It’s tragic that instead of working unitedly for their country’s stability, Bangladeshis are still fighting yesterday’s battles. The peril is all the greater because India has already been drawn into this recrudescence of a warfare that was dormant for nearly a century until the late summer of 1930 when Muslim peasants in Kishorganj, then a subdivision of Mymensingh district, rose in a body, ravagedHindu property and massacred Hindu families.
There was no logical reason for that particular enmity to linger after 1947. Even the battle for political and economic supremacy was settled in 1971. Yet, the festering grievances of all those decades continue to poison the atmosphere with increasingly powerless Hindus identified as the main adversary. One reason could be that the prejudices of diet and dialect that were invoked as part of the reason for setting up the East Bengal Club in 1920 may have been the tip of an iceberg of all-pervasive and rankling discrimination. Bangladesh feels so firmly imprisoned within a 4,096-km border stretching through five Indian states that it’s impossible to tell if one of the rampaging Hindu stalwarts who wield political power this side of the border unknowingly stoked the embers of communal conflict even before a Hindu monk was arrested in Dhaka.
It’s impossible to guess what gives offence when and to whom. I happened to be in Dhaka once to discover that people were greatly vexed by a brief news agency report from Calcutta saying that the West Bengal assembly was reinstating a portrait of A.K. Fazlul Huq, undivided Bengal’s first and longest serving prime minister, which had been removed for cleaning. People asked if India was sending a message about the Sher-i-Bangla’s ambivalence towards Partition after moving the Muslim League’s historic 1940 resolution.
Tentative plans for Tarique Rahman, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party’s acting chairman, to fly from London to Dhaka on January 10, the anniversary of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s epic flight from incarceration in Pakistan, indicate the profound importance of symbolism. His father, Ziaur Rahman, was similarly punctilious about precedents for all that he was a serving officer trained at the Pakistan Military Academy in Abbottabad. As president of Bangladesh, Zia insisted that every single protocol detail that attended Mujib’s first official visit to New Delhi should also embellish his own two-day State visit to India’s capital. Morarji Desai’s government acceded to the demand even though it was aware that Zia’s Bangladesh was forging Islamic ties, restoring links with Pakistan, and mobilising a South Asian organisation in which India’s role would be diluted.
Zia allowed Sheikh Hasina Wazed to return to Bangladesh. As leader of the Opposition in Dhaka’s Jatiya Sangsad, she was prime minister-in-waiting in British parlance but may have compromised her position by drawing the salary and perquisites of Opposition leader while denouncing the election as rigged and boycotting Parliament. Rajiv Gandhi’s refusal to receive her when she visited New Delhi was also attributed to the fear that a meeting would annoy Khaleda Zia, then prime minister, without furthering India’s interests.
The mock Vijay Diwas that some Bharatiya Janata Party pranksters have announced for December 16 cannot but add insult to injury for Bangladeshis. A bigger conflagration may loom ahead with the dangerous pursuit of Hindutva at the highest level on this side of the border. Bangladesh’s chief adviser, Muhammad Yunus, complains that India is “trying to project” the image that his country is becoming “like Afghanistan” while Mamata Banerjee stomps the stage with customary stridency to demand an international peacekeeping force for Bangladesh, suggesting that we have another Gaza Strip on our hands. Such alarmist rhetoric and drastic responses can only exacerbate tensions between India and Bangladesh, aggravate the problems of Bangladeshi Hindus and make what Yunus calls the already difficult task of charting a new course even harder. In any case, the “comprehensive reforms in the economy, governance, bureaucracy and judiciary” that he demands before holding elections means the rebirth of 170 million Bangladeshis.
When Indonesia exploded in 1998 over corruption, unemployment, and food shortage, bringing down Suharto’s 32-year-old regime, the leaders were anonymous young rebels who, their work done, slipped back into obscurity. Nothing could be farther from Bangladesh whose 84-year-old nominated (by whom?) chief adviser must hold the balance among a clutch of prima donnas from the Anti-discrimination Students Movement and party youth organisations, their bosses lurking in the wings, all with different agendas. “If you destabilize Bangladesh,” Yunus warns India, “you destabilize yourself — because these elements of destabilization will spill over everywhere, all around us.”
Where Yunus appears to ignore reality is in his attitude to Mrs Wazed and her Awami League. He wants Narendra Modi to muzzle her. Some reports suggest that even the BNP, at daggers drawn though it is with the Awami League, demurs: democracy needs contestants and the former prime minister can’t be wished away.
Paradoxically, this explosive touchiness demonstrates the extent to which epar Bangla and opar Bangla still overlap and replicate some of each other’s characteristics. Going back 77 years, it seems that the truncation was rushed through by politicians whose vision didn’t go beyond immediate needs. The wording, too, was bizarre for the resolution was not for Partition; it was for joining one or other of two Constituent Assemblies. Instead of a referendum like Britain’s Brexit, it entailed a complicated system of voting in two stages. Significantly, the Bengal assembly resolution in the joint session of the House, composed of all assembly members, was defeated. Only 90 supported Partition and joining India’s Constituent Assembly while 126 opposed both.
Hindu opinion changed after that, but not decisively. Only 79 members voted, 58 of them for Partition and 21 against. Thus, the majority responsible for cataclysmically reshaping history was only 37. All Muslim members of the Bengal assembly without exception voted against Partition. Even Jogendra Nath Mandal, the leader of the Bengal Scheduled Caste Federation, then aligned with the Muslim League, supported them. To quote Nirad C. Chaudhuri, a witness to those earth-shattering events, “never was so much evil owing to so few.”
The past can’t be undone. But something of the future may be saved. At the time of Independence, what is now Bangladesh was 22% Hindu; the Hindu population has dwindled to under 8% as Mandal predicted it would. Today, as we face the real prospect of the total disappearance of Bangladeshi Hindus, we cannot but recall the Bengali industrialist and father of the Indian Institutes of Technology, Nalini Ranjan Sarkar, originally from Mymensingh district, saying that “In a divided Bengal those Hindus who might be left in East Bengal should have this satisfaction that West Bengal as a separate province would be there as a safe home for Hindu culture and economic interests.” Although Bangladesh Hindus appear to be fighting back, the need in this unequal battle may be for a more exhaustive version of the wrongly maligned Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019.
Perhaps the grim events of 1971 quickened movement in that direction. My account of the crisis was published in The Observer newspaper in London under a banner headline stretching across the page, “Flight of the Hindu millions”. Flight did not end the travail. Although physically denuded and brutally evicted, those millions continue to haunt Bangladeshi thinking. Indian intervention alone can ensure that the end — if it becomes inevitable — is expeditious and relatively painless. Europe reminds us that the Lausanne Convention, formally the Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations, that the Greek and Turkish governments signed on January 30, 1923, provided for a similar contingency involving the exchange of around 1.5 million Greeks for 500,000 Muslims. Instead of the international peacekeepers Banerjee demands, globally appointed supervisors might be allowed to police the peace.
