In a disturbing incident of vandalising on Wikipedia, the wiki page on the Noakhali riots to have found edited to switch the religion of victims and perpetrators of the riots. An edit done to the online crown-sourced encyclopaedia page on 9th April said, “The Noakhali riots were a series of semiorganized massacres, rapes, abductions and forced conversions of Muslims to Hindu and looting and arson of Muslim properties perpetrated by the Hindu community in the districts of Noakhali in the Chittagong Division of Bengal Presidency (now in Bangladesh) in October–November 1946”. The title of the page was changed from Noakhali Genocide to Indian Genocide.
This vandalism was pointed out by a twitter user with the name Stories of Bengali Hindus on Twitter.
The Noakhali riots actually attack on Hindus by Muslims in undivided Bengal in 1946. The riots that went on for almost a week had resulted in death of almost 5000 Hindus. Other than that, hundreds of Hindu women were raped and thousands of Hindu men and women were forcibly converted to Islam by people from Muslim community. Hindus were also forced to pay Jiziyah tax to the Muslim League.
But the Wikipedia page on the riots was changed by someone from IP address 103.67.158.56, and switched the words Hindu and Muslim in the entire article, making it massacre of Muslims by Hindus. The caption of a photo used in the article was also changed, while the original caption was ‘Gandhi listens to a survivor in Noakhali, 1946’, it was changed to ‘RSS Influencing a survivor in Noakhali to kill Muslims, 1946’.
In one para while the original article said that 50000 Hindus were stranded under the strict surveillance of the Muslims, it was changed to say that 50009 Muslims were stranded under surveillance of Indian Army.
The Wiki page was later restored to its original version by alert Wikipedia editors.
A search for the IP address from where the vandalism was done shows that it is located in Dhaka region in Bangladesh. The internet connection is taken from Banglalink, a cellular service provider in Bangladesh. It indicates that some Islamist groups are behind the vandalism in an effort to whitewash the role of Muslims in the genocide of Hindus that had happened in present-day Bangladesh.