After the fall of the government of Sheikh Hasina in August, Bangladeshis have hailed a “second liberation”, now under an interim government led by Nobel laureate professor Muhammad Yunus. However, this revolutionary moment has provoked fear and insecurity among non-Muslim and non-Bengali minorities, who constitute 8% of the country’s 180 million citizens.
This most recently come to the world’s notice when Donald Trump tweeted about attacks on Hindus in Bangladesh. Although his statement was exaggerated, some minorities in Bangladesh have faced threats and violence for no other reason than their identity. These include Bangladesh’s indigenous or “jumma” people, who live in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, a densely-wooded, hilly area on the border of India and Myanmar.
For hundreds of years, the Chittagong Hill Tracts has maintained a distinct identity from plainland Bengal, retaining a degree of autonomy under the Mughal and British empires. But with the Partition of India in 1947, it was attached to East Pakistan, which became Bangladesh in 1971. Since then, the jumma people have increasingly struggled to retain their property, rights and dignity.
Many Bangladeshis might consider the fall of Sheikh Hasina to be a new start. Yunus has hailed this as a second Liberation after the war that led to the country’s freedom from Pakistan and set up a committee to redraft the constitution of Bangladesh, so that the excesses of Sheikh Hasina’s regime might never be repeated.
But the people of the Chittagong Hill Tracts have bitter experiences with liberations and constitutions, and have never been adequately represented in the state of Bangladesh.
After the liberation of Bangladesh in 1971, MN Larma, a prominent leader of indigenous people in the Chittagong Hill Tracts at that time, became a member of parliament, and advocated that the people of this region had religious, cultural, and linguistic differences that deserved recognition from the state.
In response, then prime minister Sheikh Mujibur Rahman threatened him, denied the existence of indigenous people, and encouraged indigenous people to forget their ethnicity and become Bengali. The constitution of Bangladesh, and its implementation, reflected those prejudices.
History is now repeating itself. A constitutional redrafting committee formed by the Yunus-led government does contain any ethnic or religious minorities.
Even more worryingly, the interim government is unable or unwilling to provide indigenous people with even basic protection of the kind which other citizens expect. This is especially disappointing given that the government is led by a Nobel Peace Prize winner and contains several well-respected civil society activists. The marginalisation of indigenous people is clearly so deep that they have become invisible.
On September 19 and 20, Bengali settlers reportedly attacked indigenous people in Khagrachari district, which is part of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, accusing them of killing a Bengali man.
Mobs began to attack indigenous people soon afterwards, killing four youths, and severely injuring more than 20 others. Villages were attacked and burnt; their inhabitants fled into the jungle.
But it has not ended there. Indigenous people in the cities of Chittagong and Dhaka have reported a spike in verbal and physical abuse following the September attacks. Hate speech on social media against indigenous people has proliferated. Often, indigenous people are accused of being “anti-Bengali”, “anti-nationalist” or “separatists”, when in fact they are only asking for the right to live with their own identity in dignity as equal citizens of the country.
The government seems reluctant to do anything. Yunus told the Voice of America not to expect the interim government to resolve longstanding tensions in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. He described the region as an inherited problem that only an elected government could address.
But the interim government stakes its legitimacy on a mandate to reform what is rotten in the state. The implicit bargain Yunus is making is that he will right systemic wrongs which aided tyranny; and after that, the Bangladeshi people will elect a democratic government.
But what about the Chittagong Hill Tracts?
For 53 years, the military has exerted tight control over the region; Bangladeshis – whether Bengali or Jumma – are unable to move freely without harassment at checkpoints and army camps; foreigners are unable to enter the territory, doubtless for fear of what they will discover; Bengali Muslim settlers have received official state sanction and unofficial military support at the expense of indigenous peoples’ right to property and livelihood.
And of course there has been the inevitable reaction: a low-level indigenous militancy which the Bangladesh army has seized on as a pretext for the stifling securitisation of the region and its people.
Is this not rotten too? Is this not worthy of reform?
The indications so far have not been good. Hasina may have gone but the Bangladesh Army is still there, more powerful than ever. It has stepped back, allowing an interim government drawn from civil society to implement reforms by popular consent.
That interim government has a well-publicised human rights agenda. United Nations Human Rights Commissioner Volker Turk came to Dhaka to show his support after the interim government signed the International Convention on Enforced Disappearances.
But if the government’s commitment to human rights and the freedom of Bangladeshis means anything at all, it must apply to indigenous people too.
Arjyashree Chakma is an undergraduate in Sweet Briar College in Virginia in the US.
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