Some books are a lightning flash- illuminating the dark sky for one fleeting moment, accompanied by a rumbling thunder of “the discourse”, before it all goes dark once more. ‘The Joy Bangla Deception: Bangladeshi Islamism Under The Facade Of Bengali Nationalism’ by Kausik Gangopadhyay and Devavrata is not such a book. It is instead a merciless summer sun, shining with the blinding brightness of unvarnished truth, casting away every inch of the dark malady that has entrenched itself over centuries on the eastern part of Bharatavarsha.
Bangladesh is one of the world’s greatest examples of subversion of reality through narrative power. This is a region which is upheld as a liberal utopia in media as well as in academia, while on the ground it is infected with rabid, grassroots jihadism which uses the liberal image to smother the cries of its persecuted Hindu and Buddhist minorities. How do we make sense of the blatant contradiction? Kausik Gangopadhyay (author of the pathbreaking The Majoritarian Myth) and Devavrata unravels this mystery with meticulous, data driven precision.
There are four major currents that flow through the book. Together, they weave a blood-soaked story of cultural corruption, political deceit, religious intolerance and utterly depraved violence.
The Foundation of Lies
Let us tackle the most obvious falsehood first. The story of the so-called language movement which ostensibly gave birth to liberal Bangladesh rejecting the idea of Pakistan (and the Two-Nation Theory) is a brazen narrative fabrication.
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was no secular language warrior- he was an active proponent of Pakistan and a participant in the Direct Action Day riots and the genocide of Hindus during the Partition. The original Bengali language movement in East Pakistan was actually launched by a Hindu Bengali, Dhirendranath Dutta, which was then opportunistically hijacked by the Awami League. In fact, Bengali Hindus were by far the biggest victims of the repressions of the East Pakistani regime, including the infamous Operation Searchlight.
What were the rewards for the Bangladeshi Hindu community? They were told not to return to their abandoned homes, their properties continued to be stolen by the Bangladeshi government using carryover East Pakistani laws, their security remained subject to the whims of unhinged jihadi maulanas- to the extent that the percentage of Hindu population in Bangladesh has declined to single digits. The Butcher of Bengal Suhrawardy is still adored in there with zero apologies for this thuggish bloodlust- quite the opposite in fact. Figures like Maulana Bhasani, even in the immediate aftermath of the creation of Bangladesh, never rejected the idea of Islamist supremacy, and demanded several parts of India including Assam and West Bengal as a part of the ideology known as ‘Greater Bangladesh’.
In short, nothing changed on ground for the Hindus of East Pakistan. One can even claim that their repression only increased, their cries smothered by the covering fire of vacuous platitudes by liberal darlings like Amartya Sen.
Anti-syncretism
One of the most crucial insights of the book is on the forces which led to the creation of the Bengali Muslim identity. The authors state that since the arrival of Islam in the medieval era, Hindus and Muslims were always seen as two different communities with two different value systems (by both communities). Yet, the cultural practices of “the atrap– the peasantry and the various service classes comprising the majority of the muslims” were almost indistinguishable from their Hindu brethren. These people, without any doubt, were Muslims who were Bengalis.
The authors posit that syncretic coexistence is a threat to the Ashraf (the subcontinental Islamic elite caste) Muslims, whose power and clout depended upon them showing the rest of the converts what they considered the “true path”. Almost all variants of Islamic exceptionalism (couched in the rhetoric of fighting against shirk or malpractices) in India can be traced back to this original insecurity- from the movements launched by Syed Ahmed Barelvi to the creations of groups like Tablighi Jamaat. In Bengal, this anti-syncretic movement was championed by folks like Titumir and Haji Shariatullah- two people who Mujib directly mentions as the original jihadis of the Pakistan movement.
The Destruction of the Bengali Language
Perhaps the politically incorrect truths that every Bengali speaker instinctively knows is that the language spoken by the Hindu Bengalis and the Bengali Muslims are very different- both idiomatically and from a vocabulary perspective. This is by design.
The 17th century Muslim poet Alaol calls the Bengali language ‘Hinduani’. In the 19th century, there were fatwas calling Bengali as ‘Kufuri Jaban,’ or the ‘language of infidels’. Elite Bengali Muslims up until the early twentieth century refused to accept Bengali as their mother tongue, agitated against its use as a medium of instruction in colleges, and demanded the adoption of Urdu for their cultural and social communication. This anti Bengali sentiment (which agitated even Tagore) was complemented by a new class of Muslim writers influenced by ‘Persian, Hindi and Urdu romances’ whose work was ‘saturated with Perso-Arabic and Hindi words’.
With the advent of political Islam, the corruption of the Bengali language by infiltrating it with foreign words became a well calculated strategy which would allow Islam and Muslims to lay claim to the entirety of Bengali identity. Abul Mansur Ahmad in 1944 talks about Tamadduni Azadi or Cultural Swaraj being critical for the Pakistan Movement, since it is ‘the difference between two species, two peoples and two individuals which counts towards making the identity’. In order to achieve that, he declared ‘the literature of East Pakistan will be written in the dialect of East Pakistanis. That language shall have no respect for Sanskrit grammar or the so-called Bengali grammar’.
The authors, with searing clarity, state that the ‘end product of this Tamadduni Azadi is nothing but creating an Arabic-colonised version of Bengali language and culture’.
The Great Deception
This brings us to the core of the book- the ongoing Islamist imperial agenda carried on under the cover of the innocuous sounding slogan – ‘Joy Bangla’. This particular slogan is used on both sides of the border, officially and semi-officially. The authors show that Hindus have been fooled into thinking that Bangla here refers to the language and linguistic identity; however, for the Bangladeshi regime Bangla refers to the religious-cultural identity of the Bengali Muslim. This is a well thought out Islamist strategy which aims to completely replace non-islamic Bengali population and their culture with the same ideas of the two-nation theory which led to the Partition. Bengali Hindus adopting this slogan are nothing but useful idiots falling into the trap set by the Islamists.
The book correctly argues that the Bangladeshi government uses its residual Hindu population as a geopolitical hostage against India, as well as liberal insurance to fool the west and fan sub-nationalist tendencies through leftist intellectuals in India. A simple look at the so-called Bengali edition of the BBC will provide enough evidence of this phenomenon in action. Quite succinctly, the book refers to the supposedly liberal Awami League (a general stand in for the Bangladeshi regime in my opinion) and the overt jihadis as a good cop, bad cop routine.
The Joy Bangla Deception is one of the most critical works published in the last decade. Despite its heavy and often heart-wrenching content, the clear and sparkling language of the authors never succumbs to mere rhetoric. All arguments are fact based, and supported by citations. The endnotes deserve special mention for their depth and curation.
I sincerely hope this book becomes required reading for not just every official drafted into the Indian Civil Services, but also for every legislator who takes oath in the Parliament.
In conclusion, let me expand upon the apt provocation which concludes this masterful work: Bangladesh does not exist- it never existed. What does exist (still) is East Pakistan, the mangy wolf long thought dead but in reality, hiding under the sheepskin of a Bengali cultural umbrella whose heritage is purely Hindu. Many factors aid this wolf in its deception- the ideology of secular-liberalism, the internal votebank politics of India, the Anglo-American deep state, the media and narrative power enjoyed by the global Islamist movement, but above all – the shortsighted, suicidal forgetfulness of the Bharatiya Hindu, especially the Bharatiya Hindu Bengali.
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