Targeting Bangladeshi Hindus was never the message nor the intent of the student movement.
DHAKA - Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Bangladesh’s Sheikh Hasina long ignored the democratic backsliding in each other’s countries to forge close ties. With Hasina ousted from power, India’s warnings over the safety of Bangladesh’s Hindu minority smacks of hypocrisy.
“I was surprised because the people of our country, we live in harmony. We don't want any chaos or anarchy between us. As soon as we heard the reports, we tried to figure out if they were authentic or not,” said the architecture student in a phone interview from the Bangladeshi capital. Hindus, Muslim-majority Bangladesh’s largest religious minority, comprise around 8% of the country’s nearly 170 million population. They have traditionally supported the Awami League, putting them in the crosshairs of rioters.
Religion – an old fault line on the Indian subcontinent and the cause of the bloody dissection of colonial British India into modern South Asian nation states – had reared its head again. On Monday, Yunus met with Hindu community members at the Dhakeshwari National Temple, the country’s largest Hindu shrine, where he called for patience and assistance in his government’s bid to ensure equal rights and protections for all Bangladeshi citizens.
Mainstream Indian news outlets, which often serve as mouthpieces for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government, have been focused on a Bangladeshi Islamist party. “What is Jamaat-e-Islami? The Pakistan-backed political party that brought down Sheikh Hasina’s govt,” read one headline. “Jamaat may take control in Bangladesh,” read another, quoting a senior member of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party .
Their decision to ask Yunus, a respected economist, to lead an interim administration reflected their desire for a break from a political past dominated either by the Awami League or the BNP. “I also congratulate the people of Bangladesh for the successful conduct of elections. We are committed to further strengthen our enduring and people-centric partnership with Bangladesh,” Modi said in a post on X.
In March 2023, Hasina inaugurated a $1.21 billion China-built submarine based at Bangladesh’s Cox Bazaar off the Bay of Bengal coast. It was a crown in what the Washington, DC-based Center for Strategic and International Studies calls China’s “submarine diplomacy”. Bangladesh was founded in 1971 after it won a war of independence against Pakistan with the help of an Indian military intervention.
Following Hasina’s victory in the January election, an “India Out” campaign calling for the boycott of Indian goods gained traction on social media. Shop owners in Dhaka and other cities told the Voice of America in February that there had been a drop in sales of some Indian products. Security and defence cooperation increased between Dhaka and New Delhi, particularly in India’s insurgency-hit northeastern states bordering Bangladesh.
“Dispassionate experts talk about the Indian red lines on how the Hindu minority is treated in Bangladesh. They talk about it as a legitimate and longstanding New Delhi position. What I do not understand is how does New Delhi gets away with its treatment of its own minorities, its own Muslims,” said Tripathi.
Meanwhile, Hasina’s presence in India since her August 5 resignation after weeks of protest poses a challenge to both New Delhi and Bangladesh’s interim authorities.
پاکستان تازہ ترین خبریں, پاکستان عنوانات
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