Indian Hegemony Agents and Cultural Fascists Must Be Countered

Jamaluddin Bari

A nation’s security and independence-sovereignty cannot be protected through military strength alone. Above all, this requires national unity, patriotism among civil society, a sense of justice, and a mindset of moving the country forward by facing all challenges together. Such a civil society and national unity are built through a well-planned intellectual development and cultural practice cultivated by the country’s education system. Although the religious-cultural intellectual roots behind the emergence, development, and historical evolution of Bangladesh as a nation-state were meant to progress successfully toward their ultimate goal through the independence of 1971, in reality this did not happen.

The moral foundation and cultural deviation of our civil society began through the excessive emphasis on, and monopolistic control by, an education system rooted in a foreign language and culture, disconnected from local roots, during the British colonial era. In the nineteenth century, when the British colonial government planned to restructure this region’s education system, their primary goal was to build an educated generation that would become the necessary local manpower for British administration — a generation born in Indo-Bengal but which, in mind and thought, would become followers of British cultural ideology. Our children were taught that “he who studies rides in cars and on horses” — meaning that instead of presenting education as a vow of service, the education system was degraded by making it into a tempting means of consumption for children.

Since then, the mental degeneration, intellectual decay, and downfall of the country’s certificate-holding educated generation has continued unabated. Under the British “divide and rule” policy, the education system’s inequalities were where the work of dividing the country’s people in various ways and keeping them locked in mutual distrust and conflict began. However, the resentment of the British and Hindus toward Muslims as an incumbent society, along with the short-sighted tendency to reject everything British — good and bad alike — set back what was once an advanced Muslim society considerably.

Yet the final arrangement establishing a state on the basis of the two-nation theory or religious division did not come about because of Muslims. Under the Government of India Act of 1935, the establishment of Muslim League leadership in the Muslim-majority regions of Calcutta and West Bengal under a democratic system created a new democratic Indian reality that did not sit well with Hindutva-oriented groups — so alongside the emergence of Pakistan on religious grounds, they also made the reckless partition of Bengal inevitable. This cultural division was made inevitable by creating horrific riots in Calcutta that killed thousands. Yet during the eight-hundred-year rule of Muslim sultans and Mughals, Hindus and Muslims had coexisted peacefully under the same flag.

The history of human civilization is a history of rise, fall, and division. In this subcontinent, the history of Muslims is one of uniting the divided Sanatani and Aryan societies to establish Greater India and the Mughal Empire. When Muslims made up less than 5 percent of this region’s population, they ruled India with valor. After the Muslim population grew over hundreds of years to reach a balanced position, the plan to divide and rule India on religious grounds stemmed from ignorance, incapacity, and a sense of inferiority. Subsequently, the Hindutva narrative of reclaiming a mythology-based “Akhand Bharat” (Undivided India) has destabilized and made the entire region unsafe. Scars of former colonialism are scattered across the world, but nowhere else in the world is there an example of such recklessness as the continuous striking at the wounds of nearly two billion people of the Indian subcontinent, turning a bleeding wound into gangrene. Bangladesh bears the primary example of this. Through the 1947 partition, the distinctiveness and self-identity of Bangladesh, or East Bengal, was not recognized for the first time — four decades earlier, in 1905, the British government had already recognized Bengal’s independence through the Partition of Bengal order. That the tearful lament over the “dismemberment of Mother Bengal” was mere pretense was proven by the very act of breaking that vow through the partition of Bengal in 1947.

The self-identity that East Bengal gained as East Pakistan in 1947 was essentially a broken or fragmented form of the 1905 Partition of Bengal. Its first recognition had come from Mughal Emperor Akbar, who in 1576 recognized Bengal as Suba Bangla, one of the provinces of the Mughal Empire — and it was the richest, wealthiest, and largest province of the Mughal Empire. Bangladesh, or East and West Bengal, formed the most important part of this province. Suba Bangla was composed of what are now known as the Seven Sisters states of India’s eastern region, including Assam, Tripura, and Meghalaya. The unjust partition of 1947 blocked that Suba Bangla’s potential to become South Asia’s most prosperous modern state. The conspiracy to swallow up the independent Bangladesh that emerged in 1971 from the fragmented portion of undivided Bengal began right after 1947. Three decades after India annexed the independent or princely states of Kashmir, Hyderabad, and Junagadh, it annexed Sikkim in 1975.

Essentially, there is no real historical example before India of Hindutva rule under the name of Akhand Bharat. Even the scriptures of India’s Sanatan religion have no historical basis. The Vedas are essentially epic literature propagated by Aryans who came from Central Asia and Persia. Even the existence of a religion called “Hindu” is absent from the Vedas. West Bengal’s historian, mythologist, and Sanatan religious scholar Mr. Nrisingha Bhaduri has also acknowledged this view. He has even openly admitted that Hindu mythological gods and characters ate beef and buffalo meat, and that nowhere in Hindu mythology is eating beef prohibited. The Mauryan Empire, founded by Chandragupta Maurya, reached its greatest expansion under his grandson Ashoka. Although lacking historical basis, Ashoka’s empire is considered to have spanned about 5 million square kilometers, and this is cited as the example of Akhand Bharat — yet British India’s area, up until partition, was also about 5 million square kilometers. Due to the close relationship between the last Viceroy of British India, Lord Mountbatten, and the leaders of the Indian National Congress and the Nehru family, the proposal to partition Bengal was implemented according to their wishes. Similarly, Punjab and Kashmir were also divided on religious grounds under the two-nation theory.

When Sheikh Mujib was killed along with his family on August 15, 1975, his two daughters, Hasina and Rehana, were in Europe. From there, they came to India and spent six years under Indian state patronage and intelligence supervision. It is reported that the then formidable intelligence officer Mr. Ajit Doval is now overseeing Sheikh Hasina, who is currently residing in Delhi. After Sheikh Hasina fled to India on August 5 of last year [2024], news of Mr. Ajit Doval meeting with her was first published. Sheikh Hasina’s presence in India, her political statements made from there, and her provocative remarks aimed at creating instability in Bangladesh were not accepted as normal — first by Dr. Muhammad Yunus’s interim government in Bangladesh, and then by the current elected BNP government.

India does not have the capacity to seize Bangladesh by military force and sustain that hold — this would be extremely risky for India, just as Soviet Russia and America could not sustain their occupation of Afghanistan and were forced to flee in disgrace. Even the Mughals could not establish full control over Bangladesh and Afghanistan. The proponents of Akhand Bharat know this history well. That is why, like the British, they have chosen a “divide and rule” policy, seeking to keep alive a narrative of division among the people of Bangladesh in service of India’s hegemonic agenda.

Except for the exception of Shaheed Zia, for nearly 54 years, the country’s ruling class has swallowed the bait of the cultural narrative produced by Indian hegemonism. Even after Bangladesh’s development as a state was stifled and cut off from the world through near-total control over its demography, river water management, politics, economy, national security, foreign policy, language, and culture, a segment of this country’s civil society remains busy defending India — and this is precisely the success of India’s cultural hegemony agenda.

India’s network of patronage in this sector extends across Bangladesh, India, and the global Indian diaspora. Following the tradition of the Hijri calendar, Emperor Akbar introduced the Bengali calendar in the sixteenth century. In independent Bangladesh, the culture of celebrating the welcoming of Bengali New Year as the “Mangal Shobhajatra” procession was introduced by Indian cultural agents. The July Revolution of last year was a direct blow against the India-backed political and cultural hegemony. After Hasina fled to India, the jackals and dogs — the deep roots — of Indian cultural dominance, built up in Bangladesh over seven decades, seem to have fallen into a state of panic. They are trying with all their strength and at the top of their voices to keep themselves relevant.

Ms. Taslima Nasrin, a woman poet who fell into the wrath of the country’s people for spreading ethnic and religious hatred, left the country thirty-two years ago, spent a few months traveling through various European countries, and settled in India. She is a cultural-political hegemony agent of India. After the July Revolution, thousands of Awami League supporters who have taken shelter in India are working as Indian propaganda operatives using social media. That same Ms. Taslima Nasrin, in the 1990s, by preaching that Bangladesh should align itself with India, became a favorite of Indian intelligence agencies.

Thirty-two years later, that now-elderly Ms. Taslima Nasrin is seen more active than ever before. Alongside her, thousands of fugitive offspring of the Awami League who have fled Bangladesh, as well as numerous cultural workers from a trained force of cultural fascism, have become active. It is only natural that Ms. Chaitali Roy, Ms. Rokeya Prachi, Ms. Shaon, and Ms. Priya Sahara would be more active now than ever before. While it has become difficult to directly deploy political agents to regain India’s lost empire in Bangladesh, cultural agents continue carrying out their assignments through social media. The country’s students and citizens must remain vigilant, like sleepless sentries, against them. The initiative to build the new Bangladesh’s education system and cultural sphere in the light of a thousand years of Muslim heritage and communal harmony must begin right now.