The Prolonged Partition and its Pogroms: Testimonies on Violence Against Hindus in East Bengal 1946-64 (Hardcover)

Scholarly studies on the genocidal waves charaterising the unequal coexistence of Hindus and Muslims in East Bengal are extremely few, as are those on the Partition massacres in Punjab in 1947. The two problems are basically identical, for what happened in West Punjab in a few months, viz. the total cleansing of the Hindus, is merely a quick version of what has been happening in East Bengal in a long-drawn-out fashion, intermittently and in successive waves. The cleansing of the Hindus from East Bengal in phases is a prolonged version of the Partition has envisaged since the beginning by the Pakistani leadership, viz. the creation of a purely Muslim state, carved out of India and at the expense of the Hindus. The Muslim death toll in 20th century South-Asian inter religious violence is much smaller than the Hindu death toll. If we only consider the second half of the 20th century, the Hindu death toll becomes many times higher: at most several tens of thousands of Muslims killed in India (all categories included, even foreign “Kashmiri” militants), versus at least one and possibly several million of Hindus killed in East Bengal. Also, within the number of Muslim victims, far fewer have been killed by Hindus than by fellow Muslims (hundreds of thousands in the Bangladesh war alone).