What TV doesn't, print can't; we deliver.
What TV doesn't, print can't; we deliver.
Anyone portraying Khaleda Zia as anything other than a shrewd political operator with a long record of hostility toward Bangladesh’s Hindu minority should remember one phrase that still haunts survivors: “The Night of the Lost Nose-Rings.”
History is not a matter of image management. It is a record of human suffering. And few chapters in the Indian subcontinent’s recent past are as meticulously documented, or as deliberately denied, as the anti-Hindu pogroms that unfolded under Khaleda Zia’s political leadership.
In late 2001, Khaleda Zia returned to power at the head of a BNP-Jamaat coalition. What followed was not spontaneous unrest, but a coordinated campaign of violence against Bangladesh’s Hindu population—one of the darkest episodes since independence.
A judicial commission ordered by the Bangladesh High Court to investigate the post-election violence documented a staggering scale of abuse. The commission reported that over 18,000 Hindu women were raped or gang-raped during the months-long reign of terror [1]. Killings, arson, mass displacement, and systematic destruction of Hindu properties and places of worship were recorded across more than 20 districts.
The commission stated that it had found evidence implicating approximately 25,000 individuals, including 25 ministers and members of parliament, in targeted attacks against Hindus [1]. This was violence enabled and protected by political power.
The BNP dismissed the findings as “partisan.” No serious judicial reckoning followed.
On 16 November 2001, the horror reached an almost unfathomable scale in Char Fasson Upazila of Bhola District. That night, over 600 Hindu women—ranging in age from 8 to 70—were gang-raped by BNP party members and their supporters.
Survivors later recalled that their nose-rings were torn off during the assaults, giving the atrocity its name: The Night of the Lost Nose-Rings. It was not merely an act of sexual violence; it was an assault designed to humiliate, mark, and terrorise an entire community [2].
The perpetrators were known. The victims were identified. Justice never arrived.
The international community took note. Human Rights Watch, in its World Report 2003, accused the Khaleda Zia–led government of failing to take any meaningful action to prosecute those responsible for post-2001 anti-Hindu violence.
Domestically, the message was equally clear. Journalist and human rights activist Shahriar Kabir was arrested in November 2001—not for inciting violence, but for interviewing Hindu families fleeing Islamist attacks. Documenting persecution itself became a punishable act [3].
This was not administrative failure. It was political choice.
The events of 2001 did not emerge from a vacuum.
In 1992, during Khaleda Zia’s earlier tenure, Islamist mobs looted and vandalised at least 150 Hindu temples and over 400 Hindu households. Hindu localities were systematically targeted following communal tensions linked to events in India.
The government’s response was denial. The People’s Inquiry Commission (PIC)—a group of prominent Bangladeshi intellectuals openly criticised the state for dismissing reports of persecution as “exaggerated” and “baseless,” despite overwhelming evidence on the ground [4].
That same year, Khaleda Zia’s government banned the novel Lajja by Taslima Nasreen, a work that depicted the lived reality of Hindu families facing communal backlash. Instead of addressing persecution, the state chose to suppress its narration.
Today, there is a concerted attempt to rebrand Khaleda Zia—to present her as a benign democratic figure, stripped of the consequences of her rule. This sanitisation is not harmless. It erases the lived experience of Bangladesh’s indigenous Hindu population, whose suffering was neither accidental nor undocumented.
Memory is a form of justice. Forgetting is a political act.
The Night of the Lost Nose-Rings was not an aberration. It was the culmination of a pattern of denial, impunity, and targeted violence that defined an era. To deny this history is to side not with reconciliation, but with erasure.
History does not forget. Only people do. And when they do, the victims are violated a second time.
References :
