A bloody hostage situation involving gunmen played out in Dhaka’s diplomatic area. A Hindu brutally hacked to death, the 5th murder in just a month.
ISIS claiming responsibility for the killings. Not in Syria or Iraq. But next door in Bangladesh. Members of religious minorities, secular bloggers, academics, foreigners and gay-rights activist dozens of them have been killed in Bangladesh since 2013.
So who and what’s really behind this?
ISIS and some groups claiming links to Al-Qaeda have taken responsibility, but the government blames opposition parties and local extremist groups.
Some government officials have blamed Israel; some have even blamed the victims’ secular views!
Is, as some allege, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina “in denial”?
Is she playing politics instead of actually tracking down the killers and the masterminds behind them?
When her government did take action, it detained 11,000 suspects.
How does that help?
The spate of killings is apparently a response to the Shahbag protests of 2013 that were held against religious politics and demanded the death penalty for war crimes during Bangladesh’s 1971 war for independence.
This angered Islamist extremists because four of the five executed were Jamaat-e-Islami leaders, the country’s largest Islamist political party.
But the fight is bigger now – should Bangladesh remain secular, as enshrined in its constitution, or become an Islamic state like the erstwhile-West Pakistan, which it fought to break away from?
For a country whose national anthem was written by a Hindu Tagore, and whose capital Dhaka takes its name from the city’s Dhakeshwari Devi temple, which has been a great example of syncretic South Asian Islam, this bloody radical turn does not bode well.
Camera: Sanjoy Deb
Video Editor: Sunil Goswami
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