Being Hindu In Bangladesh: The Untold Story

PREFACE

SMRITIKANA BISWAS WAS twelve when her father thought of killing her sister. The family was hiding inside a college building. Outside, the fire of religious hatred burned through Noakhali. The twelve-year-old had seen things nobody should see. Hacked bodies strewn on streets, houses on fire, raped women wailing. Other families were huddled together inside the college building as well, praying that the mad pack of murderous men would somehow not find them. But who would explain the extent of danger to Smritikana’s seven-month-old sister? The little one just wouldn’t keep quiet, her wails could bring the rioters in. Hand-on-mouth, tight hug, treacle—nothing would stop her. ‘Maybe, we have to kill her to save ourselves,’ Smritikana’s father said. Horror-struck at what he said he would do, and what would happen if he didn’t, Smritikana shuddered.

It was October 1946, and the place—Noakhali—was then in undivided India and now in Bangladesh. Smritikana Biswas, now almost ninety, is the grandmother of Avishek Biswas, the co-author of this book.

We are the sons and grandsons of refugees. Avishek and I (Deep Halder) were born thirteen years apart in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal. Our parents, and their parents before them, were born on what lay to the east of West Bengal, which is now the independent country Bangladesh. When they were born, there was no West Bengal and Bangladesh. There was one big Bengal. When they left, hearts and homes had been partitioned, hope hacked, a province ripped into two.

The eastern part of Bengal became East Bengal first with the Partition of India in 1947. And then, it was renamed East Pakistan after 1955. This land snatched its bloody freedom from West Pakistan in 1971 and became Bangladesh. In all this, the back stories of Avishek’s parents and mine were blown away like grains of sand in the wind. And Bangladesh remained another country.

Growing up, my ‘Bangal’ identity,¹ would come up every once in a while—in the slightly different tongue my grandmother would speak (she was from Barishal district in south-central Bangladesh) and the odd jibes my friends in school would casually throw at me and the other Bangals in class. ‘If all Bangals are from zamindar families in East Bengal before the Partition, pray who were the subjects?’ they would say. I would hear the chatter about Banglas and Ghotis,²—spicing their cuisines differently, not marrying each other and so on. The differences, if not always the hostility, even spilled over to the football field with the Bangals and the Ghotis having their own football clubs named East Bengal and Mohan Bagan respectively; the 1976 film Mohonbaganer Meye touched upon the subject.

But, for me, that is where the refugee experience ended. Growing up with relative privilege in the home of a professor father and a banker mother, the Partition was at best an occasional bedtime story and Bangladesh a country that was once known by another name, where my parents came from. My parents shielded me from the horror they kept hidden in their hearts.

For Avishek, though, the refugee experience was too real to gloss over. The stink of an open drain, the sweat of a community cramped together in Netaji Nagar Colony— it was a congested, unauthorized refugee settlement just outside Kolkata. He witnessed the struggle of a father who had to carry a big bag of incense-stick packets that his (Avishek’s) mother and grandmother, Smritikana, would make at home to sell to shops in Kolkata. Having lost everything to the Partition, Avishek’s family toiled to make ends meet and make something of their only son. Perhaps because of this lived reality and the stories he heard as a child of why they were the way they were, Avishek chose oral narratives of the Dalit Partition survivors as the topic for his PhD thesis. And perhaps it was the refugee blood in him that compelled him to reach out to me after I wrote my first book, Blood Island: An Oral History of the Marichjhapi Massacre.³ It was on the plight of a band of Dalit Hindu refugees, who escaped persecution and almost certain death in East Pakistan and fled to West Bengal, only to be massacred by the police under the Left government in 1978–79.

Avishek and I became fast friends, trading stories and planning trips to Bangladesh to see what is left of our origin stories and thinking, maybe, to put pen to paper and write what we see. But I felt a sense of disquiet when a copy of the Quran was found at the feet of Lord Hanuman’s statue at Nanua Dighir Par puja pandal in Bangladesh’s Comilla district on 13 October 2021, and Muslim mobs took to the streets attacking Hindu temples, breaking idols, breaking into Hindu homes and setting their property on fire.⁴ My day job as online editor of India Today requires me to report the news first and feel later even if the news is about grave calamities. But this was different. What started in Comilla with murderous mobs attacking Hindus, had spread to other parts of Bangladesh, even Noakhali.

Smritikana’s nightmares were becoming news again.

Avishek and I decided it was time not just to travel to Bangladesh together, but also to begin writing about a land that was home to our families once and is now a memory. To write about people whose last names still make them vulnerable to extremism today, in much the same way that it made our parents and grandparents vulnerable and afraid many decades ago and forced them to flee. We thought of a long narrative piece for a newspaper, but did not know it would become a book.

Many trips and a year later, when we met Mukta Saha (her name changed to Mukta Das after marriage) in Noakhali, she asked us where we were when they were being attacked. ‘We?’ we asked incredulously. ‘When neighbours become murderers, shouldn’t strangers come to save us?’ she asked us. She had lost much to the 2021 anti-Hindu violence and simply said, ‘We died last year. What you see are corpses.’⁵

As we began our journey not just through the length and breadth of Bangladesh but also through the bloody pages of its history, we met many Muktas. In Dhaka, we met Purnima Rani Shil, who bore the brunt of being a Hindu and working for Bangladesh’s current Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s party, the Awami League. In 2001, the coalition led by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami (popularly known as Jamaat) won the general election, replacing the Awami League. This led to the 2001 Bangladesh post-election violence, during which the Awami League supporters and members of religious minorities were targeted by the BNP and Jamaat activists.

Purnima Shil, then twelve-years-old, was targeted as she was a polling agent of the Awami League and had also protested ballot-stuffing by the BNP activists during the election. She lived in Perba Delua in Ullahpara upazila, Sirajganj district. Her home was attacked by thirty to forty men on 8 October 2001. She was gang raped. Four people, associated with the BNP and Jamaat, were arrested but never charged. Her sister lost her eyesight and the family business (a saloon) was looted twice. Her family was forced to flee the village. This was part of a systematic attack by radical Islamists and the Jamaat on Hindu villages to drive their residents out of Bangladesh.

The countryside was no longer safe for her and she went to Dhaka, where she met Sheikh Hasina, then opposition leader. Hasina asked Purnima to stay with her. ‘I call her Mamoni. She did for me what my relatives didn’t. She cared for me as if I was her own,’ Purnima tells us. Why, then, is she not happy with Hasina today? (See chapter 2, ‘Horror in the Countryside’.)

In Dhaka, I met the President of Bangladesh, Mohammad Shahabuddin Chuppu. In December 2006 following a High Court order, a three-member judicial commission was formed to look into the 2001 anti-Hindu violence led by the BNP and Jamaat. It was led by former District and Sessions Judge Mohammad Shahabuddin Chuppu!⁶

‘Yes, I travelled across Bangladesh to record the statements of victims,’ the President said. ‘I remember Purnima Rani Shil. Her case drew international attention. But there were hundreds of others. I met Hindu women raped so many times during that wave of anti-Hindu violence that they lost their minds. I feel what happened in 2001 was even worse than what happened in 1971 during the Bangladesh Liberation War.’

But was it just the BNP and Jamaat that were to blame? The 2021 anti-Hindu violence and the attacks happened under Sheikh Hasina’s watch. Her party and her government swear by secularism. So what gives? In chapter 3, ‘The DNA of Hate’, we take a hard look at Bangladesh’s social fissures and the heat of Islamist hate that is rising through the cracks to engulf the society at large. When I interviewed Bangladesh Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan, he laid the blame on the Jamaat camp: ‘They targeted and killed the intellectuals of Bangladesh. At present they are banned from participating in the politics of Bangladesh and trust me their number is getting smaller by the day.’

But the rot, as we found out, runs deeper. Thirty years from now, no Hindus will be left in Bangladesh should the current rate of exodus continue. ‘The rate of exodus over the past forty-nine years points in that direction,’ predicts Dr Abul Barkat, a Dhaka University professor. On an average, as of 2016, 632 people from the minority community leave the country each day.⁷

If section I of this book is about the fissures in Bangladesh’s socio-religious fabric, section II is about fusion. Like most countries in South Asia, if one hypothesis is found to be true, the exact opposite is almost always true as well. A strong argument can be made that Hindus are under siege in Bangladesh. But an equally strong counterargument can be put out that Hinduism is alive and thriving in the country.

How many people know today that the first law and labour minister of independent Pakistan was a Dalit Hindu named Jogendranath Mandal? We travelled to Mandal’s old house, now a ruin, in the village of his birth, now in Bangladesh’s Barishal district. Curiously, Muslims and Hindus of that dusty hamlet still hold on to his dream of religious unity, of a country where Muslims may be in majority, but Hindus can also live in peace with many gods. (See chapter 4, ‘The Burnt Forehead of Jogen Mandal’.)

It is not just about Hindus occupying top positions in government, bureaucracy, police and industry in Bangladesh even today, but the many ancient strands of the religion that continue to coexist with the religious belief of Bangladesh’s majority population. The most famous YouTuber from Bangladesh, Salahuddin Sumon, shoots videos about the Hindu temples in Bangladesh, digs into their history and mythology. Why does he do that? ‘Whenever I go back in time and try to dig up our past, I come across the Hindu temples. I have been asked often why I am obsessed with Hindu temples. The answer is my love for history. The story of Bangladesh’s temples fascinates me,’ he said. (See chapter 5, ‘Roots, Shoots and Sermons’.)

But what happens when this love for each other translates into marriage? Looking out from the terrace of her apartment in Dhaka’s posh Dhanmondi area, actress Ashna Habib Bhabna said, ‘Animesh is seventeen years older than me. And he is Hindu. But in our journey together, as friendship gradually turned to love, these things didn’t matter.’ But society? ‘Society tries to cage you, yes. I hear taunts from colleagues, concerned questions from friends, but am I not the perfect example of Hindu-Muslim love?’ Is she? Or is that simply privilege talking? Can interfaith love survive outside the charmed circles of Dhaka’s social elites? (See chapter 6, ‘Loving the Other in Bangladesh’.)

In section III, we dig into the story of Bangladesh’s origin. How and why East Pakistan fought to be something else—a new nation birthed from the massacre of millions. Many of them Bengali-Hindus who were ravaged, raped and reduced to mere numbers in a genocide that the rest of the world turned their face away from. The blood of Bengali-Muslims was also spilled, those who stood against the tyranny of West Pakistan, and rejected Urdu for their mother tongue Bangla.

And from their supreme sacrifice, Bangladesh was born.

It was conceived as a country for both the Hindus and Muslims, and others with Bangla as the common language, with Bengali culture acting as the glue between citizens of different faiths. What was it like then? And did the war for a secular state that began in 1971 end with the birth of Bangladesh? (See chapter 7, ‘1971 Has Not Ended’.)

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman famously said:

This country does not belong to Hindus. This country does not belong to Muslims. Whoever thinks this country is theirs, this country will be theirs. Whoever will feel happiness seeing this country prosper, this country will be theirs. Whoever will cry seeing this country sad, this country will be theirs. This country will also belong to those who have given away everything for this country’s freedom and would do so in the future.

On 27 January 1952, when Khwaja Nazimuddin, then Prime Minister of Pakistan, declared Urdu to be the only national language of Pakistan, protests from all corners flared up in East Bengal, reaching a peak on 21 February, when lakhs of students gathered at the campuses of Dhaka University and