This is the fear, and it has been confirmed by the recent publication in Dhaka of the report of a public enquiry commission on the prolonged reign of terror that followed the BNP’s landslide victory in the 2001 general elections. That it has taken more than a decade for the full report to be placed in the public domain is a serious indictment of the prevailing political mood in Bangladesh, where the safety of its minorities is in grave doubt.
The report comes with a companion volume which, in addition to presenting graphic details of what happened in 2001, documents blatant attacks on minorities that occurred last year and the government did nothing to stop. Therefore, the fact that the publishers have still gone ahead and printed the reports, as another election approaches, must be seen as a desperate appeal to the political conscience of the ruling authorities, a wake-up call to action.
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“What an image is this of my beloved Bangladesh!” writes professor Anisuzzaman of Dhaka University, a prominent intellectual, in his introduction, referring to attacks all over the country against the Hindus, the Buddhists, and the Ahmadiyas. “It’s unbelievable,” he adds in extreme anguish. “Equally unbelievable is the failure of the administration and its mysterious inability to act.” Anisuzzaman was the convener of a 10-member committee of intellectuals and social activists that had formed the three-member public enquiry commission headed by eminent educationist Zillur Rahman Siddiqui.
Together, the two volumes present the most damning documentation yet of the plight of the minorities in Bangladesh. It’s a tale not only of brutal killings, physical torture, sexual crimes against women of all ages, widespread looting and destruction of personal and commercial property, and forced conversions, of large-scale vandalism against Buddhist temples and monasteries in Cox’s Bazar last September, or of the public lynching of a 24-year-old Hindu boy only a couple of months ago in Dhaka, but, more alarmingly, of what appears to be a quiet decimation of the minority population.
While riots played their parts in the past, when Bangladesh was East Pakistan, driving Hindus into exile in large numbers, controversial laws like the Enemy Property Act, reincarnated later as the Vested Property Act, have served in more recent times to foment atrocities by extremist groups, like the Jamaat-e-Islami. Even replacing the Vested Property Act subsequently with the Vested Property Return Act hasn’t helped improve things, and the undercurrent of religious hatred, in a supposedly secular Bangladesh, remains as strong as ever.
Even in 1951, in what was then East Pakistan, 22 per cent of the population was Hindu. In 2001, three decades after the birth of Bangladesh, that figure stood at nine per cent. A decade further on, it slid to 8.5 per cent. And, as militant attacks continue to blunt hopes for a reversal of this trend, bias works in invisible ways to make the future of the minorities bleaker. Hindu presence in Bangladesh’s civil administration, for example, is a miserable 9.6 per cent. At 0.65 per cent and 0.11 per cent, respectively, the Buddhists and the Christians don’t matter at all.
If the reports are meant as a challenge to the conscience of well-meaning Bangladeshis, and of the Awami League government in particular, they couldn’t have come at a better time. Bangladesh is in the midst right now of an unprecedented popular upheaval over the ongoing trial of war criminals, reminiscent of the heady days of 1971 when people stood as one, forgetting their religious differences, to fight for the establishment of a liberal, democratic nation. Now is the opportunity for Sheikh Hasina’s government to reassert its old faith and reclaim the glory of secularism in which Bangladesh had come to be born.
Will she seize it? After Parliament’s passing last Sunday of a much-desired amendment to the war crimes law, making communal organisations liable to prosecution, will she now declare the Jamaat-e-Islami illegal and formally brand all attacks on minorities as a direct attack on the very idea of Bangladesh, as liberal intellectuals want her to? These are questions only she can answer, and if she chooses not to, there may not be another Shahbag coming her way in a long time.
rbarun@gmail.com