Soon after the news of Sheikh Hasina resigning as Bangladesh’s Prime Minister spread (and at some places, even before that), sporadic violence was reported against the country’s minorities, mainly Hindus. With even news channels being subjected to violence in Dhaka, organisations working for minorities screamed for help on social media. With a prospect of Bangladesh Nationalist Party’s (BNP) return getting real and the prospect of Islamists of Jamat getting a strong foothold in Bangladesh’s political sphere — that Hasina has been able to keep at arm’s length, to her credit — religious places of Bangladeshi Hindus have started getting desecrated.
An ISKCON temple in Meherpur, in Bangladesh’s Khulna division, was vandalised and set on fire by protesters on Monday.
A minority that makes up about 8 per cent of Bangladesh’s population, or around 13.1 million people — Hindus have been at the receiving end of a student agitation metamorphosed into sectarian violence that has got a taste of ‘my way or highway’. This is not a report card on Sheikh Hasina’s ability to turn Bangladesh into a ‘safe-haven’ for its minorities. Even under Hasina, attacks on places of worship and forced evacuation from the land were regular for its minorities. But she was able to keep the militant Jamat from unleashing its fire. Today’s 8 per cent Hindu population of Bangladesh is a significant decrease from 1947, when Hindus made up 30 per cent of the population, a testament to their fate from now.