A Series of Open Letters to Bangladeshi Premier Muhammad Yunus from An Indian Citizen ' Part 4 About Your Track Record with Democracy and Human Rights
By Yusha Rahman, New Age Islam
14 February 2026
Dear Mr. Muhammad Yunus,
If you are reading this, it is obvious you read my previous letters to know who I am, why I am writing to you towards the end of your tenure and what these letters are about.
As stated in my previous letters, I express solidarity with you in mourning and strongly condemning the lynching of your Hindu fellow citizen Dipu Chandra Das and your government having had arrested the perpetrators who happen to be Muslim extremists. As a secular humanist, I urge the authorities in your country to take prompt action in all such cases of violence based on religion, and in fact, take steps to prevent such hate crimes from occurring. I also register my protest against the demolition of a Hindu temple by your authorities without it being reconstructed elsewhere. I have no special affinity based on religion to Muslims who are not my fellow Indian citizens and I view them as regular human beings like I view foreign non-Muslims, and I have touched on why I think this is the correct Islamic theological position as well in my first letter in this series (though among foreigners, I do have an affinity to fellow South Asian people across religious lines, including Nepalese, Sri Lankan and Bhutanese Hindus and Buddhists), but given that Islamists (theocracy-advocating Muslims) often invoke a global pan-Muslim fraternity, I, like very many other Muslims, want to emphasize – such acts of intolerance ought not to be done in my name, as very many Hindu brothers and sisters have indeed also emphasized in the also worthy-of-condemnation cases of Hindu extremism! Also, given that the Hindus of what became Pakistan and Bangladesh were almost unanimously antagonistic to the idea of the partition of India in 1947 and other non-Muslims like Christians too did not largely have a role in the same (much as many of the non-Muslims, on staying back in the newly carved out countries, have indeed exhibited loyalty to their countries and contributed to their nation-building), and given that they were indeed part of India prior to the partition, we, Indians, do have an interest in the basic security and religious freedom enjoyed by non-Muslims in Pakistan and Bangladesh, a position affirmed by the Nehru-Liaqat Accord.
Having established in my two previous letters that the spoiler in Indo-Bangladeshi ties has been your regime and not the Indian government or media with the ball now being in the court of the new BNP government of your country to set things right hereafter, let me proceed to discuss the concerns about democracy under your regime, since you have falsely accused us, Indians, of destabilising your country. Whataboutism with respect to wrongdoings taking place in our country, which I am also vocal about as an Indian citizen within my country, is irrelevant in this context, and as I have established in my very first letter in this series, the civil society pushback in our country has indeed often been strong enough for our executive and judiciary to change track. I would not have even bothered to write to you about internal affairs of your country (except issues of non-Muslim minorities over which, as explained above, India has a locus standi), had you not falsely accused us, Indians, of having played a negative role in the same in current times.
As a journalist, I will start discussing the same by drawing attention to a core issue – freedom of the media. Your government cancelled the press accreditation cards of over a hundred journalists seen as supporters of the Awami League. Journalists exposing labour, environmental, economic and other irregularities have been booked by your government under anti-terror and other laws, as can be seen here, here, here and here, other than being physically attacked, even being killed, as can be seen here, here, here, here, here and here. Sheikh Hasina was often dictatorial but you are certainly no better, notwithstanding all your denials! She did not get a Nobel Peace Prize but you did, and just like I support revoking Aung San Suu Kyi’s Nobel Peace Prize for her refusing to take a stand against the ethnic cleansing of Myanmar’s nearly all non-Bamar Buddhist minorities (not just Rohingya Muslims, though complicity by silence only for that would also be indefensible – anti-Muslim bigots are requested to read my first letter in this series), for you to not be proactive in promoting press freedom but stifling it means that your Nobel Peace Prize too should be withdrawn!
Then, the next issue at the very heart of democracy – allowing people with multiple perspectives to contest. After declaring that the Awami League would not be banned by you, you suspended the party from contesting elections altogether, leaving room mainly for the two major parties with an Islamist history! If free and fair elections are to happen, why must the Awami League, which has many economic growth-oriented achievements to its credit and has the support of very many Bangladeshi Muslims and most Bangladeshi non-Muslims, be denied an opportunity to contest? Let the people of Bangladesh decide! And it is no secret that you personally have had issues with that party when Hasina was prime minister, and if you were settling personal scores, it exhibits your pettiness. After India’s partition, the Muslim League and the Congress, which had had opposite views on the partition of India, were allowed to continue as the Indian Union Muslim League and the Pakistan National Congress after 1947, and even participate in constitution-making in both the countries (though Jinnah, who denied you, Bengali Muslims, equal linguistic rights did not let the great Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and his followers contest in Pathan regions for long, but then, Sir, do you want to go the Pakistan way?).
Further, you actually banned lessons in Music and Physical Education for children in your schools. Contrary to what some ultra-orthodox Muslims say, the text of the Holy Quran nowhere prohibits or even discourages music, nor are the Hadiths meant to explain the Quran, anywhere unanimous on this point, as discussed at length here. Learning music hones one’s skills in so many ways, including improving math scores. The sense of discipline, focus and creativity that learning music fosters is deeply spiritual, and it is not a coincidence that some of the greatest scientists, even from the Islamic world such as Ibn Sina, Abu Bakr al-Razi, Al Farabi, Al Kindi and in modern times, Abdus Salam, and females in this list would include Sutayta al-Mahamali and Lubna of Cordoba in medieval times and Sameena Shah, Qamar Rehman and Aisha Elsafty in modern times, as also great non-Muslim scientists across centuries, including males like Pythagoras, Aristozenus, Galileo, Einstein, C.V. Raman, S.N. Bose, Partha Ghose, Homi Bhabha, Vikram Sarabhai, Richard Feynman, Max Planck, Bian May and Brian Cox, and females like Caroline Herschel, Fiorella Terenzi and Mira Aroyo are known to have or have had a very keen interest in music, the ancient and even medieval Indian Hindu scientists usually having written their scientific works in poetic form, which could be set to tune. And while scientific innovation ought to respect environmental and other ethical concerns, it is indeed science that took us from the caves and jungles to agriculture, architecture and metallurgy to medical treatment, and any country lagging in scientific research certainly cannot make good progress. Music is sound that is pleasant to the ear, and it is simply absurd how some ultra-orthodox Muslims, Christians and Jews oppose it, but even more absurd how you, in a country that still celebrates Rabindra Sangeet, could accede to this demand.
And speaking of Physical Education, its benefits for physical and mental health are too obvious to be stated. Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) himself asked of parents to teach children (without specifying boys) to learn swimming, horse-riding and archery. In fact, a woman, Nusaybah bint Ka’ab (May Allah’s Mercy Be Upon Her), fought in his army, just as Hindu lore refers to Arjun’s wife Chitrangada as an ace fighter and how Kaikeyi and Madri were ace charioteers. This article discusses in some detail the freedoms accorded to women by Islam and early Arab Muslim societies, and how they partook in diplomacy, business and several other fields of life, and indeed, there is no dearth of empowered Muslim women throughout history, including in our own subcontinent, veiling not being mandated anywhere by the text of the Holy Quran [and strongly rejected by Sukayna bint al-Husayn (May Allah’s Mercy Be Upon Her), the granddaughter of Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him)], Muslim women having worn garments like ‘salwar kameez’ throughout history. And for those saying that feminine beauty and motherhood can’t go together with sport, you have Jodie Kidd from Britain who is a mother, fashion model who appeared on the covers of Elle, British Vogue etc., dancer, chef, horse-rider, car-racer who has beaten men, winner of the Polo World Cup, and also a leading player in international golf tournaments.
And actually, you have prohibited Physical Education for boys too, but Islam nowhere prohibits sport or even recreation in general, as this short film also very nicely elucidates.
Sensible people in your country protested against this absurd decision of yours, rightly accusing you of being a “front man for extremists”! But you may argue that you had only removed them from the curriculum, not otherwise banned music and sport, though that is still not acceptable to any progressive person. But, Mr. Yunus, as I pointed out in my previous letter, one decision of yours suffices to prove that you have indeed put your country on the path of instability. You not only released an Al Qaeda terrorist Jasimuddin Rahmani who supported killing atheist bloggers, has very clearly incited terrorism and has gone on to declare armed jihad against India, even declaring that he would hoist an Islamist flag over Delhi, but he faced no punitive action from your government. I do care as much for lives of non-Muslims as fellow human beings, but interestingly, Al Qaeda has killed not only hundreds of innocent non-Muslims but also a good many progressive practising Muslims like Ahmad Shah Massoud and has killed eight times more moderate Muslims than non-Muslims; if someone had to destabilise his own country, this is the way to go!
Nor is he the only terrorist released by your government – there are others too. I rest my case. And it is rather ironic that secular journalists and activists were being booked by your regime under anti-terror laws while your government was releasing actual terrorists!
As an Indian citizen, someone who wishes well for all South Asians and for humanity at large, I hope that the new BNP government in Bangladesh is genuinely committed to democracy, secularism and friendly ties with India. Unfortunately, the only viable electoral options having been the BNP and Jamaat-e-Islami or fronts led by either of them is not a happy story for committed liberals, even among a very large section indeed of your own Gen Z, which wanted a genuinely progressive as also a genuinely democratic framework without trading off one for the other.
That said, I am glad that the Bangladeshi electorate has chosen the BNP over the Jamaat, for the latter openly does not accept as fully equal Bangladeshi non-Muslims or even Muslim women for that matter, though as a matter of fact, this is not a consensus in Muslim-majority regions. A Kashmiri Hindu lady won the election to become the sarpanch (village chieftain) of a Muslim-majority village in Kashmir beating her Muslim rival in 2011, and yet another Kashmiri Hindu, Ajay Pandita, was elected sarpanch in a Muslim-majority village in Kashmir in 2020 (though he was unfortunately killed in cold blood by separatist terrorists, like many Kashmiri Muslims also are for voting and contesting under the Indian constitutional setup – see, for example, news of Wasim Ahmad Khanday, a Kashmiri Muslim sarpanch, killed after Ajay Pandita; in fact, over half a score of sarpanches in Kashmir, mostly Muslims, have been killed by terrorists since 2011), as have several others, just as Muslims have also been elected sarpanch in some Hindu-majority villages in other parts of India, even in recent years, as you can see here and here, something also seen in municipal elections, as you can see here. Even elsewhere in the Islamic world, in Iraq, Ammar Francis Boutros, a Christian, won a parliamentary seat representing the Muslim-majority province of Wasit (Al-Kut) southeast of Baghdad where the number of Christian families can be counted on one's fingertips, and the Iraqi judiciary awarded the death penalty to an ISIS terrorist for having raped a woman from Iraq’s non-Muslim Yazidi minority. Even in Pakistan, Hindu politician Ramesh Kumar Vankwani won an election from a general constituency defeating his Muslim rival (though the slow-motion ethnic cleansing/expulsion of Hindus in rural pockets in Sindh by Muslim extremists, not representing regular Sindhi Muslim villagers, unfortunately continues despite such positive signs). In Senegal, a Muslim-majority (Senegal is over 95% Muslim) constitutional secular democracy, their first ever elected president was Leopold Sedar Senghor, a Christian, and Muslim-majority Nigeria has also seen elected Christian presidents like Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan. Janet Michael, a Palestinian Christian lady, was elected mayor of Ramallah, Palestine, and Alees Thomas, also an Arab Christian lady, chaired Bahrain's upper house of parliament. Non-Muslim Chinese-origin people like Henk Ngangtung and Basuki Tjahaja have been elected governors of Jakarta in Indonesia. Speaking of women, several Muslim-majority countries like your own country Bangladesh as also Pakistan, Turkey, Indonesia, Mali, Senegal, Tunisia and Kosovo have actually had women as elected heads of government. So, the Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh’s regressive positions far from represent unanimous Bangladeshi or even global Muslim public opinion on these scores, and I am glad that they have been defeated. We, regular Indians and Bangladeshis across religious lines, can only hope and pray for the best for future Indo-Bangladeshi ties.
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The author is a journalist and fact-checker hailing from Patna, India.
She would like to thank her friend Karmanye Thadani, president of the Citizens’ Foundation for Policy Solutions (CFPS), a Delhi-based thinktank, for his inputs, and though these letters are penned in the first person, it would not be a stretch to actually acknowledge him as a co-author.
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