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Are Bangladeshi Hindus India’s burden?
THE saviour complex of India has no match. Like the white-supremist poet Rudyard Kipling’s white man’s burden, are Bangladeshi Hindus India’s burden that they are called to take up? Is Bangladesh...
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Are Bangladeshi Hindus India’s burden?
by Sayema Khatun 01 January, 2025, 00:13
THE saviour complex of India has no match. Like the white-supremist poet Rudyard Kipling’s white man’s burden, are Bangladeshi Hindus India’s burden that they are called to take up? Is Bangladesh not the motherland of the Hindus, just as it is of the Muslims or people of any other religion? Is any minority group any less of the citizens of the country? Did they not win Bangladesh with their blood as an independent nation? Can they not speak for themselves? Do they need to be represented by some third party? These are the questions blowing in the wind to deal with for the last four months after the July uprising. Ever since the Gen-Z-led uprising, as the former fascist prime minister Sheikh Hasina fled to India, Indian media, notorious as the Godi media, had been ranting out to Bangladesh, dictating what to do and not to do.
The ecstasy of dismantling a mafia government was deemed by a fierce anti-Bangladesh campaign opening the floodgates of disinformation/misinformation of so-called ‘Hindu persecution’ by Indian social and mainstream media. Echoing Hasina’s narrative, they are blatantly making false accusations against the chief adviser of ‘genocide’, when on the contrary, Dr Yunus described the nation to be a big family from day one, despite internal conflicts and struggles that are possible to work through. Nevertheless, India escalated its tactics by scrutinising the internal affairs day in and day out.
Not to mention that Bangladesh did not even have any government in place whatsoever from August 5 to August 8 when no law enforcement agency was active to prevent the chaotic and violent incidents around the country. Thousands of police, the perpetrators of the July massacre, fled out of workstations fearing retaliation by the mob. The groups associated with the fascist regime facilitated the mass killing of the students. Awami sympathisers or beneficiaries of the regime, both Hindu and Muslim, inevitably became subject to retaliatory attacks that had been slowly put into judicial process as the order was restored. In the absence of any law-enforcing authority, the students and youths themselves volunteered as traffic police and introduced community monitoring against widespread robbery, attacks, vandalism and mob justice.
Godi media had been deliberately and relentlessly presenting the dramatized stories of attacks on people, property, and temples ‘just because of religious identity’ only after Hasina received shelter in India. The perception and belief that the Awami League is the best custodian of the Hindu community in Bangladesh is not factually true; however, such belief can never be debunked by mere facts and figures. Political instrumentalisation of Bangladesh’s Hindus by the Awami regime remained a dark reality of history. According to the human rights organisation Ain o Salish Kendra’s record, 3,679 incidents of attacks on the Hindus took place in eight years and nine months from 2013-21 under the Awami regime, including 1,678 incidents of consecration of idols and vandalising and torching of the worship pavilions and temples, 1,559 incidents of destruction of Hindu residences, and 442 incidents of attacks on their businesses. The question remains, ‘What was the reaction of the Hindutva Indian to such a large number of attacks on the Hindu community during the Awami regime? Did they attack the Bangladesh High Commission? Did they stop exporting onions and potatoes to Bangladesh? Did they call for the UN peacekeeping force to deploy in Bangladesh? If not, why are they doing this now? For love of Bangladesh’s Hindus or political motives?’
India’s Bangladesh problem
NOTWITHSTANDING the emerging frameworks of anti-discrimination and inclusivity, the challenge remains in inheriting corruption-ridden governance, broken institutions, and a bankrupt economy by the interim government. In this turbulent time, at least 49 Indian media outlets were identified as spreading misinformation about Bangladesh using numerous fake and unrelated images and videos as evidence. This is deeply dishonest and hypocritical. When playing the guardian angel for Bangladesh’s Hindus, India’s Bangladesh problem runs deep and complicated within Indian internal politics that scapegoats and marginalises Bengali Indian Muslims and constantly destabilises the relationship between the two neighbours that share a 4,096-kilometre-long border, the fifth-longest land border in the world. There seems to be no end to horrific border killing by the Border Security Force, which mercilessly and indiscriminately killed a Muslim 10-year-old girl, Felani Khatun (January 7, 2011), and a Hindu 16-year-old girl, Swarna Das (September 1, 2024); it took 31 Bangladeshis’ lives just in 2023 alone.
Despite being the world’s largest democracy, it fails to protect its own minorities from pervasive violence even under an established government. Indian Muslims and other ethnic and religious minorities are routinely being targeted by the Hindu extremist groups enjoying unhinged impunity. Destroying the secular fabric of their own state, setting the tone for the project of a Hindu state in place, it is farcical that India is lecturing on secular principles to the neighbours.
Can Bangladesh similarly express concern regarding the Citizenship Amendment Act and National Registration of Citizenship that stripped away the rights and dignity of Indian Muslims and relegated them to second-class citizens? Should the humiliation of Indian Muslims on a daily basis, the assault on their language, culture, and architectural heritage, and the violation of human rights be tolerated by the global community? Can the violent demolishing of Babri mosque ever be forgotten? Can the Bangladesh government or media summon accountability for the serial killing of mosques and Islamic structures employing the pseudo-scientific approach of the Archaeological Survey of India and rationalising by the judicial system? Can we question the politics of looking for Hindu temples under mosques after mosques in India? Who is fuelling the evil motivation of the latest claim for a Shiva temple under the Sufi shrine of Ajmer Sharif? There are growing concerns and despair about allowing the desecration of Islamic places of worship and the bulldozing of sacred structures and Muslim residences by the Indian authority. No one can ever forget the well-documented state-sponsored Gujarat genocide that killed about a thousand Muslims in 2002. I wonder, what makes India qualified to be the saviour of Bangladesh’s Hindus? Can Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Malaysia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, or Turkey be saviours of the oppressed Indian Muslims in the same logic?
The saviour complex of India does not limit itself only to building false narratives but rather finding pretexts for intervention, instigating mob attacks on Bangladesh borders and high commissions, and fuelling hate-mongering and divisive politics inside Bangladesh, which cannot go unchallenged. The signs of Indian interference in Bangladesh’s national election are, absolutely, despicable. Without the support of India, the fascist regime could not last for three consecutive terms through engineered elections destroying the opposition and repressing dissenting voices. The Hindutva regime waged an extensive propaganda war against Bangladesh once all the damaging secret treaties between Awami Leagues and Bharatiya Janata Party were set to be annulled, they lost their hegemonic grip over Bangladesh once and for all, and their persistent ominous efforts to make it a vessel state had utterly failed. India’s disproportionate trade with Bangladesh faces an enormous loss of annual trade worth $13 billion is not easy to digest. Now, perhaps the last resort remaining is the pretext of saving Bangladesh’s Hindus, who do not need India’s chaperoning to live in their own country. They belong to us.
Vulnerability of Bangladesh’s Hindus is real
WE ARE assured to see Dr Yunus called for building national unity. There is no scope for maintaining a denial mode about the precarity of our minority communities (that includes all religious, ethnic, and linguistic minorities). Bangladesh’s Hindus do have vulnerability in the very structure of how India-Pakistan-Bangladesh was created and feel the fear of small numbers as is true for all other minorities in South Asia. Tragically, the making of India and Pakistan on the Hindu-Muslim fault line created vulnerable minorities on both sides of the borders, which is, actually, way beyond the Hindu-Muslim binary opposition, often cleverly neglected. Rather, a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural complex mosaic of communities exists in this region that often remains invisible in the relentless manufactured dramas performed in the framework of the Hindu-Muslim false dichotomy. No doubt that the historical memory of Hindu-Muslim riots in the 1930s-40s before the 1947 partition, mass migration, displacement, genocide in the 1971 war, and everyday forms of marginality might produce a state of victimhood. The same is true for minorities such as Muslims in India, Hindus in Pakistan, and Muslims in Myanmar or Sri Lanka, for example. The fear of small numbers is something that Bangladesh alone, being a neo-liberal state in its current form, cannot solve; rather, it has to do with the very nature of modern democratic nation-states and the existing electoral system. Having said that, we should be able to recognise that communal hatred does exist and violent incidents along the religious line targeting Hindus do happen. However, we must be able to distinguish such incidents from the systemic state-sponsored atrocities we see in India that are supported through anti-Muslim policy and legal frameworks.
In Bangladesh, on the other hand, the state acknowledges the responsibility to protect and safeguard all minority communities from such incidents by protective policies and functioning legal frameworks. Making everyone equal before the law should be the first principle.
In the course of the decolonising project taking place in Bangladesh right at this moment, the strategies for the preservation of minority rights and protection are enormously important. Throughout the reconstruction and reform of the statecraft, Bangladesh must devise a structural overhaul that safeguards and guarantees the safety, security, and well-being of all minorities and provides opportunities to flourish. As Indian Muslims are Indian citizens, and they must be protected by the sovereign state of India, in the same vein, Bangladeshi Hindus are citizens of Bangladesh and have the same rights and duties as Muslims or people of any other religion. Bangladeshi citizens must not need any religious identity to be protected. The Hindus are an integral part of Bangladesh and India’s intervention of any sort is unwelcome.
Sayema Khatun is a US-based independent anthropologist and an organiser of the Bangladeshi Women Solidarity Network.
by Sayema Khatun 01 January, 2025, 00:13
THE saviour complex of India has no match. Like the white-supremist poet Rudyard Kipling’s white man’s burden, are Bangladeshi Hindus India’s burden that they are called to take up? Is Bangladesh not the motherland of the Hindus, just as it is of the Muslims or people of any other religion? Is any minority group any less of the citizens of the country? Did they not win Bangladesh with their blood as an independent nation? Can they not speak for themselves? Do they need to be represented by some third party? These are the questions blowing in the wind to deal with for the last four months after the July uprising. Ever since the Gen-Z-led uprising, as the former fascist prime minister Sheikh Hasina fled to India, Indian media, notorious as the Godi media, had been ranting out to Bangladesh, dictating what to do and not to do.
The ecstasy of dismantling a mafia government was deemed by a fierce anti-Bangladesh campaign opening the floodgates of disinformation/misinformation of so-called ‘Hindu persecution’ by Indian social and mainstream media. Echoing Hasina’s narrative, they are blatantly making false accusations against the chief adviser of ‘genocide’, when on the contrary, Dr Yunus described the nation to be a big family from day one, despite internal conflicts and struggles that are possible to work through. Nevertheless, India escalated its tactics by scrutinising the internal affairs day in and day out.
Not to mention that Bangladesh did not even have any government in place whatsoever from August 5 to August 8 when no law enforcement agency was active to prevent the chaotic and violent incidents around the country. Thousands of police, the perpetrators of the July massacre, fled out of workstations fearing retaliation by the mob. The groups associated with the fascist regime facilitated the mass killing of the students. Awami sympathisers or beneficiaries of the regime, both Hindu and Muslim, inevitably became subject to retaliatory attacks that had been slowly put into judicial process as the order was restored. In the absence of any law-enforcing authority, the students and youths themselves volunteered as traffic police and introduced community monitoring against widespread robbery, attacks, vandalism and mob justice.
Godi media had been deliberately and relentlessly presenting the dramatized stories of attacks on people, property, and temples ‘just because of religious identity’ only after Hasina received shelter in India. The perception and belief that the Awami League is the best custodian of the Hindu community in Bangladesh is not factually true; however, such belief can never be debunked by mere facts and figures. Political instrumentalisation of Bangladesh’s Hindus by the Awami regime remained a dark reality of history. According to the human rights organisation Ain o Salish Kendra’s record, 3,679 incidents of attacks on the Hindus took place in eight years and nine months from 2013-21 under the Awami regime, including 1,678 incidents of consecration of idols and vandalising and torching of the worship pavilions and temples, 1,559 incidents of destruction of Hindu residences, and 442 incidents of attacks on their businesses. The question remains, ‘What was the reaction of the Hindutva Indian to such a large number of attacks on the Hindu community during the Awami regime? Did they attack the Bangladesh High Commission? Did they stop exporting onions and potatoes to Bangladesh? Did they call for the UN peacekeeping force to deploy in Bangladesh? If not, why are they doing this now? For love of Bangladesh’s Hindus or political motives?’
India’s Bangladesh problem
NOTWITHSTANDING the emerging frameworks of anti-discrimination and inclusivity, the challenge remains in inheriting corruption-ridden governance, broken institutions, and a bankrupt economy by the interim government. In this turbulent time, at least 49 Indian media outlets were identified as spreading misinformation about Bangladesh using numerous fake and unrelated images and videos as evidence. This is deeply dishonest and hypocritical. When playing the guardian angel for Bangladesh’s Hindus, India’s Bangladesh problem runs deep and complicated within Indian internal politics that scapegoats and marginalises Bengali Indian Muslims and constantly destabilises the relationship between the two neighbours that share a 4,096-kilometre-long border, the fifth-longest land border in the world. There seems to be no end to horrific border killing by the Border Security Force, which mercilessly and indiscriminately killed a Muslim 10-year-old girl, Felani Khatun (January 7, 2011), and a Hindu 16-year-old girl, Swarna Das (September 1, 2024); it took 31 Bangladeshis’ lives just in 2023 alone.
Despite being the world’s largest democracy, it fails to protect its own minorities from pervasive violence even under an established government. Indian Muslims and other ethnic and religious minorities are routinely being targeted by the Hindu extremist groups enjoying unhinged impunity. Destroying the secular fabric of their own state, setting the tone for the project of a Hindu state in place, it is farcical that India is lecturing on secular principles to the neighbours.
Can Bangladesh similarly express concern regarding the Citizenship Amendment Act and National Registration of Citizenship that stripped away the rights and dignity of Indian Muslims and relegated them to second-class citizens? Should the humiliation of Indian Muslims on a daily basis, the assault on their language, culture, and architectural heritage, and the violation of human rights be tolerated by the global community? Can the violent demolishing of Babri mosque ever be forgotten? Can the Bangladesh government or media summon accountability for the serial killing of mosques and Islamic structures employing the pseudo-scientific approach of the Archaeological Survey of India and rationalising by the judicial system? Can we question the politics of looking for Hindu temples under mosques after mosques in India? Who is fuelling the evil motivation of the latest claim for a Shiva temple under the Sufi shrine of Ajmer Sharif? There are growing concerns and despair about allowing the desecration of Islamic places of worship and the bulldozing of sacred structures and Muslim residences by the Indian authority. No one can ever forget the well-documented state-sponsored Gujarat genocide that killed about a thousand Muslims in 2002. I wonder, what makes India qualified to be the saviour of Bangladesh’s Hindus? Can Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Malaysia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, or Turkey be saviours of the oppressed Indian Muslims in the same logic?
The saviour complex of India does not limit itself only to building false narratives but rather finding pretexts for intervention, instigating mob attacks on Bangladesh borders and high commissions, and fuelling hate-mongering and divisive politics inside Bangladesh, which cannot go unchallenged. The signs of Indian interference in Bangladesh’s national election are, absolutely, despicable. Without the support of India, the fascist regime could not last for three consecutive terms through engineered elections destroying the opposition and repressing dissenting voices. The Hindutva regime waged an extensive propaganda war against Bangladesh once all the damaging secret treaties between Awami Leagues and Bharatiya Janata Party were set to be annulled, they lost their hegemonic grip over Bangladesh once and for all, and their persistent ominous efforts to make it a vessel state had utterly failed. India’s disproportionate trade with Bangladesh faces an enormous loss of annual trade worth $13 billion is not easy to digest. Now, perhaps the last resort remaining is the pretext of saving Bangladesh’s Hindus, who do not need India’s chaperoning to live in their own country. They belong to us.
Vulnerability of Bangladesh’s Hindus is real
WE ARE assured to see Dr Yunus called for building national unity. There is no scope for maintaining a denial mode about the precarity of our minority communities (that includes all religious, ethnic, and linguistic minorities). Bangladesh’s Hindus do have vulnerability in the very structure of how India-Pakistan-Bangladesh was created and feel the fear of small numbers as is true for all other minorities in South Asia. Tragically, the making of India and Pakistan on the Hindu-Muslim fault line created vulnerable minorities on both sides of the borders, which is, actually, way beyond the Hindu-Muslim binary opposition, often cleverly neglected. Rather, a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural complex mosaic of communities exists in this region that often remains invisible in the relentless manufactured dramas performed in the framework of the Hindu-Muslim false dichotomy. No doubt that the historical memory of Hindu-Muslim riots in the 1930s-40s before the 1947 partition, mass migration, displacement, genocide in the 1971 war, and everyday forms of marginality might produce a state of victimhood. The same is true for minorities such as Muslims in India, Hindus in Pakistan, and Muslims in Myanmar or Sri Lanka, for example. The fear of small numbers is something that Bangladesh alone, being a neo-liberal state in its current form, cannot solve; rather, it has to do with the very nature of modern democratic nation-states and the existing electoral system. Having said that, we should be able to recognise that communal hatred does exist and violent incidents along the religious line targeting Hindus do happen. However, we must be able to distinguish such incidents from the systemic state-sponsored atrocities we see in India that are supported through anti-Muslim policy and legal frameworks.
In Bangladesh, on the other hand, the state acknowledges the responsibility to protect and safeguard all minority communities from such incidents by protective policies and functioning legal frameworks. Making everyone equal before the law should be the first principle.
In the course of the decolonising project taking place in Bangladesh right at this moment, the strategies for the preservation of minority rights and protection are enormously important. Throughout the reconstruction and reform of the statecraft, Bangladesh must devise a structural overhaul that safeguards and guarantees the safety, security, and well-being of all minorities and provides opportunities to flourish. As Indian Muslims are Indian citizens, and they must be protected by the sovereign state of India, in the same vein, Bangladeshi Hindus are citizens of Bangladesh and have the same rights and duties as Muslims or people of any other religion. Bangladeshi citizens must not need any religious identity to be protected. The Hindus are an integral part of Bangladesh and India’s intervention of any sort is unwelcome.
Sayema Khatun is a US-based independent anthropologist and an organiser of the Bangladeshi Women Solidarity Network.
