They are aware that they are witnessing their own end. Much like millions of “Mischlinge” (legal pejorative used in Nazi Germany to describe Jews) knew when they were sent off to be starved and then gassed in concentration camps run by the Nazis sworn to Hitler’s demonic racial fetishes.
That fear of certain annihilation at the hands of Islamist brigands has led thousands of Hindus to stage a protest march on the streets of Dhaka amidst the anarchy in Bangladesh. It’s very much the proverbial last throw of the dice. Unfortunately, in this game of chance, the odds of anyone noticing are, without exaggeration, very long.
Unlike the “Mischlinge” for whom the free world rose up in arms, the Hindus of Bangladesh have been all but abandoned.
While some of Bangladesh’s tyrannized Hindus have chosen to play the odds and see where fate takes them, others skipped the Dhaka protest march, preferring to take the perfidious road to the border with India. Here they’ve amassed in hordes. Sadly, in vain. India’s border guards have held the line and read them the rules. “Keep out for you have no automatic legal Right to Return,” proclaimed an India border guard who was filmed addressing a group of expectant asylum seekers in Bangla.
India’s stance is an incomprehensible break from logic. Why shouldn’t “Mother India” who has long cradled the Hindus of Hindustan also nurture these other Hindu children? After all, for no fault of their own, they were left stranded on the wrong side of the cartographic divide. Far from being embraced in post-Partition Pakistan and Bangladesh, they were deemed infidels to be put to the sword. Now, that the spectre of genocide is inexorably creeping up on them, the Hindus in Bangladesh are clinging to the hope that they will be given asylum in India – ostensibly the only stable nation within their reach where their identity will not mark them out for slaughter.
For those who must know, countries around the world routinely grant asylum to specific classes of refugees.
Israel offers a Law of Return to Jews living anywhere in the world, Spain has the Jure Sanguinis that allows descendants of Sephardic Jews expelled in 1492 to return as citizens, two specific US laws allow that country to welcome Iranian Christians and Turkey offers citizenship to descendants of the Ottoman Empire.
The Modi-led union government will only be following a laudable precedence. Not that a BJP-led government with Hindu nationalist pretensions needs a pretext. The Citizen Amendment Act was the NDA’s way of accommodating persecuted minorities from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. But with its cut-off date and other fussy bureaucratic frills, it just doesn’t do the job.
One can understand the diffidence among certain opposition political parties in India on endorsing a move to confer an automatic right to return upon persecuted diaspora Hindus.
The Congress and its friends in the INDIA bloc, after all, are all too ham-strung by political compulsion. Muslims are an important component of their vote base. And the so-called secular bloc mobilises their support by fanning the community’s inherent suspicion of the Hindu majority. The Congress, for one, never tires of pointing out that it is the only entity standing between the “othered Muslims” and persecution at the hands of “Hindu fascists”. In this depiction, the Muslim is always the victim, never the aggressor. This means that the Congress and its ideological co-travellers will agitate passionately on the need to save Palestinian lives in places as far afield as Rafah but will pay lip service to the anti-Hindu rioting in neighbouring Bangladesh. The rampaging Islamist mobs of Bangladesh are far too inconvenient a truth for the Congress and its so-called “secular” cohorts to ever admit.
But the BJP-led union government is not held back by such cynical electoral calculations. And yet, the BJP-led NDA seems to be averse to pursuing the issue decisively.
A group of writers, thinkers, and civil society voices have shot off a letter to the union government, pleading with it to act substantially.
The BJP has a wonderful opportunity to not only be seen doing the right thing but also to shatter the chimera of Muslim victimhood once and for all.
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