Making Of India , Pakistan and Bangladesh and the Plights of East Bengal Refugees and Muslims in India
Palash Biswas
Contact: Palash C Biswas, C/O Mrs Arati Roy, Gosto Kanan, Sodepur, Kolkata- 700110, India. Phone: 91-033-25659551
Email: palashbiswaskl@gmail.com
"In the post-World War II period refugee problem emerged out to be one of the biggest problems before the international community. India has also experienced it at a large scale. Factors such as rise of religious nationalism, ethnicisation of politics, state terrorism, anarchic majoritarianism and above all state’s refusal to conform to norms set by the international refugee regime, rendered the refugees stateless and subjects for inhuman treatment. On the other hand, historical forces like religious, linguistic or ethnic nationalism and regional economic disparity continue to generate refugees in the eastern and north-eastern regions of India. Faced with unfriendly state, both in the country of origin and the country of adoption, the refugees struggle to find the ways and means for a healthy living, and wherever possible they make efforts to put up an organised movement for their ‘human rights’.
Politics of Demography in India may be well explained with case studies in West Bengal and Gujrat. Sharing the state power by enslaved communities in North India under leadership of the likes Mayawati, Mulayam,Nitish Kumar, Lalu yadav and Mulayam is also a classical example of Demography politics. In every case ,the Muslim Vote Bank and minority psyche plays the key role. In West Bengal, after Modi`s charishma in Gujrat and BJP in the helms in Himachal it is near impossible to dislodge the ruling Left Front despite violent and vigourous War cry by Mamata Bannerjee. Thus, capitalist marxist Chief minister of West Bengal Buddhadeb defying ideology, party, history and culture , follows the dictates of MNCs and Corporate Finance capital. Bengal has become the free hunting ground for Ruling Hegemony. The regemented Gestapo won`t allow you to breathe until you surrender! The North India type change in political scenerio in Bengal is impossible because of Demography. Marxist have hijacked Muslim vote Bank for ever. Muslims may not ally with SC and ST and OBC as the allied before independence. Majority of SC, ST and OBC from the subaltern base East Bengal have been uprooted and scattered all over this bloody sub continent. Even the rfugee influx has not stopped at all. Mrs Indira Gandhi might have pondered over the option of annexing East Bengal like Sikkim later, had she opted for it, Bengali Elites would have resisted as the Polpulation of East and North East India including bangladesh establishes dominance of Muslims.
Bengali SC and St aborigin peple are being persecuted in Bangladesh, we know well. We know all about the Genocide of 1971. But, in fact, the East Bengal partition Victim refugees resettled in different parts of India including homeland Bengal are persecuted much more.
Citizen Amendment Act happens to be Death warrant for all East Bengal Refugees. In context to Partition and great Population Transfer, Dalit Bengalies were never treated as par as the West Pakistan refugges. They got War Level Resettlement with compensation while East Bengal Fellows lived on Dole. They were ejected from their homeland and dumped in unfriendly landscape as well as humanscape. East Bengal refugges have been used as Vote Bank in every state of India. They have been used against tribals as well as Muslims for further demographic readjustment. Now, Pranab Mukherjee and Buddhadeb lead a deportation drive against them. A refugee Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh leads the drive.Another refugee from sindh, Lalkrishna Adwani as the deputy prime minister plus Home Minister in NDA goverrnment enacted the anti bengali Citizenship act with active help of Parnab Mukherjee who chaired the Parilamentary committe. Marxist and all SC, ST and OBC Mps supported.
Manmohan is the Comrador Prime Minister of Zionist Brahmincal White Post Modern Galaxy Order neoliberal MNC Corporate Colony that Shining India has become losing Freedom, Sovereignity and Democratic institutions as well as Productio n System and cultural roots. But remote control happnes to be in the hands of Italian born white woman Mrs sonia gandhi. Pranab Mukherjee works as De Facto Prime minister and he heads 39 parliamentary committees instrumental to kill huaman and civil rights, finsh higher education and reservation. Not only reservation or Citizenship, the Brute Ruling Hegemeony is working Up the Hills to kill the Constitution of India to nullify the Empowerment of enslaved Indian majorty Eighty Five percent People.
Taslima Nasrin and dead Rizwan are the examples of West Bengal politics. In Nandigram, no caste Hindu is killed. Every victim happens to be either Muslim or SC OBC marginalised people deprived of life and livelihood. Nadigram is a Muslim majority area. Nandigram Insurrection would have been impossible withot the particiaption of Muslims. Women also played key role to mobilise in resistance. They were killed, gangraped. Intlligentsia, NGOs and Opposition could not defend the victims neither they could stop the capitalist annihilation of peasants. Under this scenerio, CPIM made an issue of Taslima Nasri to subvert Nandigram Insurrection. Ration riots were also tamed in between. Ant American Campaign in the light of War against terrorism also helped the Marxist. Muslims overlooked the meeting of Buddhadeb with Henry Kissinger. Nuclear Deal Dram had been played nationally and Taslima was used for locaised agenda, which eventually became national as well as international. CPIM also encashed the Rizwan Love Tragedy in its favour to mobilise Muslim Vote Bank.
What happened at last?
In a new twist to the Rizwanur Rehman case, the CBI says that Rizwanur, a graphic designer who was found dead along the railway tracks in Kolkata on September 21, committed suicide.
According to reports available to NDTV, the investigating agency has found that the Todis abetted 30-year-old Rizwanur's suicide.
The agency will tell the Kolkata High Court on Tuesday that it has established through scientific and electronic evidence that it was not a case of murder.
It says that Rizwan was driven to suicide after being separated from his wife Priyanka Todi, the daughter of rich industrialist Ashok Todi.
But, NDTV's sources have said that the agency will chargesheet all those persons who were involved in separating Priyanka and Rizwanur soon after their wedding in August.
The CBI feels that the separation and attempts to intimidate him had a 'cumulative effect' that led to his suicide.
Those likely to be charged are Priyanka's uncle and her father, Ashok Todi, against whom the CBI had initially registered a murder case.
But the charge will now be a lesser abetment to suicide charge carrying the maximum penalty of imprisonment upto 10 years.
The CBI has also found that senior police officers considered close to the Todis acted improperly in this case and will also be recommending action against them.
Due to the extremely sensitive nature of this case, the agency is still finalising exactly what action to take against whom.
For instance, they are looking at each police officer's role separately and deciding action. But one thing they claim is indisputable that when Rizwanur went to dumdum railway tracks on September 21, he wanted to end his life.
For his family, this may be hard to digest but they will have to wait for the full report in the high court on Tuesday, where the CBI is expected to explain in detail what it has found.
The partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 was followed by the forced uprooting of an estimated 18 million people. This paper focuses on the predicament of the minority communities in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) who were uprooted and forced to seek shelter in the Indian province of West Bengal. It considers the responses of Indian federal and provincial governments to the challenge of refugee rehabilitation. A study is made of the Dandakaranya scheme which was undertaken after 1958 to resettle the refugees by colonising forest land: the project was sited in a peninsular region marked by plateaus and hill ranges which the refugees, originally from the riverine and deltaic landscape of Bengal, found hard to accept. Despite substantial official rehabilitation efforts, the refugees demanded to be resettled back in their "natural habitat" of Indian Bengal. However, this was resisted by the state. Notwithstanding this opposition, a large number of East Bengal refugees moved back into regions which formed a part of erstwhile undivided Bengal where, without any government aid and planning, they colonised lands and created their own habitats. Many preferred to become squatters in the slums that sprawled in and around Calcutta. The complex interplay of identity and landscape, of dependence and self-help, that informed the choices which the refugees made in rebuilding their lives is analysed in the paper.
Refugees and Displaced Persons
Who
A refugee is someone with a well-founded fear of persecution on the basis of his or her race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion, who is outside of his or her country of nationality and unable or unwilling to return. Refugees are forced from their countries by war, civil conflict, political strife or gross human rights abuses. There were an estimated 14.9 million refugees in the world in 2001 - people who had crossed an international border to seek safety - and at least 22 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) who had been uprooted within their own countries.
What
Enshrined in Article 14 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the right "to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution." This principle recognizes that victims of human rights abuse must be able to leave their country freely and to seek refuge elsewhere. Governments frequently see refugees as a threat or a burden, refusing to respect this core principle of human rights and refugee protection.
Where
The global refugee crisis affects every continent and almost every country. In 2001, 78 percent of all refugees came from 10 areas: Afghanistan, Angola, Burma, Burundi, Congo-Kinshasa, Eritrea, Iraq, the Palestinian territories, Somalia and Sudan. Palestinians are the world's oldest and largest refugee population, and make up more than one fourth of all refugees. Asia hosts 45 percent of all refugees, followed by Africa (30 percent), Europe (19 percent) and North America (5 percent).
When
Throughout history, people have fled their homes to escape persecution. In the aftermath of World War II, the international community included the right to asylum in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In 1950, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was created to protect and assist refugees, and, in 1951, the United Nations adopted the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, a legally binding treaty that, by February 2002, had been ratified by 140 countries.
Why
In the past 50 years, states have largely regressed in their commitment to protect refugees, with the wealthy industrialized states of Europe, North America and Australia - which first established the international refugee protection system - adopting particularly hostile and restrictive policies. Governments have subjected refugees to arbitrary arrest, detention, denial of social and economic rights and closed borders. In the worst cases, the most fundamental principle of refugee protection, nonrefoulement, is violated, and refugees are forcibly returned to countries where they face persecution. Since September 11, many countries have pushed through emergency anti-terrorism legislation that curtails the rights of refugees.
How
Human Rights Watch believes the right to asylum is a matter of life and death and cannot be compromised. In our work to stop human rights abuses in countries around the world, we seek to address the root causes that force people to flee. We also advocate for greater protection for refugees and IDPs and for an end to the abuses they suffer when they reach supposed safety. Human Rights Watch calls on the United Nations and on governments everywhere to uphold their obligations to protect refugees and to respect their rights - regardless of where they are from or where they seek refuge.
Refugees
Every year millions of people around the world are displaced by war, famine, and civil and political unrest. Others are forced to flee their countries in order to escape the risk of death and torture at the hands of persecutors. The United States (U.S.) works with other governmental, international, and private organizations to provide food, health care, and shelter to millions of refugees throughout the world. In addition, the United States considers persons for resettlement to the U.S. as refugees. Those admitted must be of special humanitarian concern and demonstrate that they were persecuted, or have a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group.
Each year, the State Department prepares a Report to Congress on proposed refugee admissions, then the U.S. President consults with Congress and establishes the proposed ceilings for refugee admissions for the fiscal year. For the 2005 fiscal year (i.e. October 1, 2004 - September 30, 2005), the total ceiling is set at 70,000 admissions and is allocated to six geographic regions: Africa (20,000 admissions), East Asia (13,000 admissions), Europe and Central Asia (9,500 admissions), Latin America/Caribbean (5,000 admissions), Near East/South Asia (2,500 admissions) and 20,000 reserve.
Joining a civilisation
Nayanjot Lahiri
January 04, 2008
http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?id=f48f1d97-7457-403c-8a5d-37d4303f09dc&&Headline=Joining+a+civilisation
New Delhi’s National Museum houses an outstanding Harappan gallery, one that unfailingly attracts visitors. Not many, though, stop to wonder about the objects from Mohenjodaro and Harappa displayed there. If India — as we have been told — had lost her Indus heritage because most Indus sites in 1947 fell within the national boundaries of Pakistan, how has she retained such a superb collection of Indus artefacts from those ‘lost’ cities?
An answer to this can be excavated out of the treasure trove of files in the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). This is because the ASI was centrally involved in tortuous negotiations through which undivided India’s past was partitioned.
Why, though, were these negotiations so twisted and prolonged? The Partition Council itself, in October 1947, had resolved that museums would be divided on a territorial basis. This Council had been set up to deal with the administrative consequences of Partition, and decided on a wide range of issues, from revenue and domicile to records and museums. In addition to its decision concerning a territorial division of museums, the council also stipulated that when the territory of a province was partitioned, the museum exhibits of the provincial museums would also be physically divided. On this basis, the exhibits in the Lahore Museum which belonged to the united Province of Punjab before Partition, were to be split between East Punjab and West Punjab. This was straightforward enough.
More complicated though was the fate of objects that had been sent on temporary loan to places which, on August 15, 1947, happened to be on the wrong side of the border, far away from the original museums to which they belonged. On that date, we know that there were objects from Harappa, Taxila and Mohenjodaro in India, and in London as well. These were on loan to the Royal Academy of Arts. In its wisdom, therefore, the Partition Council ruled that all objects that had been removed for temporary display after January 1, 1947, were to be returned to the original museums.
For Pakistan, this did not pose any problems in relation to most museums, since nothing had been removed from their precincts after January 1. At Harappa, some antiquities had been taken out of its site museum in July and September 1946, and these they were willing to treat as belonging to India. The real problem, though, revolved around the antiquities of Mohenjodaro.
This is because, on the day of Partition, as many as 12,000 objects from Mohenjodaro were in Delhi. Since Mohenjodaro fell within the territory of Pakistan, the objects should have fallen in their share. However, India’s negotiators maintained that these rightfully belonged to India because they had not been removed for after January 1, 1947 from the original museum (which was at Mohenjodaro) but came from Lahore. Similarly, they had not been removed for the purposes of temporary display but because, as early as 1944, the Director General of Archaeology, Mortimer Wheeler, had wanted to concentrate all the best Indus objects in a Central National Museum. It was in the absence of such a museum that it had been decided that Lahore Museum would act as a substitute, pending the establishment of a Central National Museum. Wheeler had continued to reiterate that “all objects from Mohenjodaro now on exhibition at Lahore are deposited by the Central Government on loan, and the Punjab Government has no lien upon them.”
It was this — the question of intention about the future disposal of the objects in a Central National Museum — that was central to the contentious dispute around how the antiquities were to be divided. Several formulae were suggested and rejected, pressure tactics were used by both parties. In order to make things difficult, the West Punjab government postponed the actual handing over of East Punjab’s share of the Lahore Museum holdings till such time that India had handed over to Pakistan their share from the central museums. And a final decision on the central museums remained pending till the Mohenjodaro matter was sorted out.
That India considered Indus objects to be an integral part of its own heritage was equally an issue. N.P. Chakravarti, who succeeded Wheeler as Director General in 1948, said it in so many
1
Interrogating Victimhood: East Bengali Refugee Narratives of Communal Violence
Nilanjana Chatterjee
Department of Anthropology
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Introduction
In this paper I am interested in analyzing the self-representation of Hindu East Bengali
refugees as victims of Partition violence so as to historicize and politicize their claims to inclusion
within India and their entitlement to humanitarian assistance in the face of state and public disavowal.
I focus on the main components of their narratives of victimhood, which tend to be framed in an
essentializing rhetoric of Hindu-Muslim difference and involve the demonization of "the Muslim." I
conclude with a brief consideration of the implications of this structure of prejudice for relations
between the two communities in West Bengal and the rise of Hindu fundamentalism nationwide. A
story I was told while researching East Bengali refugee agency and self-settlement strategies in West
Bengal bring these issues together for me in a very useful way.
Dr. Shantimoy Ray, professor of history and East Bengali refugee activist had been sketching
the history of the refugee squatter colony Santoshpur, referred to the enduring sense of betrayal, loss
and anger felt by East Bengalis after the partition of Bengal in 1947: becoming strangers in their own
land which constituted part of the Muslim nation of Pakistan, being forced to leave and rebuild their
lives in West Bengal in India, a "nation" that was nominally theirs but where they were faced with
dwindling public sympathy and institutional apathy. Spurred by their bastuhara (homeless) condition--
a term which gained political significance and which referred to their Partition victimhood, groups
of middle and working class refugees began to "grab" land and resettle themselves in West Bengal.
Santoshpur was one such colony which was founded on the outskirts of Calcutta in 1950. Dr. Ray had
not mentioned anti-Muslim sentiment in the colony although India’s Partition is synonymous with
sectarian violence.
Then he began to speak of an incident in 1964. A relic of the Prophet Muhammad was
rumoured to have been stolen from a shrine in Kashmir and this was followed by attacks on Hindus
in East Pakistan, and rioting against Muslims in India. Thousands of Hindu East Bengalis began to
seek refuge in West Bengal.
Some local Muslim families who still lived scattered around
the colony--they were mostly agricultural labourers, carpenters
--poor people, came to our compound in terror. Colony youth
had destroyed their huts and were out to slaughter them. I let
them in and locked our gate. Our household was overwhelmed.
We had over forty people in our care--bereft, wounded, fearing
for their lives. And then I saw the boys approaching. I knew them
well. We all knew each other in those days. I had seen them
grow up here. Kanu, Romesh, Madhab--they were unrecognizable
in their hatred. They were armed with sticks and knives and screaming
about avenging the murder of Hindus in East Pakistan. Slaughter
them as they slaughtered us, they shouted. I was stunned by
2
the insanity of their words. But I knew that if I did nothing,
they would kill the Muslims cowering behind my flimsy walls.
I opened the gate and shouted for quiet. I did not know if they
would strike me down but something made those boys hesitate.
Perhaps they were still a little in awe of an old schoolmaster.
I told Kanu to come forward and asked him when he had come
to this country. He looked bewildered and said impatiently, You
know it was 1950--during the riots in Barisal. Yes, I said and
did you lose any members of your family during your journey here?
No he replied, but others did. Those Muslim pigs made the rivers
of Bengal run with Hindu blood. And now they are doing it again.
Except this time we’ll take care of them. His eyes were red and I
could see he would not humour me much longer. Quietly I asked
him how he had come to Calcutta. By boat, by bullock cart, on foot,
he shouted, what does that matter? And who drove the cart? Who
ferried the boat? I shouted out for the first time. His belligerent glare
wavered as he said, I remember one-- Rahimchacha (uncle). So
Rahimchacha saved your lives, did he? And now you have come to
repay him? Well, come in then. I stood back with the gate open.
Silence. One of the boys began to weep. Kanu stood still as stone
and then dropped to my feet. Forgive me, he mumbled. It is not my
forgiveness you need, I replied. Go home and let these poor people
go home as well. Gradually the crowd dispersed and the Muslims were
able to return to their neighbourhood (Interview with Shantimoy Ray,
June 1994).
One of the reasons Dr. Ray told me this was to explain the successful role of Communist
activists--mostly East Bengali refugees themselves--in blunting anti-Muslim sentiment among refugees
and directing their sense of victimhood away from the "communal" towards mobilization as "havenots"
for rehabilitation in keeping with their Marxist politics. But while he saw the youths’ hesitation
as acknowledgment of the resilience of local bonds between Hindus and Muslims in East Bengal, I
was struck by the strong hostility toward Muslims evinced by these East Bengali refugees and their
selective memory. The fact that they had "forgotten" individual Muslim saviours speaks to the erasure
of the Muslim in their nostalgic conceptualization of East Bengal. Dr. Ray’s appeal to their memories
and their consciences worked this time, but memories are sites of construction and contestation, and
in this case the refugees’ attitudes about Muslims were structured as much by experience as by a
hegemonic discourse about "bad" Muslims in Bengali culture. In what follows I will deal with the
East Bengali refugees’ construction of the image of Partition victimhood--the self-conscious
insistence on the historicity of their predicament as patriots and subjects of "communal" persecution,
which challenged their marginalization after Partition and legitimized their demand for restitution.
First a note on communalism. Unlike its Anglo-American sense which conveys community
feeling and obligation, in its Indian usage has a specific history. It refers to collective identity defined
by religious identification and expressed in chauvinist, exclusivist and oppositional terms vis-a-vis
other communities seen to be similarly defined. "Communalism not only produces an identification
with a religious community but also with its political, economic, social and cultural interests and
3
aspirations" (Kakar 1996: 13). The category "communalism" was a product of British Orientalist
ideology and practice which "systematically institutionalized a nation of communities, above all what
were deemed to be the two great communities of Hindus and Muslims" (Metcalf 1995: 951, Pandey
1990) through enumeration and classification which in turn shaped the emergence of interest groups,
their demands for political representation, employment quotas and so on, in the colonial period. In
addition to the reification of "Hindu" and "Muslim" as ahistorical essences, "communal strife--
conflict between people of different religious persuasions--was represented by the British colonial
regime in India as one of the most distinctive features of Indian society, past and present (Pandey
1990: 94) and attributed to instinctive difference and animosity. In postcolonial liberal-left discourse,
communal ideology and action is cast in negative terms and associated with intolerance.
This paper locates itself within two sets of ongoing academic discussions: one, which focuses
on the lived and remembered experiences of Partition as distinct from what might be called its "high
politics"(Sen 1990); and a second, more general one, which involves the exploration of refugee
agency and questions hegemonic representations of them as victims and passive objects of
intervention. While a review of gendered, subaltern and partial or fragmentary perspectives on
Partition history is beyond the scope of this paper, it is important to note that these intellectual
approaches are productive in several ways: they challenge official nationalist history and examine the
operation of power/knowledge in postcolonial context, seek to recover the voices and silences of the
subordinated, prioritize the particular, and seek to develop a new language for understanding ethnic
and sectarian violence. While much of the new work in this vein is oriented to Punjab and North India
(Butalia 1998, Das 1990) Menon and Bhasin 1998, Pandey 1992), it has gradually expanded to
include perspectives on Bengal (Bose et al 2000, Chakrabarti 1990, Chakrabarty 1995, Chatterjee
1992, Ghosh 1998) and Assam (Dasgupta 2001), and is not merely confined to the experience of the
bhadralok1. Another crucial referent for me is the anthropological literature on refugees which makes
central the linkage of displacement to national belonging and exclusion, and refugee identity to
hegemonic nationalist ideologies; the construction of refugees not only through the languages of law
and humanitarianism but by the institutional management of "the refugee problem"; the silencing of
refugees by humanitarian rhetoric and practice as dehistoricized victims so that their own assessment
as historical actors is bypassed (Malkki 1996); and most importantly, the agency of the displaced--
appropriating, transforming and contesting hegemonic discourse and interventions.
Mistrusting refugees
1 The Bengali word bhadralok means a respectable person of middleclass background--
landowners or professionals, usually but not exclusively upper caste, and distinguished socially by
education, non-manual labour and a refined lifestyle.
The partition of British India and the emergence of the independent states of India and Pakistan
in 1947, is linked to the largest recorded population dislocation in history. The two-nation solution
negotiated by the competing nationalist movements led by the Congress Party and the Muslim League
produced a territorial settlement linked to the principle of religious majoritarianism. Pakistan came
to consist of the North West Frontier Provinces, Baluchistan, Sind, and West Punjab, separated by
4
nearly thousand miles from East Bengal and the Sylhet district of Assam. Though two-third of India’s
Muslims became Pakistanis, both nations included numerically large yet vulnerable minorities. In
Punjab, nearly 12 million Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus were displaced and 1 million lost their lives
(Zolberg et al 1989) during the so-called "exchange of populations". In the case of Bengal however,
Partition was predated by sectarian violence in 1946 which spurred the initial two-way movement of
Hindus to West Bengal and Muslims to East Pakistan, and unlike the situation in Punjab, the flight of
Hindu refugees eventually overtook that of Muslims and has continued sporadically through the brutal
civil war in Pakistan in 1971 and the birth of Bangladesh into the present. Not only is Partition
associated with national and personal trauma for many Bengalis, the presence of over 8 million
refugees from former East Bengal irrevocably shaped West Bengal’s political economy and popular
imagination and is seen to be symptomatic of Bengali decline.
The Government of India’s conservative and disputed schematization of population dislocation
from East Pakistan over nearly a quarter century helps situate the refugees’ own assessment of their
predicament. Among other things, it does not include the 9 million Hindu and Muslim refugees from
the war of 1970-71 in East Pakistan (Luthra 1971)2. The United Nations estimated that the majority
of these refugees returned home--an assessment disputed by the Government of West Bengal with
regard to the displaced Hindus (Goverment of West Bengal 1980).
Initially, the Government of India attempted to discourage the migration of East Bengalis to
India by exhorting them to pledge their allegiance to Pakistan, offering temporary and limited relief
rather than permanent rehabilitation, and signing a series of agreements with Pakistan aimed at
assuring the minorities of security and preventing mass migration. But as the migrations became a
persistent and irreversible reality, the state attempted to regulate them. The border in the east was left
open until 1952 to give people time to decide on their citizenship, and then passports were introduced
to reduce further migration from East Pakistan. As the population movement continued, an additional
barrier of permits and migration certificates was instituted in 1956. Then from 1958-64, the Indian
government tried to deter East Bengali Hindu migrants by refusing to recognize them as "refugees" and
thereby making them ineligible for relief and rehabilitation assistance. This changed with the riots of
1964 in East Pakistan, and the displaced were given permanent refuge in India through the civil war
of 1970-71 in Pakistan after which East Pakistan seceded as the independent state of Bangladesh.
Post-1971 migrants were declared ineligible for settlement assistance in India, a "deterrence" that
seems not to have affected migration in subsequent decades. Border watchers seem agreed that
displacement in the 1980s was mainly due to economic privation in Bangladesh and included Hindus
and Muslims, while the early 1990s saw a rise in the numbers of East Bengali Hindu victims of
communal violence following the demolition of the medieval Babri mosque in India by Hindu
nationalists. The chart is interesting, not only because it reflects the Indian state’s failure to stop the
migration of East Bengalis, but a cursory reading of the causes of displacement indexes the latter to
diplomatic ruptures in Indo-Pakistan relations, tensions between East and West Pakistan which finally
culminated in the east’s separatist movement for Bangladesh, and conflicts between Hindus and
Muslims in each nation which sparked retaliatory violence in the neighbouring country. This is a
representation of events which while not disputed in its details by the East Bengali Hindus refugees,
is linked by them to one originary cause--Partition on religious lines--which, they contend, made all
2Muslims who migrate to India from Bangladesh are labeled "infiltrators" by the Indian
state.
5
East Bengali Hindus homeless in a Muslim dominated nation.
Refugee rehabilitation was designated a national responsibility by the postcolonial Indian
government and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru explained in a public speech that this was not
merely a humanitarian act on the part of the state for the welfare of the displaced alone, but a
pragmatic one
Refugee Influx from East Pakistan, 1946-70
Year Reason for Influx Total
1946
1947
1948
1949
1950
1951
1952
1953
1954
1955
1956
1957
1958
1959
1960
1961
1962
1963
1964
1965
1966
1967
1968
1969
1970
Noakhali riots
Partition
Police action in Hyderabad
Khulna, Barisal riots
idem
Agitation over Kashmir
Economic conditions, passport scare
Unrest over Urdu in E. Pakistan
Pakistan's Islamic constitution
Hazrat Bal incident in Kashmir
Elections in Pakistan
19,000
334,000
786,000
213,000
1,575,000
187,000
227,000
76,000
118,000
240,000
320,000
11,000
1,000
10,000
10,000
11,000
14,000
16,000
693,000
108,000
8,000
24,000
12,000
10,000
250,000
Total 5,283,000
on which the future and welfare of India depended (The Statesman, 25 January 1948). But the primary
object of this early initiative was the resettlement of refugees from West Pakistan. The national
leadership was ambivalent regarding its responsibilities toward East Bengalis--unwilling and unable
to block migration altogether, but afraid of "inviting" millions of East Bengali Hindus into the country
6
and alienating Pakistan as a result, undermining India's foundational principle of secularism, and
burdening the fragile economy. Nehru's letter to the Chief Minister of West Bengal, Bidhan Chandra
Roy reflects this quandary: "It is wrong to encourage any large-scale migration from East Bengal to
the West. Indeed, if such a migration takes place, West Bengal and to some extent the Indian Union
would be overwhelmed... If they come over to West Bengal, we must look after them. But it is no
service to them to encourage them to join the vast mass of refugees who can at best be poorly cared
for" (Chakraborty 1982: 106). A half century after Partition, reviews of the Central Government of
India’s record on East Bengali refugee rehabilitation suggest that it was not only inadequate but
discriminatory in view of its policy toward West Punjabi refugees of Partition (Estimates Committee
1989, Govt.of West Bengal 1980).
The East Bengali migrants’ access to rehabilitation assistance in India rested on their
recognition as "refugees"--and therefore eligibility for assistance by the state. A "refugee" or
"displaced person" was defined as A "person who was ordinarily resident in the territories now
comprising East Pakistan, but who on account of civil disturbances or the fear of civil disturbances
or on account of the partition of India has migrated" (Ministry of Rehabilitation 1957: 86). But while
acknowledging that "fear" of persecution or violence was a valid justification for migration, the
official definition was imprecise about the preconditions of fear that the state would accept as meriting
shelter in India. Increasingly the Indian government tuned its antenna to spectacular worse-case
scenarios in Pakistan and tried to ignore complaints of "everyday" insecurity--quick to declare that
it was "not aware that the East Bengali Hindus had problems" or it knew of no "incidents" in East
Pakistan to justify a population displacement (Ananda Bazar Patrika, 21 February 1948). This
euphemistically termed "incident" was an incontrovertible and immediate event of life-threatening
violence--the quintessential case of which was taken to be a "communal riot". In other words, the state
sought to distinguish between "voluntary" and "forced" migrants.
A distinction was also sought to be made between "economic" and "political" refugees. In
1948, the provincial Government of West Bengal issued a press note stating that they would
discontinue registering East Bengalis coming to the state as refugees because "whatever might have
been the cause of the exodus in the past, similar conditions do not now prevail. There is hardly any
communal disturbance in Eastern Pakistan... Therefore, the present exodus is due to economic causes"
(Ananda Bazar Patrika, 26 June 1948). This assumption was challenged by the president of the East
Bengal Minority Welfare Committee in Calcutta: "The Press Note... lightheartedly refers to the
‘economic causes’ of the steadily continuing exodus. These ‘economic causes’ are a direct
consequence of partition on a communal basis" (ibid). There can be little doubt that he considered the
government's hairsplitting, specious and his explicit linkage of refugee status to Partition victimhood
will be shown to be a part of a resistant discourse of entitlement among displaced East Bengali
Hindus.
The government's "mistrust" of the refugees (Daniel and Knudsen 1995) reflected that of the
general West Bengali population's. Cartoons appeared in Calcutta newspapers revealing public
apprehension regarding the costs of assisting a large population of East Bengali refugees. In one, West
Bengal was depicted lying in a hospital bed with various ailments including "refugee-itis". A worried
visitor was shown asking the attendant doctor, Chief Minister B.C. Roy, if the case was "hopeless"
(Amrita Bazar Patrika, 14 January 1950). West Bengalis associated the influx of thousands of East
Bengali refugees with every malaise from overcrowding, squalor, social disintegration and soaring
crime rates to unemployment and the rising cost of living. It was anticipated that the Hindu refugees
would stoke communal violence against the Muslims of West Bengal or be manipulated by political
7
parties seeking constituencies. And the refugees' acts of trespass on private and state property as they
attempted to resettle themselves, only confirmed popular misgivings. Communist workers trying to
build up a following among the local poor and the refugee testify to the anger of the rural West Bengali
landless over the distribution of precious agricultural land among the refugees, and occasions when
refugees were prevented by locals from settling on land that the government had allocated for their
resettlement (Interview with Bijoy Majumdar, 1988). There were several clashes between industrial
worker striking for higher wages and improved working conditions, and refugees eager to work for
a pittance. Against this background, it becomes clear that the West Bengali joke that back "home"
every East Bengali was a zamindar (landlord) reflected suspicion about the authenticity of the
refugees claims to be victims. But there was considerable sympathy as well which acknowledged this
public reluctance to engage with the humanitarian burden signalled by East Bengali claims of
victimhood. Another cartoon by the same artist whose work I referred to earlier showed a swordwielding
Liaquat Ali Khan, the Premier of Pakistan, standing over mutilated bodies while a
Congressman pulled away in a boat while pleading with folded hands: "There is no space, this boat
is small." It was an unambiguous representation of the East Bengalis as victims--both of physical
violence in Muslim Pakistan and of epistemological denial in India.
The refugee discourse of "Historic Rights"
East Bengali migrants were quick to counter the power imbalance inherent in the state's
attempt to determine eligibility and the reservations on the part of a section of the local population
regarding the validity of their claim to refugee status. The politico-social category of the "refugee"
and its Bengali synonym sharanarthi (someone who seeks refuge from a greater power ) were initially
the topic of intense debate. For many East Bengali Hindu migrants the image conveyed was a
derogatory one, conflated with the act of begging, dependence on the charity and compassion of
strangers and demeaning supplication. As one East Bengali commentator noted, "Those who roamed
the streets of Dhaka soliciting support for the Partition didn't even dream that, as a reward for their
gesture in agreeing to leave, they would be forever labelled ‘refugees’, a word that does more
violence to the idea of a home than any other in any language"(The Sunday Statesman, 2 March 1986).
But increasingly, it was this word "refugee" with its powerful connotations of loss, that was
appropriated by the displaced as they collectively sought to represent their interests on a political
platform. A pamphlet issued to commemorate a refugee convention organized by the Refugee Central
Rehabilitation Council--the refugee wing of the Revolutionary Socialist Party in West Bengal--makes
it clear that the migrants were determined to establish their entitlement to protection and assistance
in India as an inalienable right--not subject to the host people or government's pity or whim:
The East Bengalis expelled from Pakistan, can demand to
build their homes on every inch of Indian soil on the strength
of their adhikar (own right). They are not sharanarthi (supplicants)
but kshatipuraner dabidar (claimants to compensation for losses)
(RCRC n.d.: 1).
Consider the following exerpt from a pamphlet entitled "Aitihashik Adhikar" or "Historic Rights",
published by the East Bengal Minority Welfare Association which advocated refugee rights for post-
1971 migrants who were denied state assistance.
The partition left us homeless, bereft of everything. We did
not fight for independence in order to lead the lives of
8
beggars. Those of us who cannot remain in East Pakistan are
not doing anything wrong by seeking shelter in India. Why
should the police push us back? Why should we live in hovels
next to rail-tracks? Why should we be the object of people's
mercy? ... it is only right that those who struggled
and sacrificed for independence be repaid (EBMWA n.d.: 8-9).
Rehabilitation with dignity was not to be seen as an act of charity but as the repayment of a national
debt to the East Bengali Hindus represented in this passage as historic agents--freedom-fighters and
victims of Partition which consigned them to minorityhood and therefore subordination in a Muslimmajority
state.
Identification as a refugee was important since this entitled them to relief and rehabilitation
aid from the state or a least recognition of their special history and needs. It came to be used
interchangeably with "displaced person" and "migrant" which are part of the official vocabulary of
humanitarian assistance in India; and also with the more evocative "udbastu" and "bastuhara" of
Bengali public discourse. "Bastu" means foundation of a house, and is associated with originary,
foundational, ancestral and sacred. The prefix "ut" means "out of" and thus the word "udbastu"
signals loss of home and by extension homeland; as does "bastuhara." Both these no longer simply
index a lack of shelter but bear the weight of the trauma of Partition. What is significant is that the
migrants appropriated the signifiers, investing it with a positive repertoire of meanings, turning a lack
into a strength, a powerful moral claim to victimhood which would have to be assuaged. Especially
with the transformation of the displaced into voters, those who turned to the Left for redress took to
the streets with the slogan "Amra kara? Bastuhara!" ("Who are we? Refugees!") a signal of their
presence and predicament. And in later years those who continued to define themselves as "refugees"
did so in a spirit of critique, as a commentary on the failure of the government to rehabilitate them.
In addressing the ideas embedded in the concept "historic rights", I would like to talk briefly
about the refugees’ representation of themselves as exemplary nationalists and move on to considering
the question of Partition victimhood. I draw here on documented evidence such as public speeches,
press notes, letters to newspapers3, pamphlets/circulars, depositions to "fact" finding commissions,
as well as personal interviews and auto-biographical or literary sources. The text of a letter to the
editor of the Bengali-language newspaper, Ananda Bazar Patrika in 1948 by self-proclaimed East
Bengali refugee is revealing:
The dissection of India and division of Bengal has prevented
the enjoyment of our hard-won independence. Hindus and Sikhs
have left their homes in the Punjab, North West Frontier
Provinces, Sind, and Baluchistan and the Indian government
have helped to evacuate them and are trying to solve the
complicated problem of resettling them. But it is our
3The readership of papers like the Ananda Bazar Patrika and the Amrita Bazar Patrika
which were based in Calcutta, continued to span the two Bengals as late as 1950-1. They
published news on and letters from East Bengalis, and were perceived as a window into the
condition of the Hindus in post-partition East Pakistan--where they were first censored and then
banned for inciting communal animosity.
9
misfortune that those who have undertaken the greatest
atmatyag (self sacrifice) and given the most blood in
the independence movement are neglected at home and abroad.
The West Bengal government is ashamed to think of East Bengali
Hindus. The Government of India neither are nor feel the need
to be informed about them. And this, even though the first to
dream of freedom was the sage Bankimchandra and the first
general in the battle for independence was Bengal's
Surendranath. (5 January 1948)
In the 19th century, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee instructed Bengalis through his historical, nationalist
novels into a consciousness of themselves as a proud and virile jati or race, capable of future
greatness. Surendranath Banerjee, also mentioned in the letter, was a founder of the Indian Association
which later merged into the Indian National Congress--the political organization which dominated the
nationalist movement for an independent India. By invoking these two names, the writer was tapping
into a self-image that is widely prevalent among all Bengalis--that as torchbearers to the rest of India,
they had initiated the nationalist movement against the British, radicalized it, and lost the most in its
cause. Bengali intellectuals and activists had been prominent in the nationalist movement in the 19th
and early 20th centuries, but in the 1930s, Bengal's leadership was eclipsed by the Gandhian faction
in the Congress. With the attrition of Bengal's power, developments like Partition came to be cast by
the people of the region as an anti-Bengali plot or rationalized as a sacrifice willingly borne by the
East Bengalis for the greater good of India4. The argument continued that they had struggled for a life
of emancipation in India, not of subordination in a Muslim nation not of their own choosing, and
therefore had a right to live in a Hindu homeland.
The patriot proved to be an evocative signifier in terms of which East Bengali Hindus made
claims about the distinctiveness and exemplariness of their nationalism, contradicting the disparaging
allegations of non-migrants and Indian officialdom, that migration was an act of passive cowardice
and burdensome disservice to the inhabitants of both India and Pakistan. The self-referential use of
the allied image of the shahid or martyr was also a authenticating gesture that drew on the traditional
Indic concept of "generative sacrifice" (Das and Nandy 1985: 178) as and projected East Bengali
Hindus as historical agents to whom the nation owed a collective debt--asylum and resettlement.
Finally, this discourse of patriotism and sacrifice included each East Bengali Hindu in its address,
serving to unify and mobilize the refugees into a community of solidarity and expectation by smoothing
over the unevennesses of caste, class and interest so that every refugee became the historical heir of
the swadhinata sangrami or "freedom fighter." The ultimate act as true nationalists was to go to India-
-the destiny of Hindu East Bengali refugees who must abandon their ancestral homes for a Hindu
4Having played a key role in the anti-colonial movement in Bengal, the Hindu elite had
hoped to replace the British in the postcolonial order and rejected the idea that a united Bengal
would be included in Pakistan, unwilling to be subjected to the rule of a Muslim majority in the
province. Thus the partition of Bengal was actively proposed by West Bengali politicians--of both
the Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha. And while Bakarganj was the only East Bengal district to
endorse the partition campaign, many East Bengalis considered the redrawing of boundaries
preferable to losing undivided Bengal to Pakistan.
10
homeland of the spirit. A doggerel that a refugee interviewee remembered being taunted with by
Muslims in the days leading up to Partition, drew on this structure of feeling: (Interview with
Mahendra Mondal from Barisal, 1989)
On the excuse of Noakhali,5
They made Bihar into Karbala6.
Bihar has become Hindustan.
Bengal has become Pakistan.
Go away--each to his own address.
The refugees as Partition victims
As we have seen earlier, in the government’s scheme of things "partition" was presented as
the reason for the refugee influx of 1947 alone, "communal riots" were recorded as the official reason
for the migration of 1950--each episode in the massive and protracted flight from East Pakistan was
related to a different cause. The reason for this was to attempt to establish a sliding scale of true or
deserving displacement to ease the state’s humanitarian responsibility. But in the refugees’ own
accounts of their displacement it was "desh bhag," literally the "division of the homeland" or
Partition which is the dominant reference. There is of course the detail of year and "immediate" cause,
but as a schoolmaster interviewee pointed out, the "underlying cause" for the insecurity of Bengali
Hindus in East Pakistan and their ultimate exodus was Partition (Interview with Nirmal Chandra
Sarkar, 1989). I found when I asked my interviewees the question, "Why did you leave your desh
(homeland)?", the answer was often on the lines of "After desh bhag we could no longer remain
there", and sometimes an outraged "Don’t you know!" I was seen to be casting doubt on what the
refugees assumed to have been established beyond question--that the East Bengalis were victims of
the partition of India on the fundamental basis of religion, which uprooted them psychologically and
then physically. Was I trying to imply that they had left their ancestral homes "for fun?" Partition
functioned as a structuring device, describing one original trauma and a shared experience of
misfortune. It provided a central and awful image that had the power to explain the migrants’
collective predicament. The description of their victimhood in terms of Partition-induced
homelessness, minorityhood and Muslim communalism reflected their opposition to the Indian
leadership's scepticism about their allegations of post-Partition insecurity in East Pakistan and
reluctance to accord them refugee status.
Saadat Hasan Manto wrote on a note of mordant prophecy after the bloody partition of Punjab
in 1947, "...India was free. Pakistan was free from the moment of its birth. But man was a slave in both
countries, of prejudice, of religious fanaticism, of bestiality, of cruelty" (1987: 6).This equation of
the moment of independence with the unfreedom of fear and prejudice, of nationalism with exile
affords us an insight into the condition of insecurity and degradation experienced by the religious
minorities in India and Pakistan. Nationalisms with their declared affiliation to a place, a people and
a past arrogate truth exclusively to themselves and assign falsehood and inferiority to others. The
presence of 40 million Muslims in India, and over 12 million Hindus in Pakistan--as visible religious
5This is a reference to the Noakhali riots of 1946 in East Bengal.
6The Imam Husein was martyred at Karbala--a powerful symbol of the triumph of evil over
good for Shia Muslims--and a shorthand for the slaughter of innocents.
11
minorities, proved to be a source of friction as nationally guaranteed rights came to be equated with
rights guaranteed only to "nationals," or the majority community. And the Hindu minority in Pakistan
and the Muslims in India came to be perceived as political misfits or worse--enemies of the state.
The minorities in Western Punjab have known at their cost
what partition means, and if there is any such thing as
political experience, we should be under no illusions
about our future. ...there is a fundamental flaw in the
policy of the Government of India. The division has been
accepted on the basis of the two-nation theory which
obviously implies the elimination of non-nationals from
each state... That being so, the minorities of East Bengal
have a right to demand a place in India. ...We are tired of
the platitudinous effusions of leaders who in most cases do
not even live here among us (A.B.Chaudhuri of Dacca,
Amrita Bazar Patrika, 12 March 1948).
There was a creeping awareness of fear among us, as if we
were criminals of some sort ...Our position was like
that of a servant suspected of theft. Even if he is innocent,
he has no way of asserting that. He has to submit to being
beaten up, and often has to lose his job. The misconceptions
of a few leaders turned millions of people into servants.
(Gangopadhyay 1987:49)
After Partition the babus of the village left. The shastras (holy
texts) say that the upper castes are the head of Hindu society and
we Namasudras7 are the hands and feet. How long does a headless
body survive? In our village in Khulna, we bit the earth and clung on.
But the Muslims stole our land, cut our paddy, refused to pay for fish
we caught. The police called us kafir when we went to complain and
beat us. They told us we were sitting on land which was rightfully theirs,
eating food that was theirs. (Prafulla Gharami of Khulna, who left with
his family after the riots of 1964 in East Pakistan.)
The Muslims became very arrogant after Partition. They said, Charaler
po (son of an untouchable), come eat with us. Let your girls marry
our sons. Then the son of the President of the village union--he was
Muslim--molested one of our Namasudra girls. Someone from our side
could not take that and the president’s house burnt down. Of course
after that we were finished. The Muslims told us they would teach
us how to enjoy ourselves in Pakistan and attacked the Hindu
neighbourhood. Many were murdered. Some of us hid in the canal
7Low caste peasants and fishermen.
12
holding water hyacinth over our heads. We heard one woman drowned
her crying baby because she did not want her other children to be
found and killed. That night we left. We managed to escape to Narayanganj
where there were more Hindus and then to India. This was five years after
Pakistan (Interview with Jadunath Mondal from Bariba, Dacca, 1988).
We came after Joi Bangla8.You may ask why we stayed so long.
Bangladesh is my homeland. I come from a family of schoolmasters.
I was determined to prove their two-nation theory wrong. We
withstood every riot and humiliation. I worked in the language
movement because I believed that Muslim or Hindu, we are
Bengalis. My son worked for the Awami League9. He was killed
by Pakistani soldiers. They castrated his dead body. So many
people were slaughtered. We became refugees in India but I
went back after Mujib became leader of free Bangladesh. I
could not stay. The Pakistanis are gone but the maulavis (religious
teachers) have poisoned the minds of Bengali Muslims. Bangladesh
is an Islamic state. The two-nation theory was right. (Interview with
Nirmal Chandra Sarkar of Faridpur, 1989).
From the available public "evidence" it seems East Bengal Hindus left their ancestral homes for
contingencies of varying compulsions and at different times because of riots, the fear of riots,
economic privation, political targeting, insecurity about the maintenance of their cultural lives, an
attrition in their numbers, the existence of pre-partition family and business connections in India--
because they felt they had no choice.
8The term means "Hail Bangladesh!" and refers to Bangladeshi independence from West
Pakistan.
9The Awami League was the Bengali party which led the nationalist movement for an
independent Bangladesh, and included Muslims and Hindus among its members.
Their recourse to Partition as the historical explanation for their victimhood as a minority and
then a displaced population has to be seen as partially determined by their experience of migration
laws which created a hierarchy of acceptable causes for migration in order to determine aid-worthy
"authentic" refugees and by which logic, Partition, was represented as the definitive instance of
sectarian violence. By linking themselves to this paradigmatic "communal incident"--the refugees
constructed themselves as "involuntary" political refugees, dramatized and legitimized their condition.
They were also responding to the strand of public scepticism they encountered in West Bengal which
dismissed their accounts of Partition-related displacement as exaggerated, and unreliable. According
to this mode of thinking, the reason for the migration of East Bengalis was not life-threatening
13
violence. It was in this vein of distrust that a prominent Calcutta intellectual wrote "Exodus" to
disabuse Hindus of the widely held belief, "that most of the Muslims in Pakistan are communal
fanatics and that all Hindus were forced to leave East Pakistan due to riots" (Maitreye Devi 1974: ii).
After the 1964 riots in Dhaka and Narayanganj, she visited the refugee resettlement site at
Dandakaranya in central India in search of people who had been "directly involved" in a riot. She
reported a "typical" exchange in which an elderly refugee woman answered her question "Why did
you come to India?" by saying, "For fear of the mian (Muslim men), what else?" Maitreyee Devi's
next query was "What did they do?" and the answer, "They kidnap our daughters, burn our homes, stab
us, kill us"--the response particularly remarkable for the use of the present tense. She continued,
"Were any of your relations’ or friends’ houses burnt?" and was told, "No, nothing happened in our
village, but in other villages there was trouble." Maitreye Devi concluded that "socio-economic
reasons were the real cause of the exodus, more than riots" (ibid). In rejecting the migrants’ claim to
be victims of violence as symptomatic of extreme prejudice, and untrue, the writer was not only
minimizing the gravity of their predicament in Pakistan but in effect, questioning their eligibility to
refugee status.
The refugees, for their part, insisted that Partition set in motion a telos of annihilation of the
Hindu minority community in Muslim East Pakistan (and in Bangladesh). The president of the
revolutionary nationalist organization Anusilan Samiti10, an East Bengali, wrote in the Ananda Bazar
Patrika:
Ever since independence on the basis of partitioned rather
than a united India, the condition of the minorities of
Pakistan is becoming unbearable with every passing day. If
something is not done soon the minorities of East Pakistan
will cease to exist (astittwa bilop) The wealth, lives and
honour (dhon, pran, man) of the minority community in East
Pakistan are endangered in every way. (Nalini Ranjan
Bhattacharya, 2 January 1948)
This attribution of a sort of murderous intentionality to the Muslim majority was, as critics
contended, contradicted by accounts of Hindu-Muslim friendship, of aid and succour, of political
solidarity during the anti-Urdu language movement in East Pakistan and the struggle for the liberation
of Bangladesh. In other words, inter-community relationships which depended on bonds other than
those of religious affiliation, and identities which encompassed religion but were not reduced to it.
But since the characterization of the political effects of Partition as physical obliteration and cultural
erasure, a planned and certain assault on the wealth, life and honour of the Hindu community was a
recurrent one, it is necessary to examine the key elements of this narrative of victimhood.
(I)Threat to dhon (wealth)
In the years immediately after Partition there was a movement toward redressing the stark
10At the turn of the century in Bengal, anti-colonial organizations with a terroristnationalist
agenda such as Jugantar and Anusilan Samiti emerged as an militant alternative to the
moderate politics of the Congress. They were ultimately absorbed into the Congress as radical
cells, or formed Left parties outside it like the Revolutionary Socialist Party.
14
inequalities of wealth in East Pakistan--though the Muslim underclasses may not have benefitted as
much as the West Pakistani and to a smaller extent, the emerging Bengali Muslim middleclasses. As
part of its programme of national reconstruction, the Pakistan government took steps to abolish
landlordism without compensation, to review the process of granting licenses for industries and
commercial ventures, raise income tax, and requisition houses for refugees--all of which hit the Hindu
propertied classes the hardest and not unexpectedly, drew strong complaints of discrimination. The
minority community also felt itself to be singled out for routine attacks on their property and economic
security by the majority community--which the perpetrators might have described as redistributive
justice--the non-payment of rent, boycott of Hindu businessmen and professionals, and larceny. The
minority's attempts at obtaining redress were apparently less than successful and only reinforced their
conviction that the "criminals" were backed by the authority of the state.
In his speech to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on 28 March 1952, Bhupendra Kumar
Dutta, a "Minority member" stated the "basic problem" to be one of "livelihood":
Practically all sources of livelihood have been ...closed to
them. Government jobs, jobs in private firms, they are
not to have. In the professions there has been a silent
campaign of boycott.. Control shops, licenses for motor
buses and taxis the Hindus have been quickly deprived of.
Formerly, some of them had agencies for various oil companies,
The Imperial Tobacco Company ...and such other firms. They
have almost all changed hands. If they are professors or school
masters, as soon as a fresh graduate is available to replace an
experienced M.A., some fault is found with the latter, in the long
run he would be accused of anti-State propensities. If he does not
get into other troubles, he must, give up his job and run for safety
across the border.
Even the poorer folk, the peasant, the fisherman, prove no exceptions.
A peasant is busy ploughing by a riverside, a constable appears and
asks him to ferry him across, the peasant points to a bamboo
bridge nearby, the peasant gets a sound drubbing not only there
but subsequently in the police camp