Today the world of Asian human rights activists, supporters of liberation movements, defenders of refugee rights have lost a great soul. Free Rohingya Coalition lost its citizen Ambassador.

FRC Co-founder and prominent Rohingya activist Nay San Lwin tweeted:

And I have lost a great friend and a living role model.

Tapan-gyi, as I called him with genuine respect, affection and admiration, passed away in New Delhi today.

Sabber Kyaw Min, a Rohingya refugee who founded and leads the Rohingya Human Rights Initiative issued a brief statement of appreciation: (we) are “deeply saddened by the demise our patron Tapan Kumar Bose. Tapan sir has been a backbone for the organisation and the Rohingya community in South and Southeast Asia at large.”

Tapan Bose (far left, with a cane in his hand) with Rohingya activist leaders of Rohingya Human Rights Initiative which he helped establish, New Delhi, August 2019. (From left to right: Tapan Bose, Maung Zarni, Sabber Kyaw Min, Ali Jinna, and Ali Johar).

Sabber, a survivor of the earlier waves of violence and genocidal destruction in Western Myanmar, has been living in India for the last 20 years, as a refugee. Tapan took him under his wings, mentored him in community organizing, helped raise funds for the grassroots documentation and community self-help initiative that Sabber and fellow Rohingya refugees have set up and lead, and enabled the small group of Rohingyas with talent and integrity to do their diplomacy and outreach among international diplomats, journalists, activists and scholars.

I had come to know Tapan-gyi though my own activism and scholarship that had centred on my birth-country Myanmar’s genocidal Islamophobia and eventual textbook genocide against the predominantly Muslim Rohingyas in 2017. Like many individuals from the Indian subcontinent – including what is now India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the divided Kashmir – Tapan had family ties with the old colonial Burma, which was annexed as “a part of British India”.

In sharp contrast to many a Burmese who harbour resentment and racism towards what we/they refer to as “kular” (a racial slur), that is, generally darker-skinned subcontinental Indians, who had made the colonial Burma their home and prospered as the backbone of the urban commercial class, Tapan was warm and kind towards the Burmese emigres and activists, particularly Rohingya who have been denied both their national identity as Myanmar people and birthright citizenship. (After the 1st military coup in March 1962, General Ne Win, an Islamophobic and xenophobic coup-leader and the architect of Rohingya genocide, expelled 300,000 Indo-Burmese and Burmese of Indian descent, embracing economic racialism almost a decade before Ugandan President General Idi Amin infamously expelled Asian population in 1972).

Though I had known Tapangyi by reputation, I met him in person for the first time when he came to speak an international conference on Rohingya genocide at Barnard College/Columbia University in New York in February 2019, which I co-organized with the renowned scholar of post-colonial studies Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

The last time I saw Tapan was in New Delhi in August 2019 when I went to attend an international security conference organized and hosted by the Observer Research Foundation (ORF) – and funded by Facebook (now Meta), where I talked about Islamophobia as a crucial driver behind state-sponsored and popularly supporter Rohingya genocide to the largely indifferent audiences of national security advisors, former and serving directors of intelligence agencies, defence officials from UK, Israel, India, Sri Lanka, etc.

In such venues, amidst the rise and rise of Hindutva, Indian ruling party’s neo-Fascist ideology with a veneer of Hinduism, Rohingyas, predominantly Buddhist Myanmar’s victims of genocide, were portrayed as “terrorists,” “termites” (that eat away the house). Such vile ideology is something that is in sync with Europe’s – and the West’s – centuries-old Orientalist, (that is, racist and false), framing of Islam as a religion of violence and terror.

Never mind that the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament) is full of references condoning genocides and slaughter, loot and land grab were key features of the rise of Christian Europe as a force of evil, worldwide, patronizing slave trade, slavery, and ethnic cleansing throughout the non-European world.

Initiatives designed to “deradicalize” young Muslims – “prospective terrorists”!!! – were discussed as a part of regional and national security agendas by the very states – Israel, India, UK, etc. – that have institutionalized policies of material deprivation, political disempowerment and demonization of Muslim populations in territories these fundamentally Islamophobic states control, through both normal civil administration and violent military occupational administrations.

Tapan was a very principled opponent of such state-sponsored Islamophobic propaganda and policies of persecution and racial profiling of the oppressed, the vulnerable, and the occupied – whatever their names or legal status or nationality.

While I was at the security conference, attended by the likes of the openly Hindutva authoritarian racist government of Modi revoked the special status, or internal sovereignty, which the two Northwest states of Jammu and Kashmir, with large pockets of native Muslim populations, enjoyed under Article 370 of the Indian constitution.

Already quite frail and in poor health, and accompanied by Sabber and two other Rohingya activists, Tapan came to have lunch with me at a guest house. While walking slowly with the aid of a cane, Tapan was quite agitated and told me that he and his small band of progressive Indians were organizing a protest rally against such regressive move against the two autonomous regions in the Indian Northwest. He and his wife Rita Manchanda were very active in the support campaign for Jammu and Kashmir. They raised their voice when many Indians around them kept quiet about the Neanderthal forces of Hindutva nationalism have taken control of the institutions of Indian state with its secularist aspirations.

Tapan’s last contributions to the activist initiatives I have been involved in was a marathon online FORSEA Conference aimed at calling attention to the rising Islamophobia whipped up by India’s ruling BJP party and its civil society networks of religious bigotry three years ago in February 2022. Tapan gave his opening remarks as the chair of the event which some of the global voice of conscience including Professor Noam Chomsky joined.

Already Tapan was on oxygen in his bedroom which he turned into a working space. The viewers could tell he was struggling with his poor health.

In his words: “The BJP came to power on the shoulders of a movement that is opposed to India’s secular constitution that endeavoured to rise above the scarred legacy of the partition. In these circumstances, … a section of the ruling party and police were allegedly complicit in the events in Haridwar, calling for genocide of Muslims…”

A lifelong secularist, Tapan’s cautionary words against unscrupulous and bigoted politicians of India – and anywhere else – manipulating people’s religiosity for political gains continue to resonate in today’s world where Christian Zionism and extremist religious Zionism – on display in powerful circles in the United States and Israel – have become a very real threat to not only secularist Americans and predominantly Muslim Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories but also our humanity at large.

A polymath, Tapan Kumar Bose was born into a well-to-do Bengali family in Kolkata (Calcutta), West Bengal in 1946. I remember him telling me that his father was not happy with the fact that he chose to embrace very left-leaning radical values (that is, justice, fairness and anti-exploitation), instead of continuing the paternal footsteps of becoming a successful businessman.

Tapan left home in his early 20’s and pursued a career as a filmmaker and a journalist, anchored in these progressive values.

I will mention a few of his well-known films Tapan here.

From Behind the Barricade (1993), the story of the Sikh people’s struggle for recognition of their identity, religion, culture and their right to political, economic and social autonomy, in the context of the Indian state’s repression in Punjab. The film was banned in India for 12 years. Beyond Genocide (1086)

Bhopal: Beyond Genocide (1986) is “the most comprehensive film made” about the catastrophic gas leak at the US corporation Union Carbine-run chemical factory in Bhopal which resulted in thousands of Indian deaths. It shed light on the conflicts between the state and the people and on environment issues that adversely affect the poor and voiceless. The film’s real-world significance is attested to by the fact that Tapan and his colleagues had to wage legal battles to get the legal license from the state to show it to the Indian audiences.

When the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi turned a democratic Indian state into an instrument of national security establishment in the mid-1970’s, Tapan made a decisive shift to get directly involved in causes which many of his contemporaries would consider “lost”, as a rights defender and campaigner for peace. He remained a committed activist until his final breath.

Finally, I would like to mention Tapan, the man. Despite his fame, impactful and life-long activism, and standing among activists, members of the South Asian intelligentsia and state functionaries, Tapan was such a grounded and down-to-earth person. He had mentored younger generations of activists and rights defenders across South Asia. With his signature genuinely warm and disarming smile, he exuded deep humanity and wisdom. He was kind and generous.

Four years ago, my little sister from Mandalay, Myanmar, underwent medical operation in New Delhi where she stayed hospitalized for a month. I had difficulty sending her some money through India’s extremely restrictive international banking procedure to help with her expenses. Frail and ailing, Tapan got wind of the news, and he stepped in and gave her cash she needed. He declined my repeated attempts to pay him back.

I consider him an outstanding role model as a public intellectual and a fine human, who lived his progressive values till his final breath. I will miss him dearly.

Tapan is survived by his wife and comrade Rita Manchanda, daughter Devjani Saini, grandchildren Rudra Saini and Somansh Saini and sisters Gauri and Danu.

Muang Zarni

Posted by Maung Zarni

Dr Maung Zarni is a scholar, educator and human rights activist with 30-years of involvement in Burmese political affairs, Zarni has been denounced as an “enemy of the State” for his opposition to the Myanmar genocide. He is the co-author (with Natalie Brinham) of the pioneering study, "The Slow Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingyas" (Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal, Spring 2014) and "Reworking the Colonial-Era Indian Peril: Myanmar’s State-Directed Persecution of Rohingyas and Other Muslims" (The Brown Journal of World Affairs, Fall/Winter 2017/18).

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