Election Season, Open Season: Communal Attacks and the Political Calendar in Bangladesh

On 1 October 2001, Bangladesh held its eighth parliamentary election. The BNP-Jamaat coalition won a two-thirds majority. Within days, violence targeting Hindu-majority areas had broken out across south-western Bangladesh, in districts including Bagerhat, Barisal, Bhola, Brahmanbaria, Chittagong, Feni and more than a dozen others.

The attacks were systematic, aimed at destroying the economic resources of the Hindu community, terrorizing residents into fleeing to India, and seizing their properties. The timing was not random. It followed a pattern that Bangladesh’s political history has since confirmed multiple times.

A government-appointed commission investigated those attacks over nine years, producing a 1,078-page report delivered to Home Minister Shahara Khatun in April 2011. The report found evidence of targeted violence against the Hindu community by around 25,000 people, including 25 ministers and members of parliament from the BNP-Jamaat alliance government.

It attributed the violence to differences in political philosophy, efforts to establish a communal ideology, and weaknesses in the caretaker administration of the time, describing the persecution as an attempt to reintroduce Bangladesh to the world as a communal country. The commission acknowledged that most of the violence could not be fully investigated within the scope of a single inquiry — language that documented, without fully confronting, the impunity that had accumulated around perpetrators. The BNP rejected the report’s findings as partisan.

The 2001 case is the most extensively documented, but the political-violence calendar runs in both directions from it. On 28 February 2013, the International Crimes Tribunal sentenced Jamaat leader Delwar Hossain Sayeedi to death for war crimes committed in 1971. Jamaat enforced a 48-hour hartal immediately. Activists of Jamaat and its student wing, the Islami Chhatra Shibir, attacked Hindu communities across the country: houses burned, temples desecrated, property looted. Amnesty International documented attacks in Noakhali and Comilla, and reported that survivors identified attackers as participants in Jamaat-organized actions.

In January 2014, ahead of the tenth general election from which the BNP and Jamaat had withdrawn, the violence resumed. Around 250 to 300 workers of Jamaat and BNP attacked Malopara village in Jessore, vandalising about 130 houses and burning around 10. Activists armed with sticks and sharp weapons drove residents towards the Bhairab River, which hundreds crossed to escape. Seven Jamaat and BNP members were arrested. The attacks began after the polling had concluded.

Rights organizations tracking communal violence in Bangladesh have identified a consistent pattern: attacks on Hindus occur during elections, political transitions, and moments of religious controversy, using broadly similar methods — arson, sexual violence, temple desecration, economic destruction — and resulting in consistently low prosecution rates. Several analyzes of this pattern have concluded that the violence functions as structural rather than sporadic, sustained by an environment in which the legal system provides minimal deterrence.

The prosecution record makes that absence of deterrence concrete. The 1,078-page commission report on 2001 identified large-scale involvement by named political leaders, yet no senior figure from the period was convicted specifically for inciting communal violence against Hindus. The 2013 attackers were in some cases prosecuted under general criminal law, but the communal dimension of organized targeting received comparatively little distinct legal attention. The 2014 Malopara case produced seven arrests in one village.

Impunity’s persistence is itself a documented data point. Human Rights Watch, in its April 2014 report on the violence surrounding the January 2014 polls, documented numerous serious violent acts by opposition supporters and noted reciprocal abuses by Bangladeshi security forces. The report identified Jamaat’s student wing, the Islami Chhatra Shibir, as having been implicated in significant violence over many years, including the attack on Malopara itself.

What the election calendar shows, mapped against the attack record from 2001 through 2014, is a recurring structure: political transition produces communal violence; communal violence goes largely unpunished; the absence of punishment makes the next cycle of violence cheaper to execute. Each wave reinforces the conditions for the next.