On August 5, 2024, after packing off Sheikh Hasina into a waiting car, Bangladesh’s newly appointed Army chief General Waker-uz-Zaman promised the nation that it was his responsibility to safeguard the country and protect its people.
At that time, Gen Zaman’s pledge sounded solemn. But now, nearly 11 months after the fall of the Sheikh Hasina regime, with Bangladesh in turmoil and rent by violence against its minorities, Gen Zaman’s so-called word of honour is increasingly sounding hollow.
The June 26 gang-rape of a Hindu woman in Muradnagar, Comilla district, which was video-filmed by the perpetrators, who later had the impunity to release it on social media two days later, is but a litany of violent acts perpetrated against the country’s minorities.
The main accused, said to be a BNP activist, was arrested from Saidabad near Dhaka in the wee hours of June 29. But by that time, the outrage on social media had become unstoppable.
The same day, a video of a Hindu woman, her limbs tied and her body in a pugilistic position and stuffed inside a blue polythene bag surfaced on social media.
The body was found in a wooded area near Talukdar Market on the Barisal-Bhola road. She is presumed to have been raped. The police later found her to be acid-burned but alive.
In far-away Satkhira’s Ashashuni village, the body of a Hindu man, with his face bashed in, was found hanging from a tree, again in a wooded area, on June 29.
A few days ago, a Hindu barber in Lalmonirhat was assaulted by Muslim men allegedly on the ground that he had blasphemed Islam.
However, the truth was that the Hindu man had the temerity to ask for the full amount for the services he had rendered to the customer who refused to pay up.
The victim and his son were promptly arrested by the local police while the culprit continues to roam free.
Murderous assaults on Bangladesh’s minorities is not a new phenomenon, but ore about that later.
The recent spate of violent attacks against Hindus is but part of a second phase; the first phase was set in motion immediately after August 5, 2024, during which time over 2,000 incidents were recorded by the Dhaka-based Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council. The post-August 5 months also saw gratuitous violence being committed against sufi men and places of worship.
But Bangladesh’s Chief Adviser Mohammad Yunus and his colleagues preferred to remain silent, with not even a squeak in defence of the law – the police force had all but disappeared – and Gen Zaman’s soldiers unable or unwilling to use force.
Some other force appeared to hold them back.
Meanwhile, on April 4 this year, after a meeting between Yunus and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the sidelines of a BIMSTEC summit in Bangkok, New Delhi issued a statement that clearly spelt out that violent targeting of minorities must stop.
The evidence on record shows that this has been wholly disregarded by the Bangladeshi establishment.
The unabated violence against Bangladesh’s minorities is not without design. Besides being easy targets, minorities constitute a symbol – they are Hindus and are therefore pro-Indian; so, they must be destroyed when the ‘larger enemy’ is not quite close at hand.
The conflation of anti-Hindu and anti-India sentiments was framed as an “existential threat” to the larger Muslim identity, with the consequence that the really secular elements now remain marginalised in Bangladesh.
This anti-Hindu-anti-India dichotomy has, arguably, deepened over time. It would be puerile to believe that the prolonged Awami League rule from 2009 to 2024 did not witness anti-Hindu violence.
Ain o Salish Kendra, a Dhaka-based human and civil rights body, found 3,679 attacks on the Hindu community between January 2013 and September 2021. The violence ranged from killings to vandalism, arson, bodily harm and rape.
In 1992, immediately after the destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, waves of Hindus left several districts of Bangladesh for West Bengal following widespread deadly violence against them. At that time, the BNP was in power.
Over the years, rising radical Islamism – admittedly, much of Bangladesh’s social and religious landscape is unrecognisable from, let’s say, 25-30 years ago – has emboldened extremist organisations who have political patronage and access to dubious foreign funding.
In many ways, the Awami League, which swore by secularism, was responsible for this deepening Islamism, pandering to demands and distributing largesse mainly in the form of allowing mosque-building and madrassah construction.
The rise of the Hefazat-a-Islam was during the Awami League tenure even as the Hizbut Tahrir, banned in 2009, remained underground but grew in latent popularity.
This surfaced after August 5, 2024, with the Yunus regime being a ready and willing enabler that has now served out a deadly cocktail of anti-India, anti-Hindu and anti-secular force that could have disastrous consequences for not only Bangladesh but this part of South Asia.
The Army, which has not remained untouched by this growing infection, did not come in the way of a violent mob which razed Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s iconic house in Dhaka’s Dhanmondi neighbour on February 25 this year.
A platoon of soldiers came by to the spot, strolled around and then left as the vandals continued unhindered with the demolition. It can only be surmised now that Gen Zaman gave tacit approval to this barbarity.
Across Dhaka and Bangladesh’s towns and villages there is no rule of law. The mob rules. The Army’s earlier warnings against mob violence – not very different from what Somalia encountered in the 1990s and early 2000s – have largely been ignored.
Indeed, the once powerful Army is now a shadow of its former self: not many Bangladeshis, and certainly not those who are bent on prolonging the communal agony and causing mayhem, take the force seriously.
Gen Zaman met two foreign officials today. One was US Chargé d’Affaires in Dhaka, Tracey Ann Jacobson, and the United Nations Resident Coordinator in Bangladesh, Gwyn Lewis.
It is not known whether Jacobson and Lewis tried to knock some sense into Gen Zaman – to act before it is too late. Otherwise, Gen Zaman, who began his stint as Army chief in unusual and unsettling circumstances, may find himself in an inglorious situation.
