Who are the persecuted minorities in the Indian subcontinent?

The Citizenship Amendment Bill 2019 was finally passed by the Lok Sabha on 9^th December, after a prolonged debate and vitriolic criticism by the opposition and sections of media and intelligentsia, accusing the government of murdering secularism at the altar of democracy.

The amendment, roughly speaking, without going into the nitty-gritty, exempts only the non-Muslim illegal immigrants of deportation or imprisonment, and gives them a chance to obtain Indian citizenship, if they have been victims of religious persecution in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. Questions have been raised about excluding Muslims from such an exemption, and thus discriminating against them on the basis of religion.

In so many narratives from the either side – the government along with the supporters, and the oppositions along with the opponents of such a move – one very simple fact is being totally ignored. Though the names of Pakistan and Afghanistan have also been taken along with that of Bangladesh, as the possible sources of the illegal immigrants, some basic fact check and recalling of deliberately forgotten not-so-old history could reveal that the bulk of this so called illegal immigrants are Hindus from East Pakistan and Bangladesh who shouldn’t be called “illegal” in the first place.

Oscar Spate, an eminent geographer and an unofficial advisor to the Muslim League, especially on the matter of the desired boundary of the Pakistan side of the Punjab, said in the paper The Partition of the Punjab and of Bengal, published in December 1947 in The Geographical Journal, "I favor the Muslim case in the Punjab … and in Bengal my leaning is towards the other side." In the same paper he elaborated why he said so.

The proposed boundary in the Punjab left 3.5 to 4.5 million minorities on either side. Western Punjab had a population of 15.8 million, of whom 11.85 or close to 75% were Muslim, and the rest 25% predominantly Hindu and Sikh minorities. East Punjab had a population of 12.6 million, of whom 4.4 million or roughly 35% were Muslim minorities. Presently, both sides have only around 3% minorities. Almost the entire minority population changed sides soon, amidst the fast deteriorating atmosphere of insecurities and brutal violence of unthinkable magnitude inflicted upon the minorities on either side.

The boundary of the partitioned Bengal was unduly favorable to the Muslim side. For example, whole of Khulna district with 49.3% Muslim population was awarded to Pakistan, for reasons even Spate couldn’t figure out. West Bengal had a population of 21.2 million, of whom only 5.3 million or roughly 25% were Muslim minorities, whereas East Bengal had 39.1 million people, of whom a staggering 11.4 million or roughly 30% were predominantly Hindu minorities. Presently only 8% of East Bengal, now Bangladesh, is Hindu, whereas West Bengal is 27% Muslim, compared to 25% at the time of partition.

By 1948, as the great migration drew to a close, more than 15 million people had been uprooted, and between one and two million were dead.

Anything between seven to eight million of the 11.4 million Hindus were forced to flee East Bengal or East Pakistan and seek refuge in West Bengal and other parts of India, over the years, in a staggered way, during which there was formidable resistance even from the newly formed India government in accepting them, or even acknowledging their status as displaced people, forget settling them respectfully. 

On the contrary, as pointed out by a Bangladeshi writer in an article published in the New York Times during the seventieth anniversary of the partition of India, “only 700,000 moved to East Bengal… Bengali Muslims suffered less violence than other groups. For many of them the move was voluntary, indeed opportunistic… [in the] hope of a better future, rather than the mere search for a safe haven.” It might be noted here that a good number of them who moved to East Pakistan or East Bengal (now Bangladesh) from India for better prospects were not Bengalis, but Hindi speaking Biharis, who later played a significant role in the brutal persecution of the Hindus who were still there in East Bengal.

Exactly a year before the partition of India, Jinnah had declared the Direct Action Day on 16^th August 1946 – “Direct Action” to achieve Pakistan. Rajmohan Gandhi, in his magnum opus Mohandas, quoted Jinnah as saying, “Today we bid goodbye to constitutional methods.” What ensued was mayhem in the streets of Calcutta, killing thousands of Hindus. On 20^th August the British owned The Statesman reported, “The origin of the appalling carnage – we believe the worst communal riot in India’s history – was a political demonstration by the Muslim League.” The Great Calcutta Killing, as the daily reported it as, unleashed the chain reaction of communal riots in India, something which would attain more sinister forms in the next hundred years. The Suhrawardy government in Bengal did literally nothing to stop the killings in Calcutta. That was the beginning of the Hindu genocide in Bengal, something which would be very soon brushed under the carpet. The Great Calcutta Killing is the mother of all communal riots in India, setting off an unending fission chain reaction of killings and destruction.

Every action has a reaction, and the reaction another retaliatory action, which again triggers a reaction, creating a sort of an avalanche. The Hindu killings in Calcutta on the Direct Action Day immediately triggered Muslim killings in Calcutta and elsewhere, which in turn triggered horrific riots in Noakhali in East Bengal in October, unleashing another round of Hindu genocide, which led to the Bihar killings of the Muslims, which again had catastrophic impact on the ongoing Noakhali riots. The Great Calcutta Killings left 7000 to 10000 dead, both Hindus and Muslims. In the Noakhali riots more than 5000 Hindus were killed, villages after villages were burned, innumerable Hindu women were raped and many were forcefully converted to Islam. In Bihar 2000 to 3000 Muslims were killed. The Noakhali riots were so horrific that Gandhi had to camp there for months, to get things under control.

By end of 1946, it was clear that the League wouldn’t allow the riots to stop till the demand for Pakistan was met.

When the partition finally happened in 1947, East Pakistan had a staggering 11.4 million Hindus, who by now, had realized that they wouldn’t be safe, for sure, in what had already become East Pakistan. Unlike Punjab, here it was not possible for such a huge population to flee East Bengal overnight. As they trickled into India slowly, over the years, carrying with them never heard of horrific stories of one sided Hindu genocide of massive proportions, Nehru, then the Prime Minister, came up with an ill-conceived idea, much to the protests of people like Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, the founder of the organization which eventually evolved into the present Bharatiya Janata Party. To prevent the Hindu exodus from East Bengal, Nehru entered into a pact with the government of East Pakistan to help create favorable conditions for the post 1950 Hindu refugees to go back to their original homes in East Bengal. It’s really surprising that such a plan was never implemented in the Punjab.

The only reason for such an action could be the for a ‘secular’ garb, at any cost. Accepting the disproportionately large number of Hindus from East Bengal would destabilize the Hindu-Muslim parity in the share of violence inflicted by each side. It would expose the uncomfortable truth that in Bengal the violence was inflicted predominantly by the Muslims against the Hindus. The very fact that only 700,000 Muslims migrated to East Bengal from the west, against the eight million Hindus who would eventually move into India over the years, is proof enough that the violence in Bengal was one sided, against the Hindus. In Punjab though, it maintained the much sought after parity, which would make both the Muslims and the non-Muslims equally devil. Any disparity in this regard would be uncomfortable for the idea of secularism. The Bengal side of the partition didn’t fit into a particular kind of narrative of Hindu-Muslim equality, which is rather more impractical and utopian than idealistic. The disparity also had another danger – the retaliation. The moment the rest of India would come to know of the magnitude of the atrocities against the Hindus in East Bengal, there ought to be retaliation and chain reactions of communal violence.

That’s not the end of the story.

Under Pakistan, the condition of the Hindus in East Bengal deteriorated drastically. They were always looked at with suspicion, as though they were all Indian agents. When the people of East Bengal, irrespective of religion, protested against the imposition of Urdu on them by the federal government, the Hindus were again at the receiving end of the Pakistan Army’s wrath, as they thought the Hindus, with their India leanings, were instigating, influencing and corrupting the Muslims of East Bengal. Even a theft of a holy relic from the Hazratbal shrine in Srinagar, in Kashmir, lead to killings of Hindus in 1963. Hindu genocide, on any pretext, continued for years, and it culminated in 1971, during the Bangladesh war of liberation, when around 2.5 million Hindus were killed by the Pakistan Army. Compare that with the five to six million Jews killed in Holocaust.

The Hindu genocide in East Pakistan and Bangladesh, since the Bengal Partition in 1947, might need a little more background for a better understanding. Dr. Hans Hock, a faculty of Linguistics & Sanskrit and an Emeritus Professor at UIUC, summarized it quite well in his talk Banglatā, Islam, and Language, at the panel on Borderland Narratives of the Bengal Partition. Dr. Hock said, “there is and has been a dual identity for many Bengali Muslims, especially in East Bengal, a tension between what may be called Banglatā and Islam.” Banglatā, or the Bengali ethnic and linguistic identity of the Muslims of East Bengal or East Pakistan, often superseded their Islamic religious identity. For the Hindus though, there was never any confusion with regards to the identity – they were just Bengalis. Right after the creation of Pakistan, Banglatā posed a severe threat to the very idea of Pakistan, which very strictly centered around an exclusive Islamic identity. Any other identity was not at all acceptable.

Immediately after 1947, Hock said in his talk, the government of East Pakistan proceeded to remove Bangla from its currency and postal stamps. The minister of Education, Fazlur Rahman, started the procedure of making Urdu the single official state language. Students protested in December 1947 and March 1948. They were joined by numerous East Bengal intellectuals, both Muslim and Hindu. Jinnah condemned the Bengali language movement as an effort to divide Pakistan. He said, “The State Language of Pakistan is going to be Urdu and no other language. Anyone who tries to mislead you is really the enemy of Pakistan. Without one State Language, no Nation can remain tied up solidly together and function. Look at the history of other countries. Therefore, so far as the State Language is concerned, Pakistan’s language shall be Urdu.”

This subsequently led to the violent suppression of the Bhasha Andolan, the Bengali Language Movement, in East Pakistan by the Pakistan Army on 21^st February 1952 – the day commemorated now as the Mother Language Day worldwide. Tensions continued, and then, in 1971, “Operation Searchlight” by the Pakistan Army against the Bengali intelligentsia and cultural institutions, as well as the Hindu minorities, lead to some 10 million fleeing to India, and some three million being killed, of which a massive 2.5 million were Hindus. Interestingly, the Hindi-speaking Biharis, who had moved to East Pakistan from the Indian state of Bihar after 1947, played a major supporting role in the genocide. Finally, with intervention from India, Bangladesh was declared independent in December 1971, at the end of a very decisive war between India and Pakistan, where the latter had to swallow and very inglorious defeat.

It was expected that Bangladesh, the country which was created on linguistic lines, would turn out to be secular. But, sadly enough, “atrocities [against the Hindus] recurred numerous times after 1971, driven by Islamist groups. At the same time, many Bangladeshi intellectuals protested against these events, including the well-known writer Taslima Nasrin [she wrote the controversial book Lajja, Shame], who had to go into exile in 1994 and, [ironically], met with opposition in India as well.”

Though the Banglatā, Hock referred to, does play a crucial role in the identity of the Muslims in Bangladesh, but there have been numerous instances when the frenzy Islamic identity overtook the ethnic and linguistic identity, ever since the Muslim League declared the “Direct Action” in 1946.

Unlike the population migration in the Punjab, which happened in one shot, the Hindus left in East Bengal, and then Bangladesh, have been trickling into India continuously, over the years, till this day, being constantly under the threat of violence and genocide. They were always unwanted and never accepted properly, or rather legally, by Indian government. Moreover, many were sent back at the behest of Nehru, with the false assurance that they would be safe in their ancestral land. That never happened.

The very tenet of the partition of India was to carve out a safe “home” for the Muslims. The very name Pakistan – the Land of the Pure – implies that it’s not a home for the impure – the non-Muslims. This also implies, by contrast, that the rest of India should provide safety to the non-Muslims of the sub-continent, because otherwise there wouldn’t be any “home” for them. So, providing sanctuary to the Hindus of East Bengal and Bangladesh was the moral obligation for India. Here too, the same obsession for a particular form of secularism played a big role. It was as though, accepting the Hindus facing persecution in Bangladesh would be tantamount to being partisan to the Hindus, and hence being communal.

Thus, the bulk of the “illegal immigrants” we are talking about are none but those Hindus from East Bengal who couldn’t enter into India immediately after the partition and were forced to stay back in a hostile land. They faced severe persecution in years to come and the ones who survived took desperate attempts at entering into India again and again. If all, who crossed the borders in 1947 and took refuge in India, could be considered legal citizens, why should the Hindus from East Bengal, who were not allowed to settle in India at that time, become “illegal immigrants”? Had Nehru not been a fanatic apostle of secularism, the situation in Bengal would have been the same as that in the Punjab – everyone would have crossed the border in 1947 and there wouldn’t be this problem of “illegal immigrants” now.

So, if seen closely, the Amendment of the Citizenship Bill is nothing but predominantly a much belated attempt by the Indian government to provide a safe home to the Hindus of East Bengal whose ancestors, just a generation back, were denied their rights and were left to their own fates to fend for themselves. I don’t think there’s any accurate figure for their numbers, and for that matter, for the others like them who had to flee Pakistan or Afghanistan, but it wouldn’t be a wrong estimate to put the former much above the others.

Given this background, should we still ask why the non-Muslims are being considered now for an exemption?

I would say, it’s not an exemption anyway. It’s delivering them their rights, though much belated.