West Bengal, a land of sages like Swami Vivekananda, Ramakrishna Paramahansa, Srila Prabhupada, Sri Aurobindo, and Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, and the birth place of reformers, philosophers, and freedom fighters like Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Rabindranath Tagore, Subhash Chandra Bose, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Chittaranjan Das, and Shyama Prasad Mukherjee (thanks to whose efforts West Bengal became a part of India and not Pakistan in 1947) is today a land where, even in areas not too far from Calcutta, a silent jihad and a surreptitious ethnic cleansing are taking place.
Demographic changes in West Bengal and Assam have actually been going on for years. It’s nothing new. Mass infiltration and settlement of Bangladeshi Muslims coming in search of lebensraum into these regions had been taking place for decades. India knew this but had always been complacent. After Independence, Muslim migrations into India had even been encouraged due to vote-bank politics and the hunger of the Congress Party and CPI-M for Muslim votes.
Designs for a Greater Bangla Islamic Caliphate
According to Dr. Mohit Roy, an expert on Indo-Bangladesh relations and demographic changes, Muslim Bangladeshi infiltrators now make up 4 percent of India’s population, but in vast areas of Bengal and Assam, the situation has now reached a tipping point. In her article published in American Thinker, Janet Levy reports that
At partitioning, the Muslim population of West Bengal stood at 12% and the Hindu population of East Bengal 30%. Today, with massive Muslim immigration, Hindu persecution and forced conversions, West Bengal’s Muslim population has increased to 27% (up to 63% in some districts), as per the 2011 census and Bangladesh’s Hindu population has decreased to 8%. While the situation for Hindus in Bangladesh is certainly dire, life has become increasingly difficult for Hindus in West Bengal, home to a Muslim-appeasing government and a breeding ground and safe haven for terrorists. For several years, West Bengal has suffered under apparent Muslim-planned riots designed to implement shariah, extract government concessions and grab more territory.
The demographic changes in West Bengal have reached a point where the consequence has been a wave of aggressive Islamization, a jihadi consolidation, and a suicidal politics that harks back to the genocidal era of 1946 -1947. The congruence of all of these is resulting in a fresh Hindu Bengali exodus from what have traditionally been Hindu lands.
Remote, and thus vulnerable and mostly poor villages are being targeted under a greater project to merge West Bengal and Assam with Bangladesh by driving out non-Muslims. According to a report titled ‘Greater Islamic Bangladesh’ – A Serious Threat to Indian Integrity, Sovereignty and Hindu Majority published on the Pamela Geller website which monitors global jihad,
“The NIA (National Investigation Agency) has smelled a deeper conspiracy of the establishment of a Greater Islamic Bangladesh hatched by the ISI (Inter service Intelligence) of Pakistan and DGFI (Director General of Foreign Intelligence) of Bangladesh with other terror modules engaged in Burdwan Blast. As per revelation through recovered documents by the NIA suggest that a bigger conspiracy was being materialized in different parts of Burdwan, Murshidabad, Birbhum, Nadia, Jalpaiguri and in different madrasas stretched out in the border areas of West Bengal. The documents reflect that the terror modules working on brain-wash of the Bengal Jihadis to establish a ‘Greater Islamic Bangladesh’ considering the territory of the last nawab of Bengal Siraj ud-daulah (1733-1757), as on 1750 AD, who was infamous for his anti-Hindu cruelty and debauchery. The proposed Greater Islamic Bangladesh includes whole of present Bangladesh, West Bengal, Assam, Tripura, Meghalaya, Tripura and parts of Bihar, Jharkhand and Orissa.”
Bangladeshi authorities also acknowledge jihadist plans for an eastern Islamic caliphate. Reporting on the killing of a Hindu priest of the Deviganj temple who was beheaded on 21st February 2016 near Panchagar, 494 km north of Dhaka, by militants suspected to belong to Jamaatul Mujahedeen Bangladesh (JMB), Pakistani newspaper Dawn quotes deputy director general of police, Humayun Kabir, as saying that “The motive for the killing was probably to create an unstable situation in the country and ultimately establish a caliphate.”
This side of the border, in West Bengal, vote bank politics of the communist CPI-M government earlier and the pro-Islamist stance of the TMC government subsequently have facilitated the Mughalistan project by emboldening the jihadi forces in the state. State patronage under TMC rule has rendered Islamists untouchable even by Central Government security forces.
Mamata Bannerji’s policies have resulted in a rapid Islamization of West Bengal and the concomitant creation of a sociopolitical climate in which Hindus are attacked, killed and prevented from practicing their religion, Hindu homesteads and properties are looted and destroyed, and young Hindu girls are kidnapped, raped, and forcibly converted to Islam and then often sold into prostitution or killed.
In areas where there is a substantial Muslim presence, entire villages are being targeted where the Hindus are terrorized, demoralized and displaced. As Anirban Banerjee reports in his comprehensive piece on the growth of jihadi culture in West Bengal, West Bengal as a Jihadi Playground, the Hindu population is losing land and livelihood and is migrating as laborers to safer places.
In this silent war on Bengali Hindus, Hindu temples have been destroyed or vandalized, confirmed rapes by Bangladeshis have taken place, state money worth crores of rupees has been disbursed to mosques, and Hindu leaders have been murdered in West Bengal. In addition, it is believed 1,200,000 Bangladeshis have illegally crossed into India through Bengal in the same period (since 2011).
Marxist Islamist Nexus in the Garb of Secularism
Human rights abuses against the Hindus of West and East Bengal have been going on for years, yet the elite, leftist, intellectual class and the “secular” media and journalists in Calcutta and Delhi choose to be blind to it. None of the secular Bengali writers, journalists and intellectuals who try to dominate public discourse in India and constantly attack the Hindu civilizational foundations of India have questioned Mamata on Muslim appeasement like Taslima Nasreen did recently.
While Islamist forces prepare the ground for the inclusion of West Bengal in an Islamic Caliphate, mainstream media in Bengal and rest of India seems to be completely disinterested and disconnected, and does not cover any of this stuff. Calcutta’s two leading English dailies, The Statesman and The Telegraph, mouthpieces of Bengal’s entrenched communist ideology, for example, routinely black out such news. With reference to The Telegraph, this is what Shefali Vaidya writes in the context of l’affaire JNU:
“This is the front page of an ‘Indian’ newspaper. The biggest and most prominent headline that covers 75% of the space is dedicated to a 30 year freeloader who shouted anti-India slogans and organised a march to protest against the hanging of a terrorist after a full trial. This is the same man who hid like a sewer rat for one week only to resurface now to play the ‘minority’ card. A 22 year old man made the supreme sacrifice to defend that VERY freedom that Umar Khalid abused with such impunity, and the Telegraph dedicates the bottom corner of the front page to him.”
On social media, one encounters throngs of leftist Bengali “intellectuals,” who have now fanned out all over India. Many of them are themselves from refugee families who fled East Bengal (former name of Bangladesh) during one of the many cyclical periods Hindu mass killings there, and who were completely unable to resist Islamic fundamentalism there in any meaningful way. They all seem to be cut from the same cloth – that of Marxist ideology – who now bemoan the new awakening of Indian Hindu political and social consciousness as evil or communal, and are unable or unwilling to see reality of jihad in their own backyard. Their ostrich like attitude seems very puzzling until one reads an exposé like West Bengal: the Enemy Within to understand why Marxists and radical Islam are natural allies in India and how Marxists and radical Islamists collaborate to nurture hate and violence towards mainstream society.
It is also a fact that politically correct Western media does not tell the story of Muslim persecution of Hindus in India. Neither does mainstream media in India report violence against Hindus, especially when it is committed by Muslims.
The Sorry Condition of Hindu Bengal
One thus feels compelled to signal Tapan Ghosh, founder of Hindu Samhati, as one lone brave soul who has been documenting and raising awareness about the atrocities on the simple and helpless Hindu victims of Islamic jihad, who up until the very recent Malda riots that began on 4th January 2016, tended to be mostly poor, rural agrarians with very low educational attainment levels.
His organization, Hindu Samhati, courageously investigates, documents and reports on the Islamic persecution of Hindus in West Bengal, often times at great risk to the lives of the investigators. According to Ghosh, there are about 32,000 villages in West Bengal that are sites of active ethnic cleansing. There are multiple acts of violence against Hindus in many places daily and only some get noticed. In many villages and towns, the Hindu population has dropped to below 50 percent due to an earlier exodus of middle-class Hindus, and now only the poor Hindu segment is left to bear the brunt of ethnic cleansing. Thousands of Hindu girls disappear in the state every year.
If all this situation does not change, the story of East Bengal will soon be repeated in West Bengal. Hindus, just a few decades ago, were 40 percent of the population of East Bengal. Today they make up just 8 percent of the population there.
While the disenfranchised rural Hindu segment has been enduring soft jihad for years now and their victimization was never reported in mainstream media, the recent Malda attacks show how the organizers of micro-level jihad in Bengal have upped the ante by expanding the magnitude and the focus of their operations. A mob of 2,50,000 Muslims wreaked havoc in Malda district, West Bengal, ostensibly over a blasphemous remark. After Malda, the violence also spread to Birbhum and to Purnea in Bihar state. The events in Malda, which secularists have tried to pass off as a simple law and order related disturbance, are a warning signal that West Bengal may be heading towards a Kosovo-like situation with the rise of Islamism which poses a great danger to India’s security and territorial integrity by creating a civil-war like situation. One can read more about Malda in the context of the Greater Bangladesh project here. To know more about the background context to the 2016 Malda riots, one may read another interesting piece: Everything You Wanted To read About Malda Violence, But Were too Secular to Ask.
The greatest irony of India’s blood soaked partition – which was carried out for the creation of a separate homeland for the Muslims – is that today, both Bengals are reeling under Islamic fanaticism. Sheikh Hasina has done more to combat Islamic fundamentalism in her country than Mamta Banerjee, who has actually encouraged it in her state.
It must be remembered that “West Bengal was created by negotiating about 35% area from erstwhile Bengal as a safe sanctuary for the Hindus.” Given the demographic changes that have already taken place and the damage that has already been done, feasible options to correct the situation seem very few.
How do you integrate a large, powerful, and aggressive minority that has an exponential growth rate, looks upon the Mughal Empire and past Caliphates as Utopia, considers national borders as irrelevant, demonstrates a strong will to not assimilate, overwhelms a meek majority, and bides its time as it waits for the day it can fully impose its sharia on the rest of the population?
Noting that “The land was partitioned on basis of religious demography alone but unfortunately unlike Punjab (both east-Indian and west-Pakistani) population exchange was not done,” and that “crores of illegal Bangladeshi Muslim invaders have captured major parts of the state with the help of local Muslims who were not sent to Bangladesh as Punjabi Muslims from Indian Punjab to Pakistan,” Subarno Pande suggests a Kashmir-like Article 370 constitutional arrangement for West Bengal that would give only Hindu Bengalis voting and permanent civic rights in West Bengal. He also advocates the completion of the unfinished business of the exchange of the Muslim and non-Muslim populations of West Bengal and Bangladesh, and the formation of a Bengal Regiment comprising solely Bengali Hindu youths for the protection of the border in lieu of the BSF guards, some of whom reportedly allow Bangladeshis to cross into India for a few hundred rupees.
While this may be the new dream of many a Hindu Bengali who now clearly sees the writing on the wall, and while this may not very different from Malaysia’s Bhumiputra (sons of the soil) policies designed to ensure the domination of Malay Muslims, it might already be too late for such measures in Bengal. One can only imagine the violence that will erupt all over India if the first two ideas were even broached in the public political sphere. At any rate, the time has come to oust Mamata Banerjee from power so that further ethnic cleansing of Hindus can at least be stopped.
Why the 2016 Election is Critical for an Indian Future
In 2014, a serious allegation “leveled against Mamata Banerjee and her closest aides for helping Jamaat-e-Islami in Bangladesh to promote a political Jihad in West Bengal with Saradha cheat fund money,” was not pursued to its logical conclusion by her political opponents. The Central investigative agencies also dropped the ball in this regard. Nevertheless, public discontent against Mamata is at an all-time high, state assembly elections will take place in May this year, and Mamata will be more than ever dependent on the Muslim vote to stay in power.
As Bengal gears up for elections, a shocking front page news item published in The Telegraph (of all places!) on Feb 17, 2016, indicates how Mamata Banerjee plans to increase the number of Muslim voters to augment her share of votes. The Telegraph reported has that Mamata Banerjee has declared that “the Bengal government will urge the Centre to give citizenship to all Bangladeshis living in the state for five years or more, a move that will impact Assembly poll results as 10 districts share borders with the neighboring country.”
According to the news item, state officials themselves admit that there are “huge” numbers of undocumented Bangladeshis in the 10 districts bordering Bangladesh. The piece also quotes an unnamed TMC minister as saying “People who have identity documents but want citizenship certificates can decide the electoral outcome in at least 50 Assembly seats in the 10 districts. They are mainly from the minority community. We want to get their votes.”
This brazen anti-people and anti-national strategy that TMC is plotting to add more Bangladeshi Muslims to the electoral rolls should be of grave concern to all right minded people, and especially to all Bengalis.
Nationalist forces in the state should not hesitate to vocalize and propagate the truth to raise the political consciousness of the majority Hindu population. This will be a difficult process given the previous long-term communist indoctrination of Bengal’s masses, the anti-Hindu bias of the state’s administrative apparatus, and the stoic silence of the state’s Marxist controlled media outlets who have a long tradition of censoring all information relating to anti-Hindu violence and jihad. Even with Modi at the Centre, a BJP government at the state level might just be the only way to keep Bengal from slipping away from its Hindu identity and from India.
The stakes are very high. If nationalists do not come to power now, jihad-propelled demographic changes will only accelerate and it is certain that we will see a violent, “democratically” orchestrated movement for the secession of Bengal from India in our own lifetime. The Islamist demonstrations and riots in Malda, and the recent call for breaking up India emanating from JNU, an influential university with heavy leftist and Islamist leanings situated in the very heart of the national capital, are clear indications where things are headed.
Given TMC’s nefarious plans to court the Islamist lobby further, perhaps the biggest challenge and ultimate obstacle for the BJP this time will not be how to awaken or win the confidence of the Hindu voters, but rather the usual rigging of elections and booth capturing by the TMC goons who will be inside and outside the polling stations when elections take place this summer.
Defeating the Islamist forces and their allies like the TMC will require tremendous will and tremendous Hindu unity within Bengal. In another century, some great sons of Bengal like Vivekananda and Tagore had urged India to awaken. Today, India needs to urge Bengal to wake up!
~ Dr. Shonu Nangia, Associate Professor of Foreign Languages, Department of Arts, English and Humanities, Louisiana State University at Alexandria
