The violence of December 2025 was triggered by the killing of Sharif Osman Hadi, a prominent activist from the 2024 uprising that had brought down Sheikh Hasina’s government. Hadi was shot in broad daylight in Dhaka on 12 December.
New Delhi: On the night of 18 December 2025, a garland factory worker named Dipu Chandra Das was dragged from his home in Bhaluka, a quiet upazila in Mymensingh, by a mob acting on rumours that he had made blasphemous remarks.
He was beaten, hanged from a tree, and set on fire. He was not a politician. He was not an activist. He was a Hindu man who went to work and came home, in a country where, for people like him, that has never been quite enough of a defence.
That same night, in Dhaka, mobs armed with petrol torches stormed the offices of Prothom Alo and The Daily Star, two of Bangladesh’s most respected newspapers, trapping journalists on rooftops as smoke rose through the floors below.
When Nurul Kabir, the editor of New Age, rushed to the scene out of solidarity with his colleagues, the crowd surrounded him, grabbed his collar, and screamed that he was an agent of the Awami League. Soldiers had to pull him free.
These are not isolated incidents. They are the latest chapter in a story that began long before Bangladesh existed.
The Idea That Bengalis Were the Wrong Kind of Muslims
To understand why minorities in Bangladesh remain so vulnerable today, you have to go back to the founding logic of Pakistan — a state built on the proposition that Muslims and Hindus were two separate nations who could not share a country. What that theory conveniently obscured was that Muslims themselves were not a monolith.
The Bengali Muslims of the east were culturally, linguistically, and historically distinct from the Punjabi and Urdu-speaking elite who came to dominate West Pakistan’s military and bureaucracy. And that distinction made them suspect.
The ruling establishment in Karachi and Rawalpindi viewed Bengali culture with barely concealed contempt.
Bengali, a language with a rich literary tradition shared across the Hindu-Muslim divide, was dismissed as too Hindu, too Sanskrit-inflected, too impure for a properly Islamic nation.
In March 1948, Muhammad Ali Jinnah himself travelled to Dhaka and declared, to a visibly hostile audience, that Urdu — spoken by around seven per cent of Pakistan’s population — would be the country’s sole state language.
Bengali, spoken by fifty-four to fifty-six per cent of Pakistanis, would have no official standing. Students in the hall interrupted him to shout their protest. He did not change his position.
This was not merely a linguistic dispute. It was the West Pakistani establishment announcing, in the clearest possible terms, that the people of the east were culturally inferior and politically subordinate. Military dictator Ayub Khan, who came to power a decade later, recorded in his diaries that Bengalis were “consciously Hinduizing” and unfit to govern themselves.
The logic was circular and self-serving: Bengali culture was contaminated by Hinduism, Hindus were agents of India, therefore Bengali nationalism was, at its root, an Indian conspiracy. It was the kind of reasoning that ends in mass graves.
The Night They Came with Lists By the time General Yahya Khan’s government refused to hand power to the Awami League after the 1970 elections — an election the Bengalis had won decisively — that logic had curdled into something murderous. On the night of 25 March 1971, Lieutenant General Tikka Khan, Commander of the Eastern Command, launched Operation Searchlight.
Pakistani troops fanned out across Dhaka. They shelled Dhaka University. They attacked the East Pakistan Rifles barracks at Peelkhana. They killed students in their dormitories and professors in their quarters. Tikka Khan would later be remembered across Bangladesh as the Butcher of Bengal.
The militias who worked alongside the Pakistani army — the Razakars, Al-Badr, and Al-Shams, recruited with the involvement of Jamaat-e-Islami — operated with lists. Lists of intellectuals, of Awami League members, of Hindu households. Homes were identified and marked.
Hindus were hunted with particular ferocity: the army’s logic, reported by witnesses and journalists at the time, was that Bengali nationalism was a Hindu plot, and that even Bengali Muslims who sympathised with it had been corrupted beyond saving.
Archer Blood, the US Consul General in Dhaka, watched all of this from the American consulate and sent telegram after telegram to Washington. His dispatch of late March 1971, headed “Selective Genocide,” described how Awami League supporters, students, academics, Bengalis, and Hindus were being systematically targeted.
On 6 April, he and nearly thirty colleagues signed what became known as the Blood Telegram — a document of extraordinary moral clarity, in which American diplomats formally accused their own government of moral bankruptcy for its silence.
Nixon and Kissinger, who considered Pakistan a useful Cold War ally, recalled Blood from his post. Between 200,000 and 400,000 Bengali women were raped. By December 1971, when Pakistani forces surrendered to Indian and Bangladeshi troops, somewhere between 300,000 and three million people were dead, and ten million refugees — the great majority of them Hindu — had fled to India.
The Law They Never Abolished
When Bangladesh was born, there was an opportunity to build something genuinely different from the state it had broken away from. In some respects, it did. But in one crucial area, it did not.
Pakistan had passed the Enemy Property Act in 1965, following the India-Pakistan war. In practice, as a government circular quickly made clear, “enemy property” meant property owned by minorities — overwhelmingly Hindus who had left or who might leave for India. It was a mechanism for legal land theft on a vast scale.
When Bangladesh became independent in 1971, this law should have been one of the first things dismantled. Instead, in 1974, the government passed two acts that, while formally repealing the Pakistani ordinance, vested all previously confiscated properties in the Bangladeshi state and extended similar provisions to non-resident property owners.
The Enemy Property Act had been given a new name — the Vested Property Act — and a new landlord. The dispossession continued.
The numbers tell the story quietly but without ambiguity. In 1901, Hindus made up thirty-three per cent of the population in what is now Bangladesh. By the time of Partition in 1947, that figure had fallen to around twenty-two per cent as communal violence and uncertainty pushed families across the border. By 1974, it was approximately thirteen per cent.
By 2022, according to the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, it had fallen to under eight per cent. These are not the statistics of a community that is simply moving on. They are the statistics of a community being steadily pushed out.
Each political crisis accelerates the process. Violence during elections, communal riots after perceived blasphemies, land grabs facilitated by local officials and backed by political connections — the specific triggers vary, but the underlying mechanism stays the same. And the slur used to justify it stays the same too. Hindu Bangladeshis are Indian agents. They are fifth columnists. They are not quite loyal. It was the framing Pakistan used to justify its genocide in 1971, and it is the framing mobs use today when they burn a man alive in Mymensingh.
The December That Clarified Everything
The violence of December 2025 was triggered by the killing of Sharif Osman Hadi, a prominent activist from the 2024 uprising that had brought down Sheikh Hasina’s government. Hadi was shot in broad daylight in Dhaka on 12 December and died six days later. The grief and rage that followed were real. But what was done with that grief — who was targeted, what was burned, who was beaten — revealed something about where the country now stands.
Mobs attacked not just political targets but independent journalism and secular culture. The offices of Prothom Alo and The Daily Star, newspapers that had spent decades trying to hold Bangladeshi governments of every stripe to account, were stormed and set on fire. The Chhayanaut cultural centre, one of the oldest and most respected institutions of Bengali artistic life, was attacked by people who called it a promoter of Indian culture. Dipu Chandra Das, who had nothing to do with any of this, was killed because a rumour spread through a crowd.
Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus condemned the attacks on the press and declared state mourning for Hadi. But critics, including Nurul Kabir — the journalist who had been roughed up by the mob outside the Daily Star — publicly stated their belief that parts of the interim administration had been warned that the attacks were coming and had done nothing.
The perpetrators had announced their intentions days in advance. The arrests that followed were few.
For Bangladesh’s minorities, none of this was surprising. The architecture of their vulnerability was not built in December 2025. It was built across decades of legislation, neglect, and official indifference dressed up as neutrality. What the events of that December made clear, once again, is that the ghosts of 1971 have never really left. They have simply been waiting, in the gaps between laws that were never changed and prosecutions that were never brought, for the next moment of political turbulence to walk back through the door.