15 hours Ago By Firstpost
One of the direct fallouts of the tumultuous regime change in Bangladesh has been a spate of mindless mayhem against the minority Hindu community. Observers of Bangladesh have long warned that the lingering apprehension surrounding the Chinmoy Krishna Prabhu episode is only a grim reality check. The annals of this Indian offspring nation on the eastern frontier are replete with such minority-bashing, consistently carried out with impunity since its creation—a fact the world has largely failed to acknowledge.
What sets this instance apart is the ubiquitous presence of social media, which has resisted every attempt by vested interests to obscure these gruesome episodes. Indeed, social media has compelled a reluctant mainstream media to provide coverage of the one-sided atrocities. One of the most underreported cases of persistent ethnocide in the post-colonial period has arguably been that of the Bengali Hindus of East Bengal.
In terms of the magnitude of brutality and its spread—even on the scale of time—it has few parallels in contemporary history. Starting with one-sided massacres in collusion with changes in administration; vandalising religious places on the slightest pretext; implicating conscientious leaders in false cases to stifle legitimate movements; dispossessing a particular community of its ancestral land by enacting pernicious legislation like the Enemy Property Act; and using rape as a tool for forced conversion (long before the world became aware of it during the Bosnian War)—Bengali Hindus of East Bengal seem to have withstood it all, far from the public eye. Memes like “all eyes on Rafah” or movements like “Me Too” never resonated in the public sphere.
Take, for instance, an evocative X (formerly Twitter) clip, purportedly depicting a sordid incident that caught attention. It shows a place called Puthia in Rajshahi, with one hapless Supriya Sarkar wailing in the open, after being forcibly dispossessed of her ancestral property, while the police stood by mockingly, serving only as bystanders. Rewind some seven decades.
In his book Pak Bharater Ruprekha , Prabhas Lahiry gave a vivid account, portraying the pitiable lives of Hindus who remained in East Pakistan post-partition. The author wrote about the same Puthia and the adjoining Charani estate, where the widowed wife of the zamindar was deftly ousted from the estate of their forefathers by one Qamar Begum. This deceitful woman appeared seemingly from nowhere, just after the zamindar’s death, and falsely claimed to have been secretly married to him.
Taking full advantage of the prevailing grief within the bereaved family, Begum colluded with the district magistrate—the notorious Abdul Majid. First, the district authorities tricked the zamindars’ security into surrendering their firearms, on the pretext of inspection, and then withheld them. That same night, a gang of rabid jihadists rampaged through the zamindari estate and drove out all the family members.
Prabhas Lahiry’s book was not unique. There were several such commentaries, like Jaile Trish Bachor by Trailokyo Nath Chakraborty and Rakte Ronjito Dhaka Barishal by Dinesh Singha, all portraying the grisly onslaught from the pages of East Pakistan’s history. These accounts had one thing in common: they were all allowed to go out of print, courtesy of the left-liberal establishment in Bengal.
Not many know that, unlike on the western front, turmoil on the eastern front began somewhat later in 1950. Jogen Mondal’s famous resignation letter as Law Minister, after his unceremonious flight to India, may have been the point of inflection. But it followed a series of events, the most gruesome of which was the planned and devious slaughter of Hindus.
Curiously, Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan , portraying a horrific story of mayhem on a moving train, became famous. But what went unnoticed was a similar incident that took place on the night of 10 February, on Anderson Bridge over the Meghna River, just beyond Bhairab Bazar in Mymensingh. Trains heading towards Dhaka and Chattogram were stopped on the bridge—one after the other—in collusion with railway officials.
Then, the unsuspecting and wailing Hindus were taken out, butchered, and their corpses thrown into the dark waters of the Meghna River below, staining it crimson. While that gory incident came to light courtesy of sympathetic mainstream media in West Bengal, another incident of the same nature and no less magnitude took place at the little-known Santahar Railway Station, bordering Bogura and Rajshahi, but went almost unreported. Such a sudden surge in reckless, one-sided violence may have caused significant embarrassment for a fledgling nation globally.
Consequently, the perpetrators changed their strategy, opting for low-level but persistent violence. Without unduly alarming the world, this kept the embers burning as a constant irritant for minorities. Analysts often liken this transition to a shift from “jhatka” to “halal”—both methods kill, but in different ways.
Over the decades, the operating protocol remained the same. Hindu temples were the customary targets of attack, as were the minority community’s educational institutions. The sprawling campus of Rajshahi’s renowned Bholanath Bisweswar Hindu Academy was summarily taken over one morning, and its adjoining student hostel forcibly vacated.
Even Prabhas Lahiry, then a member of the East Bengal Assembly and a minister, had to wage a protracted legal battle to recover the property, ultimately to little avail. In the case of Comilla’s Iswar Pathshala, established by the renowned Mahesh Bhattacharya, the massive building and its student hostel, Rammala, were requisitioned during Ayub Khan’s regime. Although the Dhaka High Court subsequently quashed the order, no one in the administration enforced it.
The sordid saga of the Barendra Research Society of Rajshahi went to unimaginable lengths. It had a rich historical legacy, having been funded by the celebrated king of Dighapatia. Prabhas Lahiry writes, “It was a centre for cultural excellence—the halls of the building were adorned with frescoes of Hindu gods and goddesses of artistic brilliance.
” Abdul Majid, the same magistrate, was behind this as well. He requisitioned the entire premises. Later, when a court order forced him to revoke the requisition, he turned the majestic museum into a morgue, ensuring the owner could never restore it to its former glory.
The Town Hall in downtown Comilla suffered a similar fate. The building, an architectural novelty built by the Maharaj of Tripura (of which Comilla was a zamindari estate), had its panoramic wall adorned with photos of noted sages and freedom fighters. One morning, a gang of marauders descended upon it, tearing down these invaluable photographs and disdainfully discarding them in the adjoining pond.
The news somehow reached Kolkata’s newspapers. The fallout was swift and unexpected. The next morning brought a strong denial, which ironically confirmed the Hindus’ precarious situation.
It came from three prominent Hindu leaders of Comilla, much to the surprise of those like Prabhas Lahiry, who were anguished by the turn of events. Ground-level inquiries, however, revealed a different story. One of the leaders later confided that they had been summoned that very night by the magistrate and forced to sign a typed statement while a violent mob bayed for their blood outside.
Therefore, the recent spectacle of Hindu leaders eulogising the interim government of Muhammad Yunus, in a recently held ‘staged’ meeting, should not have come as a surprise, had we known these closely guarded stories, beforehand! The individual witch-hunting was pervasive, as usual. The episode of Ajit Datta Choudhury would shake any sane mind to its core. A bright young man from Sylhet, Ajit was an idealist, singularly devoted to the cause of his fellow countrymen.
In a time of extreme crisis, when most Hindus around him viewed independence as a disheartening defeat and were torn between staying or fleeing to India, Ajit chose to remain by their side, rejecting the safer option of migrating to India. He went on to become a member of the prestigious Civil Service of Pakistan (CSP). Over the next decade, he worked in various capacities within the government, consistently displaying exemplary courage and defying his adversarial political masters, particularly when they wronged the minorities.
Ultimately, it was this principled stand that led to his downfall. During martial law, the Governor of East Bengal, Zakir Hossain, orchestrated his transfer to the position of District Judge in hostile West Pakistan. The covert plan, however, was to frame him in a false case and imprison him.
Fortunately, one of Ajit Babu’s colleagues revealed the plot in time, enabling him to flee to India for his personal safety. In this long period of gloom, a thin line of support has come recently from a few plain-speaking international journalist-activists. However, the works of these contemporary commentators, such as Richard Benkin ( A Quiet Case of Ethnic Cleansing: Murder of Bangladesh’s Hindus ), Joseph Allkin ( Many Rivers, One Sea ), and Garry Bash ( The Blood Telegram ), never received the minimal moral support from the establishment in Bengal.
Without attempting to decode the psychological refrain of fellow Bengalis on the Indian side in response to the unspeakable suffering of their ‘first cousins’, it sometimes feels as though Sheikh Mujib might have given a reluctant nation independence, while his daughter, former PM Hasina, only did her bit to defer the inevitable. This forgotten chapter of human misery, endured by the Bengali Hindus of Bangladesh, has only resurfaced for the mainstream global audience to retrace the lessons that remain unlearnt. The author is a freelance writer, presently working on the translation of ‘Pak-Bharater Ruprekha’ by Prabhas Lahiry.
Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views..
