The visuals of a weeping Hindu woman describing how she gave away all her belongings to save her daughters from a group of attackers finds resonance in many parts of Bangladesh. The recent upheaval in Bangladesh forcing the elected Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to flee the country on 5 August 2024 has once again brought the vulnerability of Hindu women and other religious minorities in Bangladesh to centre stage. Many Hindu women have been abducted, raped, beaten in several areas of Pirojpur, Rayer Kathi, Brahman Kathi, Baju Kathi to name a few. The law and order and legal safeguards in Bangladesh have failed to protect the minority population and especially the women folk.
Hindus and other minority like Christians, Buddhists in the erstwhile East Pakistan (presentday Bangladesh) were facing victimization in 1946, 1950 as well as in 1964–1965. There were many pogroms where Hindu houses and neighbourhoods were burnt and women were attacked, raped including the one on the call of Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s ‘Direct Action Day’ in August 1946 which was followed by the ethnic cleansing in ‘Noakhali riots’ on the Puja Day in the month of October. It was estimated that more than 5000 Hindu men and women were butchered, women held captive, raped and were converted.
The history of partition of Bharat (India) has been soaked in the cries and tears of wailing mothers for their children, bereaved wives for their husbands and sisters for their family members. Dishonouring women was institutionalised as a tool to humiliate Hindu community. This was evident from the statement of the then Prime minister of Bengal Hussein S. Suhrawardy who stated that ‘rape of Hindu women was natural as they were more attractive than the Muslim women’. The Time Magazine report titled ‘India: Written in Blood’ on the Noakhali riots stated that Mahatma Gandhi advised women that ‘the only way they could avoid dishonour was to bite the tongues and hold the breadth of the marauders, until they died’. The report stated that if that did not work, Gandhi snapped, let them take poison.
The sinister design of the Pakistan President Yahya Khan led to 10 million refugees from the erstwhile East Pakistan in to Bharat. The conflict risen sexual violence during the liberation of East Pakistan into Bangladesh from Pakistan in 1971 subjected women from all class and community to sexual aggression by the Pakistani army for a ‘different’ ethnic and cultural composition. According to several reports, it is estimated that women raped by Pakistani Army was between 200,000 and 400,000. However, after the creation of Bangladesh, the wrath of fundamentalists was once again faced by the Hindu Community as a minority, especially by its women. The Bangladesh Ministry of Planning, Bureau of Statistics data reveals that the population of Hindu community plummeted from 28 per cent in 1941 to 13.5 per cent in 1973 and 12.2 per cent in 1981. The Bureau of Statistics of Bangladesh cites the minority population in 2022 as 7.95 per cent Hindus, 0.61 per cent Buddhists, 0.30 per cent Christians and 0.12 per cent other religions.
The recent attacks on the Hindu community especially women has become a recurring cycle with every socio-political economic military upheaval in Bangladesh. As if, the Hindus of this country have become the guinea pig as the largest minority community, every time time there is unrest or change of power. One can recollect that during the change in the government in Bangladesh in the year 2001 when the Bangladesh National Party (BNP) won the election ousting Awami League, saw large number of attacks on Hindus. The rise in fundamentalism has a co relation with dishonouring Hindu women in Bangladesh. For instance, post the 2001 elections that were held in Bangladesh, 200 Hindu women were brutally raped in the southern town Char Fashion Bhola including an eight-year-old girl, a middle-aged amputee and a seventy- year-old senior citizen. An article in the Daily Star, a Bangladeshi Newspaper on the Bhola Rape Case in 2001 stated that their ‘society has lost something more precious – it has lost its ability to stand on the high moral ground of civilisation where both gender and religion ought to get equal protection’. It goes beyond imagination how men in a society are gauging for opportunities and reasons to turn hostile and brutal, disrobing women of a community of their honour. Pornima Rani shil was merely 13-year-old when she fell unconscious after being brutally raped by more than 25 men in the cremation ground of her village in Ullapara in 2001. She knew the perpetrators as they lived within the vicinity of her home. Though now living in the capital city Dhaka, she fears for the repetition of that ghastly night when there is political unrest and provocation in Bangladesh.
Sonali Rani Das, a professor in Red Crescent Nursing College, Dhaka was forced to resign by the students after the present political turmoil erupted in Bangladesh. She informed at a press conference that she was kept captive in her office for hours, was denied to use the washroom till her thumb impressions were forcibly taken on the resignation letter. She was threatened with dire consequences. The unprecedented prejudice violating the honour of Hindu women is not short of rape terrorism. In a written statement submitted to the General Assembly of the United Nations Human Rights Council by the Human Rights Congress for Bangladesh Minorities (HRCBM) in 2023 titled ‘The Ongoing, Reoccurring and Unacceptable “Genocidal Crime” Committed against Minorities in Bangladesh’ stated that the communal tension which culminated into attacks on the Hindu community in October 2021 was investigated by them in 34 out of 64 districts and it was found that nearly 600 women and girls were sexually assaulted in the town of Hajiganj, five Hindu women and girls were gang raped and hundreds of houses, businesses and temples belonging to Hindu community were destroyed and looted.
A writ petition was filed in the High Court of Bangladesh for judicial enquiry against the attacks on the minority in 2021 in six districts but was postponed on the request of the government of the day. Bangladesh has repeatedly violated the Rome Statute of International Criminal Court which it ratified as a signatory in 2010 making it obligatory for them to comply by it. The World Council of Churches in its Stakeholder submission to the Commission of the Churches on International Affairs of the World in 2023 titled ‘Discrimination against minorities in Bangladesh’ recommended that particular measures must be taken to ensure the empowerment of women and girls, and their protection from violence and discrimination. The international agencies need to assert for the human rights and the fundamental rights of the minority in Bangladesh. Men and women both have been subjected to violence, attacks, loot and arson but using sexual atrocities as a weapon on a minority community reverberates the trauma that their generations to come will live.
