Bangladesh is slowly developing a new map of fear. It is not drawn by rivers, highways, districts or administrative boundaries. It is drawn by rumours, loudspeakers, edited videos, processions, sticks, kerosene, and the certainty that nobody will stop the crowd before it reaches its destination.
From Rajbari to Kushtia, from Comilla to Barguna, from Gazipur to Narayanganj, the route is becoming painfully familiar.
First comes the allegation of insulting religion. Then comes the announcement through microphones, mosques, Facebook posts, or village gossip. Then comes the crowd. And inside that crowd, almost invisibly, comes another group that knows exactly what to do.
The statistics alone should have shaken the conscience of the country. More than 60 attacks on shrines in less than two years cannot be dismissed as isolated incidents. These are not spontaneous eruptions of emotion. They are patterns.
The same choreography appears again and again. One group gathers ordinary villagers and curious onlookers. Another creates rage. A third enters the shrine, breaks doors, beats people, loots valuables, burns houses, and disappears before the police arrive. The geography changes, but the method does not.
In many of these attacks, the crowd behaves like an audience at a theatre. The spectators stand, shout, watch, record videos, perhaps throw a stone or two, but the actual destruction is carried out by a smaller, disciplined core.
They arrive with rods, machetes, petrol, and a plan. They know which room contains money, which cupboard contains gold ornaments, which corner should be set on fire first. They know how to kill quickly and leave quickly. This is not a mob in the classical sense. This is a mob with management.
The French philosopher Gustave Le Bon once argued that individuals inside a crowd lose their rationality and become capable of acts they would never commit alone. Yet what we are seeing in Bangladesh no longer fits that old theory entirely.
These attacks are not simply the madness of the crowd. They are the organization of madness. They resemble what the German philosopher Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil, where violence becomes routine, bureaucratic, and strangely normal.
Someone spreads the rumour. Someone arranges the transport. Someone edits the video. Someone points out the house. Someone leads the prayer. Someone leads the looting. Evil no longer arrives wearing a mask. It arrives carrying a microphone.
The targets are revealing
Shrines, music events, women's football matches, minority homes, people accused of being gay, people with unusual beliefs, anyone who stands slightly outside the authorized version of society.
The attacks are not merely against individuals. They are attacks against pluralism itself.
Bangladesh has always contained many Islams, many Bangladeshes, many forms of culture and spirituality. Shrines, especially, represent an older Bengali Islam shaped by rivers, folklore, poetry, Sufi traditions, local saints, and centuries of coexistence.
The shrine is not only a religious place. It is also a social geography. It is where people gather, eat, seek healing, share stories, and remember ancestors.
That is precisely why shrines are attacked. They represent a version of religion that cannot be controlled easily. They stand against the harsher, narrower, imported vision of faith that divides the world into pure and impure, believer and enemy, permitted and forbidden.
The attack on a shrine is therefore not just an act of religious anger. It is an attempt to redraw the cultural map of Bangladesh.
History offers uncomfortable parallels
In medieval Europe, mobs burned women accused of witchcraft, not because the accusations were true, but because fear could be politically useful.
During the Partition of India in 1947, rumours travelled faster than trains, and entire neighbourhoods were destroyed before anyone could verify the truth.
In 1992, after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in India, rumours and speeches transformed ordinary men into rioters within hours.
Everywhere, the pattern is similar. Before violence comes a story. Before the fire comes a sentence.
Today that sentence is spread through social media. An old video is edited. A speech is cut into fragments. A photograph is shared with a false caption. Within minutes, the accused becomes guilty in the court of Facebook.
The irony is tragic. The same technology that was supposed to democratize information now democratizes hatred. Villages that once waited days for news now need only minutes for panic.
Understanding the motives
But religion alone does not explain these attacks. There is almost always another motive hiding behind piety. Land disputes, economic rivalry, local political competition, looting, revenge, or the desire to establish dominance.
The language of blasphemy becomes a convenient tool because it silences questions. Once someone is labelled anti-Islamic, nobody dares ask whether his land is valuable, whether his enemies are influential, or whether his attackers want his property more than his soul.
This is why the state's failure is so dangerous. A weak state does not merely fail to stop violence. It encourages it. Every unpunished attack becomes a lesson. Every unfinished investigation becomes an invitation.
When dozens of cases remain unresolved, when only a handful of people are arrested from crowds of hundreds, when political parties compete to sound more religious than responsible, the mob learns that it can act without consequence.
The most frightening part is not that extremists exist. Every society has extremists. The frightening part is that ordinary people are slowly becoming accustomed to them.
The crowd watches, the neighbour remains silent, the local leader hesitates, the police arrive late, and the next day another rumour begins somewhere else.
A republic does not collapse only when its institutions fail. It also collapses when its citizens stop believing that law is stronger than anger.
What can be done
Bangladesh still has time to choose another path. The government must show that protecting law is not less important than protecting religion.
Religious leaders must say clearly that no belief permits murder. Political parties must stop using faith as an electoral weapon. Schools must teach not only mathematics and grammar, but also how rumours work, how propaganda works, and how easily human beings can become cruel.
Otherwise, the country will continue to produce not only more mobs, but more trained mobs. And once a society begins training itself in hatred, it eventually forgets how to live together.
The tragedy is especially painful because Bangladesh was born from the rejection of precisely this kind of politics.
The Liberation War of 1971 was fought against a state that tried to define citizenship through a single religious identity and punish difference as betrayal.
The constitution spoke of secularism not as hostility to religion, but as protection for every religion and every citizen.
The village shrine, the mazar beside the highway, the temple under the banyan tree, the church near the tea garden, all belonged to that promise.
If mobs now decide which belief may survive, then the country is moving backwards through history. The question is therefore larger than a few shrines or a few deaths.
It is about whether Bangladesh will remain a nation governed by law, memory, and coexistence, or become a territory where every rumour becomes a verdict and every crowd becomes a court.
Geography teaches that landscapes are shaped slowly by erosion. Democracies are destroyed the same way. Not through one spectacular collapse, but through repeated small acts of fear, silence, and surrender.
Each burned shrine leaves behind more than ashes. It leaves behind the idea that some citizens matter less than others. Once that idea spreads, no wall, mosque, court, or government office remains truly safe. For anyone at all.
HM Nazmul Alam is an academic, journalist, and political analyst based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Currently he teaches at IUBAT.
