Denial

Bengali Hindu Genocide like any other genocide has been denied by the perpetrators and trivialized by their supporters. The bystanders have ignored the genocide by choosing to remain silent.

The Government of Pakistan which was squarely responsible for planning and executing the Bengali Hindu Genocide has never acknowledged its culpability. Till date it doesn’t recognize that any genocide took place in East Pakistan during the Bangladesh Liberation War. The Bangladeshi collaborators of the Pakistan military regime who actively perpetrated the Bengali Hindu Genocide too deny that any genocide took place during the Bangladesh Liberation War.

A section of the Bangladeshi nationalist elites are uncomfortable in acknowledging the Bengali Hindu Genocide. They contend that the massacres and rapes during the Bangladesh Liberation War constitute a genocide of the Bengalis, and not genocide of the Bengali Hindus in particular. Professor Sabyasachi Ghosh Dastidar noted this phenomenon in his book, “Some among the ruling urban middle-class elite Muslims express unwillingness to accept such large scale Hindu killings as it reminds the disproportionate sacrifice of this small minority towards independence of Muslim-majority nation… Except for the small, marginalized pro-tolerant individuals, it is sacrilegious to talk about this sacrifice for nation-building.“

A section of Indian liberals indirectly deny the Bengali Hindu Genocide. Arundhati Roy had gone on record stating, “Pakistan has not deployed its army against its people the way India has.” Salil Tripathi has stated, “Pakistan army killed East Pakistanis who were Bengali, and weren’t targeting only Hindus. The majority of the victims were Muslims…“

Unintentional trivialization of Bengali Hindu Genocide occurs through trivialization of the incidents as well as the perpetrators.

In India, the general tendency of among the Hindu nationalists is to label the contemporary incidents of atrocities on Hindus in Bangladesh as ‘genocide’. This treats the atrocities by the non-state Islamist groups at par with the state sanctioned incidents of massacres and forced expulsion of the Bengali Hindus during the East Pakistan period, thus trivializing the latter in intent and intensity.

In 1971, a Razakar was a member of the official paramilitary Razakar Force that actively participated in the genocide of the Bengali Hindus. In contemporary Bangladesh, the overuse of the word ‘razakar’ to mean ‘a person supportive of united Pakistan’ has devalued it’s original meaning. The use of the slogan ‘Tui Razakar‘ (You are a Razakar) by the nationalists on anyone who disagrees with them has rendered the connotation of the word trivial.