MD NURUL HAQUE 

In the sprawling mosaic of South Asia, where faith and identity collide with politics and power, two neighboring countries, India and Bangladesh, exist as counterpoints. India is now the world’s largest so-called democracy, as its elections during the Modi Government have aroused suspicions and mystery of muscle power, but it has gone downhill! They resorted to emperor rule under the banner of Hindutva, the iron-fisted tyranny of Hindu majoritarian forces, and their Muslim citizens face institutionalized persecution. In the meantime, Bangladesh, often living in the shadows of its giant neighbors, has seldom had a narrative about the relative tolerance in the country, which allows the country's Hindu minority to escape the storms of religious polarization. This is not just a policy comparison, but an exploration of how political will or its malignant absence determines the fate of vulnerable communities.

The air in India becomes dense with the acrid smoke of hatred. What had been celebrated as a pluralistic civilization now carries the scars of institutionalized Islamophobia. The numbers tell a horrific story: the India Hate Lab found that 2024 saw an explosive growth in anti-Muslim vitriol, with 1,165 reported instances of hate speech, a 74.4% rise over the previous year. These are numbers and a chilling record of a nation’s moral desolation.

The violence is visceral as well as vicious. The New York-based Human Rights Watch has painstakingly documented at least 50 lynchings since 2015, in which enraged mobs have bloodied Muslim men over false rumors of cow slaughter. Doing this is, of course, a grotesque theatre of cruelty; the murder of Sabir Malik, a Muslim laborer in Haryana, epitomizes this. Beaten to death on the altar of bovine idolatry, his innocence was belatedly established, a tragic footnote to India’s descent into barbarism.

The state itself is now an architect of oppression. The 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act is a legislative monument to religious apartheid, promising sanctuary to every persecuted South Asian minority, except Muslims. The 2020 Delhi pogroms, where policemen assisted saffron-clad mobs in rampaging through Muslim neighborhoods, exposed the true face of the regime: democracy in name, majoritarian fascism in practice.

Bulldozers have become tools of state terror. In Uttar Pradesh, the bulldozer has been turned into a weapon,  mowing down more than 600 Muslim homes and businesses last year alone — a crude variant of collective punishment dressed as urban policy. This “bulldozer justice” is not only the violence of property destruction: it is the bulldozing of the constitutional soul of India. Recently, More than 200 age-old mosques have been demolished and defamed by institutionalized expeditions.  The Waqf Amendment Bill has been entitled to acquire hundreds of thousands of acres of land owned by mosques and madrasas in India.  

Bangladesh is a more complex picture on the other side of the border. Though not a utopia, its Hindu minority, reduced from 22% of the population in 1951 to around 8% today, has found refuge niches in the country's social and economic fabric. A road map for cohabitation can be found in the game-changing work of Nobel prize-winning Dr. Muhammad Yunus, who, as the state's chief advisor, pioneered microfinance as the thread that knitted the country’s tapestry of religions.

And the Grameen Bank became an unlikely crucible for communal harmony. In the rural hinterlands of Jessore and Khulna, Hindu and Muslim women, once divided by the scars of partition, now sit side by side at the self-help groups, and their joint economic fate outweighs ancient animosities. Yunus’ social businesses became secular temples where faith was secondary to ability. Dr Yunus' speeches after 5^th August 2024 hummed with interfaith workforces, and schools and clinics served everybody without bias.

For the record, Bangladesh’s Hindus have not been entirely free of the specter of violence. Scorched temples raided in the 2021 Durga Puja riots still lie in ruins, reminders of tensions that have yet to settle. But critically, these are now those sporadic eruptions,  not state-sponsored policy. Where land grabs happen in the slender shadow of the Vested Property Act, courts sometimes intervene. When temples burn, the officials at least mouth a few words of justice — a far cry from the official bulldozers and lynching apologists of India.

These parallel narratives serve as a mirror to South Asia’s soul. India,  for all its economic ambition and nuclear power, has adopted a quality of religious nationalism that would make Savarkar blush. Its Muslims are hostages in their own ancestral homeland, their citizenship there a subject in doubt, their livelihoods obliterated, their very being criminalized.

Bangladesh, for all its failings and spasms of communal bloodshed, has resisted this plunge into the abyss. Caution aside, a Hindu shopkeeper in Dhaka doesn’t have to worry about his faith getting his store bulldozed. There is no such guarantee for the Muslim seamstress in Uttar Pradesh.

As the first light of dawn spreads across the Sundarbans,  falling equally on both nations, the thought that lingers in the mind is one of judgment; which nation will history vindicate? India’s course — with a nuclear-armed state committing cultural genocide on its own citizens — or Bangladesh’s imperfect but ongoing experiment in coexistence?

The numbers don't lie. Hindu entrepreneurs are thriving in Bangladesh's garment factories, while India's bureaucracy is merely 3% Muslim. Six thousand bulldozed Muslim homes or Hindu students from attending Bangladeshi universities without bans on hijab. They are not historical accidents but choices with consequences.

Ultimately, this is about more than comparing how minorities are treated. It’s a morality play about the spirit of South Asia itself. As India’s Muslims murmur prayers behind closed windows, while Bangladesh’s Hindus light diyas in tentative hope, the subcontinent holds its breath, waiting to see which version of pluralism will win.

The writer is an Assistant Professor of English and a PhD candidate at UPM