Press Release

The ICHRRF Board of Directors on Sunday once again drew attention to the alarming rise in brazen state-lead persecution and repression of Bangladesh's beleaguered Hindu and Buddhist minority. Bangladesh’s minority Hindus, who constitute about 8 per cent of the 170 million population, have faced over 200 attacks across 50-odd districts since the military supported Islamist coup that deposed Sheikh Hasina’s democratically elected Awami League government on August 5, 2024. With little or no condemnation of Muslim mobs that have unleashed murder, arson and rape, the interim caretaker government lead by Muhammad Yunus and supported by the military instead arrested Hindu religious leader Chinmoy Das Brahmachari on November 24, followed by another arrest of Hindu priest Shyam Das Prabhu on November 30. Denied bail, they face dubious and draconian charges of "sedition" for placing a saffron religious flag above the Bangladesh national flag at a rally protesting atrocities on Hindus. Mr. Saiful Islam, a lawyer arguing their case, was dragged out of the court premises and hacked to death by a Muslim mob on November 26 in Chattogram, an area of Bangladesh where Muslims have historically not been a majority. Bangladeshi Hindu businesspersons are also being butchered by jihadi mobs without the law enforcement agencies intervening. 

As part of its mandate of sounding early warnings of impending genocide and ethnic cleansing in various parts of the world, ICHRRF has been shining the spotlight on the rising tide of mass killings and violence against the Bangladeshi Hindu minority. In this vein, at the recently concluded Forgotten Genocides Convention near Washington, DC, ICHRRF reiterated its assessment that the mass killings in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) in 1971 at the hands of the Pakistan Army and local Bangla  Razakars (volunteers) was unequivocally a genocide, killing approximately 3 million mostly Hindu Bangladeshis and featuring the public targeted rape of 200,000 women. The overwhelming documented evidence of religiously targeted mass murder by Bangladeshi Islamist Razakars and the Pakistan Army was brought out clearly in ICHRRF's Special Hearings on the Bangladesh atrocities of 1971 held in December of 2021, after which a full Hearings Report was published. 

Then, as now, Islamist violence against Bangladesh's Hindu minority has proceeded brazenly due to the tacit support of Western governments, including the US government that see Bangladesh and Pakistan as pliant geopolitical footholds in the region. The myopic tactical gains touted by Western geopolitical establishment ignore the long-term brutal effects and loss of trust from such a policy. 

The current level of arson, rape, killing, destruction of Hindu temples, banning of Hindu festivals and general Hindu repression fits the pattern of a slowly evolving genocide, and definitely the overall pattern is one of ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. ICHRRF urges conscientious governments and non-governmental organizations including the UNHCR to document and sound the warning against this continuing tragedy and impress upon the current coup leaders and interim Bangladesh authorities to uphold the rule of law.