Feature 
 

Tolerance

A Splintering Identity

Although the Bangladesh government has spoken out against Islamist extremism, its willingness and ability to crack down on these organizations has not been sufficient.

By Jai Kumar Dhirani | December 2021

In Pakistan, the minority enjoys the same rights and security as the majority do. Both India and Bangladesh ought to learn the treatment of minorities from Islamabad.

The South Asian region currently faces a grave security threat due to increasing extremism. The politics of violence and extremist trends in South Asia can be linked to the contradictions arising as a consequence of dirty national politics. It can either be Indian PM Narendra Modi’s extremist political approach or that of Bangladesh’s extremist groups’ approach.

The Hindus in Bangladesh constitute 8.5% out of the total 149.7 million population, according to the 2011 census. The Hindu population reduced by nearly one million between 2001 and 2011. As in 1974, the population percentage of Hindus was 13.50%, which reduced in 1981 to 12.13 %, 10.51% in 1991, 9.61% in 2001 and 8.5% in 2011. In 2013, Amnesty International reported that the rise of more explicitly religious extremist political formations in Bangladesh during the 1990s had resulted in many Hindus being intimidated or attacked, and that fairly substantial numbers left the country for India. Dhaka University economist namely Abul Barkat, from his 30-year-long research, also found that around 11.3 million Hindus left Bangladesh due to religious persecution and discrimination.

Contemporarily on 12 October in Bangladesh, the first day of Durga Puja, the biggest festival of Bengali Hindus, a strange video began circulating on social media. It showed a man carrying the Islamic holy book, with a voice-over claiming it had been rescued from under the feet of a Hindu idol. It quickly went viral on Facebook and WhatsApp, unleashing a wave of attacks on Hindus and other religious minorities.

The Bangladesh Hindu Grand Alliance claimed that ‘attacks were planned and politically motivated while religion was used to cover up the real motives.’ The organization also claimed that five people were killed and four women raped during the violence, while media reports put the toll at four deaths and no rapes. Beginning in Comilla, the attacks took place in 22 districts across Bangladesh within a few days. Till the end of October, altogether 25 districts experienced communal attacks, five people succumbed to death while five women were raped, and five others escaped attempted rape. Besides this, 400 women were harrassed during the attacks, at least 31 temples, 227 puja mandaps and 994 idols were vandalized, 241 Hindu homes and 747 other houses were attacked and about 20 business establishments owned by Hindus vandalised and looted.


In response , Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina instructed the home minister to initiate immediate action against those who incited violence using religion as she asked the people not to trust anything on social media without fact-checking. The Foreign Ministry in Dhaka in a statement underlined that the Government of Bangladesh “unequivocally condemned those incidents and took serious note of the reactions from within and outside the Hindu community.”

Evidence suggests the initial incidents in Comilla were a deliberate sectarian provocation. CCTV appeared to identify Ikbal Hossain, a 35-year-old Muslim, as the one who placed the Quran in the shrine in the early hours, and he has now been arrested. But it was the streaming of the Quran incident on Facebook live, which was then shared and downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, accompanied by inflammatory calls for violence, which appeared to provoke the widespread riots.

The violence seeped over the border into the neighbouring Indian state of Tripura, where more than a dozen retaliatory rallies by rightwing Hindu group Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) and others escalated into violence and anti-Muslim attacks. Muslim residents were terrorised, Muslim shops were torched, and at least 16 mosques were vandalised – of which four were set alight – in violence that began on 21 October and continued. Witnesses saw upwards of 3,000 people in Tripura, many carrying sticks, iron rods, swords and cans of kerosene or petrol, marching through districts across Tripura, attacking Muslim homes and businesses. Saffron flags, the symbol of Hindu nationalism, were planted on several mosques.

The region has a long history of communal tensions and violence. The major reason behind this is the ethnocentric mindset of the masses which have often been used as a tool by the political parties, using religious sentiments to grab power or to overthrow or mount pressure on the incumbent government. The minority becomes the victim everywhere , whether it is the Muslim minority in Indian occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJ&K) and inside India or Hindus in Bangladesh. In Pakistan, the minority enjoys the same rights and security as the majority do. Both India and Bangladesh ought to learn the treatment of minorities from Islamabad.

If the violence continues, the percentage of Hindus in Bangladesh will further decrease from 8.5%, as it is a direct menace to their lives, property and sentiments.

Read More