Religious harmony?
Once again, I am left shaking my head in disbelief as The Daily Star publishes the claim of the nation's leaders that Bangladesh is a country of religious harmony when, bless it, it does not hesitate boldly to inform its readers again and again to the contrary!
Yes, thank God, there is plenty of evidence of an underlying tradition here of a tolerance between faiths. But this underlying tradition is being more and more overlaid by something a great deal more unpleasant that, it seems, rather a lot of people simply do not want to talk about….
The Daily Star recently published the hard evidence produced by painstakingly accurate research, proving that both the Hindu community and many indigenous peoples (all of whom have an equal claim to be Bangladeshis and whose ancestors have lived here for centuries) have lost huge tracts of their land to all sorts of trickery. Such minorities have left Bangladesh in thousands since independence, hugely reducing the percentage of 'minorities'.
Even though it has been on inside pages, The Daily Star has also honourably reported, over the last few years, several instances of people from other minority faiths who have been murdered, seriously wounded or threatened by all sorts of bigots and bullies. Regrettably, I have never discovered any follow-up stories to these. Moreover, rather a lot of the minorities seem to 'buy in' to the assumption that it is only OK to be a minority here, if you keep your head down…………So everyone keeps smiling and repeating what a tolerant country this is!
A couple of weeks ago the shocking story of the murder of an elderly Buddhist monks was published. Thus I have been watching the columns carefully to see if there would be any follow-up. Yes, indeed, there was - but not the one that I had hoped for. There it was the CA repeating that this was a country of religious harmony, greeting members of the Buddhist community on Buddha Purnima and absolutely no mention at all of the shameful murder of the Buddhist monk and no apologies for it and no assurance that justice would be sought for this action!
Come on, DS! You can do better than this!
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