Complexities of Post-Mujib Era as Misunderstood in India.

A new politics, a new economics and a new culture, taken together, started unravelling itself in post independent India under the leadership of Nehru as a result of adopted policy of state secularism, which aggravated the confusion of the exuberant and adventurist politics of secularism of the erstwhile radical nationalist and the radical left in India.  Gradually, for the first time, the Hindu refugees were being treated at par with the Muslim infiltrators.  This twin flow at the same time had introduced a new opportunity to show perversely that Bangladesh was as much secular as India.  Politicians, who placed immediate electoral gain above national interest, successfully equated Muslim infiltration with the Hindu refugee flow under the grand title of infinite and indefinite migration of Bangladeshis with nondescript faces through all conceivable manholes in the border region.

Growing population pressure and crippling poverty and pauperization of the marginal rural masses in Bangladesh encouraged, if not forced, them to put this agenda of migration as a life and death question, which no force can resist.  In the meantime, the consolidation of Islamic forces was already advanced.  They adopted the agenda of a greater Islamic region as a grand political strategy.  Although it was an emotional issue for Sheikh Mujib, later it became a political and strategic issue with the covert support of Pakistan.

There is no state religion in secular India, which is obliged to protect all religions equally, but the State of Bangladesh must preserve religious peace and harmony under the shadow of its state religion, viz. Islam.  The adoption of Islam as the State Religion has utterly demoralized Hindus and has reinforced their already unavoidable compulsion regarding migration to India.  Significantly, a state religion cannot extend the minimum of socio-economic protection even to Muslims, who, instead of being satisfied with living in Islamic Bangladesh, have long been voting with their feet, and continuously leaving for secular India, especially Assam and West Bengal.  Whereas this is a constant tribute to India’s secularism, this is also a threat to India’s socio-economic stability and political security.  Unfortunately, policy makers in India have displayed little alertness in pre-empting or arresting this grave threat.

Reality of Independent Bangladesh:

The minority community in Bangladesh participated in the war of liberation with the expectation that in the newly liberated country they would enjoy equal status and rights along with the majority community. But, in practice, the persecution of the minorities continued even after independence.  The forms of oppression of the religious minorities in Bangladesh are manifold.  Constitutionally, they have been downgraded; economically, they have been crippled through different discriminatory laws and practices; politically, they have been segregated and alienated from the mainstream; culturally and socially, they are insecure and overwhelmingly dominated.  They are totally deprived of the privileges of participation in the top positions of the government, and nationally they are used as subjects tortured through communal violence organised by the government for counteracting political unrest against the ruling party.  Because of the discriminatory policies, combined with land grabbing, looting, arson, rape, murder and attack on religious institutions and populations with the collusion, if not instigation, of the government or semi-government agencies, there has been a continuous exodus of the minorities from Bangladesh.

From the very beginning since the liberation of 1971, Hindus who had earlier gone to India as war refugees and returned to independent Bangladesh, again started migrating from the newly independent country to India, because they failed to retrieve their property and enjoy social security.  Bengali nationalism was eroding fast, and anti-India sentiment was growing rapidly. 

After the assassination of Sheikh Mujib (President of Bangladesh) in 1975, the relevance of the very idea of non-communal Bangladesh borne out of liberation war of 1971 was lost, and Bangladesh became a state tilting towards Islamization.  All these show that the emergent idea of secular Bangladesh, partially apparent in 1971, was not only missing but was probably mistaken.  Mujib’s case of fighting against Pakistan had finally given way to a Bangladesh which never denied its Islamic character.  On the surface, while Hindus imagined a new secular-democratic prospect, Muslims suffered from a bankruptcy of leadership, which threw them eventually into the clutches of Mustaq Ahmed, Ziaur Rahman and similar others after Mujib’s death.  It was a pity that Bangladesh soon came out as a new country and a state with an overt Islamic identity.

Leaders of the Muslim society, at every level, are trying to organize and consolidate Muslim masses on the basis of religion and madrassa teachings.  The moderate views of a small section of the liberal minded urban middle class in the society society are gradually being replaced by the stronger radical trends.  As a result, the differences with the other religious and cultural communities and sects have become wider.  Now Bangladesh has become the epicentre for propagating and promoting ultra-Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism in eastern and northeastern India which has a sizeable Muslim population.