Partition Drilled anti-Hindu Mindset in East Pakistan: Book

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Edward Kennedy Exposed Genocide in East Pakistan

By Anirban Ganguly

The minority population of East Pakistan in 1971 was around 16–17 per cent and the bulk of those driven out by the Pak army composed of them. In his deeply disturbing masterpiece, Blood Telegram: India’s Secret War in East Pakistan (2013), American journalist Gary Bass notes how India had ‘secretly recorded that by the middle of June, there were some 5,330,000 Hindus, as against 443,000 Muslims and 150,000 from other groups’.

A number of Indian diplomats, notes Bass, ‘believed that the Hindus would be too afraid ever to go back’ to East Pakistan. Bass also records in some detail the role that Senator Edward Kennedy played in exposing the Pakistan army’s genocide in East Pakistan during those crucial months.

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Kennedy played a crucial role in highlighting the Pak army’s perfidy to the world. He undertook tours to refugee camps in West Bengal and Tripura. Bass narrates Kennedy’s heart-rending tours and his interactions with these hapless refugees.

Touring the northern fringes of Kolkata during those fateful days, Kennedy met dozens of Bengali peasants who narrated their harrowing tales; they were a few samples of the actual exodus, and Kennedy saw ‘children dying along the road as their parents pleaded for help. Many were obviously in shock, sitting in despair by the side of the road wandering blindly. Most of them, he realised, were Hindus’.

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The passing of the CAA, thus, was an attempt to bring to closure this devastating episode; it was meant to give permanency of existence as citizens of India to these persecuted people. The Pakistan army and establishment, ever since its formation in 1947, had been systematically carrying out pogroms against its Hindu minorities, especially in its eastern wing.

These gradual, systematic, and periodic pogroms and Pakistan’s driving out minorities have been documented over the years. It is this that kept the citizenship debate alive in India.

Should not the beleaguered minorities of Pakistan be protected and given shelter, space, and scope in India as promised in the past, or should they be left at the mercy of the Islamic state of Pakistan, which does not believe in providing equity to its minorities?

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Many of those in the West who have been persisting with their fallacious hectoring of India on the citizenship issue and have continued to do so over the years, soon after the CAA was passed as law by the Indian Parliament, are supporters and patrons of Pakistan and its diabolically destabilizing policies.

They stood by it or silently looked the other way when Pakistan was indulging in planned pogroms against its minorities and when the Pakistan army was perpetrating one of the worst genocides against its own citizens in the eastern wing, butchering intellectuals and mowing down the Hindu minorities

One of those who witnessed the era first-hand and played a crucial role in the historic events of that period was P.N. Dhar, a diplomat administrator and the advisor to Indira Gandhi. In his memoirs, Dhar, a Kashmiri pandit, notes how, when the Pakistan army genocide began, the ‘first to arrive were the Awami League cadres and remnants of the police and the military personnel who managed to escape. They were followed by Hindus who had escaped a merciless hunt’.

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This indoctrination against Hindus in East Pakistan had started in the early days of Partition and percolated all layers of society. The Pakistani regime’s perpetual anti-India stance was placed before the people as a perpetual struggle against a ‘Hindu’ India, as a ‘broad struggle against Hindus, the adherents of a religion’, writes Pakistani politician academic Farahanaz Ispahani.

The acerbic Dawn, for instance, after India’s liberation of the Portuguese-occupied enclave of Goa, wrote in its editorial that as soon as India is confident enough, ‘she will try to wipe out Pakistan because Indians in their heart still regard the areas now forming Pakistan as basically parts of Akhand Bharat over which some day Hindu rule must extend’. This mindset and approach were also the driving idea of Pakistan since its demand and formation.

(Excerpted from ‘From Partition to Progress: Persecuted Hindus and the Struggle for Citizenship’, published by BluOne Ink)

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