India ‘over-invested in Hasina and under-invested in Bangladesh’ – and is now panicking
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Bangladesh’s Sheikh Hasina long ignored the democratic backsliding in each other’s countries to forge close ties. With Hasina ousted from power, India’s warnings over the safety of Bangladesh’s Hindu minority smacks of hypocrisy.
When Agontuk*, a 21-year-old architecture student in Dhaka, first saw the social media posts of attacks against Bangladesh’s Hindu minority community, his immediate response was to check on a building in his neighbourhood of the Bangladeshi capital that has mostly Hindu residents.
Agontuk had joined the student movement that drove out Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh’s longest-serving prime minister. But following a brutal crackdown that killed more than 300 people, the young student avoided street protests. Instead he joined a team of student volunteers using their tech skills to dodge the online surveillance and overcome internet blackouts to get international media attention for their cause.
Targeting Bangladeshi Hindus was never the message nor the intent of the student movement, noted Agontuk. And the allegations of “pogroms” – some even claimed a “genocide” – against the minority community were alarming.
Religion – an old fault line on the Indian subcontinent and the cause of the bloody dissection of colonial British India into modern South Asian nation states – had reared its head again.
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