Media Ban!!On the night of May 31, Agrojyoti Bhante was brutally attacked by two machete-wielding men at a monastery in Khagrachari, 270km (168 miles) south of capital Dhaka in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT).
The attackers, later identified as two Bengali construction workers who worked at the monastery, also looted about 60,000 takas ($700) from the monastery and left the 47-year-old Buddhist monk, belonging to one of Bangladesh’s Indigenous communities, for dead.
While no accurate data on the number of Indigenous people in Bangladesh is available, a census conducted by the government in 2011 found they are about 1.6 million.
try, the majority of them living in the northern and southeastern plains. The rest, about 20 percent, are in CHT – most of them Buddhists. In the plains, most are Christians.
Three attacks in a week
Indigenous groups and activists say the communities suffer from gross human rights violations and disparities.
On May 30, a day before the Khagrachari incident, a case of arson against the Indigenous Khasi people was reported at Baralekha in Moulvibazar district, 278km (170 miles) from CHT.
Unknown miscreants had cut down thousands of betel leaf trees at an Indigenous farm that served as the primary source of income for at least 48 families in the area, who, according to sources, incurred a loss of at least $8,000.
According to local media reports at the time, unidentified settlers were busy illegally occupying three other Indigenous betel leaf farms in a different area of the town, triggering anger among the Khasi community.
On June 6, The Daily Star newspaper reported that in Dinajpur, some 350km (217 miles) from Moulvibazar on the other end of the country, a lawsuit was filed against 22 Indigenous Santal community members.
Plaintiff Mahbubur Rahman, a local Bengali, claimed the men, led by Rabindranath Soren, the president of a local Indigenous rights organisation, allegedly pillaged his crop worth $530.
Santal community leaders protested against the lawsuit, calling it a false allegation to harass the Indigenous people who were engaged in a land dispute with Rahman.
gal occupiers in Moulvibazar, and promises were made by the local law enforcement authority to look into the land dispute in Dinajpur.
But three separate incidents of attacks on Indigenous people in a span of a week sparked an atmosphere of fear among the marginalised communities.
Land grab by Bengali settlers
Locals believe the attacks were carried out as part of a larger ploy to grab the lands belonging to the Indigenous people – an issue far too common in a country facing a decades-old rift between the Indigenous communities and the Bengali settlers.
The strife between the settlers and the Indigenous communities has a long and complex history that goes back to 1980, when landless Bengali families first began migrating to CHT en masse.
In the years that followed, Bengali settlers outnumbered the Indigenous population in the southern region.
A 2002 paper by Zobaida Nasreen and Masahiko Togawa, titled Politics of Development: “Pahari-Bengali” Discourse in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, shows that in 1959, the Indigenous population in CHT was 91 percent, with the rest being settlers.
In the next 30 years, by 1991, the settler population had risen to 48 percent in the region, displacing much of the Indigenous people, causing them to drop to 51 percent.
Citing a 2016 book by Devasish Roy, circle chief of the Chakmas, the largest Indigenous group in the country, The Daily Star reported that approximately 200,000 to 450,000 Bengali people were rehabilitated in the region between 1979 and 1985.
More than 100,000 Indigenous people migrated to neighbouring India during this time, though many of them returned in the 1990s.
ries – in the hills as well as the plains – to accommodate a booming Bengali population.
The settlements sparked land disputes and violent clashes between the settlers and the local communities that continue to this day.
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