Allegations are that a plan has been hatched to kill two lakh Hindus and Buddhists in Chittagong’s Raozan sub-district.
The banner that details the plan for the genocide of Hindus and Buddhists. (Image: File)
New Delhi: Ever since trouble has broken out in Bangladesh over the killing of a former Islamist student leader Osman Hadi by unknown assailants, Bangladeshi Hindus have been living in fear. In the crosshairs of Islamist ire, which has been spiralling into violence against the Hindu and other minority communities, their anxiety has been heightened by the brutal mob lynching of Dipu Chandra Das on the fake charge of blasphemy. To add to their anxiety a banner has surfaced in Chittagong’s Raozan subdistrict, claiming that a plan has been hatched to kill two lakh followers of the Hindu and Buddhist communities. The Sunday Guardian has in its possession photographs of one of the banners that was seized from a place in Raozan where houses belonging to the Hindu community were set on fire on Tuesday. The Islamists are using the unproven claim of an Indian hand behind Hadi’s killing to target the minorities. Bangladesh’s national election is scheduled for February 2026, but the largest party of the country, Awami League has been barred from participating in the election by the interim government led by Muhammad Yunus.
On Tuesday, when Anil Sheel of Raozan realised that his house had been set on fire, he and his family members found the main door bolted from outside. Sheel’s was one of the several houses in the area which had been set on fire by unidentified miscreants on Tuesday night and his family members had to cut through a fence surrounding the house to escape from the inferno. According to Bangladeshi news website BDNEWS24, several houses of the Hindu community had been similarly set on fire in Raozan sub-district over the last few weeks. “After each fire, the police seized kerosene-soaked cloth and handwritten papers with the names and mobile numbers of various political leaders and senior administration officials,” the website reported. It quoted the Raozan police station officer-in-charge, Sajedul Islam as stating that the “previous houses were set on fire in the same manner as on Tuesday.” In a video which captures the family members of one Hindu family attacked in Raozan, a woman can be heard wailing that everything belonging to them had been set on afire. “Our house is gone,” she cries and tells journalists that someone had bolted the house from outside and set it on fire. 12 people including a child and a newly-wed couple nearly escaped death, C Plus TV reported. Another woman tells a journalist that their house too had been bolted from the outside and the perpetrators doused it with kerosene before setting it on fire. Sitting in front of her charred house, the woman says that they are shattered and are wondering what to do next.
Speaking to The Sunday Guardian from Chittagong over phone, Kushal Barun Chakraborty, sahmukhpatra of the Bangladeshi Sammilita Sanatani Jagran Jote told this newspaper that he visited the aggrieved Hindu families and they shared their ordeal with him. Speaking of the banner that was found at Raozan, Chakraborty said, “The police took the banner with them. It read that: ‘On December 13, 2025, a plan was hatched and funding was provided to implement this plan. The plan and funding were aimed at killing a total of two lakh followers of the Hindu and Buddhist communities in Raozan subdistrict of Chittagong. No sign of the Hindu and Buddhist communities will be left in Raozan, they will not be allowed to remain’.” He added that attacks on Hindus continued. “First, Dipu Chandra Das was lynched in Mymensingh and now, another Hindu youngster, Amrit Mondal, has been killed. While the government and the police have termed him a criminal, the question is, how did a Muslim man who was arrested remain alive while Mondal—a Hindu—get killed?,” he asked. Chakraborty was speaking of the brutal lynching of 27-year-old Dipu Chandra Das who was set on fire after being beaten to death by a mob and hanged from a tree in Bhaluka’s Mymensingh area on December 18. Eight days later, 29-year-old Amrit Mondal, alias Samrat, was killed by a group of Islamists at Hosaindanga Old Market in Pangsha subdistrict around 11 pm. While the Muhammad Yunus-led government condemned the killing, it claimed that there was no communal angle involved to the violence and said that Mondal had two cases lodged against him including one of murder. Bangladesh’s interim government said in a statement that the killing ensued after a violent situation stemming from extortion and criminal activities. “The deceased, Amrit Mondal, alias Samrat, was a listed top criminal who had entered the area with the intent of collecting extortion money. At one stage, he lost his life during a clash with agitated residents,” the statement said. Chakraborty questioned the government’s version of the sequence of events and said two persons were detained after the incident which included Mondal and a Muslim man named Selim. It was only Mondal who was killed. In another incident, some youngsters entered Dhaka University’s iconic Madhur canteen—named after a Hindu freedom fighter Madhur and a historic and symbolic space at the varsity—and vandalised the setup, breaking windows and furniture, an incident that sent shockwaves through students and the Hindu community. The word “boycott” was scribbled on the walls of the canteen which is widely regarded as the intellectual nerve centre of student politics in the varsity.
Commenting on the incident, Chakraborty alleged that attacks on minorities had taken place under several governments including the Khaleda Zia’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and the regime of Lt Gen H.M. Ershad of the Jatiya Party. The Ershad regime had the Bangladeshi Constitution amended in June 1998 to declare that “the state religion of the Republic is Islam” in what some observers remarked was “the last nail in the coffin of secular ideals.” Chakraborty said that several such incidents took place under the Sheikh Hasina government as well and no action would be taken against the perpetrators. “Everyone is shocked when the fruits are ready, not realising that the seeds of this tree of radicalism had been sown long back. Hundreds of madrasas mushroomed under the Sheikh Hasina regime too and she even declared that the ‘Dawra-e-Hadith’ degree of the Qawmi Madrasas (Islamic seminaries) of Bangladesh will be recognised as a Master’s degree on Islamic Studies and Arabic,” he remarked. Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League describes itself as a party that follows secular ideals unlike the BNP which has, in the past, fought elections on the “need of defending Islam” from the “un-Islamic” political forces. Before the 2001 general election, the BNP’s election manifesto proclaimed that the party, if voted to power, “will not enact any law contrary to Islam”. Going a step further, Ershad’s Jatiya Party had declared ahead of that election that “Shariah laws will be followed, existing laws will be brought in line with the principles of the Quran and Sunnah and special laws will be made for punishing those making derogatory remarks against Allah, the prophet and Shariah” along with a promise of making religious education compulsory at all levels. As for Jamaat-e-Islami, whose writ is running in Bangladesh at present, it has announced that if voted to power, it will convert the “People’s Republic of Bangladesh into an Islamic Republic.” While the BNP, Jamaat-e-Islami and the Jatiya Party have been termed radical by observers, Hasina’s Awami League too has been criticised for being soft on Islamists during the attacks on Bengali Buddhist pagodas at Ramu and Hindu temples in Ukhia under Bangladesh’s Cox Bazar district in September 2012 to please her vote bank. However, former diplomats say that the Awami League would take action in some of the cases and note that radicals have always existed in Bangladeshi society. “It is true that radicalism has existed in Bangladesh and even in 1971, 20% of people in the country were opposed to the liberation war and were in fact, pro-Pakistan. Such elements have always tried to reassert themselves to negate the value of the liberation war. In fact, for three months after Khaleda Zia was elected as Bangladesh Prime Minister in 2001, such elements went on a rampage targeting Hindus and other minorities. This was till then the worst such instance since 1971. The situation that we are seeing today is much more serious,” former Indian high commissioner to Bangladesh, Veena Sikri told The Sunday Guardian. Sikri pointed out that since July-August last year when Hasina was ousted from power after protests broke out in Bangladesh, the country has seen “the longest and most persistent attacks ever known in Bangladesh on Hindus, Buddhists, Sufis, Christians, Ahmadiyas.” “There were attacks on minorities when Sheikh Hasina was PM too, but she always used to ensure that such elements were put down. Her regime would deal with such elements,” she said. She stated that Chinmoy Das, a Vaishnavite leader and one-time member of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), who was arrested by the Mohammad Yunus interim government in November 2024 continues to be in jail without any FIR or charges framed against him. “Religion has been central to people and political parties across South Asia but at the end of the day, Hasina believed that the best future of Bangladesh lay in its secular ethos,” she said. With Bangladesh set to head for polls on February 12, Sikri said that the fact that the student-led National Citizen Party (NCP) has tied up with the Jamaat-e-Islami proved that the events of July-August 2024 were not a student uprising but a simple regime change operation. She noted that BNP matriarch Khaleda Zia’s son and the frontrunner for the post of the next Bangladesh PM, Tarique Rahman had not condemned the violence against Hindus. Rahman, who is widely seen as the crown prince of Bangladesh, returned to the country on December 25 after a 17-year exile and was extended a grand welcome across the country with party members, officials and the public coming out to welcome the BNP leader.
