Fear and Loathing in Yunus’ Bangladesh

Sharif Osman Hadi’s death elicits Western condolences while Bangladesh’s burning newsrooms and lynched minorities go unremarked.

The most damning moral failures announce themselves not with silence, but with selectivity. Bangladesh, on the brink once again, offers a textbook example. After Sharif Osman Hadi, a student activist elevated by last year’s uprising that toppled the pro-India Sheikh Hasina government succumbed to gunshot injuries in Dhaka, Islamist mobs rampaged across the capital.

They stormed and set ablaze the offices of ‘The Daily Star’ and ‘Prothom Alo’ as their journalists were left gasping for air on rooftops as black smoke swallowed their offices. The mobs torched cultural institutions such as Chhayanaut and lynched a Hindu man by beating him, hanging him from a tree and setting him ablaze.

And yet, the European Union’s public response, issued with diplomatic solemnity, found room only for condoling Hadi’s death. “We are deeply saddened by the death of Sharif Osman Hadi and extend our sincerest condolences to his family, friends and all those affected,” The EU’s mission in Bangladesh said in its post on X.

There was no acknowledgment of the Indian missions attacked, no recognition of the burning newspapers. The EU was silent about the Hindu man who had been barbarically executed.

Ditto the UN Human Rights office, which issued a statement calling on Bangladeshi authorities to conduct a “prompt, impartial, thorough and transparent investigation” into Hadi’s death, describing as a “prominent leader” of last year’s demonstrations. Again, there was no reference to murdered Hindu man, no acknowledgement of newsrooms torched, journalists nearly suffocated or minority terror unleashed in plain sight.

Curated Freedom

Notably, these are the same Western institutions that routinely conjure global freedom and press indices that often rank Bangladesh and Pakistan above India.

For these western liberals and their supposedly ‘progressive’ counterparts in India, radical Islamism is routinely interpreted as a ‘sociological grievance’ and ‘rage with a context’ while its victims, especially if they are Hindu or inconveniently secular, are regarded as irrelevant collateral.

The implication is grotesque: that Bangladesh and Pakistan, where the press where the press has long operated under intimidation, censorship and episodic violence and where minorities are routinely and gruesomely lynched for their faith, is somehow ‘freer’ than India where several journalists and ordinary citizens denounce their Prime Minister and other top officials daily – and aften with relish - without their offices being torched or they being physically harmed.

Bangladesh’s own history should have inoculated the world against it. The country was born in 1971 not as an Islamic republic but as a secular revolt against Pakistani Islamo-military domination. West Pakistan’s Urdu-speaking generals had attempted to crush a linguistic civilisation under the homogenising banner of faith, treating Bengali language and culture as suspect, effeminate and even heretical. The genocide that followed – the horrific targeting of Hindus, intellectuals, journalists, artists and teachers - was central to its logic.

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s Bangladesh was conceived as an answer to this violence. Its four founding principles of nationalism, socialism, democracy and secularism were not borrowed abstractions but hard lessons drawn from near-annihilation.

Yet within four years, Mujib was assassinated and with him fell the moral architecture of the republic. What followed was not merely a coup but a civilisational reversal. The Jamaat-e-Islami - the party that had opposed independence and collaborated with the Pakistani army in 1971 - was rehabilitated and normalised. Islam, once a personal faith woven into Bengali life, was refashioned into a political credential.

From Ziaur Rahman’s calculated invocations of faith to Hussain Muhammad Ershad’s blunt declaration of Islam as the state religion, Bangladesh drifted from its founding wager.

The return of the Awami League briefly revived hopes of correction. War crimes trials reopened the wounds of 1971 while restoring a moral vocabulary long suppressed. The Shahbagh movement of 2013 led by young, urban Bangladeshis demanded accountability from collaborators who had lived comfortably for decades.

However, the Islamist mobilisation that soon followed saw several bloggers and writers being hacked to death in public.

Safe Target

And yet, it is India and not Bangladesh, that elite Western bodies and their press, often echoed at home, habitually depicts as teetering toward a ‘fascist Hindutva dictatorship’ under Narendra Modi.

They cannot, or do not want, to understand that where radical Islam has historically sought to brutally erase dissent by, Hindu social traditions have absorbed differences in faith and creed without annihilation.

This is not to deny India’s own crimes or its unresolved failures. The murders of rationalists Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare, scholar M.M. Kalburgi and journalist Gauri Lankesh were brutal assaults on reason and dissent. But they were aberrations that provoked national outrage, sustained investigation and judicial process and were not the expression of a governing ideology or a tolerated social order.

The point is for all the reports about the press and the minorities being throttled, the Indian media still publishes, caricatures and critiques. Newspapers and television channels scrutinise policy and Opposition leaders speak freely – often stridently. The Indian press is noisy, competitive and adversarial - a far cry from Bangladeshi journalists fleeing rooftops amid flames.

But some of the loudest defenders of press freedom in the West and India speak as if repression arrived in India only in 2014 with Narendra Modi’s rise. The Emergency of 1975-77 – the most direct assault on press freedom - is treated as an unfortunate aberration best hurried past.

The New York Times, which now treats India as a permanent object lesson in democratic decay, once functioned as a stenographer for power when it mattered most. During the Stalinist terror of the 1930s, its Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, systematically minimised and often outright denied the ‘Holodomor’ - the Ukrainian famine that killed at least four million people. For this service to moral blindness, Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize, which the paper has since described as an embarrassment but has never formally rescinded.

Prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, it was most notoriously journalist Judith Miller’s amplification of false claims about weapons of mass destruction, that helped launder state deception into public consensus. More than Miller, it was her then bosses at the New York Times who took the decision to front-page her stories, who are to blame. Talk of speaking truth to power.

Likewise, The Guardian has long cultivated a reflexive suspicion of democratic nation-states that do not conform to its moral grammar while extending interpretive charity to movements that claim ‘resistance’ credentials. It has shown particular indulgence toward political Islam, treating Islamist movements less as ideological actors than as expressions of ‘grievance.’

When Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Tehran in 1979, he was feted by leftist Western intellectuals in search of a usable revolution. Among them was Michel Foucault, the high priest of post-modern suspicion, who briefly anointed the uprising as a form of ‘political spirituality.’ That this ‘spirituality’ would soon manifest as firing squads – whose victims would be the very Iranian leftists who had cheered Khomeini over the Shah - and theocratic terror was waved away as a ‘temporary excess.’

Indian leftist discourse, especially in elite universities and media-adjacent spaces, has long treated its own misjudgements as marks of sophistication rather than failure. In their long tryst of romanticising Maoism, Indian academics spoke of ‘agrarian resistance’ and ‘people’s war’ while conveniently ignoring the skulls beneath the slogans. Similarly, the militancy that drove Kashmiri Pandits out of the Kashmir Valley was dressed up as ‘popular uprising.’

What unites these episodes with the violence now consuming Bangladesh and the dissonant international responses is a shared hauteur among self-styled liberals and progressives: the belief that virtuous intention absolves catastrophic outcome and that occupying the ‘right side of history’ matters more than noticing where history, in fact, went.

This is the logic behind the EU’s and the UN Human Rights’ condolence for Sharif Osman Hadi absent any acknowledgement of a Hindu youth lynched and burned alive.

A few months ago, Trinamool Congress MP Mahua Moitra TMC leader Mahua Moitra, drawing a comparison between India and Bangladesh, claimed that Bangladesh offered a superior quality of life and better infrastructure, noting that studies had suggested Bangladesh might be considered better for “joy of everyday life” and the “prospect of being able to build an even better life in the future.” Welcome to Utopia!