Leading human rights activist and intellectual Shahriyar Kabir arrested in Bangladesh on false charge of murder

By Our Correspondent

Agartala, September 18, 2024

The havoc being wreaked by the goons and thugs of Jamat-e-Islami and ‘Haphajatis’ in Bangladesh post August 5 continues unabated. On last Monday night universally respected Shahriyar Kabir, a liberal humanist and pro-liberation human rights activist, was picked up from his home in Mohakhalil area in Dhaka and put behind bars. He was produced in court yesterday and sent on a fortnight long police custody as the senior police officials charged him with mass murder along with 22 others including deposed prime minister Sheikh Hasina.

Sources from across the border said that on August 20 this year-that is, fifteen days after the forced ouster of Sheikh Hasina-a notorious ‘Hephazati’ leader Mufti Harun Izhar Chowdhury had filed a case of mass murder against Kabir in a Dhaka police station. The complaint was based on an incident of police firing during a ‘Hephazati’ rally in Dhaka’s Motijhil area eleven years ago on May 5 2013. In the present fragile condition of fundamentalist terror in Bangladesh no political leader, intellectual or even media has spared a word against the conspiratorial incarceration of Shahriyar Kabir for so-called crimes with which he was not even remotely connected. Sources from Bangladesh said that serving jail term for no offence is nothing new for Shahriyar Kabir as in the year 2001 he had widely reported the persecution of Hindu minorities by BNP supporters and fundamentalist thugs in the immediate aftermath of the BNP victory in the elections. In fact Kabir had been arrested by police from a bordering area where he had gone to interview the minority families leaving Bangladesh following terror attacks, arsoning and rapes.

Meanwhile, reports from across the border said that in isolated pockets of Bangladesh where minority Hindus are vastly outnumbered by the Muslims, the Jamat-e-Islami is trying to forcibly convert them to Islam. A few such forcible conversions have taken place in Dinajpur district and Chhatak area of Sylhet. A retired professor here who still has relatives in Bangladesh said that the situation in Bangladesh is ‘terrible’ for minorities leading a sub-human existence under the present dispensation. He also confirmed consistent attempts and sustained pressure by soul-harvesters on the minority families to convert and wondered how the Hindu minorities can survive in Bangladesh in the present anarchic conditions.