Yunus govt hasn’t made minorities feel safe, but Hindus need course correction too

The hostilities witnessed this time is fundamentally different from the past communal conflicts, throwing a complex challenge for the unfledged government headed by Noble peace prize recipient Muhammad Yunus.

Hindus move past political patronage

For the first time, minorities, particularly the Hindus, mobilised in huge numbers without any direct support or patronage of an established political party. Earlier, the minorities either looked upon the Awami League or the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) to provide them protection or address their grievances.

The community’s face invariably used to be the Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council, an umbrella body officially formed in 1988 after Islam was declared as Bangladesh’s state religion.

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Office bearers of the council have been reputed citizens from the minority community with impeccable social standing. Its founding president Chitta Ranjan Dutta was a retired Major General of Bangladesh Army.

Its conflict resolution approach used to be basically advocacy and dialogues.

Exclusive platform, aggressive leadership

This time, however, Hindus have floated an exclusive Hindu platform called the Bangladesh Sammilita Sanatani Jagran Jote under the leadership of the saffron-clad Das.

This is for the first time minority cause in Bangladesh is spearheaded mostly by Hindu religious leaders. The country’s other two major minority groups, Buddhists and Christians, are not in the lead role.

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The nascent outfit is also much more aggressive as it has preferred street protests over the council’s approach of advocacy and dialogues.

‘Sanatani’ pitch stirs Hindu sentiments

“We are sons of the soil…. We have not come here from anywhere else. We have our stake in this country. We Sanatanis (Hindus) will no longer bear any attempt to undermine our rights. We have endured enough torture and oppression...We will not accept any farce. If you want to put us in jail, three crore Hindus are ready to be incarcerated. We are not scared anymore… We have tolerated enough,” Das told a mammoth rally at Rangpur last month.

“We are Hindu, we are the heirs of rishis; we are Arya putra. We will fight till death,” he thundered at another rally.

Jote has organised several massive protest rallies in different parts of Bangladesh in the past few months, demanding minority rights and security for the community.

Assertive minority voice

It has laid out an eight-point demand that calls for, among others, speedy trials of cases of minority persecution by forming a tribunal; a minority protection law and a minority affairs ministry, and five days of public holidays for Durga Puja.

The outfit threatened a long-march to Dhaka if its demands were not fulfilled.

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"The more oppression is inflicted upon the Sanatan community, the more united we will become. After holding rallies at the division and district levels to press for our demands, we will proceed with a long march towards Dhaka," Das was quoted by the Daily Star as saying at a Chittagong rally.

Such strong-worded statements from a minority leader were unheard in Bangladesh before. For radicals among the majority community the utterances expectedly were red-rag.

Government crackdown on minorities

That the Hindus continued their mobilisation despite the fact that there were no major physical attacks on them after the initial bout of violence, witnessed in the immediate aftermath of the Awami League-led government’s fall, was perceived out of line by many including those in the government.

The only major incident of physical violence against Hindus in the last couple of months was reported from Chittagong’s Hazari Goli on November 5. The trigger was a “derogatory” Facebook post from a local businessman Osman Mollah. Taking strong exception, local Hindu residents attacked his shop. When law enforcers went to rescue the businessman, the group tried to stop them by hurling bricks and acid at them. Several policemen were injured in the pitched battle.

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Following the incident, joint forces including members of the army launched a massive crackdown in the area and detained scores of people accused of attacking law enforcers. There were allegations of highhandedness against the minority community during the raid.

ISKCON bears the brunt 

The Yunus government instead of opening a dialogue with the minority group over its eight-point demand started looking at it as its adversary, visibly rattled by the international attention the unprecedented minority demonstrations were drawing.

A section within the government joined the bandwagon to defame the movement and the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), a 58-year-old Hindu organisation, founded in New York, with which Das was associated.

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The call for action against the monk and the ISKCON started getting shriller, branding them India’s agent – almost echoing the similar vilifying of any strong minority voice as pro-Pakistani often heard in India from those close to the country’s ruling dispensation.

Das’ arrest adds fuel to fire

Amidst the charged atmosphere, the interim government, which is accused of weaponising the country’s crumbling legal system to muzzle criticisms, arrested Das last week over a sedition case for allegedly disrespecting the Bangladeshi flag during a rally in Chittagong in October.

The arrest acted as a fuel to the fire. Das’s followers stormed Chittagong's Metropolitan Magistrate Court in a bid to prevent his transportation to judicial custody after his bail was rejected.

A lawyer, Saiful Islam Alif, was killed during the skirmish, turning the interfaith relation from bad to worse.

Situation became so volatile that no lawyer mustered courage to represent Das in the court during the last hearing on November 3. Two of his lawyers Ramen Roy and Regan Acharya were physically assaulted. Others were intimidated.

Attack on Hindus

Hindu houses, business establishments and religious places were attacked in many parts of the country in the past few days.

Rather than addressing the security concern of the minorities, the interim government is in complete denial, dismissing the reported attacks as figments of Indian establishment and media.

It is also true that a section of India’s media and Hindutva forces are exaggerating the conflict in Bangladesh, even calling it genocide.

Also read: ‘Power-hungry’ Yunus perpetrating ‘genocide’ in Bangladesh: Hasina

“The truth is somewhere between the two extremes. The situation is neither as bad as India is trying to project nor as good as Yunus' government tries to pretend,” said a Dhaka-based senior journalist.

He preferred anonymity as the current regime is not very tolerable to criticism.

Media freedom, free speech suffer

Recent systematic attacks on Bangladesh’s two leading media houses, The Daily Star and Prothom Alo, public heckling of a veteran female journalist (incidentally from a minority community), cancellation of press accreditation of 167 journalists and random filing of cases, including murder charges, against hundreds of journalists are pointer to the state of media freedom and free-speech in Bangladesh.

The biggest failure of the current government, the senior journalist said, is its failure to be seen as an inclusive government, fuelling a sense of insecurity among minorities.

The government’s position against the term “secularism” as stated by attorney general Md Asaduzzaman during a court hearing; 'Joy Bangla' as the national slogan, secular dress-code against female members of the armed forces, granting of amnesty to the large-scale killings and rioting that took place between August 5 (the day Hasina fled the country) and August 8 (the day Yunus took charge); release of hardcore terrorists from jails; failing to take action against mobs that forced many teachers to resign so on and so forth, accentuated the perception of this government being Islamist.

Why minorities fear for their lives?

Not that the attacks for which amnesty were granted or targeting of teachers were communal in nature. They were mostly political reprisal, targeted against Awami League supporters. Members of minority as well as majority communities were the victims.

“Such large scale attacks on minorities irrespective of whatever be the motive created a sense of insecurity among the entire community because of the minority-complex syndrome. This syndrome is bound to happen, particularly during a conflict situation, unless the community is convinced otherwise through visible action and outreach. Unfortunately, this has not happened in Bangladesh either from the government or the so-called liberal civil society,” the Dhaka-based commentator pointed out.

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The only visible outreach came from one of the country’s leading intellectuals, Farhad Mazhar, who had met Das (before his arrest) and other Hindu leaders to “try and understand their sense of grief.”

Stating that the eight-point demand placed by the Sanatani Jagran Jote was not inconceivable, he in a Facebook post last month called for a dialogue, immediate release of Das and to stop tagging Hindus as Delhi's broker or BJP's agent.

One can only hope that the government will pay heed to him and help build a discrimination-free society as espoused in the student-led uprising.

Need for course correction

The minority-community too should avoid fitting into any imposed labelling.

Unfortunately, by forming an exclusive Hindu-platform for the minority cause, raising the ‘Jai Shri Ram’ slogan – which has become a political battle cry for the BJP to assert majoritarianism in India – and maintaining a stoic silence on transgressions by Hindu radicals in India, the Jote is only helping the Islamist forces to demonise minorities.

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A course correction on its part, to begin with, would be to ask Hindutva forces in India to stop pretending to be the saviour of minorities of Bangladesh for the political advantage back home.