A new book has argued that the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) is repayment of debt to Dalit Hindus who helped the cause of separate Bengali homeland. It chronicled the spirited campaign among the Dalit leadership, all across Bengal, for the separate “homeland for Bengali Hindus” ahead of the partition of India. “On 20 June 1947, during voting in the Bengal Legislative Assembly, twenty five of the thirty SC MLAs voted for the Congress-Mahasabha sponsored resolution in support of the partition of Bengal,” wrote Anirban Ganguly in his new book – From Partition to Progress: Prosecuted Hindus and the Struggle for Citizenship.
Ganguly stressed that the “movement for the creation of West Bengal as a homeland for the Bengali Hindus was supported by the Dalit leadership and intelligentsia”. He lamented that the “Dalits of Bengal played a crucial role in the formation of West Bengal is a story that has been deliberately marginalized”. The book documents episodes chronicling “forced exodus of the Hindus, mostly Dalits and the backward castes” from then East Pakistan in the first four years of the partition.
Ganguly quoted Sukumar Biswas and Hiroshi Sato from their work – Religion and Politics in Bangladesh and West Bengal: A Study of Communal Relations, saying that the “1950 witnessed pogrom in East Pakistan, orchestrated by the police, against the tribal, the Santals. “Village after village was indiscriminately burnt down, peasants were beaten and tortured .