Opinion | Bangladesh: A Nobel Halo, An Islamist State, Terror Networks & Radicalisation As State Policy |
On a mid-December night in Bangladesh, 25-year-old Dipu Chandra Das, a Hindu garment factory worker, was beaten by a frenzy of Islamists, hung from a tree, and set ablaze on a highway. His alleged “crime"? A rumour that he insulted Islam. Yet investigators have since confirmed there is zero evidence that Dipu ever blasphemed at all. Not one can point to a single derogatory remark he made; “no one saw or heard" anything offensive, a Rapid Action Battalion officer admitted. In other words, an innocent Hindu man was lynched and immolated over a lie.
One would expect such a medieval atrocity, captured on video and circulated worldwide, to provoke an outpouring of shock from international human rights watchdogs. Imagine if the roles were reversed: a Muslim man lynched and burned by a mob in a Hindu-majority country. The global indignation would be instantaneous and deafening. But in Dipu’s case, the outrage has been oddly muted. Major human rights organisations and Western governments that normally champion minority rights barely mustered a whisper of protest. The deafening silence of these supposed watchdogs is as harrowing as the crime itself, and it exposes a disturbing double standard.
Bangladesh’s own minority rights groups vehemently condemned the lynching, the Bangladesh Hindu-Buddhist-Christian Unity Council decried the “so-called blasphemy" killing as an assault on communal harmony. But where were the urgent press releases from Geneva, the high-profile tweets from Human Rights Watch, the emergency sessions at the UN? Their voices have been either absent or astonishingly subdued. Such restraint stands in stark contrast to their usual activism when religious persecution occurs elsewhere. The message implicit in this silence is chilling: that the lynching of a poor Hindu man in Bangladesh is somehow a lesser transgression on the global human rights ledger.
The hypocrisy extends to Bangladesh’s interim rulers. The........