A Geographic Perspective on Attacks on the Hindu Community in Bangladesh

This post returns to the topic of religious cleansing in Bangladesh, the same subject as a post a few days ago. While I won’t be revisiting this topic continually, as this blog is supposed to be more than tracking current events, I do find myself keeping tabs on this particular country and issue. As I’ve said previously, I find issues of identity and violence particularly compelling within the discipline of Geography and considering that I wrote my thesis on Bangladesh… let’s just say I can’t keep away!

For this post, I wanted to map out recent attacks on the community as reported in a battery of news reports from BDnews24 (while I’d prefer the Daily Star, BDnews24 has a working RSS feed, well done). From my thesis I ended up acquiring district-wise population of religious communities in Bangladesh, but only for 1991. Apparently, these numbers were captured in 2001 or they were not reported. Incidentally, the center-right Bangladesh National Party was in power in 2001. Guess who was part of the ruling coalition? If you guessed the Jamaat-e Islami Bangladesh I owe you a drink. At any rate, not reporting the numbers of religious minorities during that particular regime is a little… odd, to say the least. Keep in mind that academics, and some NGOs, have been discussing the “missing millions” of Bangladeshi Hindus for at least a few decades at that point in 2001. The Census results for 2011 seem to be available, but in a useless format (PDF) so it will take me some time to get it converted to Excel and then into a more user-friendly GIS format (stay tuned!). More to the point, religious statistics are also in the 2011 results (you really have no idea how excited I am right now!!). And to make it even better, individual villages, unions, and sub-districts (upzilas) have that information – this is unprecedented! Well folks, I’m sorry but there will be some more Bangladesh-centric blogging!

Back on topic, obviously I don’t have the 2011 data available (since I literally just found it!) so we’ll have to make do with the 1991 until I crunch it so, at the very least, there will be an update.

As we can see on the map below, the Hindu community (at least the folks who decided that they would self-identify, which isn’t a foregone conclusion in a society that has routinely targeted minorities for prejudice and violence) is primarily concentrated in peripheral districts outside the capital at Dhaka (which is the central city figuratively and literally). The largest concentration is in the southwest, in Khulna and Barisal division (those borders are not shown). As I indicated in the previous post, Khulna “should have” gone to India in 1947. Joya Chatterji (1999) has a great article on the making of the Bengal frontier. The deciding factor for Khulna being provided to Pakistan, rather than India, lies not in human geography (since Khulna was majority non-Muslim at the time) but in economic geography. Calcutta, one of the principle trade centers for British India, was going to India. However, its link to the Ganga River was bisected by a Muslim-majority district, Murshidabad. In order to secure Calcutta’s link to the rest of India, the Indian National Congress was willing to trade Khulna for Murshidabad. The other aspect, which Chatterji points out deftly, is the internal politics at work. She argues that INC leaders were already thinking ahead to dominating electoral politics and so cut-out Khulna and the likely voter base there. You can identify, roughly, where Murshidabad is located. There’s a noticeable lack of Hindu communities north of the Khulna concentration, just across the border lies Murshidabad (in West Bengal state, India).

Attacks on the Hindu Minority Community and its Population, 2013/1991 (via ME!)

Overlaying recent attacks reported by BDnews24 (there are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 reports mentioning 7 distinct sub-districts), there are only a few conclusions that we can make, none of them strongly. I’ve heard elsewhere that Human Rights Watch has a report out condemning violence and noting at least 100 attacks, that would be useful material for updating this work. In the meantime, the attacks betray JIB’s diffuse reach in Bangladesh. It would seem that JIB, and their supporters, are either avoiding targeting the community in the largest metropolitan areas (the divisional capitals) or I’ve missed the reports (which is likely). However, temples are being burned to the ground in the district towns, such as Gazipur Sadar and Faridpur Sadar (labelled Gazipur/Faridpur S.). From an organic state framework, these attacks are happening in relatively state-powerful areas – district towns. One hopes that these attacks aren’t occurring with the complicity of the local police…

Moreover, the attacks are occurring where there are relatively large number of Hindus (like Morrelganj in Bagerhat district, Khulna, the southern most) and small numbers of adherents (Shibganj in Chapain Nawabganj district, Rajshahi, the western most). In Nawabganj, Hindus made up 4.8% of the population in 1991, in 2011 they made up 4.0%. In Shibangaj itself, Hindus make up only 2.8% of the population (2011 data).

The decrease is starker in Bagerhat district. In 1991, 22% of the population claimed to be Hindu, in 2011 that proportion dropped to 18%. In Morrelganj, the minority Hindu community makes up 10.5% of the population.

When I had initially started this particular geographic exercise I hypothesized that JIB activists and supporters might not target the Hindu community in large concentrations (like Khulna) because of the likelihood for retaliatory attacks. Instead, I hypothesized that the JIB would target the community in places where it was less populous (like Rajshahi). Obviously I was wrong and right on each count, respectively, forcing me to amend my hypotheses as I continue to dig.

I could amend this model to include the fact that local JIB leadership will target, whoever and wherever they feel like, population-size be damned. Additionally, I should account for decreases in the Hindu population. Why? Because if I know its decreased, based on a Census report, than local militant Islamists certainly know it. What do they have to fear, there’s less Hindus now then there were in 1991. On the other hand the minority community of Hindus, while the largest minority religious group in the country (by far), is fast dwindling. After being routinely targeted over the decades and assuming that the Government, now as well as then, isn’t going to assist, and being acutely aware of being a minority group – perhaps the only recourse is simply to leave the country? In the end, the Islamists get one of the things they want: a fully “Muslim” Bangladesh.

This is one of the problems with the 24-hour news cycle and humanity’s inherent attention deficit disorder. We’re quick (or not) to jump on obvious genocides: Nazi Germany, Rwanda, Bosnia. But slow-burning problems, like the displacement of millions of Bengali Hindus, fails to spark a debate. Even within India, a country one would think would be more sensitive to this situation, this is scantly (if ever) reported. On the other hand, the plight of Tamils in Sri Lanka has been grabbing headlines in the Times of India for weeks, literally. But, then again, Sri Lanka’s treatment of Tamils (even before the emergence of the Liberation Tigers) leaves much to be desired, but that’s for an upcoming post.