Chinmoy Krishna Das: Fiery Monk

CHINMOY KRISHNA DAS PRABHU, born Chandan Kumar Dhar, circa 1985 in Chattagram (formerly Chittagong), was not around in 1971 let alone 1947. Few outside Bangladesh knew he existed till August this year.

And yet, as far as Hindu resistance against the combined assault on minority rights by the state and its extra-legal storm troopers is concerned, there couldn’t have been a more natural leader. Rumour has it that ISKCON had to let him go, rather dissociate itself from him, finding his oratory too fiery for its own tongue. Das is spokesperson of the Bangladesh Sommilito Sanatan Jagaran Jot, a union of Hindu and minority rights bodies. He is the president of the Pundarik Dham near Chattagram, an important centre of Vaishnavism in Bangladesh.

The centrality of Chattagram in all of this is not without irony— it was the base of revolutionary Indian freedom fighter ‘Masterda’ Surya Sen; it is where Chief Adviser and Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus hails from. The Pundarik Dham, as a matter of fact, is under Hathazari Thana while Yunus was born in Hathazari Upazila in 1940, in British India’s re-undivided Bengal. The Indian bombing of Chattagram city and nearby Cox’s Bazar in 1971 decimated the Pakistan Air Force and sped up the liberation of Bangladesh.

Bangladesh has shot back at India, for protesting about the attacks on Hindus and now Das’ arrest on November 25, by telling New Delhi to stay out of Dhaka’s internal affairs. Das has been charged with sedition based on a petition filed on October 30, again in Chattagram, after a Hindu rally allegedly disrespected the Bangladesh flag, to which Das’ associates responded that said flags near the venue had crescents on them and thus could not have been Bangladesh’s national flag. Besides, did a few saffron banners unfurled nearby constitute disrespect? The umbrella of law and order and now treason has been unfolded and expanded to seek a ban on ISKCON itself as a fundamentalist organisation, as per a petition filed in the Bangladesh High Court on November 27. The court has asked the government to address the situation.

The state, apparently, has been acting all along—by being absent where it ought to be present, as when student-extremist mobs rampage and attack minorities; and by being present where it might not have any business, such as tailing Hindu leaders and keeping an eye on everything they say and do. No one seems to have scared the authorities more than Das, who has demonstrated his ability to gather thousands of Hindus in no time. An under-40 skilled communicator and rising minority mass leader speaking up for the victims of mob-military-puppet rule was not what they wanted. The November 22 rally at Rangpur may have been a turning (or breaking) point for Dhaka and, as pointed out, a sedition charge could not have been the decision of a local police station. It had to come from the very top, such as the home ministry. Das had been surveilled and accosted by detectives (detectives?) and finally arrested at Dhaka airport trying to board a flight to Chattagram.

The Bangladesh government, thus, persists in persecuting the victim while letting the victimiser run amok on every street, confident that barring India, there would be few international voices of protest, certainly not from the ‘liberal’ Western media that has presented even Das’ case as a face-off between Delhi and Dhaka, perhaps thinking Bangladesh’s minorities are the equivalent of gun-wielding terrorists in Kashmir. In any case, Yunus and his military masters either do not have the courage to confront the student- Islamist alliance or they do not intend to, knowing that the mob brought them to office. Ironically, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, hitherto legitimiser-in-chief of Islamists, has reportedly expelled its leader who had filed the sedition petition.

Chattagram still has an almost 3 per cent Buddhist population, nearly 11 per cent of the population is Hindu while that figure in Bangladesh has dwindled to 8 per cent, and the Chakmas of the Chittagong Hill Tracts had petitioned Gandhi and Nehru to be allowed to join the Indian Union in 1947. Hindu victimhood in eastern Bengal began in the second half of the 19th century when Bengal’s demography flipped and they became a minority. A monk from Chattagram defiantly flashing a victory sign from a police van has suddenly

come to personify a century-and-a-half of history. Does that guarantee him and his people a future?

BangladeshChattagramChinmoy Krishna DasHindu rallyISKCON leader