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Recent reports of attacks on Bangladesh’s minority Hindu community have been criticised by the US. Human rights include the freedom of religion or belief. According to a State Department official, everyone should feel protected and supported when celebrating major holidays around the world, regardless of their religious affiliation or belief.
According to the spokesman, the State Department strongly condemns recent reports of attacks against Bangladesh’s Hindu minority. Meanwhile, in a statement, Pranesh Halder, a member of the Bangladeshi Hindu minority, requested the department to ensure that the country’s suffering Hindus receive no additional injury.
He asked US-based watchdog groups and news organisations to call attention to the severity of the violence in Bangladesh. The Bangladeshi Hindu diaspora staged a protest in front of Bangladesh’s embassy here on Sunday to denounce large-scale violence that resulted in the demolition of Hindu homes and temples across Bangladesh during Durga Puja celebrations.
According to Utsav Chakrabarti, Executive Director of HinduPACT, a US-based Hindu advocacy group, “it is especially horrifying to see the last remaining Hindus in Noakhali being attacked in this manner, 75 years after Islamists demanding the creation of Pakistan killed 12,000 Hindus and forcibly converted 50,000 to Islam in October 1946.”
HinduPACT claims that in Bangladesh, where the minority population has consistently fallen from 28% in the 1940s to 9% currently, indigenous Hindus continue to be the focus of organised hate and discrimination. This latest round of violence underscores the risk that indigenous Hindus continue to confront. Hindus are still being targeted for their faith fifty years after the Pakistan Army massacred over 2.8 million of them and made another 10 million destitute and refugees during Bangladesh’s independence fight in 1971, according to the report.
