Savage Drift

The murder of Sharif Osman Hadi comprehensively exposes a Bangladesh that tolerates disorder, indulges radicals and misreads its neighbours.

Bangladesh is in accelerating disorder. Mob violence, attacks on minorities, and the vandalism of temples and historical sites are no longer exceptional events but recurring markers of a political order under strain.

The immediate trigger for the latest bout of frenzied violence was the killing of Sharif Osman Hadi, a key anti-India figure associated with last year’s July Uprising. Shot in the head by masked attackers in central Dhaka while launching his election bid, the 32-year-old died six days later in a Singapore hospital. His death has deepened instability as Bangladesh prepares for a consequential national election and grapples with strained ties with New Delhi.

In Dhaka, mobs vandalised and torched the offices of Prothom Alo and The Daily Star in the Karwan Bazar area. The ancestral home of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman at Dhanmondi 32, a museum and symbol of the Liberation War, was ransacked and set ablaze. In Chattogram, protesters gathered near the Indian Assistant High Commission, turning diplomatic premises into targets of street politics.

Beyond the capital, the violence has been more intimate and more brutal. In Dubalia Para village in Bhaluka upazila of Mymensingh district, Dipu Chandra Das, a Hindu man, was beaten by a mob, tied to a tree and his body set on fire following allegations of blasphemy.

This sustained domestic turbulence coincides with an ideological assault on Bangladesh’s founding narrative. The 1971 Liberation War, which ended Pakistan’s campaign of mass murder, rape and repression against Bengalis has been softened, relativised and in some quarters actively rewritten ever since the Yunus regime was installed in Bangladesh following the ouster of the pro-India Sheikh Hasina.

Pakistan, once the oppressor, is cautiously rehabilitated in public discourse, while India, whose intervention ended the carnage, is increasingly portrayed as a hegemonic threat. The revisionism is not a scholarly debate; it is a deliberate effort to reshape identity, prioritising religious nationalism over civic pluralism.

The removal of Sheikh Hasina was far from an organic domestic transition. Observers across South Asia describe it as the result of persistent U.S. influence - an exercise of deep-state instruments, from diplomacy to NGO networks - that destabilised the political equilibrium and created the conditions for a rapid regime change. Whatever the exact mechanics, the effect has been a rupture in authority followed by a vacuum that radical Islamist forces were quick to occupy.

These forces, long constrained by Bangladesh’s secular constitution and the historical memory of 1971, have now surged with newfound confidence. Over the past few months, temples have been desecrated, minority homes attacked and mobs have executed atrocities with appalling impunity.

The US feted, Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus has been at the centre of this drift. His administration has oscillated between moral posturing abroad and indecision at home. His deliberately provocative remarks on India’s northeast ignited anti-India rhetoric that has now become commonplace on political platforms. In the wake of the attack on Osman Hadi, Yunus sought India’s assistance to arrest and hand over the shooters, even as extremist elements insinuated Indian involvement. India categorically rejected these allegations, describing them as a false narrative advanced by radicals.

It is regrettable that a person of Yunus’ stature fails to see that India remains Bangladesh’s principal neighbour, largest trading partner and unavoidable strategic interlocutor. His dangerous embrace of Pakistan since Hasina’s ouster offers neither substantive economic support nor security guarantee but foretells ominous days for Bangladesh.

After a Bangladeshi court sentenced Hasina to death in absentia, Dhaka’s subsequent calls for Hasina’s extradition have been met with studied restraint by Indian officials.

India has also rejected claims that Awami League leaders are directing political activity from Indian soil, reiterating that it does not permit its territory to be used for destabilising a neighbouring state. At the same time, New Delhi has made clear that elections which effectively exclude the Awami League would struggle to command credibility.

For New Delhi, a Bangladesh that criminalises its largest political force, tolerates Islamist mobilisation and rewrites the legacy of 1971 risks sliding into chronic instability - an outcome India neither seeks nor can ignore. History is not infinitely forgiving. A country that allows its past to be vandalised should not be surprised when its present is set alight.