Mafizul Huq: The footage of the conversation between the US President Trump and Priya Saha, who is one of the organizing secretaries of Bangladesh Hindu-Bauddha-Christian Oikya Parishad, quickly has gone viral on different social media flat-forms. She was seen telling the president, “Sir, I’m from Bangladesh… 37 million Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians are disappeared…”
Obviously, she had not meant to imply that all the disappeared Hindus were killed by the Muslim fundamentalists. In the post-partition Pakistan era and Bangladesh, the majority of Hindus who disappeared into thin air will not be coming back to their country of origin because many of them were oppressed and mistreated as the second-class citizens.
But if a Hindu leaves their home country willfully for a better life, nobody stops them from doing so, for example, her two daughters who migrated to the USA for perusing higher studies will try to settle down in the US. They are also disappeared persons, so all the disappeared Hindus from Bangladesh were not oppressed and attacked for grabbing their land properties.
The critics say that she complained to Trump so that it will then be easy for her to get the US Green Card for her two daughters. The numbers of such disappeared people have been growing irrespective of their religious beliefs.
Land grabbing is a huge problem in Bangladesh. If the landowner is weaker than the land grabber, then the land will be gone irrespective of landowners religious faith. Usually, in Bangladesh, Hindus feel weaker and unsafe than their Muslim counterpart. So, it is not true that only Muslim fundamentalists grab the land of the Hindus but others also do so.
This is a deliberate attempt to misinform the US President against Bangladesh by providing erroneous accusation. She needs to prove that all of the 37 million Hindus, Christians and Buddhists disappeared from Bangladesh were forcefully ousted from their lands.
Priya Saha’s husband Malay Saha is the deputy director of Anti-Corruption Commission-Bangladesh and she herself is a socialite and social worker, so both of them are in the positions to take their issue to the concerned authorities or she could have talked about it in different flat-forms instead of complaining it to US President Trump.
Recently, Trump himself told his three congresswomen to go back to their country of origins. She expected that Trump would do something about it, how could she imagine an intervention from such a guy who himself a racist? She was just barking up the wrong tree. It is highly unlikely that Trump will do anything about the minority communities of Bangladesh. He is a White-supremacist.
He doesn’t give a shit about brown people irrespective of their religious faiths. The US ambassador to Bangladesh Earl Miller said that Priya Saha’s alleged oppression about minorities are not correct. So, it is highly unlikely President Trump will even make a comment in this regard let alone intervention.
The bitter debate among the people over the issue of Priya Saha’s allegations make us frustrated that hope for a harmonious society for all the religious people in Bangladesh will not be coming any time soon. Both liberal Hindus and Muslims say that there was a degree of exaggeration in Priya Saha’s description of the allegations. Her irresponsible action could put in jeopardy the minority communities’ safety and security all across the country. Perish the thought!
Rumor has it that the former chief justice Surendra Sinha also among others who might have helped her to meet Trump. Maybe a powerful lobby worked to get her included in one of the 17 representatives, who went to meet President Trump.
It has been proved in the past that when a state tries to establish a particular religion for its majority people, the other people feel ostracized, that results in feelings of alienation to society or country. The minority people feel scared and tortured mentally and such people move out their beloved ancestral homes, so the government should not support a particular religion.
The state religion Islam makes the Hindus the second-class citizen. They don’t like it but can’t do anything about it. There is no way that the current or any future government will scrap it. It is psychological torture for minorities. There is no scope in saying that all the Hindus in Bangladesh have been living a peaceful life.
A huge majority of Muslims in Bangladesh are overly religious and living among such religious people is always depressing for the Hindus. And, incidents concerning with the lives and properties of Hindus have been taking place here and there very isolatedly. But terming it oppression is a complete lie. Bangladeshi fundamentalists are not in a position to send Hindus in a mass disappearance or migration to India. I think a good number of Hindus don’t believe what she was saying to Trump.
The writer, a Bangladeshi freethinker, is based in Toronto, Canada
