If We Are Not for Them

THEY HID THE JEWELLERY IN A HOLE DUG IN THE garden. Then they tried to run, hoping they would be back one day, when things had settled and neighbours had become normal again.”

“But?”

“They couldn’t even get out of the house. They came and slaughtered them, slit their throats. They took the house and they knew exactly where the gold was hidden…”

This conversation, between my grandmother and a 40-year younger me, must have repeated itself a half-dozen times and yet stood hanging in the air, fading into the ellipsis of resignation without reconciliation. It still plays in a loop in my head. It was always “they” (ora), for both victims and perpetrators. The victims were the family of an aunt of my paternal grandfather in Rangpur, in today’s northern Bangladesh. Nothing exceptional about it. So many people could tell the same story, another time, another place. Or same place, same time.

In Achintya Kumar Sengupta’s (1903-76) poem ‘Udbastu’ (Refugee), as the father rushes the little boy, urging the family to quickly grab whatever is close at hand, the trees, the birds, the algae around the pond, his torn kite stuck in a tree, the paddy, all speak to the kid, asking him: Where will you go, leaving us behind? Aren’t we your own? In a reversal of roles, the boy is caught in the present which is already becoming the past, unable to move. The father cannot wait for what he believes is a better future in their new, own country. The connotation of the Bangla phrase bhite maati doesn’t translate. It’s not just the house (property) or the earth it stands on, but an umbilical link to the past. What is one’s own? How can what’s new already be one’s own? Ergo, where does one belong?

Ritwik Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-Clapped Star, 1960) penetrated the silenced, gendered trauma within the larger trauma of Partition. It also gave us the legend: “Dada, aami baanchte chai (Brother, I want to live)”. That line from Ghatak’s script became a household joke long ago. As memory fades, we descend too readily from the sacred to the profane.

On Partition jokes, here’s a classic Dhakaiya-Kutti (denizens of Old Dhaka known for their wit) sample. A Muslim gentleman tries to convince his Hindu neighbour to stay: “Look at the flag of Pakistan. There’s green for us, and there’s white for the rest.” The impatient man-servant moving stuff, quips: “Karta, the bongsho in the Pakistani flag is on the white side.” (Bongsho, baansh in colloquial Bangla, means bamboo, or the pole, signifying what it does vis-à-vis the rectum.)

Dada, aami baanchte chai never said enough when it didn’t ascend from the individual to the collective. The surviving Hindus of Bangladesh are saying it together. But they are also saying, “We’re staying.”

Bangladesh’s Hindus are the destitutes of history. Writing about them is not easy because they were hardly talked about, let alone written. Partition was one of the biggest man-made catastrophes of the sanguinary 20th century but couldn’t be on a par with its other big human disasters in the eyes of the world. Within the hierarchy of the historiography of Partition, the eastern border lost out to the western. Thereafter, it was forgotten that for the minorities of West and East Pakistan, later Bangladesh, Partition never ended. On the eastern side, those who left in 1947 and 1971 and through the decades in-between, never had much of their story told but those who stayed behind, every time, didn’t get even that meagre acknowledgement.

Talking about the Hindus of Bangladesh is not easy because it is conflated with the robust­ness of rediscovered Hindu pride in India, with the liberal-leftist-academic machinery deliber­ately ignoring the fundamental difference be­tween a majority here and a minority there. As far as the West is concerned, from Bangladesh to Syria what’s playing out is a great triumph from below, of people taking their country back. In reality, it is the mainstreaming of Taliban, Al- Qaeda, ISIS, Jamaat, call them what you will.

Where do the 13 million Hindus of Bangladesh figure in all this? Nowhere. Without petro dollars or violence, nobody takes you seriously.

In 1947, Hindus were 12.9 per cent of the total population in West and East Pakistan taken together. In the post-Partition 1951 Pakistan census, Hindus were only 1.3 per cent. But the same 1951 census showed a Hindu population of 22.05 per cent in East Pakistan. By the time of the 2011 Bangladesh census, the Hindu population was 8.54 per cent of the total. And while the number of Hindus in Bangla­desh had increased from 12.2 million in 2011 to 13.1 million in the 2022 census, they were down to 7.95 per cent of the total population of the country. Census 1951, the Indian one, recorded 2.5 million East Pakistani refugees in India, those who had fled between 1947 and 1951 and settled mostly in West Bengal, Tripura and Assam. A 2021 study by a US-based Bengali academic claimed the ‘missing’ Hindu population in Bangladesh, between Parti­tionandtheturnofthecentury, is almost 50 million. The 1971 genocide by the Pakistani army and Razakars—a history that Muhammad Yunus’ military and mullahs want to erase— targeted Hindus disproportion­ately. That’s not to take away from the heroism and sacrifice of Bengalis in East Pakistan as a whole but to reiterate that Hin­du neighbourhoods and villages were systematically burned to the ground. Hindu women were declared war booty, raping and murdering them legitimised by a fatwa from West Pakistan.

A 2016 article in the Smithso­nian Magazine recalled: “When Australian doctor Geoffrey Davis was brought to Dhaka by the United Nations to assist with late-term abortions of raped women, at the end of the war, he believed the estimated figure for the number of Bengali women who were raped—200,000 to 400,000—was probably too low.” The figures were always too low, and the proportion of Hindus among them too high. Nobody knows for certain how many people died. Independent estimates range between 300,000 and 500,000. The Bangladesh government claims 3 million were killed. To say, CIA’s own estimate of 200,000 was conservative is too kind. In any case, another 10 million refugees arrived in India, again almost wholly Hindu. But how many million Hindus have disappeared since? A Bangladeshi media count had put the number at 1 million just for the first decade of the new century. Even if that’s correct, how many have left since and how long will the residual 13 million last?

The servant with the impatient quip had sharper instincts than most.

BANGLADESH IS A promise belied. While from an Indian perspec­tive, Partition should never have happened, nobody is advocating an undoing of what was done 77 years ago. Bangladesh was supposed to be the next best thing, at least on one border. When the Bengalis of East Pakistan rose against an alien tyranny and linguistic genocide 53 years ago, their enemy was the might of West Pakistan and its army, not each other. Muslims and Hindus both suffered and died. Hindus paid a higher price no doubt given their status as a shrinking and persecuted minority but of the 30 million internally displaced people, the majority was Muslim as were the dead. But the state established by Mujibur Rahman died with him, lasting barely four years and replaced by an increasingly Islamising military dictatorship.

After Hussain Muhammad Ershad declared Bangladesh an Islamic republic in 1988, Hindus demanded state recognition of the 12th-century Dhakeshwari temple in Dhaka. In 1996, the government declared it Dhakeshwari National Temple, thus making Bangladesh the only Islamic country with a national Hindu temple. It is owned by the state and flies the national flag. But there’s a backstory to how Dhakeshwari emerged as Bangladesh’s most important Hindu place of worship.

That distinction, of the preeminent temple in eastern Bengal/ East Bengal/ East Pakistan had been held by the Ramna Kali Mandir in Dhaka. On March 27, 1971, the Pakistani army entered the temple premises as part of its mass-murdering OperationSearchlight, killedanestimated100-pluspeople(itwasaHindu neighbourhood), and destroyed the temple. It was rebuilt and inaugurated as recently as December 2021 by then Indian President Ram Nath Kovind when he attended Bangladesh’s 50th anniversary celebrations. About a year before she lost power to Khaleda Zia in 2001, Sheikh Hasina, then prime minister, had ordered an official inquiry into the Ramna Massacre. In any case, once the tallest structure in Dhaka, the Ramna Kalibari had lost its place to Dhakeshwari.

DHAKESHWARI ITSELF HAS seen periodic mob attacks and vandal­ism, significantly in the wake of the demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992. Most recently, the temple made headlines as Hindus and Muslims got together to protect it from Islamist mobs who were attack­ing Durga Puja sites, with Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus even visiting the temple and calling for tolerance and promising protection of every Bangladeshi citizen’s rights. Beyond words, Yunus hasn’t counted for much and, abroad, he has downplayed the threat to Hindus while attributing reports on the plight of Hindus to propaganda.

Bangladesh, the eastern bulk of Bengal, still has many temples, ashrams and other Hindu religious institutions in every nook and cranny. And that’s after so much and so many are gone. The largest cluster of extant historic Hindu tem­ples, incidentally, is the Puthia Temple Complex on the outskirts of Rajshahi city. In an originally Shaivite land where Shaktism and Vaishnavism blended, with a once dominant Buddhist culture, where Islam moderated under the Ilyas Shahi and Hussain Shahi dynasties and embraced Hindu thought as much as the Hindu epics, those temples and the intellectual-spiritual heritage of a vanishing people must be worth fighting for.

It’s not accurate, let alone fair, to call the defiant note struck by Bangladesh’s Hindus, who haven’t had a moment’s peace since the fall of Hasina, new. They have been fighting to preserve their lives and identity and rights all this time. The inten­sity of that struggle has varied according to dispensations in power and the current phase, if it is indeed that, is doubtless one of the worst collectively and individually for them. But there is a new firmness to the declaration that they are staying. Ban­gladesh, where they have their bhite-maati is their land, not the political entity of Hindu-majority India or Muslim-majority Bangladesh but the soil and the air that have known the blood and breath of their ancestors. But for the realisation of that fact, a Chinmoy Krishna Das would have been a nobody. What Bangladesh’s Hindus—up against the mob-military-marionette regime of Yunus that is indifferent to their predicament at best and collaborators-indulgers of the extrem­ists at worst—could certainly do with is amplifi­cation of their voice. Yunus may not have many friends left in DC soon and social media’s reach is deep and wide.

While some may argue that Hindu jingoism in India is not help­ing Bangladesh’s Hindus who are victims, it is a sign of the change in India itself that there is much more awareness (and instant reac­tion thanks again to social media) of whatever happens across the eastern border. Public sympathy and outrage are complemented by diplomatic protest. If those Hindus were to cross the border, settle and apply for citizenship tomorrow, they would not perhaps be denigrated as refugees as their predecessors were and considered a burden despite India’s population multiply­ing from 361 million in 1951 to 1.4 billion. But everybody would rather they remained in Bangladesh, although that country too is un­likely to succeed where Jinnah’s Pakistan failed.

It’s far more likely Hinduism in eastern Bengal will disappear altogether, much soon­er than feared earlier. According to a nearly decade-old Pew study, the Hindu population in Bangladesh would peak at 14.7 million in 2040 and then fall again to 14.4 million by 2050, at a percentage of 7.3 of the total population. That’s with too many factors remaining unchanged and too many variables changing expectedly. Given the country’s direction since August 5, such projections are now too optimistic.

OF ALL THE injustices and mis­takes of Partition, two should have been avoided. One, Hindu-majority Khulna district, and perhaps also Jessore, should not have gone to Pakistan. But this was hard to do given the trade-off with the Muslim-majority districts of Malda and Murshidabad which stayed with India. Two, the Chittagong Hill Tracts should have certainly been in India. Chattagram still has an almost 3 per cent Buddhist population and a nearly 11 per cent Hindu population. The Chakmas of the Chittagong Hill Tracts had petitioned Gandhi and Nehru to be allowed to join the Indian Union in 1947 when Buddhists and Hindus were a 99 per cent majority there. The Boundary Commission had overstepped its mandate in giving the region to Pakistan. The Indian Tricolour was hoisted at Rangamati on August 15, 1947, because the locals never thought they were in Pakistan.

Bangladesh’s Hindus, at the end of the day, are on their own. There’s only so much India can do, especially with a not-too-friendly government in Dhaka. But Indians can still speak for them and speak they must.

“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, who am I? And if not now, when?” Hillel’s Mishnah in the Ethics of the Fathers is not a self-care guide or a call to arms. It is an invitation to explore the self and realise what one is. The ‘I’ (ani), which is the innermost self; the ‘Me’ (li) or the superficial self, the persona presented to others; and finally, the ‘I’ as anochi, implying a more intimate connection with others. Hillel’s most famous aphorism starts with the self but moves to an expanded and collective sense of that same self by the end. One must find oneself and then move on to help others. And one must begin right away.

Primo Levi, who turned the last part of Hillel’s aphorism into the title of his 1982 novel Se non ora, quando? (If Not Now, When?), threw himself from his third-storey landing in 1987, prompting Ellie Wiesel to say, “Levi died at Auschwitz 40 years later.” Such is the pathology of trauma, especially when one is a survivor of the biggest mass-murder in history. Partition isn’t that distant in the past and for many it never ended.

Hillel’s second universally applicable aphorism was about not doing unto one’s fellows what one would not have done unto oneself, that is, not doing to others what is hateful to oneself. Perpetrators always do unto their victims what they would not have others do unto them. Bangladeshi Hindus have asked the question. Perhaps they are on course for the answer. Indians, for their part, should keep in mind Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer’s admonition in the Bundestag in 1988: “[T]hou shalt not be a perpetrator; thou shalt not be a victim; and thou shalt never, but never, be a bystander.”

2025 New Year IssueIndia-Bangladesh relationsminority HindusMuhammad Yunusregime changeReligious intoleranceSheikh Hasina