How long will this artistic misinformation and ridicule about refugees from East Pakistan/Bangladesh continue?

‘Pain of Partition’ is the theme of this year’s (2021) Durga Puja pandal of a club in south   Kolkata.   It became quite popular. The media covered it and many people posted pictures of the puja pandal on Facebook. One of them narrated the visuals of the theme – There is a railway compartment representing similar ones that brought the Hindu refugee families from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) to India.  Many household items of those days are scattered around.   Names of a number of places of East Pakistan from where the refugees came out are displayed on roadside mileposts. A nostalgic journey through memory lane?

Actually not. 

This depiction of the pain of partition is a well-designed deliberate left-secular artistic misinformation about Hindu refugees that has been around for the past seven decades. Let me explain.

If there was minimum respect for truth, the railway compartment displayed in the puja pandal should have bloodstains all over it. At the door of the compartment should have the (models) of blood-soaked corpses dressed in dhoti, torn sarees and a pile of broken bangles made of conch shells. This railways compartment would have then represented a similar Tripura bound train in 1950. The train, when it was on the Bhairav bridge crossing the Meghna river, was attacked by Muslims killing all Hindu male passengers, looting,  raping women. One train after another was stopped on Bhairav bridge and marauding gangs of Muslims who systematically killed   Hindu males and raped/ molested  Hindu women. 

Does that railway compartment in the puja pandal remotely bring back that memory?  

No.

In West Bengal, the main condition of any story, in book/film or puja pandal, about Hindu refugees is that you cannot say why these people had to flee. It cannot be even hinted that they have come to save their religion, culture and modesty of womenfolk threatened by the Muslims. It is a long-standing policy of the Left-secular combine to protect Islamic fundamentalism.  Ritwik Ghatak, an award-winning leftist filmmaker, is the leading example of peddling misinformation and ridicule about refugees from  East Pakistan. When the heroine of his award-winning film “Meghe Dhaka Tar”: cries out, ‘Dada, I want to live’,  dada (elder brother) dared not to say, “You are not dying due to poverty of refugee colony life. You are dying because of Islamic persecution which forced you to live in a shanty refugee colony”. 

In West Bengal, you can write or film sob stories on the plight of refugees provided you never mention who made them refugees.

The most disturbing thing is that such nostalgic portrayal declares Hindu refugees are a thing of the past. The fact is that the refugee issue is not a thing of the past, it is still a burning issue. Persecution of Hindus has not stopped for a single day in the last seventy years in East  Pakistan or Bangladesh. For the past seventy years, Hindus have been forced to move out from East  Pakistan and later Bangladesh. Even during writing this article, Durga Puja pandals in Bangladesh are being vandalized and obviously many Hindu families are planning to flee from  Bangladesh. The population of Hindus in East Pakistan/ Bangladesh have come down from 30% in 1947 to 8% today.  In times of peace, such a large migration has not occurred in the history of the world.       

From the Noakhali Hindu massacre of 1946 to the present – persecution of Hindus followed by migration is a continuous process.

My earnest request to left-secular combine: You stay secular, turn West Bengal to West Bangladesh, pursue your secular sharia complaint culture,  art etc. Please spare the refugees from East Pakistan/ Bangladesh. Don’t belittle their plights and spread misinformation about them. Ignore them as ignored by big label Hindu organizations of West Bengal.

14 October 2021 

Maha Navami

Kolkata