Thank you for allowing this urgent question, Mr Speaker.
Since the fall of the previous Government in August, Bangladesh has seen more than 2,000 incidents of violence, most of which have been targeted against the minority Hindu community. Hindus make up less than 10% of the population of Bangladesh. As my hon. Friend will be aware, anti-Hindu violence has been a recurrent event in Bangladesh. Indeed, earlier this year, the Jamaat-e-Islami party was banned after riots in which 200 people were killed.
While Bangladesh no longer has the secular constitution of 1971 and became an Islamic state in 1988, there are none the less supposed to be protections for minority religions under the constitution, including articles 28 and 39. However, these appear not to be being enforced. There are reports of police and army standing by, as more than 20 places of minority Hindu and Sufi worship were vandalised and their worshippers attacked. This came to a head on Friday, when extremist groups from the Jamaat-e-Islami party attacked two Hindu temples in Chittagong and conducted a campaign of orchestrated violence against the Hindu population.
A leading Hindu monk, Chinmoy Krishna Das, a former leader of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness has been arrested. ISKCON is a worldwide branch of modern Hinduism with its UK headquarters at Bhaktivedanta Manor in Bushey, many of whose worshippers live in my constituency of Brent West and the surrounding areas of north-west London. People are concerned that while he was engaged in exclusively peaceful protest, he has been denied due process, charged with sedition and refused bail, yet none of the individuals who attacked the temples has been apprehended or charged. On Saturday, senior Bangladeshi journalist Munni Saha was taken into police custody following an attack on her car by a large mob in Dhaka, and released only under the provisions of the criminal code.