New Delhi, August 20, 2020: Bangladeshi Muslim leader Zafrullah Chowdhury, a freedom fighter and the founder of Gana Swasthya Kendro, recently made some remarks against the Indian leaders as well as Hindu religious texts. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party sympathizer is probably angry at the growing Bangladesh-India ties under Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.
On August 9th, this Muslim leader claimed that people are being killed with the border with India but the Bangladesh government has taken no action. He also attacked politicians who say that India Bangladesh ties are very much like the blood-ties. He termed the ‘blood-ties’ as contaminated saying Bangladesh needs clean blood.
Zafrullah also said that Bangladesh cannot be truly liberated without speaking out against India. But his anti-India venom soon took an anti-Hindu turn, as has been the case always in the country. He first said that Hindus ate beef before Narendra Modi’s time and then said that Muslims in India could not even celebrate Eid and they are being stopped from practicing Islam.
He did not tell from where he got all this fake news from despite subsequent protests from Hindus of his own country demanding an apology and reiteration.
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Continuing his tirade, Zafrullah then claimed, that Indians made a ‘strange’ Ram Mandir based on a myth and for that, they demolished the 500-year old Mosque. He said in all this Bangladesh did not protest at all.
He however overlooked the fact that countless Hindu Temples get ransacked, Hindu properties are grabbed and forced conversion of Hindu girls and even pregnant women happens at an alarming rate in Muslim-majority Bangladesh at fabricated blasphemy charges, but the Indian government out of respect for a friendly country has stayed mum.
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Zafrullah who says he is a freedom fighter may not even be making these claims had it not been Indian soldiers who stopped the genocide of Bengalis in Eastern Pakistan in 1971. But let us not allow facts to puncture his communal ramblings.
Taking an even more venomous line against Hinduism and its millions of adherents in Bangladesh, Zafrullah said that Ramayana and Mahabharata contain stories of ‘lies.’
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This is the latest of many attacks on the Hindu minority of Bangladesh. In 2016, Bangladesh Minister Mohammad Sayedul Haque (Minister for Fisheries and Livestock) described Hindus as Maluyaner Bachyara (children of Kafirs).
In a statement sent to me, a prominent Bangladeshi Hindu group, Bangladesh National Hindu Grand Alliance (Hindu Mohajote) strongly condemned the statement of Dr. Zafrullah Chowdhury.
The statement also said that ‘a case has already been filed against him for hurting religious feelings further stating that the Hindu group is ‘demanding exemplary punishment.’
But the point is, why the nations’ law enforcement did not bother to give him a lesson in communal harmony till now? Is it waiting for another Brahmanbaria?
By Namta Gupta
