Hindu Minorities in South Asia: A Case of Systematic Erasure of a Civilization

From Afghanistan’s near-complete disappearance of the Hindu population, from approximately 700,000 in the 1970s to fewer than 7000 by 2021, to the ongoing systematic violence against Hindus in Bangladesh and Pakistan, this pattern is rather a recurring one. Yet the international community remains hesitant, dismissive, and apathetic to this silent massacre. The Hindu minorities across South Asia are being systematically displaced through institutionalized persecution, mechanisms facilitating their extinction, and yet, the global human rights apparatus remain largely silent on what constitutes a regional crisis of conscience. 

Evidence and narratives demonstrate that while the proportion of the Hindu population has diminished notably across Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, and Afghanistan, the majority religious communities have expanded in parallel. However, this is not an organic demographic change; it is a product of deliberate amendments privileging the said religions, legal statutes enabling land confiscation, police complicity in the cases of mob violence, and the absence of accountability that emboldens these perpetrators. 

However, to understand the scope of this crisis, one must first grasp the scale of this demographic collapse. For instance, in Bangladesh, Hindus represented nearly 22% of the population in 1951. By 1974, this figure had fallen to 13.5%, and by 2022, to 6.9% (Indian Express, 2024). In Pakistan, Hindus comprise approximately 1.96 million or 1.2% of the total population, with 96% residing in rural Sindh often as landless bonded laborers. In Bhutan, over 100,000 members of the Lhotshampa minority, primarily Hindu ethnic Nepalis, were expelled in the 1990s under discriminatory citizenship laws and the “One Nation, One People” policy. Afghanistan represents the most extreme case of erasure, once-thriving Hindu and Sikh populations reduced to single digits. In the case of Bangladesh, the ethic erasure of the Chakma Buddhist Hindus from the Chittagong Hill Tracts is not a standalone instance, which yet has a superseding and heinous precedent, i.e., the horrors of the 1971 partition. 

What unites these disparate cases is their institutional architecture. The state, through authority and inaction, sanctions the erasure of Hindu communities. Bangladesh illustrates this process viscerally. On December 18, 2025, Dipu Chandra Das, a 27-year-old garment worker in Mymensingh, was beaten to death by a mob and his body set ablaze on a tree. The initial revelation about the case exposed that the alleged blasphemy against Islam was the prime causation. However, later on, police investigation found no evidence of any such defamatory remarks (Dhaka Tribune, 2025). Instead, the violence emerged from a workplace dispute. Das had been dismissed from his factory job, and colleagues weaponized religious accusations to incite mob violence. 

This lynching epitomizes how institutionalized hatred, working in tandem with state authorization, translates into mobocracy. Yet, the case of Dipu Das is not an isolated tragedy. During the political unrest following Sheikh Hasina’s resignation in 2024, more than 2000 documented attacks targeted minorities across Bangladesh, including 69 temple desecrations and the looting or burning of 157 homes. Five Hindus were killed in Khulna Division alone. 

The broader pattern reveals how institutional discrimination breeds violence. The Vested Property Act (previously the Enemy Property Act) has enabled the confiscation of approximately 40% of Hindu-owned land. The 1988 constitutional amendment making Islam the state religion, combined with vague blasphemy laws, created the legal framework enabling this violence. Abul Barkat, in his book “Deprivation of Hindu  Minority: A Story of Perpetual Discrimination,” writes that the implementation of this act between 1965 and 2006 directly impacted 12 lakh households and 60 lakh Hindus, resulting in the loss of their properties. The Bangladeshi Hindus lost over 26 lakh acres of land, and many families were financially destitute. 

Pakistan’s approach to Hindu minorities differs tactically, but shares the same institutional goal. Rather than episodic lynching, Islamabad has systematized forced religious conversion. The UN has repeatedly documented instances of administrative and legal lapses in the protection of minorities in Pakistan. According to reports, over 1000 minority girls are forcibly converted each year in Pakistan, the vast majority from Sindh’s Dalit Hindu communities. 109 registered cases of abduction, forced conversion, and forced marriage of Hindu women and girls occurred between January and November 2023 alone. Most importantly, these statistics likely represent only documented cases. Many conversions occur in remote rural areas without any oversight. And the state participates directly in this system. In June 2023, Pakistan’s Higher Education Commission banned the celebration of the Hindu festival Holi on institute campuses to preserve ‘Islamic identity’ and ‘sociocultural values’ – exemplifying how state apparatus actively constrains Hindu cultural expression. More broadly, blasphemy laws function as the prosecutorial machinery through which Hindu minorities are persecuted. While the constitutional framework nominally guarantees non-Muslims the freedom to profess and practice their religion, the constitutional hierarchy encoded through the Objective Resolution privileges Islam, and enforcement mechanisms systematically target minorities. Hindu temples have been demolished or seized; the only Hindu temple in Lahore was destroyed in 2007 to make way for commercial development, while state authorities provide minimal protection for Hindu worship spaces or property.

Afghanistan and Bhutan present different but equally troubling cases. The documented Hindu and Sikh population has moved from hundreds of thousands to single digits. This is not gradual emigration but forced displacement enabled by state weakness under Taliban rule and systematic persecution. The Taliban’s introduction and enforcement of strict religious edicts severely restrict the religious freedom of minorities; Hindu and Sikh families face crime, land-grabbing, societal discrimination, harassment, and reported instances of violence. The international community has largely ignored this complete erasure of populations that inhabited Afghanistan for centuries. 

More than 100,000 ethnic Nepalese, predominantly Hindu, were forced out of Bhutan in the early 1990s by authorities who sought to impose the country’s dominant Buddhist culture. This Hindu population has lived as refugees in Nepal ever since, with no mechanism for homecoming or rehabilitation despite decades of negotiations and back channel talks. Arguably, the most disturbing facet of this erasure in Bhutan is that, cleansing of the Hindu minorities was adopted as a deliberate state policy. The preference for Mahayana Buddhism and Drukpa cultural identity continues to marginalize the remaining Lhotshampa minorities, from suppression of linguistic and political rights to inequitable treatment of non-Buddhist places of worship.

These cases reveal structural similarities that distinguish systematic persecution from isolated communal violence. First, constitutional and legal frameworks explicitly privilege certain religions over others. Bangladesh’s 1988 amendment, Pakistan’s Zia-era constitutional changes, Bhutan’s explicit Buddhist preference, and Afghanistan’s Taliban edicts all encode hierarchical religious citizenship. When the law books privilege specific religion, the state itself becomes the facilitator and the source of institutional discrimination. Second, impunity architecture enables violence. When perpetrators face no accountability, when police fail to intervene or actively participate in curb themob violence, when courts are slow to prosecute cases, the message is clear: violence against minorities carries no cost. Bangladesh's inadequate response to repeated temple attacks, Pakistan's failure to prosecute forced conversion cases, and Bhutan's continued exile of the Lhotshampa demonstrate how institutional indifference enables persecution to persist. Third, political incentives reward extremism. In Bangladesh, anti-minority violence escalates during political instability as leaders weaponize communal sentiment. In Pakistan, Islamist parties have made enforcing stricter religious codes a political platform. In Afghanistan, Taliban enforcement of religious edicts garners legitimacy. The political economy of persecution creates incentives for its continuation.

What makes this crisis particularly severe is the international silence and back-channel legitimacy. International human rights agencies have published reports, UN bodies have issued statements, and NGOs have compiled data. Yet this documentation rarely translates into any cohesive or sustained diplomatic pressure, material sanctions, boycotts, or any of the international accountability mechanisms. Hindu suffering is systematically reframed as these killings become “violent clashes,” forced conversions become “voluntary decisions,” and ethnic cleansing is rendered as “migration.”  Despite being one of the world’s most prosperous and long-standing religious communities, Hindus rarely receive recognition as victims. Hindu persecution does not fit the ideological templates that dominate global rights narratives. Western discourse on minority rights tends to emphasize certain narratives while rendering Hindu victimhood invisible.

The question for the global intelligentsia is no longer whether persecution exists; the evidence is unambiguous, documented across multiple countries and institutions. The question is why the slow-motion disappearance of entire populations fails to trigger the international mobilization that characterizes responses to other human rights crises. From Afghanistan to Bhutan to Bangladesh to Pakistan, Hindu minorities are being demographically displaced through law, violence, and institutional indifference. This is not a communal tension or an isolated incident. This is systematic erasure engineered through constitutional preference, enabled by impunity, and sustained by international silence. Until Hindu persecution across South Asia is recognized not as a cultural footnote but as a central moral emergency requiring urgent, sustained, and coordinated international response, the erasure will continue. The documentary record is complete. Justice remains outstanding.

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