Displacement and the production of difference: East Pakistan/Bangladesh, 1947–1990

ABSTRACT

This paper explores Hindu East Bengali/Pakistani/Bangladeshi belonging as a contingent relation of inclusion that is constitutive of securing majoritarian rule. I argue that despite their formal citizenship status, Hindus are produced as undeserving others, as proxy citizens, a status that casts them as having questionable loyalty to their country of birth. I explore this production as a relation of in-situ displacement, a characterization that reveals their relation to place that does not depend on physical mobility. I offer an historical analysis that highlights the country’s relation to changing national and transnational relations of a dependent political economy as a colony, under military rule, and as a democratic formation, where Bangladesh is characterized by ongoing, if uneven, tensions between majoritarianism and more inclusive forms of belonging.

KEYWORDS:

• In-situ displacement
• belonging
• citizenship
• Bangladesh

Acknowledgements

I appreciate the intellectual support I received from colleagues at the Max Weber Kolleg. This paper is part of a project that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 665958. I also thank the reviewers for their careful and suggestive reading.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The last quarter century has offered a wealth of creative analyses of diasporic populations, migration, and rethinking what global mobility suggests for understanding nation and state formation, citizenship, and rights.

2 It is crucial to emphasize that discussing Muslim nationalism shares the practices of rule with other nationalist projects and thus its critique need not be understood primarily in an idiom of communalism or Islamaphobia.

3 In this paper, I do not distinguish Hindus by caste, class, gender, sexuality, or region as the construction as other crosses all of these distinctions, if differently, but, together, they expose the constitutive character of distinguishing between us and them.

4 As Mohsin and Guhathakurta (2007, p. 4) argue, for example, the 1978 declaration of Islam as the state religion, ‘put other religious community in a disadvantaged position … [and] turned the Bengali Hindu community into minorities as well’.

5 While such difference may take a communal form, as it often does in South Asia, my argument is that such form is not essential in the making of difference.

6 As van Schendel (2002, footnote 31) notes, lndia’s proxy citizens in Pakistan formally include Buddhists, Christians, Sikhs, and other non-Muslims. These groups have indeed been ignored in much of the scholarship on Bangladesh. Nonetheless, as I suggest, in the reproduction of majoritarian politics, Hindus’ place in the body politics needs to be analytically distinguished from these groups.

7 Presidential address to the first Constituent Assembly of Pakistan, Karachi, 11 August 1947.

8 As the late U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy acknowledged: ‘Hardest hit have been members of the Hindu community who have been robbed of their lands and shops, systematically slaughtered, and in some places, painted with yellow patches marked ‘H’. All of this has been officially sanctioned, ordered and implemented under martial law from Islamabad’.

9 van Schendel’s (2001, p. 119) provocative essay offers an interpretation of the regional challenges posed by Bengali nationalism and the changing character of the Muslim community, no longer threatened by Hindus but by ‘an external enemy – the tutelage and corrupting influence of “the West”–and an internal one–Bangladeshi secularism’.

10 Under these regimes, Hindus as well as Ahmediyas and Qadiyanis were also threatened by this constitutional change (Mohsin & Guhathakurta, 2007).

11 According to Barkat et al. (2008), 43 percent of all Hindu families have been affected by this act.

12 For the Chittagong Hill Tracts see, for example, Guhathakurta (2004), Mohsin (1997a, 1997b), Adnan (2004).

13 For details of the Ordinance see Barkat (2000).

14 There is a growing body of literature on land-grabbing following democratic rule, including the role of government, its policies, and the elite. (See, for example, Adnan, 2013, 2016; Feldman, 2017; Feldman & Geisler, 2012; Mahmud et al., 2020.) Unfortunately, space limitations make it impossible to elaborate this and the long career of the VPA here.

15 See Roy (2016) for an excellent review and longer history of document regimes that regulate travel differentiating between India, West Pakistan, and East Bengal. Also, the rich literature on borders and enclaves highlight travel amongst these communities; however, this example addresses border-crossing and documentation for those living beyond this spatial zone.

16 The opposite could be said for travellers to India (Roy, 2016).

17 Indigenous communities, and Christian and Buddhist Bengalis, among others, also have a specific, if different relation to state rule (see Mohsin 1997a, 1997b; Guhathakurta, 2001, 2004; Adnan, 2008).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement: [grant number 665958].

Notes on contributors

Shelley Feldman

Shelley Feldman is currently Senior Fellow, Max-Weber-Kolleg für kultur- und sozialwissenschaftliche Studien, Universität Erfurt, Germany. From 1984 to 2016 she was International Professor, Cornell University, and Director of its Feminist, Gender, and Sexualities Studies Program (2007–2014). She has undertaken research in Bangladesh since 1978 with a focus on the political economy of economic and social restructuring. Her research has featured in REVIEW, SIGNS, Interventions, Economy and Society, and numerous other journals and collections. She is currently completing a manuscript on In-situ displacement: Property ownership, rights and security among Bangladeshi Hindus.