Erased in silence: The intelligentsia's blind spot on Hindu persecution

For generations, the liberal intelligentsia in India and the West have platformed themselves as the champions of a conscience-driven society and flagbearers of the oppressed and voiceless.

- ADIT KOTHARI

Yet, their silence on the inexorable persecution of Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh exposes their absolute hollowness of this claim.

These are states whose very foundations were laid on the idea of Islamic othering. The non-Muslim, particularly the Hindu, exists as an unwanted relic of a rejected hangover of 1947. As a consequence, the persecution they suffer isn't just societal but institutional, legal and sustained via the state's policy mechanisms.

THE PARTITION THAT NEVER ENDED

It is often forgotten that over 90% of Indian Muslims of undivided British India, who voted in the 1946 elections, supported the Muslim League's call for Pakistan. Yet after Partition, more than 70% of them who voted chose to stay back in India and not embrace the Pakistan they helped create. Some, like Khaliquzzaman, who were patrons of the Muslim League and Gazwa-E-Hind project (literal translation Holy War against Hind), even stayed on to help shape India's Constitution sitting in the Constituent Assembly before eventually departing for Pakistan they had politically birthed.

This unacknowledged historical truth is uncomfortable for the intelligentsia, which continues to present Muslims of the Indian subcontinent as mere victims of Hindu majoritarianism, while refusing to scrutinize the ideological forces and often deflecting it on the Hindu Mahasabha or Savarkar that led to Partition and its consequences.

TWO NEIGHBOURING ISLAMIC STATES, ONE SILENT GENOCIDE