New Delhi:

A United Nations report into the violence that roiled Bangladesh in mid-2024 – student protests over job quotas forced Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to quit and flee Dhaka (to India) – has said Hindus were among members of minority communities “subject to violent attacks by mobs”.

Hindus make up an estimated eight per cent of Bangladesh’s 17 crore-population.

These attacks, the report by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said, included burning of homes and some attacks on places of worship.

The attacks, the report said, came as Ms Hasina’s government “lost control” and mobs in Dhaka and other parts, including Chittagong, “engaged in retaliatory killings and other serious revenge violence targeting”. The UN agency said officials from Ms Hasina’s Awami League and its supporters (real or perceived), as well as police, were among those with targets on their backs.

Hindus have “often been stereotypically associated with this political faction”, the report said.

The report also said the authorities were in “disarray” and “unable to provide an effective response to protect the human rights of these victims against abuses by non-state actors”.

The OHCHR had been invited by the current Bangladeshi administration – an interim government led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Md Yunus – to conduct an independent and impartial fact-finding mission into the violence that raged between July 1 and August 15, 2024.

In December last year the Yunus administration acknowledged 88 cases of communal violence, mostly against Hindus, and said 70 people had been arrested in connection with those attacks.

This was after India, through Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri, made strong remarks about ensuring the safety of minorities, including Hindus. The Bangladesh government had, till then, insisted that a few incidents aside, the attacks on Hindus were not linked to their faith.

Attacks on Hindu community members, including priests, and temples in Bangladesh made headlines last year. And the arrest of a Hindu priest – former International Society for Krishna Consciousness, or ISKCON, leader, Chinmoy Krishna Das, who was last month denied bail, triggered more protests.

READ | Court Denies Bail To Jailed Hindu Monk Chinmoy Krishna Das

According to the UN report, many of the attacks were from rural and historically tense areas like Thakurgaon, Lalmonirhat, and Dinajpur, as well as others like Sylhet, Khulna, and Rangpur.

Investigators said they spoke to Hindu homeowners in these areas and were told of “property destruction, arson, and physical threats”.

Bangladesh’s early reactions to this (and the arrest of other Hindu priests and individuals) had been to call the entire matter an “internal affair” and dismiss India’s concerns as “unfounded”.

Meanwhile, in a disturbing conclusion, the agency said there are “reasonable grounds to believe the former government and its security and intelligence apparatus, with violent elements associated with the Awami League, systematically engaged in serious human rights violations”.

READ | “1,400 Killed In 45 Days”: UN On Sheikh Hasina Government

These violations included extrajudicial killings, extensive arbitrary arrest and detention, and torture and other forms of ill-treatment, and there are “reasonable grounds to believe these violations were carried out with the knowledge, coordination, and direction of political leadership and senior security officials, in pursuance of a strategy to suppress dissent…”

With input from agencies

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Bangladesh’s former government was behind systematic attacks and killings of protesters as it tried to hold onto power last year, the UN said on Wednesday, warning that the abuses could amount to “crimes against humanity”.

Before Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was toppled in a student-led revolution last August, her government cracked down on protesters and others, including by “hundreds of extrajudicial killings”, the United Nations said.

The UN rights office (OHCHR) said it had “reasonable grounds to believe that the crimes against humanity of murder, torture, imprisonment and infliction of other inhumane acts have taken place”.

These alleged crimes committed by the government, along with violent elements of Hasina’s Awami League party and the Bangladeshi security and intelligence services, were part of “a widespread and systematic attack against protesters and other civilians”, OHCHR’s report into the violence said.

Hasina, 77, who fled into exile in neighbouring India, has already defied an arrest warrant to face trial in Bangladesh for crimes against humanity.

Asked about Hasina’s personal culpability, UN rights chief Volker Turk told reporters that his office “found reasonable grounds to believe that indeed the top echelons of the previous government were aware, and in fact were involved in… very serious violations”.

Up to 1,400 killed 

Bangladesh’s interim leader Mohammed Yunus, who had asked the UN rights office to launch its fact-finding mission, welcomed the report, insisting that he wanted to transform Bangladesh “into a country in which all its people can live in security and dignity”.

The UN investigation examined events in Bangladesh between July 1 and August 15 last year, relying on hundreds of interviews with victims, witnesses and others, and on photos, videos and other documents.

The team determined that security forces had supported Hasina’s government throughout the unrest, which began as protests against civil service job quotas and then escalated into wider calls for her to stand down.

OHCHR estimated that “as many as 1,400 people may have been killed” over the 45-day period, the vast majority of them “shot by Bangladesh’s security forces”.

Children made up 12 to 13 percent of those killed, it said.

The overall death toll given is far higher than the most recent estimate by Bangladesh’s interim government of 834 people killed.

‘Rampant state violence’ 

“The brutal response was a calculated and well-coordinated strategy by the former government to hold onto power in the face of mass opposition,” Turk said.

He pointed to findings of “hundreds of extrajudicial killings, extensive arbitrary arrest and detention and torture and ill treatment”, decrying “a disturbing picture of rampant state violence and targeted killings”.

The rights office also found indications of widespread gender-based violence and the abuse and killing of children.

On the other side, the report highlighted “lynchings and other serious retaliatory violence” against police and Awami league officials or supporters. 

Bangladeshi rights group Odhikar said that a dozen people had died in detention since Hasina’s ousting.

Asked about these cases, Turk said his office had only examined the situation up to mid-August. 

He hailed the interim government’s cooperation and expressed commitment to reforms, but warned of “major challenges and deficiencies in the current legal system”.

Rory Mungoven, head of OHCHR’s Asia-Pacific section, said the office was prepared to cooperate with Bangladesh’s judiciary to help ensure justice, but only if the process meets international fair trial standards.

The fact that Bangladesh allows capital punishment also posed a problem, he said.  

Turk said that the country needed “a comprehensive process of truth-telling, healing and accountability, and to redress the legacy of serious human rights violations and ensure they can never happen again”.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)