Bad things happen everywhere. That is the human condition, not a national indictment.
On the same day in late August that a family of four was killed in Bangladesh, a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl was stabbed to death in Sweden, and in Britain several young men died in a car crash during a police pursuit.
No society, however ordered, is spared sudden and terrible loss.
The measure of a state, then, is never whether tragedy occurs. It is what the state does the morning after.
In Sweden and in Britain, elected governments set the machinery of justice in motion -- investigation, disclosure, prosecution, public accounting. Bangladesh also has an elected government. Yet here the machinery too often produces an explanation faster than it produces evidence.
That is the difference that should concern every citizen. And minorities are simply where that difference becomes visible first.
Consider the case that prompts this. Ganapati Chakraborty spent his working life in a classroom. He taught at Rangpur Zilla School until his retirement last year, and by the accounts of his former students, he was the kind of teacher a town remembers.
On the night of August 20, in the Machuapara neighbourhood of Rangpur, he was killed in his own house, along with his wife Pritilata, their daughter, and their young son. The bodies were found two days later.
Two young men were arrested quickly and gave confessional statements before a magistrate. Since then, the police account of what happened inside that house has changed on more than one occasion, and the relatives of the dead have publicly disputed it.
On August 26, community organizations stood in a human chain before the National Press Club in Dhaka and asked for one thing: A judicial investigation, so that whatever the truth is, it may be established rather than announced.
Days later, in Chandpur, a businessman named Pintu Das disappeared together with his wife and their two sons. Relatives say he had been threatened. The police say they are looking into it.
Who killed the Chakraborty family is not known. What has become of the Das family is not known. Neither, at this moment, does the country -- and that is the point.
When the killing of a schoolteacher’s entire household produces an explanation faster than it produces evidence, something larger than one case is lost. What is lost is the public’s belief that the state is able to find out the truth at all.
What is happening is not sudden
It would be convenient to treat the Rangpur killings as an aberration, a crime like any other. The longer record makes that difficult.
Professor Abul Barkat of Dhaka University spent three decades studying what the Enemy Property Act and its successor, the Vested Property Act, did to this country’s Hindu citizens.
His finding was not about riots; it was about paperwork. Roughly 2.6 million acres were taken from Hindu families, and around 60% of Bangladesh’s Hindus were left landless.
In 2005 the United States State Department put the figure at about 2.5 million acres and estimated that nearly every Hindu family in the country had been touched by it.
The Vested Property Return Act was amended in 2011, largely because of the movement that Professor Barkat’s work helped to build. Restitution has still barely happened.
The census tells the second half of the story. In 1951, Hindus were a little over a fifth of the population. In 1974, 13.5%. In 2011, 8.54%. In 2022, 7.95%.
The absolute number has held roughly steady at 13 million, so this is not a community disappearing overnight. It is something slower and, in a way, sadder: A community that does not grow, because in every generation a portion of it quietly concludes there is no future here and leaves.
Professor Barkat gave this process a precise name. He called it unpeopling -- not the sudden violence that makes the newspapers, but the steady administrative and social pressure that makes staying unreasonable.
No government of Bangladesh invented this. Every government since 1971 has inherited it, and none has ended it. But it can only end under a government that decides to end it.
Beyond Minneapolis
Some years ago I wrote publicly, more than once, about the killing of George Floyd, as millions did who had never been to Minneapolis and had no personal stake in it.
I supported the movement that gathered under the words Black Lives Matter, and said so in letters to The New York Times. My sadness was such that I proposed, in one of them, that Washington Avenue be renamed George Floyd Avenue -- a small gesture of moral protest from very far away.
I want to be careful about why that case mattered, because the principle travels and the slogan is often misheard.
The principle behind those three words was never that only some lives matter. It was the opposite: That a life reliably ignored is the emergency -- that when a whole category of deaths dependably produces no consequence, the problem is not the individual death but the system around it.
The demand that followed was startlingly modest: Count the deaths honestly, investigate them as you would any other, and prosecute without regard to who the dead man was.
That principle has no borders and belongs to no one community. It can be applied in Bangladesh without importing a single foreign idea, because it is already written into our own constitution.
A country in which some citizens’ deaths are investigated seriously and others’ are explained away is not a country with a minority problem. It is a country with a rule-of-law problem -- and the minority is simply where that problem becomes visible first.
What should be done
The remedies are small, and each is within the government’s power.
Order a judicial investigation into the Rangpur killings, and let it go wherever the evidence goes. Find the Das family. Try these cases in open court, publish the verdicts, and accept the outcome even when it is inconvenient.
Instruct the police that a confession is where an investigation begins and not where it ends, and discipline officers who close files rather than solve them. Resume the return of vested property, which is 15 years overdue.
And let the state itself collect and publish honest national data on communal violence -- because at present the only figures available come from advocacy organizations, and a government that disputes those figures has an obvious remedy: Publish better ones.
Let me also say plainly what I am not saying, because in this country such things are heard before they are read.
I am not saying that the Muslims of Bangladesh are the enemies of the Hindus of Bangladesh. In every bad season we have had, including this one, it has been Muslim neighbours who sheltered Hindu families. I am not calling for retaliation of any kind; anyone who answers murder with murder has become the thing he feared.
And I am not inviting any foreign government to adopt this community as an instrument of its own quarrels. Minorities who become another country’s talking point end up less safe, not more. This is a Bangladeshi matter, to be settled in Bangladeshi courts.
Nor is this a Hindu matter alone. Impunity has no religion and no loyalty. The same police stations and the same courts that fail a Hindu family in Rangpur are failing Muslim families elsewhere, and the political killings that were promised to end have not ended.
Minorities are only where the failure shows itself first, because we have the least protection and the fewest voices raised on our behalf. We are the early warning. We are not the exception.
This is not, in the end, a plea for the protection of Hindus. It is a plea for the ordinary functioning of a state that means what it says.
Rajani K Saha writes from Sweden and is a practising physician.