Christians, Hindus, Buddhists seek secular state in Bangladesh in response to violence against them

A version of this story appeared in the Higher Ground newsletter from The Washington Times. Click here to receive Higher Ground delivered directly to your inbox each Sunday.

Christians in Bangladesh are joining Buddhists and Hindus in calling for a secular state in their fight against religious oppression in the Muslim-led nation.

The religious minorities have renewed pleas for the new Bangladeshi government to remove Islam as the state religion after a flurry of faith-based attacks this summer in the South Asian country.

A Bangladeshi priest told the French Catholic newspaper La Croix International that he received information about “attacks on small churches and Christian communities.” One account described “assaults and fires” in a village in the northwest Dhamirahat region.

Mobs looted the home of a pastor with a Muslim background and burned his Bible translation work, Christianity Today reported.

Christians have joined other religious minorities in Bangladesh to form an interfaith organization, which has led the charge in demands for a secular state.

“According to our sources and information received from the media, the main target of the communal evil forces in more than 50 districts has been the houses, homes, business establishments and places of worship for the minorities,” the Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council said in an open letter to the government.

“There have been attacks, widespread looting, arson in some places, land grabbing, torture of women and killings, extortion, threats to leave the country, plots to … grab land continue.”

The violence has erupted during months of student-led protests against the economic policy shifts implemented by former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s administration. Citizens and even the U.S. have accused the more secular government of being unfairly elected.

Aparna Pande, director of the Initiative on the Future of India and South Asia for the Hudson Institute, said Bangladesh has been struggling since the onset of the pandemic in 2020.

The situation became untenable this summer after Ms. Hasina’s government allocated much-desired job reservations for descendants of “freedom fighters” involved in the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War with Pakistan.

Many Bangladeshis felt excluded. “Instead of addressing concerns through dialogue,” Ms. Pande said, “the government responded with a crackdown, leading to further unrest.”

The protests, walkouts and strikes succeeded. The government collapsed in early August, and Ms. Hasina fled the country. An interim government led by Nobel Peace laureate Muhammad Yunus was swiftly sworn in.

The violent frustration against the Hasina administration quickly turned against supporters of her party, the secular Awami League, including religious minorities who have long been eager for a secular state.

The minorities have been bearing the brunt of what experts have described as largely political violence, intensifying the urgency of their request for official secularization. A report from the U.N. Human Rights Commission says the surge of violence has killed at least 650.

According to census data, 91% of Bangladesh’s population is Muslim. Hindus account for 7.9%, Buddhists 0.6% and Christians 0.3%.

A Bangladeshi expatriate said animosity toward Christians and other minorities in Bangladesh has been building for decades. Pastor Prodip Das, a Bangladeshi church planter who now lives in Queens, New York, said his family had always experienced overt and sometimes extreme discrimination.

Born in Bangladesh in 1974 and raised by a Christian convert from Islam, Mr. Das told The Washington Times that his family lived in a neighborhood surrounded by those who hated their beliefs. Muslim families, he said, would deposit their trash in their apartment building despite requests not to do so.

“We go to ask them, ‘Why you do that?’ But although we request them not to do that and they do anyway, we love [them],” the pastor said.

Mr. Das said his church, though small, would routinely be harassed by neighbors using megaphones and intimidation to demand that churchgoers be silent during holy hours for Muslims. Angry extremists, he said, told them they could either obey their orders or leave the neighborhood.

The church’s typical response, Mr. Das said, was silence. “That’s why we were always quiet. We always avoid the chaos, whatever we can tolerate. This is my very practical experience, and my wife did this skill every day.”

The Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council maintains that minorities have endured more than 1,000 human rights abuses this summer in businesses, homes and places of worship.

Foreign policy experts say attacks on religious minorities are common in some Muslim-majority countries. Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, said Bangladesh’s struggles are small in comparison with the oppression of Christians in other Muslim nations.

An attempt by the interim Bangladeshi government to assuage the 9% minority religions by designating the country anything other than “Islamic” could anger the 91% Muslim population, experts say.

“Quite frankly, if Islam were removed as a state religion, I think that would actually empower some of the very groups that worry religious minority communities, particularly some of the Islamist hard-liners … and they would be in power,” Mr. Kugelman said.

“They would be angry if Islam were to cease to be the state religion. And you know that could provoke certain kinds of reactions from some of these hard-line Islamists.”

Mr. Kugelman said the odds of the Bangladeshi government agreeing to become officially secular are slim to none.

Yet the interim government officials have done little to intervene in attacks on the minorities. Ms. Pande said they have other things to worry about, such as ensuring Bangladesh appears stable to prospective industries.

“I also think that the interim government is more technocratic. It’s not made up of politicians. Politicians believe that they owe something to the public because they’re going to fight elections, right? [This government] doesn’t think that way,” she said.

Instead, many students leading the economic protests have been standing guard over minority places of worship, eager to keep their economic protests focused on politics, not religion.

Nahid Islam, one of the student protest organizers, told local media that the demonstrators don’t want division. “We are against any kind of religious incitement, sabotage or division. We will prevent any such attempts.”

Indeed, videos and images of the unrest show students, some of them Muslim, protecting Hindu temples, churches and other religious sites, including in Chittagong, the nation’s second-largest city.

Russell Ahmed, a coordinator at Chittagong University, told the Bangla Tribune that “certain factions are intentionally targeting public and private institutions to disrupt the student movement.”

With varying media reports, directly identifying the instigators of the violence is difficult. Many of these students also identify themselves as secular.

Mr. Kugelman said Ms. Hasina’s government was the one significant political entity that projected the idea of secularism and its importance in Bangladesh. With the Awami League gone, the future of secularism is much less bright.

“And now that they have been replaced by different groups and different parties that are not at all inclined to embrace secular ideals. I think that the goal of this [interfaith minority] council is highly unlikely,” Mr. Kugelman said.

Such a situation leaves Christians and other minorities with few options. “Either we need to compromise, or we need to leave Bangladesh,” Mr. Das said.

Moving, for many impoverished Bangladeshis, is no easy feat.

“They may not have the resources to get out,” said Mr. Kugelman, adding that Bangladeshis with family elsewhere would be helpful, but it’s simply not the case for many who wish to leave. “And also, Bangladesh’s neighborhood is pretty tricky. It borders India, and it’s a very tense border, and you’ve had times when people try to sneak out and they’re shot at by Indian border troops.”

Nearby Myanmar isn’t an option. “[Myanmar] is not a place that anyone would want to go to these days, given that you’ve got an intensifying conflict playing out there,” Mr. Kugelman said.

Mr. Das’ three brothers and their families are still in Bangladesh and have struggled to receive visas to America, though one recently succeeded after years of waiting.

“We are only in complete comfort when we [go to the] USA or England. But [these countries] are so difficult to get to … Bangladesh,” he said.

The U.S. response to the violence has been largely hands-off, though the State Department held talks with Bangladesh’s interim government on Sunday.

In a meeting with a U.S. delegation in Dhaka, Mr. Yunus sought U.S. support “to rebuild the country, carry out vital reforms and bring back stolen assets,” his press office said. He further outlined his administration’s efforts to reset the economy and reform institutions.

The U.S. delegation, which included representatives from the Treasury Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, signed an agreement to provide $202.25 million in aid to Bangladesh, in keeping with the trend set during Ms. Hasina’s tenure. During her administration, the U.S. became the single largest foreign investor in Bangladesh, The Associated Press reported.

Sarang Shidore, director of the Global South Program at the Quincy Institute, said the U.S. is right to support the interim government in this approach to quelling internal strife.

“The new government has sent the right messages on minorities and internal stability to the international community,” Mr. Shidore said in an email. “The new government has its task cut out in terms of maintaining domestic stability and improving upon the country’s good socioeconomic performance of the past two decades.”

What happens after the interim government gives way to a more solidified rule is uncertain. Ms. Pande said the answer to what Bangladeshi Christians can hope for seems to be “wait and see.”

“If the interim government doesn’t answer to, you know, some of the issues that the students and the broader society has pushed up, then it is going to face challenges in the coming months, and then we will have to see,” she said. “Will the military and interim government decide to go for elections? Or will they prefer to go for military rule — which has happened in the past in Bangladesh?”

For now, Mr. Das hopes the more peaceful Muslims will speak up and intervene on behalf of Christians.

“[Christians] will have to compromise. But I don’t dislike all Muslims. There’s those who are fundamentalists. They actually do harm. But others are good,” he said. “Sadly, they are just silent.”