Author: Times News Network
Publication: The Times of India
Date: May 6, 2002
Why doesn't your conscience cry
for the Hindus of Bangladesh who are subjected to continuous communal atrocities?
Those collecting relief for the victims of the Gujarat carnage in Kolkata
have confronted this question, often laced with anger and sarcasm.
"This shows that the saffron brigade
has succeeded in ingraining a dubious logic in the mind of a large section
of the middle-class Hindus in Left-liberal West Bengal. A perceived threat
to the Hindus in the entire sub-continent rationalises the politics of
vengeance and mass brutalisation as we have seen in Gujarat," said Kunal
Chattopadhyay, history professor and an activist of the Gujarat solidarity
Committee against Communalism. He faced an agitated group at Kalighat on
May 1. Some others think differently.
"Our intellectuals were apprehensive
that hue and cry over the plight of Hindus in Bangladesh would only help
the Sangh Parivar. Our silence has been counter-productive," said professor
Ratneswar Bhattacharya who has authored a book on the cleansing of minorities
in Bangladesh recently.
According to him, at least three
million people of the minority communities, mostly Hindus, have been uprooted
from Bangladesh so far. From Census reports of both India and Bangladesh,
Bhattacharya showed the steady decline of minority population in Bangladesh
while there was growth in the same category in India and Pakistan.The attacks
on the minorities increased after the BNP-Jamat alliance came to power,
said the author citing Bangladeshi media reports extensively.
"In contrast to Gujarat, it is lowkey
pogrom in which rape, plunder and occupation of properties of the minorities,
desecration of religious places and idols and evictions were done systematically.
The discrimination has been institutionalised by laws such as the Enemy
Properties Act and declaration of Islam as the state religion. The stream
of refugees continues to sneak into West Bengal. Unlike seventies,many
of them were greeted with BSF bullet in recent past," observed Bhattacharya.
"Bangladesh has never witnessed
a communal riot, because a riot takes place between two sides. Here one
side has remained silent and is at the receiving end," he quoted Bangladeshi
writer Salam Azad. "From Shamsur Rahman to Salam Azad, Jahanara Imam to
Taslima Nasrin, Kabir Choudhury to Shahriar Kabir, many of the Bangladeshi
intellectuals have tried to preserve the ideals of the liberation war,
composite Bengali identity and secular credos. In Dhaka, Paila Baisakh
is observed as a common festival of all Bengalis irrespective of their
religions. But there is another hidden Bangladesh in the hundreds of villages
and towns where the divisive forces reign supreme," he said.
However, Bangladeshi researchers
like Meghna Guhathakurata of Dhaka University have said that the minority-bashing
was the part of the reactionary degeneration of the country's politics.
"The Islamisation of politics and public life had already made minorities
marginal.Terror is playing an increasing role in politics and social intimidation
is part of the power structure. Political elites based in Dhaka behave
like absentee landlords. They use their hirelings to plunder underdogs
to oil their election machinery and maintain their post-poll fiefdoms.
Minorities are the most soft targets," Guhathakurata wrote. The silver
lining lies in the unity of the secular minority of the subcontinent against
all kinds of majoritianism, agreed the scholars.
