Ethnic Cleansing in Bangladesh

THE INCENSED Hindus who put pressure on BCCI to pressure Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) to withdraw their offer to a Bangladeshi cricketer for this year’s IPL probably had the best interests of their co-religionists across the border in mind.

It is undeniable that since Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League government was ousted on August 5, 2024, Bangladesh’s Hindu minority has been at the receiving end of targeted mob violence. There were two reasons why the Islamists—the driving force behind the July revolution— perceived Hindus as their enemies. The first was the conviction that stemmed from the Pakistan movement of the Muslim League that was exclusively a Muslim homeland. Hindus who once comprised nearly one-third of the population of East Pakistan have seen their numbers shrink to around 8 per cent. In times of political turbulence, Hindus have been easy targets of violence. The underlying idea was to force as many Hindus as possible to cross the border and submerge themselves in India. This further fuelled their conviction that Hindus had no allegiance to either Pakistan or Bangladesh.

This silent ethnic cleansing has wilfully been ignored by India’s secularists. Accustomed to viewing history through an exclusively North Indian prism, they conveniently forgot that Partition also affected Bengal and the rest of eastern India. The ‘Bangal’ refugees were inconvenient for both the West Bengal Congress leadership and the Jawaharlal Nehru government in Delhi. Their idea was to disperse them all over India. This was only partly successful and the refugees who chose to stay in West Bengal and Tripura became political fodder for the communist movement, a disastrous political turn that further detached the community from the mainstream. It is only after 2014 that the Namasudra community has associated itself with BJP, a move that yielded the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).

The second factor behind the targeting of Hindus is linked to the community’s active involvement in the movements that led to the birth of Bangladesh in 1971. Both Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Sheikh Hasina considered Hindus as close political allies and a loyal vote bank of the Awami League. This contributed to their persecution under the two Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) governments and the regime of General Ershad. Under the Muhammad Yunus dispensation, the Islamists have been given a blank cheque to settle scores with Hindus, all under the cover of fighting the ‘fascism’ of the Awami League.

Since August 2024, India has maintained a frostiness towards Bangladesh and even terminated cultural contacts and curtailed medical tourism. Visiting Bangladeshis, who were once a feature of the area in Kolkata around New Market and Mirza Ghalib Street (better known to my generation as Free School Street), have now become a trickle. The persecution of Hindus that began with the arrest of Chinmoy Krishna Das and escalated after the killing of a student leader in December last year, has also turned the mood viciously anti-Bangladeshi. The inclusion of a Bangladeshi cricketer in KKR at this juncture had all the possibilities of making the Kolkata crowds even more excitable.

At the same time, it is true that this non-political cricketer had no connection with the turbulence in Bangladesh. Why, it may well be asked, is he being made to shoulder the follies of the Yunus regime? Moreover, the abrupt cancellation of a lucrative IPL contract on political grounds is certain to be viewed in Bangladesh as a spiteful act that will further fuel anti-India feelings.

The perception of India among Bangladeshi Muslims is highly complex. At one extreme are the jihadists who want the destruction of Hindu India. However, in the middle classes, there is a certain awe of India, its economic growth and its ability to maintain its strategic autonomy from the West and China. Every aware Bangladeshi would love to send their children to a college in Delhi and avail of the opportunities India has to offer. At the same time this is coupled with a belief that India wants to turn Bangladesh into a vassal state and is intent on sucking Bangladesh dry economically. These contradictory impulses are further complicated by the conviction that Hasina ran a puppet regime for India and that the rigged elections were managed from Delhi.

International relations are often based on such colourful misrepresentations.