Land Grabbing is the Prime Motive for Persecution of
Hindus in Bangladesh
Nidhu
Bhusan Das
Incidents of persecution of minorities (Hindus) in Bangladesh is on a steep rise. More than 79 Hindus have been killed in the last six months and more than 800 Hindus injured or threatened to be killed. This has made it “extremely” difficult for Hindus to live in that country and Hindu organisations in Bangladesh are asking for help from both India and the Sheikh Hasina government.
“In Bangladesh, what we are witnessing is a silent persecution of the
minorities (Hindu) and it is spread across the country, from killings, to death
threats to attempt to murder, to forced conversion and land grabbing and even
raping of Hindu women, while the government here turns a blind eye. The
government here has even instructed the media not to report incidents involving
the persecution of Hindus. There is targeted and organised crime against Hindus
in this country and sometimes it feels like we must have done something
extremely wrong in our past life to have been born a Hindu in Bangladesh,”
Pradip Chandra, a Bangladeshi Hindu working for Hindu rights in Bangladesh,
told The Sunday Guardian. The statement points to the failure of the government
to protect the right to life and property of the Hindus and the secular credential
of the country. To consider Bangladesh a secular state is ironical,isn't it?
The Hindu population of
Bangladesh fell by 0.59 percentage points to 7.95% in 2022 from 8.54% in 2011,
reports Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS).
The 2022 census shows
Muslim population increased by 0.60 percentage points to 91% from 90.4% in
2011, while Buddhist population fell marginally by 0.01 percentage points to
0.61% from 0.62% in 2011.
Over the past 50 years,
the total population of the country has more than doubled, but the Hindu
population in the country has decreased by around 7.5 million (75 lakh)
compared to what it should have been based on their percentage at the time of independence
of the country. The number of Buddhists, Christian and persons of other
religions has remained more or less constant.
The 2022 census report
mentioned two factors contributed to the fall of Hindu population: the
first and foremost is outward migration of Hindu population meaning that they
are leaving the country, and the second is lower fertility rate among Hindus.
The Hindu population in Bangladesh has dwindled
progressively since independence in 1971. It is a fact that population of Bangladesh is on the
increase and a reverse trend is evident in case of the Hindus. Not that
the birth rate has decreased and mortality rate scaled up among the Hindus.
Then what could be the reasonable cause for the unnatural / unbiological
decline of the second largest population of the country which fought for
independence from the Islamic Republic of Pakistan with the avowed pledge to
establish a secular state based on a linguistic-cultural nationalism rooted in
the Language Movement of 1952?
The plausible answer is Bangladesh could split off from
Pakistan but could not forsake the heritage of religious persecution. The
heritage may be traced to the Noakhali Genocide of 1946 which made the Hindu
persecution so pronounced. British historian Yasmin Khan in her prize winning
book The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan tells us at least 5,000 Hindus were
massacred, hundreds of Hindu women raped and thousands forcibly converted to
Islam; many more fled to India. Even Mahatma Gandhi’s peace mission to Noakhali
failed to quell the atrocities which continued unabated during his stay. Gandhi
left Noakhali, urging the Hindus there to “Quit Noakhali or Die” (NY Times.
8 April 1947).The same template of persecution is perpetuated by the Islamists
in Bangladesh.
What Gandhi said proved prophetic.
Even after the emergence of Bangladesh, the Hindu population dwindled from
13.5% in 1974 to 8.96% in 2011, a nearly 33% decline. This suggests the prevalence
of a deeply anti-Hindu environment in the country. Besides, on the eve of the
second anniversary of victory in the Bangladesh Liberation War for tenable
reasons the general clemency for the Islamist collaborators was
announced. This paved the way for their rehabilitation and propagation of
Islamist ideology vis-a-vis the nascent secularism in Bangladesh.
True, the Constitution adopted by the
Constituent Assembly in 1972 made Bangladesh a secular democratic republic. The
fundamental rights enshrined in the third part of the constitution,inter alia, promises
equality before law, no discrimination on grounds of religion, right to
protection of law, protection of right
to life and personal liberty and freedom of religion. The noble constitutional
provisions could not come to the rescue of the Hindus because matching actions
were not taken. In contravention of the non-communal provisions of the new
constitution, they retained the anti-Hindu Enemy
Property Act of Pakistan and rechristened it as Vested Property Act in
1974.Bangladesh Government thereby vested itself
with the “enemy” properties previously seized since the 1965 Indo-Pak War and
continued to use the discriminatory law to confiscate the land owned by the
Hindus.
Approximately 1.2 million Hindu
families, or 44% of all Hindu households, have been affected by Enemy/Vested
Property Act. Hindus have been dispossessed of more than 2 million acres of
land. Even after the Restoration of Vested Property Act passed in 2001, land
encroachment involving Hindu land has continued but mostly during BNP
governments. Subsequent amendments of the original constitution made the
religious minorities including Hindus second class citizens and encouraged
atrocities against the Hindus.
A
seminal book by Professor Abul Barkat of Dhaka University, Inquiry into Causes
and Consequences of Deprivation of Hindu Minorities in Bangladesh through the
Vested Property Act, published in 2000 shows that the largest beneficiary
of Hindu property transfer in the past 35 years of Bangladeshi independence
were people belonging to Awami League They grabbed 44.2 per cent of the land.
Other grabbers are affiliated with BNP (31.7%), Jatiya Party (5.8 %)
Jamat-e-Islami (4.8%) and others (13.5%). The greatest appropriation of Hindu
property took place immediately after independence during the first Awami
League government (1972–75) and during the first period of rule of the
Bangladesh Nationalist Party (1976-1980). The confiscation of the land broke
the economic backbone of the Hindus. So, migration of the Hindus is the natural
consequence.
