On Friday (15th August), the left-leaning portal The Wire carried an article by Bangladeshi writer Ahmede Hussain that attempts to present the Pakistan Movement in an entirely different light. The article does not portray it as a religious demand but instead claims that the demand for Pakistan was supposedly a “class struggle” of peasants and oppressed groups against zamindars and colonial exploitation.”

The author further goes on to argue that Islam in Bengal acted as a force of equality. According to his line of reasoning, the Partition of India must therefore be seen not primarily as a communal project but as a larger pursuit of “social justice.” Such claims essentially suggest that Islam was a levelling tool that empowered the poor against the powerful.

At first glance, this argument may seem like an attempt to add nuance to history and make it appear more complex than the commonly accepted narrative. Yet when studied carefully, it becomes clear that this exercise is not about academic nuance but about whitewashing the past. What is presented as intellectual reinterpretation is, in reality, an ideological attempt: to erase Hindu suffering and justify Islamic bigotry by wrapping it in the modern vocabulary of Marxism and “social justice.”

The danger of such narratives lies in how they create moral justification for past crimes. By presenting communal violence as a form of peasant uprising, they provide cover for the same explanations once used to legitimise brutal massacres such as the Moplah riots of 1921, Direct Action Day in 1946, and the Noakhali genocide later that year. What is being promoted as reinterpretation is, in fact, rehabilitation of arguments that were once used to excuse large-scale killings.

The Pakistan Movement: A project driven by religion, not by class conflict

The Wire article strongly claims that the Pakistan Movement in East Bengal was essentially a peasant uprising in which Islam was merely a unifying symbol of resistance against class oppression. This framing deliberately attempts to reduce or ignore the deeply religious character of the demand for Pakistan.

The historical reality, however, stands in sharp contrast. Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s “Two-Nation Theory” was not a manifesto of class revolution; it was an unambiguous declaration that Hindus and Muslims could not live together as one nation. The Muslim League never mobilised masses under the red flag of socialism. Instead, they rallied under the green banner of Islam.

From speeches to resolutions, every campaign of the Muslim League was saturated with religious calls and Islamic symbolism. The language of redistribution or class equality was never central to their programme. If the core issue was truly zamindari oppression, then the logical solutions would have been land reforms or socialist policies, not carving out a separate Islamic homeland.

That the final outcome was Pakistan—an explicitly religious state created solely as a homeland for Muslims—destroys the claim that the movement was ever about class struggle. What actually took place was communal mobilisation, plain and simple.

Wiping away the blood-soaked truth of Partition: Direct Action Day and the Noakhali genocide

One of the most striking aspects of this revisionist framing is its silence on the horrific communal violence that immediately preceded Partition. On Direct Action Day, 16th August 1946, Muhammad Ali Jinnah gave a direct call for a massive show of Muslim strength. The result was not a peasant uprising but an orchestrated massacre. For three days, Calcutta was turned into a slaughterhouse.

The brutality of those three days is difficult even to comprehend. Conservative records put the death toll at 4,000, but several historians suggest the number was closer to 10,000. More than 100,000 Hindus were driven out of their homes within 72 hours. The nature of the violence showed unimaginable cruelty. Hindu women were publicly gang-raped before being killed, children were hacked to pieces, and corpses were desecrated beyond recognition.

Eyewitness Philip Talbot provided one of the most chilling accounts of this horror, writing: “bodies grotesquely bloated in the tropical heat, slashed bodies, bodies bludgeoned to death, bodies piled on push carts, bodies caught in drains, bodies stacked high in vacant lots.” His testimony makes it clear that this was not about land reforms—it was a calculated display of Islamist terror meant to crush Hindus into submission.

The destruction went beyond human life. Hindu temples were desecrated, idols smashed, sacred texts burned, and religious symbols deliberately targeted. The attackers clearly sought to wipe out Hindu presence from Calcutta, seeing the city as the future capital of East Pakistan.

Barely two months later, on 10th October 1946, Bengal witnessed another horror: the Noakhali genocide. This massacre was carried out with chilling planning and precision. More than 5,000 Hindus, mostly men and boys, were murdered, and many times that number were forcibly converted to Islam. Survivors recounted that Hindus were forced to eat beef and chant the Islamic verses of the kalma.

The violence inflicted on women was particularly devastating. Thousands of Hindu women were raped, many of them in front of their husbands and children, and countless were taken away as captives to be used as sex slaves. The scale of the attacks caused a sharp and visible decline in the Hindu population in the region.

Even today, what is shocking is that the Noakhali Hindu Genocide is still often referred to in textbooks and accounts as “riots.” In truth, every detail—from the systematic killings to the forced conversions—shows that it was nothing less than a planned and full-fledged genocide.

The Moplah massacre: A hundred years of denial and deliberate whitewashing

On 25th September 1921, one of the darkest massacres unfolded in Tuvvur, a village in Malappuram, Kerala. What had begun in August as part of the Khilafat agitation—a campaign tied to the Ottoman Caliphate in Turkey and openly supported by Mahatma Gandhi—transformed into brutal violence targeting Hindus.

In Tuvvur alone, 50 Hindus were murdered and their bodies dumped into a well. Over the next four months, the killings spread like wildfire. By the time authorities were able to bring it under control, more than 2,500 Hindus were slaughtered, many of them by beheading. Countless victims were thrown into wells simply because they refused to convert to Islam.

The violence displaced entire communities. Around one lakh Hindus had to abandon their homes and villages, becoming refugees overnight. Thousands of Hindu families were forced to convert under direct threats of death. Even E.M.S. Namboothiripad, who would later become the first Chief Minister of Kerala, had to flee from his ancestral home to save his life.

Yet, despite the scale of this horror, successive governments and intellectual circles deliberately reshaped its memory. They labelled this barbarity as a “class struggle” or even a “freedom struggle.” Figures such as Gandhi, Annie Besant, and B.R. Ambedkar documented the atrocities, yet in academic and political spaces the narrative of an “agrarian revolt” was allowed to persist. Even today, the Kerala government lists many of the perpetrators as “freedom fighters.”

The Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) has made its position clear: the Moplah uprising was no freedom struggle but a jihadist attempt to create an Islamic caliphate. Yet the tendency to cloak Islamic violence in the Marxist vocabulary of “class struggle” has continued for decades, blurring the memory of Hindu victims.

Moplah massacre was never a peasant revolt—it was jihad in the name of religion

The meaning of martyrdom itself was reshaped by the Moplah fanatics. “The true meaning of Suhadah (martyr) was recaptioned in Islam, when their cause of war was purely religion, and in that name brutally killed, raped and robbed enormous non-Islamic people. According to them, Islamic martyrs, who die during this so-called rebellion, cross the heaven’s gate on horses caparisoned with precious stones, welcomed by ‘Houries’ (Virgin angels) and other fantasies. For an illiterate Eranadan Moplah, these promises of after life were more welcoming than the mundane earthly life he lived.”

The contrast with India’s national movement could not have been sharper. The Indian freedom struggle called on every man and woman to unite for a common cause. But Mahatma Gandhi’s decision to combine the Khilafat agitation with the Swaraj movement proved disastrous. Gandhi had hoped it would bring Muslim communities into the freedom struggle. “Little he knew about the fates of Hindus, when thousands were sacrificed and killed in the name of Islam. The Indian freedom fighters dreamt about a free country, but the Khilafatites, dreamt about a free Islamic country.”

Thus began the 1921 Mappila Jihad. The slogans that filled the air were not nationalist. “Nara-e-Takbir, Allahu Akbar” was the cry—not the chants of freedom or the strength of peasants. Neither did the rioters march with the Swaraj Flag (designed by Pingali Venkayya) nor with the Khilafat flag of two intersecting circles. Instead, they carried the ominous black ‘Banner of Eagle’ (rāyat al-`uqāb), a flag with deep roots in Islamic tradition. Historically associated with Prophet Muhammad, it is also used in Islamist and jihadist movements as a symbol of apocalypse and holy war.

The mobs were armed with iron rods and sheer numbers. Police bayonets could not stop them. Nine rioters were killed in police firing. When the crowds temporarily withdrew, the British captured Kunjikhadar, Secretary of the Thanur Khilafat Committee, along with 40 other Mappilas.

Even so, the administration struggled to respond. Government offices were raided, police stations plundered, treasuries looted, and courts attacked. The violence quickly spread to nearby areas of Malappuram like wildfire, leaving terror in its wake.

When “social justice” is turned into a weapon to erase Sanatan victims

The pattern of distortion is undeniable. Every time Hindus fall victim to Islamic violence, the atrocity is later rebranded under the language of “social justice.” When Hindus are massacred, the story is rewritten: it was not jihad, it was “class struggle.” It was not communal slaughter, it was “anti-colonial resistance.”

This deliberate manipulation erases the victims and elevates the perpetrators into so-called revolutionaries. It is a cynical exploitation of the language of equality. Instead of genuinely addressing caste or agrarian inequalities, the vocabulary of social justice is used to justify aggression. The Moplah rioters were excused because their Hindu victims were portrayed as landlords.

The same rewriting continues with the Pakistan Movement. It is reframed to suggest Hindus were “upper-caste oppressors.” But history records that the slaughtered and forcibly converted included poor Hindu peasants, artisans, and Dalits. Their pain is erased under the pretext of a “larger struggle.”

This is not just distortion—it is a second act of violence. The victims not only lost their lives, homes, and dignity, but their memory continues to be stripped away by false narratives.

The betrayal of Partition: Pakistan delivered no social justice, only new oppression

Even if one were to briefly entertain the argument that the Partition was a social revolution, the outcome itself exposes the falsehood. Did Pakistan bring equality for the oppressed?

The answer is clear. “The answer is a resounding no. Pakistan quickly evolved into a feudal-military state dominated by elites. Land reforms failed, peasants remained impoverished, and minorities, particularly Hindus, were persecuted more than ever. Far from liberation, Pakistan became a nightmare for both its minorities and its poor.”

Thus, the claim that the Pakistan Movement was about social justice collapses in both theory and practice. Its origins were never about liberation, and its consequences only entrenched inequality and bigotry.

The danger of such historical revisionism continues today. By whitewashing Islamic violence and disguising it as social struggle, media platforms like The Wire give cover to ideological justifications that still endanger Hindu communities.

“The religious hatred that fuels the violence is erased. The message is clear: Hindu lives do not matter on their terms; they only matter if their deaths can be repurposed into someone else’s narrative of struggle.”