New Delhi: Union home minister Amit Shah claimed that Bangladesh had 27% Hindus at the time of Partition, but today they are “just 9% as they have been subjected to forced religious conversion.”
Shah’s claim comes at a time when Bangladesh has claimed that reports of attacks on its Hindu minorities – in the aftermath of its former prime minister Sheikh Hasina fleeing the country to India after quota reform protests – had been “exaggerated”.
In his first conversation with Bangladesh’s interim leader, Muhammad Yunus on August 16, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had urged protection for Hindus and minorities.
Today, while handing over citizenship certificates to 188 Hindu refugees in Gujarat, Shah lauded the Citizenship (Amendment) Act brought by his government in 2019 – which keeps Muslims out of an Indian citizenship scheme.
Shah said that because of the “policy of appeasement of past governments run by the Congress and its allies, those who came to the country for refuge did not get rights and justice,” according to PTI.
He also said that past governments allowed crores of intruders into the country and made them citizens illegally.
Shah had made a similar claim on Bangladesh’s Hindu population number a few months ago, in an interview. He said, justifying the CAA:
“When the partition happened there were 23% Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan but now only 3.7% of them are left. Where have they all gone? They have not returned here. They were converted, insulted, given second-class status. Where will they go? Will the Parliament not think about them? If I speak about Bangladesh, in 1951, the Hindu population was 22% but now as per the statistics, the Hindu population has been reduced to 10% in 2011. Where are they?…”
AltNews fact-checker Abhishek had then posted on X, showing archived census figures, that Shah’s claims are incorrect. He highlighted that Bangladesh was naturally East Pakistan – formally a part of Pakistan – in 1951.
Abhishek noted that in Pakistan’s first 1951 census data available on the Indian government website, the combined Hindu and other religion population (excluding Muslim and Christians) was 12.86% of the whole of Pakistan. He then added that if data of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) is excluded from the total population count, the total percentage of Hindu and other religion population (excluding Muslim and Christians) were 7.5% of the total population of today’s Pakistan (including just Pakistan and West Pakistan).
“In both ways, whether he includes or excludes East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) data, his claim about the post-partition census is still incorrect about the Hindu and Sikh population in Pakistan,” the fact-checker had noted.
