The Monumental Genocide of Bangladeshi Hindus by Muslims

Bangladeshi Hindus have been systematically subjected to religious cleansing by the erstwhile Pakistani forces, Bangladeshi government and the local neighborhood Muslims with complete knowledge and connivance of different establishments over the last many decades. What you are about to read is well documented truth and facts. That they escaped the narration and even commentary by global media (New York Times, CNN, BBC etc) shows the level of Hinduphobia that has seeped into these media outlets.

That the Indian and the Global media has focused on demonizing the law that was to provide some relief to these unfortunate people, and not on sharing the largest genocide of any community in the world since the last century is indeed instructive.

One wishes that the facts and the title could have been made less direct. But when the scale of human tragedy is of this level, only a scoundrel can window-dress it in any way. Either one retains his humanity or his political correctness. I am choosing my humanity.

Who is persecuting whom in Bangladesh?

No, the cleansing and genocide did not yield any killing fields or concentration camps. But, district after district, town after town and one neighbor after another, Muslims have gone ahead and raped, killed,gang-raped, and thrown out the Hindus. In a remarkable article titled “Ethnic Butchery and Genocidal Massacres”, American human rights activist Richard Benkin pointed out an interesting fact after personally talking to many Bangladeshi Hindus who came to India after persecution.

The killers and the villains who persecuted these Hindus were NOT “radical Muslims” or “Mullahs”, but neighbors and local Muslims they knew! Read the full article here.

Marriage laws and issues

In Bangladesh, there is no marriage registration system for Hindu people in Bangladesh. This creates a lot of issues for the minority women as the poor living in small villages who get married by local customs cannot go out and register their marriage in the court. And Hindu marriage customs are not recognized.

So if some woman is kidnapped, converted and married to a Muslim, which is quite common, there is no way to prove that she was even married to a Hindu!

Forced Conversions, kidnappings, rapes

The extent and the scale of the persecution is so wide and mind-boggling that Indians, specifically Hindus in India do not fully understand the evil that is being unleashed on the Hindus specifically and other minorities in Bangladesh. Let us recount the atrocities and the manner in which they have been done to fully understand the scale and the barbarity.

In an article in Dhaka Tribune written on June 27, 2013 – and later reproduced in Hindujagruti.org – the following cases were shared.

A sixth grader from Gazipur’s Tongi area, name change – Prima, was kidnapped on her way to school on April 6, 2013. 55 days later she was found at a hotel in Cox’s Bazaar. She had been repeatedly gang-raped by some boys from her locality (an observation which Richard Benkin’s interviews with Bangladeshi Hindus in India corroborate). She was forced to convert to Islam and then married off to one of the perpetrators, Rabiul Hossein Manik.
13 year old Kakoli Haider (name changed) wrote a heartfelt letter to her father. She was sleeping when five Muslim men forcibly entered, vandalized the home and forcibly kidnapped the screaming, shouting and fighting kid. 3 months later, she wrote a letter to her father to tell him that she felt like dying because the criminals had forced her to convert and one of them had married her to “legalize” the crime.
A 16 year old Ranu Saha (name changed), was abducted from Patuakhali’s Bauphal area, where she was staying with her brother and converted later.

These inhuman crimes are real. As were the victims. The only reason why no one – not BBC, not New York Times, not Times of India, not CNN – ever reported on these was because the victims were Hindus.

And, they were not raped and gang-raped and persecuted by some mullah or radicalized Muslim groups. But by neighbors and local men and boys! That makes the existence of Hindus even more dangerous in Bangladesh. Where every Muslim could be a potential rapist of your daughter. You don’t know. As these families didn’t.

The only reason why those who have known of these crimes and those afflicted by Islamist-Secularism upon reading this will not feel nauseated is because none of these girls was their own daughter.

Genocide of Bangladeshi Hindus – One massacre and pogrom at a time

2.3 million Hindus were killed in the run up to the 1971 war. The scale and extent of that genocide was never seen before in the modern world since the 1940s. In her interview with BBC, Ms. Indira Gandhi confirmed it as well.

Anthony Mascarenhas, a West Pakistani journalist had written in the Sunday Times on June 13, 1971 in his report titled “Genocide” about the extent of war crimes committed against the Hindus.

“I saw Hindus, hunted from village to village and door to door, shot off-hand after a cursory ‘short-arm inspection’ showed they were uncircumcised. I have heard the screams of men bludgeoned to death in the compound of the Circuit House (civil administrative headquarters) in Comilla. I have seen truckloads of other human targets and those who had the humanity to try to help them hauled off ‘for disposal’ under the cover of darkness and curfew.” Anthony Mascarenhas in The Sunday Times, London on 13 June 1971

The Pakistanis treated Bangladeshis as an inferior group of people. But Hindus came in for the worst treatment. As political scientist, R.J. Rummel said about what Pakistanis thought of Hindus – “as Jews to the Nazis, scum and vermin that best be exterminated”.

Operation Searchlight launched on 25 March 1971 was a massacre on an unprecedented scale. 3 million people died, 10 million crossed over to India, and 30 million were displaced and made homeless within Bangladesh itself. Here is a list of documented 53 large scale massacres of Hindus in Bangladesh alongwith their Wikipedia links for the reader’s reference. A lot of these happened in the run up to the 1971 war.

These are the documented large scale massacres. But the killings and rapes have not always been done on a “grand scale”. A cut everyday in this district or the other created the cleansing operation.

For years, the Bangladeshi government used the Vested Property Law, where property owned by the Hindus was declared as “enemy property” and seized.

According to Shipan Kumer Basu, the President of the World Hindu Struggle Committee, in recent times, the Bangladeshi government has been utilizing the Vested Property Law in order to seize Hindu property and to claim it as their own, thus turning Bangladeshi Hindus into homeless underprivileged paupers. He noted that while on paper under the Vested Properties Law, some Hindu properties that were lost supposedly can be reclaimed, in reality, the law works in order to push Hindus off of their ancestral lands.Rachel Avraham, political analyst working at the Safadi Center for International Diplomacy, Research, Public Relations and Human Rights.

Please listen to Richard Benkin lay out the complete extent of the religious cleansing that has gone on in Bangladesh.

Conclusion – Any humanity left?

Since 1947, a large scale and unprecedented religious genocide has been perpetrated in Bangladesh on the Hindus. 49 million Hindus are simply missing! Unaccounted for.

“Since 1947, 49 million Hindus in Bangladesh have gone missing.”former Congressman Bob Dold in the House in 2011,

Just for context Nazis killed 6 million Jews.

Massacre of Hindus in Bangladesh has been many times over! And, yet there is no recognition of this unprecedented human tragedy that happened right next door to India.

And these Hindus were either killed by the state (Pakistan then and Bangladesh now) or worse still, by the neighbors and local people with whom these Hindus had been living for centuries. Those whom they grew up with or played with or went to school with.

When Modi government came up with the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019, where the persecuted minorities from Bangladesh were included and not the majority from that country, it had a context.

To say that Hindus have been massacred by Bangladesh state and ordinary Muslims in that country is not a “communal statement”. It is a statement of fact. However uncomfortable and however damning it may be for the people of one religion.

If they have massacred another community, where 49 million Hindus, as per Congressman Dold’s statement in the US House of Representatives in 2011, are just simply missing, then we need to look at this monumental tragedy in the eye!

We cannot afford to turn a blind eye!

This is why those who committed those massacres can never be defined or acknowledged as the “persecuted”. And the persecuting forces should be punished, not invited to your living room!

Instead, the focus should be on those who are hunted because of their religion and who they are.

If, we have any humanity left in us anymore.

Donate for Drishtikone

We spend from our personal savings to keep Drishtikone up and running while adding thoughtful and analytical content. If you like what you read, please share it with your friends.Also please donate towards the cost of this Online Magazine.

$15.00

Extra Information

Watch the details of the Citizenship Amendment Act – an Unvarnished truth to get the complete information on the law.