Dutch Hindus are raising awareness of the plight of their fellow believers in Bangladesh. They blame radical Muslims for the recent surge in violence against Hindus in that country. “It’s strange that our government is so weak,” says one.
Hindus in Bangladesh are under attack by Islamists and have no voice, say Dutch Hindu activists. So they want to make their voices heard. “It affects me when I see temples being burned and idols being urinated on,” says Nawin Ramcharan, 27, an activist with Dutch Hindu advocacy group SOHAM. Ramcharan shares his story with a few fellow activists in an office in The Hague. “I noticed that in news reports about Bangladesh, there was almost no mention of the suffering of Hindus.”
What’s happening? This month, disgraced Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina left Bangladesh after weeks of student protests met with a harsh response. After Hasina left, chaos erupted. According to Hindu spokesmen, radical Muslims have looted Hindu shops, homes and temples. Hindus are a minority of 13 million in this densely populated, predominantly Muslim country of 169 million. According to the Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Union (BHBCUC), Hindus have been attacked in 52 of the country’s 64 districts.
The situation has now largely calmed down. Elderly economist and Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus (84) has been asked to sort out the chaos and usher in a new era. “Yunus is a long-time American puppet,” says Monish Sharma (49), director of consulting firm MS Advisory. “The US wants to expand its influence in the region because oil shipments to Russia and China pass through the region. Hasina says she had to leave because she refused to allow a US military base on St. Martin, a strategically located island in the Bay of Bengal.”
Nawin Ramcharan is “not convinced” by Sharma’s observation that geopolitics played a role in the ouster of authoritarian Prime Minister Hasina. “But I also don’t rule it out.”
How exactly all this fits together is unclear. What may surprise many Dutch people the most is the involvement of Dutch Hindus in developments in Bangladesh, a faraway country that is not even in the daily news. “The Dutch see us as Hindus from Suriname,” explains Glenn Doerga (26), a law lecturer at the Netherlands University of Applied Sciences. “But Hindus can be Hindu, Muslim or sometimes Christian. We Hindus are a religious community spread all over the world and we feel solidarity with our fellow believers elsewhere.”
Monish Sharma: “Our ancestors came from British India. They were brought to Suriname as indentured labourers, but ultimately our roots are in South Asia.”
The fate of Bangladesh’s Hindus, whose numbers have dwindled over the years, is hardly discussed here, according to the interlocutor, because lobbying has not been done properly. Sharma: “Hindus in the Netherlands can organize themselves culturally and religiously, but politically they do not take a firm stance. They prefer to fit the image of well-integrated and respected doctors, lawyers and accountants. They are very different from Muslims, for example, who ask all sorts of questions about Gaza through Denk.”
Glenn Doherty: “My interview about Bangladesh was published on TikTok, and a Hindu girl said, ‘I don’t want to talk about this because it’s so easy to get labeled Islamophobic and Hindu nationalist.’ Dutch Hindus are as humble as Indo-Dutch people.”
In Bangladesh’s neighboring country of India, where Hindus number 1.1 billion, Hindu nationalism has become mainstream under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The Indian media has widely reported and expressed anger at attacks on “Hindu brothers and sisters” in Bangladesh, which are perpetrated by Muslims, a group that Modi’s India has a problem with.
Nawin Ramcharan: “Indian media reports are largely dismissed as fake news in the West. Why? Because the people accused of violence are Muslims? But when Hamas claims something, the editors readily accept it.” He shows Veldkamp’s response to a question from PvdA/GL. “Here Veldkamp writes: ‘There is online misinformation about violence against Hindus, according to several sources. This makes it difficult to assess the scale of the violence.’ Well, I have seen exactly three viral videos that Deutsche Welle has refuted. Many of the other images were certainly real and up-to-date.”
Dozens of people denounced the “Hindu genocide” in Bangladesh at a solidarity rally in The Hague last week. In his response to the House of Commons, Minister Veltkamp questioned whether the violence against Hindus and the small Christian community in Bangladesh was merely “religious in nature.” After all, many Hindus in Bangladesh support the disgraced Sheikh Hasina party. So it could be political revenge.
That may be so, but Hindu activists in the Netherlands continue to sound the alarm. Monish Sharma: “The number of Hindus in Bangladesh has declined dramatically in recent decades. People have converted or fled to India under pressure from the spread of Islam. Even Prime Minister Modi of India warns about this. Islam is widespread, even in the Netherlands. It has penetrated all levels of society here. Maybe that’s why you rarely hear or read about the misdeeds of Muslims in Bangladesh.”
