quoted in Bass, G. J. (2014). The Blood telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a forgotten genocide.
“

“The term ‘selective genocide,’ you had an army crackdown on one set of people,” says Butcher. “There was a racial prejudice between Punjabis and Bengalis. You’d hear snide remarks that these people are less religious, our little brown brothers.” Some West Pakistanis scorned Bengalis—even the Muslim majority—as weak and debased by too much exposure to Hindus among them. As one of Yahya’s own ministers noted, the junta “looked down” upon the “non-martial Bengalis” as “Muslims converted from the lower caste Hindus.” In similar terms, Sydney Schanberg reported in the New York Times on the “depth of the racial hatred” felt by the dominant Punjabis of West Pakistan for Bengalis.43

— Bengalis

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "“The term ‘selective genocide,’ you had an army crackdown on one set of people,” says Butcher. “There was a racial prejudice between Punjabis and Bengalis. You’d hear snide remarks that these people are less religious, our little brown brothers.” Some West Pakistanis scorned Bengalis—even the Muslim majority—as weak and debased by too much exposure to Hindus among them. As one of Yahya’s own ministers noted, the junta “looked down” upon the “non-martial Bengalis” as “Muslims converted from the lower caste Hindus.” In similar terms, Sydney Schanberg reported in the New York Times on the “depth of the racial hatred” felt by the dominant Punjabis of West Pakistan for Bengalis.43" in the context of "quoted in Bass, G. J. (2014). The Blood telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a forgotten genocide." to mean that wisdom is timeless.

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Source: Wikiquote: "Bengalis" (Quotes) The 'What it means' explanation text was generated by Google Gemini Flash (accessed January 18, 2026). https://gemini.google.com/app
Bengalis

About Bengalis

Bengalis (বাঙালি baŋgali), also rendered as Bangalee or the Bengali people, are an Indo-Aryan ethnolinguistic group originating from and culturally affiliated with the Bengal region of South Asia. The native population is divided between the independent country Bangladesh and the Indian states of West Bengal, Tripura and Assam's Barak Valley. Most of them speak Bengali, a language from the Indo-Aryan language family.