Delhi must open a new diplomatic front against Dhaka, seek autonomous territory for beleaguered Hindus

This may be the most opportune moment for the Indian leadership to take up the maximalist position vis-à-vis Bangladesh, given the government in Dhaka that doesn’t even pretend to be friendly. Reading Anirban Ganguly’s new book, From Partition to Progress: Persecuted Hindus and the Struggle for Citizenship, especially in the context of what’s happening in Bangladesh post-Sheikh Hasina, reminds us how little has changed since what became East Pakistan, after Independence, and Bangladesh, after the 1971 war. The moral failure, as Syama Prasad Mookerjee had said in one of his speeches, is because “the Hindus of East Bengal are entitled to the protection of India, not on humanitarian considerations alone, but by virtue of their sufferings and sacrifices, made cheerfully for generations, not for advancing their own parochial interest, but for laying the foundations of India’s political freedom and intellectual progress. On the other hand, in the minds of the Muslims, 60 per cent of them feel confident to live in West Bengal and India.” From Partition to Progress: Persecuted Hindus and the Struggle for Citizenship, Paperback – 29 August 2024, by Anirban Ganguly Manoranjan Byapari, a well-known Bengali writer who had lived a traumatic life as a child in the refugee camps of West Bengal and Dandakaranya, in his memoirs, Interrogating My Chandal Life, remembers not just the prison-like situation in camps but also couldn’t forget, despite decades having passed by, the foul smell that would envelope the entire camp whenever the food, especially rice, was cooked. A significant number among the 10 per cent Hindus who decided to go back to East Pakistan couldn’t take the inhuman condition they faced in these refugee camps; 90 per cent still thought these pathetic standards were better than those awaiting them in what later became Bangladesh.