The latest round of anti-Hindu terror let loose by well organized bands of Muslim criminals in West Bengal is nothing new, except that it went on for a long time with the local administration failing to provide any meaningful help and security to the beleaguered Hindu population, a majority community suffering at the hands of an aggressive minority.

Can one imagine Coptic Christians going on the rampage, attacking and desecrating Muslims and their mosques in Egypt? Can anyone dream of Christians in Lebanon in a similar offensive role assaulting their Muslim neighbours? Can one visualize Christians in Pakistan behaving in a similar manner? Certainly not, this is absurd, most of us would say.

But north African Muslims rampaging in Paris or Pakistanis on a similar “holy” mission in Birmingham or Leicester are not news any more! Has anyone heard of Hindus behaving this way in any part of the world? No, that is absurd you would say.

What is happening in West Bengal today is thus not an isolated phenomenon. It is the typical behaviour pattern of some who think they have theological sanction to do so. The mode is called Jihad, the victims are “unbelievers” or kafirs.

What is notable about the latest round of Muslim attack on Hindus, desecration of their temples, destruction of their properties, including assault on women, is that the aggressors belong to the so-called  minority community at the national and State-level, but are a majority in that part of West Bengal. And mind you, this is the remainder of Bengal, a bulk of which became East Pakistan in 1947, and then Bangladesh in 1971.

In many districts of West Bengal, Hindus have been reduced to a minority while the Muslim population has continued to increase because of an officially encouraged policy of bringing lakhs and lakhs of Muslim infiltrators from Bangladesh, settling them in, providing them  with ration  cards, voters’ identity cards, other necessary documentation and facilities, including throwing out Hindus from their rightful habitat, grabbing Hindu property, desecrating temples, abducting womenfolk and marrying them by force after converting them to Islam.

This is the “tolerance” level and genuine commitment to “secularism” of many of Bengal’s perverted Bhadralok. These are seldom reported in the Bengal media or talked of elsewhere. But in private conversations, most would say that they indeed have a serious problem and their very existence has been jeopardized by this ever-increasing Muslim population and its growing clout in every sphere of life.

Right from Siddhartha Shankar Roy to Jyoti Basu, all politicians in West Bengal, and so-called Buddhijibis, have been party to this “Holy” mission of creating another “Holy” land in whatever is left of Bengal and the Bengali way of life. In fact, one former Governor of West Bengal, T.V. Rajeshwar, exposed this menacing scenario and demographic aggression many years back; so have some of its remaining intellectuals.

The queer thing about the role of such “secular” Bengal politicians is that many of them are victims of religio-ethnic cleansing from the Islamic eastern Bengal, who were thrown out following the Noakhali pogrom in 1946, at the time of partition in 1947, in the Holocaust of 1950, large-scale pogrom of 1964, and on several occasions subsequently, as during 2001, etc etc. Hardly a day passes when a persecuted and terror-struck Hindu does not cross over to India, in search of security and safety from Islamised Bangladesh. But India may no longer be safe, if the present trend of Islamic expansionism continues unabated.

I would add a caveat here. There is no dearth of such high-profile Hindu-Sikh refugees in Delhi who are also in the vanguard of promoting Islamic expansionism in the name of a perverted ‘secularism” or vote-bank politics.

This powerful lobby, very sympathetic to the further growth of Islamic influence in India, is strident in claiming that Muslims should have the first priority to the country’s resources, or crying hoarse for a Muslim terrorist and spending sleepless nights over his fate, etc. Another refugee wants reservation of jobs for Muslims, when he should have actually returned to Pakistan and demanded that Hindus/Sikhs(less than 2%) must have a right to a life of dignity there.

Another refugee-leader came up with a spurious doctrine to appease Pakistan and Bangladesh at tremendous cost to India, like giving away the Farakka waters. The latest agenda is to return “vested property” to the families who led the movement for Pakistan and went to Pakistan which they thought was their Jannat. Yet they won’t help Hindu refugees from Kashmir to return to their abandoned homes or even ensure that they receive adequate compensation for the financial loss(besides other damages) they incurred in the distress sale of their landed/homestead properties left there.

Such  acts of kow-towing to the aggressor and tormentor are part of a calculated policy of appeasement of pan-Islam, which began with Congress’s vocal support to the Khilafat and near-acquiescence in the Pogrom unleashed by the Moplahs of Kerala, and continued through partition that went against the Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists and created solid Muslim states in the east and west, while ensuring another round of mayhem, bloodshed and forced conversion of the remaining Kafirs by retaining most Muslims in all parts of India. We see its disastrous consequences through acts of Islamic terrorism and anti-Hindu violence almost daily in West Bengal, Assam, Kerala and various parts of India. Our “secular” establishment, by desisting from exposing the so-called sleeper-cells, actually helps the proliferation of “no-go” areas that flourish all over “secular” India.

Returning to the unhindered anti-Hindu attacks in West Bengal, we would do well to recall that this area was the centre of a Jihadi upsurge led by Titu Mir (1781-1832). This was also the playing fields of both the dreaded Wahabis and the Faraizis. That was Muslim Bengal’s major contribution to the Islamic “reform” movements.

It is sickening to know the depth of degeneration to which a large section Bengal’s famed elite has sunk. A few years ago, a Calcutta Durga puja pandal was modelled on the Bansher Kella (a fortress-like structure built by Titu Mir to fight the idolators). Prof. Rudra Pratap Chattopadhaya records that once the Indian national Congress had arranged their annual conference at Barasat and projected Titu Mir as a freedom fighter! These pan-Islamist expansionists (like Tipu Sultan) who have always been important icons of the “nationalist” and “secular” Congress, deliberately suppress the well known fact that Titu Mir was a Wahabi, a follower of Tariqah-i-Muhammadia, and fought not to restore India/Bengal to the Hindus but to throw out the British so that Muslims defeated  by Lord Clive in the battle of Plassey were restored to power.

The Marxist Government in West Bengal named the Zilla Parishad office building in Barasat after this fanatic Muslim. Must we then conclude that a section of West Bengal’s ruling class, including their intellectuals, the Buddhjibis, who are now changing sides (from the frying pan Communist camp to the fire of the Trinamool camp), many of them refugees from the Muslim “holy” land, have invited the disaster on themselves for worshipping the “sacred” memory of this fanatic “revolutionary” in their misplaced zeal.

The jihadis on the rampage in West Bengal desecrated 5 Hindu temples, thus following the path shown by Titu Mir, who while attacking a Hindu village had killed a cow in a public place and smeared the Kali temple with its blood. Yet “revolutionary” minded intellectuals projected Titu Mir as an Inqalabi in the mould of Lenin, Stalin, Mao and the disastrous Jyoti Basu!

It is a tragedy that the subalterns of West Bengal, again many of them hapless refugees from Islamised eastern Bengal, who abandoned everything in their ancestral homeland, who thought they finally had shelter in post-partition Bengal/India, are once again suffering horrendously because of the demented mindset of their elitist political class and their votebank politics.

It’s a shame that Bengal, once in the forefront of regenerating a defeated society and leading the freedom movement, which had pioneering nation-builders like Rammohan Roy, Swami Vivekanada, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Sri Aurobindo, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, Syama Prasad Mookerjee and countless revolutionaries who went to the gallows singing Bande Mataram, should be groveling at the feet of Jihadis, pampering a communal votebank of aliens dependent on petro-dollars, and go down on their knees to sell their newspapers, books and magazines or artistic and musical skills in Bangladesh. A prestigious fortnightly, once a symbol of a dignified Bengali bhadalok’s literary and cultural symbol, describes the Indian army’s presence in our Kashmir as a “Dakhaldari sainya” or army of occupation. Similarly, after the Mumbai massacre, it blandly asserted that the perpetrators were not based in Pakistan!

It is time all such shady characters, however glorious and high they appear, be brought under the scanner and their subservience to the Ummah, their meek acceptance of Jihad as a legitimate tool of terror against all polytheists (their kinsmen), and their demonstrated antipathy to everything Hindu/Indian exposed.

Today it is Deganga, Bashirhat, Barasat; tomorrow it could be Jamia Nagar, Chandni Chowk, Meerut, Ahmedabad, Mallapuram, Patna City or Kishanganj or any mohalla or city where the demographic balance had gone against the Kafirs and the administration/media and intelligentsia servile to the Ummah and Jihad-friendly thugs.

According to media reports, the local Trinamool Congress MP, Nurul Islam, is behind this Jihadi terror. If true, what was Mamata Banerjee doing? She and her “secular” MP can’t escape responsibility and culpability in the entire Jihadi operation. She must answer.

While Kerala Chief Minister rightly shudders at the prospects of his state turning into a Muslim-majority state, it is time Buddhadeb Bhattacharya and company desist from providing reservation of jobs to Muslims. One can see the dangerous implications of his policy of encouraging madrasa education and his flip-flop on that score.

Keeping all this in mind, it is time we renew the demand for an exchange of population with both Pakistan and Bangladesh. The abundant Hindu generosity, spirit of accommodation, an unending desire to forget the past and have a new beginning with Muslims, has failed time and again.

The author teaches History at the University of Delhi, Delhi