By Jyotirmoy Prodhani
The phrase ‘Hindu Bangladeshi’ is a curious term. Let us be honest that when we utter this word in Assam we actually mean the Hindu Bengalis. The term has turned out to be a very handy euphemism to target the classical adversary of the Assamese people. Though one cannot deny the historical factors leading to such a deep seated antagonism against the Bengalis, the continuation of the same sentiment, however, against an imagined prospect of doom is necessarily misplaced. One has a strong reason to believe that the recent belligerent outcry against the “Hindu Bangladeshi” is not only against the Bengalis but also a clever ploy to target several tribal and ethnic communities to strategically dislocate and dispossess them.
This is quite well known that among the so called ‘Hindu Bangladeshis’ the second largest chunk of people, after the Bengali Hindus, are the people belonging to various tribal and indigenous communities whose territories were wrongfully annexed to the then East Pakistan largely because of the apathy of the central leadership towards such communities. Among the communities that became the biggest victims of this hugely erroneous and lackadaisical partition of territories were almost all the indigenous communities of the North East including the Jaintias, Khasis, Garos, Borok tribes, Mizos, Bodos, Rabhas, Hajongs, Koch Rajbanshis, Dhimals and others. The Chakmas, quite sadly, lost their entire territory to East Pakistan owing to the horrible indifference shown by Nehru and Patel to the repeated appeals of the Chakma leaders like Manabendra Narayan Larma and others. Chittagong Hill Tract was virtually gifted to Pakistan when there were barely 2% Muslims in CHT at that time. Soon after the formation of the East Pakistan the Pakistan government took it as a state policy to inundate the tribal territories with Bengali Muslims. As part of this policy all the territories where the indigenous communities had dominations were implanted with the Bengalis (read Bengali Muslims) and the properties of these communities were also systematically annexed by the state and the Bengali Muslims largely on the strength of the notorious law called Enemy Property Act of 1948. The law was later renamed as Vested Property Act in 1971 in Bangladesh, through which the property of the non Muslims were being confiscated by the state in a massive scale. One prominent property that was confiscated under this law was that of Nobel laureate Amrtya Sen’s ancestral household. (The present government in Bangladesh is mulling to return the property to the Nobel laureate)
The Chakmas have been the most mercilessly displaced lot from their native hearth in Chittagong Hill Tract through a series of strategies including the construction of the Kaptai dam by the East Pakistan regime in 1964 that had submerged 44% of their arable land and one lakh Chakmas were forcefully displaced from their hearth forcing them to migrate to India as Asia’s biggest stateless nation. Later, between 1980 and 1993, at least eleven most dreaded massacres were carried out with the active support of the Bangladesh military to kill thousands of Chakmas. CHT is a classical example of how the Bangladesh state actively devised methods to dispossess the indigenous natives. Mujibur Rahman betrayed his extreme intolerance to the pluralistic reality of the land when he had rejected outright the request made by M.N. Larma to recognise other small languages and culture within the constitutional framework of the newly established country for which the Chakmas too made supreme sacrifices. For Mujibur Rahman the only pillar of identity was Bengali Nationalism which later became a combination of Bengali chauvinism and Islamic fundamentalism. A noted historian from Dhaka University, Mejbah Kamal, in one of his most elaborate papers presented in Shillong on the Chakmas of Bangladesh described the combination of Bengali Nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism as the most ‘poisonous’combination in the world. However, Mujibur Rahman during his tenure went to the extent of implanting, almost immediately after his meeting with M.N. Larma, about two lakh Bangalis in CHT from the plains under the full military protection. He made the most infamous comment when he had asked Larma to meet him next him only after they became fully Bengalis. The Chakma crisis, in fact, is reflective of the plight of the other non Muslim ethnic minorities in Bangladesh.
Implantation of Bengali Muslims in non-Muslim territories has remained one of the constant exercises with the full support of the state and the military establishments, as a result of which thousands of non-Muslims had to flee their native land and in case of the indigenous tribes and ethnic communities they had to come to their respective villages which happened to be just across the border. In west Assam there is innumerable people belonging to Hajong, Garo, Rabha, Bodo, Rajbanshi etc. who were forced to come to the Indian side of their habitation, and all of them are not Hindus, there are Christians as well as Buddhists. Despite these well known facts, the organizations that primarily represent the interest of the mainstream caste Assamese communities like the AJYCP, AASU etc. have willfully remained silent on this issue and used all the tricks of the cards not to allow this aspect of the debate gain any due importance. If one takes a glance at the recently circulated list by the Assam Police on the Untraced Foreigners of Goalpara, for example, one would come across many names belonging to various indigenous ethnic groups. From Bangladesh, as has been projected for popular consumption, the ‘Hindu Bengalis’ were not the only non-Muslim communities who were displaced and forced to migrate.
This whole political enterprise of Anti Foreigners Movement turned out to be one of the biggest failures in the history of Assam primarily because it has remained largely a heavily diluted and waywardly disseminated public mobilization without having any concrete and well focused agenda in place apart from strong and passionate rhetoric of a perceived prospect of de-stability grounded on xenophobic hysteria. The trajectory of the movement itself has remained a witness to this uncomfortable truth. From foreigner to bahiragata the movement turned out to be an event primarily aimed at inventing an endless directory of Assam’s perceived enemies in the process, quite ironically, with utter ignorance and disrespect to the India’s historical relations and bilateral protocols, the over enthusiastic agitators had subjected the Nepali speaking natives of Assam and the seasonal traders from Bhutan (mostly women) to severe physical violence. In the process, the whole enterprise of the Assam Movement got effectively derailed.
The present protagonists that perceive the whole Bangladeshi issue from a cultivated vantage of ahistoricity, misplaced understanding of ethno-social reality and grudging antagonism against the ‘Bengalis’ would do it well at least to make an honest attempt this time to address this issue from the perspective of deeper understanding and unimpassioned approach to contemporary history of this part of South Asia. Before joining the bandwagon one must lay on table the all the cards candidly with the subtle details of the demands else it would become, yet another, an epic scale failure very much like that of the Assam Movement.
(Jyotirmoy Prodhani is a professor of English at NEHU. Shillong. He can be contacted at [email protected])