“As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who is demoralised is unable to assess true information. The facts tell him nothing, even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents and pictures….he will refuse to believe it… That’s the tragedy of the situation of demoralisation.”
–Yuri Bezmenov [1983]
Twins of Destiny
Providence seem to have played out an uncannily similar script for two disparate communities, namely the Jews and the Bengali Hindus, divided by geography but united in tragedy. Both communities boast of illustrious citizens, great thinkers, scientists, philosophers and poets, great minds who made a difference to the world. Both have also suffered a fair share of genocide and ethnic cleansing. While the Jews have suffered ages of religious persecution culminating in the “Final Solution“ by the Nazi, the Bengali Hindus have endured the likes of Great Calcutta Killing, Noakhali Genocide and the 1971 pogrom, orchestrated by genocidal Islamists like Hussain Sohrawardy, Yahya Khan and others of their ilk.
Yet there is a third similarity in the terms of the concept of “The Promised Land”, bestowed upon Abraham and his descendants, which if extrapolated to modern times would translate to “Homeland For the Jewish People”. The concept of the Promised Land is the central tenet of Zionism whose discourse fortify the legitimacy of the state of Israel.
The promised land and a forgotten messiah
On 20 June 1947, legislators from predominantly Hindu western part of Bengal at the Bengal Legislative Assembly voted against the inclusion of western Bengal in Pakistan and for the Partition of Bengal to create West Bengal, the “Promised Land” for the Bengali Hindus and include it in the Indian Union marking the culmination of the Hindu Homeland movement at the backdrop of gruesome genocide during the Partition.
The Messiah was none other than Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, whose superhuman efforts in the face of insurmountable odd, ensured that India retained a third of Bengal, a sanctuary for Bengali Hindus to live with dignity and honor, safe from the unspeakable atrocities of the Muslim league, corroborated by the terrible fate suffered by their co-religionists unfortunate enough to be trapped in the Eastern part of Pakistan. 20th June, the birthday of West Bengal, is fondly remembered as a symbol of victory of Hindu Bengal against Islamist Tyranny. It is proudly remembered that “while Jinnah divided India, Shyama divided Pakistan” – a ‘moth-eaten Pakistan’ by Jinnah’s own admission.
A curious case of selective amnesia
The similarity between the Hindu Bengalis and the Jews ends right here. The Jews have remembered and documented every single atrocity committed on their people in the form of literature, art, sculpture and movies since they have realized that those who forget history, are condemned to repeat it. The Holocaust have been immortalised in Oscar winning ‘Schindler’s List’, scripted by the Jewish Filmmaker Steven Spielberg. The Jews have fought and kept the surrounding malevolent Arabs at bay, with the resolve ‘Next Year in Jerusalem’.
The case with the Bengali Hindus on the other hand is that of selective amnesia coupled with a liberal dose of Stockholm Syndrome. West Bengal boasts of a plethora of Intellectuals, authors, poets, and filmmakers who have scripted an abundance of tearjerkers on the plight of the refugees but have never bothered to elaborate the root cause for their misery, not even in whispers lest it ruffle liberal feathers. This self-imposed censorship spawned generations of zombies oblivious of their past, clueless about the present and defenseless about the clear and present danger which stares them in the eye.
This business of whitewashing stooped down to such a ridiculous level that a prominent Bengali daily photoshopped the picture of a Bangladeshi Hindu riot victim to remove her vermillion mark, lest it disturb the fragile religious equilibrium by betraying her religious identity. While the progenies of these refugees proudly flash their ‘Bangladeshi’ ancestry in matrimonial advertisements and boast of huge landed ancestral property in Bangladesh, it is often mentioned in a lighter vein that if all these forgone lands as claimed by the refugees are added up, might actually overshoot the boundary of Bangladesh itself. However the topic never discussed is the raison d’etre of their mass migration, often in rags leaving their treasured lands. Or the topic is trivialized to the extent that the refugee crisis looks like a tourist immigration procedure. The fanatical football fans never ask the loaded question as to why East Bengal Club is in West Bengal but not where the name is suggestive of. Expectation of a spirited exaltation like ‘Next Year in Dhaka or Faridpur or Barisal’ seem like only a pipe dream.
A swarm of Red Locusts in the horizon
The decadence of West Bengal commenced after the demise of its founder Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherjee when the treacherous communists stepped in to fill in the void. The refugee movement was hijacked and their tyrannical reign set off the Bengali Hindu homeland in self-destruction mode. The rot that set in, continues to fester till date, prompting ridicule of the promised land as ‘Waste’ Bengal.
Demography Is destiny
The first onslaught of the Left front was on the basic premise of the creation of West Bengal, it’s demography favouring a Hindu majority. The farcical Liaquat–Nehru Pact ensured that population exchange never took place in West Bengal, as it happened for Punjab. The Muslim minority of India stayed put and prospered, whereas the Hindu Minority of East Pakistan was hounded out wave after wave. The left front encouraged Muslim infiltration from Bangladesh and created a captive vote bank for themselves after legitimizing their locus standi with fake documents, which was one of the trade secrets of their 34-year mammoth tenure in West Bengal.
This policy of legitimizing the Muslim infiltration drastically altered the demography of bordering districts resulting in the mass migration of Hindus to other regions, given the lack of safety and security from these unchecked infiltrations. The circumstances of their migration can be summed from a jeer popular among Bangladeshi criminals ‘Taka rakhbi Banke, Goru rakhbi campe, Bou rakhbi kothay’. Meaning you can keep your money secure in banks, your cattle in BSF camps, but how will you ensure the security of your wives?
During the Communist satrap Jyoti Basu’s iron curtain rule from 1981 to 1991, West Bengal’s percentage of Population growth exceeded that of India. Curiously while the Hindu population growth percentage declined, Muslim population growth increased from 29.55% to 36.89%. The demographic calamity that should have been defused with alacrity, was quietly kept in the back burner and allowed to fester where the sun never shines. India’s first Communist Home Minister Indrajit Gupta estimated the number of infiltrators to be around 1 crore on 6th May 1990. If the figure is extrapolated to the current date, alarm bells should be ringing at the highest quarters.
As per the census of 2011, the Muslim population in West Bengal is 27.2%, a jump of eight percentage points from the population of 19% in 1950. Another terrifying factor, is the demographic distribution of children between 0-6years. While the Muslim population was 25.2% in 1991, their children were 33.17%.This is a harbinger of the future of the demography of West Bengal, the very foundation of its being. To reap the fruits of the demographic dividend, the number of Bidhan Sabha seats declined in Hindu dominated areas and increased in Muslim dominated border areas like Murshidabad, Malda and Dinajpur. No political party worth its salt can ignore this trend. This altered demography is at the root of the howling in unison when CAA was formalised in parliament.
Breaking West Bengal brick by brick
During their tyrannical rule, the ruling left tried every trick in the book to break the back of the Bengali Hindus, from massacring Hindu refugees in Marichjhapi, to trivializing the rape of Hindu women as a routine affair. ’Orkom to kotoi hoi’ (It is just another one of the routine crimes) remarked Jyoti Basu with characteristic nonchalance on the infamous Bantala Rape and murder case. The cycle of communal violence during the left reign was majorly censored owing to their stranglehold over the local press and administration and absence of the electronic media.
The present Trinamool Congress regime has turned Communal riots into some sort of a cottage industry but owing to the abundance of social media, such occurrences can no longer be hidden from public discourse. Hence different localities of West Bengal, like Baduria, Kaliachak, Dhulagarh and the latest Telenipara pop up on the national radar for the wrong reasons, betraying the ticking time bomb that West Bengal really is.
Another nail in the coffin of West Bengal was implanted by left front was in the form of 10% reservation for Muslims in government jobs and education even though it is downright unconstitutional. The present incumbent has improved upon the act by including 97% of the Muslims in OBC A category, paving the way for future dominance of Muslims in the administrative machinery. Another well-known legacy of the Left Front is the destruction of West Bengal’s industry. The former ‘Sheffield of the East’ is now only a shadow of its former self thanks to the militant trade unionism of the left front. The disgruntled unemployed population, dependent on party doles, was easy picks for the ruling party to bolster their ranks and deployed as muscle during the state election.
A laboratory of Cultural Marxism
The final and the deadliest assault were at the soul of Hindu Bengali consciousness, their traditions and culture. When the socialist revolution failed to materialise beyond the Soviet Union, Marxist thinkers like Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukacs tried a root cause analysis. Their answer was that culture and religion blunted the proletariat’s revolutionary fervour, and the solution was that Marxists should carry out a “long march through the institutions” – universities and schools, government bureaucracies and the media – so that cultural values could be progressively altered to suit their purpose.
West Bengal was a text book case of a vision of Cultural Marxism in action.
The left front through its stranglehold over administration, media,intellectuals, and elite university campuses controlled the narrative in West Bengal. Age old traditions, religious beliefs, notions of nationalism were ridiculed to be replaced by their own versions of atheism and the utopia of classless society. There was a written circular for the deletion of the mention of Islamic atrocities from text books. Nationalism was dirty world in the lexicon of the left and imported Communist icons like Lenin, Marx and Stalin adorned the walls of many Bengali households. Ridiculing Hindu symbolism was hailed as progressive while turning a blind eye to similar dogma practiced by Islamists was an established norm.
A notorious case in point is a piece of pornographic poetry called ‘Mahayan’ carefully spread and popularised by radical atheist cabals which directed blasphemous sexual slurs at Hindu Gods, like Ram, Sita and Hanuman, ignoring Bengal’s age-old reverence to these deities. There was another furor, when Left Front Strongman Subhash Chakraborty visited the famous Tarapith temple and claimed his identity as a Hindu and a Brahmin. Consequently, his stakes dropped rapidly in the corridors of power and was swiftly banished from Marxist paradise by the all-pervasive Politburo. While liberals of Kolkata exploded in protest at the slightest pretext on topics as diverse as the atrocities in Vietnam to the plight of the potato farmers in Limpopo, or the vanishing penguins in Antarctica, their acute myopia and apathy with respect to unspeakable beast-like treatment ironically against their co-religionists in their own backyard, namely Islamic Republic Of Bangladesh is a case study in itself.
The ‘progressive’ intellectuals of the left front stable, spawned truckloads of literature, films and plays glorifying interfaith romance, only when the man is a Muslim and the woman is a Hindu but never ever the other way round as a sort of unwritten convention. They understood that the threat to life and limb exists from the Islamists, unlike from the brainwashed zombified Bengali Hindus. A popular example being Sunil Gangopadhyay’s novel ‘Dhulibasan’ where an elite married woman with a married NRI daughter settles down with a Muslim Rif-raff in rural Sundarbans who attempted to rape her previously. These ‘supari’ literature and motion pictures aimed at societal behaviour modification were celebrated as highest forms of Literature in leftist circles, promoted by the state machinery and rewarded in cash and kind.
The tradition of cultural aggression continues till date under the present regime. Some prominent examples being selective distortion of school syllabus, changing the Bengali word for rainbow Ramdhanu to Rangdhanu in keeping with pseudo-secular conventions. Some other equally ridiculous examples being “Ram came from the word roaming”, and the latest gem, Hussain Shah depicted as the avatar of Krishna. However lacking the subtlety of the crafty left, their brazen attempts at social re-engineering have almost always resulted in social media outrage and grabbed media headlines,only to be left with egg on their face.
Another subtle attempt is to rename West Bengal as ‘Bangla’, so that a curious teenager in the future would never ask the loaded question, where is East Bengal? Effectively burying the brutal history of partition. The aim is the ultimate Dhimmification of the Bengali Hindus, for easy assimilation into Greater Bangladesh, just like a boa constrictor softens its prey before swallowing it.
Winds of Change
We must understand that West Bengal is not merely a landmass, but a concept. It was a statement of defiance against the Islamists who wanted Calcutta to be the capital of Pakistan. With the digital revolution and the social media phenomenon and the blatant Muslim appeasement of the present regime, the youth of Bengal are longer susceptible to the narratives that leftist cabals dish out to them. They are now asking uncomfortable questions beyond comprehension of the apologists. The panic reaction of the administration has been brutal state repression and stoking fires of Bengali sub nationalism through splinter groups.
These fringe elements are working overtime to drive a wedge between Bengali Hindus and rest of India with their vitriol in National media. With the stellar performance of Nationalist elements in the last Lok Sabha elections, these fringe elements have been temporarily relegated to the sidelines along with their mentors but are by no means dead and looking for the opportune moment to strike.
The Future beckons
Rest of India has strong role to play for the consolidation of nationalism in Bengal. They must understand that to stop Ghazwa-e-Hind in its tracks, India’s Eastern flank must be protected. It should not be forgotten that the British domination of India started with the battle of Plassey in Bengal. The difference in threat perceptions from the eastern and western flanks must be analysed and acted upon. To drive home a Medical analogy, the security threat from Pakistan is like malaria, predictable and easily detectable through its symptoms and cured by medicine. On the other hand, the threat from Islamic Bangladesh is like Diabetes, not easily detected until at a fatal stage. The nationalists of Bengal need to be distinguished supported and not stereotyped as Communists by the rest of India.
For the Bengali Hindus, West Bengal is our last stand and need to be protected at all costs or be permanently stateless like the Sindhis and Kashmiri Pandits.
The future is uncertain but certainly not hopeless. Such a vision in indeed possible in the future where the bloodlines of Khudiram Bose, Surya Sen, Rashbehari Bose and Bagha Jatin will meet under the ruins of a Lenin statue over a steaming earthen cup of tea and greet with ‘Next Year In Dhaka’.
Author: Abhishek Sen
Abhishek Sen is a West Bengal based Business Consultant for consumer goods sector, political analyst and blogger. A travel enthusiast with an avid interest in the stock market.
