Thanks KamalDa for pointing out my limitation! Unfortunately what you have said here is almost nothing new. British policy of "Divide and Rule" is a well known fact. That's what I referred to in one of my responses to Dr. Bain's post. Jiten Roy has also acknowledged it in his last post on Allama Masriqi. Any way I must thank you for providing me with ready reference.
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Mr. Chakrabarty has little sense of history. He has not learned that Jinnah was hand picked by the British years after he left India voluntarily to lead the League. He received regular instructions from his masters from England on how to create dissent. The ruling parties in the Muslim majority areas were coerced to join the league and thus came the Lahore resolution. Pakistan was not created by the mass movement of the Muslims. It was created to sustain the British business interest in India. One should read Wali Khan's 'Facts are Facts' to understand the genesis of Pakistan. Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India, said during the uproar created by the genocide in Bangladesh, " If we could forecast the fast rise of China as a regional power, we would have left India undivided". This single sentence speaks volumes. The British rulers left eighteen months ahead of planned departure. Because, "If they waited that long, there would be no power to hand over" to paraphrase Raja Gopalacharya.
Among the achievement of 'independent' Bangladesh, notable is the fact that more minority property has been confiscated under 'the vested property act' than under 'the enemy property act' as it was known during the Pakistani rule. The majority religious community has been given preference to settle in minority areas like Chittagong Hill Tracts. No nation can be both secular and retain adherence to a religion. Ours is no exception. The mushroom growth of religious schools could lead us only to another dark age. In 1947, undivided India had 2500 madrassahs, now Bangladesh alone has about twenty times as many.
On Tue, May 8, 2012 at 4:20 AM, Sukhamaya Bain <subain1@yahoo.com> wrote:Mr. Subimal Chakrabarty's comments below have two irrational and untenable balancing acts.His point #3 sounds like the complete reversal of the Hindu-Muslim ratios in the cities and towns of Pakistan was due to the Hindus leaving their home voluntarily, and that most of them were businessmen, teachers, doctors and lawyers.The facts were: 1) Pakistan was hostile to the Hindus, that is why the Hindus left involuntarily; and 2) most of the Hindus (95% of the population) in a city like Karachi could not have been businessmen, teachers, doctors and lawyers; Pakistan has uprooted all kinds of Hindus from their home of centuries.The first part of his point #4 sounds too disingenuous. He really needs to stop his absurd attempts of finding similar trends in India. From India, the Muslim migration to Pakistan happened only during the turbulent time of the partition. India has not been hostile to its Muslims over the last 65 years, and the migration of Muslims from India to Pakistan stopped shortly after the partition in 1947. The Muslim fanatics of Bangladesh, many of them pose as secular, talk about communal riots in India, really to justify what they have been doing in Pakistan and Bangladesh; what they do not talk about is that the system in India has kept the Muslims of that land strong enough even to start riots against the Hindus.As for the educated people among the so-called schedule caste Hindu people in Bangladesh, Mr. Chakrabarty needs to learn that from among that class of people the ones that migrated to India got the opportunity to produce many more PhDs, doctors, engineers, etc. All indications are that they would have done far better without the partition of India in 1947. In spite of their foolish decision to join Pakistan in 1947, India even had a problem of unduly favoring the underclass, due to which many so-called high-caste Hindus would seek fraudulent means of getting schedule caste certificates for themselves, in order to get admitted to professional schools and in order to get jobs.Nobody said, 'independence of Bangladesh has done us nothing'. Under any measurement, Bangladesh has been better than Pakistan for all kinds of its citizens. Bangladesh has improved the life of the Muslims of the land tremendously. Even the Hindus, in spite of the hatred and discrimination against them in Bangladesh, have done many times better than what could be expected had the land remained a part of Pakistan. However, as Mr. Chakrabarty seems to have pointed out (not very clearly), so far Bangladesh has failed to deliver the expectations of reductions of disparity, communalism and persecution against the non-Muslims of the land.Sukhamaya Bain===========================================================From: subimal chakrabarty <subimal@yahoo.com>
To: "mukto-mona@yahoogroups.com" <mukto-mona@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, May 6, 2012 4:05 PM
Subject: Re: [mukto-mona] Partition: Panorama of the Indian history andhHuman tragedies,1. Jinnah was stubborn, Nehru was impatient, and the British were in a hurry and left almost every thing in a mess. Gandhi was helpless and resorted to seclusion. And the greatest blunder in the history of India occurred. Immediately after partition, India was on the verge of being a failed state. Soldiers of South Indian orgin had to be deployed to contain the communal violence that erupted. Good thing is that India survived the turmoil thanks to the secular, efficient, and visionary elements in the party. Gandhi's assassination turned out to be a boon as Hindu fanatics got cornered in Indian politics for a while.2. I agree that Hindu caste-ism had a lot to do with the panoramic change in India's political geography and demography. Jagajivan Ram wanted to defer independence of India by a decade. Jogen Mondal became the trump card for Muslim League and thereby created his own political death and personal tragedy (a good account has been provided in a recent historical novel titled "Barishaler Jogen Mondal" (about a 1100-page book) by a prominent WB writer named Debesh Roy.3. As regards complete reversal of Hindu-Muslim population ratios in Pakistan, I think it was generally true for for all cities and towns. The small town I was raised in had only a handful of Muslims (all professionals) even in late fifties. The reasons include the fact that businessmen, teachers, doctors, lawyeras, etc. came from caste Hindus. They started leaving for India creating a big vacuum.4. Similar trends could be found in the Indian states (Bihar, Nagaland, etc.) which have indigenous people as the majority. That is one of the fruits of independence that less privileged sections of the population enjoyed. I do not have the proper statistics. But I see a huge number of educated people with highest degrees including PH.D among the scheduled caste population in Bangladesh. We sometimes get carried away with frustration and try to believe that independence of Bangladesh has done us nothing. If we look at the statistics, we should be convinced that economically, socially, and culturally, the Bengalis in general have achieved a lot. What has not happened is the reduction of disparity, corruption, communal-ism, persecutions, and injustice. Probably in some areas things have become worse.=====================================================From: Sukhamaya Bain <subain1@yahoo.com>
To: "mukto-mona@yahoogroups.com" <mukto-mona@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Friday, May 4, 2012 7:18 PM
Subject: Re: [mukto-mona] Partition: Panorama of the Indian history andhHuman tragedies,The bottom line really is that the Hindu-Muslim two-nation theory for the creation of Pakistan was probably the second biggest curse in the history of the Indian subcontinent; the first being the Hindu caste system. (I call the Hindu caste system the number one curse, because it has caused the most suffering of humanities in the subcontinent over a long period of time, even though it did not cause any big scale killing of people within any short period of time.)Now, talking about the 1947 partition to create Pakistan in the subcontinent, just imagine Hyderabad and Junagadh as two other parts of Pakistan, land-locked by India, on top of the eastern and western parts being separated by more than a thousand miles of India. No sensible leadership could ask for such an arrangement of a country at that time.Looking at Pakistan over the last 65 years, I would say, today no sensible person, Hindu or Muslim, would regret the fact that Hyderabad, Junagadh, Kashmir or Tripura was not part of Pakistan in 1947 or thereafter. Even the innocent Kashmiri Muslims who got wrongful treatments from the Indian security personnel would not want Pakistan; they would probably want an independent Kashmir.While talking about the creation of Pakistan, we have to look at its after-effect that has been going on over the last 65 years. We can blame the British divide-and-conquer policy for the partition. However, we can not blame that for the reversal of the 95:5 Hindu-Muslim population ratio in Karachi within a few years after 1947, as Mr. Chakrabarty has noted below.Creation of Pakistan was horrific; worse was the purpose of it, i.e., to do what Pakistan has been doing to the non-Muslims of that land over the last 65 years. It is a shame that too many intellectuals of the subcontinent, both Muslims and Hindus, are callously indifferent to the curse of Pakistan, with too many Muslims on the side of injustice and
