Seldom do I fancy myself as a story-teller -- I am terrible at it. I mix up my tenses and my prose style is all over the place. Friends tell me I am extremely incoherent, and that I rush too much.
But I have stories to tell, and there’s a lot of room for improvement.
The last one I wrote has a rather bold and quite unbelievable ending where Biharis get rounded up and thrown into camps (the ones who escaped).
I thought I did a good job overall, but the finishing was excessively over the top.
Who’d go that far anyway?
Deciding to keep the dystopia I had created aside, I happily logged on to Facebook, and one of the first things I saw was a link of policemen setting fire to Santal homes.
My ending seemed a bit mellow then.
One might ask how the Santals are related to Biharis -- when they share neither ethnicity nor religion and they had distinctively different roles in our history?
Well, that may be. But both groups are paying the same price right now for the same basic mistake: Not being born as a Bengali Muslim.
The country is still a somewhat democracy.
People have rights and we can pretend all we want, but Bangladesh is a country tailor-made for only this particular group.
Anyone and everyone who fails at being either Bengali or Muslim isn’t worthy of Bangladesh or anything -- except, perhaps, having their homes set on fire.
I consoled myself by saying it was all political.
It was about the land after all.
It was about power.
Bengali Muslims who oppose the authority get their houses set on fire occasionally too. More than occasionally, actually -- when there is no arrest or abduction.
So evidently, Bangladesh as a country doesn’t even cater to the entirety of Bengali Muslims.
This strange conclusion somehow led me to serenity.
It led me to theorise that there was nothing wrong with communalism as long as it is originated from non-communal political conflict.
There was no deep-rooted hatred in play, I happily thought.
But I couldn’t be more wrong.
Very recently, a high-ranking official of a Bangladeshi embassy wrote a very interesting piece on Biharis.
It is interesting because in a decent society, it would be considered hate speech.
It is interesting in the way Trump talking about banning Muslims from entering US was interesting.
It is interesting in the way David Duke is interesting.
I found only plain and simple hatred in the article.
The official should be applauded for his ability to perfectly combine jingoism with racism.
It is interesting how, despite nearly half a century of independence, segments of the Bangladeshi society still foster the same darkness as certain segments of Pakistani society
He proudly and unequivocally said Biharis were “beimans” -- strongly implying that there was in fact no difference between the two words.
They were the same and more, that Biharis by nature only knew treachery and deceit, that the goodness of the country lies in sending them off to Pakistan, and that tolerating them would doom us.
These statements were preceded by something about Biharis demanding human rights and a passport.
Apparently calling out for human rights and a passport can very logically result in people calling one a traitor -- only in Bangladesh.
The official was not one to speak without evidence.
He spoke of two Biharis: One a collaborator of the Pakistani army and another by-marriage member of his family.
The first was guilty of getting people killed and the second was guilty of creating conflict in the family.
Apparently both crimes were comparable, and both persons were of similar stature -- and that the second person was born after 1971 and hadn’t gotten anyone killed, became quite irrelevant.
After all, the point is that Biharis are all one and the same. And the official is successful at emphasising on it.
He also unabashedly states that Urdu will not be tolerated in Bangladesh, only Bangla will prevail here.
A curious mind wants to know his stance on the languages of the ethnic minorities.
The answer will probably be plain and simple: Be Bangali or get out.
He finally finished by saying that Biharis must be removed from the Bangladeshi voter list before 2019, because they’d vote for Pakistan -- in Bangladesh.
The most ironic thing here is that even in Pakistan, Biharis and Muhajirs, in general, aren’t always accepted.
They are, even right now, fighting for their rights. Some of the Muhajir leaders tried to further their cause with bloodshed in the past (quite like Bangladesh) and infuriated the state machinery.
The result was Operation Clean-Up.
“An armed military intelligence program” whose objective was to “cleanse” Karachi of its “anti-social elements” (I have to oversimplify a few details here to keep things short).
Bottom line: A lot of Biharis got killed for being involved in “anti-Pakistan” activity.
Segments of the Pakistani society still stereotype them as being two-faced murderers, who want what is not theirs, and are by nature traitors.
It is interesting how, despite nearly half a century of independence, segments of Bangladeshi society still foster the same darkness as certain segments of Pakistani society.
The question remains now: Can we treat the minorities of Bangladesh the way minorities get treated in Pakistan?
Oh wait, we are already doing it.
Fardin Hasin is a freelance contributor.
