Gandhi's Mission In Noakhali Failed in 1946-47. Will Modi Too Fail To Protect Bangladeshi Hindus?

A tiny news item in The New York Times from 1947 had this title: “Quit Noakhali or die, Gandhi Warns Hindus.”

This report, barely a few paragraphs, was written many weeks after Mahatma Gandhi’s four-month mission to restore peace in riot-torn Noakhali in East Bengal (now Bangladesh) failed.

Noakhali saw a horrendous massacre, rape and forced conversion of minority Hindus in October 1946, but Gandhi’s mission ended without any resolution.

One Bengali Muslim leader of that time, A K Fazlul Haq, even claiming that Gandhi was harming Hindu-Muslim amity by his mere presence. He wondered how Muslims could tolerate him. 

Odd, for the same Haq was supported by Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose’s Forward Bloc and the Hindu Mahasabha of Syama Prasad Mukherjee in the provincial Bengal Legislative Assembly to form a government during 1941-43.

At that time, Haq was opposed to the Muslim League and Mohammed Ali Jinnah, but in 1946-47, and especially after the Noakhali riots, he showed where his real loyalties lay.

A couple of days ago, The New York Times produced a tendentious headline while reporting on the recent bout of violence against Hindus and Awami League party officials after the Sheikh Hasina government was ousted and the Prime Minister herself had to flee. “Hindus in Bangladesh face revenge attacks after Hasina’s Ouster”, said the headline.

Revenge? For what? Voting for the allegedly “secular” Awami League in elections? And was the Awami League as secular as Indians would like to believe?

It is time to ask a more basic question: Is Bangladesh going to be any different today from when it was East Pakistan?

Apart from the vast swathe of Indian territory separating East and West Pakistan, and differences over language policy (Urdu versus Bengali), why do we need to think of Bangladesh as any different from the old East Pakistan?

Let’s talk about Hasina herself first, though we must acknowledge that she was a geopolitical friend of India who did not allow anti-India insurgents to operate from her territory.

For this alone we must give her temporary sanctuary, just as France gave Ayatollah Khomeini sanctuary when the Shah of Iran was in power. This could change in a post-Hasina scenario. But did Bangladesh itself become less Islamist under her skin-deep secularism?

In 2021, after Bangladesh was rocked by anti-Hindu riots after a Quran was allegedly desecrated, I made a brief reference to how Hasina’s own secularism was something for limited consumption. I wrote at that time, quoting from what she had said in 2014. 

“In 2014, Hasina made her intentions clear when she said that Bangladesh will always be a Muslim majority country and it will be run according to the Medina Charter, which the Prophet drew up when he fled from Mecca and had to lead a mixed community which was half-Jewish. But by the time he left Medina to return to Mecca and claim victory, there were no Jewish tribes left. So, the Medina Charter is no consolation to any kafir.”

“A Medina charter in Bangladesh will not protect Hindus, for it still privileges Islam. The Bangladesh Constitution, even though it embraces the four ideals of democracy, socialism, nationalism and secularism, starts with an invocation to Allah, which implies that other religions are not on a par with it. Hasina herself has said that “There will be no law against the Holy Koran and Sunnah here ever.” How can any other religion, which may disagree with Islam, then claim equal status? Nobody is asking for any law against the Quran, but if abuse of other religions is fair game, how is the field level or secular? The alleged blasphemy against the Quran, which was used as a ruse to attack Hindus in Bangladesh this time, is clearly part of this one-sidedness in Islam.”

As in the case of Haq, the line separating genuinely secular leaders and reality has always been a thin one in Muslim-majority Bangladesh.

The bitter truth is that despite the Awami League’s reputation as the only party Hindus could vote for, the evidence does not suggest that the Awami League was any more secular in practice than the opposition Bangladesh National Party or some of the more Islamist outfits.

The following are summaries or excerpts from one chapter in a book by Deep Halder and Avishek Biswas, Being Hindu in Bangladesh: An Untold Story. 

In chapter 3, titled "The DNA of Hate", the authors tell a nuanced tale of how the Awami League had to make its peace with some Islamists, even while former razakars, pro-Pakistani irregular forces who plotted the genocide of Hindus and Bangladeshi freedom-fighters during the independence struggle, had quietly infiltrated the Awami League.

An exiled Bangladeshi blogger Asad Noor is quoted in the book as saying:

“It is true that Awami League did not trade in religion, but after the grenade attack on her in 2004, Sheikh Hasina realised she had to reach out to fundamentalists. Understand her politics. Hasima is perceived in Bangladesh to be close to India and India is a Hindu-majority country. To balance this, she has to give a degree of free hand to Islamic hardliners.”

Taslima Nasrin, another exiled writer whose fictionalised book, Lajja, dealing with the lived reality of Hindus in Bangladesh, was banned by Begum Khaleda Zia. But even after “secular” Hasina came to power, the ban on the book was never lifted.  

Halder and Biswas give us another example of how the very same forces that backed Pakistan’s genocide during the 1971 war were back in Bangladesh after Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was assassinated in 1975. One case relates to Ghulam Azam, who was Amir of the Jamaat-e-Islami before the war.

He wanted Bangladesh to remain East Pakistan. When the effort failed, he left for Pakistan. But in 1978 he was back in Bangladesh. Though he was later arrested for war crimes and sentenced to life imprisonment, the fact is such people were allowed to come back to create communal mayhem.

A BBC report at that time by Mahfuz Sadique (quoted from the book) noted that moderately Muslim Bangladesh was steadily turned hardcore Salafist with the entry of Saudi money and the building of fundamentalist madrassas and Islamic charities.

Net result, between 2013 and 2016, 48 people, including secular bloggers, Hindus, Buddhists, and foreigners were killed by fundamentalists, with the nadir being plumbed during the terror attack on Holey Artisan Bakery in Dhaka’s post locality in July 2016. While the Islamic terrorists were killed by special forces, they managed to kill 22 people, mostly foreigners.

The simple takeout from the book is that despite its “secular” credentials, fundamental Islam has been gaining ground during Hasina’s tenure.

While the book contains many heart-rending stories of the Hindu and other victims of the fundamentalist tide, I have chosen not to focus on these stories and instead underline the fact that the fundamental religious faultline was never healed by the creation of Bangladesh.

The book must be read as a whole, for it contains a lot more nuance on what is going on in Bangladesh.

A quote from Anthony Mascarenhas, who was Pakistan correspondent of the Sunday Times, London, during the 1971 war, tells us about the horrors Hindus faced at that time (and continue to face now at a lower intensity). Mascarenhas, who was given a chance by the Pakistani army to see their operations in East Pakistan during the war, wrote:

“For six days I travelled with the officers of the 9th Division headquartered at Comilla. I witnessed at close quarters the extent of the killing. I saw Hindus, hunted from village to village and door to door, shot off-hand after a cursory short-arm inspection showed they were uncircumcised.”

There is no reason to think today’s Bangladesh, under a more pronounced Islamist regime after the exit of Hasina, will end the torments of Hindus in Bangladesh.

Whether it was Gandhi in 1947 or Narendra Modi in 2024, the only advice to Hindus in Bangladesh seems to be the dismal one: Prepare to die or flee.

Isn't it time the Modi government abandoned abject silence in favour of a more supportive programme to protect hapless Hindus in Bangladesh?