Richard Benkin
Bangladesh’s Hindu population is dying. That is an irrefutable fact,supported by decades of data. A consistent torrent of reports documenting anti-Hindu incidents in Bangladesh has bombarded anyone who had an interest in what is happening in the world’s seventh largest country. Those “incidents” included murder, gang rape, assault,forced conversion (to Islam), child abduction, land grabs, and religious desecration — with government culpability.Bangladesh’s Hindu population is dying. That is an irrefutable fact,supported by decades of data. At the time of India’s partition in 1948, they made up alittle less than a third of East Pakistan’s population. When East Pakistan becameBangladesh in 1971, Hindus were less than a fifth of the new nation’s people. Thirty years later, they were less than one in ten; and while current statistics do not yet exist,several estimates put the Hindu population at less than eight percent. Using demographic and other calculations, Professor Sachi Dastidar of the State University of New York estimates that about 40 million Hindus are missing from the Bangladeshi census.
During the same period of time, a consistent torrent of reports documenting anti-Hindu incidents in Bangladesh has bombarded anyone who had an interest in what is happening in the world’s seventh largest country. Those “incidents” included murder, gang rape, assault, forced conversion (to Islam), child abduction, land grabs, and religious desecration. And while Bangladeshi officials might assert—with only some justification—that the perpetrators were non-state actors, government culpability rests, at the very least, in the fact that it pursues very few of these cases and punishes even fewer perpetrators of these atrocities. Successive Bangladeshi governments appear to have been passive bystanders, failing to exercise their sovereign responsibility to protect the life and security of all their citizens; and thus they have sent radical Islamists and common citizens alike a clear message that these acts can be undertaken with impunity.2
