However, poorer Hindus in East Bengal, most of whom belonged to lower castes like the "Namashudras" found it much more difficult to migrate. Their only property was immovable land holdings. Many sharecropped had no skills other than farming. As a result, most of them decided to stay in East Bengal. However, the political climate in Pakistan deteriorated soon after partition and communal violence started to rise. In 1950, severe riots occurred in Barisal and other places in East Pakistan, causing a further exodus of Hindus. The situation was vividly described by Jogendra Nath Mandal's to Pakistani Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan. Mandal was a "Namashudra" leader and despite being a lower-caste Hindu, he supported the Muslim League as a protest to the subjugation of lower-caste Hindus by their higher-caste coreligionists. He fled to India and resigned from his cabinet minister's post. For the next two decades, Hindus left East Bengal whenever communal tensions flared up or relationship between India and Pakistan deteriorated as in 1964. The situation of the Hindu minority in East Bengal reached its worst in the months preceding and during the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, when the Pakistani Army systematically targeted ethnic Bengalis, regardless of religious background, as part of Operation Searchlight.