Matribhumi Samachar English
For nearly a week after Dipu Chandra Das was lynched, burnt, and publicly humiliated in Mymensingh, Bangladesh, the silence from major Western media outlets was conspicuous. No breaking alerts. No anguished editorials. No prime-time outrage. A Hindu garment factory worker in his thirties was beaten to death by a mob, his body tied to a tree and set ablaze in full public view over alleged blasphemy, yet the world’s most influential newsrooms looked away.
The New York Times did report the atrocity, but the way it was framed by reporters Saif Hasnat, Mujib Mashal, and Suhasini Raj says less about the crime itself and more about the deep-seated distortions and ideological blind spots that now shape much of contemporary Western journalism.
The reporting of the incident was done so cautiously, almost reluctantly, framing the killing not as a targeted act of Islamist violence against a religious minority but as part of a broader, amorphous “South Asian pattern of intolerance.” The acknowledgement came, but accountability was conspicuously absent.
This was not merely a question of delayed reporting. It was about how the story was told, what was emphasised, and most tellingly, what was omitted.
The killing that could not be ignored
On December 18, 2025, Dipu Chandra Das was at his workplace in Mymensingh, employed as a garment factory worker, one among millions who sustain Bangladesh’s export-driven economy. During a discussion with colleagues, Das reportedly made a comment questioning religious superstitions, a remark that quickly escalated into accusations of insulting Islam and Prophet Muhammad.
That accusation was enough.
A mob of Muslim co-workers and local Islamists attacked him. He was beaten mercilessly, dragged outside, tied to a tree, and set on fire. Videos circulated showing the mob chanting religious slogans as his body burned. The act was neither spontaneous nor discreet; it was performative, public, and meant to instil fear.
Such lynchings over alleged blasphemy are not anomalies in Bangladesh. They follow a well-worn pattern: accusation, mobilisation, public violence, and eventual dilution of responsibility under the guise of “mob unrest.”
Western silence, then strategic framing
For days, global media giants, CNN, The Washington Post, BBC, The Guardian, maintained a near-total blackout. The killing of a Hindu man in a Muslim-majority country did not fit easily into the preferred narratives of global journalism, which often prioritise Muslim victimhood while treating violence against Hindus as either incidental or politically inconvenient.
When The New York Times eventually published its report, the headline itself revealed the editorial approach: the lynching was framed as “fanning fears of rising intolerance,” subtly shifting focus from the act and its perpetrators to the emotional aftermath. The subject became fear, not the mob. Anxiety, not accountability.
The report acknowledged that Das was Hindu and that the accusations were related to Islam, but it stopped short of naming the attackers as an Islamist mob. Instead, it relied on generic phrases like “co-workers,” “angry crowds,” and “religiously motivated violence,” as if the killers’ ideological motivation was an incidental detail rather than the central cause.
Perhaps the most striking editorial choice was the decision to contextualise Das’s killing within a supposed “broader South Asian pattern of intolerance.” By doing so, the NYT effectively dispersed blame across an entire region, implying equivalence between fundamentally different social and political realities.
Bangladesh’s Hindu population has shrunk from nearly 22 percnt at the time of Partition to under 8 percent today, a decline driven by decades of targeted violence, forced conversions, land seizures, temple destruction, and systemic discrimination. To frame the lynching of a Hindu minority member in Bangladesh alongside isolated and often legally prosecuted incidents in India is not balance; it is obfuscation.
This “both-sides” approach allows Islamist violence to be softened, even relativised. The implicit message becomes: intolerance exists everywhere, everyone is equally guilty, and therefore no specific ideology or group warrants scrutiny.
Dragging India in
True to pattern, the NYT’s report made sure to pull India into the narrative. It cited concerns raised by the Indian government, only to quickly counterbalance them with references to alleged attacks on Muslims in India, “cow vigilantism”, migrant suspicions, and caste violence.
Notably absent were mentions of cases where Hindus have been brutally killed by Islamist mobs in India, incidents involving slogans like Sar Tan Se Juda, targeted killings over religious identity, or attacks during Hindu festivals. The selective invocation of examples ensured that the moral weight never rested squarely on Islamist extremism.
Even more telling was the NYT’s choice of Indian examples: a Dalit Hindu assaulted after being mistaken for a Bangladeshi Muslim migrant. The selection neatly advanced two narratives at once, Muslim victimhood and caste oppression, while avoiding any acknowledgment of Islamist violence against Hindus within India itself.
The NYT attributed the violence in Bangladesh partly to political instability following the ouster of the Hasina government and the rise of an interim administration under Muhammad Yunus. While instability can exacerbate violence, it does not explain its ideological direction.
What the report glossed over was Yunus’s political accommodation of Islamist forces: the unbanning of Jamaat-e-Islami, the release of jailed extremists, and the induction of Islamist sympathisers into governance structures. These decisions have emboldened radical elements, creating an environment where accusations of blasphemy become lethal weapons.
By framing the lynching as a security challenge rather than targeted religious persecution, the NYT echoed the Bangladeshi establishment’s preferred narrative one that consistently downplays anti-Hindu violence as “exaggerated” or politically motivated.
Celebration of violence, barely mentioned
One of the most disturbing aspects of Das’s killing was that it was celebrated by sections of society. A local political aspirant reportedly praised the lynching, using it to rally Islamist support ahead of elections.
This detail appeared in the NYT report almost in passing. There was no deeper examination of how public endorsement of religious violence signals societal decay, or how such celebrations reinforce impunity. Had a Hindu politician in India celebrated the lynching of a Muslim, the reaction would likely have been wall-to-wall coverage and moral condemnation.
The contrast becomes starker when viewed alongside Western reactions to the killing of Islamist figures elsewhere. Radical student leaders, even those with documented extremist affiliations, are often memorialised as “activists” or “revolutionaries.” Their deaths prompt statements from the UN, EU, and Western capitals demanding justice.
Dipu Chandra Das received no such global empathy. No urgent calls for accountability. No international fact-finding missions. No anguished editorials questioning the moral direction of Bangladeshi society.
His crime was not activism or ideology, it was being Hindu in an increasingly Islamised public sphere.
The uncomfortable truth
Language matters in journalism. When perpetrators are unnamed, ideology unexamined, and responsibility diffused, violence loses its specificity. The NYT’s framing transformed a targeted Islamist lynching into a sociological case study about “intolerance,” stripping it of moral clarity.
There is a pattern here but not the one the NYT suggested.
The real pattern is that when Hindus are victims of Islamist violence, especially in Muslim-majority countries, their suffering is minimised, contextualised away, or rendered abstract. When Muslims are victims, identity becomes central, perpetrators are scrutinised, and structural explanations abound.
No amount of narrative engineering can change the basic facts: Dipu Chandra Das was lynched because he was Hindu. His killers were motivated by Islamist intolerance. The violence was public, ideological, and celebrated by some.
By refusing to name the mob or confront the ideology, Western media did not merely fail a victim, it failed journalism’s core obligation to speak plainly about power and violence.
Acknowledging a lynching while obscuring its cause is not neutrality. It is abdication.
And in that abdication lies a deeper hypocrisy: a global media ecosystem that claims to stand for human rights but selectively decides whose suffering deserves clarity and whose can be blurred into a “regional pattern.”
Credit : Organiser Weekly
