On August 5, Bangladesh’s prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, was forced to resign and flee to India after student-led protests turned into a violent demand for change in the country. The political and social upheaval that has followed has devastated Christians, Hindus, and other religious minorities. Islamists are exploiting the unrest to attack them with impunity.
According to reports and social media posts from the region, many houses and farms belonging to religious minorities have been destroyed, with their possessions and livestock looted as well. Both Christians and Hindus have been beaten, raped, murdered, and pressured to abandon their homes. Many of those not driven from their homes remain in hiding out of a fear of persecution, according to Open Doors, which monitors Christian persecution globally.
Bangladesh ranks 26th on the World Watch List, placing it amongst the worst offenders for persecution of Christians. This latest crisis is worsening an already bad situation for Christians in the country.
Since the violent removal of the country’s PM from power, Islamists have attacked, terrorized, and murdered non-Muslim minorities in the country. In the city of Khulna, for instance, a Hindu boy named Utsab Mandal was reportedly lynched by a violent Muslim mob over allegations that he ‘insulted’ Islam’s prophet, Muhammad, on social media. This brutal incident unfolded on September 4 and occurred while Bangladeshi military personnel and police officials stood by and watched, according to OpIndia. The Khulna Metropolitan Police Deputy Commissioner also confirmed the mob lynching of the 18-year-old Hindu boy. In viral videos, a badly injured, brutalized person, dead or alive, is seen lying face down while army personnel parade around. Someone in the background yells: “Hindu … Nastik [atheist].”
Open Doors has recorded other recent, violent incidents:
Safiq Biswas is a Muslim convert to Christianity whose house was attacked on 10 August while he was working in his field. His daughter called him on the phone asking him to go home because a group of local Muslim people were attacking their home. They were shouting and yelling slogans against Christians, “Drive out the Christians from Bangladesh!” all while looking for Safiq Biswas.
The perpetrators looted his belongings and broke the fences of his house.
There are hundreds of similar and ongoing cases of persecution against Christians and Hindus in Bangladesh. OpIndia further reports:
Hindus are subjected to rapes, murders, lynchings, and institutionalized abuse including hospitals not treating Hindu victims. Their temples have been burnt and they’ve been abused with ‘kafir’ [infidel] slurs.
Meanwhile, two evangelists in Bangladesh were recently beaten and detained by police:
On September 5, two evangelists were visiting a local house church when a group of Muslims stormed the meeting. Both were beaten, before the mob turned their attention to one of them, Mizanur, asking if he was formerly a Muslim (Mizanur is a Muslim name). He was unable to answer, given the state he’d been left in, so they called his wife, who confirmed that he was a convert. They were then taken to the police station, where they were detained overnight without any treatment for their wounds.
According to Bangladesh’s full country dossier on the Open Doors website:
Forced marriage, rape, discrimination in the distribution of public resources and mob attacks against Christians are all increasingly common.
In almost all cases where Christians are the victims of an incident, no perpetrators are found or punished. This is even true when it is about violent attacks such as rape and the perpetrators are known. There is a high degree of unwillingness on the part of the authorities to even start proper investigations.
Bangladesh’s history—including its founding—is replete with examples of violence against Hindus and other non-Muslims.
In 1947, India was partitioned into two separate independent countries: the secular republic of India and the Islamic republic of Pakistan. Bangladesh then became part of Pakistan. Anti-Hindu pogroms took place repeatedly in Bangladesh (then known as East Pakistan). These occurred in 1947, 1949, 1951, 1952, 1954, 1956, 1964, and 1971.
The last of those dates was the year in which Pakistan carried out a determined genocide in Bangladesh. According to the American Hindu Foundation (HAF),
On March 25, 1971, the Pakistan military began a 10-month campaign of genocide against the ethnic Bengali and Hindu religious communities in Bangladesh, which was then part of East Pakistan. This spurred the 10-month Bangladesh Liberation War and later the 13-day Indo-Pakistan war. Both ended on December 16, 1971 with the surrender of Pakistan.
Although Hindus were a special target of the Pakistan military, Bengali Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, and other religious groups were also significantly affected. By the end of the first month in March 1971, 1.5 million Bengalis were displaced. By November 1971, 10 million Bengalis, the majority of whom were Hindu, had fled to India.
Although precise figures are difficult to obtain, approximately 3 million people were killed and at least 200,000 women were raped.
The Islamic jihad, predominantly targeting Hindus, has been so bloody and brutal that many researchers call it ‘the largest genocide in human history.’ For example, Melissa Kapoor says that the consensus is that the number of the Hindu victims of the Islamic genocides is certainly in the hundreds of millions, and that such figures are a conservative estimate:
Of course, on top of that you have hundreds of millions more Hindus who have been raped, who have been forced to flee, who have been tortured, who have been forced to convert to Abrahamic religions. And all this began with the Islamic invaders roughly near the 11th century.
Throughout the centuries-long jihad, countless Hindus were forcibly converted to Islam. Today many Muslims in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are descendants of those Islamized Hindus. Flemish researcher Koenraad Elst further explains:
Apart from actual killing, millions of Hindus disappeared by way of enslavement. Slaves were likely to die of hardship, e.g. the mountain range Hindu Koh, ‘Indian mountain’, was renamed Hindu Kush, ‘Hindu-killer’, when one cold night in the reign of Timur Lenk (1398-99), a hundred thousand Hindu slaves died there while on transport to Central Asia. Though Timur conquered Delhi from another Muslim ruler, he recorded in his journal that he made sure his pillaging soldiers spared the Muslim quarter, while in the Hindu areas, they took ‘twenty slaves each’. Hindu slaves were converted to Islam, and when their descendants gained their freedom, they swelled the numbers of the Muslim community. It is a cruel twist of history that the Muslims who forced Partition on India were partly the progeny of Hindus enslaved by Islam.
This centuries-long persecution has led to a Hindu population collapse in the region. In Bangladesh, 22% of the population were Hindus in 1951, but today that figure is down to approximately 8%.
Two lessons have emerged for the West from the plight of non-Muslims in Bangladesh. The first thing to note is that non-Muslims are perpetually dehumanized, persecuted, and treated as semi-slaves in Muslim majority lands. And the second is that the woke-dominated human rights establishment largely remains silent in the face of these severe human rights abuses when they are committed by Islamists.
Europe should show solidarity with Hindus and Christians in Bangladesh. But Europe should also take precautions so that it preserves its sovereignty as well as its Judeo-Christian heritage. Otherwise, its population might well find itself in the same predicament as that of the oppressed minorities in Bangladesh.