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14-12-2024
DHAKA: Krishna Das had never imagined that his peaceful life in Sunamganj, a northeastern district of Bangladesh, would come crashing down on a seemingly ordinary Tuesday evening last week.
The trigger was an allegation of blasphemy. A young Hindu man, Akash Das, had allegedly posted an insulting comment about the Quran on Facebook. The comment quickly spread across social media, igniting protests and escalating tensions, particularly in the predominantly Muslim community of Dowarabazar, about 270km (168 miles) from the national capital Dhaka.
Krishna was at home when the first signs of chaos reached his doorstep in Monglargaon village about 8pm. “I heard shouting coming from the market,” Krishna recalled. “I couldn’t understand what was happening but I could feel something was wrong.”
Stepping outside, he saw people gathering in the streets, chanting slogans. Soon, the crowd grew into a mob, waving sticks and batons. “I rushed inside, locked the doors, and tried to hide,” he said but “they broke in anyway.”
The violence spread quickly, even though Akash Das, the 17-year-old Hindu man from his neighborhood, had already been arrested by the police under the “cyber security act” before the mob descended on Monglargaon.
“They destroyed everything everything I had worked for. It was as if we were nothing our lives didn’t matter,” Krishna, a small-scale farmer, told media. “They smashed our windows, destroyed our furniture, and began looting everything of value. They took money, little jewelry and anything they could find. Even the kitchen utensils.”
The attackers even set fire to part of his house. Though Krishna was able to extinguish the flames, the family’s tin-roofed and walled home was destroyed, their possessions gone and their sense of security shattered. When media met Krishna four days after the incident, his family, a wife and two teenage sons was not at home.
“I sent my wife and sons away to stay with relatives in the city,” Krishna told us in an exhausted voice. “They were terrified.”
At least 20 other Hindu homes in Monglargaon were also attacked.
“When they attacked my home, my two daughters and wife fled through the backdoor into the jungle,” said Bijon Das, referring to a dense patch of trees behind his house.
“I have sent my daughters and wife to my relative’s house in the city (Sylhet, the nearest big city),” he added, saying that several Hindu men were staying back only to guard their homes.
The mob violence lasted for about three to four hours before security forces intervened.
“I saw that most of the damage was to tin-roofed houses and tin-shuttered shops,” said local journalist AR Jewel, who was on the scene when the attack happened, estimating about 20 properties were affected.
However, Meher Nigar Tanu, the top bureaucrat for the sub-district in which Monglargaon falls, downplayed the scale of the violence, arguing that “only a few homes and shops had been slightly damaged”.
She insisted that some social media reports had “exaggerated” the violence, and told Al Jazeera that law enforcement officials had managed to stop a mob from entering a temple belonging to the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), a Hindu religious movement. (Int’l News Desk)
