[Officials from Bangladesh’s ruling Awami League party, which favors secularism, have hit out at what they called a divisive campaign by their opponents to turn their country into a “Taliban state and Islamic republic.” Hasina, for her part, vowed to “hunt down” the perpetrators and dispatched ministers to visit Hindu families who were affected. Bangladeshi police said this week that they have arrested 13 people, including a local cleric, for their alleged role in the anti-Hindu attacks.]
By Gerry
Shih and Taniya Dutta
In Panisagar town in Tripura, a
remote Indian state hugging the Bangladesh border, more than 3,000 Hindu
activists held a protest Tuesday night that quickly erupted into violence, said
Soubik Dey, a local police official. A mosque and several homes were attacked,
forcing Muslim residents to flee. Dey said that no deaths were reported and
that the town is now “under control” with a heavy police presence.
Muslim leaders in Tripura say the Tuesday
rally was the latest in a string of revenge attacks targeting their community
this month in response to events in Bangladesh, where Muslims have targeted
Hindus, who make up a tenth of the population.
After an Oct. 13 post spread on
social media claiming Hindus were desecrating the Koran, a Muslim mob attacked
the small Hindu community in the town of Cumilla as it celebrated the Durga
Puja, a major religious festival. At least seven people, including two Hindus,
died in the ensuing chaos that engulfed several cities across Bangladesh,
prompting condemnation from Indian officials and appeals for unity from
Bangladesh’s leader, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.
The fresh violence now spilling
into India is yet another reminder of the internal divisions that haunt South
Asia more than seven decades after the region’s borders were drawn along
religious lines. The partition of India in 1947 saw millions of Hindus flee to
modern-day India and millions of Muslims to Pakistan and what is today known as
Bangladesh. But countless others remained rooted as minorities in each country,
enduring persecution and bouts of violence, which observers fear is becoming
increasingly normalized.
Across the region today, “the
dominant political forces of our time want to see a conclusion of the logic of
1947,” said Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a prominent Indian political scientist, who
noted that Islamists are in the ascendancy in Pakistan and Bangladesh, while
India has seen Hindu nationalism become the dominant ideology.
Those who espouse religious
intolerance in each country, Mehta added, “are feeding off one another.”
The violence in Tripura erupted
this week at huge gatherings organized by the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), a 6
million-strong right-wing organization best known for its role in one of the
most controversial events in modern Indian history, the 1992 storming and
razing of the centuries-old Babri Mosque in the city of Ayodhya.
Munwar Ali, a local resident who
works in an Islamic seminary in northern Tripura, said hundreds of VHP members
launched into anti-Muslim chants Tuesday evening before ransacking a mosque.
Local residents and police stopped the mob from attacking a second mosque but
could not prevent several homes and shops from being torched.
A VHP spokesman in Tripura, Purna
Chandra Mandal, denied that the group’s members had gathered to exact revenge.
“Our intention was not to attack any mosque,” he said. “It was a rally against
atrocities in Bangladesh.”
Mufti Tayebur Rahman, president of
the Jamiat Ulama, a Muslim organization in Tripura, blamed the police and local
government officials for allowing the right-wing groups to gather.
“They should’ve been alert,” he
said. “We want to say we are not Bangladeshis. We are Indians. We have lived
with our Hindu brethren peacefully and harmoniously forever here.”
In recent weeks, many on both sides
of the border raised the possibility that the communal attacks were abetted —
if not outright orchestrated — by groups seeking political gain.
Officials from Bangladesh’s ruling
Awami League party, which favors secularism, have hit out at what they called a
divisive campaign by their opponents to turn their country into a “Taliban
state and Islamic republic.” Hasina, for her part, vowed to “hunt down” the
perpetrators and dispatched ministers to visit Hindu families who were
affected. Bangladeshi police said this week that they have arrested 13 people,
including a local cleric, for their alleged role in the anti-Hindu attacks.
But so far in India, national
leaders — and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a Hindu nationalist
party with ties to the VHP — have been more reticent.
As trouble began brewing in Tripura
this week, the influential Indian Express newspaper nudged the BJP government
to rein in the region’s right-wing extremists and follow Hasina’s lead in
sounding a note of unity.
“The Sheikh Hasina government has
been quick to reach out to the Hindu community after the Durga Puja violence,”
the newspaper said in an editorial. “There’s a lesson here for leaders across
the border as well.”
Mehta, the political scientist,
said that it was difficult to predict whether the violence would spread in
Tripura but that it would be determined by political will.
“If the state decides to stop
violence, it can stop it,” he said.
Sadiq Naqvi contributed to this
report.
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