Research

Partition and the legacy of the two-nation theory have shaped the history of the subcontinent. The division of two nation-states into Hindus and Muslims had formalized this divide in a way that one religious community dominated the other, that is, the Hindus in India and the Muslims in Pakistan. The partition of the subcontinent along religious lines with accompanying communal violence produced a politics that was reproduced consecutively in the day-to-day lives of religious minorities of the region. In this article, I discuss how Hindus came to be constituted as minorities in the state of Bangladesh, in the context of its Constitution, legal structure, demography and ideology. It charts the trajectory of their journey as a minority in Bangladesh, the politics of minority vote banks, its interplay with electoral politics, the intricacy of property laws and the reasons for their resultant exodus into India. In describing the growing vulnerability of Hindus, I locate their responses in the context of present-day national, regional and global politics.