the self-conscious
insistence on the historicity of their predicament as patriots and subjects of âcommunalâ 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. âCommunalism not only produces an identification
with a religious community but also with its political, economic, social and cultural interests and
3
aspirationsâ (Kakar 1996: 13). The category âcommunalismâ was a product of British Orientalist
ideology and practice which âsystematically institutionalized a nation of communities, above all what
were deemed to be the two great communities of Hindus and Muslimsâ (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 âHinduâ and âMuslimâ as ahistorical essences, âcommunal 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 âhigh
politicsâ(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 âthe refugee problemâ; 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 Indiaâs
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 âexchange of populationsâ. 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 Bengalâs political economy and popular
imagination and is seen to be symptomatic of Bengali decline.
The Government of Indiaâs conservative and disputed schematization of population dislocation
from East Pakistan over nearly a quarter century helps situate the refugeesâ 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 ârefugeesâ 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 âdeterrenceâ 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 stateâs 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 eastâs 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 âinfiltratorsâ by the Indian
state.
5
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 âinvitingâ millions of East Bengali Hindus into the country
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 6 - 10
and alienating Pakistan as a result, undermining India's foundational principle of secularism, and burdening the fragile economy. Nehru's letter to the Chief Minister of West Bengal, Bidhan Chandra Roy reflects this quandary: âIt is wrong to encourage any large-scale migration from East Bengal to the West. Indeed, if such a migration takes place, West Bengal and to some extent the Indian Union
would be overwhelmed... If they come over to West Bengal, we must look after them. But it is no service to them to encourage them to join the vast mass of refugees who can at best be poorly cared forâ (Chakraborty 1982: 106). A half century after Partition, reviews of the Central Government of Indiaâs record on East Bengali refugee rehabilitation suggest that it was not only inadequate but
discriminatory in view of its policy toward West Punjabi refugees of Partition (Estimates Committee 1989, Govt.of West Bengal 1980).
The East Bengali migrantsâ access to rehabilitation assistance in India rested on their recognition as ârefugeesâ--and therefore eligibility for assistance by the state. A ârefugeeâ or âdisplaced personâ was defined as A âperson who was ordinarily resident in the territories now comprising East Pakistan, but who on account of civil disturbances or the fear of civil disturbances or on account of the partition of India has migratedâ (Ministry of Rehabilitation 1957: 86). But while acknowledging that âfearâ of persecution or violence was a valid justification for migration, the official definition was imprecise about the preconditions of fear that the state would accept as meriting shelter in India. Increasingly the Indian government tuned its antenna to spectacular worse-case scenarios in Pakistan and tried to ignore complaints of âeverydayâ insecurity--quick to declare that it was ânot aware that the East Bengali Hindus had problemsâ or it knew of no âincidentsâ in East Pakistan to justify a population displacement (Ananda Bazar Patrika, 21 February 1948). This euphemistically termed âincidentâ was an incontrovertible and immediate event of life-threatening violence--the quintessential case of which was taken to be a âcommunal riotâ. In other words, the state sought to distinguish between âvoluntaryâ and âforcedâ migrants.
A distinction was also sought to be made between âeconomicâ and âpoliticalâ refugees. In 1948, the provincial Government of West Bengal issued a press note stating that they would discontinue registering East Bengalis coming to the state as refugees because âwhatever might have been the cause of the exodus in the past, similar conditions do not now prevail. There is hardly any communal disturbance in Eastern Pakistan... Therefore, the present exodus is due to economic causesâ
(Ananda Bazar Patrika, 26 June 1948). This assumption was challenged by the president of the East Bengal Minority Welfare Committee in Calcutta: âThe Press Note... lightheartedly refers to the âeconomic causesâ of the steadily continuing exodus. These âeconomic causesâ are a direct consequence of partition on a communal basisâ (ibid). There can be little doubt that he considered the
government's hairsplitting, specious and his explicit linkage of refugee status to Partition victimhood will be shown to be a part of a resistant discourse of entitlement among displaced East Bengali Hindus.
The government's âmistrustâ of the refugees (Daniel and Knudsen 1995) reflected that of the general West Bengali population's. Cartoons appeared in Calcutta newspapers revealing public apprehension regarding the costs of assisting a large population of East Bengali refugees. In one, West Bengal was depicted lying in a hospital bed with various ailments including ârefugee-itisâ. A worried visitor was shown asking the attendant doctor, Chief Minister B.C. Roy, if the case was âhopelessâ (Amrita Bazar Patrika, 14 January 1950). West Bengalis associated the influx of thousands of East Bengali refugees with every malaise from overcrowding, squalor, social disintegration and soaring crime rates to unemployment and the rising cost of living. It was anticipated that the Hindu refugees would stoke communal violence against the Muslims of West Bengal or be manipulated by political 7 parties seeking constituencies. And the refugees' acts of trespass on private and state property as they attempted to resettle themselves, only confirmed popular misgivings. Communist workers trying to build up a following among the local poor and the refugee testify to the anger of the rural West Bengali landless over the distribution of precious agricultural land among the refugees, and occasions when refugees were prevented by locals from settling on land that the government had allocated for their resettlement (Interview with Bijoy Majumdar, 1988). There were several clashes between industrial worker striking for higher wages and improved working conditions, and refugees eager to work for
a pittance. Against this background, it becomes clear that the West Bengali joke that back âhomeâ every East Bengali was a zamindar (landlord) reflected suspicion about the authenticity of the refugees claims to be victims. But there was considerable sympathy as well which acknowledged this public reluctance to engage with the humanitarian burden signalled by East Bengali claims of victimhood. Another cartoon by the same artist whose work I referred to earlier showed a swordwielding Liaquat Ali Khan, the Premier of Pakistan, standing over mutilated bodies while a Congressman pulled away in a boat while pleading with folded hands: âThere is no space, this boat is small.â It was an unambiguous representation of the East Bengalis as victims--both of physical violence in Muslim Pakistan and of epistemological denial in India.
The refugee discourse of âHistoric Rightsâ East Bengali migrants were quick to counter the power imbalance inherent in the state's attempt to determine eligibility and the reservations on the part of a section of the local population regarding the validity of their claim to refugee status. The politico-social category of the ârefugeeâ
and its Bengali synonym sharanarthi (someone who seeks refuge from a greater power ) were initially the topic of intense debate. For many East Bengali Hindu migrants the image conveyed was a derogatory one, conflated with the act of begging, dependence on the charity and compassion of strangers and demeaning supplication. As one East Bengali commentator noted, âThose who roamed the streets of Dhaka soliciting support for the Partition didn't even dream that, as a reward for their gesture in agreeing to leave, they would be forever labelled ârefugeesâ, a word that does more violence to the idea of a home than any other in any languageâ(The Sunday Statesman, 2 March 1986).
But increasingly, it was this word ârefugeeâ with its powerful connotations of loss, that was appropriated by the displaced as they collectively sought to represent their interests on a political platform. A pamphlet issued to commemorate a refugee convention organized by the Refugee Central Rehabilitation Council--the refugee wing of the Revolutionary Socialist Party in West Bengal--makes
it clear that the migrants were determined to establish their entitlement to protection and assistance in India as an inalienable right--not subject to the host people or government's pity or whim: The East Bengalis expelled from Pakistan, can demand to build their homes on every inch of Indian soil on the strength of their adhikar (own right). They are not sharanarthi (supplicants) but kshatipuraner dabidar (claimants to compensation for losses) (RCRC n.d.: 1).
Consider the following exerpt from a pamphlet entitled âAitihashik Adhikarâ or âHistoric Rightsâ, published by the East Bengal Minority Welfare Association which advocated refugee rights for post- 1971 migrants who were denied state assistance. The partition left us homeless, bereft of everything. We did not fight for independence in order to lead the lives of 8 beggars. Those of us who cannot remain in East Pakistan are not doing anything wrong by seeking shelter in India. Why should the police push us back? Why should we live in hovels next to rail-tracks? Why should we be the object of people's mercy? ... it is only right that those who struggled and sacrificed for independence be repaid (EBMWA n.d.: 8-9).
Rehabilitation with dignity was not to be seen as an act of charity but as the repayment of a national debt to the East Bengali Hindus represented in this passage as historic agents--freedom-fighters and victims of Partition which consigned them to minorityhood and therefore subordination in a Muslimmajority
state. Identification as a refugee was important since this entitled them to relief and rehabilitation aid from the state or a least recognition of their special history and needs. It came to be used interchangeably with âdisplaced personâ and âmigrantâ which are part of the official vocabulary of humanitarian assistance in India; and also with the more evocative âudbastuâ and âbastuharaâ of Bengali public discourse. âBastuâ means foundation of a house, and is associated with originary, foundational, ancestral and sacred. The prefix âutâ means âout ofâ and thus the word âudbastuâ signals loss of home and by extension homeland; as does âbastuhara.â Both these no longer simply index a lack of shelter but bear the weight of the trauma of Partition. What is significant is that the migrants appropriated the signifiers, investing it with a positive repertoire of meanings, turning a lack into a strength, a powerful moral claim to victimhood which would have to be assuaged. Especially with the transformation of the displaced into voters, those who turned to the Left for redress took to the streets with the slogan âAmra kara? Bastuhara!â (âWho are we? Refugees!â) a signal of their
presence and predicament. And in later years those who continued to define themselves as ârefugeesâ
did so in a spirit of critique, as a commentary on the failure of the government to rehabilitate them.
In addressing the ideas embedded in the concept âhistoric rightsâ, I would like to talk briefly about the refugeesâ representation of themselves as exemplary nationalists and move on to considering the question of Partition victimhood. I draw here on documented evidence such as public speeches, press notes, letters to newspapers3, pamphlets/circulars, depositions to âfactâ finding commissions, as well as personal interviews and auto-biographical or literary sources. The text of a letter to the editor of the Bengali-language newspaper, Ananda Bazar Patrika in 1948 by self-proclaimed East Bengali refugee is revealing:
The dissection of India and division of Bengal has prevented the enjoyment of our hard-won independence. Hindus and Sikhs have left their homes in the Punjab, North West Frontier Provinces, Sind, and Baluchistan and the Indian government have helped to evacuate them and are trying to solve the complicated problem of resettling them. But it is our 3The readership of papers like the Ananda Bazar Patrika and the Amrita Bazar Patrika which were based in Calcutta, continued to span the two Bengals as late as 1950-1. They published news on and letters from East Bengalis, and were perceived as a window into the condition of the Hindus in post-partition East Pakistan--where they were first censored and then banned for inciting communal animosity. 9 misfortune that those who have undertaken the greatest atmatyag (self sacrifice) and given the most blood in the independence movement are neglected at home and abroad.
The West Bengal government is ashamed to think of East Bengali Hindus. The Government of India neither are nor feel the need to be informed about them. And this, even though the first to dream of freedom was the sage Bankimchandra and the first general in the battle for independence was Bengal's Surendranath. (5 January 1948)
In the 19th century, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee instructed Bengalis through his historical, nationalist novels into a consciousness of themselves as a proud and virile jati or race, capable of future greatness. Surendranath Banerjee, also mentioned in the letter, was a founder of the Indian Association which later merged into the Indian National Congress--the political organization which dominated the nationalist movement for an independent India. By invoking these two names, the writer was tapping into a self-image that is widely prevalent among all Bengalis--that as torchbearers to the rest of India, they had initiated the nationalist movement against the British, radicalized it, and lost the most in its
cause. Bengali intellectuals and activists had been prominent in the nationalist movement in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but in the 1930s, Bengal's leadership was eclipsed by the Gandhian faction in the Congress. With the attrition of Bengal's power, developments like Partition came to be cast by the people of the region as an anti-Bengali plot or rationalized as a sacrifice willingly borne by the East Bengalis for the greater good of India4. The argument continued that they had struggled for a life of emancipation in India, not of subordination in a Muslim nation not of their own choosing, and therefore had a right to live in a Hindu homeland.
The patriot proved to be an evocative signifier in terms of which East Bengali Hindus made claims about the distinctiveness and exemplariness of their nationalism, contradicting the disparaging allegations of non-migrants and Indian officialdom, that migration was an act of passive cowardice
and burdensome disservice to the inhabitants of both India and Pakistan. The self-referential use of the allied image of the shahid or martyr was also a authenticating gesture that drew on the traditional
Indic concept of âgenerative sacrificeâ (Das and Nandy 1985: 178) as and projected East Bengali Hindus as historical agents to whom the nation owed a collective debt--asylum and resettlement.
Finally, this discourse of patriotism and sacrifice included each East Bengali Hindu in its address, serving to unify and mobilize the refugees into a community of solidarity and expectation by smoothing over the unevennesses of caste, class and interest so that every refugee became the historical heir of the swadhinata sangrami or âfreedom fighter.â The ultimate act as true nationalists was to go to India- -the destiny of Hindu East Bengali refugees who must abandon their ancestral homes for a Hindu 4Having played a key role in the anti-colonial movement in Bengal, the Hindu elite had hoped to replace the British in the postcolonial order and rejected the idea that a united Bengal would be included in Pakistan, unwilling to be subjected to the rule of a Muslim majority in the province. Thus the partition of Bengal was actively proposed by West Bengali politicians--of both the Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha. And while Bakarganj was the only East Bengal district to endorse the partition campaign, many East Bengalis considered the redrawing of boundaries preferable to losing undivided Bengal to Pakistan.
10
homeland of the spirit. A doggerel that a refugee interviewee remembered being taunted with by Muslims in the days leading up to Partition, drew on this structure of feeling: (Interview with Mahendra Mondal from Barisal, 1989)
On the excuse of Noakhali,5 They made Bihar into Karbala6. Bihar has become Hindustan. Bengal has become Pakistan. Go away--each to his own address. The refugees as Partition victims As we have seen earlier, in the governmentâs scheme of things âpartitionâ was presented as the reason for the refugee influx of 1947 alone, âcommunal riotsâ were recorded as the official reason for the migration of 1950--each episode in the massive and protracted flight from East Pakistan was related to a different cause. The reason for this was to attempt to establish a sliding scale of true or deserving displacement to ease the stateâs humanitarian responsibility. But in the refugeesâ own accounts of their displacement it was âdesh bhag,â literally the âdivision of the homelandâ or Partition which is the dominant reference. There is of course the detail of year and âimmediateâ cause,
but as a schoolmaster interviewee pointed out, the âunderlying causeâ for the insecurity of Bengali Hindus in East Pakistan and their ultimate exodus was Partition (Interview with Nirmal Chandra Sarkar, 1989). I found when I asked my interviewees the question, âWhy did you leave your desh (homeland)?â, the answer was often on the lines of âAfter desh bhag we could no longer remain
thereâ, and sometimes an outraged âDonât you know!â I was seen to be casting doubt on what the refugees assumed to have been established beyond question--that the East Bengalis were victims of the partition of India on the fundamental basis of religion, which uprooted them psychologically and then physically. Was I trying to imply that they had left their ancestral homes âfor fun?â Partition
functioned as a structuring device, describing one original trauma and a shared experience of misfortune. It provided a central and awful image that had the power to explain the migrantsâ collective predicament. The description of their victimhood in terms of Partition-induced homelessness, minorityhood and Muslim communalism reflected their opposition to the Indian leadership's scepticism about their allegations of post-Partition insecurity in East Pakistan and reluctance to accord them refugee status. Saadat Hasan Manto wrote on a note of mordant prophecy after the bloody partition of Punjab in 1947, â...India was free. Pakistan was free from the moment of its birth. But man was a slave in both
countries, of prejudice, of religious fanaticism, of bestiality, of crueltyâ (1987: 6).This equation of the moment of independence with the unfreedom of fear and prejudice, of nationalism with exile affords us an insight into the condition of insecurity and degradation experienced by the religious minorities in India and Pakistan. Nationalisms with their declared affiliation to a place, a people and
a past arrogate truth exclusively to themselves and assign falsehood and inferiority to others. The presence of 40 million Muslims in India, and over 12 million Hindus in Pakistan--as visible religious 5This is a reference to the Noakhali riots of 1946 in East Bengal. 6The Imam Husein was martyred at Karbala--a powerful symbol of the triumph of evil over good for Shia Muslims--and a shorthand for the slaughter of innocents.
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 ânationals,â 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 presidentâs 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.
12
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 âevidenceâ 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 âHail Bangladesh!â 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
âauthenticâ refugees and by which logic, Partition, was represented as the definitive instance of
sectarian violence. By linking themselves to this paradigmatic âcommunal incidentâ--the refugees
constructed themselves as âinvoluntaryâ 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
13
violence. It was in this vein of distrust that a prominent Calcutta intellectual wrote âExodusâ to
disabuse Hindus of the widely held belief, âthat most of the Muslims in Pakistan are communal
fanatics and that all Hindus were forced to leave East Pakistan due to riotsâ (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 âdirectly involvedâ in a riot. She
reported a âtypicalâ exchange in which an elderly refugee woman answered her question âWhy did
you come to India?â by saying, âFor fear of the mian (Muslim men), what else?â Maitreyee Devi's
next query was âWhat did they do?â and the answer, âThey kidnap our daughters, burn our homes, stab
us, kill usâ--the response particularly remarkable for the use of the present tense. She continued,
âWere any of your relationsâ or friendsâ houses burnt?â and was told, âNo, nothing happened in our
village, but in other villages there was trouble.â Maitreye Devi concluded that âsocio-economic
reasons were the real cause of the exodus, more than riotsâ (ibid). In rejecting the migrantsâ 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.
14
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 âcriminalsâ 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 âMinority memberâ stated the âbasic problemâ to be one of âlivelihoodâ:
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 fishermanâs 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 villagerâs 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 âuntouchablesâ in India following their inclusion in a
schedule or classificatory list.
15
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 Leagueâs 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
âreactionariesâ used the âweapon of communalismâ 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 refugeesâ 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
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 16 - 20
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 âfact-findingâ 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 âdisappearanceâ 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 âbutcher.â A typical example of this was an account, which with minor variations, involved a Muslimâs 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 ânormalâ maternal gesture, as the woman and the dead or dying infant were converted to symbols of
the physical, generational annihilation of the Hindu âraceâ 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 refugeesâ 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: âIt is true we have experienced no beatings or murder,
but all people do not have the same degree of endurance.â He then recounted his reason for leaving East Bengal. One evening, he had heard a loud call outside his house, âHo korta (master of the house)! Are you home?â 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, âKorta, the English have left, the country is free, and we have our Pakistan. So I came to make friends with you.â Angered by his tenantâs 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 âthe time of Pakistan,â so he pretended pleasure. The tenant proceeded to walk right in to the manâs home âas if the house was his own property--and not to the sitting room outside, but right inside to the sleeping quarters.â Sitting down on the manâs bed without his permission he said in an unmistakeable tone of threat, âKorta, this is Pakistan. Donât 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.â The refugee exclaimed accusingly to Bandyopadhyay, âAfter all this, how can you still expect us to stay in Pakistan!â (Bandopadhyay 1970: 13-4).
For the bhadralok, escape to West Bengal seemed the only way to âkeep faceâ--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 âinsolenceâ: Muslims proposing inter-community marriages; contravening pollution laws by âaccidentallyâ touching the Hindusâ bodies, their food and water, or entering their homes or ritual spaces; âtrickingâ 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 threatsâ to the Hindu communityâs religious integrity. An example of such
a âthreatâ 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 âsecond-class citizenshipâ 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, âRepeated declarations that Pakistan is an Islamic State make both the Hindus and the Muslims
think alike that Pakistan is ultimately meant exclusively for the Muslimsâ (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 âtheocraticâ state bound to destroy and deny Bengali Hindu culture and nationalism, and to celebrate Muslim victories. Thus Dhirendranath Roy Chowdhury told me, âThe 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 courtyardâ (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: âWhat role did the kafirs (non-believers) play in helping the British gain an empire in India?â (Interview with Rasaraj Goswami, 1988). The imputation of âtreacherousâ collaboration with British imperialists was perceived as a calculated slur on their ânationalistâ heritage. The âchastityâ 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, âmiscegenation,â the loss and humiliation of the (male) Hindu self. Such acts compromised the âpurityâ 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 âprized their self respect and the honour of their women above everything elseâ (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 âoutraging of female modestyâ was described by the refugees
as an attack on the individual Hindu and the community as a whole, since women were âresponsible for the continuity of tradition and the raceâ (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, âIt was sheer thin-skinnedness.â His father had been incensed when the local Muslim cobbler offered to âprotectâ 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 âcharaler poâ or âson of an untouchableâ 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 âHinduâ identity, the experience of refugeehood forced them not only to âturn their backs on caste rulesâ--his father was forced to live cheek by jowl with âuntouchablesâ in refugee colony--but even to forgo their much vaunted âBengalinessâ as they were dispersed all over India (Interview with Anil Sinha, 1989). The East Bengali Hindusâ 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 âminorityâ--with its connotations of secondariness. As inheritors of a colonial revisionist-nationalist historiography that denigrated the medieval or âMuslim periodâ of Bengalâs history as the âdark ages,â the East Bengali Hindus were in agreement with their supporter, the
eminent Bengali historian Jadunath Sarkar, who asserted that East Bengal was âlapsing into barbarismâââgoing the way of Palestine without the Jewsâ (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 âdead 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 devoteesâ14 (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 âa spark of light in the midst of the mess of Muslim misgovernment and stagnation,â 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. âHowever 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,â he said, and urged West Bengalis â...to engraft this rich racial branch upon its old decaying trunk and rise to a new era of prosperity and powerâ (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 âhad 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 sacredâ (Chakrabarty 1995: 129). Herein lay
the unexamined structure of prejudice evident in this public discourse which ostensibly avoids a âlow language of prejudiceâ (128). In an autobiographical essay on growing up in a refugee colony Manas Ray refers to this prejudice, âThe 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 figureâ (Ray 2000: 168).
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 21 - 25
If this strand of elite East Bengali public discourse is implicitly dismissive of Muslims, the refugee testimonies of victimhood across class tend to be overtly anti-Muslim. In recognition of this, the Government of India instituted an investigation of âsocial tensionsâ among refugees from East Bengal in 1950 under the direction of the Anthropological Survey. The report noted âmarked tensionâ against Muslims irrespective of caste status and sex, though found it âsoftenedâ among upper castes
because of their education and stronger among women across caste because of their âidentificationâ with âtraditional ideologyâ (Guha 1959: ix). The negative stereotype of the Muslim which emerged in this study included such characteristics as cruelty, crudeness, lust, cow-killing, treachery, dirtiness and fanaticism. According to the researchers, the most significant feature about the stereotype was its ânonpolitical and nonreligious natureâ--its emphasis on what they termed the âbehavioral.â âThe political ideology of the Muslim League or features of Islam as a religion found no place in it. Though aggravated by political conflicts in recent years, the basic roots of tension lay in deeper trends of personality structure which prevented Hindus from identifying with Muslimsâ (ibid). The suggestion
is that the refugee rhetoric of victimhood constructed the East Bengali Muslim as the ontological âOtherâ of the Hindu--both superhuman in ferocity, strength and rampant sexuality, and subhuman because of dirtiness--associated with the moral pollution of beef consumption--rather than the physical, and with treachery and sexual transgression. And while I would question the analytical
relevance of âpersonality structuresâ the broader point the report made is that the opposition between Hindus and Muslims was cast in essentialized terms rather than in those of historical or local context.
This hegemonic narrative about âthe Muslim,â systematically circulated in the press, pamphlets and commemorative literature and repeated in private in story and rumour, both erased the Muslimâs docile presence in an idyllic Bengali past and demonized âhisâ15 antagonistic presence in a language of excess.
15The negative and totalizing image of the Muslim in East Bengali refugee stories is
explicitly gendered as male.
What was the immediate implication of this refugee rhetoric of prejudice and antipathy? While East Bengali refugees who sought asylum in India represented themselves as victims of Muslim communalism to claim refugee status and thereby humanitarian assistance, they found it very difficult to influence the stateâs rehabilitation intervention and experienced both relief and long-term rehabilitation policy as painfully inadequate. Large numbers of frustrated refugees took matters into their own hands and began to âresettleâ themselves by squatting on land they argued to be unoccupied and unused. The words they used were âvacant,â and the Bengali equivalent âkhaliâ as well as âpatitâ or abandoned, and âjola jamiâ which meant marshland. The impression these words conveyed was clearly that such lands were marginal and available for settlement--which was referred to as âcolonyâ construction. In some cases this land belonged to the state, but for the most part the refugees squatted on privately owned property including that belonging to local West Bengali Muslims. Particularly in the areas around the city of Calcutta, many refugee settlements were established on land âformerly inhabited by Muslim labourers and artisansâ who were âreplaced by displaced Hindus from East Pakistanâ (Bose 1968:33). Many Muslims were dispossessed of their homes in the city leading to their âghettoizationâ in a few neighbourhoods (Deb 2000:68). It could be argued that East Bengali refugee settlement across West Bengal affected the minority Muslim community most adversely. While 22 researching refugee self-settlement strategies I visited colonies on the outskirts of Calcutta as well as along the Hooghly river. It was not uncommon for me to be told while I was being shown around a colony by a refugee settler, that a soccer field or community gathering point was once a âMusalmanâ eggplant field or graveyard, or that when the East Bengalis arrived the land was âovergrown with weeds, home to jackals and mosquitos, and a handful Muslims whose homes consisted of shacksâ (Interview with Paresh Haldar, 1988). There were a few instances when I noticed the contours of a mosque or Muslim saintsâs shrine in the foundation of a refugee home. The need of the refugeesâ for new homes pitted them against local West Bengalis, but the widespread dispossession of West Bengali Muslims must be seen as a manifestation of East Bengali refugee communalism driven by as
much revenge, as a racist consciousness that marginalized or erased Muslim presence in the new refugee homeland of West Bengal.
The Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM emerged as the main political opposition to the ruling Congress regime in West Bengal after Partition, and as the âold guardâ like to tell it, party workers recognized the destabilizing force of East Bengali refugee anger against Muslims and the imperative to resettle them. This prompted the Leftâs inclusion of the refugee cause in its broader programme of redistributive justice--a move which they claimed to have âneutralizedâ refugee communalism, helped prevent large-scale violence against West Bengali Muslims and minimized the ir migration to Pakistan (Interviews with Bijoy Mazumdar, Anil Sinha, 1988-89). Gyan Pandey has argued that the history of sectarian violence âhas been treated in the historiography of modern India as aberration and absenceâ (1992: 27). In the Leftâs master narrative of successful leadership of
subaltern movements, the material or economic has been stressed as an explanation for Hindu-Muslim conflict. In this version the East Bengali refugeesâ communalism--and expropriation of Muslims--is represented as an aberration, a distortion of the normal condition of inter-community harmony., cultural syncretism and class solidarity, corrected as it were by the Left successful efforts at
consciousness raising. This erases the recent history of East Bengali communalism, and marginalizes Muslim victims. The fact that the Congress and the CPM insist on a small figure for Muslim outmigration to Pakistan (relative to East Bengali Hindus) and take pride in the stateâs apparent restitution of property to Muslim âreturnees,â posits secularism as normative in India as a policy and an
objective condition. I return here to the story of âthwarted communalismâ that I began this paper with.
In that story, East Bengali refugeesâ âmomentaryâ communalism--cast as an aberration--was ostensibly corrected by a liberal appeal to the East Bengali refugee rioters to remember the âgoodâ Muslim. Manas Ray writes, âToday the Left draws its rhetorical force from an act of remembrance:
it asks not to forget the early days of hardship and achievement of the colony peopleâ with the support of the Left in the face of Congress indifference. For those too young to remember, there is another âbrand of the politics of memory that gestures at the treatment meted out to Hindus by the Muslims in undivided Bengal. Those born after the Partition are more eager to subscribe to this thesis of the past.â (188). It is my submission that not only was the good Muslim itself a product of condescension and erasure--and therefore of communalism, but as I have tried to show in this paper, East Bengali refugee identity was predicated on the claim to communal victimhood which explicitly demonized Muslims. Even if one were to accept the argument that Bengali Hindu communalism has been muted relative
to north and west India and that the politics of Hindu nationalism have not gained much ground in West Bengal despite the presence of the second largest populations of Muslims after Uttar Pradesh and a porous border with Bangladesh (Ruud 1996), I would suggest that the case of the East Bengali Hindus
refugees demonstrates the existence and elaboration of a collective cultural memory of âbadâ 23
Muslims, a particular history of Hindu communalism, and a past which may seed anti-Muslim politics in West Bengal in the years to come. While acknowledging East Bengali Hindu refugee agency, it is important to research further its communal effects on the Muslim minority in West Bengal; to examine the dynamics of Bengali refugee communalism, its distinguishing features and self-location relative to the Bharatiya Janata Party and its âfamilyâ of Hindu fundamentalist organizations; and to probe for alternative stories--perhaps those that tell of shared experiences and solidarity among Hindu and Muslim Bengalis.
24
References
Butalia, Urvashi. 1998. The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. New Delhi:
Viking. Bandyopadhyay, Hironmoy. 1970. Udbastu. Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad.
Bose, Nirmal Kumar. 1968. Calcutta: A Social Survey. Bombay: lakshmi Publishing House.
Chakrabarti, Prafulla K.1990. The Marginal Men. Calcutta: Lumiere Books.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 1995. Remembered Villeges: Representations of Hindu-Bengali Memories
In the Aftermath of the Partition. South Asia 28:109-129.
Chakraborty, Saroj.1982. With B.C.Roy and Other Chief Ministers. Calcutta: Rajat Chakraborty.
Chatterjee, Nilanjana. 1992. Midnightâs Unwanted Children: East Bengali Refugees and the Politics of Rehabilitation. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation.
Daniel, Valentine & Knudsen, John eds. 1995. Mistrusting Refugees. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Das, Veena. 1990. Introduction. In Mirrors of Violence; Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia, 1-36. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Das, Veena & Nandy, Ashis. 1985. Violence, Victimhood and the Language of Silence.
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Dasgupta, Anindita. 2000. Denial and Resistance: Sylheti Partition ârefugeesâ in Assam.
Contemporary South Asia 10(3): 343-360.
Deb, Arun. 2000. The UCRC: Its Role in Establishing the Rights of Refugee Squatters in Calcutta.
In Refugees in West Bengal, ed, Pradip Kumar Bose, 65-79. Calcutta: Calcutta
Research Group.
Estimates Committee. Rehabilitation of Migrants from East Bengal. New Delhi: Lok Sabha Secretariat.
Gangopadhyay, Sunil.1987. Arjun. New Delhi: Penguin.
Ghosh, Gautam. 1998. God is a Refugee: Nationality, Morality and History in the 1947 Partition of India. Social Analysis 42(1): 33-62.
Government of West Bengal. 1980. Report of the Refugee Rehabilitation Committee. Calcutta:
Saraswati Press.
Guha, B.S. 1959. Studies in Social Tensions Among Refugees from Eastern Pakistan. Calcutta:
Government of India.
Indian Commission of Jurists. 1965. Recurrent Exodus of Minorities from East Pakistan. New Delhi: Purshottamdas Trikamdas.
Kakar, Sudhir. 1996. The Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion and Conflict.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Luthra, P.N. Rehabilitation. 1972. New Delhi: Government of India Publications.
Maitreye Devi. Exodus. Calcutta: Nabajatak Printers.
Malkki, Liisa. 1996. Speechless Emissaries:Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization.
Cultural Anthropology 11(3): 377-404.
Manto, Saadat Hasan. 1987. Kingdomâs End and Other Stories. London: Verso.
Menon, Ritu & Bhasin, Kamla. 1998. Borders and Boundaries: Women in Indiaâs Partition. New 25 Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Metcalf, Barbara D. 1995. Too Little and Too Much: Reflections on Muslims in the History of India. Journal of Asian Studies 54(4): 951-967.
Ministry of Rehabilitation, Govt. Of India. 1957. Annual Report, 1955-56. New Delhi:
Government of India Publications.
Pandey, Gyanendra. 1990. The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
------1992. In Defense of the Fragment:Writing About Hindu-Muslim Riots in India Today.
Representations 37(Winter): 27-55.
Ray, Manas. 2000. Growing Up Refugee: Memory and Locality. In Refugees in West Bengal, ed,
Pradip Kumar Bose, 163-195. Calcutta: Calcutta Research Group.
Ruud, Arild Engelsen. 1996. Contradictions and Ambivalence in the Hindu Nationalist Discourse
in West Bengal. In Asian Forms of the Nation, ed. Stein Tonnesson et al, 151-180.
Richmond: Curzon.
Zolberg, Aristide et al. 1989. Escape from Violence: Conflict and the Refugee Crisis in the Developing World. New York: Oxford University Press.
Pamphlets:
Refugee Central Rehabilitation Committee. n.d. In the Interest of Stable Rehabilitation. Calcutta.
East Bengali Minority Welfare Association. n.d. Aitihashik Adhikar. Calcutta: Gouranga Press.
Newspapers:
Ananda Bazar Patrika
Amrita Bazar Patrika
The Statesman
This is a History of the early Civil War in East Pakistan in 1971 from Time and Newsweek.
Dacca, City of the Dead
Courtesy: TIME [May 3, 1971; pp. 28]
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Within hours after launching a tank-led offensive in Dacca and other East Pakistani cities on the night of March 25, the Pakistan army imposed a virtual blackout on the brutal civil war in Bangla Desh (Bengal State) by expelling foreign newsmen. TIME correspondent Dan Coggin, who was among them, recently trekked back from India by Honda, truck, bus and bicycle to become the first American journalist to visit Dacca since the fighting started. His report:
Dacca was always a fairly dreary city, offering slim pleasures beyond the Hotel Intercontinental and a dozen Chinese restaurants that few of its 1,500,000 people could afford. Now. in many ways. it has become a city of the dead. <b>A month after the army struck unleashing tank guns and automatic weapons against largely unarmed civilians in 34 hours of wanton slaughter, Dacca is still shocked and shuttered, its remaining inhabitants living in terror under the grip of army con trol. The exact toll will never be known. but probably more than 10,000 were killed in Dacca alone.</b>
Perhaps half the city's population has fled to outlying villages. With the lifting of army blockades at road and river ferry exits, the exodus is resuming. Those who remain venture outdoors only for urgent food shopping. Rice prices have risen 50% since the army reportedly started burning grain silos in some areas. In any case, 14 of the city's 18 food bazaars were destroyed. The usually jammed streets are practically empty and no civil government is functioning.
"Kill the Bastards!" On every rooftop, Pakistanâs green-and-white flags hang limply in the steamy stillness. "We all know that Pakistan is finished,' said one Bengali. 'but we hope the flags will keep the soldiers away.'. As another form of insurance, portraits of Pakistan's late founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah, and even the current President Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan, were displayed prominently. But there was no mistaking the fact that the East Pakistanis viewed the armyâs occupation of Dacca as a setback and not a surrender. "We will neither forgive nor forget," said one Bengali. On learning that I was a sangbadik (journalist), various townspeople led me to mass graves, to a stairwell where two professors were shot to death, and to scenes of other atrocities.
<b>The most savage killing occurred in the Old City, where several sections were burned to the ground, poured gasoline around entire blocks, igniting them with flamethrowers, then mowed down people trying to escape the cordons of fire, "They're coming out!" a Westerner heard soldiers cry, "Kill the bastards!"</b>
One Bengali businessman told of losing his son, daughter-in-Iaw and four grandchildren in the fire. Few apparently survived in the destroyed sections-25 square blocks-of the Old City. If they escaped the flames, they ran into gunfire. To frighten survivors, soldiers refused to allow the removal of decomposing bodies for three days, despite the Moslem belief in prompt burial, preferably within 24 hours, to free the soul.
<b>The dead of Dacca included some of East Pakistan's most prominent educators and businessmen, as well as some 500 students. Among at least seven University of Dacca professors who were executed without apparent reason was the head of the philosophy department. Govinda Chandra Dev, 65, a gentle Hindu who believed in unity in diversity. Another victim was Jogesh Chandra Ghosh, 86, the invalid millionaire chemist. Ghosh, who did not believe in banks, was dragged from his bed and shot to death by soldiers who looted more than $1 million in rupees from his home.</b>
Looting was also the motive for the slaying of <b>Ranada Prasad Saha</b>, 80, one of East Pakistan's leading jute exporters and one of its few philanthropists: he had built a modern hospital offering free medical care at Mirzapur, 40 miles north of Dacca. Dev, Ghosh and Saha were all Hindus.
"Where arc the maloun [cursed ones] rampaging soldiers often asked as they searched for Hindus. But the Hindus were by no means the only victims. Many soldiers arriving in East Pakistan were reportedly told the absurdity that it was all right to kill Bengali Moslems because they were Hindus in disguise. "We can kill anyone for anything," a Punjabi captain told a relative. "We are accountable to no one.â
Next Prime Minister. <b>The tales of brutality are seemingly endless. A young man whose house was being searched begged the soldiers to do anything but to leave his 17-year-old sister alone; they spared him so he could watch them murder her with a bayonet. Colonel Abudl Hai, a Bengali physician attached to the East Regiment, was allowed to make a phone call to his family; an hour later his body was delivered to his home</b>. An old man-who decided that Friday prayers were more important than the curfew was shot to death as he walked into a mosque.
About 1:30 on the morning of the attack, two armored personnel carriers arrived at the Dhanmandi home of Sheik Mujibur ("Mujib") Rahman, 51, the political leader behind the campaign for Bengali independence. Mujib first took refuge beneath a bed when the Special Security Group commandos began to spray his house with small-arms fire. Then, during a lull, he went to the downstairs veranda, raised his hands in surrender and shouted, "There is no need for shooting. Here I am. Take me."
Mujib was flown to West Pakistan, where he is reported held in Attock Fort near Peshawar. As an activist who had already spent nine years and eight months in jail, he may have reasoned at the time of his arrest that his political goals would be served by the martyrdom of further imprisonment. But he obviously did not expect to face a treason charge and possible execution. Only two months earlier, after all, President Yahya had referred to him as "the next Prime Minister of Pakistan."
No Choice. In Mujib's absence, the resistance movement is sorely lacking leadership, as well as arms, ammunition and communications gear. In late March, the mukti fauj (liberation forces) overwhelmed several company-size elements, as at Kushtia and Pabna, but bolt-action rifles cannot stop Sabre jets, artillery and army troops operating in battalion strength.
Still, everywhere I visited on the journey to Dacca, I found astonishing unanimity on the Bengali desire for independence and a determination to resist the Pakistan army with whatever means available. "We will not be slaves, said one resistance officer, "so there is no choice but to fight until we win." The oncoming monsoon rains and the Islamabad government's financial problems will also work in favor of Bangla Desh. As the months pass and such hardships increase, Islamabad may have to face the fact that unity by force of arms is not exactly the Pakistan that Jinnah had in mind.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
This is Part I..more to follow.
Part II
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Pakistan:
Round 1 to the West
Courtesy: TIME [April 12, 1971; pp. 23-24]
THERE is No doubt," said a foreign diplomat in East Pakistan last week," 'that the word massacre applies to the situation." Said another Western official: "It's a veritable bloodbath. The troops have been utterly merciless."
As Round 1 of Pakistan's bitter civil war ended last week, the winner-predictably-was the tough West Pakistan army, which has a powerful force of 80,000 Punjabi and Pathan soldiers on duty in rebellious East Pakistan. Reports coming out of the East (via diplomats, frightened refugees and clandestine broadcasts) varied wildly. Estimates of the total dead ran as high as 300,000. A figure of 10,000 to 15,000 is accepted by several Western governments, but no one can be sure of anything except that untold thousands perished.
<b>Mass Graves. Opposed only by bands of Bengali peasants armed with stones and bamboo sticks, tanks rolled through Dacca, the East's capital, blowing houses to bits. At the university, soldiers slaughtered students inside the British Council building. ..It was like Genghis Khan,' said a shocked Western official who witnessed the scene. Near Dacca's marketplace, Urdu-speaking government soldiers ordered Bengali-speaking towns-people to surrender, then gunned them down when they failed to comply. Bodies lay in mass graves at the university, in the Old City, and near the municipal dump.</b>
During <i><b>rebel</b></i> attacks on Chittagong, Pakistani naval vessels shelled the port, setting fire to harbor installations. At Jessore, in the southwest, angry Bengalis were said to have hacked alleged government spies to death with staves and spears. Journalists at the Petrapole checkpoint on the Indian border found five bodies and a human head near the frontier post-the remains, apparently, of a group of West Pakistanis who had tried to escape. At week's end there were reports that East Bengali rebels were maintaining a precarious hold on Jessore and perhaps Chittagong. But in Dacca and most other cities, the rebels had been routed.
The army's quick victory, however, did not mean that the 58 million West Pakistanis could go on dominating the 78 million Bengalis of East Pakistan indefinitely. The second round may well be a different story. It could be fought out In paddies and jungles and along river banks for months or even years.
Completing the Rupture. The civil war erupted as a result of a victory that was too sweeping, a mandate that was too strong. Four months ago, Pakistan's President, Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan, held elections for a constituent assembly to end twelve years of martial law. Though he is a Pathan from the West. Yahya was determined to be fair to the Bengalis. He assigned a majority of the assembly seats to Pakistan's more populous eastern wing, which has been separated from the West by 1,000 miles of India since the partitioning of the subcontinent in 1947.
To everyone's astonishment, Sheik Mujibur Rahmari and his Awami League won 167 of the 169 seats assigned to the Bengalis, a clear majority in the 313 seat assembly. "I do not want to break Pakistan," Mujib told TIME shortly before the final rupture two weeks ago. "But we Bengalis must have autonomy so that we are not treated like a colony of the western wing." Yahya resisted Mujib's demands for regional autonomy and a withdrawal of troops. Mujib responded by insisting on an immediate end to martial law. Soon the break was complete. Reportedly seized in his Dacca residence at the outset of fighting and flown to West Pakistan, Mujib will probably be tried for treason.
<b>All Normal. West Pakistanis have been told little about the fighting. ALL NORMAL IN EAST was a typical newspaper headline in Karachi last week. Still, they seemed solidly behind Yahya's tough stand. "We can't have our flag defiled, our soldiers spat at, our nationality brought into disrepute," said Pakistan Government Information Chief Khalid Ali. "Mujib in the end had no love of Pakistan."</b>
Aware that many foreigners were sympathetic to the Bengalis, Yahya permitted the official news agency to indulge in an orgy of paranoia. "Western press reports prove that a deep conspiracy has been hatched by the Indo-Israeli axis against the integrity of Pakistan and the Islamic basis of her ideology," said the agency.
The Indian government did in fact contribute to the Pakistanis' anxiety. Although New Delhi denied that India was supplying arms to the Bengali rebels, the Indian Parliament passed a unanimous resolution denouncing the "carnage" in East Pakistan. India's enthusiasm is hardly surprising, in view of its longstanding feud with the West Pakistanis and the brief but bloody war of 1965 over Kashmir. But Western governments urged New Delhi to restrain itself so as not to provoke West pakistan into making an impulsive response.
Hit and Run. For the time being, West Pakistan's army can probably maintain its hold on Dacca and the other cities of the East. But it can hardly hope to control 55,000 sq. mi. of countryside and a hostile population indefinitely. The kind of Bengali terrorism that forced the British raj to move the capital from Calcutta to Delhi in 1911 may well manifest itself again in a growing war of hit-and-run sabotage and arson. In modern times, the East Bengalis have been best known to foreigners as mild-mannered peasants, clerks and shopkeepers, perhaps the least martial people on the subcontinent. But in their support of Bangla Desh (Bengal State), they have displayed a fighting spirit that could spell lasting turmoil for those who want Pakistan to remain united. As Mujib often asked his followers rhetorically: "Can bullets suppress 78 million people?"<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Part III
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Pakistan:
The Push toward the Borders
Courtesy: TIME [April 26, 1971; pp. 39-40]
Radio Pakistan announced last week that Pakistan International Airlines has resumed its internal flight between the East Pakistan capital of Dacca and the town of Jessore, formerly a stronghold of rebel resistance. The broadcast failed to note that the PIA prop jets were carrying only soldiers, and that they were escorted into Jessore airport by air force Sabre jets.
It was true, however, that the army has taken the offensive in Pakistan's savage civil war. In the early days of fighting, the troops had prudently preferred to remain in their garrison areas, for the most part, until additional men and supplies arrived. Last week they began to push toward the Indian border, hoping to secure the hardtop roads by the time the monsoon rains begin in late May. If they succeed, they will he able to block any sizable imports of arms and other equipment for the Bangla Desh (Bengal State) resistance fighters.
Naxalite Sympathizers. Despite the heavy cost of the operation (estimated at $1.3 million per day) and widespread international criticism, the government of President Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan seems determined to press for a decisive victory. <b>The U.S. and most other Western countries have thus far maintained a careful neutrality. Washington announced that it has furnished no arms to Pakistan since the fighting began March 25. Communist China, on the other hand, has strongly supported the Pakistan government, while India, Pakistanâs traditional adversary, has quietly sympathized with the rebels.</b>
The Indians most deeply involved are the West Bengali insurgents. But West Bengali sympathy is tempered by a fear that a civil war in East Bengal will prove costly to themselves as well. For a generation, West Bengal has received a steady flow of refugees from across the border. Now the flow has greatly increased, with an added burden to the state's economy. <b>Among West Bengalis, the most enthusiastic supporters of the East Pakistani cause are Calcutta's urban terrorists, the Maoist Naxalites</b>. Some are said to have slipped across the border with homemade guns and bombs to help the rebels.
Strong Words. Officially, India has tried to maintain calm. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared earlier that India could hardly remain a "silent observer to the carnage in East Pakistan. But last week, when asked if she would describe the fighting as an "imperial war'. she replied sternly. .'the use of strong words will not help."
From East Pakistan came reports that the destruction was continuing. Estimates of the number of dead ranged to 200,000 or more. <b>In the port city of Chittagong, hundreds of bodies were dumped into the river to be carried away by the tide. Some observers reported a virtual pogrom against East Pakistan's educated leadership, raising the specter of a region reduced to peasant serfdom.</b> Even the modern jute mills, owned by West Pakistani businessmen, were reported destroyed.
Provisional Government. There was also savagery on the Bengali side. Rebels were reported to be paying off old scores against non-Bengali Moslems who settled in East Pakistan after the 1947 partition of British India into India and Pakistan. At the town of Dinajpur, most male members of this group were killed and the women taken to makeshift internment camps.
Despite the continued absence of their political leader, Sheikh Mlljibur ("Mujib") Rahman who is thought to be in prison in West Pakistan. the rebels announced the formation of a Bangla Desh provisional government last week. They named Mlljib President. One of his colleagues, Tajuddin Ahmad, who is at large in East Pakistan, became Prime Minister. As their provisional capital, the rebels prudently chose the town of Meherpur, which lies a mere four miles from the Indian border.
The Bangla Desh forces are critically short of gasoline and diesel fuel and lack the field-communication equipment necessary for organized military activity. They have avoided any full-scale engagements, in which they would undoubtedly sustain heavy losses. Some observers believe, in fact, that the long guerrilla phase of the civil war has already begun, with the army holding most of the towns and the rebels controlling much of the countryside. Despite the apparent determination of the Pakistan government to maintain its hold on East Bengal, the sheer human arithmetic of the situation seemed to indicate that the Bengalis would ultimately win freedom or at least some form of regional autonomy. At the present time, the East Bengalis outnumber the West Pakistani soldiers in their midst by about 1,000 to 1.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Final Part
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Pakistan: Reign of Terror
Courtesy: Newsweek [April 19, 1971; p. 52-54]
Blealy-eyed from lack of sleep and emotionally drained by what they called their "ten days of terror," hundreds of Americans who had been trapped in war-ravaged East Pakistan finally got out to safety last week. Nearly 500 of them were evacuated by air from the East Pakistani capital of Dacca. Another 119 foreign nationals, including 37 Americans, were brought out by a British freighter from the battered East Pakistani port city of Chittagong. Most of them begged off from interviews, fearful that anything they said might endanger some 200 Americans-consular officials, businessmen and missionaries-who chose to remain behind in East Pakistan. But a few, unable to contain their outrage at the wanton slaughter they had witnessed, talked guardedly to newsmen. And their harrowing accounts tended to confirm earlier reports of savage repressions by the Punjabi-Ied Pakistani Army in its attempt to stamp out the Bengali rebellion in East Pakistan.
The Americans evacuated from Chittagong told NEWSWEEK'S Tony Clifton that the bitter fighting there had reduced East Pakistan's largest port to a ghost town. "In the first few days," recalled Neil O'Toole, a New Yorker working for a private charitable organization, "I actually saw Awami League people [supporters of Bengali nationalist leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman] patrolling the streets with bows and arrows, and I wondered how they could possibly hold off the army with things like that.â Four days later, the reinforced Pakistani Army gained full control of the city and launched a reign of terror. <b>"Some Punjabi soldiers called a kid over and hit him around the head and in the groin and then forced him to his knees," said Fritz Blankenship, a crane operator who had been employed by an American construction firm. âThe kid was crying, begging and the soldiers just watched him for a minute.â Finally, according to Blankenship, âthey just shot him out of hand and walked on.â</b>
A similar wave of atrocities was reported by the Americans who had been in Dacca. As soon as the curfew was lifted, they said, at least a half-dozen Americans were met by nearly hysterical Bengali friends who told of a massacre at Dacca University. When three young Americans agreed to investigate the story, they found a staircase in a faculty building splattered with the bloodshed when five teachers were dragged out and coldly mowed down by gunfire. Still more shattering was the experience of Victor Chen, who had been visiting Dacca as a tourist when the war broke out and was led by a group of excited Bengalis to a shantytown set in the middle of Daccaâs sprawling racetrack. âThe houses were burned down, and some were still smoldering,â he told NEWSWEEK'S Milan J. Kubic. "Literally dozens of dead bodies were strewn all over the place, many of them small kids, all of them riddled by bullets.â And another young American said in obvious disgust: <b>"We just donât see why the U.S. should go on supporting a regime that behaves in this fashion.â</b>
<b>Cautious: Indeed, Washingtonâs policy of calculated ambiguity on Pakistan has left the U.S. open to charges that official silence is tantamount to support for the martial-Iaw regime of President Mohammed Yahya Khan. Even touchier was the charge that U .S.-supplied Patton and Sabre jets were being used Pakistani Army to slaughter Bengalis. But State Department officials argued that the unsettled circumstances dictated a cautious policy. They also pointed out that no American weapons have been Delivered to the Pakistani Army since 1965 <i>{LIES}</i></b>. And last week, the departmentâs spokesman, Charles Bray 3rd, expressed "sympathy" to the "victims" and hoped that "it will be possible soon to alleviate the suffering caused by recent events" in East Pakistan. Though U .S. officials denied any implications beyond humanitarian concern, Bray's use of the word "victims..struck some Pakistani Government officials as a slap at the Yahya Khan regime, which has never conceded that there was much suffering going on in East Pakistan.
<b>Washington, of course, was hardly alone in this dilemma. Both the Soviet Union and Communist China, the principal purveyors of arms to Pakistan since 1965, have only begun to choose their rhetorical stance-with Moscow urging Yahya to find a way to end the fighting and Peking edging toward Yahya's side</b>. But by far the most difficult position was that facing the government of India, where popular sentiments remained overwhelmingly pro-Bengali and where pressures mounted for direct action. "It is neither proper nor possible for India to keep quiet [over the Pakistani situation)," said Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
The watch-and-wait policy assumed by most foreign governments stemmed from a widely held belief that the Pakistani Army will ultimately fail in its attempt to subjugate 75 million East Pakistanis. Still, fears increased that the army was fully prepared to wreak bloody havoc even in a futile try. An American businessman who was evacuated from Dacca last week recalled asking a Punjabi major why the army was killing so many people. "There are millions of them, and only thousands of us," the major replied. "The only way we can control these people is by making them scared stiff." And from what he saw, the American said, "it looked as if the army went berserk. I can't help feeling sorry about the poor Bengalis in that hel_l."<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Why do West Bengalis and East Punjabis (my Father's generation) suffer from Stockholm syndrome w.r.t the obviously venomous Pakis and B'Deshis? Even if one accounts for the Trauma of Partition, it is very hard for folks like Moi to comprehend. <!--emo&  --><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/sad.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='sad.gif' /><!--endemo-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Shyama Prasad Mookerjee was born in Bengal and became the youngest ever vice-chancellor of Calcutta University at the age of 33. He was a close friend of Kaji Nazrul Islam, helped him when he needed most, was a part of the family of Rabindranath Tagore, became a legendary figure in his life time, inherited a legacy Bengal is justifiably proud of, and he died for Kashmir. His mysterious âdeathâ in the jail of Sheikh Abdullah, in Srinagar on 23rd June 1953 raised questions that are still unanswered. The only reason for his untimely death was his demand that Kashmir be assimilated in India like any other state. And there should not be two flags, two constitutional provisions and two heads in relation to Kashmir. He was arrested for entering the valley without a permit, in his own country and jailed where he met a sudden death.
Mookerjeeâs mother, Jogmaya Devi wrote to Nehru on 4 July 1953: âHis death is shrouded in mystery. Is it not most astounding and shocking that ever since his detention there, the first information that I, his mother, received from the government of Kashmir was that my son was 'no more', and that also at least two hours after the end? And in what a cruel, cryptic way the message was conveyed! '. A fearless son of free India has met his death while 'in detention without trial' under most tragic and mysterious circumstances. I, the mother of the great departed soul, demand that an absolutely impartial and open enquiry by independent and competent persons be held without any delay. I know nothing can bring back to us the life that is no more. But I do want that the people of India must judge for themselves, the real causes of this great tragedy enacted in a free country and the part that was played by your government.â
Nehru gave a short reply on 5 July 1953: âl did not venture to write to you before without going into the matter of Dr Shyama Prasad Mookerjee's detention and death fairly carefully. I have since enquired further into it from a number of persons who had occasion to know 'some facts'. I can only say to you that I arrived at the clear and honest conclusion that there is no mystery in this and that Dr Mookerjee was given every consideration.â
This was really rude and Jogmaya Devi replied on 9th July, 1953: âYour letter dated 5th July reached me on the 7th. It is a sad commentary on the whole situation. Instead of helping to clear up the mystery, your attitude deepens it (further). I demanded an open enquiry. I did not ask 'for your clear and honest conclusion'. Your reaction to the whole affair is now well known. The people of India and I, the mother, have got to be convinced. There is a rooted suspicion in the mind of many. What is required is 'an open, impartial, immediate enquiry'.
'Your experience in jails is known to all. It was at one time a matter of great national pride with us. But you had suffered imprisonment under an alien rule and my son has met his death in detention without trial under a national government. It is futile to address you further. You are afraid to face facts. I hold the Kashmir government responsible for the death of my son. I accuse your government of complicity in the matter.â
Nehru never cared to reply.
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Tarun Vijay's masterpiece:
Why Kaveri wears saffron
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