#DurgaPuja4All — A cruel joke for Hindus of Bangladesh
Today as I write this article, it is the 10th day since my distant cousin in Comilla died in the latest violence. He was of 17 years, and he wanted to study medicine. The last time I talked to him, he said he wanted to study outside Bangladesh, and he considered me as his ideal as I was the first person to enter into medicine in our family. He died during the violence in Navami, his body was badly mangled and mostly unrecognizable if not for the rings worn on his relatively less-damaged right hand. This was so traumatic for his maternal uncle (mama), who is married to my maternal aunt in India, that he died in his sleep 5 days after. Every day and night he wept for the loss of his “choto khoka” or “little son”, continuously talking about how happy he was while feeding him the first rice during annaprashan and how the baby was so comfortable and happy on his lap. I too had to suffer nightmares, but visions of his smiling face kept coming.
As we observed the last rites of both members of my extended family, we wondered what was my cousin’s fault? Was his fault in defending the puja pandal and the pratima when the murderous mob came? Was his fault in celebrating one of the most widely celebrated festival among Bengali Hindus? Was his fault in being a Hindu? What was really his fault? Was this the only time such violence has happened in Bangladesh? I explored much deeper, as this intellectual journey became more personal to me.
Violence during Hindu festivals is not new in Bangladesh. In every festival, there is always an incident of disruption of worship by the Muslim population in Bangladesh. In Durga Puja, puja pandals in Dhaka are heavily guarded to prevent disruption of the festivity. Unfortunately, such protection is not available in places like Chittagong, Comilla, Brahmanbaria, Noakhali, and other peripheral areas of Bangladesh. It seems that the threshold of such incidents becoming news is very high, as there’s very little news portals in Bangladesh which cover them. This year, the number of incidents exceeded this very threshold, and in spite of increasing attempts to censor news of the violence, it came out.
Anyone who would say that the attempts to disrupt and bar the celebration of Durga Puja in Bangladesh started from 13th October is wrong. On 11th October, Hindus in Dhaka were barred by the government from doing Puja in Shankhanidhi Mandir at Tipu Sultan Road (formerly known as Madan Mohan Basak Lane). There was a local protest against this, but this news didn’t spread as widely. Hindus had to then do the Puja at a makeshift pandal outside the premises.
On 13th October, the widespread circulation of a photo which showed the Quran placed on the thigh of Hanuman’s pratima sparked the violence which continues to this day. Since then, the violence led to the deaths of many Hindus, majority of whom were unreported by the police and mainstream media, and also the loot and plunder of property of Hindus all across Bangladesh. From Comilla it spread to Chittagong, Noakhali, Sylhet, Rangpur. Bombs were implanted in a cremation site in Khulna. Temples like ISKCON temple, Ramakrishna Mission Ashram, Sri Kaibalyadham, etc. were vandalized, pratima of our beloved saints like Srila Prabhupada, Sri Ramthakur, were broken or burnt. A 10-year-old Hindu girl was raped by these miscreants. What was her fault? Why did she have to bear this fate? Just because she was born in Bangladesh as a Hindu?
As all of this was going on, many Facebook posts were coming up from Bangladesh cheering these incidents. One said it was a retaliation to Hindutva, as according to them Durga Puja cannot have Ram, Sita and Hanuman, and that having them in the Puja pandal indicated an Indian influence and a handiwork of the ruling political party in India. To those who may not know, the timing of Durga Puja is called as “Akaal Bodhon” for this very reason that Lord Ram invoked Goddess Durga in this season, which in his time was deviant from the usual timing of invoking the Goddess. Ram, Sita and Hanuman, therefore, is very much an integral part of Durga Puja. Another post called upon its followers to attack the ISKCON temple and convert it into a mosque. Doesn’t this fit the template of the Islamic conquests of India, where the invader used to build the mosque atop the Hindu temple it destroyed? How can they say that their mindset has changed from the medieval era to this time?
As all of this was going on, there was an all-out attempt to suppress and censor news of the violence, even manipulation of narrative to normalize the violence. Section 144 CrPC was imposed all over Bangladesh, mobile networks were either stopped or slowed down (Netblocks did not report this, unlike other times). Journalists were told to limit reportage on the violence, and most of them observed self-censorship. Next came the shutting down of account of ISKCON Bangladesh on Twitter, which shocked a lot of observers. Mails written to the embassies of Bangladesh were replied back saying “only 2 Hindus died” and “many Muslims died alongside”.
As latest news is coming out regarding the incident at Comilla, CCTV footage captured and traced back led to the arrest of Iqbal Hossain, who is being labelled a “drug addict” by the local media of Bangladesh. Let us look into this news furthermore –
● The first question arises is why is his drug addiction highlighted by Bangladeshi media? Will this lead to the use of M’Naghten rule in favor of him? (The M’Naghten rule is a defense of insanity wherein to establish a defense on the ground of insanity, it must be clearly proved that, at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was laboring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong.)
● The next question which comes up is why is it necessary to prop him up so much? Is the media trying to pin the entire blame of the violence on him, and thereby absolve all the attackers from the mayhem?
● After the news broke out, why is there no outrage against Iqbal from the Muslim community at large for desecrating the Quran? Or was it actually their plan to desecrate our sacred spaces?
Frankly, I have not yet got answers from anyone for these questions.
Finally, I come back to the conclusion with the title of this opinion piece — the Twitter hashtag #DurgaPuja4All. We saw just after Mahalaya how this hashtag was trending, how many Hindus themselves in West Bengal were posting on social media about how they supported this initiative, in view of “Bangaliyana”. This trend happened in last year too when the organizers of a particular pandal in Kolkata were playing azaan inside, in a show of “secularism”. What explanation would they give to that 10-year-old who was raped? What explanation would these social media influencers and intellectuals give to my dear cousin? Dissociation of our holy festival away from the core of Sanatan Dharma, isn’t this what the attackers too desired when they tried to justify the attacks using Hanuman and “Indian Hindutva”, and hence not “their puja”? Even furthermore, if we look back into the infamous “Dismantling Global Hindutva” conference held this year, were’t the speakers themselves saying that “It’s not Hindutva that needs dismantling, it’s Hinduism itself which should be dismantled”?
