Dr. Sachi (Sabyasachi) Ghosh Dastidar is a Distinguished Service Professor of the State University of New York at Old Westbury. His book titled Empire's Last Casualty: Indian Subcontinent's Vanishing Hindu and Other Minorities (2008) is a study of effects of religious communalism on a pluralistic, tolerant, multi-religious society. It focuses on the loss of indigenous Hindu population from the land of their ancestors; and on changes brought about since a multi-religious progressive region of Colonial British India was partitioned in 1947, and its effects on Hindu and non-Muslim (Buddhist and Christian) minorities, on pluralism and on indigenous cultures.
After Britain's Muslim-Hindu partition of Bengal Province east Bengal became Muslim-majority East Pakistan, a part of Islamic Republic of Pakistan, unleashing regular, merciless anti-Hindu pogroms by intolerant Islamists. West Bengal remained in India, with Muslim minority and ever-growing massive Bengali Hindu refugee who turned towards left extremism. Following a 1971 war of independence against West Pakistan,
Bangladesh gained independence, creating the second largest Muslim-majority nation. That war was concurrently anti-Hindu and anti-Bengali genocide by Islamic Republic's army and its Bengali and Urdu speaking Islamist allies. The book documents the decade-wise "missing" Hindus from Bangladesh Census: over 49 million; larger than 163 of 189 nations listed in World Bank's April 2003 World Development indicators database, and between 3.1 million (larger than 75 of 189 nations) and 1.4 million Hindus lost their lives through the process of Islamization. Documenting three million-plus lost lives have been painful and difficult; especially when Hindus cremate their dead.
Additionally rivers of the world's largest delta washed away signs of mass murder leaving no clue. All attempts have been made to justify the data presented in the book, hardly-known to the world and rarely discussed in Bengal itself. Read more here.
I don't understand why these propaganda are being cooked up without any protest.
ReplyDeleteMassive population exchanges occurred between India and Pakistan (West and East) in the months immediately following Partition of India in 1947. About 14.5 million people crossed the borders to what they hoped was the relative safety of religious majority. Based on 1951 Census of displaced persons, 7,226,000 Muslims went to Pakistan from India while 7,249,000 Hindus and Sikhs moved to India from Pakistan immediately after partition.
The migration is still happening in some scale. I guess Dr. Sachi et al are planning to push back Indians into Bangladesh.
The real thing is there is a large scale floating economic migrants between India and Bangladesh. They will be finding refuge in the place the get more opportunities. In the era of borderless countries, it a very wrong concept to seal borders instead of solving the problems in the first place, why they migrate. Propaganda of religious tensions will only create more problems.