BHARATA BHARATI

The Western narrative on Hindus and episodes of mass violence affecting Hindu communities globally has often been marked by selective visibility, conceptual ambiguity, and ideological discomfort with recognising Hindus as victims of genocide or ethnic cleansing. While Western media, academia, and human-rights institutions readily deploy the language of genocide for atrocities against certain groups, mainly Muslims, comparable frameworks are rarely applied to cases involving Hindus, even when violence is systematic, targeted, and driven by religious or civilisational hostility. – Dr. Roshni Sengupta

The abject hypocrisy of the West on the atrocities against minority Hindus in Bangladesh must not only be called out—it should be underscored for what it really is: a colossal failure and a tame surrender to the forces of radical, fundamentalist Islam, unlike all the big talk, virtue-signalling, and sermonising coming India’s way from the epitomes of democracy in the West.

The blood boils when the UNHCR puts out a one-sided, whitewashed statement condemning the killing of the anti-India hate-peddler Sharif Osman bin Hadi, choosing to remain completely silent on the gruesome public lynching of Dipu Chandra Das on mere allegations of blasphemy. But is this silence and erasure a deliberate Mummers’ Farce or a pantomime of useful idiocy cloaked in the garb of universalism, globalism, postcolonial secularism, and religious tolerance? Events as they have unfolded over the past year—and those gone by—have established quite clearly where the sympathies of the West lie, and they certainly do not give a dime for certain kinds of religious groups, Hindus being the most prominent among them.

The role of the Western media—and the 0.5 segment in India—in cementing false narratives and aiding and abetting the erasure of the plight of Hindus in Bangladesh remains second to none. Let us consider the half-cooked, perfunctory, badly researched stories platforms like the BBC and Al Jazeera produced following days of speculation about the silence of the West on the Dipu Das lynching incident. Equating the communally charged, genocidal public execution of Das by a frenzied mob chanting Nara-e-Takbir and Allahu Akbar with what the reports described as “similar incidents of mob lynching of minorities in Hindu-majoritarian India” is not only libellous slander; it smacks of contextual ignorance, gratuitous ambivalence, and an almost laughable effort at establishing a false equivalence where none exists.

The intention of the BBC and other powerful Western media platforms remains clear—to deflect the blame for the Hindu genocide taking place in Bangladesh on to India—thereby extending a helpful push to the anti-India narrative put in place by the Jamaat-Yunus-BNP-Razakar-madrassah-educated fanatic youth combine that threw Sheikh Hasina out of power in 2024.

Consider the prerogatives of the BBC in this scenario for a moment. The national broadcaster of the UK has, over the past decades, exhibited a structural and narrative bias that remains clearly sympathetic to the Pakistani-Islamist position, particularly on issues such as Kashmir, terrorism, minority rights, India’s domestic politics, and its position in the subcontinent. The BBC’s South Asia coverage has, over time, come to reflect the perspectives of journalists, editors, and commentators of Pakistani origin, or those socialised within Pakistan-centric intellectual and journalistic networks that are increasingly Islamist and partisan in the UK. It is important to note that this has emerged as more than just a perception advanced by critics. A cursory glance at the identities of the reporters writing and commenting on the region and on India would perhaps establish this as an empirically settled fact.

Historically, the BBC has drawn heavily on diasporic communities in Britain for linguistic expertise, regional familiarity, and access to subcontinental societies. Within this ecosystem, Pakistani-origin journalists have been highly visible in South Asia desks, Urdu services, and conflict reporting related to Kashmir and terrorism. Whether this is by design or coincidence is anybody’s guess. It is pertinent to note here that the Pakistani and Pakistani-origin population in the UK has seen substantial growth since the 1950s, clocked at a rather enormous 1.6 million in 2021.

The lukewarm coverage it gave to the Pakistani rape-gang revelations and the ongoing investigation into the role of powerful Pakistani-Islamists in the UK provides sufficient grounds to argue that the conflation of South Asian narratives with the Pakistani voice has coincided with a tendency to foreground Pakistani-Islamist state narratives—such as framing Kashmir primarily as “disputed territory”, emphasising allegations against India while downplaying Pakistan’s role in cross-border terrorism, or presenting Islamist violence in Kashmir as an “insurgency” rather than externally sponsored militancy.

This bias is reinforced by the BBC’s broader ideological orientation: a postcolonial liberal, heavily anti-India worldview that is sceptical, even dismissive, of nationalism and civilisational, political assertion. As India increasingly articulates itself as a civilisational state with strategic autonomy, the BBC’s editorial instincts—shaped by Western human-rights discourse, motivated NGO reports, and largely Western academic frameworks—often align more comfortably with Pakistani-Islamist diplomatic and advocacy narratives that portray India as the dominant or coercive power in the subcontinent.

Furthermore, the Western narrative on Hindus and episodes of mass violence affecting Hindu communities globally has often been marked by selective visibility, conceptual ambiguity, and ideological discomfort with recognising Hindus—such as Dipu Das—as victims of genocide or ethnic cleansing. While Western media, academia, and human-rights institutions readily deploy the language of genocide for atrocities against certain groups, mainly Muslims, comparable frameworks are rarely applied to cases involving Hindus, even when violence is systematic, targeted, and driven by religious or civilisational hostility.

One explanation lies in dominant postcolonial and liberal paradigms that ignorantly position Hindus primarily as members of a “majority” faith in India and therefore as structural oppressors rather than potential victims. This framing makes it analytically difficult within Western discourse to acknowledge Hindu suffering in contexts such as the ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Pandits, mass killings during the Partition of India, the persecution of Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh, or targeted violence against Hindu minorities in Afghanistan. As a result, these events are frequently described in euphemistic terms such as “riots”, “communal clashes”, or “migration”, obscuring intent, asymmetry, and long-term consequences.

Additionally, Western narratives have been shaped by Cold War geopolitics and subsequent strategic alignments in which Pakistan was often viewed as a frontline ally state, while India was deliberately framed as a hegemonic regional power. Within this lens, violence against Hindus in Pakistan or Kashmir has tended to be downplayed, relativised, or subsumed under broader discussions of conflict, rather than examined as ideologically driven persecution. Islamist violence was often contextualised as political grievance, whereas Hindu victimhood was rendered devoid of a comparable moral vocabulary.

Another factor is the misplaced discomfort within Western academia and media with civilisational or religious explanations for violence when they challenge secular or universalist assumptions. Acknowledging genocide against Hindus risks unsettling entrenched binaries of majority versus minority and complicates prevailing critiques of what they perceive as majoritarian Hindu nationalism by introducing historical and transnational patterns of Hindu vulnerability.

As a result, the Western narrative does not outright deny Hindu suffering but marginalises it through silence, misclassification, asymmetrical moral scrutiny, and false equivalence. This narrative gap has irrevocably underlined Western discourse as selective, politicised, and insufficiently attentive to Hindu historical experiences of mass violence and displacement. This Western paradigm is then conveniently adopted by Indian academia and media—primarily fifth columnists—to further their agenda of misrepresentation and, in some cases, abject denial of ideological violence targeting Hindus, whether in Kashmir, the North-East, or against minority Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh.

This woke cabal, fronted by the likes of Dhruv Rathee and Arfa Khanum Sherwani, is amply aided and abetted by useful idiots from the entertainment industry—culturally influential, albeit—crying “All Eyes on Rafah” for events unfolding halfway across the globe, but choosing deafening silence when Dipu Das and Amrit Mandal are butchered by Islamists just across India’s eastern border. Hence, as Hindus continue to be targeted, their lives destroyed and their homes reduced to ashes, the blatant face of this farce continues its grotesque globalist, universalist narrative. – News18, 30 December 2025

› Dr. Roshni Sengupta is an author, political commentator, and Professor of Politics and Media at IILM University, Gurugram.

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