Sometime in December 2024, an observant professor in a Dhaka-based university noticed that a student belonging to a minority community would remain disengaged in class.
“He had a meek demeanour. He would appear disinterested, distant and morose,” the professor disclosed to Northeast News over the phone.
“I kept a keen eye on him. Then, one day, after consulting with other senior colleagues, I took the student aside and encouraged him to speak up and share any problem he might be in,” the professor said, as he narrated what the student shared (with him) with Northeast News.
“He confidently disclosed that his aunt and sister had already left to settle in India’s West Bengal state. We were stunned. The reason the student gave was the volatile politically uncertain and communally hostile environment that was unfolding across Bangladesh in general and Dhaka in particular,” the professor said.
“A fourth-year student of an undergraduate programme at the university, he disclosed that the other members of his family, including his parents, were planning to leave too.
He hailed from another district but lived in a students’ mess near the university campus.
“And then he stopped turning up for class. Without any notice, without withdrawing himself officially from the undergraduate programme and without sharing his mental agony with the university’s management, the student disappeared,” the professor said as he shared the chilling details of the departure and border crossing of a Hindu family.
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This was about two months ago. But the student’s story, as narrated by the professor, is a stark reminder that Hindus in Bangladesh are yet again at a crossroads – to continue living in their land of birth as equal citizens alongside their Muslim brethren and suffer the indignities heaped on them by the spectre of militant Islam or pack up quietly leave a country now in the throes of turmoil.
When Sheikh Hasina fled Bangladesh in the face of a violent students’ movement against the Awami League regime in August last year, she left behind a country that witnessed a speedy regrouping and surfacing of religio-political forces that had lain dormant for years as a consequence of the application of an iron hand.
It took no time for the Hizbut Tehrir, the Jamaat-e-Islami and other sundry extremist organisations to crawl out of the woodwork.
They rallied their respective constituencies through overt and covert means, cloaked themselves in political rhetoric and issued open threats to dismember neighbouring India’s northeastern region.
The Mohammad Yunus-led interim authority winked at these extremist organisations, often encouraging or providing the outfits the political space to practice a brand of politics that is largely anathema to the vast majority of Bangladeshis for whom putting together their means of livelihood is far more important than consuming incendiary and divisive rhetoric that could potentially take the country to the brink of complete chaos.
Bangladesh is now amid countrywide disorder: a police force that is disinterested or unwilling to strictly apply the law, an army that does not appear keen to crackdown yet, the high-octane rhetoric of the students’ coordinators, a political party (BNP) that is battling to replace the Awami League and bands of desperadoes looting, pillaging and raping at will.
Is Bangladesh increasingly appearing like Somalia of a few years ago? While many political observers are divided on this issue, they agree that the situation across the country is grim.
They fear that barring the hostile rhetoric directed against India a few times in the past few months, the prevailing domestic chaos could soon go out of control and that a security situation might arise on Bangladesh’s periphery.
Their next logical question is: should New Delhi be faced with a security situation in the coming days or weeks, will Indian policymakers continue to maintain a stoic silence and choose to pull their punches?
It cannot be that the Indian national security bureaucracy is not alive to the evolving situation in Bangladesh. New Delhi has too much at stake as far as Bangladesh is concerned.
Irrespective of whether the Trump administration has winked at New Delhi, the government of the day has already indicated that it is concerned for the condition of the minorities and the overall security situation.
Senior security officials have held meetings with field-level officials in West Bengal where the length of the border with Bangladesh makes it a likely “place of occurrence” in the event hotheads in that country choose to go overboard as a means to mobilise politically.
So, all eyes are now on the Bangladesh Army. Will it play a stabilising role and pull the country from the brink or will forces other than the men in olive green create the conditions for returning Bangladesh to normalcy?
