A Legacy Suffering: Historical Reckoning of Persecution of Hindus in Bangladesh |
Desaix “Terry” Myers, a USAID assistant program officer in Dhaka in 1971 and co-author and signatory of the “Blood Telegram,” wrote a desolate letter home to his friends lamenting what he had seen in a small, impoverished Hindu village in the countryside of Bangladesh.
The army had “lined up people from their houses, shot down the lines, killing close to six hundred.” The people in nearby villages heard the gunfire and fled. The rice mills were burned to charcoal, the rice to ash. The handful of villagers who had returned told their stories through sobs. A tall, frail Bengali man took Myers to his scorched house: “a room with a rice ash heap and charcoaled bed stead, nothing remained to show us that his three children and wife had lived there, died there. Another old man, pan stained teeth, mucus glazed eyes, (glaucoma or tears?), whimpered the loss of his family.”
“….genocide was the right description for what was happening to the Hindus. So the consulate “began to focus our ‘genocidal’ reporting on the Hindus.” The military crackdown, he cabled, “fully meets criteria of term ‘genocide. ”
…” Kissinger and President Nixon were repeatedly alerted about this genocide. Harold Saunders informed him about reports that the Pakistan army was “deliberately seeking out Hindus and killing them,” while a senior State Department official notified him that the state’s policy was “getting rid of the Hindus.” From the book “The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide” by American journalist and academic Gary J. Bass about The Blood Telegram. The Blood Telegram is a State Department dissent memo on American policy during the 1971 Bangladesh genocide sent by Archer Blood, the American Consul General to Dhaka, East Pakistan.
It is both necessary and long overdue to confront a tragic reality that has been systematically minimized since the Partition of the1947: the profoundly unenviable and perilous existence of the Hindu community within the borders of what is now Bangladesh. As scholar Vivek Gumaste starkly summarized, this population has been the victim of an “unprecedented genocide,” subjected to the illegal seizure of property, the desecration of their temples, and the targeting of their women, a relentless persecution that has forced a continuous exodus to India for generations. The recent escalation in atrocities following the political ouster of Sheikh Hasina is not an isolated development but merely the latest chapter in a protracted campaign of violence that began in erstwhile East Pakistan and has persisted within sovereign Bangladesh. While the current grim predicament warrants detailed examination, it is critical first to understand the sheer scale of historical trauma inflicted over decades and to confront the uncomfortable possibility that India, in its strategic choices, has historically failed this community.
The most chilling evidence of this sustained campaign is found in the cold arithmetic of demography. In 1941, the Hindu population of the region stood at 11.76 million, representing 28% of the total population of 42 million. Today, within a vastly increased national population of approximately 165.16 million, the Hindu community numbers around 13.13 million—a figure representing a catastrophic decline to 7.95% of the population. This precipitous drop is not a coincidence but the direct outcome of ethnic cleansing. Projecting this trend forward, Bangladeshi scholar Dr. Abdul Barakat arrives at a harrowing conclusion: if the current rate of decline continues, there may be virtually no Hindus left in Bangladesh by the year 2046. This looming extinction demands an inquiry into the mechanics of this demographic erasure.
The refugee flow tells a story of unceasing pressure. Unlike the migration from West Pakistan, which essentially concluded by 1950 after the near-total expulsion of minorities, the outflow from the eastern wing never ceased. The Hindu minority there was initially too significant to be quickly displaced, leading to a gradual but incessant process of expulsion, punctuated by violent surges........