Bangladesh’s Indigenous Hindu Minority Protection and Proposing their Survival.
Bangladesh’s Indigenous Hindu
Minority Protection and
Proposing their Survival
At the
Annual North American Bengali
Convention (NABC) of 2023
Atlantic City, New Jersey, U.S.A.
Sachi G. Dastidar
During the 4th of July weekend,
as usual, the annual NABC convention was held, this time at Atlantic City, New Jersey. At
its initiation of Bengali Convention over four decades ago this writer was a member of the committee
and was in charge of organizing forums for the first three years until he
volunteered to give that to Dr. Alamgir. Several decades ago, NABC didn’t like
forums, but this year they allowed two separate forums on the issue of minority
protection and saving them from extermination. At British-created Muslim-Non-Muslim
partition of Bengal and India in 1947, Bangladesh, then called East Pakistan, had over 30%,
almost about a third of its population as non-Muslim indigenous Hindu minority,
with small numbers of Christians and Buddhists, in the world’s 5th most
populous nation, but now has barely 7% of the population as minority. Many
prominent secular Muslim leaders have warned the nation that unless we can
bring a tolerant society, we will head towards Afghanistan, with 0% indigenous
pre-Islam majority.
One of the forums, “Religious and
Ethnic Minority Protection Act of Bangladesh”, was chaired by Dr. Dilip Nath, Chair
of Indian Subcontinent Partition Documentation Project or ISPaD of New York
City, and the other forum was “Discussion on Investigative Report on the Atrocities
Committed Against Hindus in Bangladesh During Durga Puja Festival of 2021,” led
by Ashok Karmakar, Esq., a practicing Hindu minority lawyer and former bureaucrat
of Bangladesh. In Karmakar’s forum speakers were Hon. Tathagata Roy, a former Governor
of Indian states, humanist and a writer, Dr. Kali Pradip Chowdhury, Ashok Karmakar, and
this writer. Unfortunately, there were very few attendees although there were
large numbers of Bangladeshis, and East-Pakistani-Bangladeshi-Hindu-Refugee-Indian Americans, also called Bangals or East Bengalis in India at the convention. Sadly, hearing that one organization in New York has been
helping the poor and the oppressed peoples in Bangladesh, including her oppressed
indigenous Hindu minority, one wealthy minority mentioned that he doesn’t like
to help the oppressed. The speaker immediately challenged his hypocrisy. Although I writer was the "Chief Speaker," but there wasn't much time to discuss the newly released book. The Karmakar group documented their work with "The Bloodied Autumn: An Inventigative Report on Atrocities on Hindu Religious Minorities in Bangladesh During Durga Puja Festival in October 2021."
At Dr. Nath’s forum the picture was very
similar. Speakers were, Dr. Nuran Nabi, Hon. Tathagata Roy, Sitangshu Guha, Dr.
Masudul Hasan, Dr. Dwijen Bhattacharjya, Ashok Karmakar Esq, Utsav Chakrabarti,
and this writer. Nath moderated the session well. This forum wanted to send a request to Bangladesh Government
in protecting indigenous minorities before the upcoming election.
Here is the proposal for protecting
indigenous minority rights:
The Minority Protection Act of 2023
In consideration of the facts that,
•
The
People’s Republic of Bangladesh was born in 1971 as a secular democratic
nation through a liberation struggle in which the country’s religious &
ethnic minority groups actively participated and made supreme sacrifices as did
the progressive Muslims.
•
The constitution adopted by the Constituent
Assembly on December 4,1972, granted all the citizens of the nation equal
rights, and all the religions equal status, by adopting secularism.
•
The minorities of Bangladesh have been blatantly
discriminated against by every government and relentlessly brutalized by the
Islamists, particularly since the assassination of the father of the nation
Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman on August 15, 1975.
•
Through the 5th, 8th and
15th Amendments to the constitution, secularism was replaced with
Islam accorded the status of state-religion, thus ending secular democracy and
denuding the religious & ethnic minority groups of their equal rights and
equal status of their religions.
•
While successive governments have seized 2.8
million acres of land, factories, industries, etc., from the minorities,
particularly the Hindus, by deliberately retaining the Pakistani-era black law
called the Enemy Property Act.
•
While on the on hand the clerics have
historically denigrated the minority citizens, propagated hatred against them,
and even incited the common Muslims to grab their land, use their women for
sexual gratification, and forcibly convert them to Islam during the waz mahfils, politically backed
Islamists, on the other, have
conducted a vicious campaign of religious & ethnic cleansing often with
direct government complicity, e. g., the Logan Massacre of April 10, 1992. And,
because of this three-pronged oppression, tens of millions of minorities have
been forced to flee India. Consequently, whereas the Hindus represented 16% of
the country’s population (minorities 17%) in 1998 (CIA World Fact BOOK 2016) it
plummeted to 7.95 % in 2022, and they are predicted to become extinct in less than
30 Years (Abul Barakat, Dhaka Tribune,
Nov. 20, 2016).
•
No government has ever prosecuted and punished
the minority persecutors except for a handful of internationally publicized
cases, in other words every government has granted them impunity.
•
During the days leading up to the October 2001
election and thereafter, the coalition of BNP and Jamaat-E- Islami unleashed a reign of terror on the country’s
minorities which was so horrendous that The
Economist captioned one of its reports, “Bangladesh’s minorities: safe only
in the departure lounge” The Guardian
captioned one of its reports, “Rape and torture empties the villages.” If those
Islamists were to win the next election, they would undoubtedly plunge the
minorities into the same infernal situation.
•
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and her coalition
enjoy absolute majority in the parliament by virtue of which she can easily
pass a bill that can end violence against the minorities and deter future
atrocities against them.
Therefore, rather
than claiming contrary to the truth, that a “wonderful inter-communal harmony
exists in Bangladesh,” it is of the
utmost importance to end the on-going campaign of discrimination, persecution,
and propagation of hatred against the country’s non-Muslim citizens by the
clerics, by establishing a legal mechanism that is capable of deterring future
discrimination, denigration, and atrocities against the minorities, and
expeditiously dealing with incidents of minority persecution. Prime Minister
Sheikh Hasina and her coalition partners can easily
1
accomplish this highly desirable goal by immediately
fulfilling their long overdue 2018 electoral promise of enacting a Minority Protect Law.
In order for The Minority Protection Act of 2023 to be highly effective, should
include the following statutes and provisions[1]:
1. Designation
of Minority Status Law.
2. Hate
Crime & Hate Speech Prohibition Law.
3. Fast
Track Courts for the Trial of Minority Persecutors.
4. Creation
of a Civil Rights Division within the Supreme Court
5. Trial
of the Minority Persecutors Law.
6. Biased
Curriculum Modification Prohibition Law.
7. Protection
of the Religious Heritage Law.
8. Prohibition
of Forced Conversion Law.
9. Prohibition
of inter-faith forced- marriage Law.
10. Creation
of a Ministry of Minority Affairs.
11. Creation
of a National Minority Commission.
12. Prohibition
of Discrimination Law.
13. Religious
Heritage Protection Law.
14. Affirmative
Action Law
15. Creation
of Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian Foundations.
16. Mortmain
Property (Devottar Property like the Waqf property) Protection Law
17. Creation
of Land Commission for the indigenous peoples of the plains.
18. Protection
of the traditional religious Laws.
19. Judicial
Inquiry Commission.
20. Reinstatement
of the Constitution of 1972.
Rationale
for the reinstatement of the 1972 Constitution.
Although the above listed set of twenty laws & provisions working together can end violence against the minorities forever as well as prevent discrimination & atrocities against them, they can neither restore secular democracy nor equal status of all religions and equal rights of the minorities as citizens of the country. Hence the 1972 constitution must be reinstated.
Here are few pictures of the forums:
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