Sheikh Hasina Wazed’s forced flight from Dhaka and her arrival in Delhi made Bangladesh news again in India. For most Indians outside West Bengal, Bangladesh is a series of noises off. This is a useful moment to unpack what those noises have traditionally signified.
As a child in the Sixties, Bangladesh, or East Pakistan as it was then, figured in our consciousness as a place aggrieved by the Farakka Barrage. I didn’t know what a barrage was then; I later learnt that the barrage was built to divert Ganga’s water into the Hooghly to sluice Calcutta’s port. Otherwise, East Pakistan didn’t figure in our imaginations at all; it was just the junior wing of the eccentric enemy state called Pakistan.
As a boy, the only public figure I could have named from there, apart from Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, was Maulana Bhashani. I suspect the reason why Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani (to give him his proper name) got lodged in my head was that Indian newspapers cast him as a belligerently anti-Indian figure, a reputation consolidated by his storied long march against the aforementioned Farakka Barrage.
By the time Bangladesh happened, East Pakistan had become a byword for catastrophe: flooding, a devastating cyclone, and near famine conditions consolidated its basket case image in the Indian mind. The fact that India in the Sixties was something of a hell hole itself, plagued by two wars and food crises in Bihar in 1966-67 and Maharashtra in the early Seventies, didn’t detain us. Famine and poverty in India were challenges to be overcome; in East Pakistan/Bangladesh, on the other hand, these were permanent, constitutive conditions.
Sitting in Delhi, the way in which we understood the liberation of Bangladesh had very little to do with the aspirations of the people of that ravaged country. For Indians, the rout of Pakistan and the birth of Bangladesh represented a historic rejection of the Two-Nation theory. I remember a Muslim colleague of mine in Jamia Millia Islamia telling me that it had been an enormous relief because it laid the ghost that had haunted Indian Muslims since Partition, the notion that a single nation state could claim to represent all of the subcontinent’s Muslims. More generally, the birth of Bangladesh was read as a vindication of the Indian state’s version of history.
I think it’s fair to say that we saw Indira Gandhi as the midwife who had delivered Bangladesh, and our attitude towards the infant state was proprietorial. India had sheltered ten million refugees from the carnage of Yahya Khan’s army and its razakars, it had nurtured the Mukti Bahini, and created the necessary context for independence by routing Pakistan. Mujibur Rahman, or Bangabandhu, was both enormously popular in India and regarded as something of a political protégé. The fact that he declared Bangladesh a secular state and nominated a song by Tagore as his country’s anthem strengthened this friendly but big-brotherly feeling.
It wasn’t a stable basis for enduring state relations. Sheikh Mujib’s assassination and the inauguration of Islamist army rule, hostile to India, made Bangladesh seem like a born-again version of East Pakistan. Having cast Bangladesh as a protégé, Indians now fulminated about ingratitude, but for the most part, they didn’t think about Bangladesh at all. This is odd on the face of it given that Bangladesh lives on the delta of a river system that sustains nearly half of India’s population, but not surprising. Even discounting Pakistan, India’s relations with neighbouring South Asian states have been case studies in clumsy hegemony.
It was in the Eighties that the term, ‘Bangladeshi’, became current in Delhi as a way of describing ragpickers and waste collectors who were assumed to be illegals. Some of them almost certainly were; ‘Bangladeshi’ spoke to a fastidious and growing distaste for an underclass that served a function, but which could be legitimately despised as alien. It also spoke to the new relevance of demography to politics; it was in 1983 that the Nellie massacre of Bengali Muslims in central Assam, assumed to be illegal migrants, was perpetrated. ‘Bangladeshi’ became a placeholder for the illegal alien and since Bangladesh was seen as a poor, teeming, festering pit of a country, the provenance of indigent Bengali Muslims could be taken for granted.
Concurrently, the steady shrinking of Bangladesh’s Hindu population as a result of its discriminatory, majoritarian politics became a political talking point. This was a demographic trend that predated Bangladesh. The Hindu population of East Pakistan accounted for some 22% of its total population in 1951. This was after a sharp decline as a result of migration to India after Partition. In 1974, after liberation, that figure was down to approximately 14% and the last figure we have is from 2022, when Hindus made up just under 8% of Bangladesh’s population. The current political unrest, with reports of violent attacks on Hindus and temples, is an ongoing part of this squalid political history. Majoritarianism in one South Asian country is fuel for bigoted arsonists in the next one.
My father-in-law was born in Sylhet in 1923. For him, growing up, the big city was Shillong, not Calcutta. After Partition, one of his four brothers stayed on. The others made their lives in Shillong, Calcutta and Lucknow. Sometime in the Sixties, the ‘left-behind’ brother migrated to Calcutta, made insecure by communal violence in what was then East Pakistan. The first time my father-in-law returned to Sylhet was nearly seventy years after he had left in 1946. Accompanied by his daughters, he returned to his village, Ramapatipur, visited the high school he had attended, and had a long chat with its current principal. There’s a wonderful photograph of him in his village, flanked by two smiling old men who didn’t know him but who welcomed the visit of this prodigal son.
The country he described wasn’t the basket case that we had used to prop up our sense of ourselves. We know now, much to our discomfiture, that Bangladesh does better than we do on important human development indicators like infant mortality, outdoor defecation and even life expectancy. It’s hard to feel superior about a country that is, in crucial ways, superior to yours. It might be better to think of Bangladesh as a country much like ours, that struggles with the same subcontinental challenges: inequality, poverty and precarity.
All violent political change in South Asia has to be approached warily and it’s perfectly reasonable to respond to Sheikh Hasina’s ouster with concerns about the geopolitics of our neighbourhood and the security of Bangladesh’s minorities. That said, Indian policymakers, citizens and netizens alike might spare a thought for the students, civil society activists and citizens who are trying to steer their country through this difficult transition. Empathy is in order; this is fundamentally about them, not us.
mukulkesavan@hotmail.com
