Students held a silent protest at Dhaka University in repirtedly Bangladesh’s capital on Sunday to condemn the lynching of a Hindu garment worker.
The open lynching of an Hindu 27 year old Dipu Chandra Das in Bangladesh has rocked the nation. This has led to fear of escalating intolerance.
The story in brief:
Dipu worked at a garment factory in Bangladesh’s capital city of Dhaka. His 12-hour shifts, for a monthly salary of $150, entailed checking pants and shirts sewn by thousands of workers in the huge factory for global high street brands.
But following his comment in a debate around the inspection table last Thursday, his co-workers accused him of blasphemy and dragged him out into the street. As rumors spread that Das had said something disparaging of Islam’s prophet Mohammed, an angry mob unable to digest the comment flung into action and mercilessly lynched him, tied his body to a tree and set it on fire.
By then the authorities in Bangladesh had arrested 12 people, including two of Das’s co-workers. As per the police they haven’t been able to verify what Das had said to stir the mob.
But the brutal nature of the killing, amid a wave of riots and mob violence, has raised alarms overvthe tense leadership vacuum that has continued in Bangladesh since its authoritarian prime minister was toppled in student-led protests last year.
Reportedly, the security forces have struggled to contain sporadic breakdowns of law and order. Human rights groups have expressed concern over the safety of religious minorities in the face of extremist forces that have long lurked in the country and are now openly exploiting the moment for political gain afore a general election scheduled for February.
Meanwhile, the threats to Hindus in Bangladesh have drawn widespread concern in India, where Prime Minister Modi’s government has repeatedly voiced alarm. But they are the latest in a wider pattern of religious intolerance in the South Asia region.
In Pakistan, in the grip of an escalating Islamist militancy charges of blasphemy have frequently led to lynchings. In Afghanistan, what remained of a small Sikh and Hindu minority largely left the country following.deadly attacks before the Taliban established their fundamentalist rule.
In India, Hindu vigilantes have targeted Muslims and other minorities, particularly over accusations of possessing beef (a large portion of Hindus revere cows as sacred).
In the latest episode, last week a migrant laborer in India’s south was lynched by a mob that police said had mistaken him for being a Bangladeshi — a label India’s ruling Hindu nationalist politicians loosely use to describe Muslim migrants. The man, Ram Narayan Baghel, 31, was from the bottom ranks of India’s rigid caste hierarchy.
In the anarchy shortly after the fall of Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh’s former leader, who fled to India last August, a series of killings and arson attacks were reported against Hindus and other religious minorities.
Bangladesh’s interim government, led by the 85-year-old Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, has condemned the violence as part of a larger security struggle and not as something targeted against any section of the population. But the religiously motivated murder of Mr. Das was openly celebrated by many.
Muhammad Yunus, who leads the interim government of Bangladesh, appeared at the funeral held on Saturday for Sharif Osman Hadi, a student leader who died after being shot in the head. Yunus is struggling to preserve law and order in the country. ..
In a video, “You have brought Jubayer to the hearts of the people,” Jubayer Ahmad Tasrif, planning to run in parliamentary elections, in a video said that he posted on Facebook.
According to Naimul Hassan, a senior police official, the factory manager and a floor supervisor were among those arrested. He went on to ask as to why. didn’t they hand him over to the police, or take any measure to save him?
Selim Mia, a colleague of Das revealed to the media told that the deadly incident unfolded following religious discussion in the closing hours of the Thursday shift escalated. Mia said some of Das’s colleagues had commented that,in the lead-up of the Muslim day of Friday prayer, it was the best opportunity to repent for the week’s mistakes. Das had opened up that the fixation on the day made it sound like a superstition. When his colleagues had confronted him about superstitions in his faith as well, he had said all faiths contain superstitions.
But Mia said a quarrel broke out where those around him accused Das of his disrespect to the Prophet Muhammad.
Victim’s brother Opu Chandra Das, said his family received a call from a colleague at around 7 p.m. saying Das was in trouble, and that the family should arrive quickly.
“But around 8 or 8:30 p.m. they called again to say his brother was no more.
He said Das was a college graduate who had married three years ago and has a toddler daughter. He would visit his home in the village, about 40 miles away, once a month.
When Opu reached the crime scene late on Thursday night, his brother’s body was laid out in the street, bloodied and burned. Security forces tried to hold back the mob from desecrating it as they moved the body for a post-mortem the next day.
On Friday evening, Opu accompanied his brother’s corpse in the vehicle on a lonely journey back to their village, with a police escort following behind. They went straight to the village crematory for final rites, where just a handful of family members showed up out of fear they, too, could be targeted by violent attackers.
News Edit KV Raman
