Just a month after the student protests in Bangladesh forced former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina out of power and the creation of an interim government under Muhammad Yunus, a new controversy emerged after a young Bangladeshi Hindu boy was claimed to have been beaten to death by an angry Islamist mob after he allegedly posted derogatory statements against an important religious figure.
The Bangladeshi interim government, led by entrepreneur and Nobel Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus, overturned a ban on a controversial Islamist political party imposed by former Prime Minister Sheik Hasina, who was ousted last August following massive nationwide protests against her authoritarian rule.
Around 2,500 people were arrested in Bangladesh on June 4th after an allegedly blasphemous Facebook post defaming the Prophet Muhammad sparked street violence in the Muslim-majority, South Asian nation.
Most of those arrested for participating in the violence in the country’s capital Dhaka were unidentified. Bangladeshi authorities also arrested a man named Mohammad Sohel for making the reportedly blasphemous social media post.
A young Hindu man from Bangladesh was arrested and convicted for allegedly insulting Islam and the Prophet Muhammad through a social media post around six years ago.
On May 23rd, a court in the city of Rangpur in northwestern Bangladesh convicted a man named Titu Roy for making derogatory, anti-Islam remarks on Facebook, sentencing him to ten years in prison.
On March 22, a high school teacher in Bangladesh was arrested by authorities for allegedly hurting religious sentiment. Hriday Chandra Mondal, a teacher at the Binodpur Ram Kumar High School in Munshiganj district, was arrested for telling students that "religion is a matter of faith."
Mondal followed up on his statement by comparing religion to science. "Science looks at the evidence," he said.
On March 30, a Bangladesh court sentenced four men to death for the brutal killing of a secular blogger in 2015. Judge Nurul Amin Biplob of the Sylhet Anti-Terrorism Tribunal gave the death penalty to four out of the five suspects in the murder of Ananta Bijoy Das.
Recently, several Bangladeshi atheists and secularist bloggers lost access to their Facebook accounts as they found that Facebook was mourning their apparent deaths. Alarmed and shocked, the bloggers soon realized that this was the outcome of a planned attack on many popular online activists/bloggers within the Bangladeshi blogosphere. Facebook is still one of the most popular social media platforms for a wide demographic of Bangladeshis.
On December 20, 2021, the US Department of State’s Diplomatic Security Service, with its Rewards for Justice office, has offered a $5 million reward for information on the terrorist attack and murder of Avijit Roy, an Atheist blogger and naturalized American citizen, which took place nearly seven years ago in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Murad Hassan, the State Minister for Information of Bangladesh, said that he would speak to Parliament to begin plans to revert to the 1972 constitution. Hassan's remarks were made during the 57th birthday celebration of Sheikh Russell, the youngest son of Bangladesh's founder Sheikh Mujib.
