The spate of brutal murders of secular and atheistic thinkers in Bangladesh provides further evidence that the battle for that unhappy country’s national identity has by no means been resolved. That is further reason for welcoming the Union Home Ministry’s decision to submit a policy document to the Supreme Court seeking sanction for its decision to grant Indian citizenship to the thousands of Hindus who have been forced to flee East Bengal, often with nothing more than their lives and the clothes they stood up in.
When the refugees who escaped from erstwhile East Pakistan during the months of tumult in 1971 were being sent back – sometimes at gun point — to liberated Bangladesh, I asked one of them if he regarded himself as Bangladeshi or Indian. The grizzled old peasant replied with earthy wisdom, “You can call me an Indian residing in Bangladesh!” It was a wisdom not shared by authority until the other day when the Narendra Modi government announced the belated decision to grant citizenship to Hindus who fled East Bengal, whether Pakistan or Bangladesh, and now live in 18 Indian states. Many of these refugees have probably already acquired Indian papers. It may be years before the rest are so empowered. I have no doubt, too, that many East Bengal Muslims – illegal immigrants in the border districts of West Bengal and Assam as well as farther afield — will also benefit from the decision, if they haven’t done so already. But these are unavoidable hazards.
Setting aside negligence and abuse, the decision implies belated official acceptance of a principle akin to the Law of Return that allows any Jew anywhere in the world – whether Ethiopia or Mizoram – to seek a home in Israel. It’s a principle that Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, repeated in Paris in the aftermath of the grim Charlie Hebdo murders. British Jews also recalled that invitation in the run-up to Britain’s May 7 parliamentary election because the Labour Party leader, Ed Miliband, although himself of Jewish descent, was regarded as pro-Palestine and anti-Israeli.
The religious aspect of East Bengal’s tragedy was so determinedly suppressed that although living in Calcutta I had absolutely no idea until I actually visited the 1971 refugee camps that 99 per cent of the men, women and children who had fled to India were Hindus. That revelation placed a somewhat different complexion on what had been presented until then as a secular democratic upsurge against a theocratic military dictatorship. My article in London’s Observer newspaper of June 13, 1971 under the headline, FLIGHT OF THE HINDU MILLIONS, in bold capitals across the top of the page contradicted the official and liberation narrative of a non-denominational Elysium emerging from the womb of Pakistani theocracy.
“First they killed the Biharis” the Hindu refugees explained, referring to the Hindi-Urdu speaking Calcutta Muslims who had migrated to East Pakistan. “Then, when the Pakistani military came, they united and attacked us!” The drift to sectarian exclusiveness had to be pointed out because, as I also wrote in the Observer, “for a time last year (meaning 1970), the Hindus still inside East Bengal rallied to the heady promise of an equal life for people of all religions offered to them by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.”
One hopes that despite the polarisation between his Awami League and fundamentalist groups like the Jamaat-e-Islami, which is tacitly supported by Begum Khaleda Zia’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party, Sheikh Hasina might yet be able to realise that dream. But she can’t undo the past. She wasn’t even able to prevent prominent and commendable people like Avijit Roy and Ananta Bijoy Das, both obviously Hindus from their names, from being butchered. Roy pioneered the popular Bangladeshi free thinkers blogging platform, Mukto-Mona. Das, a bank manager in Sylhet and also a blogger critical of superstition and obscurantism, was hacked to death with machetes. The third atheist blogger to be killed, Washiqur Rahman, was born Muslim by the sound of his name.
Whatever the future may have in store for Bangladesh, it seems cruel injustice if the millions of Hindus who have fled East Bengal since 1947 and whom the 1950 Nehru-Liaquat Ali pact cruelly victimised by “recognising” their non-existent theoretical rights in Pakistan which the Pakistanis denied in practice, continue to suffer discrimination in the only country to which they have a claim. India isn’t a Hindu country. No country is for that matter. Nepal was for decades the world’s only Hindu kingdom but that status was abolished when the monarchy was overthrown, and the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal is officially secular even though most Nepalese are Hindus. Since all Indians are the same irrespective of religion – which is as it should be – India cannot have an explicit Law of Return for Hindus.
As a rule, India is very careful not to interest itself in the affairs of Indians/Hindus in other countries such as Fiji, Guyana, Malaysia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh, where they might sometimes complain of discrimination. It’s no secret, however, that, informally, there does exist some distinction between Muslim economic refugees and Hindus seeking security. It used to be — perhaps still is — first manifest at the border. If the illegal migrant was a Muslim, he paid less to the East Pakistani/Bangladeshi border guards and more to the Indian. The reverse applied to Hindus. India’s border personnel were also expected to be tacitly more sympathetic to Hindu immigrants.
It was never quite so simple in practice. Bangladesh vehemently denies the existence of economic refugees and Begum Khaleda’s late husband, President Ziaur Rahman, flew into a rage when I mentioned them. The Assamese objection was not to Hindus or Muslims but to Bengalis. Although ostensibly anti-foreigner, the agitation that paralysed Assam was a continuation of the old “Banga Kheda … Expel Bengalis” movement. Rajiv Gandhi bought peace in 1985 by agreeing to the demand of the All-Assam Students Union and All-Assam Gana Sangram Parishad that all those who came from Bangladesh after 1971 should be deported. It was never a desirable or feasible objective and is even more irrelevant after 30 years. People feared that the real intention was to get rid even of Indian Bengalis who had lived in Assam for decades.
Another complexity is that many Muslim migrants were brought by the left parties – the CPI(M) and its allies in West Bengal – to inflate their vote bank. The devil looks after its own, as they say, and those sponsors probably long ago rewarded their protégés with Indian citizenship. Finally, all central governments have understandably hesitated to act on the basis of religion, especially with indigenous Muslims complaining that the “Bangladeshi illegal” label is used as an instrument of blackmail.
The time has come now to set aside counter-productive squeamishness and right one of the remaining wrongs of partition. But it must be done without discrimination against Muslims, either those who are Indian or those who have infiltrated from East Bengal. Justice and the logic of partition demand the latter should be deported but I doubt if that will ever happen even under a Hindu revivalist government.
Sunanda K Datta-Ray
