Bangladesh is no stranger to political turbulence. But what the country is witnessing today—the serial killing of Hindu citizens across multiple districts—marks a darker turn. It is not merely a law-and-order failure. It is an assault on the moral foundation of the republic, an erosion of the pluralist compact forged in blood in 1971 and reaffirmed, at great cost, again in 2024.

Six Hindu men murdered in roughly eighteen days is not a coincidence. Nor is it random criminality dressed up as communal friction. The pattern is too clear, the methods too theatrical, the timing too politically convenient. From lynching on fabricated blasphemy charges to targeted shootings and arson, these acts bear the unmistakable signature of orchestrated terror. And behind that terror, one sees familiar shadows: Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), their local cohorts in Bangladesh, and a nexus of political Islamist parties and militant networks that have never reconciled themselves to Bangladesh’s secular origins.

Let us begin with a basic truth that extremists—both foreign and domestic—would prefer erased. Bangladesh was not born as a Muslim theocracy. It was born as a linguistic, cultural, and political revolt against Pakistani authoritarianism and religious majoritarianism. In the Liberation War, Hindus and Muslims died together, fought together, and dreamed together. Hindu villages were razed not because Hindus were outsiders, but because they symbolized a plural Bengal that Pakistan’s rulers could not tolerate. To attack Hindus today is, therefore, to finish an unfinished war from 1971—one that Pakistan lost on the battlefield but never abandoned in its imagination.

The recent killings underline this continuity. They are........

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