Memory often simplifies past events and the mind can be merciful. There is probably no greater burden than the capacity for total recall, but few of us are burdened in this way. We tend to be placidly content with fragments of the past, the anecdote highly polished in the re-telling, the once-painful vision gives the soft focus
(if not complete revision) of tranquil recollection, and we may smile when we are corrected and reminded that we have been betrayed by memory. Such thoughts, feelings, emotions and sentiments were thrown overboard in the manner of a cataclysmic explosion when Captain Balakrishnan, a friend of mine and a heroic fighter for the cause of Hindutva and Hinduism, gave me a book titled THE PROLONGED PARTITION AND ITS PROGROMS, Testimonies on Violence against Hindus in East Bengal 1946-64, authored by A.J. Kamra, with a foreword by Koenraad Elst.
Hindus are not fully aware of their past history. The fact is over a period of nearly a thousand years of invasion and rule by the Muslims in India, the Hindu suffered the greatest devastation ever recorded in the History. Untold millions of Hindus were massacred, their womenfolk ravished, their cities destroyed, their temples systematically raised to the ground, their Universities and Libraries burnt. Millions upon millions of Hindus were forcibly converted to Islam. Many millions of our finest young men and women were carried away and sold in the slave and flush markets of the then Islamic world. India, fabled for its riches, was floundered timed again.
In India ever since 1000 AD, on account of the staunch resistance of more than the 10000 year old Hindu faith to the Islamic Marauders, Muslim conquests were for the Hindus a pure struggle between life and death. Every new invader made often literally his hill of Hindu skulls. The Bahmani Sultans in Central India, made it a Government rule to kill 100.000 Hindus a year. In 1399, Teimur killed 100.000 Hindus in a SINGLE DAY, and many more on other occasions. Professor K.S. Lal in his “Growth of Muslim population in India”, has concluded that the Hindu population in India decreased by 8O MILLION between the year 1000 and 1525. IT WAS INDEED PROBABLY THE BIGGEST HOLOCAUST IN THE WHOLE OF WORLD HISTORY. No wonder, the great Historian Will Durant in his famous book ‘The Story of Civilization’ has observed as follows: “The Mohammadan conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.”
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Hindu corpses dumped between Wari and Tikatuli, Dacca, 1946. Photo by Rabindranath Dutta. |
EAST BENGAL HINDU VICTIMS OF ISLAMIC COMPASSION
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Refugees from East Bengal escaping towards Calcutta in July 1947 |
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East Bengal refugees squatting on the streets of Calcutta in September 1947 |
In his book the THE PROLONGED PARTITION AND ITS PROGROMS, Testimonies on Violence against Hindus in East Bengal 1946-64, A.J. Kamra describes the sufferings, for 50 long years, of the Hindus of East Bengal at the hands of the Muslims. This period of untold suffering started in Noakhali in 1946 and continues till today. Koenraad Elst has rightly stated that Scholarly Studies on the genocidal waves characterizing the unequal coexistence of Hindus and Muslims in East Bengal have been few, even as are those on the ‘Partition Massacres’ in Punjab in 1947. The two problems are basically identical, for what happened in West Punjab in a few months in 1947 i.e. that the total cleansing of the Hindus was merely a quick version of what has been happening in East Bengal till 1971 and in Bangladesh after 1971 in a long drawn out and deliberate fashion, intermittently and in successive waves. It will logically be correct and historically consistent to conclude that the cleansing of the Hindus from East Bengal in phases has only been a prolonged version of the Partition since the beginning by as envisaged by Mohamed Ali Jinnah and the Pakistani Leadership i.e. the creation of a purely Muslim State, carved out of India and at the expense of the Hindus. It is now well known that Jinnah and his followers wanted to convert the whole of India into an Islamic Country by resorting to total Hindu genocide.
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Hindu victims of genocide in Dacca in 1971 |
We can see clearly from A.J. Kamras book under review that Hindus comprised nearly 30% of the total population in Bangladesh in 1947. After the exodus of minorities following the partition of India in 1947, the Hindu population went down to about 22% by 1951. Due to unabated persecution, intimidation, large scale genocide and forcible conversion to Islam, the Hindu-Minority population kept on dwindling and it stood at a meagre 10.5% of the total population in Bangladesh (1991 census). In Bangladesh, Hindu population was 28% in 1941; 22% in 1951, 18.5% in 1961; 13.5% in 1974; 12.2% in 1981 and 10.5% in 1991. We can see Hindu population decreased by 8% from 1961 to 1991. This declining trend has been further accentuated through a process of forced conversion and State Sponsored Ethnic Cleansing of Hindus during the last 10 years.
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Hindu genocide in Bangladesh today |
A Hindu being beaten by Muslims in a mosque in Bangladesh. He was captured outside the mosque while going home. After Friday prayers were over, the Muslims came out and grabbed the first Hindu they could. Mr. Vimal Patak a Bangladeshi born Hindu was beaten to death with sticks as the Muslim mullas (priests) chanted “kill the Kafir!” (non-muslim). With folded hands he begged for his life and died a brutal death. Our PSEUDO-SECULAR ANTI-HINDU PARTIES like the Congress, Communist, RJD, Samaj Wadi, DMK etc. would view all this as yet another act of Islamic compassion.
Kamra’s only aim is to contribute to the awareness among Hindus of what has been done to them by Islamic Militants and of what psychology in the Hindus themselves that has made this misfortune possible. Keeping this in view he has collected contemporary reports on the Islamic violence perpetrated against Hindus in East Bengal in 1946-47, 1950 and 1964. On the largest wave of anti-Hindu violence, that of 1971, he had been collecting factual and statistical material as evidence but before he could write his story he passed away in 1996. At the request of Kamra’s family, Koenraad Elst has completed this task in a commendable manner in this very graphically revealing book.
The Muslim death toll in 20th century inter-religious violence in India has been much smaller than the Hindu death toll in India. If we consider only the second half of the 20th century, the Hindu death toll becomes many times higher. At most as against thousands of Muslims killed in India, millions of Hindus have been killed in East Bengal. The death-toll in non-Islam-related social and ethnic conflicts in South Asia has likewise been small in comparison with the death toll of the conflicts which Islam has uni-lateral impose on the Subcontinent in the second half of the 20th century: The Partition, The Wars of 1947-48, 1965, 1971 and 1999, and the ongoing Proxy War.
