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Feb 23, 2026
Gargi Joshi

Why India's Civilisational Intelligence Will Outpace Silicon Valley's Vision

DHARMA IN THE AGE OF ALGORITHMS In early 2026, the world witnessed something remarkable. At the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed leaders from over fifty nations with words that cut through a decade of Silicon Valley supremacism, “Some people see fear in AI, but India sees fortune and future in it. The real question today is not what AI can do, but what humans can do with it.” These words were not mere political rhetoric. They were a civilisational declaration. They announced, quietly but unmistakably, that a billion-year-old culture built on Dharma, on righteous order, on the flourishing of all living beings, on wisdom rooted in Satya and Ahimsa, had entered the most consequential technological race in human history. And it had entered not as a consumer, not as an imitator, but as an architect with its own blueprint. This essay argues that in the age of Artificial Intelligence, India’s Dharmic worldview is not a handicap but a profound competitive and moral advantage. That the Western, and specifically the American techno-capitalist model of AI development, is producing a form of civilisational poison, what our ancestors would recognise as Asuri (demonic) intelligence: intelligence without conscience, power without purpose, wealth without Dharma. And that India, if it holds its nerve and its roots, is positioned to offer the world not just a product, but a path. I. The Anthropology of Silicon Valley To understand why India’s approach matters, we must first honestly reckon with what the dominant Western AI paradigm actually represents. And there is no better lens for this than a single, chilling statement from Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, made in defence of AI’s enormous energy consumption: “People talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model… But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart,”, Sam Altman, CEO, OpenAI Read that again. The head of the most powerful AI company on earth has just described a child growing into a human being as an inefficient ‘training run’, a biological investment measured in calories and years, evaluated purely on the output of cognitive utility. In a single sentence, he has reduced the mystery of human personhood, the wonder of childhood, the bonds of family, the accumulation of culture, memory, love and wisdom across twenty years of living, to a cost-benefit equation. This is not merely a clumsy analogy. It is a revealed worldview. And its implications are catastrophic. Because once you accept the premise that humans are essentially inefficient meat-computers, the logical conclusion follows with terrible coherence: that artificial intelligence, which trains faster and cheaper, is not merely equivalent to human intelligence but superior to it. That burning mountains of electricity to build synthetic minds is not a trade-off to be agonised over but a simple upgrade. That human flourishing, education, childhood, culture, and raising of families, is a bug in the system, not the point of the system. This is what the ancient Indian texts would recognise as the Asuri temperament. In the Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 16, Sri Krishna describes the Asuri disposition: those who deny the Divine order, who act from ego and desire alone, who see the world as existing purely for their exploitation. “The world is without truth, without a moral basis, without a God… What is there but desire?” (16:8). For the Asuri personality, everything, land, water, data, human beings, is a resource to be extracted. Sam Altman’s worldview is structurally identical. To look at a billion people’s data as a resource deposit. To view land and water as AI infrastructure inputs. To compute human existence as an energy cost. This is not the failure of a single man’s imagination; it is the logical terminus of a civilisation that divorced technology from ethics several centuries ago and has been running that experiment ever since. II. Monopoly, Control, and the New Colonialism The Asuri logic of Silicon Valley does not merely produce bad philosophy. It produces bad economics. Specifically, it produces a monopoly, the concentration of transformative power in the hands of a tiny number of companies and individuals who then use that power to shape, extract from, and ultimately govern the lives of billions of people who had no say in the matter. Consider the infrastructure being built. OpenAI’s ‘Stargate’ project envisions $500 billion in AI infrastructure, much of it oriented around data centres that will process the digital lives of people across the Global South, their health data, their financial transactions, their political opinions, their cultural expressions, and feed them into models that optimise for outcomes decided in San Francisco boardrooms. The data flows in one direction. The wealth flows in one direction. The control sits in one place. This is not a partnership. It is the digital infrastructure of neo-colonial extraction, dressed in the language of innovation and opportunity. The early European trading companies also came with gifts, with technology, and with the promise of mutual benefit. We know how that ended. The lazily celebrated ‘AI race’ framing, where nations compete to dominate AI, is itself a product of this worldview. Racing to dominate implies that the purpose of AI is power over others. It assumes a zero-sum world where one nation’s AI supremacy is another’s subjugation. This is precisely the mindset Dattopant Thengadi identified as the fatal flaw of both Western capitalism and Soviet communism: the reduction of all human activity to a competition for material dominance, with the strongest extracting from the weakest, and calling this progress. III. Two Summits, Two Worldviews Figure 1: Contrasting visions at the Paris AI Action Summit (2025) and the India AI Impact Summit 2026, New Delhi , JD Vance on risk appetite vs. PM Modi on human agency The contrast between the 2025 Paris AI Action Summit and the 2026 India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi is instructive. At Paris, JD Vance’s address, dismissing AI safety concerns as ‘too self-conscious’ and ‘too risk-averse’, captured the dominant American posture: move fast, regulate later, and let markets sort out the consequences. The implicit assumption is that those consequences will be borne by others. In New Delhi, the spirit was categorically different. Modi’s framing, that the question is not what AI can do, but what humans can do with it, places the human being at the centre of the story, not as a cost item but as the protagonist. The Summit drew more attendees than Paris. Senior leaders from over fifty nations were present. And yet, notably, not a single Chinese firm was visible. The story being written in New Delhi was distinctly, consciously, Indian. Journalist reports from on the ground captured what official communiqués often miss: an unmistakable sense of civilisational confidence. India’s AI ecosystem is not mimicking Silicon Valley. It is building something different: Sarvam AI, India’s first fully homegrown multimodal, multilingual large language model, beat Gemini and GPT on India-specific tasks just two days before the Summit. An Indian DeepSeek moment, celebrated not as a challenge to America but as proof of indigenous capacity. As one observer put it, “Indian tech has officially arrived on the global AI stage.” IV. The Seven Pillars and the Dharmic Difference Figure 2: The Seven Pillars of the India AI Mission: compute, datasets, future skills, safe AI, innovation, applications, and startup financing Look carefully at the architecture of the India AI Mission’s Seven Pillars. What is remarkable is not merely what they include, but the order of their priorities and the philosophy embedded in their framing. The pillars are: India AI Compute, India AI Dataset Platform, India AI Future Skills, Safe and Trusted AI, India AI Innovation Centre, India AI Application Development Initiatives, and India AI Startup Financing. Compare this with the American approach, which is essentially: build the biggest models, attract the most capital, dominate the global stack, and let diffusion happen through market mechanisms. India’s framework is structurally different. Skills and safety are not afterthoughts or regulatory burdens; they are foundational pillars, equal in architectural weight to compute and capital. India is focused heavily on AI diffusion to the last mile, preparing to become the AI-enabled society of the future. This is not merely a policy preference. It reflects a deeply Bharatiya understanding of what technology is for. In the tradition of Kautilya’s Arthashastra, the measure of good governance is Yogaksema, the attainment and protection of the welfare of all people, not just the elite. The Arthashastra states clearly: what is grown must be protected, and what is protected must be distributed (Rakshanam → Vardhitam → Vitranam). India’s AI Mission, imperfect as any policy must be, is attempting to operationalise this ancient principle at a digital scale. AI capabilities would diffuse to a depth no society has reached yet. Nine hundred million Indians are plugged into high-speed data networks. The government is focused on last-mile adoption, skilling, and safety. Scale that across 1.4 billion people, including 500 million farmers, 60 million small businesses, 250 million students, and you begin to understand why India’s AI story, if it holds its Dharmic course, will not merely be different from Silicon Valley’s, it will be vastly more consequential for human welfare. V. The Underground Cables and the New Architecture of Trust Figure 3: Google’s $15B undersea cable network connecting the US, India, Australia and South Africa via Vizag, India, as the central node of future data flows The geopolitical dimension of the India AI Impact Summit was equally significant. Google announced a $15 billion investment in undersea cables landing at Vizag, connecting the United States, India, Australia, and South Africa. Microsoft announced a $50 billion pledge to expand AI across the Global South through skilling and infrastructure. The Tata Group and OpenAI are jointly building one of the largest Stargate data centres outside the US, a one-gigawatt facility valued between $35 and $50 billion. NVIDIA’s partnerships are pervasive across every major Indian AI project. Lazy commentary in both the West and India has dismissed these deals as either ‘spectacle’ or ‘digital colonisation.’ Both readings miss the strategic reality. India negotiated these partnerships from a position of sovereign strength, not supplication. The Tata-OpenAI deal, crucially, gives India the ‘off switch’ on Indian data flows to US models, a sovereignty provision that no previous technology partnership between India and the West has achieved. India’s use of UPI’s scale for a global AI standard through the FiMI-NPCI partnership further exports India’s Digital Public Infrastructure model to the world. This is the Dharmic approach to partnership: not dominance, not submission, but reciprocity. Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, the world as one family, does not mean naive surrender of sovereignty. It means engaging with the world from a position of grounded identity and mutual benefit. The Arthashastra is clear on this: a ruler must exercise bargaining power to secure the best terms, while linking foreign technology to the development of indigenous capability. India has done precisely this. What is more, these cables bypass the Red Sea chokepoints that have made global data flows vulnerable. India, positioned at the centre of this new network architecture, becomes not merely a consumer of global AI but its infrastructure. The data corridor connecting the US, India, Australia and South Africa is, in geopolitical terms, a reorientation of the world’s digital spine away from traditional chokepoints. India is not a node in someone else’s network. India is becoming the network’s new centre of gravity. VI. The Cultured Leaders and the Bharatiya Technologist What makes this moment genuinely different from previous waves of Indian technology engagement is the emergence of a new class of Indian entrepreneur, scientist, and policy leader who is self-consciously working from within a Dharmic frame. They do not need to be told that technology must serve human flourishing. They know it in their bones, because they come from a civilisation that spent millennia thinking carefully about what human flourishing actually means. Dattopant Thengadi, whose vision of a Third Way beyond capitalism and communism has become increasingly prescient, wrote that the goal of all life is happiness, complete, solidified, eternal, and unintermittent, and that this happiness must reign at physical, mental, intellectual, and spiritual levels simultaneously. A technology policy built on this foundation looks radically different from one optimised purely for GDP growth or market capitalisation. Thengadi was also prescient about the dangers of uncritical technology adoption, “The sudden application of a new technology, useful in one set of socio-economic conditions, to a different economy in which those conditions are absent may considerably upset the socio-economic life and relations prevalent under the latter.” This is not technophobia. It is wisdom. India’s technologists who carry this wisdom, who ask not ‘can we deploy this?’ but ‘should we deploy this, and how, and for whom?’, are building something more durable than the next unicorn valuation. The Sarvam AI story is exemplary here. Founded by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, built on the principle that AI must serve India’s linguistic and cultural diversity, not flatten it. Sarvam has produced the first truly multilingual Indian LLM capable of operating across the full richness of Indic languages. This is not just technically impressive. It is Dharmic. It says: the 700 million Indians who do not speak English are not edge cases. They are the centre of the story. Their languages, their knowledge systems, and their ways of knowing are not barriers to be overcome by an English-trained model. They are assets to be served. Similarly, India’s push to embed AI into its Digital Public Infrastructure, Aadhaar, UPI, DigiLocker, represents a model of AI deployment that Silicon Valley has not imagined and cannot easily replicate. Because Silicon Valley’s model requires data monetisation to generate returns. India’s DPI model generates public value without requiring data to be sold. The business model is civic, not extractive. The architecture is Dharmic. VII. The Third Way: Beyond Capitalism and Its Discontents Arnold Toynbee, one of the greatest historians of civilisation, wrote with striking foresight, “At this supremely dangerous moment in human history, the only way of salvation for mankind is an Indian way. In the present age, the world has been united on the material plane by Western technology. But this western skill has not only annihilated distance; it has armed the peoples of the world with weapons of devastating power… The only way of salvation for mankind is the Indian way.” Thengadi built on this intuition with rigorous intellectual architecture. He identified three fundamental failures of the Western paradigm: its reduction of all value to economic value, its divorce of technology from culture and ethics, and its inability to conceive of human progress except through material accumulation and competitive dominance. The result, as he observed, was not merely philosophical failure but civilisational dysfunction: degenerative disease, psychiatric disorder, ecological destruction, wealth inequality, and the paradox of unprecedented material abundance producing unprecedented spiritual poverty. The Third Way, rooted in Dharma, offers a different grammar entirely. It holds that economics must be embedded in ethics. That technology must serve human and ecological flourishing, not dominate it. That the goal of national life is not GDP but what Thengadi called ‘Param Vaibhavam’, the pinnacle of glory of a people who have fulfilled their potential at every level: physical, cultural, spiritual and intellectual. And that this goal requires, in Kautilya’s precise formulation, that what is grown is protected, and what is protected is distributed. This is not romanticism. It is a practical programme. And India is, haltingly but unmistakably, beginning to implement it in the domain of AI. The Safe and Trusted AI pillar of the India AI Mission is not window dressing. It is an attempt to operationalise the Dharmic principle that power must be exercised responsibly and that those who wield transformative technologies bear a duty of care to those most vulnerable to their effects. India’s insistence on digital sovereignty, on maintaining the off switch, on building indigenous models, on ensuring that AI diffusion reaches the last mile, is the application of Thengadi’s principle that technology must be controlled for the benefit of the many, not extracted by the few. And India’s positioning of itself as a bridge between the Global South and the technological frontier, offering Microsoft and Google access to unparalleled data and compute scale in exchange for infrastructure, skilling, and genuine partnership, is Kautilya’s bargaining wisdom applied to the twenty-first century. VIII. Why India Will Surpass the Rest There is a quiet but growing consensus among serious observers of global technology that India is not merely a participant in the AI race but its most interesting dark horse. The reasons go beyond the obvious: the demographic dividend, the engineering talent pool, and the scale of digital adoption. They are structural and civilisational. First, India has what no other large nation possesses in comparable depth: a living intellectual tradition that asks hard questions about the relationship between knowledge, power, and ethics. The Indian scientific and entrepreneurial community does not need to import these questions from philosophy departments. They breathe them in from a culture that has been grappling with them for millennia. This gives Indian technologists a native capacity for the kind of ethical reflection that Silicon Valley is only now, painfully and reluctantly, beginning to develop. Second, India’s diversity is not a weakness but an extraordinary training ground for robust AI. The challenge of building systems that work for speakers of Tamil, Marathi, Bengali, Odia, and Gondi simultaneously, that respect the epistemic diversity of Indian knowledge systems, is vastly harder than building for a monolingual population. Systems that solve for Indian diversity will be more robust, more adaptable, and more genuinely intelligent than systems trained only on English-language internet data. Third, India’s model of AI deployment through public digital infrastructure, where the state acts as a platform builder rather than a gatekeeper, and where AI capabilities are diffused to citizens rather than monetised from them, is likely to prove far more politically sustainable than the American model. There is a growing global backlash against the concentration of AI power in the hands of a few corporations. India’s alternative model, AI as a public good, AI as DPI, AI as Yogaksema, offers a template that dozens of nations in the Global South are watching carefully and beginning to emulate. Fourth, and most profoundly, India has something that no amount of capital or compute can manufacture: cultural coherence. A shared civilisational story that gives its people a sense of who they are, what they are for, and what technology is meant to serve. Sam Altman’s anthropology of humans as inefficient training runs and produces AI companies that cannot answer the question ‘AI for what?’ without eventually arriving at answers that serve the elite few rather than humanity. While India’s Dharmic anthropology considers humans as divine sparks engaged in the great project of collective flourishing, produces a different question and a different answer. IX. The Guardrails We Owe the Young There is one challenge that the Dharmic framework demands India face honestly, and which the techno-utopian narrative conspicuously avoids: the question of the young. India has the world’s largest youth population, a median age of twenty-eight, 600 million people under twenty-five, plugged into high-speed data, aspirational, energetic, and increasingly educated. This is rightly celebrated as India’s greatest asset. But it is also a profound responsibility. A young demography exposed to AI-driven jobless growth, to development sold as material excess and dopamine-hit consumption, to a world in which their cultural identity is systematically flattened by English-language AI models trained on Western values, this is not an opportunity. It is a crisis waiting to happen. The Dharmic framework demands that India ask hard questions that the capitalist AI model cannot ask without undermining its own logic: What happens to the farmer whose expertise is replaced by an AI agronomy app but who receives none of the economic surplus that app generates? What happens to the textile artisan whose pattern-making skills are captured by a generative model and then sold back to the market without attribution or compensation? What happens to the young man in a tier-three city who has access to AI-generated entertainment twenty-four hours a day but no meaningful work, no community, no purpose? These are not merely economic questions. These are questions about what kind of human beings India’s AI future will produce. And the Dharmic tradition, with its insistence that Artha (wealth) and Kama (pleasure) must always be governed by Dharma (righteous order) and directed toward Moksha (liberation and fulfilment), is uniquely equipped to hold these questions open, to resist the easy answers, and to demand that technology serve the full spectrum of human becoming. Conclusion: The Indian Ending the World Needs Toynbee wrote that the chapter of global history begun by Western technology “will have to have an Indian ending if it is not to end in the self-destruction of the human race.” He wrote that in the mid-twentieth century. The AI revolution makes his words feel not merely prescient but urgent. The model of AI development, which sees humans as inefficient biological training runs, which treats data as a colonial resource, which measures success by market capitalisation, and which builds intelligence without conscience, will produce a world that is technically sophisticated and humanly impoverished. We are already seeing the early signs: the mental health crisis driven by algorithmically optimised social media, the democratic erosion driven by AI-powered disinformation, the ecological catastrophe driven by the energy demands of unchecked computational expansion. India, rooted in Dharma, does not need to repeat this experiment. It has the philosophical resources, the policy framework, the engineering talent, and increasingly the geopolitical positioning to offer the world something genuinely different: AI as Yogaksema. AI as Lokahita, the welfare of the world. AI that knows it is a tool in the hands of human beings, not a replacement for a human being. PM Modi said it clearly, the real question is not what AI can do, but what humans can do with it. That question, rooted in the Dharmic understanding that technology exists to serve the flourishing of all living beings, is the most important question of our age. And India, if it holds its nerve and its roots, is the civilisation most prepared to answer it. The algorithms can be built anywhere. The Dharma that governs them, that insists on asking who benefits, who bears the cost, and what kind of world we are building for our grandchildren, that comes from a very particular place. That place is Bharat. Sources and References Dattopant Thengadi, The Third Way (2000 / 2023 edition). BMS / Sahitya Sindhu. Kautilya / Chanakya, Arthashastra (Shamasastry translation, 1915). Government Oriental Library. Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 16 (Daivasura Sampad Vibhaga Yoga). India AI Impact Summit 2026, New Delhi. Field reports and official communiqués, February 2026. Anugraha Sandesh: Public Policy in Civilisational Context. Brhat Institute publications. Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History (Abridgement by D.C. Somervell, 1946). Oxford University Press. R.V. Vaidyanatha Ayyar, Public Policymaking in India (2009). Pearson Education.

Feb 23, 2026
MeowMarx

When Fact-Checking Becomes a Straw Man: The Case of Bangladeshi Hindus

Rise of Straw Man Fact-Checking: A Case for Narrative War Making another case for Narrative Warfare, the state’s sheer incompetence in theorising and visualising the threat of new-age war on Narratives, Information, and Psy-ops as a real threat within its defence policy, conscious and public discourse. This is accompanied by an outdated, inefficient Babu-cracy (bureaucracy) within the Ministry of Defence and beyond, sidelining netizens’ appeals to take notice of the matter. When we talk of Narrative Warfare, which is in a non-conventional setting that is outside the warfighting domain, this term is traditionally associated with military war doctrine and is derived from it. There exists a copious amount of literature on the subject, a well-institutionalised body, from World War I to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and civil wars in Libya and Syria. However, very little literature addresses the civilian space off the battlefield, as it is still in a nascent and emerging stage. Narrative Warfare, in this sense, concerns “communication”, the dissemination and distribution of information capable of producing both positive and negative outcomes. It is a multidimensional phenomenon; it employs an entire web of information-sharing and transmission apparatus — communication technologies, media organisations, academia, and social media ecosystems. As peopleʼs information consumption habits have shifted from mainstream sources to more democratised mediums like social media, its deep penetration into societal consciousness has expanded. This shift, a positive one, also creates a vast space for narrative warfare, making it a new battlefield. In the end, it essentially boils down to contributing to the formation of identities and ‘perceptionsʼ for the masses; norms, stereotypes, myths, political subjectivities, ideological positions, enemies, etc. Perception is everything; it is easily corruptible with the bombardment of carefully curated information, and the manner in which it is presented by those who maintain a firm grip over its sources, functioning as source actors or active stimulators. Adding to this, I want to make a distinction between an actual xenophobe and an individual. It is futile to reform a xenophobic mindset; rather, an individual, foreign or native, may hold certain notions — whether pessimistic or otherwise — including preconceived notions about certain aspects. For example, India may be perceived as better or worse by someone, which is much better to acknowledge, as on a human level people are not inherently xenophobic. As I have mentioned in the previous paragraph, perception is easily corruptible with the bombardment of carefully curated information and is also coupled with inherent human ignorance, which is not a flaw but a fundamental human condition. Narrative is not the news, but the snapshots, headlines, and images that frame it. Moving forward, we will examine one of the techniques employed in Narrative Warfare, which is termed straw manning, while reporting facts and figures— Straw Man fact checking. This has been an emerging occurrence that most of us might often see but tend to overlook, as the shift toward new-age information consumption mediums continues to expand. Internet fact-checkers, an umbrella term, include scholars, journalists, activists, theorists, historians, content writers, public intellectuals, think tank fellows, Twitter commentators, and independent fact-checkers. This whole machinery does a great disservice to the masses by diverting and manipulating real facts, figures, and grievances. It has become a weapon of mass denial, used to delegitimise the gravity of ground realities by means of selective or falsely manufactured counterproofs. This machinery is fuelled through multiple channels, such as NGOs, foreign and local political dispensations, foreign governments, lobbyists, intelligence agencies, corporates and others. For instance, in a WikiLeaks document, the U.S. ambassador to Qatar accused Al Jazeera of deliberately toning down its criticism of Saudi Arabia as part of a September 2007 agreement that ended a five-year conflict between Doha and Riyadh, labelling the network as “a diplomatic tool for its Qatari sponsors.” Another case: the Qatari-bribery scandal, wherein journalists across the world are paid or placed on payrolls to shape global narratives in Qatarʼs favour. In an interview, former Prime Minister of Qatar, Hamad bin Jassim, stated, "We had journalists on our payroll. In many countries, we would pay them. Some of them have become MPs now. Others have become patriots. I know them. We would pay [journalists] in many countries. We would pay them every year. Some of them received salaries. All the Arab countries were doing this. If not all, then most of them". (Hamad bin Jassim interview with Al-Qabas, April 2022; MEMRI TV) This does not imply generalisation; not all fact-checkers are alike. What do I mean by Straw Manning in Fact Checking? Over the past year and a half, the plight of Bangladeshi minorities- Hindus, Christians and Buddhists, has drastically worsened, especially for Hindus, who constitute the second-largest religious group. Hindus constitute about 13.1 million people out of a total population of 165.1 million. It is important to note the percentage of minorities has been declining over the years. Hindu share has fallen from 23.1% in 1971 to 7.95% in 2022. The plight of Hindus struck them in the form of one-sided communal violence towards them. As a first-order effect of this violence, erupted a series of premanufactured hateful, slurs like; ‘‘Hindus are RAW agentsʼʼ and “Burn Down ISKCON” which have been in circulation, more colloquial narratives(slurs), acting as fodder in a perpetual cycle of violence, creating a right favourable situation for existential crises in the country where the allegiance of Bangladeshi Hindus to their nation has been put under intense and unfair scrutiny, which translated into the vandalism arson and often burning of numerous Hindu homes, shops, community centers, and temples, with reports of looting and destruction of personal property. In the context of temples, Idols, and religious artifacts have been damaged or destroyed, setting fire to structures, including incidents such as around 15-20 temples being damaged shortly on 5 August 2024, and defacement at ISKCON temples in Dhaka. The danger of attacks on temples was so imminent and frequent that images began circulating on Facebook and Twitter from across the country showing students, men, and women protecting temples and churches from unruly mobs. Moving away from Urban centres, deep pockets of rural Bangladesh have also witnessed huge aggressive demonstrations and threats against Hindu individuals, including Dalit Hindus, often involving chanting slogans like ‘‘Total Malaun Deathʼʼ (Malaun is a religious slur for Hindus) on social media, instigating fear of the very “existence” in the hearts and minds of people, leading to massive hordes of Hindus on the streets of Dhaka in protest against the violence on 9 August 2024, that sparked a series of demonstrations taking place around the country. While many of the Hindus protested, thousands of them tried to flee to neighbouring India to escape the violence. The violence against Hindus sparked and gained a sudden momentum after the toppling of the elected PM Sheikh Hasinaʼs government (Awami League) and her fleeing from the country on 5 August 2024, before an unruly crowd of protesters (students, activists, civilians, opportunistic elements, political opponents and sympathisers and Islami Chhatra Shibir members) stormed the PMʼs residence. After which, in her absence, Nobel laureate Dr. Muhammad Yunus, was appointed as Chief Adviser of the interim government (temporary government). This suggestion mainly came from student protest leaders, particularly Nahid Islam and other coordinators of the July Revolution, who publicly proposed his name to President Mohammed Shahabuddin. Under him, conditions had not improved, and incidents of violence have become more frequent in both urban and rural areas. His inefficient administration of home affairs stems from his lack of experience in governance and political naivety. Although he briefly entered politics by forming a party called Nagorik Shakti in 2007; he later abandoned it, stating that he was not suited for politics, including a lack of willing candidates. This very lack of administration in curtailing and controlling the violence, his incompetence, has created a conducive environment for mobs to freely harm minorities without much strict repercussion. Moreover, Yunus and his administration had condemned the violence in past and continue to do so. He himself once urged people to protect minorities in public address. However, to a significant extent, he denies the communal persecution angle in the violence and has referred to many reports of violence as “fake news” or exaggerated. At the diplomatic level he accuses India and its government of falsely spreading propaganda about violence to tarnish Bangladeshʼs image, calling it an “Industrial Scale” of misinformation. This institutional approach of his reinforces the violence, creating a self-perpetuating loop, which acts as a blanket that conceals mob violence. As of early 2026, at the time of writing in the elections are scheduled for February 12, under Yunus, Bangladesh Nationalist Party BNP) went on to win the election. However, after nearly a year and a half of Yunusʼ interim rule, the situation of minorities remains unchanged and has not improved. The world has seen, and continues to see, acts of violence against minorities, Hindus. In 2025 alone, mob attacks claimed 197 lives, as documented by the Bangladeshi NGO Ain o Salish Kendra. In the period between the last month of 2025 and early 2026, at least 11 Hindu deaths were reported. Among them, Prantosh Kormokar, a 42-year-old Hindu gold trader, was shot dead in Raipura upazila of Narsingdi district. Jogesh Chandra Roy, 75-year-old 1971 Liberation War veteran, and his wife, Suborna Roy, were found brutally murdered in Rangpur. Dipu Chandra Das, a 27-year-old Hindu garment worker in Bhaluka, Mymensingh, was lynched by an Islamist mob after being forced to resign by his factory supervisors, who then handed him over to the crowd. The mob beat him to death, hung his body on the Dhaka–Mymensingh highway, set him on fire. For more, click here. Under Yunus, the violence has become far graver, that it triggered unprecedented expatriate protests and diaspora mobilisation across the UK, Canada, and the United States. It also entered parliamentary discourse in the United Kingdom. Expatriate Bangladeshis, and even non-Bangladeshis took to the streets outside the UK Parliament, BBC headquarters, Parliament Hill in Ottawa, and city halls across North America, holding placards. Not just that, this persistent violence drew attention from governments and international institutions. Australia raised parliamentary concerns, citing arson, looting, and damage to places of worship, while U.S. lawmakers pressed for engagement with the interim government and refugee protections. International organisations- United Nations and Amnesty International called for deescalation, impartial investigations, and accountability. Notably, political figures across the spectrum — U.S. President Donald Trump, Canadaʼs Pierre Poilievre, Netherlandʼs leader Geert Wilders, Vivek Ramaswamy, & UK MP Bob Blackman — publicly warned that the violence, arrests of Hindus, and destruction of temples signal a rapidly deteriorating situation under the interim government. For more, click here. Attacks on minorities are no new phenomenon in Bangladesh. Under Sheikh Hasina, minorities were instrumentalised but relatively shielded; violence was episodic. Under Yunus, minorities are morally defended but practically exposed, with violence becoming frequent and scattered. Apart from Hindus, two other minority communities — Buddhists & Christians — have also been victims of this violence and have witnessed a steady decline since the creation of the nation-state of Bangladesh. The Buddhist population declined from about 1% in 1974 to 0.6% in 2022, while Christians, already a small minority, fell from 0.31% in 2011 to 0.30% in 2022. For reasons partly similar to Hindus, but not due to religious persecution alone; rather the migration, economic factors, insecurity from communal pressures, and historical laws like property seizures. For more, click here. Bangladeshʼs Demographic Landscape: Trends, Pressures, and Challenges Religious minorities in Bangladesh constitute ~ 8.98% of the total population. Hindus are at 7.95%, numbering 13,130,109 people. Buddhists account for 0.61% (1,007,468), Christians 0.30% (495,475), and others 0.12% (198,190), bringing the total minority population to 14,831,242. Within the Hindus, Namasudras, Scheduled Caste, constitute the largest share, accounting for ~ 75%, the dominant caste cluster it includes sub-castes such as Bagdi, Malo, and Muci. Other Shudra communities (such as Tanti and related castes) account for 10%, while Dalit/Untouchable groups (such as Chamar & others) comprise 3.5%. In contrast, Kayastha & Baidya together represent 4% and Brahmins at around 7.5%, making them one of the smallest caste groups. Ethnography also includes multiple indigenous and tribal communities. Among them, the Chakma are the largest group at 483,299 (29.28%), followed by the Marma at 224,261 (13.59%), and the Tripuri at 156,578 (9.49%). Other notable groups include the Santal (129,049; 7.82%), Oraon (85,846; 5.20%), Garo (76,846; 4.66%), Munda 60,191; 3.65%, Mru (52,455; 3.18%), and Tanchangya (45,972; 2.79%). Collectively, ~ 50 smaller tribal groups account for 337,662 people (20.46%) of the total tribal population. Note: The above data is static and not up to date. It is primarily from the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics BBS, Population & Housing Census 2022, Ministry of Planning, GoB. Additional references include historical census data, Census of India, 1941, post-Partition demographic studies, and secondary scholarly estimates on the caste composition of Hindus in East Bengal. Attacks on Minorities (Hindus) in Bangladesh (Aug 2024-Jan 2026) Note: Some recorded attacks may overlap with acts of violence against Buddhist or Christians, who represent notably smaller minorities compared to Hindus. Nature of violence: The number of attacks does not equate to deaths alone; it includes temple vandalism & idol desecration (murti-bhang), festival-targeted violence Durga Puja & Saraswati Puja), looting donation boxes, lynching & mob attacks, attacks on Hindu priests, rape, sexual assault and intimidation to force displacement, burning homes, looting, boycotts of Hindu shops and businesses, seizure of Hindu land, extortion and “protection money” demands, abduction of Hindu girls and forced conversions or marriages, erasure of Hindu heritage, etc. The figures in the table above may vary and may not be as accurate as they should be, due to the demographic and geographic challenges posed by Bangladesh in ensuring accurate reporting and investigation. The different methodological and systematic approaches to reporting across sources further complicate the fact-finding. I wish to draw attention to this critical hurdle; the abundance of sources frequently results in contradictory figures and analytical confusion. This also warrants the attention of observers, activists, and other stakeholders outside the country who are concerned with the minorities in Bangladesh. In my findings, it was extremely difficult to rely on any single source or even a small cluster of sources. Different NGOs offered varying sets of assessments; on-the-ground activists I spoke with offered divergent accounts; and think tank reports presented yet another set of assessments. Often, with overlapping figures. To illustrate my point, an investigation conducted by Prothom Alo correspondents across 64 districts and 67 upazilas reported that 1,068 attacks occurred in 49 districts from August 5, 2024. In contrast, the Bangladesh Hindu Bouddha ChristianOikya Parishad (BHBCUP) documented 2,184 incidents between August 4 and December 31, 2024. With an additional 258 incidents reported in the first half of 2025, the total rises to 2,442 over 11 months. Meanwhile, an investigation by Netra News contested the Oikya Parishadʼs claim regarding the deaths of nine Hindu men in August, stating that these cases did not constitute anti-Hindu atrocities. Proceeding further, according to the Ain o Salish Kendra, 31 houses were attacked, 22 set on fire, one business centre was attacked, four temples targeted, and 60 attacks on Hindu statues between January and September 2025. Somoy News reported that between January and December 2025 there were 38 cases of temple vandalism, one instance of temple theft, eight cases of temple arson, and one murder. Meanwhile, the administration of Bangladesh stated that in 2025, there were 645 incidents of violence against minority communities. However, the government under Muhammad Yunus claimed that out of 645 incidents, only 71 were “communal” in nature, while the remaining 574 were categorised as “non-communal.” As noted earlier, in the most recent cases, 11 Hindus were reportedly killed between December 2025 and early 2026. Lastly, this may be a factor at the granular level affecting accurate reporting. The internet penetration in Bangladesh, which stands at around 45% according to the World Bank, creates gaps in documentation, verification, and faster dissemination. That said, the rapid expansion of mobile usage, 98.9% household penetration and 72.4% smartphone usage as per Q1 2026, signals an improved information flow and rapidly widening digital base. While it is prudent to rely on multiple sources, in this context, owing to the stateʼs plausible deniability, limited accountability, and deliberate omission through narrative makeup regarding the communal persecution angle of anti-Hindu violence, it necessitates you to adopt a hierarchy-of-sources model when assessing figures, being situated outside the country. The Great Hindu Pogroms: Narratives of Denial and Distortion How is Straw Manning a Weapon of Distraction? Given the strong likelihood of underreporting, ensuring accurate reporting and investigation is a big challenge. Often weaponised to assert the claim that “there are no attacks,” or that there is no communal persecution angle to the violence against Hindus, do not constitute anti-Hindu atrocities, where deliberate inaction or investigative incapacity becomes a tool for denying reality. This results in a burden of proof fallacy — assuming that the proposition “Hindus are safe here” is true. Deconstructing Structural Logic of Straw Man Fact-Checking Suppose there are 100 reported incidents of attacks on Hindus, and out of those, 10 of them are false or exaggerated. Instead of assessing the full dataset, their focus becomes fixated on those 10 disputed cases because they serve a particular narrative. These select cases are then used as the primary basis for fact-checking. By making those 10 instances the benchmark, it is implied or argued outright that the remaining 90 incidents are likewise false or unreliable. In our case, the entire narrative apparatus — ranging from random individuals on social media (including Twitter commentators) to journalists, activists, public intellectuals, politicians, officials of the interim Bangladeshi government, Chief Adviser Yunus, and of course, so-called fact-checkers — has been engaged in shaping the discourse. Many of these actors accuse Indian newsroom studios in Noida and Delhi of orchestrating a conspiracy against “us” Bangladesh). They argue that they have successfully countered what they describe as anti-Bangladesh propaganda aimed at tarnishing the countryʼs image on the global stage. On that basis, they assert that there are no attacks, thereby adding another layer of narrative insulation that effectively conceals instances of mob violence. Let Us Understand This Through Visualisation and Analogy The visual disparity highlights the significant majority of true cases. Even though there are some inconsistencies in the data, these imperfections are inherent to the nature of data collection, which leads to the accumulation of faulty data. However, these flaws do necessarily mean that the data is fraudulent or unreliable. The proof of evidence and sufficient supply of validated data points outweigh any isolated inaccuracies. OR If you have 100 apples, and 10 are rotten, it would be absurd to claim all apples are bad based solely on the 10 rotten ones. Instead, one should evaluate the remaining 90 apples individually to determine their quality. Conclusion What we observe here is how fact-checking has become a weapon of mass denial within the broader framework of narrative warfare. Numerous internet actors have used this to create distraction, trigger panic, and flood the information space with managed counter-narratives, as we witnessed during the days of Operation Sindoor. To counter this threat, a decentralised response is insufficient. What is required is an institutionalised and top-down approach which government bodies are capable of doing or can implement with state support, as seen in the cases of Qatar and the government of Pakistan. What do you think about this article? Let me know in the comments! Footnotes: 2024 Bangladesh Anti-Hindu Violence. 2025 Bangladesh anti-Hindu violence. Attacks on Hindus Expose Bangladeshʼs Failing Political Transition. Growing Attacks on Hindus in Bangladesh Transition. Data Exposes Bangladeshʼs Dismal Minority Record Amid Rise in Hindu Killings. Bangladesh: Hindus Face Brutality; 2,400 Attacks Post-Ouster of Sheikh Hasina.Year After Hasina: Defiant Awami League and Rising Mob Violence Threaten Bangladeshʼs Stability. ‘Our Lives Donʼt Matterʼ: In Post-Hasina Bangladesh, Hindus Fear Future. Nearly 650 People Killed in Recent Spate of Violence in Bangladesh: UN Report. Report on Violence in Bangladesh. © Wokeistan.