It makes up an unending story of brutality incarnate. It is the most heinous epic of inhumanity in the name of religious rights. But to top it all the blightest part of the saga is the cowardice of the Bengali Hindus, the worst victim to hush it up under the carpet (The Genocide That Was Never Told).
It was a well-orchestrated pogrom designed to cleanse the Hindu Bengalis physically and culturally from their motherland they inhabited through generations from unknown past. The victim community confronted the gruesome elimination project and opt for a life of homeless destitute, ran from country to country, from province to province unkempt, unfed nomads. But the tragic story was carefully kept hidden from all platforms and the darkest aspect here is the role the educated and the wealthy Hindu Bengalis played. They led the entire Hindu Bengalis in ensuring this kind of suppression of horrific cruelty unleashed on their own community.
And more conspicuously the Hindu Bengalis uprooted from their beloved homeland in East Bengal in a manner that denied them the slightest dignity reserved for humans, once they crossed the border joined majorly the bandwagon of a mode of denial. Not only did they hide the obnoxious story, they helped build up a false narrative that the Muslims didn’t want partition of Bengal. Only Hindus misled by one communal Shyamaprasad carved out a part of United Bengal or Bangladesh for Hindus. This is lock, stock and barrels a Goebbelsian lie for which a completely separate dissertation is required.
The Muslim communal marauders generated waves after waves of barbaric attacks on innocent Hindus since early twentieth century. We desist from covering all genocidal acts perpetrated on Hindus but coming down to 1946 we can’t hold back our emotional attributes to look the other way from referring to the colossal genocidal assaults first during so-called Great Calcutta Killings followed by the Noakhali Massacre exactly two months hence.
The writers in this book have taken up the cases of Hindu genocides by Muslims in post-independence Bangladesh. But the germs of communal hatred against Hindus dates back prior to 1971, the year Bangladesh emerged.
For any historical events there are always two causes—one is the long term and the other short term. The former is not so apparent and is elusive, the other is wide open and easy to discern. Here the long term cause is the one and only one and that of Islamist intolerance which stoops to the lowliest to wipe out others. The short term cause was the plea that Muslims needed a separate homeland. This absurd demand was fuelled by the Communists directly and Nehru-Gandhi duo indirectly.
The numerical minority West Pakistan denied the majority of East Pakistan all political and economic dividends. The latter raised a murmur of protests based on language. The Westerners counted the danger and in a bid to twist the scenario they prompted, assisted, abetted and aided in perpetrating extreme form of anti-Hindu tirades amongst the more fundamentalist Bengali Muslims. They organised concerted attacks upon the non-militant Hindu Bengalis who were unindoctrinated. It began well ahead of March 25, 1971 the day Pakistani military dictators initiated Operation Searchlight.
The smug Bengali Hindus of West Bengal were elated that at long last Bengali Muslims in Bangladesh have woken up to their language-based ethnic identity. It was a daydream.
The Bengali Muslims as is the wont of Islamists didn’t budge an inch from the fundamentals of Islam that is the establishment of Dar-ul-Islam.
Now on to the book under review. The Operation Searchlight offered a weapon in the hands of these fanatic Muslims. In the doldrums of freedom struggle they took the camouflage of rebels and in the milieu launched severe assault on unarmed and guardianless Hindus aided by the Pak military, an all out one.
Saunak, [07/10/25 1:04 pm]
In the garb of Pak military atrocities the sizeable section of Bengali Muslims took more active part on the hapless Hindus. The results are now out in the open.
The endless accounts of atrocities follow the same pattern. First assemble a few Muslims in a Hindu locality and create small nuisances from lifting pets of Hindus. Then they increase their numbers. At night they torch the thatched homes. Next they come in hordes in broad daylight in seasons and out of seasons. They attack households during their lunch hours, spoil the food, molest the women to the point of stripping them, line up them, cut their breasts and display those cut breasts, rape them in front of all. They target the males, chop them, shoot them dead, cut their limbs and hang on their roofs. One does not know which kind of religion can preach this horrendous barbarity. They burn their granaries, loot their belongings including jewellery. They hound them, occupy overnight their landed property and hound them throughout the year. The persecuted Hindus flee home to save their lives very often through blood strewn paths of their near and dear ones.
Next come the Muslim agents. The horrified Hindus are tempted that they will ferry them over to India their maternal uncles’ home and in exchange the frightened Hindus have to part with their leftovers. But they will cheat them. The hounded Hindus will run without knowing who of them were accompanying with them or have already been butchered by the beasts or abducted and maimed, raped and killed. The children’s mouths were stuffed with clothes so that they can’t cry out or else the butchers will know and kill the fleeing Hindus. Young ladies were mostly raped and murdered and some fortunate ones were married off to any one Muslim, old, haggard as their tenth wife and converted.
In these hellish genocides all strata of Muslims took part including police, military, teachers and students, friends and foes and who not?
After a long spell of torture and being huddled from far away East Pakistan-cum-Bangladesh they trudged along various states and a group of them finally settled in Sindhanur of Karnataka. Other groups settled in many other states. But many of them are living without any landholding or homes. Until and unless they are provided with citizenship they can’t live a decent life. That is why the immediacy of Citizenship Amendment Act is warranted.
The book has been written with a humanitarian view. Hence some technical lapses can be overlooked.
Read also: The Koch Kingdom Part 1
Sudip Narayan Ghosh
