The killings of Hindus in Bangladesh have been reduced to arithmetic. Numbers circulate where names should be spoken. Incidents are counted, not mourned. Lives are lost, families erased, entire neighbourhoods emptied – and the response is a careful.
Since the political upheaval in Dhaka in August 2024, violence against Hindus and other minorities has surged. Homes have been torched, temples vandalised, businesses looted, men lynched in public, and entire communities driven out.
These are not spontaneous acts of chaos. They follow a recognisable pattern – targeted, repetitive, and designed to terrorise. Yet outside Bangladesh, this violence barely registers.
Selective outrage
The more grotesque spectacle is not the brutality itself but the silence of those who otherwise perform outrage as a full-time profession.
The same activists, opposition leaders and intellectuals who speak in urgent tones about Gaza suddenly discover the virtues of restraint when Hindus are attacked next door. Their social media feeds overflow with moral anguish for distant causes, but turn eerily mute when Islamist mobs burn Hindu homes in Khulna or Chattogram.
Apparently, injustice requires the right ideological passport to qualify for outrage. This is not a failure of information. Reports are available. Videos circulate. Testimonies exist. What is missing is not evidence, but will.
Human rights with conditions
We are told human rights are universal. In practice, they come with conditions. Violence against minorities is condemnable – provided the minority fits the preferred narrative. When Hindus are targeted, the vocabulary shifts.
Words like ‘context’, ‘provocation’ and ‘retaliation’ are hurriedly deployed. The crime is sociologised, the perpetrators anonymised, and the victims quietly interrogated for their inconvenient existence.
The interim authorities in Dhaka have dismissed reports of attacks on minorities as ‘propaganda’. What is striking is how eagerly this denial is echoed by those who otherwise mistrust every official narrative – unless that narrative helps them avoid taking a morally uncomfortable position.
This behaviour is often defended as ‘balance’. It is nothing of the sort. Balance is weighing evidence. This is weighing victims. It reflects a hierarchy of suffering in which some deaths are elevated to symbols, while others are treated as background noise.
Hindu deaths, it seems, do not travel well in elite moral circles. They do not flatter ideological self-images. They complicate carefully curated politics. So they are ignored.
Silence as permission
Silence is not neutral. It is permissive. Every unasked question reassures the mob. Every evasive statement signals safety for the perpetrator. When violence is met with silence, it does not fade – it metastasises.
The lesson is quickly learnt: some communities can be attacked without consequence, some crimes will never provoke accountability. The victims learn something too. They learn that appeals to universal values are selective, that empathy is rationed, and that when the mob arrives, they are on their own.
Outrage cannot depend on geography
Let us stop pretending this is complicated. This is not about geopolitics.
Not about nuance, ot about history. It is about the refusal to condemn Islamist violence against Hindus because doing so disrupts a comfortable ideological script.
It is about the fear of being seen on the ‘wrong side’ of a fashionable cause. It is about moral cowardice dressed up as sophistication. If you can march for some victims and avert your gaze from others, you are not defending human rights. You are curating them.
Human rights cannot depend on religion. Outrage cannot depend on geography and justice cannot depend on political convenience.
If the deaths of Hindus in Bangladesh do not move you enough to speak, then do not insult the idea of justice by pretending you ever cared.
History does not remember who stayed balanced; it remembers who spoke – and who chose silence when speaking mattered. And silence, sooner or later, always picks a side.
