September  2004 
Year 11    No.101

Editorial


The butchers next door

In a few weeks from now, the Ain-o-Salish Kendra (ASK), a legal aid and human rights group from Bangladesh will release its Human Rights in Bangladesh 2003 report. We are grateful to ASK for permission to publish, in advance of the release, a chapter from the report titled ‘De-secularising Bangladesh/On the Growing Insecurity of its Minority Communities’. It is this chapter that forms the text of our cover story this month and, to say the least, the content makes for shocking reading.

 To cite a few examples: On March 8, 2003 in the village of Komarpur under Sadar thana of Bagerhat district, miscreants brutally attacked a prominent Hindu family, hacking one person to death, gang-raping three women and severely injuring several others. In September the same year, a group of local political activists (all Muslims) forcibly encroached on some land of a Buddhist vihara of the Rakhaine community in the coastal Kalapara upazila under Patuakhali district. In October, a politically influential member of the local Union Parishad, Munser Ali, forcibly occupied 4.5 acres of cultivable land of a Christian family at Mirzapur village of Itail Union under Jamalpur district. And, in a gruesome incident on November 18, 2003, 11 of the 12 members of a Hindu family from the village of Sadhanpur sunder Banshkhali upazila, some 25 km south of Chittagong, were burnt alive when their home was bolted from outside and torched. Over the years, Hindus have been dispossessed of an estimated 1.64 million acres, which is equivalent to 53 per cent of the total land owned by the community.

Not surprisingly, non-Muslims alone are not victims of the fanatical self-proclaimed ‘defenders of Islam’. The year 2003 "was especially notable for attacks on a formerly low profile religious minority, the Ahmadiyas, also known as the Kadianis. Toward the end of the year, the Ahmadiya community, a small sect of Islam, came under repeated attacks throughout the country from over-zealous groups of Sunnis". Two organisations, the Nastik Murtad (Atheist, Apostate) Resistance Committee and the Muslim Millat Shariah Council have been targeting university professors, threatening them with death unless they repented and ‘purified’ themselves.

The growing incidents of assault on the life, liberty and property of Bangladesh’s minorities and secular individuals and groups from among Muslims are in themselves horrifying. Worse still is the complicity of the police, other state institutions and political parties in this vicious targeting. But by far the most ominous is the fact, highlighted in the ASK report, that the Bangladeshi elite has no commitment to a secular democratic polity. With secular politics on the retreat and Islamic fanatics on the rampage, the situation for the country’s religious minorities and secular-minded Muslims can only get worse in the coming period.

For more than one reason, we call upon all secular groups and minorities in India to raise their voice and unequivocally condemn the alarming rise of religious intolerance in neighbouring Bangladesh and demand stringent punishment of the perpetrators of violence. Intolerance and the targeting of minorities, religious or otherwise, anywhere in the world must be challenged. More so in the case of Bangladesh and Pakistan for, the ‘Islamisation’ drive of Muslim fanatics in either country directly fuels the sangh parivar’s drive to ‘Hinduise’ India and vice versa.

The United Nations General Assembly adopted the ‘Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide’ in 1948. India ratified the convention in 1959, but unlike scores of other countries that have done so, it is yet to enact a law on mass crimes. The anti-Sikh carnage in Delhi in 1984, the pogrom against Muslims in Mumbai and the state-sponsored genocide in Gujarat 2002 have brought into sharp focus the absence of, and the urgent need for, such a law on mass crimes.

Along with the Citizens for Justice and Peace, the Minorities Council (Delhi) and the Centre for the Study of Indian Muslims (Delhi), CC organised a two-day consultation in Delhi in August at which retired judges, experienced lawyers, retired and serving IAS and IPS officials sat together to draft ‘The Prevention and Punishment of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity Bill, 2004’.

The consultation also highlighted the urgent need for police reforms to insulate it from political interference. We are publishing the Draft Bill in this issue and appeal to our readers to actively join the campaign for this urgently needed law on mass crimes.

— EDITORS


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