Erased In Silence: How Intelligentsia Ignores Hindu Persecution

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The world must wake up to the reality that Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh are not just second-class citizens, they are targeted and oppressed minorities
For generations, the liberal intelligentsia in India and the West have platformed themselves as the flagbearers of a conscience-driven society and champions of the oppressed and voiceless. Yet, their silence on the relentless persecution of Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh exposes the absolute hollowness of this claim.
These are states whose very foundations were laid on the idea of Islamic othering. The non-Muslim, particularly the Hindu, exists as an unwanted relic of a rejected hangover of 1947. As a consequence, the persecution they suffer isn't just societal but institutional, legal and sustained via the State's policy mechanisms.
It is often forgotten that over 90% of Indian Muslims of undivided British India, who voted in the 1946 elections, supported the Muslim League's call for Pakistan. Yet after Partition, more than 70% of them who voted, chose to stay back in India and not embrace the Pakistan they helped create. Some, like Khaliquzzaman, who were patrons of the Muslim League and Gazwa-E-Hind project (literal translation Holy War against Hind), even stayed on to help shape India's Constitution sitting in the constituent assembly before eventually departing for Pakistan they had politically birthed.
This unacknowledged historical truth is uncomfortable for the intelligentsia, which continues to present Muslims of the Indian subcontinent as mere victims of Hindu majoritarianism, while refusing to scrutinise the ideological forces and often deflecting it on the Hindu Mahasabha or Savarkar that led to Partition and its consequences.
Despite the global blindspot and gaslighting of facts, it is undeniable that in Pakistan and Bangladesh, Hindus are being quietly erased. Their temples are frequently desecrated, their daughters abducted, raped and converted under State patronage, their lands snatched, and their identities crushed. This is not anecdotal but rather state-enabled.
In Bangladesh, a pivotal study conducted by Professor Abdul Barakat of Dhaka University revealed that between 1964 and 2013, an estimated 11.3 million Hindus were forced to flee the country due to religious persecution and systematic dispossession. Laws like the Enemies Property Act (Pakistan) and the Vested Property Act (Bangladesh) were designed to dispossess Hindus under the guise of nationalism or land reform. These draconian policies have been used for decades to legally plunder Hindu-owned properties, with millions of families rendered homeless and stateless without recourse or redress.
And yet, the global liberal elite, so quick to decry 'Islamophobia" in India, continues to demonstrate a deafening silence when it comes to this religious apartheid.
False Equivalences and Intellectual Gaslighting
What we instead hear are shrill claims of Muslim oppression in India, based not on institutional disenfranchisement, but often on isolated incidents inflated into sweeping narratives. Meanwhile, the systemic dispossession of Hindus in Islamic states is explained away, or worse, ignored.
Consider this – in India, Muslims benefit from exclusive educational scholarships, religious reservations, personal law privileges, and vast land holdings under Waqf Boards, unchecked by Parliament or courts. Bodies like the All India Muslim Personal Law Board act as parallel legal systems, undermining efforts like the Uniform Civil Code in the garb of minority rights.
And yet, any mention of these imbalances is branded 'Islamophobic." Meanwhile, no such label exists for ignoring the actual, ongoing erasure of Hindus in neighbouring Islamic republics.
The Islamo-Leftist Nexus
What explains this hypocrisy? It is the alliance between Islamist politics and leftist intellectual elites, a mutually beneficial arrangement. The Left provides cover for Islamists under the garb of anti-majoritarianism; the Islamists, in turn, help perpetuate the victimhood narrative that fuels leftist politics in democratic setups like India.
This axis has succeeded in portraying India's Muslims as oppressed, while remaining eerily silent about the crimes against Hindus committed in the name of Islam just across the border. The result? A distorted moral compass that condemns imagined majoritarianism while enabling real, ongoing theocratic oppression.
The Nehruvian Lie
India, too, carries historical baggage. For decades, Nehruvian historians like Irfan Habib, Romila Thapar, D N Jha etc (today known as distorians) gave us a whitewashed version of the past, airbrushing centuries of trauma under the guise of 'composite culture" and 'secular harmony." The brutalities of Islamic invasions, the forced conversions, the destruction, desecration and loot of temples, none of it found meaningful space in our textbooks or discourse.
This wilful historical amnesia was meant to foster social cohesion, but instead bred historical dishonesty, crippling India's ability to have an honest conversation about religious and historical fault lines.
The Case for Intellectual Honesty
If human rights are to mean anything, they cannot be filtered through ideological convenience. The world must wake up to the reality that Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh are not just second-class citizens, they are targeted and oppressed minorities whose lives, property, and dignity are under a constant assault.
And in India, we must stop pretending that the Muslim minority is uniformly oppressed while Hindu refugees from Pakistan and Bangladesh continue to live in squalor and fear, denied the sympathy freely offered to others.
It is time to dismantle the false equivalences and hold all states, not just politically convenient ones, accountable for their treatment of minorities.
Justice cannot be selective. Nor can memory.
Adit Kothari is a Calcuttan residing in London as a Pravasi Bharatiya, working to dismantle the plethora of false narratives and misinformation against India and Hindutva. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18's views.
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First Published:
July 22, 2025, 19:11 IST
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