Over centuries, history has borne witness to humanity's recurring atavism, when communities fractured along social, political, religious, and economic lines turn against one another with brutality. When such fractures deepen beyond redemption, humanity itself becomes the casualty, as its beauty and moral essence are devoured by the perils of genocide.
From the barbarity of the Jewish Holocaust to Idi Amin's Ugandan ethnic cleansing of Indians, to the slaughter of more than three million Bengalis by Pakistani soldiers during the Bangladesh Liberation War, to the excesses of the Pol Pot regime - to name only a few - the world echoes the collective trauma of humankind's cyclic regressions. These near-apocalyptic outrages have been etched in global memory as solemn testaments that the cost of hatred is paid only in blood and tears. They stand as reminders to humankind that only remembrance can caution the world against reliving such horrors again.
India, however, in the wake of independence, chose erasure of its wounds over remembrance. The genocides of colonial India were swiftly buried by pseudo-secular leaders and their compliant, state-sponsored historians, denying generations the right to remember, reckon, and learn from collective trauma. By condemning the nation to deliberate historical amnesia, the pseudo-secular thought police amputated Bharat's historical consciousness and left it vulnerable to the resurgence of that same atavistic violence.
Today, October 10, is one such date that bears testimony to how the pseudo-seculars of independent Bharat chose ignorance over remembrance. On this day, seventy-nine years ago, in 1946, our Bharat witnessed the communal barbarity unleashed in Noakhali of the former Bengal Presidency - an episode that our secularised, scrubbed-clean history timidly records as the Noakhali Riots, but which, in truth, deserves to be remembered as the Noakhali Genocide.
On this auspicious day of Sharad Purnima, while Bengali Hindus were busy with their annual Kojagori Lakshmi Puja, the Pir of Daira Sharif, Gholam Sarwar Husseini, along with other leaders of the Muslim League and his vicious militia, Miyar Fouj, orchestrated their revenge for the protests against Jinnah's Direct Action Day, also known as the Great Calcutta Killing of August 16, 1946, overseen and executed by Gholam Sarwar's mentor, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, head of the provincial Muslim League government. The provocative hate speeches of Gholam Sarwar made it clear that his was a single-point agenda: the mass extermination of Hindus.
While Hindu Bengalis were invoking Ma Lakshmi to enter their homes and bless them, it was Gholam Sarwar's militia that invaded those very homes, taking them by surprise. They killed, pillaged, and took women hostage - many of whom were never seen again. The house of the zamindar of Noakhali, Rajendralal Roy Chowdhury, who stood like a rock in the defence of Hindu Bengalis, was wrecked and his daughters were dragged away. Family members and retainers were shot dead. Rajendralal Babu was beheaded, and his head was presented on a puja platter to Gholam Sarwar. The orgy of violence that began on October 10 continued unrestrained for days.
The targeted violence spread rapidly - first across Noakhali and Tipperah, then to Dhaka, Mymensingh, and Narayanganj. Contemporary newspapers like Amrita Bazar Patrika reported on October 11 that over 5,000 Hindus were butchered in Noakhali, and Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy later admitted to 9,895 cases of forcible conversion in Tipperah alone.
According to many contemporary sources, the week-long genocidal violence across East Bengal claimed over 50,000 lives, yet pseudo-seculars refused to call it a genocide. The violence did not discriminate between zamindars and peasants, proving that this genocide was not about class or caste, as suggested by East Pakistani/Bangladeshi apologists masquerading as "historians"; it was about religion - more specifically, wreaking havoc on Hindus to validate Jinnah's Direct Action Day boast that "we will either have a divided India or a destroyed India."
With Suhrawardy refusing to intervene - let alone offer any official assistance - several socio-religious and political organisations stepped forward for rescue, relief, and rehabilitation. Prominent among them were the Bharat Sevashram Sangha, Hindu Mahasabha, Indian National Army, Prabartak Sangha, Abhay Ashram, Arya Samaj, and Gita Press. On learning of the atrocities, prominent leaders, including Dr. S.P. Mookerjee, Ashutosh Lahiri, Nirmal Chandra Chatterjee, Pandit Narendranath Das, Debendranath Mukherjee, and Nagendranath Bose travelled to Noakhali and Comilla to dispatch and distribute food, garments, medicines, and other essentials to the Hindus who had barely survived the violence. Sarees were in great demand, as the young women of Noakhali had nothing to cover themselves after their ordeal at the hands of the Miyar Fouj.
On the one hand, this intervention further angered the tormentors of Hindus - Gholam Sarwar even declared that whoever would defile Sucheta Kripalani, the nationalist leader, would be conferred the title of Ghazi. On the other hand, for many political leaders, Noakhali became a stage for vacuous moral exhibitionism - they added fuel to the raging fire by declaring that Hindus must leave or die.
Despite Direct Action Day and the subsequent Noakhali violence against Hindus, the Muslim-majority Bengal province under Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy's Muslim League government kept talking of a "United Bengal" independent of India. This "dream" was driven by the hope of outnumbering Hindus and using violence to force them out, to create a Muslim-only Bengal. Sadly, the Congress, expectedly, failed or refused to see through the charade of a "United Bengal". The Communists, too, backed the proposal, which would have been a death warrant for Hindu Bengalis.
It was then that Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee made a decisive move to ensure that Bengal would be divided so that Hindu Bengalis had their share of Bengal. The subsequent voting in the Legislative Assembly saw this through. Had there been no West Bengal within India, there would have been no land for Hindu Bengalis. Thus was history made.
Sadly, the horrors of Partition in the east and the advent of independent India did not ensure protection and relief for Hindu Bengalis. The trauma of Direct Action Day and the Noakhali carnage - made infinitely more debasing and humiliating by the Nehru-Liaquat Pact - was never acknowledged, never institutionalised into the nation's collective memory, and never mourned as a national tragedy. That denial became the seed of a greater malady: the politics of appeasement and selective silence that continues to enable anti-Hindu violence even today in the name of secularism.
West Bengal, to this day, bears the weight of that original sin. From the Marichjhapi massacre of 1979, which epitomised the Left's betrayal of Hindu Bengali refugees - notably Dalits - to the Bijon Setu outrage of 1982, when 16 monks and a nun of Ananda Marga were burned alive; from the 2022 Iqbalpur-Mominpur riots triggered on the eve of Kojagari Lakshmi Puja, to the 2025 anti-Waqf Act protest that resulted in the Hindu exodus from Murshidabad, with multiple riots instigated by Muslims, and the horrific violence during the anti-CAA agitation fanned by West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee - the pattern remains similar to pre-Independence days.
The Hindus of West Bengal continue to be persecuted, the perpetrators continue to be protected by the State's political leadership, and the truth continues to be rebranded as "isolated incidents". More the fool are those who are taken in by this negationism and are blind to the past looming over the future. Until remembrance replaces crafty denial and truth replaces deceit, West Bengal shall remain trapped in the cyclical atavism of its own unacknowledged history.
(Malviya is the national head of BJP's information and technology and Sah Prabhari of West Bengal)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
