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Journalism of Courage
Muhammad Yunus, head of Bangladesh’s caretaker government, visited the Dhakeshwari Temple in Dhaka on Tuesday, and assured leaders of the Hindu community that “we are all one people”, and “justice will be given to all”.
Bangladesh’s minority Hindus have faced more than 200 attacks in 50-odd districts since the fall of Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League government on August 5. As policing collapsed, at least five people were reported killed in attacks on Hindu families, institutions, and temples.
Bangladesh’s 2022 census counted a little more than 13.1 million Hindus, who made up 7.96% of the country’s population. Other minorities (Buddhists, Christians, etc.) together constituted less than 1%. Muslims were 91.08% of Bangladesh’s 165.16 million people.
The share of Hindus in the population varies widely across Bangladesh’s eight divisions — from just 3.94% in Mymensingh to 13.51% in Sylhet (See map).
In four of Bangladesh’s 64 districts, every fifth person is a Hindu — Gopalganj in Dhaka division (26.94% of the district population), Moulvibazar in Sylhet division (24.44%), Thakurgaon in Rangpur division (22.11%), and Khulna in Khulna division (20.75%).
Hindus were more than 15% of the population in 13 districts, and more than 10% in 21 districts, according to the 2022 count.
Historically, Hindus had a much bigger share of the population in the Bengali-speaking region that makes up today’s Bangladesh. At the beginning of the last century, they constituted about a third of the population of this region (See chart). There has been a significant demographic shift since then.
Every census since 1901 has indicated a decline in the share of Hindus in the population of what is today’s Bangladesh. This decline was the steepest between the censuses of 1941 and 1974, i.e. when Bangladesh was East Pakistan.
Notably however, only the 1951 census reported a significant fall in the absolute numbers of Hindus compared with the previous (1941) count — from about 11.8 million to about 9.2 million. The number recovered gradually to reach the pre-Partition level of 11.8 million in the 2001 census.
The population of Muslims in this region rose from about 29.5 million in 1941 to 110.4 million in 2001. The increase in the proportion of Muslims in the population — from an estimated 66.1% in 1901 to more than 91% today — corresponds to the percentage decline in the Hindu population during this time.
Multiple factors — including some that predate the Partition — are behind this change.
According to estimates by scholars, the fertility rate among Muslims has historically been higher than that of Hindus in Bengal. Data from the first census of India (1872) onward support this hypothesis, primarily based on a comparison between Hindu-majority West Bengal and Muslim-majority East Bengal.
The American anthropologist David Mandelbaum argued that the impact of religion on the differential fertility rates in Bengal was indirect, and acted primarily through educational and economic factors. (Human Fertility in India, 1974). Muslims across Bengal belonged to the lower socio-economic strata and lagged in education — both factors associated with higher fertility rates. They were also more rural, and engaged in agriculture, again a factor associated with larger family sizes and consequently, fertility when compared to urban households.
This trend continued after Partition. The total marital fertility rate (a lifetime measure of marital fertility) of Muslims was 7.6 children per woman compared with 5.6 for Hindus, demographers J Stoeckel and M A Choudhury wrote in their 1969 paper ‘Differential Fertility in a Rural Area of East Pakistan’, published in the journal The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly.
While fertility rates in both communities have fallen since, the total fertility rate of Hindus was 1.9 children per woman compared with 2.3 for Muslims in 2014, M Moinuddin Haider, Mizanur Rahman, and Nahid Kamal wrote in their 2019 paper ‘Hindu Population Growth in Bangladesh: A Demographic Puzzle’ published in the Journal of Religion and Demography.
Bengal and Punjab were the two provinces of British India that were divided between India and Pakistan on the lines of religion. The division was haphazard, often arbitrary, and left a trail of violence and trauma whose reverberations can be felt even now. However, in Bengal, unlike Punjab, there was no massive, state-facilitated exchange of population across the new border in 1947.
Historian Gyanesh Kudaisya wrote that 11.4 million Hindus (42% of the Hindu population of undivided Bengal) remained in East Bengal after Partition. “In 1947, only 344,000 Hindu refugees came into West Bengal, and the hope lingered among the minorities of East Pakistan that they could continue to live there peacefully,” Kudaisya wrote. (‘Divided Landscapes, Fragmented Identities: East Bengal Refugees and Their Rehabilitation in India, 1947-79’ in The Long History of Partition in Bengal: Event, Memory, Representations, 2024)
The movement of refugees took place through the 1950s and 1960s, and volumes varied based on community relations between Hindus and Muslims. Even when major riots were not taking place, Hindus in Bangladesh faced what scholars Sekhar Bandyopadhyay and Anasua Basu Ray Chaudhury called “‘conjunctural violence’ caused by the specific circumstances of Partition”. This did not amount to “more than verbal abuse and minor physical intimidation, prompted by an unusual resource crunch and severe scarcity of space caused by the steady flow of Muhajir migration from India”. (Caste and Partition in Bengal: The Story of Dalit Refugees, 1946-1961, 2022).
Kudaisya wrote: “1948 saw an influx of 786,000 people into India, and in 1949, over 213,000 Bengali refugees crossed over the border into West Bengal… An estimated 1,575,000 people left East Bengal in 1950…another 187,000 refugees came [in 1951], followed by another 200,000 in 1952… 76,000 persons coming to India in 1953, 118,000 in 1954, and 240,000 in 1955… In 1955, when Pakistan adopted an ‘Islamic’ constitution, the number of incoming refugees again mounted to 320,000… This process of gradual displacement continued throughout the 1960s.”
Assam (including present-day Meghalaya, Nagaland, and Mizoram), West Bengal, and Tripura recorded unprecedented increases in population between 1951 and 1961, which scholars attribute entirely to the arrival of refugees from East Pakistan.
Another wave of migration took place in 1971, as the Pakistani Army and its collaborators went on a murderous campaign against Bengalis before the Liberation War. According to Indian estimates, approximately 9.7 million Bengalis sought refuge in India during the conflict, around 70% of whom were Hindu.
“The West Pakistani generals had calculated that by forcing millions of East Pakistani Hindus to flee to India they would weaken Bengali nationalism as a political force,” Sanjib Baruah wrote for The Indian Express in 2021.
Since the formation of Bangladesh, migration of Hindus into India has decreased. Porous borders, well-established familial and kinship networks in India, and periodic inter-religious tensions in Bangladesh are drivers of this migration.
