On September 4th 2024, in Khulna Bangladesh, an enraged, Muslim mob attacked and killed an eighteen-year-old Hindu man, Utshab Mandal, because he supposedly insulted Muhammad in social media. The man was watching a cricket match, when suddenly the Muslims violently attacked the Hindus people.
At first, local media confirmed the incident of the eighteen-year-old Hindu man’s lynching by the enraged mob. Many social media videos show a man so badly injured, that it is not even understandable whether he is dead or alive. The man lies on the ground without moving, while someone in the background is screaming ”Hindu Atheist!”
According to reports, students of the Commercial Administrative University of Kulna
“Azam Khan” supposedly shared a Facebook post about the Prophet Muhammad,
and eighteen-year-old Utshab Mandal was one of them. The same afternoon the man was taken to the deputy commissioner’s office for Islam issues, in Southern Tajul. During his arrival, an enraged Muslim mob was shouting against him in the residential area of Sonandaga Upazila, and this protest lasted for almost three hours. The mob demanded his punishment for blasphemy against Muhammad.
Infantry and naval forces arrived there to prevent violent incidents, without succeeding, since, while the young man was being taken to the police station, the mob attacked him and lynched him in front of the police.
Various videos were posted on twitter, just moments before the man’s death, where people ask ‘’What did he do?’’, and he answers ‘’They insulted my Dharma and I lost my temper’’. In a specific video, a man from the mob asks the police a question: “I am asking you to give us ten minutes with him. We will put shoes with garland on him, we will write atheist on his skin, and we will circle his body among us’’. The police agreed on this punishment.
Of course, the mod was not satisfied with just the publicity of the man. When his circuit among them got to an end, the mob started hitting him so hard, that he soon succumbed to his injuries. The man was violently killed with the officers present, while it is surprising that these videos were directly removed from twitter and other social media by Bangladeshi mass media. The last time anyone could see them was on the morning of the September 5th.
But then, the media of Bangladesh, which is run by the Jamaat, did their best to cover up not only this incident, and also the general fierce attacks that Hindus people in Bangladesh have been experiencing from the Muslims for a long time now. It is no coincidence that, due to the constant persecutions that the Hindus people in Bangladesh have been experiencing, their population is decreasing. In 1951, the Hindus made up 22 percent of the population of Bangladesh, while today they make up only 8 percent.
We should not have a superficial look at the fact of a young man’s murder with the excuse of blasphemy against Muhammad, and include it in the big umbrella of Muslims’ bigotry in Bangladesh and their zero tolerance for diversity. The moment I read about this event, the first thing I thought was how fast all the videos depicting this incident disappeared -in less than twenty four hours-, despite the fact that the democracy of social media is at its peak.
This concealment alone is a gross violation of the world population’s individual right to free information. Someone could have expected that the United Nations would dignify this fact by imposing sanctions in Bangladesh, but since they follow pro-Muslim policy, especially in the last five years, they chose to remain deaf.
It is well known that countries all over the world use the religious sentiment of their citizens as a tool, wanting to serve their own international financial interests through people’s faith. Moreover, Islamism is a much more absolutist religion than Christianity and Hinduism, with zero tolerance for diversity. The “unclear” is the easiest to blame, and especially for Muslims in Bangladesh it is intentionally unclear what constitutes an insult against Muhammad, so that they can use this as an excuse to attack all their political enemies, and in this case the Hindus people.
This young man that was killed, who spoke about his Dharma that was insulted, I want to believe that, through his wrongful death, he fulfilled it, since he did not let this brutality against religious minorities in Bangladesh stay disguised. I don’t have the intention of blaming only the religious fanaticism through the reporting of this event, which shows that in some parts of the world like Bangladesh there are medieval torture conditions even today, with a complete circumvention of concepts such as democracy and human rights.
But I want all of us to think a little more about whether the international community or the Non Governmental Organizations that fight for human rights, especially in developing countries, place more emphasis on other parts of the human existence than on the right to different religious belief.
It is rather contradictory how Bangladesh is more tolerant with sexual freedom than with religious freedom. The Hijra transgenders have been legalized as a third gender since 2008, and they are getting more and more rights within this conservative society, when at the same time a young man is killed violently as a witness of his faith, before the eyes of statesmen operators.
The violent rule of Islam in the Asian countries has become extremely worrisome, to the point that it now openly resembles a religious war, that much that for those of us who don’t want to call it dharma but the purpose of life, it’s the fight for the respect of people’s freedoms (political, religious, sexual), regardless of their country’s politics, and the first step for that is to open our eyes and see what is going on beyond our tiny little world, and then fight for the democracy and for the freedom of information.
