Boxes of our own making

A list of thirty two names circulating on Bangladeshi social media this week seemed, to the ‘outraged patriot,’ to offer proof of minority bias. The post, originating from Shalikha upazila in the western district of Magura, claimed that a state educational stipend had been distributed exclusively to Hindu students. 

A more pointed version identified the constituency as Magura-2 and noted that its member of parliament is a Hindu from the ruling Bangladesh Nationalist Party. The implication was blunt and predictable: a minority politician was looking after his own.

As is so often the case with viral outrage, the claim was misleading. A report by the credible fact-checking outlet The Dissent revealed that the funds came from a long-standing prime ministerial scheme designed specifically for small ethnic communities of the plains, outside the Chittagong Hill Tracts. 

The complete list actually contained sixty four names, and a large chunk of them belonged to the Bagdi community, a group officially recognized by the state as one of Bangladesh’s fifty small ethnic groups. Yet the most revealing aspect of the whole episode was a ‘sincere question’ posed by many bewildered social media users: how can Hindus be ethnic minorities?

This query exposes a profound cognitive block. It assumes that a surname, such as Biswas, Roy, or Mondal, tells you everything you need to know about a person’s identity by reducing them to a singular religious category. To the modern observer, religion alone defines minoriti-ness. 

That the Bagdi are recognised on government paper as a distinct ethnic group is not an administrative error. The paperwork is correct. The failure lies in public perception, which continues to see the Bagdi simply as Hindus rather than as a distinct community. That disconnect reflects how thoroughly a colonial understanding of religion has displaced Bengal's older, far more complex social reality.

The roots of this blindness lie in the British census. In 1872, confronted with a bewildering variety of communities, administrators forced them into pre fabricated boxes. In the twenty four Pergunnahs, village headmen were sorted under religion and caste, where officials arbitrarily placed diverse groups like the Bagdi under Hindu. 

Some officers admitted the absurdity. In the Tributary Mehals, one refused to supply a table, noting that half the population would call themselves Hindu if asked, while continuing their own local practices. The act of counting created the identity, compressing a crowded spiritual landscape into two rigid, artificial, monolithic categories.

Herbert Risley, architect of the 1901 census, reinforced this by mapping caste ranks to race, designating the Bagdi as aboriginal or primitive. Yet scriptures long dismissed them as mlechha, meaning untouchable outsiders. 

Stripped of land, the Bagdi remained marginalized across Jessore and Magura. The fluidity of such labels is illustrated by the neighboring Rajbanshi. In West Bengal, they are a Scheduled Caste; in Assam, an Other Backward Class; in Meghalaya, a Scheduled Tribe. In Bangladesh, they are an ethnic minority. The people are identical, but the identity changes depending entirely on which state bureaucracy happens to be holding the pen.

Historically, these communities fought back, understanding that classification was a political weapon. In 1910, Panchanan Barma founded the Kshatriya Samiti to record Rajbanshis as high caste, proving that census categories are assigned positions rather than static facts. 

Modern Hindutva weaponized this administrative convenience. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s writings defined Hindus by geography and ancestry rather than theological belief, swallowing all indigenous and Dalit groups into the Hindu monolith to maximize demographic numbers. 

In late colonial Bengal, the privileged bhadralok elite championed Hindu unity to resist Muslim majoritarianism, using Dalit heads for political leverage while leaving the oppressive caste hierarchy completely intact.

Some Dalits resisted this strategic embrace. Jogendranath Mandal, realizing that poor Muslims and Scheduled Castes shared economic interests, supported Pakistan and joined its first cabinet. The alliance was short-lived. Mandal’s 1950 resignation letter detailed how Scheduled Castes were persecuted and forcibly converted by the very state they helped build. 

The newly dominant Muslim majority had adopted Hindutva's majoritarian logic. To them, Dalits were merely Hindus first, making their citizenship suspect and their distinct grievances irrelevant. Their own claim on the state was obliterated by the binary lens of the nation, which reduced all nuance to a single religious axis.

The recent outrage in Shalikha is this tragedy repeated. In demanding that the Bagdi be stripped of ethnic minority status, Bangladeshi Muslim nationalists are deploying the majoritarian taxonomy of Hindutva. 

They look at thirty two names through a colonial grid designed for imperial control, weaponized by Hindu chauvinists, and inherited by the modern Bangladeshi state. By refusing to see a Dalit community as anything other than a generic Hindu monolith, Muslim nationalists demonstrate how deeply they have internalized the grammar of their ostensible rivals. 

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Md Ashraf Aziz Ishrak Fahim is academically trained across Thailand, England, and Qatar, bringing together political, philosophical, and theological perspectives. He writes on the intersection of politics, society, gender, religion, and culture in Bangladesh and beyond