The Global Calcuttan Magazine Hindu Lives (Don’t) Matter!
“What’s happening is in Bangladesh they’re genociding Hindus, they’re raping our women, they’re assaulting our children they’re doing whatever they can because the Hindus are a minority and they’re trying to overrun the minorities. That’s what they’ve done in Pakistan, that’s what they’ve done in Afghanistan, and that’s what they’re trying to do in Bangladesh.” – demonstrator at the Bangladeshi Consulate, Toronto, Canada
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As a crowd gathered on World Human Rights Day in front of the Bangladesh Consulate in Toronto, shouting slogans that “Hindu lives matter,” “Shame on Bangladesh,” “Muhammad Yunus is a Murderer,” along with others, the irony that the world has not reacted in the same way to the slow but steady genocide of Hindus in Bangladesh since it began post-independence from the British when that region became East Pakistan. Later, with India’s help and the blood of the Hindu community and rebels of other religions including Muslims, East Pakistan was liberated from the oppressive West Pakistan army and Bangladesh was born.
When asked by the Indian news agency, ANI why he was protesting, one demonstrator stated the obvious: “We want Bangladesh to stop killing Hindus, stop burning places of worship, stop raping women, stop abducting women. And we want peace in Bangladesh.”
The genocide has increased in intensity in recent days with 88 attacks on Hindus including the burning down of an ISKON temple, occurring after the visit of India’s foreign secretary, to Bangladesh to express India’s concern about the welfare of the Hindu and other minority communities.
Indeed, the attacks which followed appeared to be a slap in the face to India as if to say, “we don’t care what you say; you can’t tell us what to do; if we want to eradicate non-Muslims from Bangladesh, India certainly can stop us!”
Tensions intensified on November 25th after a monk named Chinmoy Krishna Das, formerly of the Hindu organization International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKON), which is based in Mayapur, India with branches all over the world including several temples in Bangladesh – and which engages in various charitable works including feeding the poor, irrespective of their religion – was arrested on grounds of sedition. There is hardly a more serious charge in a country, which now regards him as a traitor. His purported crime: disrespecting the Bangladesh flag.
According to the Indian national daily, The Hindu, Chinmoy Krishna Das, “who has a considerable following in Bangladesh, has regularly advocated for the rights of religious minorities, and has garnered particular attention after the fall of Sheikh Hasina’s government on August 5, 2024. Since then, Mr. Das has engaged in dialogue with various political parties, including the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), urging communal harmony. In a press conference held earlier this month, Mr. Das alleged that the interim government under Nobel Peace Prize laureate Prof. Mohammad Yunus had failed to stop at least 3,000 attacks on Hindus in Bangladesh.”
Chinmoy Krishna Das, the popular Hindu monk arrested on November 25th and charged with sedition in Chittagong, Bangladesh for ‘disrespecting’ the flag of that country.
On the same day, a lawyer named Saiful Islam, purportedly defending or coming to the aid of Mr. Das was hacked to death by a bloodthirsty Muslim mob. Reacting, the Indian news outlet, Republic TV, posted the following on X (formerly Twitter): “Muslim lawyer defending ISKCON’s Chinmoy Krishna Das killed by an Islamist mob outside Chattogram court. Bangladesh is worse than Pakistan. Has anyone anywhere come out ashamed of being a Muslim yet?”
NDTV, another Indian news outlet, has subsequently reported that Mr. Islam was not a member of the defence team of Mr. Das and that his murder took place during a clash between protesters advocating for the release of the monk and police. Later, accusations were made that Mr. Islam was killed by ISKON members eliciting calls for the organization to be labeled as a terrorist group.
Clearly, disinformation is being disseminated either to burnish claims of anti-Hindu violence or to rubbish them. While the overall narrative of anti-Hindu violence has been well established, some of the details have yet to be clearly deduced.
Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council protested Das’ arrest and demanded his immediate release.
Mr. Das suffers from various medical conditions including diabetes. When two ISKON monks visited him to give Mr. Das critical medicines, they too, were apparently arrested. ISKON spokesperson: “We have got information that two monks were arrested by Bangladesh police on Friday. They had gone to jail to give medicines to Chinmoy Krishna Das. When they were returning, the police arrested them. We strongly protest against such arrests and appeal to the Bangladesh government to give protection to minorities,” Radharamn Das, vice-president and spokesperson of ISKCON, Kolkata, told The Indian Express.
The district court in Chittagong, Bangladesh, which held a bail hearing for Mr. Das on December 12threjected his pleas for bail. Another hearing has been scheduled in January, 2025. Rabindra Ghosh, an activist, submitted Mr. Das’ bail plea but was deemed by the court to lack standing as he could not prove himself a member of the Chittagong Bar Association. In fact, Mr. Ghosh is a prominent Bangladeshi lawyer, practicing at the Bangladesh Supreme Court in addition to being a well-respected human rights activist. The ruling of the court shows clear bias against the accused in the case. “I am very disheartened. I have been coming from Dhaka for the last three days and applying with repeated attempts. The judge took my application on his table. He could have heard it. It fell into some conspiracy,” Ghosh told ANI.
It has yet to be revealed by authorities who have charged Mr. Das with sedition of how he allegedly ‘disrespected’ the flag of Bangladesh, thereby eliciting the charge. Some at the rally in question, who have chosen not to identify themselves, say that it is possible that a saffron flag (saffron being the colour for Hinduism) which was flown alongside the Bangladesh flag and could have be perceived from certain angles as being hoisted above the Bangladesh flag presented a problem for some. This apparent difference in height may have been responsible for the alleged ‘disrespect’ and the resulting charge of sedition against the monk. Any reasonable observer may conclude from this that authorities really needed to do some digging to find a means for a cause of action against Mr. Das.
The charge of sedition against Mr. Das also named 164 identified individuals and 400 to 500 unidentified people as being culpable of the same charge.
If the events recounted above had not in reality transpired, the narrative might well have been mistaken for a Monty Python sketch! Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the current ‘interim’ government of Bangladesh ‘advised’ by Muhammad Yunnus has quickly acquired the traits of a Banana Republic.
Muhammed Yunus, “Chief Advisor” to the Bangladesh government seen to be installed by President Joe Biden (right) as many believe that the illegal ouster of Sheikh Hasina and her democratically elected Awami League government was orchestrated by the CIA
Hindus were among the frontline victims of the West Pakistan Army during Operation Searchlight in 1971, which killed as many as three million people in then East Pakistan. According to the Asia Times, at a meeting of the military top brass, then dictator of Pakistan, Yahya Khan declared: “Kill 3 million of them (East Pakistanis) and the rest will eat out of our hands!”
Pakistan’s religious leaders openly supported the crime by labelling Bengali freedom fighters “Hindus” and Bengali women “the booty of war”.
A large section of the intellectual community of Bangladesh were murdered, mostly by the Al-Shams and Al-Badr forces, at the instruction of the Pakistani Army. Just two days before the surrender, on 14 December 1971, Pakistan Army and the Razakar militia (local collaborators) picked up at least 100 physicians, professors, writers and engineers in Dacca, and murdered them, leaving the dead bodies in a mass grave.
Many mass graves have been discovered in Bangladesh. The first night of war on Bengalis, which is documented in telegrams from the American Consulate in Dacca to the U.S. State Department, saw indiscriminate killings of students of Dacca University and other civilians. Numerous women were tortured, raped, and killed during the war; the exact numbers are not known and are debated. The widespread rape of Bangladeshi women led to birth of thousands of war babies.
The Pakistan Army also kept numerous Bengali women as sex slaves inside the Dacca Cantonment. Most were captured from Dacca University and private homes. Rape and sexual enslavement were weaponized by the Pakistani army and marks an especially dark path down which a professional national military had taken to the ends of criminal barbarity and gross misogyny the likes of which had not been previously documented in regional conflicts of South Asia.
The atrocities led to a rebellion organized, trained, and armed by India called the Mukta Bahini consisting of East Pakistani dissidents of all religions even though the Pakistan military characterized the rebels as Hindus.
Already, bogged down with a refugee crisis in bordering areas, India was directly drawn into the conflict after Pakistan attacked India in Kashmir which the Pakistan government called a “pre-emptive strike”. That attacked was repelled, and prompted India to engage Pakistan on its Eastern flank as well. The fighting culminated in the Indian Army taking the capital, Dacca by entering the city from several directions resulting in the surrender of Pakistan general, Amir Abdullah Khan. Niazi to Indian Lt. General Jagjit Singh Auroraunder the auspices the two countries leaders on December 16th, 1971. The victory resulted in the new country of Bangladesh being liberated from the oppressive Pakistani regime.
Despite the genocidal tactics of the Pakistan army and their collaborators, India protected around 100,000 Pakistani prisoners of war from the Mukta Bahini, who, enraged over the Pakistani atrocities, craved blood for blood, seeing the red of revenge.
However, India facilitated an orderly transition to the establishment of a new government under the socialist Awami League headed by “Banga-Bandhu” (friend of Bengalis) Sheikh Mukubur Rahman. On the heels of the victory, the Indians left Bangladesh to govern itself, independently, and without a single uniformed Indian on the territory of the new country. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, for all her faults, demonstrated great statesmanship in recognizing that today’s liberators could be viewed as tomorrow’s occupiers. They were careful to prevent that change in perception from occurring, heralding an expedient departure.
Indian Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi signs Friendship Treaty with Bangladesh “Father of the Nation” and first Prime Minister, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman
At the time, the United States, headed by President Richard Nixon had supported the Pakistanis and sent the 7th Fleet into the Bay of Bengal to intimidate India, despite warnings from Archer Blood, Consul General to the USA in Daaca, whose warnings to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger of the Pakistani atrocities are documented in the Pulitzer prize shortlisted book The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide by academic Gary Bass. The Soviets sent a message to the USA that if America got involved, they too would be drawn into the conflict. This acted as a deterrent to keep the war a regional conflict and not a global one.
Bangladesh was born a secular country with that principle written into its constitution. However, a coup resulting in Rahman’s execution and the mass murder of his family members, save two of his daughters who were in the United States at the time, gave rise to a dictatorship that declared the country an Islamic state without removing the section of the constitution relating to secularism. Hence, the two conflicting identities of the state have been the dominating dialectic in the Bangladeshi identity since bloody coup of 1975.
When Sheikh Hasina, daughter of Bangladesh’s first Prime Minister, came to power in 1996, India enjoyed predominantly friendly relations with Bangladesh. Hasina’s party, the Awami League has been seen to be close to India and the party to which the vast majority of minorities have gravitated. The opposition Bangladesh National Party has long been in a coalition with the Jamaat-i-Islami, an extremist Islamic party, which aims to make Bangladesh into a Taliban-style Islamic theocracy.
The movement that ousted Hasina, illegally, in August, received support from the USA, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. They formed a government ‘advised’ by Muhammad Yunus, which has taken sharply anti-India stances. Since their emergence, the violence against minorities principally Hindus erupted and, while there have been periods of relative calm, it has not since abated.
The sacrifices that Hindus have made for their country, Bangladesh, clearly have been in vain as they have been systematically cleansed ethnically from the land where they have lived for hundreds of generations – where they have lived before there was a single Muslim living in the Indian sub-continent.
At the time of independence form the British, Hindus comprised 30% of the population of what was then East Pakistan. By 1961 the government census revealed that the population of Hindus had shrunk to 18.4%. As of the last census taken in 2022, the population of Hindus in Bangladesh stands at a paltry 7.95%. This is especially disquieting when considering that Hindus are not migrants to the land. Rather, they comprise the original habitants of Bangladesh. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the population have been forced to migrate at the barrels of guns, blades of swords, and discriminatory laws that usurped their lands – those that were not killed outright. The survivors live in fear. This is nothing short of a genocide.
Since the new government has taken power, some three thousand attacks on Hindus and other minorities have been documented, eighty-eight in the last few days since the visit of the Indian foreign secretary to Bangladesh to express India’s concerns for Bangladesh minorities.
Al Jazeera – a publication not known for having a pro-Hindu bias recently wrote of the plight of a Hindu named Krishna Das:
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 jewelry 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.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi with then Bangladeshi Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, during her last official visit to India
Notably, neither US President Joe Biden nor UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has condemned the violence against Hindus. Rather, the administrations of both governments have issued mirrored statements calling for the protection of minorities and supporting religious freedom in Bangladesh, stating that they are “closely monitoring the situation.”
A condemnation from the leaders of one or both countries would have carried far more weight. As things stand, the reaction of these key Western nations is lukewarm at best.
For his part, President Elect, Donald Trump took to X to voice his condemnation of the situation:
“I strongly condemn the barbaric violence against Hindus, Christians, and other minorities who are getting attacked and looted by mobs in Bangladesh, which remains in a total state of chaos. It would have never happened on my watch. Kamala and Joe have ignored Hindus across the world and in America…We will also protect Hindu Americans against the anti-religion agenda of the radical left. We will fight for your freedom. Under my administration, we will also strengthen our great partnership with India and my good friend, Prime Minister Modi.” President Elect Trump wrote.
Indian Americans and Hindus in the UK have been peacefully protesting developments, leading to certain lawmakers speaking out on behalf of the victims of the violence in Bangladesh.
Once again, The Hindu reports American protestors raising slogans like “We want Justice” and “Protect Hindus”, urging the Biden administration and the incoming Trump administration to ask the new government in Bangladesh to take steps to protect Hindus and also initiate action against those responsible for this.
“The Bangladeshi Hindu community and the larger Hindu diaspora from the Indian subcontinent have come in support of the Bangladesh Hindu community because there is continuing violence going on in Bangladesh, specifically in Chittagong and Rangpur area, as well as in some other parts of the country,” said Utsav Chakrabarti of HinduACTion.
Indian American Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi urged members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to address the issue of violence against minorities, primarily Hindus, in Bangladesh during the confirmation hearing of Senator Marco Rubio for the position of secretary of state whom President Elect Donald Trump has nominated for that key cabinet post.
“As targeted violence against Hindus and other minorities continues amid the disorder in Bangladesh, I urge the members of the Senate’s Committee on Foreign Relations to address this crisis directly during the upcoming hearings to confirm Senator Rubio as the next US secretary of state,” Mr. Krishnamoorthi said.
Barry Gardiner, Labour MP for Brent West in London, a constituency with a significant British Hindu population, described the situation as being “clearly on a knife edge” and raised concerns on behalf of the “large diaspora populations in the U.K. and large Hindu communities with strong links to the community in Bangladesh”. He had raised a question to the government (of his own party) during question time on December 2nd, regarding the violence, eliciting a response – not from his leader, Keir Starmer – but rather from Katherine West, the Foreign Office Minister in-charge of the Indo-Pacific.
“We are aware of the statement of concern from the Indian government following the arrest of Chinmoy Krishna Das, a well-known Hindu leader, on sedition charges. The U.K. Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) desk is closely monitoring those developments,” Ms. West said in response.
By contrast, shadow foreign secretary, Conservative MP Priti Patel, herself a Hindu, noted that the degree of escalation in the violence as being “deeply, deeply concerning”.
“What we are witnessing now is uncontrolled violence in many quarters. We are watching with horror and shock as further violence spreads in Bangladesh. The thoughts of all of us in the House are with the diaspora community here and those affected in Bangladesh. These are deeply disturbing reports,” Patel asserted.
British MP and former Home Secretary, Priti Patel calls on UK Prime Minister, Kier Starmer to take “robust action” to quell violence against Hindus in Bangladesh
Her party colleague and chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for British Hindus, Bob Blackman, echoed the concerns to highlight that “Hindus are suffering with their houses being burned and their businesses ransacked”.
“Priests have been arrested, and I understand that two more were arrested over the weekend, and 63 monks have been denied access to the country. The clear issue is an attempt at the ethnic cleansing of Hindus from Bangladesh… We want to hear not just words of piety, but absolute condemnation of what is going on,” Blackman said.
Despite the demonstration in Toronto protesting the violence in Bangladesh against Hindus, Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has remained conspicuously silent on the matter. Hence, with three Western leaders failing to condemn the violence against Hindus, the clear message being sent across the world is that Hindu lives don’t matter.
Perhaps that will change when Donald Trump is sworn in as President, having nominated more Hindus to key cabinet posts than any other president-elect.