This past week, the persecution of religious minorities in Pakistan was raised in India’s Parliament and led to Union Minister for External Affairs SM Krishna making a statement, with a particular reference to Pakistan’s tiny but beleaguered Hindu community. There was much discussion on the subject in political circles, the media and the social media too.
As can be expected, views varied strongly. There were sections that wanted default refugee status for Hindus who fled or left Pakistan and came to India. There were calls for immediate offers of citizenship to these embattled people. Others took the view that India should petition and raise the issue with the international community. After all, there were clearly-defined principles as to how countries must treat, and the freedom and autonomy they must accord, their minorities. The common-sense retort to that was that it was impossible for the international community to get Pakistan to ensure anything at all, whether related to its minority communities or indeed its majority community as well.
It has been easy to consider the matter of Hindus in Pakistan as a cause for the Indian Right, for the BJP and the Sangh Parivar. It is equally easy to contend that the Left and the Congress, the urban intelligentsia and foreign policy pundits must take a more detached view, calling for international action and cautioning against emotionalism and entanglement in domestic politics.
While there are persuasive arguments to be made on either side, it is worth asking if the implicit divide on the question of India’s responsibility vis-à-vis Pakistan’s Hindus that we see today has been with us ever since 1947. Were things always so clear cut?
Some years ago, this writer was researching the history of religious tensions and violence in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in the post-Partition period. An educative set of incidents from 1964 that emerged shook a lot of contemporary certitudes.
On December 26, 1963, a lock of hair believed to belong to the Prophet disappeared from Srinagar’s Hazratbal shrine. There was uproar in the Kashmir Valley. Crowds of 1,00,000 and more came out on the streets and stone-throwing and violence resulted, in turn triggering police firing. On January 4, 1964, the holy relic reappeared, almost as mysteriously as it had vanished. There were many theories about the episode, including the role of Indian intelligence agencies, but that should not detain us here. The locus of this article is not Kashmir, it is further east in the sub-continent.
On January 3, what had begun as a peaceful protest against the theft in Hazratbal, turned into an angry mob in Khulna, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). The brunt of the fury was borne by Khulna’s Hindus. The riots spread to Jessore and other cities in East Pakistan/East Bengal. There was growing unrest in India, especially in West Bengal, home to many Hindu migrants from East Pakistan, some of whom still had relatives across the Padma.
Politicians jumped in. A Congress session was in progress. VK Krishna Menon, eager to establish his nationalist and hawkish credentials after the humiliation of the China war just over a year earlier, accused Pakistan of atrocities on its minorities. He charged it with waging a “war of hostages”.
In Calcutta, Opposition parties — largely from the Left, since the Congress ruled in Writers’ Buildings, as it did in South Block — and student organisations started protesting outside the Pakistan Deputy High Commission. Makhan Pal, leader of the Revolutionary Socialist Party — and a familiar name to anybody who followed Left Front politics in West Bengal in the 1980s — was vocal in demanding (East) Pakistani authorities protect their Hindu citizens. In border villages, rumours spread of a Pakistani attack. These were quickly believed, given memories of the Chinese invasion of 1962. Hindu refugees (both from within India and from East Pakistan) began moving towards Calcutta.
Meanwhile, protesting students in Calcutta turned unruly, and one of them was shot by the police. This made the situation worse, rioting was now inevitable and the Muslim community in then Calcutta came under attack in a counter-mobilisation. Left parties in West Bengal had a strong constituency among Partition-era refugees and so were accused of fanning the fires. Full-scale riots broke out in Calcutta and in outlying districts. By January 11, the Army had been called in and many neighbourhoods of Calcutta were under curfew.
It was the city’s most lethal religious battle since the 1940s. There were cases of stabbing on the streets, the Army and curfew measures proved ineffective in entirely curbing the violence. An exhibition commemorating Swami Vivekananda’s birth centenary was attacked at the Park Circus Maidan in south Calcutta and partially burnt down. At this point, Gulzari Lal Nanda, then Union Minister for Home Affairs, flew down to assist the State Government.
By January 24 peace had returned. Curfew had been lifted from all parts of Calcutta. The previous fortnight had claimed 65 lives. This included 21 Hindus and eight Muslims who fell to police bullets.
Now comes the interesting aftermath. On January 27, a ‘citizens’ convention’ was held in a hall at the Calcutta University Institute. Here all political parties, other than the Congress, demanded the removal of restrictions on the migration of Hindus from Pakistan to India.
Jyoti Basu was a speaker at this convention, where the Communist Party of India (it hadn’t yet been divided and the CPI(M) had not been born), the Forward Bloc and even something called the Bolshevik Party shared a platform with, and agreed on the status of Pakistan’s Hindu minorities with, the Jana Sangh. Basu expressed his anguish at the plight of Hindus in East Pakistan. Nevertheless, he was heckled by the crowd because — ever a better communist than a Hindu — he refused to criticise China for its nexus with Pakistan.
Today, the CPI(M) and the other Left parties would not want to be reminded of the chilling Calcutta January of 1964. Today, the business of Hindus in Pakistan is a BJP affair, a point for the Hindu Right and supposedly not a mainstream concern. Fifty years ago it was all so different. Was Indian politics more honest then — or simply just as expedient?
The above is written by Ashok Mallick, a regular writer in "The Pioneer"
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