‘Our lives don’t matter’: In post-Hasina Bangladesh, Hindus fear future

Dhaka, Bangladesh – Krishna Das had never imagined that his peaceful life in Sunamganj, a northeastern district of Bangladesh, would come crashing down on a seemingly ordinary Tuesday evening last week.

The trigger was an allegation of blasphemy. A young Hindu man, Akash Das, had allegedly posted an insulting comment about the Quran on Facebook. The comment quickly spread across social media, igniting protests and escalating tensions, particularly in the predominantly Muslim community of Dowarabazar, about 270km (168 miles) from the national capital Dhaka.

Krishna was at home when the first signs of chaos reached his doorstep in Monglargaon village about 8pm. “I heard shouting coming from the market,” Krishna recalled. “I couldn’t understand what was happening, but I could feel something was wrong.”

Stepping outside, he saw people gathering in the streets, chanting slogans. Soon, the crowd grew into a mob, waving sticks and batons. “I rushed inside, locked the doors, and tried to hide,” he said. “But they broke in anyway.”

The violence spread quickly, even though Akash Das, the 17-year-old Hindu man from his neighbourhood, had already been arrested by the police under the “cyber security act” before the mob descended on Monglargaon.

“They destroyed everything – everything I had worked for. It was as if we were nothing – our lives didn’t matter,” Krishna, a small-scale farmer, told Al Jazeera. “They smashed our windows, destroyed our furniture, and began looting everything of value. They took money, little jewellery and anything they could find. Even the kitchen utensils.”

The attackers even set fire to part of his house. Though Krishna was able to extinguish the flames, the family’s tin-roofed and walled home was destroyed, their possessions gone – and their sense of security shattered. When Al Jazeera met Krishna four days after the incident, his family – a wife and two teenage sons – was not at home.

“I sent my wife and sons away to stay with relatives in the city,” Krishna told us in an exhausted voice. “They were terrified.”

At least 20 other Hindu homes in Monglargaon were also attacked.

“When they attacked my home, my two daughters and wife fled through the backdoor into the jungle,” said Bijon Das, referring to a dense patch of trees behind his house.

“I have sent my daughters and wife to my relative’s house in the city [Sylhet, the nearest big city],” he added, saying that several Hindu men were staying back only to guard their homes.

The mob violence lasted for about three to four hours before security forces intervened.

“I saw that most of the damage was to tin-roofed houses and tin-shuttered shops,” said local journalist AR Jewel, who was on the scene when the attack happened, estimating about 20 properties were affected.

However, Meher Nigar Tanu, the top bureaucrat for the subdistrict in which Monglargaon falls, downplayed the scale of the violence, arguing that “only a few homes and shops had been slightly damaged”.

She insisted that some social media reports had “exaggerated” the violence, and told Al Jazeera that law enforcement officials had managed to stop a mob from entering a temple belonging to the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), a Hindu religious movement.

Local authorities, including the army and police, are working to restore a “sense of security” for the region’s Hindus, Tanu said.

Still, fear lingers. In Monglargaon, the village at the heart of the violence, many houses were seen locked last week on Friday morning, and the streets were eerily quiet – with security forces stationed at street intersections.

For many Hindus across Bangladesh, Monglargaon is a microcosm of the community’s deep insecurities these days.

‘A twofold problem’

On August 5, then Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina fled hastily from Dhaka for India on a military aircraft after 15 years in power, following a popular uprising against her increasingly authoritarian rule. More than 1,000 people are estimated to have been killed in the crackdown by her security forces before she resigned.

India is widely perceived in Bangladesh as having propped up Hasina’s rule. Hasina and her secular Awami League party, in turn, are viewed as having been more sympathetic to the country’s Hindu minority – which makes up 10 percent of the population – than the nation’s other major political forces, such as the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and the Jamaat-e-Islami. Activists from the BNP and Jamaat – which both faced severe curbs under Hasina’s rule – no longer face those restrictions.

Reports from the aftermath of the Hasina regime’s collapse suggest large-scale looting and the ransacking of national monuments and government buildings. More than 200 people were killed, across religions, mostly Awami League activists and police officials, as Hasina’s fall precipitated a thirst for retribution and revenge.

According to the Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council (BHBCUC), a minority rights group, there were 2,000 incidents of “communal violence”, including nine Hindu deaths and 69 attacks on places of worship, between August 4 and August 20.

However, investigations by Netra News, an independent investigative outlet, which scrutinised the most severe claims, the deaths of the nine Hindu men, found that the killings were “politically and personally motivated, not religiously driven”.

Meanwhile, as relations between India and Bangladesh plummeted, some media reports in India exaggerated the scale of violence against Hindus. “Assaults targeting minority groups are not uncommon in Bangladesh, especially when the government changes hands,” said 42-year-old Deboraj Bhattacharjee, a Hindu banker in Dhaka. “But the way some particular Indian media, aligned with BJP, are twisting the ground reality and spreading a climate of fear doesn’t help us here.”

He was referring to India’s ruling Hindu majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

As many as 49 Indian media outlets disseminated at least 13 false reports about Bangladesh between August 12 and December 5, 2024, according to an investigation by Rumor Scanner, an independent Bangladeshi fact-checking organisation.

Still, “since the fall of Hasina, there is no way to deny the fear and insecurity that’s gripping the Hindu communities … mostly in rural areas,” said Bhattacharjee. Anti-Hindu religious activists, “who couldn’t dominate much during the Hasina rule, now are in strength”, he added.

Abhro Shome Pias, a 27-year-old Hindu student who studies at Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), Dhaka’s premier engineering college, said there had been “countless incidents of violence and persecution of Hindus”.

“Many Hindus have been displaced, and their lands were grabbed forcibly, and it’s unclear whether they’ve received justice or compensation,” said Pias.

The attacks also shine a light on a painful truth for many Bangladeshi Hindus: They say they need to constantly prove their loyalty to their country over India.

“India is home to 90 percent of our religious sites, and that’s where our connection lies,” Pias explained. “However, the majority of Bangladeshi Hindus do not support the current Indian government or its ‘Hindutva’ extremism,” he said, referring to the Hindu majoritarian ideology of the BJP.

That pressure to dissociate from India gets complicated when the giant neighbour is seen as peddling amplified accounts of Hindu atrocities in Bangladesh, say community members.

“Hindus in Bangladesh are facing a twofold problem,” said Chakravarty, a 29-year-old pharmacy owner at Dowarabazar market, who spoke on condition that his full name not be revealed. “On one hand, Indian media spreads disinformation and exaggerates incidents, some of which never even happened. This fuels anti-India sentiment, which, in turn, contributes to a feeling of insecurity among us, the Hindus.”

It’s an insecurity Chakravarty lived through – and barely survived – last week.

‘Trapped inside for 2.5 hours’

As the mob rampaged through Dowarabazar market last week, Chakravarty found himself trapped inside his shop, thinking only of his three-year-old daughter. His wife had passed away during the COVID-19 pandemic, and his daughter’s safety was his sole concern.

“I was inside when I heard them chanting slogans. As they attacked, I quickly put the shutter down,” Chakravarty told Al Jazeera. “I was trapped inside for about two and a half hours while they attacked my shop and others nearby.”

The attackers used machetes, threw bricks, and wreaked havoc on nearby businesses. “They couldn’t enter my pharmacy, but damaged my gates,” he said, adding that his uncle’s pharmacy in the same market was completely ransacked. “There wasn’t even a paracetamol left.”

From inside his pharmacy, Chakravarty’s mind raced back home. “I kept calling my family, wondering if our house was attacked,” he said. His elderly mother, father and sister-in-law are now staying with his brother in Sylhet city, and his daughter is with them.

“If it weren’t for my motherless daughter, I don’t know if I would have survived. I would have had a cardiac arrest,” he said, his voice cracking with emotion. “If they had gotten inside, they might have beaten me to death.” However, there were no reported injuries or casualties in the attack on the market that day.

“Later that night, I came home and found the door broken, and everything – furniture, clothes – was destroyed. They even ransacked our drawers. In the morning, there was nothing left in the house to use,” he said. Some other families whose homes had been attacked had been left without even “utensils to cook their meal the next morning”, he said.

Chakravarty, who also provides basic medical treatment door-to-door in nearby villages, said when he visited patients, he “saw disbelief in their eyes”.

“The debris, the broken bits of furniture, bricks, and broken glasses all around the premises,” he recounted.

Yet, Chakravarty emphasised that such violence was unprecedented in the region. “People here work together – even celebrate together in religious festivals and gatherings. This has never happened before,” he noted.

“This will leave a scar for a long time.”

Who’s to blame?

The interim leadership in Bangladesh, led by 84-year-old Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, has accused the Indian media of exaggerating attacks on Hindus in Bangladesh.

Shafiqul Alam, press secretary to Yunus, acknowledged to Al Jazeera that there had been some attacks on religious minorities following the ousting of Hasina. But, he added, “many of the events reported in the Indian media have been exaggerated and part of an industrial level dissemination of deliberate disinformation”.

The interim government is committed to upholding “freedom of religion, freedom of association, and freedom of assembly for all religious institutions”, he said.

Calling on the religious leaders from all faiths for a “national unity” on Thursday last week, Yunus said there was a “discrepancy between the reality and the news published by foreign media”, about attacks on religious minorities.

Meanwhile, Hindu activists have staged several large-scale protest rallies in the capital, Dhaka, and elsewhere since August to demand, among other things, laws to protect minorities, the establishment of a minority ministry, and a tribunal to prosecute acts of oppression against them. They also called for a five-day holiday for the biggest festival for Hindu Bengalis, Durga Puja.

But tensions escalated further after the arrest of Chinmoy Krishna Das, a Hindu monk formerly associated with ISKCON, in November. Das had been rallying protests after Hasina’s removal. He was detained under a colonial-era sedition law after a local politician accused him of insulting the Bangladeshi flag by raising a saffron flag (commonly associated with Hinduism) on top of it at a rally calling for an end to the violence against Hindus.

His arrest and subsequent bail denial triggered a wave of protests, culminating in a deadly clash with police when a Muslim lawyer was hacked to death outside a Chattogram court, allegedly by the supporters of ISKCON.

Police arrested more than 20 individuals in connection with the murder, amid protests by lawyers and students who called for a ban on ISKCON in Bangladesh. The Supreme Court has so far rejected legal petitions seeking to ban ISKCON.

Meanwhile, Hasina issued a statement from exile in India last week, accusing Yunus of failing to protect Hindus and other minorities. “Hindus, Buddhists, Christians – no one has been spared. Eleven churches have been destroyed. Temples and Buddhist shrines have been broken. When the Hindus protested, the ISKCON leader was arrested,” Hasina said.

Were Hindus safer during Hasina’s regime?

Yet, some Hindus argue that the notion that the community was safer in Bangladesh under Hasina is misplaced.

Bhattacharjee recalls losing two acres (about 0.8 hectares) of family land at the hands of activists of a former Awami League MP, who was arrested last September on charges of “extortion and death threats”.

“Hindus were not safe under Hasina either,” he said. “We were used as political pawns. The sense of security many Hindus felt during the Awami League regime was more psychological than real.”

However, Sreeradha Datta, a professor and Bangladesh expert at Jindal School of International Affairs on the outskirts of New Delhi, India, explained to Al Jazeera that the perception of Hindu safety under a Hasina administration is rooted in historical context.

“While violence against Hindus did occur during the Awami League’s 15-year rule, the party’s secular stance generally gave minority groups a sense of security and safety,” Datta said. “In contrast, during previous non-Awami League governments, like the BNP-Jamaat alliance, attacks on minorities notably increased. This continues to influence the current perceptions.”

The minority rights group, BHBCUC, had earlier reported 45 murders, mostly of Hindus, between June 2023 and July 2024 during the Hasina administration.

A prominent human rights group, Ain o Salish Kendra, reported at least 3,679 attacks on the Hindu community between January 2013 and September 2021, including vandalism, arson, and targeted violence, with Awami League leaders allegedly complicit in several cases.

In 2021, following mob attacks on Hindu minority households and temples in Bangladesh during and after Durga Puja, rights group Amnesty International said, “Such repeated attacks against individuals, communal violence and destruction of the homes and places of worship of minorities in Bangladesh over the years show that the state has failed in its duty to protect minorities.”

Manindra Kumar Nath, president of the BHBCUC, stressed that the minority movement in Bangladesh is distinct and independent from both India and Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League.

“It’s not a new phenomenon. The demand for a minority protection law and the establishment of a minority commission has been longstanding,” he told Al Jazeera.

Nath also noted that Hindu students were actively involved in the protest movement that led to the removal of Hasina’s government. “They united to protest the unfulfilled promises and demands that Hasina has ignored for far too long,” he explained.

Khalid Mahmud Chowdhury, a former minister in Hasina’s cabinet now in exile in India, however, defended his party’s track record.

“If you compare the violence against Hindus during non-[Awami League] regimes with what occurred under ours, the difference is clear,” he told Al Jazeera.

“Some attacks did happen during our rule, we cannot deny that. However, what’s happening after August 5 is sheer brutality and a violation of human rights,” he added. “They [the interim government] are trying to remove secularism from the constitution.”

The country’s constitution designates Islam as the state religion while also recognising “secularism” as one of the guiding principles. However, this may now be at risk of change.

Bangladesh’s attorney general, Md Asaduzzaman, suggested during an October high court hearing that he would support the removal of secularism from the constitution. “Socialism and secularism do not reflect the realities of a nation where 90 percent of the population are Muslim,” he said.

Nath warned that removing secularism from the constitution would significantly threaten the rights of religious minorities. “In the past, governments have promised us protections and rights in their election manifestos, but once in power, they failed to implement them,” he said.

Bhattacharjee echoed those concerns.

“If secularism is taken out of the constitution, it’ll send a clear message that religious minorities no longer matter to the state.”

Already, he said, the government was downplaying attacks on Hindus, by suggesting that only those affiliated with the Awami League had been targeted and that the attackers were “miscreants” rather than mobs driven by sentiments against the community.

“The real challenge for this interim government isn’t about combating disinformation from some other country,” he said. “It’s how they handle the rising violence at home, especially with fundamentalist groups now emboldened. The focus needs to be on ensuring Hindu minorities feel safe again.”

“Words aren’t enough any more.”

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