When massive protests erupted last summer against Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, third-year information technology student Sukanto Barman was all-in.
The student-led demonstrations toppled Ms. Hasina and ended 15 years of increasingly autocratic rule in Bangladesh. The uprising has set the country on a new path, with an interim government, led by Nobel Peace laureate Muhammad Yunus, preparing to hold elections by early next year.
But a clear victory for democracy in Bangladesh, a country of 170 million people, carried a sting in its tail. And that has led Mr. Barman, who is Hindu, to take up another type of activism: standing up for minority rights in a new political era.
Why We Wrote This
People-power movements can break the grip of authoritarianism. But as is clear in Bangladesh, not everyone in society wins amid the sweeping change.
Hindus make up around 8% of Bangladesh’s population. Most had supported Ms. Hasina’s secular government. In the chaotic aftermath of her ouster, hundreds of people died in reprisal attacks across the country. Hindus were among the victims: Their homes, temples, and businesses were attacked by mobs; thousands of Hindus living near the Indian border crossed over to seek refuge.
Now Mr. Barman and a group of fellow activists are documenting anti-Hindu attacks and threats, often at great risk to their own safety. But they complain that Bangladesh’s interim government has failed to protect them. And their plight is receiving scant attention inside Bangladesh, in large part because of the country’s fraught relationship with its dominant neighbor, India, where Ms. Hasina fled. There, the attacks on Bangladeshi Hindus are receiving a frenzy of media attention.
Mr. Barman has tried to get local authorities and police to punish the perpetrators, but with limited success, he says. “Our people are suffering.”
Rise in violence
One national minority rights organization said it had recorded more than 2,000 acts of violence against Hindus and other minority groups last August alone.
Swapon Chandra Das was at home in his village on the outskirts of Dhamrai when the government fell last summer. Inside the walled compound where he lives with other Hindu families, abutting a Muslim village, craftsmen were sculpting an idol for a festival. A group of 60 to 70 men armed with bamboo sticks forced its way through the front gate and began breaking windows and smashing the idol. Residents took shelter in their houses.
“The people who attacked us were from the neighboring village,” says Mr. Das. Some locals also came out to urge the attackers to leave, which they eventually did when police showed up.
Now the community lives in trepidation, unsure how quickly police would respond to a future attack.
The Yunus government insists that the vast majority of attacks on Hindus aren’t religiously motivated and noted that overall public safety hasn’t fully recovered since the collapse of the former regime. Of the more than 2,000 acts reported to police in August, only a handful were classified as communal as opposed to political or criminal.
Mr. Barman says police are too quick to blame attacks on politics simply because Hindus supported Ms. Hasina. He has tried to get Bangladeshi news media to report on these attacks but says they ignore or downplay them.
In neighboring India, however, it’s a different story: The plight of Hindus in Bangladesh is front and center in broadcast and online media. Indian social-media influencers decry what they call a genocide of Hindus and allege that Islamists have taken over Bangladesh.
This media frenzy is proving a double-edged sword for Mr. Barman. Mixed with reports of actual violence and robbery targeting Hindus is a swirl of false and misleading claims, including doctored images. Rampant disinformation has made Bangladeshis cynical about India’s defense of Hindu rights and wary of its meddling in their politics.
“The actions of India are not helping our campaign. When they spread false news, then the actual news isn’t noticed,” says Mr. Barman.
The role of politics
Accusations that human rights advocacy is tainted by domestic politics aren’t new. China’s government has long viewed Western concerns over Tibetan and Uyghur rights as efforts to undermine its legitimacy. On Monday, a group of white South Africans arrived in the United States after the Trump administration said it would grant them refugee status, claiming they were victims of racial discrimination. Resettlements of all other refugees have been suspended since President Donald Trump took office in January.
In Bangladesh’s case, India’s focus on Hindu rights is seen as part of a broader history of political tension between the two countries – a relationship complicated by India’s geopolitical dominance in the region and the Hindu nationalist politics of Delhi. Perhaps the biggest obstacle to bilateral relations is Ms. Hasina, whom India refuses to hand over to Bangladesh to stand trial on charges of corruption and human rights abuses.
India’s longtime support for Ms. Hasina has blinded it to Bangladesh’s new political reality and chilled bilateral ties, argues retired General A.N.M. Muniruzzaman, who heads the Bangladesh Institute of Peace and Security Studies. “They’re making the same mistake that they did by putting all their eggs in one basket with [Sheikh] Hasina,” he says.
Mr. Yunus recently met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at a regional summit in Bangkok, their first meeting since the uprising. Mr. Modi raised India’s concerns about Hindu rights at the meeting. Mr. Yunus has said that authorities were committed to upholding the rights of all Bangladeshis, including Hindus and other minority groups.
Some of the alleged perpetrators of attacks on Hindus belonged to opposition parties, including Jamaat-e-Islami, an Islamist party that was banned by Sheikh Hasina. Some individuals sought to seize Hindu properties last August, taking advantage of the power vacuum, according to U.N. human rights investigators. (The U.N. investigators focused primarily on the killings of more than 1,000 students and other protesters during the uprising.)
Syed Abdullah Taher, a senior member of Jamaat-e-Islami, insists the party has worked hard to tamp down communal tensions. Some supporters may have broken the law last August but not at the behest of the party, which is preparing to contest the upcoming democratic elections.
A former member of Parliament, Mr. Taher says Hindus in his constituency supported him and had good relations with the party. “We live together, Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims, very peacefully.”
The villagers in Dhamrai aspire to that multicultural harmony. In some respects, they are fortunate: Mr. Das’s cousin, the community’s leader, is a prominent educator. Their compound is near the capital, Dhaka, along a highway of brickyards and rice paddies, and not in the countryside where violent seizures of land often go unheralded.
But the community’s political ties to Ms. Hasina’s Awami League make it vulnerable. Politicians looking for votes used to visit at election time, knowing that Hindus identify with their party. “Whenever an MP gets elected, they come to this community,” says Mr. Das.
On a recent day, however, the village is quiet. Behind a tiled temple, goats graze in a courtyard. Dung is drying in the sun. Firewood is stacked beside a long pit dug for a communal kitchen. The community is preparing to welcome visitors to another festival, to offer Hindu prayers in multifaith Bangladesh.
