Bangladesh’s interim president Muhammad Yunus wants us to believe that news against atrocities on Hindus is a misinformation campaign by India.
Nobody asks him so he doesn’t answer: Why US president-elect Donald Trump and Britain’s shadowy foreign secretary Priti Patel are also horrified on attacks against the Hindus?
Yunus apparently doesn’t read his own newspapers in Bangladesh from which Swarajyamag has compiled an almost unending list of incidents of violence against the Hindus in the three months since he was planted at the helm to his country’s utter misfortune.
Yunus feels he could get away with his lies since his first major decision was to include the dreaded Hefazat-e-Islam group in his administration and everyone looked the other way.
The sleeping dogs that mainstream media is, it won’t tell you Hefazat-e-Islam are local versions of Talibans and Al Qaeda on our eastern borders.
For over a decade, Hefazat-e-Islam has been pushing for Sharia Law in Bangladesh, that women should stay under the chadar, that Kafirs be subjected to violence and those who defy Islam deserve death and death only.
You would be a very dim-wit Indian if you can’t see our country is surrounded by Islamic barbarians whose writ today runs large in two failed states of Pakistan and Bangladesh in our neighbourhood.
If your have been worrying about Khalistan, or the revival of terrorism in Kashmir, your North-East is a horror story waiting to happen as I would presently explain.
But let’s first return to Islamic jihadis who are being mainstreamed by Yunus and it’s not just Hefazat-e-Islam.
Jamat-e-Islami reborn
Hefazat-e-Islam is the dreaded Jamat-e-Islami by other name, who along with BNP (Bangladesh Nationalist Party), were Pakistan’s local help in the dreaded genocide of over a million Hindus in 1971 and were subsequently banned.
It should leave you in no doubt why these Islamist fundamentalists feel they have a long-standing score to settle against India.
Hefazat-e-Islam’s vice-president AFM Khalid Hossain is now in the Ministry of Religious Affairs in Yunus’ interim government.
Tarique Rahman, the acting Chairman of BNP, and Lutfozzaman Babar, former home affairs minister, jailed for their involvement in the horrific Dhaka 2004 grenade attack, have been set free.
In 2004, BNP was in power and they put the blame on a petty criminal Joj Mia through the machinations of Khoda Baksh Chowdhury, then Inspector General of Police.
Khoda Baksh Chowdhury was later convicted by a Dhaka lower court but is now special assistant to Muhammad Yunus with the status equivalent to a Minister of State.
Yunus would also like the rest of the world to believe that the students protest was organic, that it had nothing to do with the United States, and that he is the popular helmsman for his country even though people had chosen Sheikh Hasina as its elected leader.
Recent leaks from the International republic Institute (IRI) claim Washington was behind igniting the fire around Sheikh Hasina whom they believed to be close to both India and China.
It’s as good a time as ever to remind readers that Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founder of the nation, and his entire family, were butchered in 1975 allegedly through a CIA-sponsored plot.
Sheikh Hasina went away predicting her downfall as she won’t let the United States have a military base in Bay of Bengal which would heighten the security risk for both India and China and drag Bangladesh into the war games of Washington.
Another Ukraine in the making
Now of course US has succeeded in making Bangladesh a vassal state, and Yunus is its puppy like Zelensky is in Ukraine. The playbook is similar too: Poke India enough on it ethnic people so that India’s hands are forced as Putin’s were, and punitive sanctions against New Delhi could follow.
Dhaka is bellicose on taking on India; some international experts are all for a nuclear treaty between Bangladesh and Pakistan; and US “handlers” in media are projecting a war scenario against India and how they would leave their bigger neighbour with a bloodied nose.
One such piece in influential Dhaka Tribune by a US pen-pusher talks of the numbers Bangladesh has in its army, some 56 million young men of conscription age; the swamps and jungles which could mire down any invading army.
It is further claimed that India, already stretched on its western and northern borders, would find it extremely difficult to come to terms with a 4,000km border it shares with Bangladesh. There is that “Chicken’s Neck” around Siliguri which could severe its link with its North East.
All of this of course is chest-thumping from a distance. A few Brahmos and other missiles from India could neutralize Bangladesh’s armed and naval forces in hours. India could do a Putin in carving out a part of Bangladesh as a safe haven for its ethnic Hindus.
India has been more than generous with its waters to Bangladesh; the unpaid electricity bill is over a billion of dollar and much of the eggs it has on its breakfast table is imported from India. And such is the impoverishment of our eastern neighbours that some 4 crores of its own have illegally crossed over and still counting.
Yet Bangladesh is choosing to be a spoilsport, no doubt at the US’ behest. Hindus have dwindled from 28-odd percent share in population from 1947 to 7.5%. Islamists have been let loose on Hindus, and on other minorities, taking lives and honour of their women, snatching their lands and livestock.
India–the military question
How is India going to react to this persistent needle?
There is little doubt India can’t take its eyes off Bangladesh for its strategic location. It’s a vital link to India’s “Act East Policy,” a counter it has up it’s sleeve to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). It’s from where Britain launched its colonial expansion across South Asia. It is strategically vital for two of world’s most populous nations, India and China. It’s a hot spot from where Washington could indulge in its war-games.
New Delhi knows that Jihadi forces are doing what they are doing due to the complicity of the Yunus government. That his sponsors in Washington haven’t raised even eyebrows to these Human Rights violations should tell you something. They perceive these barbaric Jihadis are their best bests to rile up India and with good luck, it could lit a fuse across the border with fundamentalists who abound in India’s plains and mountains.
That India and China are going along well is almost catastrophic for America’a foreign policy.
India, I suspect, would opt for a military response if tens of thousands of humanity begin to mass around on its eastern borders as it did in 1971. If it led to the birth of Bangladesh then, it could well be to its break-up this time. New Delhi’s best hope is Donald Trump and if he could pull the plug on Bangladesh.
All of this is anything but good for Bangladesh. It never serves to be a vassal, and that too militarily, of Washington. It didn’t help Laos earlier during the Vietnam War, or a Saddam Hussein in Iraq, as it hasn’t Ukraine in baiting Russia. It won’t help Dhaka either for unleashing the murderous face of Islam which would destroy its secular fabric and bring only grief, not too distant in future.
