Bangladesh's
minority Hindus are being attacked by Islamists who seem as preoccupied with
land as they are with politics or religion:
On Jan 5, 2014, Bangladesh concluded what many judge to
have been the country’s most violent election to date. But in the rural
Satkhira district something much more substantial than ballot papers is at
stake. Here, minority Hindus are targeted for their land. “When anything
happens, Hindus get attacked in Bangladesh,” explains Subhash Ghosh, 63, standing in the verdant
greensward at the back of his house. Even if it weren’t ruined, he would be too
scared to live in it. “They came at around 9:30 and suddenly set fire to the
building with petrol bombs and gunpowder,” he explains. The district of
Satkhira lies only a few miles from the Indian border and just north of the
world’s largest mangrove forest, the Sundarbans. It is spliced by creeks and
tributaries that form the final reaches of the Ganges riverine plain. With a
large Hindu minority, this area has seen some of Bangladesh’s worst violence
over the past year. Much of that violence is down to land — or rather its
scarcity. With a population in excess of 160 million crammed into less than
148,000 sq km, Bangladesh is one of the world’s most densely populated
countries. To make matters worse, almost the entire country lies in a
floodplain, with lives, farms and crops constantly hanging in the balance. The pressure
on land is enormous.
Hindu
population in Bangladesh
Year
|
Percentage
|
1941
|
28.00
|
1951
|
22.00
|
1961
|
18.50
|
1971
|
13.50
|
1981
|
12.13
|
1991
|
11.62
|
2001
|
9.60
|
2011
|
7.00
|
The ‘Partition’ was
swift and vicious in the Punjabs and Sindh where religious minorities have
ceased to exist for all practical purposes. This is not so in the Bengals,
where many still live on their ancestral land The ‘witch-hunting’ boils down to two things
that can finish off the Jamaat as a viable political force. The first is the
de-registration of the Jamaat as an electoral force as per a Supreme court order that bars any
party that “puts God before the democratic process”. The second is the war
crimes trial of those who committed crimes against humanity during 1971. Much
of the present Jamaat leadership was heavily involved in murder, rape, arson
and forced conversions. In a subcontinent where politics thrives on the erasure
of public memory, this episode has stubbornly refused to disappear. A
dilly-dallying Awami League government was almost forced by the youth movement
in Shahbag to pursue the war crimes trial seriously. Facing the prospect of
political annihilation, the Jamaat responded by a three-pronged offensive. It
marshalled its cadres and young Madrassa students and use them for blockading
Dhaka. It lent its activists to a BNP in disarray to act as boots on the
ground. It carried out targeted attacks on the homes, businesses and places of
worship of Hindus, the nation’s largest religious minority.
In 2001, after the BNP-led alliance won the
elections, the usual pattern of murder, rape and arson targeting Hindus
happened on a very large scale. Hindus have traditionally voted for the Awami
League. The guarantee for ‘jaan and maal’ (life and property) is
important for the survival of any people. In the Awami League regime, although
property and homestead have been regularly taken away by the powerful persons
of the party, systematic attacks on minorities are not part of the party’s
policy. The same cannot be said of the BNP-Jamaat partnership, which regularly
threatened both jaan and maal. It is not hard to see why
Hindus chose the devil over the deep sea. This time, Hindus seemed to be out of favor from both sides. While they were targeted by the BNP-Jamaat for coming
out to vote at all, in other areas they were targeted by Awami League rebels
for coming out to vote for the official Awami League candidate who happened to
be of the Hindu faith. There have been disturbing signs over the past few years
that at the local level, the difference between the ‘secular’ Awami League and
the communal-fundamentalist BNP-Jamaat is beginning to disappear,
(Mir Quashem Ali, a senior leader of the Bangladesh's largest Islamist
party Jamaat-e-Islami shows victory sign as he enters a police van after a
special tribunal sentenced him to death in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Sunday, Nov. 2,
2014. Ali is the second leader to be sentenced to death in a week for mass
killings during the nation's 1971 independence war against Pakistan.)
Attacks on
Hindus households, temple in Bangladesh continue, more killed:
A mob of nearly
3,000 attacked Hindu households and a temple in eastern Bangladesh after two
youths from the community allegedly insulted the Prophet Muhammad on Facebook. Police
on Monday arrested 17 people, including the principal of Bagmara Madrasa, for
the attack on the temple and over two dozen households at Homna in Comilla
district, about 100km south east of Dhaka, May 2014. "We so far arrested 17 people and some of them
made confessional statements regarding the attack. A manhunt is under way to
arrest the rest of the culprits," police chief of Homna, Aslam Shikdar
said.
Banglastan: Do Hindus Have A Future In Bangladesh?
(Hindu women
in Bangladesh whose homes have been destroyed by Jamaat-e-Islami)
"I fear Bangladesh will become 'Banglastan' if things don't
change," Rana Dasgupta, a human rights lawyer. Another aspect to
these assaults on Hindus involve the illegal seizures of their homes and
properties. This practice dates back to at least 1965 when, after a brief war
between India and Pakistan (which then included what is now Bangladesh),
officials in Dhaka passed a law called the Enemy Property Act, which
essentially allowed authorities to confiscate properties of people labeled as
“enemies of the state.” That piece of legislation has been exploited by
Islamists and others to take properties away from religious minorities,
particularly Hindus. Even after the formation of the new allegedly secular,
democratic state of Bangladesh, the law remained in effect, but was renamed the
Vested Property Act in 1974. Not until 2001 did the government repeal this law
and begin the process of returning seized properties to their rightful owners
(or their descendants). DW noted, however, that Islamists continue to invoke
this old law as a justification of taking assets from Hindus and other minorities.
Bangladesh HC
orders security for minority Hindus but who care law & order! they have own
law for minorities in Muslim majority countries!
Bangladesh High Court ordered the government to take steps for the security of the minority Hindu
community in southeastern Begumganj where suspected right-wing activists
attacked several temples and houses during clashes over 1971 war crimes trial .
Bangladesh Puja
Udjapon Parishad General Secretary Prashanta Kundu alleged that a quarter was
attacking Hindus in a planned way to disturb communal harmony. He warned of
movements if actions were not taken soon. Meanwhile, in Netrokona, Model Police
Station Officer in Charge Azizur Rahman told bdnews24.com a general diary (GD)
was filed in connection with desecration of seven idols in Harimandir in Sadar
upazila’s Bobahala. Temple attendant Mithun Dutta said the ‘miscreants’ smashed
the seven idols into pieces. The temple committee informed the police of the
incident.
(smashing the Hindu idols into pieces by Bangladeshi
Muslims is now regular routine.)
(A view of the house of a Hindu family in Malopara Village bears the
signs of the post-polls attack. As soon as the voting ended , BNP and Jamaat-shibir men looted, vandalized and burned Hindu houses
in Jessore.)
(A view of the house of a Hindu family in
Malopara Village bears the signs of the post-polls attack. As soon as the
voting ended , BNP and Jamaat-shibir men looted, vandalized
and burned Hindu houses in Jessore)
(The Bangladeshi-American blogger Avijit Roy & his wife,
Avijit was hacked to death by machete-wielding Muslim extremists in 3 layer government security& on busy road & stone throwing distance from police post, had taken another stand against violent religious
extremism days before his death. )
Bibliography:
1. time, January 14, 2014.
2. THE HINDU, January 16, 2014.
3. Times of INDIA May 5, 2014.
4. ibtimes, SUNDAY, MARCH 01, 2015.
5. India Times, March 4, 2013.
6. dailymail, 27 February, 2015.
7. demotix,
6 January 2014.
8. bdnews24, 19 march, 2013.
9. Protham alo
9. Protham alo
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