Has colonialism ended? This is not a rhetorical question. Major European powers have mostly ceded control over their colonies. The process of decolonization, that gained momentum in the post-Second World War era, has seen many states in Africa and Asia gain independence and self-determination. But have we achieved true decolonization?
If language is a companion of the Empire because it is an instrument to impose laws on conquered peoples, as Spanish philosopher Antonio de Nebrija wrote in 1492 in a prologue to his Gramática de la Lengua Castellana, then it can be posited that colonialism has shifted from forced occupation of territory to occupation and domination of mind space through thought manipulation, squeezing out sovereign expressions in Global South.
As if the states in the Global South are a subaltern that cannot speak, and it is incumbent on the West to lend it voice, and in the process, reinforce Western hegemony over global discourse.
This imperialist project rests on the hierarchical nature of language and is enforced through the interpretive and discourse power of Western media that shapes global cognition, perception and interpretation of events. For example, an article in Hindi in an Indian publication, however well-researched, won’t carry the same weight in academic or even public discourse compared to an article in Western publication on the same topic, even if the latter has inherent methodological flaws.
Nowhere is the generative and transformative power of language more apparent in recent times than in the battle of perceptions in post-Hasina Bangladesh.
The overthrowing of the Sheikh Hasina government and subsequent genocidal attack on the country’s beleaguered Hindu minorities, whose numbers have steadily dwindled over decades to a point where there is question mark over the very existence of Hindus in Bangladesh in a not-so-distant future, has provided a ringside view of the machinations and functioning of the imperialist project.
What has been stunning to witness is the blatant narrative subterfuge on display, repudiating the extant realities of religious minorities in ‘post-revolution’ Bangladesh.
A treacherous attempt is evident led by the West and its publications to deny and negate the spate of violence against and religious persecution of Hindus in Bangladesh, the targeting of their homes, businesses and places of worship across multiple districts, and the failure of the Muhammad Yunus-led interim government to rein in the violent, radical Islamists.
And this deception is being carried out in real time, even as a steady stream of reports are emerging on social media from across the border
endangering the lives,
livelihoods and faith of the minority Hindu population. In this
short clip shared by Awami League, for instance, images can be seen of an attack carried out on August 16 on a mandir adjacent to a crematorium in Noakhali that lies demolished on the ground even as Bangladeshi media, that has undergone a purge, scrambles to censor information on the pogrom against Hindus.
The
attacks are
too many to cite and some have been aired by
Western media outlets as well.
Within four days of Hasina’s ouster on August 5, Oikya Parishad, a council of Hindu, Christian and Buiddhist minorities in Bangladesh, reported 205 incidents of persecution of members of minority communities across 52 districts.
That number shot up to attacks and threats in 278 locations across 48 districts against Hindus alone, according to data put forward by The Bangladesh National Hindu Grand Alliance. The apex body of Hindu minorities in a press conference on August 13 in Dhaka said that the “incidents of vandalism, looting, arson, land grabbing, and threats to leave the country have been repeatedly inflicted on the Hindu community due to the shifting political landscape. This is not just an attack on individuals but an assault on the Hindu religion,” reported Dhaka Tribune.
“Hindus are shivering”, Kajal Debnath, a senior functionary of Oikya Parishad was quoted, as saying by Associated Press. “They are closing their doors, they are not opening it without confirming who is knocking. Everybody (in the Hindu minority… from the Dhaka capital to the remote villages are very scared.”
A painstaking account of retaliatory violence and hate crime against Hindus collated by Alt News makes for grim reading. In Bagerhat region of Khulna district, schoolteacher Mrinal Kanti Chatterjee, a senior citizen, was bludgeoned to death by assailants in front of his family members. While two broke into the house of Chatterjee (one of his two daughters, a student in Dhaka, was part of the anti-Hasina Quota movement) and battered him with a hammer, “around 50-60 people were celebrating on the main road outside. Nobody came to save him,” stated his son-in-law in a video. They left looting all the money and gold.
The
Alt News report cites Chatterjee’s daughter Jhuma Rani, as saying to a local TV channel, “I had my younger son and sister at home. I saved them by hiding them on the floor and under the bed. What is wrong with us? We are not a party. Why did they attack only us? They beat my old father to death with a hammer,” she wailed.
The Alt News report also cites incidents in Panchagarh in Rangpur, where “several Hindu homes were reportedly torched and vandalized”, in Manirampur, Jashore, where a Hindu house was attacked and looted, in Meherpur, Khulna, where nine Hindu homes were attacked within 24 hours of Hasina’s ouster and an Iskcon temple vandalized, and in Lalmonirhat, where Jeevan Roy, general secretary of Oikya Parishad, was reportedly given three days at gunpoint to leave Bangladesh after Islamist radicals vandalized and looted his residence.
Worth noting that these are just a slice of the atrocities that took place, not the full picture by any means. Meenakshi Ganguly, deputy director for Asia at Human Rights Watch, in a note observed that “members of the Hindu community, which is generally considered to have largely backed the Awami League, were violently attacked, their homes torched, temples vandalized, and shops looted.”
In the last few days, even as murderous attacks, looting and arson on Hindus and their properties have waned, a new threat has arisen. Hindus are now facing threats to leave the country, forced resignations and extortions. According to Oikya Parishad, 10-12 complaints have been lodged to this effect along with growing threats of blackmail, reports Times of India.
Journalists deemed close to the Hasina regime are being hounded, while nearly 70 Hindu school and college teachers have been forced to resign, reports New Indian Express. Geetanjali Barua, principal of Azimpur Government Girls School and College, was allegedly tied to a tree by students and had to be rescued by the army, adds the report.
Sonali Rani Das, professor, Red Crescent Nursing College, Dhaka, is seen recounting in a press conference the humiliation she underwent while being forced to resign. In a widely circulated video clip, Das is seen as saying that “Students forced me to resign. They brought a printed resignation letter. They gheraoed me. They
threatened me to resign. They grabbed my hand and took my thumb impression on the resignation letter… They kept me captive in my office for 4-5 hours. Even, they didn’t let me use washroom,” narrated a tearful Das.
One would have thought that the West, that claims to be a normative power and issues long sermons to the Global South on religious freedom and human rights, would be at the forefront of highlighting the atrocities against the Hindu minorities who make up only 7.96% of the country’s population according to the 2022 census report.
The reality has been the opposite. Western media outlets have been busy denying hate crimes against Hindus and have resorted to every tactic of deception to obfuscate and muddle the truth. Take, for instance, a report that appeared on the
France24 website, headlined India ‘over-invested in ‘Hasina and under-invested in Bangladesh’ – and is now panicking’.
The writer goes at great lengths to invalidate the attacks on Hindus, accuses India of “hypocrisy” for highlighting their plight and in a remarkable sleight of hand, manages to blame violence against Hindu minorities by radical Islamists in Bangladesh into “India’s backsliding on minority rights.”
This report is veritable proof of how insidious Western propaganda is constructed, using circular citations from echo chamber malcontents. It is a stunning peek into the discourse challenges that face India. The writer stopped just short of blaming India for whatever is happening in Bangladesh.
The trouble with such narrative subterfuge is that it eventually falls into its own trap. The report, written by one Leela Jacinto, cites a fictitious character called ‘Agontuk’ who claims there has been “not a single attack” and “no violations” against temples. That dubious claim is put in focus in tvery next paragraph where the article says Hindus “have traditionally supported the Awami League, putting them in the crosshairs of rioters.”
The implication is that by dint of supporting a political party, which people are required to do in a democracy, the Hindus have invited on themselves the retaliatory violence that the writer claims in the beginning to be fictitious. In other words, the Hindus deserved the majoritarian violence.
Not just in France24, in reports by Associated Press, New York Times or German government-sponsored Deutsche Welle (DW.com), every description of an attack on Hindus is juxtaposed by stress on the political nature of the attack – a clever attempt to obliterate the minoritarian fear by putting it in a context and dilute the severity of the crime. Questions are never asked why a political attack would target articles of faith and places of Hindu worship. The retaliatory violence by the political opponents of Awami League, as these reports would have us believe, have not till date touched a single mosque. It is evident that by its act of denial, western media is complicit in normalizing and propagating Hinduphobia.
Columnist Amana Begam Ansari summarizes the duplicity against Hindus beautifully in The Print, “Hindus, as the last major pagan group in the world, are effectively a minority on the global geopolitical stage. They have few allies to amplify their voices or even acknowledge the existence of Hinduphobia. While Islamophobia is widely recognised and discussed, Hinduphobia barely gets acknowledged. This disparity highlights a significant and troubling gap in how global concerns are prioritised.”
To quote Rana Das Gupta, who leads Oikya Parishad, the Hindu Buddhist Christian minority council, in New York Times, “Some of those whose homes were attacked may be directly involved in Awami League politics, but most are ordinary Hindus… Therefore, this is definitely communal and targeted violence.”
In the France24 piece, Jacinto claims that “rumours and online misinformation turbocharged minority fears” fuelled by “fake news traced to bots and trolls from neighbouring India.”
If this claim is true, then it becomes difficult to reconcile with another part of her report, where she claims that “Many Bangladeshi students and civil society members have been doing their bit to maintain order and protect minority rights. Social media sites, such as Instagram, are crammed with photographs of students protecting temples across Bangladesh.” If there were no attacks against Hindus, and all of it was misinformation spread from across the border, then what were the students guarding the temples from?
That such a blatant fabrication of reality passes muster in a western media platform is hard to believe, but not when it becomes apparent that the aim is to distort the truth and dismiss the lived realities of Hindus under attack from Islamist radicals in a Muslim-majority country.
The mandatory reference to ‘misinformation’ and ‘fake news’ in these reports is another convenient narrative tool. When atrocities are being reported in real time from a place where there is an information black hole – lack of the presence of any administrative authority or law enforcement, no direct line of communication and a minority population under existential attack – a few anomalies are inevitable.
To highlight one or two anomalies to negate the entire, ongoing genocidal attack on Hindus is the worst form of deception. If anything, given Bangladesh’s history of majoritarian violence against Hindu minorities, any credible journalistic attempt should err on the side of the voices suffering brutalities.
Ironically, a report carried by DW, citing Ain o Salish Kendra (ASK), a Bangladeshi human rights organization that documents attacks on minority communities,
estimates “over 3,600 attacks targeting Hindus have taken place in Bangladesh since 2013. The attacks include vandalism and arson targeting over 550 houses and 440 shops and businesses. More than 1,670 cases of vandalism and arson attacks on Hindu temples, idols and places of worship were also reported during that time, according to ASK.”
There is yet another form of deceit practiced by the western media. A
BBC report headlined ‘The far-right videos distorting the truth of Bangladesh minority attacks’, that seeks to fabricate a narrative that all the videos circulating on social media of rioters demolishing Hindu houses and temples are “fake” by debunking a couple of inaccurate ones, zeroes in on one particular video that claims that Bangladeshi Hindu cricketer Liton Das’s home has been torched by rioters.
‘BBC Verify’ correctly points out that the burning house in the viral clip does not belong to Hindu cricketer Das but “to a Muslim MP from the Awami League.” What BBC Verify does not clarify, or avoids telling us, is that that house belongs to former Bangladeshi cricket captain Mashrafe Bin Mortaza, also an Awami League MP, who has in the past opened his mouth against communal violence against Hindus.
Similarly, a DW
‘fact-check’ report on the same topic points out that the house does not belong to Das, but fails to provide additional context that Mashrafe’s condemnation of violence by Muslims against Hindus could be a motivation behind the arson instead of it being borne out of political rivalry (still wrong).
What we see here is a careful construction of a mendacious narrative on the bedrock of lies of omission and commission. Lies of these kind may leave out important facts or contexts to create a misconception (or fail to correct misunderstandings) and by not presenting the whole picture create a fabricated reality. Despite the erosion of brand credibility, western media outlets still enjoy tremendous discourse power due to the hierarchical superiority of the English language and the soft power of the West that combine to perpetuate the power disbalance between the erstwhile colonizers and the colonized.
In turn, the falsehoods propagated by BBC, NYT or DW enable civil society, members of academia, media or influencers to spread and circulate the lies and establish them as ‘truths’.
A similar practice is at work in the apparently unrelated incident of the brutal rape and murder of a lady doctor in Kolkata’s RG Kar hospital. An Al Jazeera video clip shows TMC, the ruling party in West Bengal, demanding ‘justice’ for the rape victim. The Al Jazeera clip, through clever manipulation of reality, manages to frame the controversy in a way that it appears that the Opposition forces – BJP and CPM – are to be blamed for key administrative lapses for which the Supreme Court has pulled up the Mamata Banerjee-led Bengal government.
Reporting on the incident that has put chief minister Banerjee, a key Opposition figure, firmly on the backfoot with civil society and Opposition continuing with protest marches and demanding her resignation,
Wall Street Journal proceeds to deliver a sermon on the “bigger problem of deep-rooted inequality and discrimination against women within Indian families, culture and tradition” and Indian society’s unwillingness to “dismantle patriarchy in all its manifestations.”
On this topic, international media’s focus has turned to gender activism against patriarchal mores of Indian society – an activism so diffused and all encompassing that it evades asking tough questions to the chief minister of an Opposition-ruled state whose administration is guilty of serious lapses in procedure and protocol in the aftermath of a heinous rape and murder of a doctor inside a government-run hospital.
This is just one step away from the subterfuge against Hindus. The failure to criticize the West Bengal chief minister is intentional, driven by a fear that it may lead to strengthening of the hands of ‘Hindu nationalist’ BJP. Be it the denial of atrocities against Hindus in Bangladesh or failing to hold an Opposition leader responsible for crimes against women, the motivation is the same – an inherent Hinduphobia driven by an anxiety over Indic resurgence.
As long Western hegemony over global discourse remains unchecked, India and Hindus can do precious little.
The author is Deputy Executive Editor, Firstpost. He tweets @sreemoytalukdar. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
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