Author: Statesman News Service
Publication: The Statesman
Date: February 10, 2002
Hindus in Bangladesh, who comprise
about 10 per cent of the population, are now left with three options. They
can embrace Islam, leave the country or commit suicide, Mr Salam Azad,
author and chief executive of Amity for Peace, a human rights organisation,
said here today. He was in the city to release the Hindi version of his
book, Hindu Sampraday Keno Bangladesh Tyag Korcche (Why the Hindu Community
is Leaving Bangladesh), at the Book Fair.
Mr Azad said systematic ethnic cleansing
has been on since the four-party alliance led by Begum Khaleda Zia came
to power after 1 October elections last year. The three allies of Prime
Minister Zia's Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) - Jamaat-e-Islami, Islami
Oikya Jote and Jatiya Party (Manju) - are fundamentalist organisations.
Mr Azad said he had found that the
post-election atrocities were concentrated in districts with large Hindu
populations.
This supports the view that it is
a conscious policy of ethnic cleansing and not the kind of stray violence
that had taken place as a reaction to the Babari Masjid demolition.
The atrocities committed in the
post-poll period, according to Mr Azad, is unprecedented since the freedom
struggle of 1971. These are documented in a book, Post-election Atrocities
on the Hindus of Bangladesh, to be published simultaneously from Kolkata
and Dhaka. The situation, Mr Azad says, would not have been so bad if Awami
League workers had not fled their neighbourhoods for fear of their own
safety after the polls.
If the minorities have any hope
of survival with dignity, he says, it comes from that section of civil
society, consisting of people like Mr Shahriar Kabir, which is ready to
brave the wrath of Muslim fundamentalists.
Kabir, a journalist, was attending
a reception to celebrate his release from jail at the Chittagong Press
Club earlier this week when one person was killed and several wounded in
a bomb attack. Kabir's arrest in November had raised a storm. The minorities
will also have a future if a secular constitution is restored in Bangladesh,
Mr Azad says.
Terror tactics like the Press Club
attack, Mr Azad says, was the lesser of the evils feared by secular intellectuals,
most of whom had received indirect threats at the time of Kabir's arrest.
"What makes them more scared," he said, "is the fact that some of Prime
Minister Zia's allies - who even occupy senior Cabinet berths - were staunch
opponents of the country's freedom struggle in 1971 and have not changed
in the slightest since then."
One factor that gives the intellectuals
courage is the refusal, by former Awami League Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina,
to seek bail in a single case filed by the government against her.
