Given recent statements in the media about Bangladesh and “regime change”, one is likely to walk away with a hysterically-skewed picture of what actually occurred in the July 2024 uprising there.What the BJP government desperately wants India to believe is well expressed by Anand Ranganathan’s interview last week to The Times of India. There he has called the uprising in Bangladesh a “genocide against Hindus” by “jihadis who brought on this violent revolution”. Accordingly, the theory goes, India’s Gen-Z protest – as suggested by the ‘incorrigibles’, Prashant Bhushan and Neha Bora – must be seeking to effect on home territory what happened in Bangladesh: a conspiratorial and bloody coup. This idea is wildly inaccurate on all its terms, and it is openly propagated by those in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) ecosystem. But their INDIA bloc opponents too have insisted in one way or another that “India is not Bangladesh” and that the neighbour’s uprising was an essentially violent episode not to be replicated here. It is important to show why this position is wrong. Was there rampant and ugly violence in Bangladesh? The answer is yes. In February 2025, the United Nations’ Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) published the most comprehensive documentary record currently available on the incident, a fact-finding report on human rights abuses from July 15-August 5. They concluded that at least 1,400 individuals – probably many more – were killed in shootings and mob-violence of various types in and around that time. Many of these killings have been recorded and reconstructed by the OHCHR team in considerable detail. But are the protesters of Bangladesh responsible for these violent deaths? No. According to the UN report, 78% of the violence can be traced to Sheikh Hasina’s government and the security forces of Bangladesh. The OHCHR report shows that the majority of deaths occurred by the use of SKS, Type 56, and BD-08 rifles, and pellet shotguns. The Gen-Z protesters of Bangladesh did not oust Sheikh Hasina by using military grade weapons (in some instances, female hostel students reportedly fought Awami League goons back with kitchen pots and pans). However, these are exactly the weapons Hasina’s government is known to use and manufacture, and therefore they clearly used these weapons to suppress unarmed protesters and kill them. To cite the report, Hasina’s government“mobilized a continuously expanding circle of armed actors, using increasingly violent means to suppress the protest movement through systematic serious human rights violations and abuses, including hundreds of extrajudicial killings, thousands more seriously injured by unlawful force, and infliction of extensive arbitrary arrest and detention, torture and other forms of ill-treatment.”The expressed contempt against violence and regime change in India is quite hypocritical then. Slaughtering 1400 people is surely a heinous and violent act, and yet we have given sanctuary to the perpetrator and exhausted untold energy in painting the victims with broad brushes, calling them jihadis, and fabricating narratives that suit our domestic interests. Importantly, two subsequent reports on India-Bangladesh relations, published by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs, have given a justification for providing sanctuary to Hasina. Apparently her stay in New Delhi is indicative of the Indian state’s “civilisational ethos and humanitarian tradition of offering refuge to individuals facing circumstances of grave distress or existential threats”. Hard to believe. Certainly not after a year of post-Pahalgam cracking down on migrant-labourers with “verification drives”, and throwing them across the border into Bangladesh, on the usually inaccurate suspicion of being infiltrators. In fact, even as Sheikh Hasina was entering India, at least several hundred Hindu Bangladeshis attempted to cross the border and were turned back by the Border Security Force (BSF). So there is refuge and civilisational ethos for Sheikh Hasina, culpable for 78% of the violence that seemingly abhors us. But if you’re a working class migrant, a labourer, Bangladeshi or even Indian, you get what you deserve: Suvendhu Adhikari’s “detect, delete, and deport policy”, if not the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR).Nobody can deny that anti-Hindu violence occurred in Bangladesh, and that there are conservative Islamic forces seeking to gain ground there. Certainly the violence is not to be scoffed at. The Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council (BHBCUC) reported 2,010 communal violence incidents in the weeks following Hasina’s departure. According to their data, 69 of these were attacks on places of worship and the sheer majority, 1868, were incidents of arson on the houses and businesses of minority groups. The data also reports 9 killings and 4 incidents of sexual violence against women – these are underestimates too. Such cases and the eventual lynching of Dipu Chandra Das in particular have been described as signs of Bangladesh’s democracy, supposedly represented by Hasina’s Awami League, now rapidly declining. But are 15 years of rigged elections, enforced disappearances and assassinations, signs of a healthy secular democracy? Certainly not. Notably, Bangladeshi media has also carried condemnatory statements by coordinators of Students Against Discrimination, Left organisations, and even Mohammed Yunus’ interim government. Moreover, there are instances of Muslims actively safeguarding Hindu businesses and temples. Not that any of this implies much about Bangladesh’s secularism, it was in any case not reported in India’s media. It’s important to note that the president of the BHBCUC, Manindra Kumar Nath, is on record with Al Jazeera, after much of the communal violence had transpired, saying that Hindus in Bangladesh fully supported the Uprising: “They [Hindus] united to protest the unfulfilled promises and demands that Hasina has ignored for far too long.” All this besides, if the Indian media is outraged by 2,010 incidents of violence at the hands of the Bangladeshi public, of which 9 seem to have led to deaths, what about the Hasina government’s confirmed 1,400 killings, 11-13% of whom are children, and 20,000 injuries, the numerous cases of torture and sexual violence? Why is that not ‘anarchy’?In fact, the smaller portion of the violence was clearly a response to the original aggressors. All our revulsion is reserved for the response. 78% of the violence, committed unprovoked, does not draw a decimal of our supposed outrage. Right-wing forces in India are not without their own share of blame for the anti-Hindu violence in Bangladesh – for spreading wide-spread panic and disinformation on social media. The problem was expressed well by a Hindu pharmacist in an interview to Al Jazeera after narrowly escaping a mob. He said, “Indian media spreads disinformation and exaggerates incidents, some of which never even happened. This fuels anti-India sentiment, which, in turn, contributes to a feeling of insecurity among us, the Hindus.” As we have seen in our own movement against SIR, the RSS is fairly secular when it comes to its own ideological agenda, and is not above beating Hindus for safeguarding their power. This rippled into Bangladesh, where India’s Hindutva forces actively endangered Bangladeshi Hindus by spreading misinformation and stoking communal feelings for their own domestic interests. So much for the power elite in India, and their false sense of dedication to non-violence. The evidence is overwhelming but Indian personalities in the media are still unable to see that just like the population of India, the young in Bangladesh fought peacefully for a just cause and they faced violent repression for it. And yet we are incessantly told that India is not Bangladesh. “Give me one solid reason – what do we have in common with what happened in Bangladesh!” anchor Padmaja Joshi has all but blurted out in a recent NDTV segment. How about the economic fallout of more than a decade of despotic rule by the respective prime minister and ex-prime minister? Nearly 40% of India’s graduates are unemployed, and 36% of Bangladeshi graduates are unemployed. Both Sheikh Hasina and Narendra Modi set about interfering with their countries’ public institutions – banks, election commissions, the security forces, universities, the judiciary, media, all of these were suppressed and their autonomy destroyed. Both prime ministers have effected a transfer of wealth from the population to a small group of uber rich individuals – this may be seen, amongst other measures, by the astronomical wealth both countries have lost in unrecovered loans to rich businessmen, while the poor continue to be strangled by debt. In Bangladesh, this number is suspected to be at least between 17-30 billion USD, probably higher. In the Indian context, the number is known. Modi’s tenure has seen at least Rs 16 lakh crore vanished into thin air. In other words, what is common to the populations in India and Bangladesh is not a dedication to violence (that is what unites their rulers). What is common to the young in India and Bangladesh are deep social and economic wounds, and a renewed understanding that if governments insult them and call them cockroach or razakar, urban-naxal or dimagi-naxal, throw them in jail, beat them, or even kill them, they now know that they may suffer and struggle together, but they cannot be destroyed. That is a powerful realisation. And if politicians cheat, and do not play by the rules of electoral democracy, if they do not concede to such power electorally, then the young have understood once more what their Leftist peers have known very well: they too can refuse to play the game of mindless subservience. Call them anything, they have understood that they don’t need to take it anymore.Sidharth Singh is a writer based in New Delhi.