[Bangladeshi blood lust]
Dhaka University students have always been the vanguard of change in a benighted Bangladesh. The massacre by the Pakistan Army of students and select professors — proponents of Bengali nationalism in East Pakistan in March 1971 — killings expressly ordered (Operation Searchlight) by General Tikka Khan, GOC-IN-C, East Pakistan, to quell the nascent separatist movement, backfired spectacularly. Many date the inevitability of an independent Bangladesh to that sorry episode.
It was Dhaka Univerity students again leading the campaign against job quotas in government services for family members of the Mukti Bahini and other sections of society, which precipitated the ouster of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed. It was the usual raucous agitation common to the subcontinent — a lot of thunderous speeches signifying nothing. And then Hasina sent in the special riot police to literally knock some sense into them. It angered the students into violence — the wedge the Jamaat-i-Islami’s student wing — Islami Chhatra Shibir were waiting for to kick in the door of the Awami League regime. Under the cover of this popular protest, it pursued its larger agenda of pogrom against the Hindu minority. Repeated bouts of ethnic cleansing of Hindus from Bangladesh by the Jamaat-Shibir have resulted over the years into a substantial 22% minority at the time of Partition being whittled down to less than 3% of the 170-odd million strong population today. The Shibir has been very clear about its objective of zeroing out the Hindus of the country by sword or by conversion. They are almost there.
The communal politics of the subcontinent are simply dreadful and a continuing tragedy. Pakistan has been nearly cleansed of Hindus, as is Bangladesh now. The trouble is these cleansings on either flank make the condition of Muslims in India tenuous, paradoxically, at a time when their numbers have grown healthily to some 14% of the population, or nearly 200 million — the only religious minority that, numbers-wise, is flourishing in South Asia. It sets up a deadly dynamic of Indian Muslims feeling more and more beleagured as the majoritarian sentiment grows less tolerant with newsreports and reliable personal accounts reaching India of Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh being subjected to ceaseless violence, dishonour, degradation, and death. These naturally stoke Hindu outrage in this country which, if it gains critical mass, could become unstoppable, snowball into something truly horrendous. The trouble is very soon there will be no atrocities to commit against Hindus, because there will be no Hindus left in either Pakistan or Bangladesh. A tipping point will then be reached as regards the Muslims in India because Jinnah’s principle of minorities as “mutual hostages” will be voided.
The pity is Jamaat-i-Islami in Pakistan and in Bangladesh and their youth wings do not care what happens to the sizable population of Muslims in India. But the view of the Hindu Mahasabha at the time of Partition that there be a complete exchange of populations between “Hindu India” and “Muslim India” to prevent the piecemeal elimination of minorities may then begin to make sense, gain new adherents, with what consequences can only be imagined.
But to return to developments to our immediate east, the speed with which the Awami League government fell apart, does arouse suspicions about a foreign hand. After all, Hasina had placed her Awami League loyalists and people close to her party chieftains, in almost all the strategic posts in the government, especially the police, and appointed Major General Mohammed Hossain Al Morshed in April this year as head of the National Security Intelligence and, earlier, a distant relation, General Waker-uz-Zaman (ex-East Bengal Regiment), as army chief in December 2023. So, what went wrong?
Hard to say, but some rumours suggest that Hasina’s denying permission for the use by the American Navy of a base, possibly Cox’s Bazar, led to the US conspiring with Generals Morshed and/or Waker to depose her — with the student protest providing ample cover. Another story has it that Beijing, upset with Hasina handing over the $1 billion Teesta River development project to India, to crown a series of connectivity projects across Bangladesh linking West Bengal to the states in the Indian Northeast, that she had approved, was only the latest move in a series that also saw her turn to India for arms supplies, and was the poverbial last straw. And that China used the same Generals the US is supposed to have done, to do its work. Choose whichever account you are partial to, because one thing is certain — the regime change did not happen because the denizens of Dhaka U willed it so, or because the Jamaat, whose leadership ranks were decimated by Hasina, was acting in cahoots with the opposition Bangladesh National Party of Khaleda Zia — a largely spent force!
However it happened, the Nobel laureate, Muhammad Yunus (whiling away his exile in Washington) was waiting in the wings, so to say. He did not need much coaxing to agree to lead an interim government in Dhaka, which could be in power for as long as it takes to obtain a regime acceptable to many internal and external interests. India is one of those external players who cannot be ignored. But, the Modi government did get a blackeye owing to its being lulled so easily into complacency by the RAW station, Dhaka, assuring NSA Ajit Doval that all was good. So, when the eruption happened the Indian government was as surprised, and had as short prior notice as Hasina did to pack a satchel and board a helicopter taking her to Kolkatta for an Indian VIP fleet plane to fly her from Dum Dum to Delhi.
The most impassioned, heartfelt, and insightful comments and writings about the happenings in Bangladesh in the Indian media are, not surprisingly, by Hindu Bengalis. In a strange but remote sort of way I feel drawn personally to the Bengal drama. My father, a newly minted civil engineer from the College of Engineering in Pune (at a time when there were only four other engineering colleges in British India — at Guindy, Karachi, Jadavpur, and the Thompson College of Engineering at Roorkie), was selected in 1944 to join the Indian Railway Service of Engineers. This was when the Warrant of Precedence was: Viceroy; C-in-C, India; Commissioner, Railways, etc. For graduating engineers in those days, the railways were it.
My father, an adventurer at heart and a topper in the merit list, who had never travelled north of Mumbai chose Bengal Assam Railway to see the rest of the vast country and the world, with his probationary period spent at the HQ, BA in Sealdah. As required, he quickly became proficient in Bengali, a prerequisite to serving there — a frontier railway in the east and counterpart of the North West Frontier Railway in the west that reached Landi Kotal through the Khyber Pass on the Afghan border — the two railway systems at its two ends tying India together.
Newly married in 1946, my Dad took his then 19-year old wife, who had not travelled beyond Mumbai either, from our home town of Dharwad in what was then the Bombay Presidency and is now in Karnataka, to Calcutta. They reached the once imperial capital just a few days before the great Calcutta killings of 1946 occassioned by the Bengal Chief Minister Shahid Suhrawardy’s call for “Direct Action Day” that saw some 6,000 people killed — the biggest mass murder in the Partition era 3-day stretch, August 16-19.
Protected by armed railway police, my parents were terrified witnesses to many of these random knifings in the street fronting on their home in Tollygunge (I think). My mother was so traumatised she aborted the baby — her first, that she was carrying — my would have-been older sibling. That was her introduction to Calcutta and the Bengal-Assam Railway. She never quite got over it. Over time the memory of the horrors faded, of course but, perhaps, not the fear that had settled deep down within her that no amount of absorbing Bengali culture — speaking the language fluently, engaging in “Rabindro sangeet”, etc., could eraze. My parents considered themselves honorary Bengalis. When I think of the Hindus in Bangladesh today, I speculate about my mother’s state of mind in Tollygunge in August 1946, and break out into cold sweat.
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