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02-01-2026
Bureau Report + Agencies
DHAKA/ NEW DELHI: A Hindu businessman had a narrow escape after he was beaten, stabbed and set on fire by a mob in Bangladesh in the fourth such attack on the minority community in the past two weeks. The youth, identified as Khokan Chandra, escaped by jumping into a nearby pond, but he sustained serious burn injuries.
The brutal attack took place on New Year’s Eve when Khokan, 40, was returning home after closing his pharmacy shop in Keurbhanga Bazar. When he reached the Tiloi area, at around 9 pm, a group of miscreants waylaid him and assaulted him brutally.
The miscreants then stabbed him multiple times with sharp weapons, poured petrol on his body and set him on fire. However, Khokan managed to jump into a nearby pond and was later rescued by locals. He was rushed to Shariatpur Sadar Hospital, with doctors saying his condition is critical.
However, the motive behind the attack and the identities of those involved have not yet been confirmed.
The attack on Khokon has only heightened tensions among the minority Hindu community amid a series of attacks and lynchings following the murder of anti-India youth leader Sharif Osman Hadi. The protests over Hadi’s death in Bangladesh have taken a sharply anti-India tone amid allegations that the leader’s killers fled to India.
The latest incident comes a day after another Hindu man, Bajendra Biswas, was shot dead while he was on security duty at a garment factory in Bangladesh’s Mymensingh. Local reports said the killer, Noman Mia, asked Biswas, “Do I shoot you?” before pulling the trigger.
Both Biswas and Mia were members of the Ansar Bahini, a paramilitary auxiliary force under Bangladesh’s Home Ministry, responsible for community policing. They were deployed as security guards at a factory of Sultana Sweaters Limited with 20 others on Monday when the incident happened.
Last week, a man identified as Amrit Mondal was lynched over allegations of extortion. It came just days after the murder of factory worker Dipu Chandra Das over blasphemy allegations an incident that drew sharp criticism and global condemnation over the safety of minorities in Bangladesh.
India has voiced grave concern over the “unremitting hostility” against minorities in Bangladesh.
Death, it is said, is the ultimate truth. In this case, the deaths of two Bangladeshis last week also expose the truth about the West’s bias. While the US and European countries went out of the way to express their grief over Sharif Osman Hadi’s killing, the silence over the lynching of Dipu Chandra Das was deafening.
Both the deaths should be shocking for any sane society. Osman Hadi, who rose to prominence during the July-August 2024 agitation against the Sheikh Hasina regime, was shot in the head by masked gunmen in Dhaka and died on December 18 while being treated in Singapore. Dipu Chandra Das, a Hindu factory worker in Muslim-majority Bangladesh, was beaten to death by a mob over blasphemy allegations also on that day.
The person who killed Bajendra Biswas, a Hindu Bangladeshi, this week, asked him, “Do I shoot you,” before he ended up killing his colleague, according to reports from several news outlets in Bangladesh. Eyewitness accounts suggest that the killer, Noman Mia, had asked that as a joke, and the death could be the result of a prank gone horribly wrong. However, coming amid a spate of killings of Hindus in Bangladesh, there is no question of any insinuation, and the police are probing the matter.
