On Friday (15th August), The Wire published an article by a Bangladeshi writer Ahmede Hussain that attempts to reframe the Pakistan Movement.
According to this narrative, the demand for Pakistan was not rooted in religious separatism but was supposedly a “class struggle” of peasants and oppressed groups against zamindars and colonial exploitation.
The piece further claims that Islam in Bengal functioned as a vehicle for equality, and therefore, the Partition of India should be seen less as a communal project and more as a pursuit of social justice.
At first glance, this framing may look like a sophisticated attempt to add nuance to history. But on closer inspection, it is a deeply flawed exercise in whitewashing. What masquerades as intellectual reinterpretation is an ideological project: to erase Hindu suffering and justify Islamic bigotry under the fashionable language of Marxism and “social justice.”
The dangerous outcome of such narratives is that they rehabilitate the very justifications once used to legitimise massacres like the Moplah riots of 1921, Direct Action Day, and the Noakhali genocide.
The Pakistan movement: Religion, not class, was the driving force
The Wire article insists that the Pakistan Movement in East Bengal was essentially a peasant uprising, where Islam merely served as a symbol of unity against class oppression. This framing deliberately downplays the explicitly religious character of the demand for Pakistan.
The reality is starkly different. Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s “Two-Nation Theory” was not a manifesto of class revolution; it was an unambiguous declaration that Hindus and Muslims could not live together as one nation.
The Muslim League did not mobilise the poor under the red flag of socialism but under the green banner of Islam. Its speeches, resolutions, and campaigns were saturated with religious appeals, not with the vocabulary of economic redistribution.
If the problem had truly been zamindari oppression, the natural solution would have been land reforms or socialist policies, not the carving out of an Islamic state. That the result was Pakistan, an explicitly religious homeland for Muslims, demolishes the myth that this was ever about class struggle. It was communal mobilisation, pure and simple.
Erasing the blood of Partition: Direct Action Day and Noakhali
A glaring omission in this revisionist framing is the deliberate forgetting of the horrific communal violence that preceded Partition. On Direct Action Day, 16th August, 1946, Jinnah called for a massive demonstration of Muslim strength. What followed in Calcutta was not a peasant uprising but an orchestrated massacre. For three days, the city turned into a slaughterhouse.
The scale of brutality defied human comprehension. Conservative estimates put the death toll at 4,000, though many sources suggest figures closer to 10,000. Over 100,000 Hindus were rendered homeless within three days. The violence was characterised by unprecedented sadism. Hindu women were gang-raped in front of their families before being murdered, children were butchered, and bodies were mutilated beyond recognition.
Eye-witness Philip Talbot described the horrific scenes-“bodies grotesquely bloated in the tropical heat, slashed bodies, bodies bludgeoned to death, bodies piled on push carts, bodies caught in drains, bodies stacked high in vacant lots”.
This was not a cry for land reforms; it was a naked display of Islamist terror designed to frighten Hindus into submission. The targets were not merely communal, but they were civilizational targets. Hindu temples were desecrated and destroyed, religious symbols defiled, and sacred texts burned. The attackers deliberately sought to erase the Hindu presence from Calcutta, considering the city as the future capital of East Pakistan.
Just two months later, on 10th October, 1946, the Noakhali genocide in East Bengal unfolded with chilling precision. More than 5,000 Hindus, mostly men and boys, were killed, and many times that number were forcibly converted to Islam. Hindus were forced to eat beef and recite the Islamic verses (kalma).
Thousands of Hindu women were raped, many in front of their children and husbands, and taken into captivity to be used as sex slaves. The systematic and gruesome attacks on the Hindu minority led to a sharp decline in their population.
What is shocking is that the Noakhali Hindu Genocide is referred to as “riots” whereas all indicators show that it was a full-fledged Genocide
The Moplah massacre: A century of whitewashing
On 25th September 1921, a horrifying massacre took place in Tuvvur, a village in Malappuram, Kerala. What began in August as part of the Khilafat movement, a campaign linked to the Ottoman Caliphate in Turkey and supported by Mahatma Gandhi, turned into brutal violence against Hindus.
In Tuvvur alone, 50 Hindus were killed and their bodies were dumped into a well. Over the next four months, before the killings could be stopped, more than 2,500 Hindus were slaughtered, often by beheading. Their bodies were thrown into wells simply because they refused to convert to Islam.
Around one lakh Hindus had to leave their homes and villages, becoming refugees overnight. Thousands of families were forced to convert under the threat of death. Even EMS Namboothiripad, who later became Kerala’s first Chief Minister, had to flee from his ancestral home to save his life.
Yet, successive governments and intellectuals deliberately renamed this horror as a “class struggle” or even a “freedom struggle.” Gandhi, Annie Besant, and Ambedkar documented the atrocities, yet the narrative of “agrarian revolt” persisted in academic and political circles. To this day, the Kerala government glorifies the perpetrators by listing them as “freedom fighters.”
The Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) has clarified that the Moplah uprising was no freedom struggle but a jihadist attempt to establish an Islamic caliphate. Still, the habit of cloaking Islamic violence in Marxist vocabulary persists.
Moplah Massacre was not a peasant revolt
The true meaning of Suhadah (martyr) was recaptioned in Islam, when their cause of war was purely religion, and in that name brutally killed, raped and robbed enormous non-Islamic people. According to them, Islamic martyrs, who die during this so-called rebellion, cross the heaven’s gate on horses caparisoned with precious stones, welcomed by ‘Houries’ (Virgin angels) and other fantasies. For an illiterate Eranadan Moplah, these promises of after life were more welcoming than the mundane earthly life he lived.
The Freedom movements in India demanded every man and women to join hands towards a common cause. It was Mahatma Gandhi’s idea to combine the Khilafat movement with the Swaraj movement, thinking this will initiate the Muslims who were staying away to participate in our struggle for freedom. Little he knew about the fates of Hindus, when thousands were sacrificed and killed in the name of Islam. The Indian freedom fighters dreamt about a free country, but the Khilafatites, dreamt about a free Islamic country.
This was the beginning of 1921 Mappila Jihad. “Nara-e-Takbir, Allahu Akbar”, these slogans did not resonate with nationalist vigour or peasantry strength. Neither did they carry the Swaraj Flag (designed by Pingali Venkayya) nor the Khilafat flag (two intersecting circles). Instead, the rioters marched with the black ‘Banner of Eagle’ also known as rāyat al-`uqāb, the historical flag flown by Muhammad in Islamic tradition, an eschatological symbol in Shi’a Islam, heralding the arrival of the Mahdi, and a symbol used in Islamism and Jihadism.
They attacked using iron rods. The police bayonets were no match to their rising numbers. Nine mobs were killed in the police firing. When the crowd withdrew, the British captured Kunjikhadar, Secretary of Thanur Khilafat Committee and 40 other Mappilas.
The wheels of the British administration were immobile for a while, and the fundamentalists were up in arms. They raided and plundered police stations, treasuries, courts, and other government offices. These religious disturbances soon spread to the nearby areas of Malappuram like wildfire.
Social justice as a weapon against Sanatanis
The pattern is unmistakable. Whenever Hindus are victims of Islamic violence, the atrocity is rebranded through the vocabulary of “social justice.” When Hindus are massacred, the explanation shifts: it was not jihad, it was “class struggle.” It was not communal violence; it was “anti-colonial resistance.” The victims are erased, and the perpetrators are recast as revolutionaries.
This is a cynical exploitation of social justice language. Instead of genuinely addressing caste inequalities or peasant exploitation, the terms are weaponised to justify Islamic aggression. The Moplahs were excused because their Hindu victims were landlords.
The Pakistan Movement is reframed because Hindus were “upper-caste oppressors.” But the truth is that thousands of poor Hindu peasants, artisans, and Dalits were among those slaughtered or forcibly converted. Their suffering is erased under the alibi of a “larger struggle.”
This is not just distortion; it is a second violence. The victims lose not only their lives and homes but also the dignity of their memory.
The betrayal of partition: No social justice in Pakistan
Even if one entertains the argument that the Partition was a social revolution, the outcome exposes the lie. Did Pakistan deliver equality for the oppressed?
The answer is a resounding no. Pakistan quickly evolved into a feudal-military state dominated by elites. Land reforms failed, peasants remained impoverished, and minorities, particularly Hindus, were persecuted more than ever. Far from liberation, Pakistan became a nightmare for both its minorities and its poor.
Thus, the claim that the Pakistan Movement was about social justice collapses not only in its origins but also in its consequences.
The danger of such historical revisionism is not confined to the past. By whitewashing Islamic violence under the garb of social justice, media platforms like The Wire enable the same ideological justifications that continue to put Hindu communities at risk.
The religious hatred that fuels the violence is erased. The message is clear: Hindu lives do not matter on their terms; they only matter if their deaths can be repurposed into someone else’s narrative of struggle.
