1964: Hazratbal Hindu Massacre in East Pakistan On December 27, 1963, a revered hair relic of Prophet Muhammad went missing from the Hazratbal Shrine in Srinagar, Kashmir, causing massive anguish and protests across the subcontinent. Indian authorities recovered the relic in early January 1964, and its authenticity was later verified by religious scholars. The State-controlled media and political figures in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) claimed the recovered relic was fake and accused Hindus of engineering the theft. Calls for jihad and retaliation against the Hindu minority were publicly broadcasted. According to Sachi G. Dastidar, “The Hazrat Bal anti-Hindu pogrom took the lives of a large number of innocent Hindus all over the nation. Yet it was vicious, specially in Hindu-majority district of Khulna in southwest of the nation. In Nilanjana Chatterjee’s “Interrogating Victimhood: East Bengali Refugee Narratives of Communal Violence,” an oppressed caste man, Mohendra Dhali, tells an inquiry commission in India, “I witnessed the terrible mass killing by Muslim rioters at Khulna Lauch Ghat (river ferry) on 3rd January 1964…. We saw at least fifty men dressed in black with daggers … three were innumerable dead bodies… We saw village burning, I believe that night on the Khulna launch Ghat alone Hindus numbering two to three hundred were killed. The river turned red… The killing and ethnic cleansing made a Hindu majority Khulan District into a Hindu-minority district. A large number of agriculturist Hindu refugees of the Hazrat Bal pogrom were settled in the middle of dense Dandakaranya Forest of Central India with very little annual rainfall. Most of the refugees were poor agricultural workers and farmers of wet rice-growing culture of Bangladesh, while some others were fishermen. They came from the oppressed Hindu castes. After the privileged-cast-led Hindu Bangladesh Communists came to power in West Bengal in 1977, headed by Chief Minister Jyoti Basu of Dhaka, Bangladesh, a section of those Hindu refugees migrated to Marichjhapi Island in coastal West Bengal and began rice cultivation or fishing. The group remained unaffiliated with the ruling Communists of the state or with the ruling Congress Party at the national level. In a brutal, unprecedented suppression of the oppressed caste, the ruling elites took “police action” in 1979 against these agriculturalists. Writes Jagadish Chandra Mandal in Marichjhapi Naishabder Antarale (Marchjhapi: Beyond Silence), that at least 128 men, women and children were killed or were “missing” because of “police action”, 211 were imprisoned, 163 boats seized and destroyed, and hundreds of items of personal property were confiscated in order to force and starve the population to death or migration. The confiscation and destruction of boats were reminiscent of the colonial British administration in 1943 creating Great Bengal Famine taking lives of millions of Bengalis in pre-partition India at a time when there was bumper crop. Writing about his mass killing of poor, hapless, Hindu refugees peasants, journalists Sunanda K. Datta -Roy states, “Battered groups of men, women and children are being driven back every day; but privations of their journey have focused attention again on 31 years of cruel prejudice, callous neglect and often wanton repression”. (Sachi G. Dastidar, p 168, 69). Reference Sachi G. Dastidar (2021). Bengal’s Hindu Holocaust. Garuda Publication, India.