A controversy surrounding the construction of a mosque on indigenous lands in Bangladesh reveals how nationalist narratives hide and disregard the realities of military-led and exploitative tourism that continues to harm the region’s indigenous communities.
In a Facebook post on May 8, Nazmul Ahasan, the Executive Editor of Netra News, argued that concerns surrounding the construction of a mosque in a tourist area in the Chittagong Hill Tracts reflected the “normalization” of “raw Islamophobia” among “minority communities”. He questioned the reason for such a “mindless knee-jerk opposition” to the mosque construction, claiming that the Facebook group Indigenous Voice CHT had offered “no real reason” for opposing it in their post, while also arguing that tourists visiting the Hill Tracts have every right to access a mosque for their religious needs.
It should be mentioned here that Indigenous Voice CHT, in fact, did explain that the main concern is not the construction of a mosque itself. The decision to build it without consulting the local Jumma communities, whose history, culture, and opinions it said had been ignored, and that development in the Hill Tracts should take place through meaningful consultation with them, which is also outlined in the CHT Accord 1997. Given that Ahasan works for a respected news organization that regularly reports on human rights violations, authoritarianism, militarization, and issues concerning the Hill Tracts, the post was particularly surprising.
At the same time, Ahasan’s argument reproduced a familiar nationalist narrative that renders invisible the distinctive political history and present of the Chittagong Hill Tracts. This narrative completely ignores the fact that the region remains heavily militarized, that Adibashi communities continue to await the land restitution promised under the 1997 CHT Accord signed nearly three decades ago, that land remains the central unresolved political question in the region. Instead, it implicitly treats the Hill Tracts as no different from any other district of Bangladesh.
The Hill Tracts have long been treated as an internal frontier, understood primarily through a military lens and framed within discourses of national security and territorial integrity. This narrative invisibilizes the cruel othering of the region since the birth of the nation and reduces the present reality of living under military occupation, where both Bengalis and Adibashis suffer unnecessarily.
This assumption is far removed from the lived realities of the region. Underlying this mainstream nationalist narrative is the premise that the region functions like any other part of the country and should therefore be governed by the same logic of tourism, development, and market demand. From this perspective, it would be normal to expect tourists to have access to a mosque, that constructing one is an unremarkable public amenity, and that opposition to such a project can only be explained as religious prejudice.
This framing deliberately strips the issue of its political and historical context. It ignores the long history through which infrastructure, settlement, and state institutions have become entangled with Adibashi dispossession and demographic transformation. By flattening the exceptional political conditions of the Hill Tracts into the normative assumptions of the Bangladeshi nation-state, such narratives obscure the historical experiences that shape life in the Hill Tracts and, in the process, reproduce the very forms of erasure they fail to recognize.
But my article is not intended to single out one journalist’s comments. As someone who worked in print journalism in Bangladesh for many years, I am also not entirely surprised by such a reductive interpretation. It reflects a way of understanding the Chittagong Hill Tracts that is deeply embedded in mainstream discourse.
My career as a journalist brought me into close engagement with Adibashi activists, experiences that fundamentally reshaped my own understanding of the region. They taught me how essential it is for journalists to engage seriously with the political history of the Hill Tracts and to resist flattening the realities of militarization, dispossession, and the ongoing legacy of military occupation into the assumptions of an ordinary district of Bangladesh.
My article comes from my continued belief in journalism’s transformative potential to shape public understanding of the Hill Tracts. Because journalists play such an important role in shaping public opinion, especially at a moment of profound political change in Bangladesh, it is essential to examine why seemingly straightforward arguments can have damaging consequences. If journalism is to contribute meaningfully to democratic debate, it must engage with the Hill Tracts from the perspectives of those who have long been marginalized, dispossessed, and oppressed, rather than reproducing state-centred narratives that erase Indigenous histories, experiences, and political claims.
I began my career in journalism as a trainee feature writer with no formal training in the profession. Like many young journalists at the time, I joined The Daily Star out of a love of reading and writing and an almost uncritical admiration for the newspaper itself. The Daily Star offered young people like us an extraordinary privilege: the opportunity to read widely, to write for a national, albeit very privileged and educated, audience, and to learn journalism by doing it. Those of us without any theoretical grounding in journalism acquired our craft on the job, through feedback and comments from the editor of the Star Weekend Magazine and Forum Magazine, where I worked. However, for years, I knew remarkably little about the politics of the Chittagong Hill Tracts.
That began to change in 2007 and 2008, when Bangladesh was under a military-backed caretaker government. It was a defining period not only for journalism but also for the political consciousness of many young reporters. Tasneem Khalil, incidentally Nazmul Ahasan’s supervisor at Netra News, was abducted and tortured by the military in May 2007 for being critical of the state’s military and paramilitary agencies. It was difficult to comprehend that someone who had been laughing over coffee on the rooftop of our Karwan Bazar office one day could face such a consequence for simply writing. But that was also our first lesson about the consequences journalists could face for writing about state violence and the military in Bangladesh. It was an embodied education in the coercive capacity of the state.
Those two years under the state of emergency were profoundly educational in revealing the workings of state power. During that period, Ranglai Mro, a headman from Sualok Union, was abducted and tortured after protesting land grabbing in Bandarban. Around the same time, Garo leader Choles Richil, who had been organizing against the dispossession of Adibashi communities in the Modhupur Forest, was tortured and killed by members of the military. Looking back, it was through these events that what was happening in the Hill Tracts and other Adibashi regions began to take on a very different meaning for many of us.
Years later, my friend Samari Chakma, an Adibashi women’s rights activist and lawyer from Khagrachhari, reflected on that period with a remark that stayed with me. She said, “So Bengalis are finally beginning to understand what it is like to live in the Hill Tracts.” For most Bangladeshis, military rule lasted only two years under the state of emergency. For the Adibashis of the Hill Tracts, however, military-dominated governance has been a lived reality since the 1980s.
Following Choles Richil’s killing, Star Weekend Magazine editor Aasha Mehreen Amin assigned me to write a feature on his torture and death. Receiving photographs of his brutalized body was deeply disturbing. While reporting the story, I met Adibashi rights activist Sanjeeb Drong for the first time and interviewed him about the violence inflicted on Richil. After the article was published, I felt compelled to pursue the story further, something I rarely did at that stage in my career.
By then, Tasneem’s abduction had already cast a chilling shadow over the newspaper office. We, who did not work directly in the newsroom, were largely unaware of the difficult negotiations taking place behind the scenes to free Tasneem. Before my follow-up article was published, it was sent to the editor, Mahfuz Anam, for review. That rarely happened with my work, and I remember feeling anxious. A few editorial revisions were made, but one instruction was absolute: my byline had to be removed.
At the time, I found the decision very disappointing. I had done all the due diligence of attributing my sources and checking facts. But I was told it was too risky for me to be named the author of an article that detailed military torture and murder.
It was also during this state of emergency that more than 70 Adibashi homes were burned down in Sajek in an attack that took place within the vicinity of a military checkpoint. I was unable to travel to Sajek myself, but I interviewed journalists and civil society members who had visited the area and documented the violence. The attack prompted the reconstitution of the International Chittagong Hill Tracts Commission that same year.
In 2009, while still working at The Daily Star, I joined the Commission members as an interpreter for its international members during a fact-finding mission. It was my first visit to the Chittagong Hill Tracts. By then, the reign of the military-backed caretaker government had ended, and the Awami League had returned to power with an overwhelming electoral mandate. For much of Bangladesh, there was a palpable sense of relief that military rule was over.
My first journey to the Hill Tracts, however, revealed a very different reality. While the military had retreated from the rest of the country, the three hill districts remained under an extensive military presence. At each checkpoint, the Commission’s international members were required to stop, present their passports, register their identities, and answer questions before being allowed to proceed. What had ended elsewhere in Bangladesh had not ended in the Hill Tracts. It was my first direct encounter with the region as an occupied political space rather than simply another administrative district of the country.
After joining the CHT Commission as its coordinator later in 2009, I was also able to follow the many faces of military occupation in the Hill Tracts more closely. Since that first arson attack in Sajek, and another one in 2010 where around 400 homes of Indigenous people were burned down, the region was turned into a pristine tourist spot controlled by the military where tourists get military protection to get in and out of the region.
In fact, much of the tourism in the Hill Tracts is controlled by the military. This is where the disconnect of Ahasan’s and many others’ characterization of tourism shows up. Such narratives are completely devoid of the reality of the Hill Tracts. Opposition towards mosque construction is not hostility toward Muslims or towards tourists.
Tourism is not disconnected from the area’s history. In fact, the original post explains that Alutila was once a sacred landscape for Jumma communities and that there were no permanent settlements there. It was only after the area became a popular destination for Bengali tourists that its cultural and geographical character began to change, as tourism infrastructure and settlement expanded. The central concern, therefore, is not the existence of a mosque or the religious practices of visitors. It is the continued transformation of Adibashi land without the participation or consent of the people who live there.
The invocation of the term Islamophobia is, of course, conceptually incorrect to use in this context. Islamophobia is a real and deeply consequential form of racism and discrimination experienced by Muslims, particularly in Europe and North America, where Muslims occupy a marginalized minority position. In Canada, for example, Muslim communities continue to experience hate crimes and discrimination, from the 2021 murder of the Afzaal family in London, Ontario, where I live, by a man who targeted them because they were visibly Muslim, to legislative debates in Quebec over restrictions on religious symbols, including the hijab, for many public sector employees.
In the United States and other Western countries, Muslims have long been subjected to suspicion, racial profiling, and the casual association of Islam with terrorism in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. These are manifestations of Islamophobia because they emerge within political and social contexts in which Muslims are a minority and are disproportionately targeted through structures of power that privilege other religious and cultural majorities.
Bangladesh presents a fundamentally different context. More than 90 percent of the country’s population is Muslim, and Islam occupies a dominant position in public life, political discourse, and national culture. The state’s commitment to secularism has steadily weakened over the decades, while Islamic symbols, practices, and institutions have become increasingly embedded in everyday social and political life. Public greetings, religious holidays, state ceremonies, and legal regulations all reflect the cultural dominance of Islam. Political actors have repeatedly mobilized Islamic identity, and violence has often been justified in its name.
In this context, describing Adibashi objections to a development project as Islamophobia is a mischaracterization, to say the least. Islam has been politically used in the Hill Tracts since occupation began there. The Hill Tracts cannot be understood without acknowledging the longer history of religious institutions, including mosques, becoming entangled with processes of land appropriation and demographic transformation in the Hill Tracts where religious infrastructure has, at times, accompanied broader processes of settlement, dispossession, and the expansion of state authority.
In their extensive fieldwork on land grabbing in the Hill Tracts, Shapan Adnan and Ranajit Dastidar describe how encroachment on Adibashi land often unfolded through a deliberate sequence. In one Marma village, settlers first occupied the land, then constructed houses, and later established a mosque and a school to legitimize their presence and to make the return of the land more difficult, politically and socially. This was not an isolated incident but part of a broader strategy of land appropriation.
In addition, Kabita Chakma and Glen Hill have shown how the Chittagong Hill Tracts experienced a dramatic expansion of Islamic institutions from the 1970s onward. The authors have documented how the number of mosques increased from just 40 in 1961 to more than 2,200 by 2001. The concerns over the construction of the mosque in Alutila are thus informed by historical experiences in which religious institutions have been central to the expansion of settlement, state authority, and the loss of Indigenous land.
Journalism plays a crucial role in exposing injustice and holding power to account. But objective and historically informed reporting on the Hill Tracts is few and far between. This was recently observed by Denim Chakma, a journalist from the Hill Tracts who has in fact written extensively on the region for Netra News, in a Facebook post reflecting on the deteriorating state of journalism in the CHT. Denim argued that journalism in the Hill Tracts has become increasingly marginalized, with the decline of Adibashi journalists and growing political pressures producing self-censorship and limiting independent reporting, saying that national media narratives obscure the region’s political realities.
The Hill Tracts have long been treated as an internal frontier, understood primarily through a military lens and framed within discourses of national security and territorial integrity. This narrative invisibilizes the cruel othering of the region since the birth of the nation and reduces the present reality of living under military occupation, where both Bengalis and Adibashis suffer unnecessarily.
Nationalist narratives echo many familiar right-wing, military settler-colonial talking points and a disregard for the realities of military-led and exploitative tourism that continues to harm Adibashi communities in the region. It also ignores the fact that longstanding land disputes in the Hill Tracts remain unresolved and that the livelihoods and rights of local Adibashi communities, who have ancestral, cultural and religious ties to their lands, should take precedence over the majoritarian demands of Bengali-Muslim middle-class tourists.
Image Credit: Adam Jones / Wikimedia Commons ( CC BY-SA 2.0)
