Title: Hindus who fled to India tell the tales of torture
Author:  
Publication: The Daily Star
Date: Oct 22, 2001
URL: http://www.dailystarnews.com/200110/30/n1103010.htm

AFP, Kolkata

Shefali Das, a Bangladeshi Hindu, holds her son in Habra, some 45 kilometres north of Kolkata, after fleeing her homeland. Hundreds of Hindu families have crossed into India through border alleging"torture". 

Hundreds of Bangladeshi Hindu families have fled across the border into India because they say they have been "tortured" since an Islamist-allied government came to power, victims and charities said yesterday. 

"Hindu families... are trickling into India either by paying bribes or crossing along the remote unmanned border areas," said Bimal Majumdar, general secretary of a West Bengal-based non-governmental organisation (NGO). 

"These people are ending up in camps or going to their distant relatives. We are making arrangement for the treatment of the tortured women," Majumdar said. 

"Some are even going to Andaman-Nicobar Islands (in the Bay of Bengal) to begin a new life," he said. 

Hindus and other religious minorities in predominantly Muslim Bangladesh have alleged violence and harassment since the October 1 general election which brought the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and its allies to power. 

They said they were being targeted because they were thought to have been supporters of the defeated Awami League. 

Sikha Rani Das, 32, told AFP she and her teenage daughter were attacked in their village of Burhanuddin, 136 kilometres south of Dhaka, on the night of October 8 by a drunken gang. 

"It is a shame that I could not save my daughter from their hands," she said. 

"They attacked my husband, a shop-owner, three days after the national election and dragged him out of the house. He never returned... We lay on the marshy paddy fields for three days, writhing in pain without food and a drop of water and then walked 10 days to reach the border," she added. 

Shefali Das, from the nearby Radhmanasapur village, told a similar story. 

"After my husband was chased away by some youths on October 4, I rushed to a neighbouring Muslim family for shelter. I was molested by the male members of the family. At dawn, I left for the border with my five-year-old son, hoping for a new life," she said. 

Tarak Chandra Majumdar, a teacher at a primary school at Piyari Mohon village in Bangladesh's Bhola district, said he fled leaving his wife behind. 

"The fundamentalists were first targeting male members of the Hindu families and forcing them to leave the villages. Then they started molesting the women at random. Even a girl of eight or nine years was not spared." 

Majumdar, who was an assistant presiding officer at a polling station during the election in Bangladesh, claimed BNP supporters were behind the attacks on Hindu families. 

"Before the elections, they had threatened that Hindus would have to leave the country, if they came to power. 

"It is a game to grab the properties of the Hindus by creating a reign of terror with the help of administration," he added. 

Bidhu Bhusan Das, a resident of Kalir Bazar, a Hindu-dominated village in the Bhola district, said: "When the election was over, the BNP activists looted my belongings. They beat me up and threw me in a canal. I hid below a culvert and headed for the border at the first opportunity." 

But Bangladeshi Home Secretary Saadat Husain said he had no knowledge of the incidents, although he said there had been some violence, looting and intimidation immediately after the election. 

"But since then things have changed and there had been no reports of major violence or intimidation. They have been contained and nothing is happening now." 

Husain said the government had taken adequate security measures for the safety and security of the minority communities. 

The deputy commissioner of the Bhola area, Kabir Mohammd Ashraf Alam, said the allegations were exaggerated and said he had received no reports of Hindus fleeing to India. 

"We have been having regular interactions with the Hindu and other community leaders in the districts and none of them made any such complaint."