Great visionaries like Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Jogendranath Mandal, and Dhirendranath Datta once envisioned inclusive nation-states — India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh respectively — where minorities would enjoy equal footing in political, social, and economic spheres. Yet, with the passing of titans like Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, and Mujib, and the rise of lesser leaders, these pluralist ideals have steadily eroded. The majoritarian juggernaut has rolled over the dreams of minority communities. Lord Acton, the English historian and statesman, wisely observed in The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1907), "The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities." It is high time the leadership in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh introspect: are their nations truly free when judged by this standard?
Azad, Mandal, and Datta were not merely representatives of religious minorities; they were nation-builders, whose commitment to democracy, secularism, and pluralism shaped their respective countries' founding visions. Abandoning their ideals is not just an injustice to minorities — it is a form of ideological patricide.
From uncertainty to orphanhood
Maulana Azad envisaged Ummat-i-Wahida — a united Indian nation where Hindus and Muslims lived as one community.
"Azad was aware of the fault lines between the two communities, which were being exploited by both the British and the Muslim League," writes S Irfan Habib in Maulana Azad: A Life (2023). "Tragically, these same fault lines continue to be manipulated today to foster hatred and fear."
Azad vehemently opposed the Two-Nation Theory and the Partition. Yet, his warnings were ignored by the Congress leadership, and the trauma of Partition bled the nation's psyche. Hindus were left stranded in Pakistan; Muslims felt alienated in India. "The Partition of India was a fundamental mistake," Azad declared in his iconic speech at Delhi's Jama Masjid on 23 October 1947. "This country is ours, we belong to it, and any fundamental decisions about its destiny will remain incomplete without our consent."
Seventy-eight years on, can we say that Azad's hope has prevailed over despair?
Ziya Us Salam, in Being Muslim in Hindu India: A Critical View (2023), answers with stark realism: "Muslims in India have had to come to terms with orphanhood — slowly, painfully... the realization has only now begun to sink in, decades after the Father of the Nation's death in 1948." By 2014, he notes, the word "Muslim" had all but disappeared from political vocabulary, replaced by the sanitized "minorities". Electoral exclusion, tokenism, and silence have rendered Indian Muslims "the new outcastes of India — the orphans nobody cared for". In this bleak reality, Azad's dream of Ummat-i-Wahida lies defeated by triumphant majoritarianism.
Instant betrayal
If Azad was disappointed, Jogendranath Mandal was devastated. While Azad remained a respected Union Minister until his death in 1958, Mandal — Pakistan's first Minister for Law and Labour — was swiftly betrayed by the state he helped to found.
Mandal had placed his faith in Dalit-Muslim unity, believing that both communities shared common economic and social struggles. "The principal objective that prompted me to work in cooperation with the Muslim League," he wrote in his searing resignation letter to Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan in 1950, "was... that Muslims and Scheduled Castes were both educationally backward, and victims of upper-caste tyranny."
Yet, this alliance proved to be an illusion. As upper-caste Hindus fled East Pakistan, Dalits who stayed behind became targets of communal violence. Pakistan's policy of religious purification did not spare even its most loyal allies. Mandal eventually fled to India and died in 1968, reportedly of poisoning — a heartbroken man who had realized too late the cost of misplaced trust.
Pakistan has long treated its religious minorities with disdain, especially Hindus. Farahnaz Ispahani, in Purifying the Land of the Pure: A History of Pakistan's Religious Minorities (2018), reports that approximately 1,000 Hindu girls in Sindh are forcibly converted to Islam each year. The Pakistani Hindu Council estimates that 5,000 Hindus migrate to India annually due to persecution. General Zia-ul-Haq's Islamization campaign further reduced minorities to the status of dhimmis — subjugated infidels.
A leader and his people reduced to ashes
Dhirendranath Datta was the first to articulate the Bengali identity within Pakistan. Although he opposed Partition, he chose to stay in East Pakistan after India's independence and was elected to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan. On February 25, 1948, he boldly demanded that Bengali be recognized as one of the official languages, setting the stage for the Bengali nationalist movement and eventually, the birth of Bangladesh. But this commitment came at a grave cost. During the 1971 Liberation War, Datta and his son were arrested by the Pakistan Army, tortured, and murdered. Their bodies were never recovered. Datta had stood for a secular, plural, and inclusive Bangladesh — a vision that continues to be imperiled.
The rise of extremist groups like Jamaat-e-Islami now threatens the very existence of Bangladeshi Hindus. Seen as allies of Sheikh Hasina and India, they are increasingly vulnerable. According to the Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council (BHBCUC), between 4 and 20 August 2024 alone, there were over 2,000 incidents of communal violence, including nine Hindu deaths and 69 attacks on their places of worship.
Intertwined destinies
The fates of religious minorities in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are inextricably linked. As Nawab Ahmed Said Khan of Chhatari, a prominent Muslim League leader from the then United Province, warned Liaquat Ali Khan in October 1947: "If you are going to form a theocratic government in Pakistan, there will be every justification for Hindus to form a Hindu Raj in the rest of India." His fears were prophetic. After the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, a spate of retaliatory violence erupted across Pakistan and Bangladesh. In Pakistan alone, over 120 temples were reportedly destroyed within days.
If South Asia is to remain — or become — a livable region, justice and security for religious minorities must be non-negotiable. Our moral and historical responsibility is to honour the ideals of Azad, Mandal, and Datta—founding fathers who gave their lives to the cause of pluralism and equality.
(Faisal C.K. is Deputy Law Secretary to the Government of Kerala. Views are personal. Email: faisal.chelengara10@gmail.com)
