On the afternoon of 4 August 2024, Ripon Chandra Sheel, a 27-year-old barber from Habiganj, joined the crowds marching against Sheikh Hasina. As the procession passed the house of the then Awami League MP, Abu Zahir, gunfire came from the house (archive). Ripon was shot dead. His brother Shipon, hit in the leg beside him, told Netra News (archive): “He fought for our country and sacrificed his life.” His sister says he had been with Chhatra Dal, the student wing of the BNP, for years.

Ripon’s name now appears on two lists. The first is the government’s register of martyrs of the July uprising (archive). The second is a report by the Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council (BHBCUC) on “communal atrocities committed upon the religious-ethnic minorities” published on September 19th, 2024. There his entry is Sylhet-057, one of nine killings the council presents as part of a wave of anti-minority violence after Hasina’s fall. The entry reads, “A young man named Ripan Sheel was shot and killed in Habiganj city on August 4, 2024.” It does not say who shot him, or why.

Ripon’s case is not a slip. The Dacca examined every one of the report’s 1,770 entries. We compared each entry with every other, grouped them by upazila, and checked them against about 1,400 Bengali and English news reports. The findings:

  • The headline number is not a count of incidents. BHBCUC’s “2,010 incidents” adds up categories of damaged property. Its own tables hold 1,770 entries.
  • Entries were copied and re-entered. A block of 14 Satkhira entries appears twice, 20 rows apart, with union names changed and two damage figures swapped in the copy.
  • The politics were removed. At least 28 victims were Awami League office-holders or “elected” officials, among them a sitting MP, a party district president, a party district general secretary and a mayor. The report records none of these roles.
  • Deaths and damage that had nothing to do with religion are counted as communal. Among them: an electrical fire, a debt case, a heart attack, a police officer killed by a crowd, and Ripon.
  • The count for the same days grew fifteenfold. On 6 August the council gave the press a list of about 110 incidents for 5–6 August. The final report puts 1,690 entries on 4–6 August.

None of this was corrected. The number travelled instead: into Indian news-agency copy within days, into a US congressman’s letter to the Secretary of State, into the British House of Commons, and into answers India’s foreign ministry gave its parliament. At each step it grew: “more than 2,000 attacks on Hindus”, “nine Hindus lost their life”, “23 Hindus killed”.

Attacks on Hindus after 5 August were real, and some were plainly communal, as we will elaborate later in this article. But the report BHBCUC built on them is not a reliable record of those attacks. It inflates their number, strips out their politics and mixes in deaths and damage that were not communal. Those who wanted to deny the attacks and those who wanted to exaggerate them were both handed a number they could use.

How the numbers travelled

BHBCUC’s first figures were modest. In the first two days, a council leader, Kajol Debnath, told PTI (archive) that at least four temples had suffered “minor damages”. On 6 August its general secretary, Rana Dasgupta, told Reuters (archive) that 200–300 homes and businesses had been vandalised and up to 40 people injured, “though not seriously”. On 9 August the council wrote to the interim government’s chief adviser, Muhammad Yunus, citing 205 incidents in 52 districts, a figure it called preliminary. Within 48 hours that number was in The Hindu (archive) and The Times of India (archive). Livemint’s headline made it “Over 200 attacks on Hindus” (archive).

The final report, launched on 19 September (archive), put the total at 2,010. On 16 October Raja Krishnamoorthi, a US congressman from Illinois, wrote to Secretary of State Antony Blinken (archive) that the council “recently reported over 2,000 incidents of communal violence targeting minorities, mostly Hindus”. Netra News reported (archive) that activists from the council and its partners in Washington “inundated the mailboxes” of congressional offices, and that its US chapter paid for a digital billboard in New York.

On 1 November the Associated Press’s wording shifted. “Incidents targeting minorities” became “more than 2,000 attacks on Hindus since August 4” (archive), in a story that also carried Donald Trump’s post condemning “barbaric violence against Hindus”. That wording spread through VOA, Livemint, ETV Bharat and India Today.

In the House of Commons on 2 December, Barry Gardiner MP spoke of “more than 2,000 incidents of violence” (archive). Jim Shannon MP went further: “2,010 people reported incidents, including attacks on 69 Hindu temples … and nine Hindus lost their life.” BHBCUC’s 69 were places of worship of all kinds, and its nine dead include Ripon. Neither MP named the source.

Then the Indian government took up numbers of the same size. On 20 December India’s Ministry of External Affairs told the Lok Sabha (archive) that 2,200 cases of violence against Hindus and other minorities had been reported in 2024, “as per available data from minority/human rights organisations”. Dhaka called the figures (archive) “misleading and highly exaggerated”. On 7 February 2025 the Indian ministry told parliament (archive) that reports “have cited deaths of 23 Hindus”. Twenty-three was BHBCUC’s count of deaths among all minorities between late August and December. Yet, Four days earlier, the interim government of Bangladesh had said police found non-communal causes for 22 of those 23 deaths, DW Bangla reported (archive). The Hindustan Times headline (archive) read: “23 Hindus killed”.

By then the figures had been examined. Police had investigated the list and found (archive) that 1,234 of 1,254 substantiated incidents were political. Netra News and Samakal had found no communal motive in eight of the nine deaths. However, BHBCUC changed nothing of its report despite the revelation. It further added new incidents on top of the September figure, 2,184 (archive) and then 2,442, and each new total ran in Indian media as fresh evidence. In August 2025 a council leader gave Dainik Bhaskar a count of 59 murders of minority people. The paper headlined it (archive) “59 Hindus murdered”.

The council did not create the wider flood of false claims. The BBC found the main hashtag had nearly a million mentions (archive), driven mostly by accounts geolocated to India. Rumor Scanner counted (archive) 137 misleading reports about Bangladesh in 72 Indian outlets in 2024. But BHBCUC’s report was what gave that campaign its authority. It was the one number with a Bangladeshi minority organisation’s name on it, and the one that governments could cite.

Why look again, two years on

In August 2024 almost none of these entries could be checked. The interim government was days old, and reporters were counting damage as it happened.

The facts have had time to settle since then:

  • Police investigated the list and published their findings, twice.
  • Courts accepted murder cases, and arrested men gave confessions.
  • Samakal, Netra News and Prothom Alo sent reporters back to the places named.
  • Local papers kept reporting: the coverage we checked runs to August 2025.

The size of BHBCUC’s claim is also what makes it testable. Each of its 1,770 entries gives a place and a date. Many of them gives a victim’s name and phone number – making the list traceable.

And the number has not gone away. BHBCUC still builds its new totals on the 2,010, and its 2026 report shows the same method at work.

Fuel on the fire

The number did its first work at home. On 9 August 2024, the day after the interim government was sworn in, Hindu protesters blocked Shahbagh in Dhaka for four hours. They demanded a ministry for minorities, a minority protection commission and 10% of the seats in parliament. The next day protests spread to Chattogram, Barishal, Tangail and Kurigram (archive). Their fear was real. “Many of us are sitting at the border, waiting to leave for the neighbouring country,” one organiser, Shanti Ranjan Mondal, said at Shahbagh.

That same weekend BHBCUC put out its count of 205 incidents in 52 districts. It called the figure preliminary, but the figure went straight into coverage of the protests at home and abroad. Meanwhile student coordinators had set up committees in every district to guard temples and churches (archive), and Muslim and Hindu neighbours were standing watch together at Dhakeshwari. CA Yunus called the attacks “heinous” (archive) and asked students to protect every Hindu, Christian and Buddhist family.

Later, in the speech that launched the report, BHBCUC’s general secretary, Rana Dasgupta, called it “a matter of hope” that minority “women and men, students, youths and teenagers … all over the country have taken to the streets”. The speech also:

  • put the number of minorities “living in panic and fear” at 20 million;
  • asked the UN Secretary-General to investigate “crimes against humanity and genocide committed on the minorities”;
  • on the same day, called nationwide demonstrations (archive).

The anger soon found other figures. In October a new platform, Bangladesh Sanatan Jagaran Mancha, drew thousands to Chattogram’s Laldighi ground (archive) with an eight-point charter. Its spokesman, the monk Chinmoy Krishna Das, warned that if Hindus were driven out, “this land will become Afghanistan, Syria”. He was arrested on a sedition charge in November. The next day, as his followers clashed with police outside the Chattogram court, a 32-year-old lawyer, Saiful Islam Alif, was hacked to death (archive). BHBCUC did not organise those rallies. But by then its 2,010 was the only national figure for the attacks, and it told the same story the rallies did: a community under systematic assault.

Nine deaths, and only one without an explanation

The report lists nine killings. Two newspapers investigated every one of them. Samakal (archive) sent correspondents to the families, witnesses and police, and found no communal link in eight. Netra News (archive) found that “none of the deaths bore clear signs of religious or sectarian motives”. Our own reading of the coverage agrees.

The councillor with the procession

The report says “miscreants” killed Haradhan Roy, a Rangpur city councillor, on 5 August in Khatkhatiya village, and describes him as president of the city’s Puja celebration committee. However, Haradhan Roy was also the president of the Parshuram thana Awami League. He died on 4 August, in the city, while the Awami League was clashing with protesters. His wife’s complaint to police, obtained by Netra News (archive), says a crowd “captured my husband … and Fattah”, a Muslim Awami League activist, and killed them both. Three Muslim Awami League men died in the same incident. Hindu community leaders in Rangpur, including the council’s local chapter, held a press conference saying they saw no communal motive in the killing. A top official of the Rangpur chapter told Netra he had informed the central leadership that it was political violence. The report cites the council itself as its source.

The officer at Baniachong

The report says “a group of miscreants brutally killed” Sub-Inspector Santosh Chowdhury and hung his body from a tree. It does not say that police fire at Baniachong police station had killed eight or nine people (archive) that day, or that the crowd singled him out as one of those who had fired. The officer in charge told Samakal there was no communal element.

The journalist in the press club

Pradip Bhowmik, a journalist in Raiganj, Sirajganj, was killed on 4 August. The report says he died “while he was collecting information”. That day protesters attacked the Awami League office (archive) and then the press club next door, where he was trapped with Awami League men. Five Muslim Awami League men were killed alongside him. “Nobody killed anyone after checking their religion,” one of the people Samakal interviewed there said.

The heart attack

A Narayanganj hosiery trader (Dhaka-056) died of a heart attack four days after extortionists demanded Tk 10 lakh from him. The same gang had demanded money from Muslim traders too. BHBCUC’s own Narayanganj city president told Samakal that the trader died “out of fear of extortionists”.

The land, the motorcycle and the witness

Mrinal Kanti Chatterjee, a retired teacher in Bagerhat, was hacked to death on 5 August. His wife told Samakal: “It is not Hindu–Muslim. The attack happened because of that land.” Two men arrested later confessed to the land motive.

In Brahmanbaria, Sushanta Sarkar was killed on 18 August by men who owed him money for a motorcycle, according to his mother and the police (archive). Three men arrested later confessed. One of the buyers his mother named is also a Hindu.

In Mymensingh, Ajit Sarkar, who had testified in a war-crimes case, was abducted by the accused man’s son and relatives. His body has never been found, and the complainant told Samakal it was “not a Hindu–Muslim matter”. Rajib Ahamod, the Samakal journalist who led the paper’s investigation, had written that this is the one killing on the list that could fairly be called persecution of a minority, because Ajit was targeted for his testimony.

Only one death, that of Swapan Biswas, a former Union Parishad member in Paikgachha, remains unexplained. Samakal could not establish why he was killed. Though Netra News found (archive) he had been elected on the Awami League’s ticket, which the report omits.

When Samakal asked why a protester killed by the Awami League was on a list of communal atrocities, Manindra Kumar Nath, the council’s member secretary for data collection, gave a direct answer (archive). The list, he said, includes everyone from the Hindu community who was killed between 4 and 20 August. “We compiled the list from information received through the organisation,” he said. “We are not an investigating agency. Let the government investigate what the truth is.”

That is the method, in the council’s own words. The report does not claim that these nine men were killed because they were Hindu. It simply treats them as communal atrocities. Netra News estimated that fewer than three dozen of the roughly 1,000 people killed around 5 August were Hindu, about 3% of the dead, below the Hindu share (archive) of the population.

The MP, the mayor and the district party chiefs

In the whole report, 4 of the 1,770 entries mention a victim’s political party.

At the report’s launch, BHBCUC told reporters (archive) that every incident in it was communal and that it had not recorded political violence. But on 5 August crowds attacked the homes and offices of Awami League leaders across the country, Muslim and Hindu alike. The report lists the Hindu ones as communal atrocities, without their titles:

We found at least 28 such entries: a sitting MP, district presidents and secretaries, a mayor, and Union Parishad chairmen in Dakop, Satkhira, Narikelbaria, Satkania and Panchagarh.

Samakal’s field check found the same pattern wherever it looked. In Lalmonirhat (archive) it checked 10 of the 44 listed incidents, and every one was an Awami League leader’s house. In Panchagarh every victim it checked held an Awami League post. In Monirampur, Jashore, all 18 victims it checked were Awami League leaders or activists. In Magura, 10 of the 20 it checked were Awami League leaders, followers or business partners of the former MP Saifuzzaman Shikhor. Awami League leaders who were Muslim and were attacked the same day do not appear in the report. Asked about this, Nath told Samakal: “Why would a minority be attacked just because he is in the Awami League?” He said the government should investigate.

One of the first entries in the report shows how far this goes. It says three shops belonging to a man in Rajarbagh, Dhaka, were attacked on 5 August. The shop owner told Samakal (archive) that a local BNP leader, Pabon Chandra Das, had the shops attacked and taken over. The BNP leader, on the other hand, said the shop owner was a ward Jubo League convener who once had him jailed for 90 days, and was now trying to “give it a communal colour”. Whoever is right, this is a political and business feud between two Hindus, recorded in a report on communal atrocities. BHBCUC’s own Nath told Samakal: “A fight between Hindus is not communal violence.”

The independent reviews all find the same thing, though they disagree on scale.

A fire, a debt, a rumour and a land dispute

Some entries describe events that did not happen, or did not happen as the report says.

The fire in Dhala Bazar

Six entries in Trishal, Mymensingh (Mymensingh-004 to 009) say “perpetrators attacked, vandalized and looted” six Hindu-owned shops on 9 August, with Tk 77 lakh in damage. According to Samakal (archive), the shops burned in a fire that police and the fire service both traced to an electrical fault. The same fire destroyed seven shops owned by Muslims, which are not listed. An application for compensation had been made to the upazila administration.

The musician’s house

The entry for Rahul Ananda’s house in Dhanmondi (Dhaka-010) cites a Prothom Alo article of 13 August. The article’s headline (archive): “The fire at Rahul Ananda’s house has nothing to do with religion”. The house stands next to the Bangabandhu Memorial Museum, which the crowd was burning.

Tk 12 crore, or Tk 60 lakh?

The largest single claim in the report is Tk 12 crore 18 lakh for one family’s businesses in Naogaon (Rajshahi-219). The owner’s son told Prothom Alo (archive) the loss was “about Tk 60 lakh”, one-twentieth of the claim.

“I don’t know how my name got on the list.”

A man in Boda, Panchagarh, is listed with a Tk 7.5 lakh loss (Rangpur-147). He told Samakal (archive) that no attack took place: local residents had driven the attackers off. Another house in the same area was set on fire on 5 August, and it is not on the list.

A debt, a rumour and two land disputes

  • A Jashore man listed as attacked at 2 am on 5 August (Khulna-356) was in fact attacked on 8 August, over a debt and cheque-fraud case (archive). His kidnapped son was freed with a BNP leader’s help.
  • The crowd at the Gotamari border crossing (Rangpur-193) had gathered because of a rumour (archive), spread by some Awami League men on Facebook, that Indian leaders were coming. The upazila’s own Hindu leader called it a rumour.
  • In Bogura, Samakal found (archive) that an alleged attack in Chakdeuli, with Tk 3 lakh looted and a temple vandalised, was a fight between two Hindu neighbours over 15 decimals of land.
  • In Chattogram, Samakal checked all 13 listed incidents and could confirm only two. One of the two was a dispute over family land that an outsider had tried to occupy.

The leaders who said otherwise. BHBCUC’s own local officials contradicted the report before it was published:

  • Sylhet. A senior leader of the council’s Sylhet district branch, speaking anonymously, told TBS Bangla (archive) in August 2024: “To my knowledge, no ordinary Hindu has been attacked in Sylhet so far. Those who have been attacked are all Awami League leaders and activists.” The report has 29 entries for Sylhet district.
  • Fulbari, Kurigram. Anil Chandra Roy, general secretary of the council’s upazila unit, told Ajker Patrika (archive) that one Hindu family had been attacked, “for political reasons”, that “no idol vandalism or looting took place”, and that “there is no scope to call this attack communal”. The report has three entries for Fulbari.

Police investigated 1,415 of the allegations and found 161, or 11.4%, unsubstantiated (archive). Samakal checked 296 and found 38 (archive), 12.8%, “not true”.

Copy, paste, edit

On page 33 of the report, entries Khulna-087 to 100 record 14 incidents in Shyamnagar, Satkhira: shops looted in Harinagar Bazar, a man hacked in Ramjannagar Bazar, temple land occupied, death threats in five villages.

Twenty entries later, the same 14 incidents are recorded again, as Khulna-107 to 120: the same victims, the same order, mostly the same times to the minute. The copies were edited. Five moved from Ramjannagar union to Munshiganj union, and one from Shyamnagar to Ataliya. Two damage figures were swapped. A mechanical-parts shop worth Tk 4 lakh in the original is worth Tk 1 lakh in the copy, and a computer shop worth Tk 1 lakh becomes Tk 4 lakh.

This is not an isolated error. In Magura, entries 511 to 514 reappear as 523 to 526 with the unions changed. Across the tables we found 25 groups of word-for-word duplicates with identical damage figures, and up to 47 groups describing the same victim in near-identical terms. Other examples:

  • One Shyamnagar victim appears again under a different upazila, Tala, with the same phone number and the same Tk 33.7 lakh claim (Khulna-084 and 165).
  • One entry is filed in two districts, Kishoreganj and Tangail (Dhaka-124 and 138).
  • One Abhaynagar shopkeeper is listed three times (Khulna-405, 457 and 484), twice with “seven ounces of gold”.
  • One Norarchar villager is listed three times with the same text and phone number (Khulna-282, 298 and 306).
  • In Nawapara, Abhaynagar, two entries name a Krishnapad in the same village, one with the surname Das and one with Dutta, with phone numbers that differ by a single digit (Khulna-463 and 469).
  • Two entries are sentences lifted from a Prothom Alo round-up (archive): “Attacked three Hindu houses in Sekendarpur village” is entered once under Abhaynagar and again under Jashore Sadar (Khulna-401 and 483).

One raid, many incidents

The report also turns single events into many “incidents”. A night raid on Gabtali, Bogura, becomes 26 entries. Karmakar Para alone has 14 entries for the 6 houses (archive) Samakal found there. We found 119 clusters, 493 entries in all, with the same date, the same place and the same sentence, changing only the victim’s name.

Same phone, not the same man

About a third of the entries give a contact number in brackets after the victim’s name. If each entry were a separate victim reporting a separate attack, each would have its own number. Instead, 23 numbers are each given for two or more different people.

  • One number, one surname, several incidents. In Tala, Satkhira, the same number is given for three men with the same surname (Khulna-157, 159 and 160). Each is counted as a separate communal incident with its own damage claim. One of the three is a Tala upazila Awami League leader. Twelve of the 23 shared numbers follow this pattern: one number, one surname, several entries.
  • Numbers that belong to neither victim. Eleven numbers are given for people with different surnames. In Keshabpur, Jashore, one number is listed both for a newspaper seller in the town and for a shopkeeper in another village (Khulna-371 and 372). One phone cannot belong to both men. It is most likely the number of whoever reported the entries: a neighbour, a local leader or the person compiling the list.
  • One contact for two upazilas. Three numbers are each given for victims in two different upazilas. One is listed both for a man in Munshiganj, Shyamnagar (Khulna-077) and for a man in Kumira, Tala (Khulna-141). Shyamnagar and Tala are also where entries were copied from one upazila’s table into the other’s: Khulna-082 to 086 reappear as 163 to 167.

To test the numbers, we took every one printed in the report and checked three things. First, whether it can exist: six cannot, because they are printed with the wrong number of digits. That leaves 537 distinct numbers. Second, where each one reappears: 41 are given for more than one entry, and three for victims in two different upazilas. Third, whether it leads to anyone: we picked 150 at random and looked each one up in a caller-ID app and on WhatsApp. Two-thirds led to a name or an account. A third led to nothing, and all eight of those we called were switched off. We cannot say those numbers are invented, but we could not tie them to anyone.

What the numbers show is how the list was made. The entries were not reported one by one by the people attacked. A small number of local contacts gathered them, and a family, a market row or a whole neighbourhood could go into the tables as several separate incidents. Each one added to the 2,010.

That is how 1,770 entries become a headline of 2,010. At its launch the council gave the total as a sum of damage categories: 915 homes, 953 businesses, 69 places of worship, 38 assaults, 21 seizures, 9 killings, 4 rapes, 1 homestead. An attack on a family’s house and shop counts twice, and the council itself says 157 families lost both. It also says 1,705 families were affected, fewer than its own entries. In Chittagong division, the tables hold more entries (107) than the council’s own total for the division (100).

From 110 to 1,690

On 6 August 2024, the day after Hasina fled, BHBCUC gave the press its list of attacks from the previous two days. Kalbela printed it (archive) district by district under the headline “Over a hundred communal attacks in two days”. It adds up to about 110 incidents nationwide. Kalbela added that “many of those attacked were Awami League office-holders”.

On 9 August 2024 its letter to Yunus counted 205 incidents in 52 districts. Six weeks later, the final report dated 1,690 entries to 4, 5 and 6 August, the same days its first list had covered.

An early list will miss things. Some of its items were whole neighbourhoods, and collection was still going on. But a fifteenfold increase needs explaining, and the council has not explained it. The council has not even given one account of how the list was compiled. The launch speech says the early information came “through phone calls from the victims and their associates, social media data and reports published on media”, and the full list from its district committees. Five months later Dipankar Ghosh, a member of its monitoring cell, told DW Bangla (archive): “We took no help from newspapers then. All the information came from our district and upazila committees.”

That explains the shape of the numbers. Where a local committee collected hard, the count runs far above anything reported. Satkhira had 4 items on the 6 August list. It has 279 entries for the same days in the final report, and 283 in all: 16% of the national total from one of 64 districts. Prothom Alo, surveying all 64 districts over the same 5–20 August window, ranked (archive) Satkhira third, behind Khulna district’s 74 and Jashore, which puts its Satkhira count at no more than 73. Satkhira is also where the copied block is.

Attacks in Satkhira were real. Samakal checked 21 of its entries and confirmed 18. But where a committee collected less, real attacks are missing:

  • Koyra, Khulna. Prothom Alo reported (archive) at least 35 Hindu houses and 11 shops attacked; the report has four entries.
  • Thakurgaon. Prothom Alo counted 78 attacked homes and businesses; the report has 23.

The national total adds these uneven counts together as if they measured the same thing.

Counted before the fall

Most of the report’s entries fall on a single day. 83% are dated 5 August, the day Hasina fled and crowds attacked Awami League offices, homes and leaders across the country. Sixty-two entries are dated 4 August, before the government fell, when the Awami League still held power and protesters were being shot in the streets.

Twenty-nine of those 62 are in Kaliganj, Satkhira, where 29 of the upazila’s 30 entries carry that date, although local newspapers date the attacks there from 5 August. Fourteen more are in Sirajganj, every entry for the district. Awami League homes and offices were attacked across Sirajganj on 4 August. One of them is a district Awami League leader, whom the report describes only as a freedom fighter. Ripon Sheel, Haradhan Roy and Pradip Bhowmik all died on 4 August too. Netra News noted that the report “offers no explanation for starting its documentation from August 4th” (archive).

What can be checked

We checked every entry against the local press, area by area.

The results:

  • 121 entries: a news report names the same victim, shop or temple.
  • 172 more: attacks were reported in the same village or bazar around the same date.
  • 38 entries: contradicted by the press. In 18, the attack happened but the victim’s Awami League or elected role is left out. In 16, the press reports a different cause, date or event. In 4, local sources deny the attack.
  • 644 entries: we found only upazila-level reports of attacks, which neither confirm nor rule them out.
  • 795 entries: we found nothing.

A missing news report does not prove an attack did not happen. Rural attacks often go unreported. It does mean that more than 80% of the report cannot be checked against any independent record at victim or village level. Whole clusters exist only in BHBCUC’s tables: 59 entries in Patgram, 67 in Panchagarh, 51 in Norarchar, 65 in Magura, 44 in Pirojpur. For those places the report is its own only source.

It happens every time

The same thing happened again in 2026. BHBCUC’s report on the first six months of the year counted 257 incidents of communal violence and 44 people killed (archive) in the first six months of the year. Indian outlets, among them ANI, Aaj Tak Bangla and Asianet, repeated the figures as proof of “continuous persecution”. The Dissent checked 16 of the deaths against police and news accounts. In none of the 16 did the evidence show communal violence:

  • a customs official thrown from an auto-rickshaw by a mugging gang;
  • a teenage auto-rickshaw driver hit by a truck while chasing the men who had stolen his vehicle;
  • a man shot by cattle thieves in his cowshed;
  • land disputes, an extortion demand, and a fight over a bunch of bananas.

Asked for the council’s definition of communal violence, Nath told The Dissent there was none. “We consider an abnormal death to be violence,” he said. Asked whether the muggers who killed the customs official even knew his religion, he said: “There was violence. All of them are communal — communal violence.” Pressed on three cases, he conceded they “could perhaps be excluded. Fine, exclude those three. But there is no scope to deny the rest of the 44.”

Rajib Ahamod, the Samakal journalist who led that paper’s 2024 investigation, has looked at two more deaths on the 2026 list. Entries 9 and 10, he wrote on Facebook, are two killings from the evening of 5 January. He checked both.

Moni Chakraborty: That night Moni Chakraborty, a businessman in Palash, Narsingdi, was shot in the head from behind at the gate of his own house. The next day traders marched to demand arrests. The Indian channel Aaj Tak Bangla (archive) presented his death as the latest in a run of killings of Hindus: six in 18 days. It quoted a man it named as Rajendra Chohri, described as Moni’s close friend: “We cannot imagine Moni having any enemy.”

Moni’s mother and his wife suspected Moni’s business partner, Rajendra Chauhan Raju, from the start, Ahamod wrote. Moni’s father filed the murder case against “unknown persons”. He now says Rajendra took him to the police station and steered him into it. Police arrested four other men, who spent months in jail before getting bail. Moni’s wife and brother made their own inquiries and filed a separate case in court. The court handed it to the Detective Branch, which traced the phone records. In September, nine months after the killing, detectives arrested Rajendra Chauhan Raju as the main accused. According to Moni’s wife, the motive was money: after getting a work visa for Romania, Moni had asked his partner for about Tk 1.2 crore he said the business owed him.

Rana Pratap Bairagi: The same evening, in Monirampur, Jashore, Rana Pratap Bairagi was called out at Kapalia bazar, shot and his throat cut (archive). He owned an ice factory there and was acting editor of a small Narail newspaper. The next day his father told Prothom Alo that Rana had “no enemies” and might have been killed “for some interest”. Six weeks later police arrested two gunmen (archive), who confessed before a magistrate. According to police, Rana Pratap was a regional leader of an outlawed party, the Biplobi Communist Party, and was killed in a feud with members of a rival outlawed group, the Purba Banglar Communist Party. The killing had been solved for months by the time BHBCUC listed it as communal violence.

“Every time I have spoken to the council, they have told me they list any non-Muslim who is murdered,” Ahamod wrote. Bangladesh records three to four thousand murders a year, he noted, and given the country’s population, 250 to 300 of the dead would be non-Muslim in an ordinary year. “But the lists are made and publicised at home and abroad before any investigation, and sent as far as India’s Lok Sabha and the US Congress. Even when investigations find a different story, the reports are never corrected, and no regret is expressed.”

The verdict

BHBCUC’s report is not evidence of 2,010 communal attacks.

It is a compilation by the council’s local committees, and its size reflects how hard each committee collected. It is inflated by copied entries, by single raids split into dozens of incidents, and by a headline that counts damage categories instead of events. It strips out the politics of its victims, even when they were MPs, mayors and district party presidents attacked on the day their party fell. It includes deaths and damage that had nothing to do with religion: a protester killed by the Awami League, a policeman killed by a crowd, a heart attack, an electrical fire. By the council’s own admission, there is no definition behind any of it and no investigation.

When independent reporters and the police examined the report, they found most of it political, some of it false, and part of it communal. The council did not correct a single entry. Its number went on to foreign ministries and parliaments, where it was used as evidence of systematic anti-Hindu violence that the council’s own tables do not show.

The victims of the real attacks are the ones this hurts most. Samakal found Hindus in Bagharpara who were attacked “just for being Hindu”, and our check found serious attacks the report leaves out. Their cases were buried under a number that was built to be large, not accurate. “When five incidents are turned into five hundred,” Rajib Ahamod wrote, “the credibility of the five real ones will be questioned.”

The Dacca made several attempts to contact the BHBCUC regarding the discrepancies in their report, but did not receive a reply.

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Last Update: September 26, 2026