Land, Faith And Fear: How Jamaat’s Pakistan-Backed Networks Are Systematically Dispossessing Minorities – OpEd

The story of Jamaat-e-Islami in Bangladesh cannot be separated from Pakistan’s long shadow over the region’s Islamist politics. During the 1971 Liberation War, the Jamaat actively collaborated with the Pakistan Army against Bengali nationalists, embedding a political culture that treats secularism and minorities as enemies of an imagined “Islamic” state. Today, analysts warn that Jamaat’s ideological and organisational links to Pakistan, and to Pakistan-based jihadist networks, open Bangladesh’s eastern flank to the same pattern of radicalisation and minority persecution that has devastated Pakistan’s own social fabric.

This is not an abstract concern: Pakistan’s own trajectory, from the exclusion of Hindus and Sikhs to the constitutional relegation of Ahmadis, is being consciously replicated by Pakistan-linked movements operating in Bangladesh, including Jamaat and allied outfits. The result is a climate where land, faith and fear are weaponised to systematically push minorities out of shared spaces.

Property Destruction as Coercion

Across Bangladesh, waves of violence have repeatedly targeted Hindu homes, shops and businesses, often in the wake of political unrest or manufactured “blasphemy” controversies. Amnesty International documented how participants in Jamaat-organised rallies and strikes vandalised more than forty Hindu temples and burned scores of Hindu homes in 2013, leaving hundreds homeless. Similar patterns were visible during election-related violence, when Hindu shops were ransacked and entire bazaars ruined, forcing families to flee ancestral localities where they had lived for generations.

In many villages, the twisted tin roofs and charred walls of Hindu properties stand as physical reminders that the state has failed to deter attackers closely linked to Jamaat’s cadres and student wing. Such organised vandalism is not random mob fury; it is a calibrated message that minorities will pay a price whenever Jamaat and its Islamist allies seek to pressure the government or reshape the political order.

Land Dispossession by Design

Behind the spectacle of arson lies a colder calculus: to drive minorities off valuable land so it can be seized with impunity. Rights groups have recorded how acres of land belonging to Hindus have been forcibly occupied by Islamist elements, including cadres associated with Jamaat and other radical outfits, often after orchestrated campaigns of intimidation. Attacking temples and homes during festivals or political upheavals is a way of “scaring them away from their land”, as one Bangladeshi activist put it.

This dispossession is cumulative. Over the decades, thousands of Hindu businesses have been plundered and hundreds of Hindu landholders killed or forced to migrate, especially towards India’s border states. Such demographic engineering mirrors Pakistan’s own record, where everyday discrimination and threats of violence have driven many Hindus to leave for India, reinforcing a communal logic of “Muslim-only” spaces.

Temple Vandalism as Psychological Warfare

The heart of this campaign is an assault on faith itself. Islamist mobs, frequently mobilised through social media rumours about alleged Quran desecration or “insult to Islam”, have attacked Buddhist monasteries, Hindu temples and ISKCON centres with chilling regularity. In 2013, Jamaat and its student wing supporters were implicated in attacks that destroyed or damaged dozens of temples and shrines across Bangladesh, reducing places of worship to ashes.

Later episodes, such as the Nasirnagar violence of 2016 — in which a Facebook post linked to a Hindu individual was used to trigger attacks on temples and houses in Nasirnagar Upazila of Brahmanbaria district — followed the same script: a mob descended on temples and houses, and law enforcement arrived late and often half-heartedly. 

Each desecrated murti and burnt sanctum is meant to signal that minority faiths are tolerated only at the pleasure of Islamist street power, a logic that echoes Pakistan’s own blasphemy-fuelled vigilantism against Christians, Hindus and Ahmadis.

Social Exclusion and the Climate of Fear

Communal violence such as the 2012 Ramu attacks — in which thousands of people attacked Buddhist monasteries and homes in Cox’s Bazar, with Hindu temples in nearby areas also struck — did not end with the last stone thrown; they reshaped everyday life for minorities. 

Field studies of the Ramu violence show how minority families relocated from mixed localities due to security fears, saw their representation in local leadership decline, and experienced a hardening of social boundaries that isolated them from Muslim neighbours. Similar research on social media triggered attacks notes that religious extremism, impunity and weak legal safeguards embolden attackers and normalise treating minorities as expendable.

Under this pressure, many Hindu, Buddhist and Christian families have chosen a quiet exit over futile complaints, joining a steady outflow of minorities from Bangladesh that has been flagged by advocacy groups. Bangladesh’s Hindu population stood at roughly 28 per cent before the 1947 Partition, declined to about 22 per cent by the first post-Partition census in 1951, and now stands at around 8 per cent. Security analysts argue that Pakistan-backed Jamaat networks thrive in an environment of fear, using moral policing, vigilante violence and systematic intimidation — including diktats on how women dress and what religious symbols can be displayed — to push society towards a more rigidly Islamist order hostile to pluralism.

For India, this is not merely a human-rights concern but a strategic one. The documented hostility of Jamaat to secular norms and minorities, combined with its longstanding ideological links to Pakistan, raises serious concerns that Bangladesh could become a more permissive environment for extremist networks. 

Pakistan’s historical ideological and organisational engagement with Jamaat and kindred groups reflects an effort to replicate aspects of its own Islamisation model, one whose first casualties have consistently been minorities, especially Hindus. A state that has failed to protect its own minorities has no moral standing to sponsor Islamist politics next door.