The ‘Joy Bangla’ Deception: A Review
“Joy Bangla” is a self-pride slogan of people calling themselves Bengali by culture and language. However, this book by Dr Kausik Gangopadhyay and Devavrata shows that “Joy Bangla” is a mask for a pure and simple Islamic imperialist design set to conquer Bangladesh completely and later include Assam, Tripura, and Bengal. Disturbing, shocking, and illuminating, this book explains the formation of Bangladesh and how it has become a textbook example of religious intolerance where the “other” (mainly Hindus and Buddhists) have been driven out, killed, or subjugated to a position of insignificance.
The genocide of Hindus follows a similar pattern in Kashmir and Pakistan, and sadly, few know about the persecution of the Hindus in Bangladesh. The problem of Bangladesh is at many levels of the individual, society, and state. Future hostilities will undoubtedly persist, primarily affecting West Bengal. At the core of the issue is the intolerance of one religion, and the sooner the problem is addressed by intellectuals besotted with secularism, the better India will be in its ability to deal with such religion-inspired intolerance. Numbers ultimately determine democracy, and weaponized demography can severely impact Hindus’ future fortunes.
The Majoritarian Myth
Kausik Gangopadhyay is a professor of economics at IIM-Kozhikode. He is the author of an important book, The Majoritarian Myth. The present book is a strong validation of the thesis proposed in the first book where he argues that it is a myth that only the majority instigates and perpetuates intolerance in society. Thus, the common narrative of alleged intolerance against Muslims (or even Christians, as per popular reports) pins the blame on the majority, the Hindus. An analogy for such thinking is the tendency to automatically blame the driver of the larger vehicle in any accident, regardless of the actual circumstances and facts.
Gangopadhyay offers a research-based response to the “Linear Theory of Social Evolution” (LTSE). Intolerance has nothing to do with dominant numbers in society, he points out. LTSE, a linear plan manufactured by the “liberal West” for social evolution in a community, has two components:
- The first component is a general linear plan that applies to all of humanity. Thus, all non-Christians or non-Muslims will become Christians or Muslims, respectively; only the proletariat will become rulers; only liberalism, with its troika principles of diversity, equity, and inclusivity, can give equality. This component makes a group consider one’s own culture, philosophy, ideology, or religion as the best.
- “Otherisation” of those not believing in the LTSE propositions with sometimes dire consequences. Thus, there will be eternal hell for non-Christians or non-Muslims; non-Communists will be labeled as “reactionaries” fit for elimination; people will be canceled; freedom of speech will be denied to people who do not believe in liberalism; and so on.
It is the belief in LTSE, by even a minority, that sparks intolerance and violence in society. Crucially, there is no scope for evidence-based change in this plan. A majority without an LTSE belief does not show intolerance. Gangopadhyay then shows how political Christianity, political Islam, communism or Marxism, Nazism, racism, present-day cultural Marxism, and liberalism are the most ardent promoters of LTSE. Nazism was a peculiar mixture of socialism, nationalism, and racism. Despite all the atrocities committed by the regime, Hitler did not perceive himself as a leader of the entire world.
Importantly, the author points out that nationalism (as a middle ground between the extremes of anarchy and liberalism), Hinduism, and Hindutva do not have LTSEs embedded in them since they do not subscribe to frozen theories or ideologies, and they change with the times to accommodate diversity organically and without violence.
What could explain the absence of LTSE among the Hindu majority? It may be important to understand SN Balagangadhara’s thesis that India has no religions. The phenomena we describe as Indic religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism) are practices and beliefs of a different kind. The various sampradayas and paramparas where gurus and lineages, rather than strict monopolist doctrines, are best-termed traditions, for want of a better word. Traditional cultures have a different configuration of dealing with the world, especially the “other.”
The Genocide of Hindus
In the preface of The ‘Joy Bangla’ Deception, Richard Benkin argues that the Holocaust against the Jewish people was also the result of inaction by “good people” who chose to ignore the atrocities. A clear parallel exists in the Hindu hatred exhibited by the state, society, and individuals of Bangladesh. The reduction in the population of a particular group is one of the clearest indicators of societal intolerance against that group, as The Majoritarian Myth demonstrates. The reduction happens through killing, conversion, or migration. Kashmir and Bangladesh are stark examples of this phenomenon.
Hindus now make up about 7% of the Bangladesh population, down from a third in 1951. Thus, Hindus who were one in three at the time of independence from Britain are now one in fifteen. On Direct Action Day (August 16, 1946), in Calcutta (now Kolkata), under the active participation of Chief Minister Suhrawardy, five thousand to ten thousand people, mostly Hindus, were killed. Incidentally, Suhrawardy is a hero in Bangladesh, and a park bearing his name stands in Dhaka, built on the remains of a destroyed Kali temple. Between August 1949 and January 1950, massive anti-Hindu pogroms resulted in the deaths of thousands and caused two million Bengali Hindus to migrate to India as refugees.
The communal riots in East Pakistan, which later became Bangladesh in 1971 (1950, 1964, 1965, 1989, 1990, 1992, 2013, 2014), are a common occurrence where Hindus bear the brunt of the violence. Similarly, the Enemy Property Act (later the Vested Property Act) was a ploy by the government to capture the lands of Hindus forced to migrate to India. Finally, in 1971, political problems, the details of which the authors explain in detail, led to the invasion by the West Pakistan Army into East Pakistan, or present-day Bangladesh. The Indian Army joined the Bangladeshi forces and defeated the Pakistani army. The latter had inflicted untold brutalities, and it was the Hindus who were most affected.
A plaque at Dhaka University lists 63 Hindus among the 66 people killed at the Jagannath Hall on 25 March 1971. Out of the three million victims of the Bangladesh genocide, it is estimated that about two and a half million were Hindus, despite constituting only 17% of the population at that time. This involved acts of killing, looting, and rape, as well as the destruction of temples. Bengali-speaking Muslims (Razakars) collaborated with the Pakistan Army and caused more damage to the Hindus than the army itself. 4000 Indian army soldiers died in the operation to liberate Bangladesh. The Pakistan Army surrendered on December 16, 1971. However, on the part of Bangladesh, as time unfolded, there has neither been gratitude for India nor Hindus.
Hindus started losing land between 1972 and 1980 even as the cry of “Joy Bangla” was peaking in intensity. Today, the persecution of Hindus has been normalized., where at election time they get special dispensation: 18,000 cases of rape alone were documented after the 2001 election. One scholar, Shariar Kabir, states that elections in Bangladesh are episodes of terror for religious minorities. It is not only the Hindu minorities but also the Buddhist Chakma tribes who are facing constant persecution and extinction. Nearly 20,000 Chakmas have lost their lives or have gone missing. About 100,000 of them have come to India as refugees.
Bengali Language and Cultural Identity
Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze’s book, An Uncertain Glory, almost makes one want to migrate to Bangladesh from India. The fascination for Bangladesh as a secular paradise is deep-rooted in these narratives. However, left-liberals typically tend to ignore or reject the facts. Bangladesh is transforming into an Islamic imperialist state, with the progressive decrease in the Hindu population, a complete lack of Buddhist representation, an Arabic-Persian infiltration into the Bengali language, and a more stringent propagation of ideas regarding “Greater Bangladesh,” which includes Assam, Tripura, and West Bengal. A great leader, loved by the left-liberals the world over, especially in India, is Abdul Hamid Bhasani, who propagated this idea of “Greater Bangladesh”.
Liberal secular narratives by the likes of Amartya Sen whitewash the persecution of Hindus in Bangladesh. Despite sharing a common language, the people of Bengal never developed a unified culture. Religion led to the division of Bengal into two distinct groups. For Bangladeshi Muslims, the Islamic identity takes precedence over the Bengali one, as the book demonstrates. An ancient and rich language with Vedic-Sanskrit roots has undergone alarming distortions to conform to an Islamic identity.
The transformation takes the form of “cleaning” Bengali of Sanskrit terms and replacing them with words of Persian or Arabic origin. Even in his time, Tagore found the Arabization of the Bengali language disturbing. The authors devote a whole chapter to Tagore’s stand against this Arabization. The authors reproduce excerpts from his essay, which sharply criticized the phenomenon of abusing the original language. He wrote, “It will be even sadder if the original form of the Bengali language is made miserable by abuse.” He wrote that conscious use in the Bengali language of obsolete Parsi-Arabic words is simply an intrusion and not an organic evolution of language. This aspect of Tagore is something the liberal/secular people ignore or forget about when talking about a “secular, syncretic, all-inclusive” Bengali language and culture.
Few Muslim litterateurs of the past could speak of syncretic culture, but for most, the Bengali language never united the Bangladeshi Muslims and Hindus into one grand culture. The authors state that the Bengali language was an issue only for official state recognition in combined Pakistan. Beyond that, the Bengali language rarely played a significant role in the story of the country. “Tamudduni Azadi” was the call of Muslim intellectuals way back in 1944, which meant cultural autonomy and a distinct East Pakistani literature separated from modern Bengali literature.
The authors note that the pre-Islamic Arab language serves as a framework for Islamic peoples and regions in their efforts to shape local languages. In India, Urdu, a language based on Sanskrit, shares a script with Arabic. Bangladesh is in the process of creating another such language, but the script is through the reconstruction of the Bengali language under the project of Tamadduni Azadi.
The Political Leaders
As the authors point out, Bangladesh has transformed from a secular rhetoric to an Islamic state. The most remarkable feature of the partition of India was Pakistan’s two parts (East and West), with all of India in between. India faces unrelenting hostility on both sides, although its eastern neighbor has done so over time and away from the glare of media. Thus, India can never be at peace. The authors trace the political history of East and West Pakistan and the broad reasons for the separation of East Pakistan as the independent country of Bangladesh, even though the Indian Army was responsible for the liberation of Bangladesh in 1971.
However, political policies throughout history have never aligned with the interests of Hindus. The Awami Muslim League removed the word “Muslim” from its title, apparently for secular reasons, but it was a pragmatic strategy to win elections. However, even under Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the father of Bangladesh’s struggle for independence, the political parties were not kind to the non-Muslim segments of the country. The authors write that he had no hesitation in calling Suhrawardy, the butcher of Calcutta, a “great man without any meanness.” At the core of his ideology remained the Muslim League resolution of Lahore in 1940.
The academic-political saga in Bangladesh concerning the Hindu community includes rewriting history to conform to an Islamic narrative and tracing the ancestry of the people to Arab and Iranian lands. People celebrate Bakhtiar Khilji, the man responsible for the destruction of Nalanda University. Scholars imagine that Hindus who convert to Islam experience social liberation. The influential scholar, Richard Eaton, himself says that Muslim intellectuals did not stress their religion’s ideal of social inequality as opposed to Hindu inequality but rather Islamic monotheism to Hindu polytheism. Thus, the frame of reference for comparing the two civilizations was theological and not social.
Bangladeshi laws have continuously deprived Hindus of their lands and properties. The political-academic combine has silently watched the propagation of “Greater Bangladesh”. Violent acts such as rape, murder, arson, and looting have targeted Hindus and their belongings. Such behavior includes even the destruction of temples. This has all led to the forced migration of people, motivated solely by the need to escape persecution rather than for economic reasons.
The Path of Islamic Imperialism
The decreasing proportion of Hindus (13.5 % in 1974, 8.96% in 2011, and 7.95% in 2022) is one of the most worrying indicators of intolerance in Bangladesh. Between 1964 and 2013, 11.3 million people left Bangladesh, which translates to 632 people daily. Before liberation in 1971, 705 people migrated per day. There was a decrease in migration during the following two decades, but since 1991, it has increased, reaching an all-time peak of 774 people per day between 2001 and 2013.
A scholar predicts that Bangladesh will be devoid of Hindus by 2043. The Noakhali riots of 1946 made the district Hindu-free. By 2043, all districts would be, in all probability, would have no Hindus. Bangladesh serves as a prime example of how a series of small-scale acts of violence can have a greater impact than a single, large-scale genocide. The recent attacks on ISKCON and the deaths of many secular bloggers in Bangladesh are indicative of the intolerance in Bangladeshi society. The authors dedicate the book to the many secular bloggers who lost their lives in recent times. Taslima Nasreen, the Bangladeshi author, has been in exile since 1994 for her writings.
Religions and Traditions
Hindus of both Bangladesh and Pakistan are on an irreversible path of extinction. In contrast, the number of Muslims in India has grown over decades, including in Gujarat, which is regularly characterized by the media and scholars as the most intolerant. The Majoritarian Myth proposes that it is the presence of LTSE, not majority numbers, that causes intolerance in society. Despite noises from left-liberal groups, how is it possible that India does not have the palpable intolerance present in neighboring countries? A quip goes that at partition, Muslims in the East and West of the subcontinent got Pakistan, and Muslims in India got secularism.
To improve one’s comprehension of the root issues, there is an urgent need to study the important thesis of SN Balagangadhara that India does not have religions. Indian “religious” groups (Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism, and Hinduism) belong to a different category, best termed traditions. These traditions have a different approach to dealing with the “other,” which is characterized by “indifference.”
When traditions come close, they can interact or even debate without violence, but the main configuration is “indifference to the differences,” as Balagangadhara explains. This attitude of “I am true, but you are not false” has been the hallmark of all traditional cultures, whether in India in contemporary times or the Greco-Roman cultures of the past. This perspective contrasts with religious cultures that say, “I am true, and you are false.”
The keys to understanding religion from a traditional perspective are intolerance and proselytization, as Balagangadhara explains. The Darkening Age by Catherine Nixey describes the equally aggressive nature of Christianity when it wiped out the pagan cultures of the Greco-Roman world. Balagangadhara demonstrates that the Enlightenment reduced the religious fervor of Christians, although the underlying theological concepts continued to spread in a secular context. However, a similar form of intellectual renaissance awaits the Islamic world. The so-called Islamic moderates turn out as apologists rather than challenging the disturbing facets of the imperialist expansionism of Islam based on theology.
Secularism served as a solution for the predominantly Christian European world during a specific period in its history when various denominations were in conflict with one another. The state separated from the church, but everyone knew what Christ, God, or Christianity meant.
Jakob De Roover (Europe, India, and the Limits of Secularism) explains how, despite frictions and episodes of violence, but never on the scale of the West, India handled its pluralism far better than the rest of the world at any time in history. The solution was not secularism, and the problems that arose were not due to its absence. Secularism was a fairly successful solution for a non-plural European world. Secularism, for India, was an inappropriate solution that required the conversion of its diverse traditions into “proper” religions.
Our colonial consciousness did not object; it perpetuated the colonial understanding of the existence of Indian religions. Traditionally, at the sociocultural level, India addressed alien religions that arrived with a dual dynamic of intolerance and proselytization by treating them like other traditions, adding to the rich diversity of the country. Indian pluralism absorbed alien religions by traditionalizing them, so the latter shifted its focus away from proselytization. They also became increasingly indifferent to the “other,” a process, of course, resisted by the evangelists and the madrasas.
Our intellectual understanding, instead of continuing this process, is in the reverse process of converting our traditions into religions and thus transitioning from indifference to intolerance. The fissures and polarisations seen today in Indian society are due to the religionizing of our traditions. Pakistan and Bangladesh, based on religion, should not surprise us. However, if we do not radically review our understanding of Indian culture—an effort that may take several generations—we are likely to follow the same path as Pakistan, leading to the destruction of Indian culture.
The ‘Joy Bangla’ Deception deserves serious study for understanding the dynamics of religions and traditions in the Indian subcontinent. Venkat Dhulipala’s book, Creating a New Medina, and Saumya Dey’s book, The Seedbed of Pakistan, provide valuable perspectives on the origins of our hostile neighbors and the religiously motivated partition. This book stands as an equally important resource to understand the increasing hostility and intolerance of Bangladesh, especially after its liberation in 1971.
This book demonstrates that secularism in an Islamic world is a near-impossible dream for people of other faiths bearing the brunt of the state, society, and individuals. The Majoritarian Myth explains the problem of intolerance in societies. At the root level, the solutions, always existing in Indian culture but waiting to be rediscovered, are in the Ghent School’s works, especially The Heathen in His Blindness.
Intellectuals from all sides need to work urgently to have a reboot of our understanding of the phenomena of traditions and religions. The current understanding threatens future generations, putting the beauty of Indian culture at risk. The threat of its disfigurement beyond recognition or repair is real.
