Basant Panchami, dedicated to Maa Saraswati, is traditionally the subcontinent’s most serene festival – a celebration of learning, music, and the gentle arrival of spring. Yet in recent years, this very festival has repeatedly become a flashpoint for targeted hostility against Hindu minorities in Bangladesh and Pakistan, ranging from vandalism of murtis and arson on temples to physical assaults and state‑level bans.​​

What emerges from the documented incidents is not a series of isolated “law and order” disturbances, but a pattern: the criminalization, intimidation and gradual erasure of visible Hindu religio‑cultural life in regions where Hindus are already demographically vulnerable. For a Bharatiya audience, this is both a civilizational concern and a geopolitical signal; for global observers, it is a stark case study in how majoritarian states manage—or fail to manage—religious pluralism.

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Ten incidents, one pattern

This article delves on some of the major Basant Panchami–linked attacks or restrictions between 2018 and 2025: nine in Bangladesh and one in Pakistan. They span at least seven districts in Bangladesh—Rajshahi, Patuakhali, Brahmanbaria, Chapainawabganj, Netrokona, Chattogram, Bogura, Gopalganj and Dinajpur—plus a nationwide ban in Pakistan, showing geographical spread rather than local aberration.​​

Key episodes illustrate the escalation:

• In February 2025, Islamist mobs in Phudki Para village, Rajshahi, assaulted Hindu women, smashed a Saraswati murti and vandalised the pandal during visarjan, despite public assurances of protection from Bangladesh’s interim chief adviser Muhammad Yunus.​
• In January–February 2024, a Hindu family in Patuakhali was attacked for the “offence” of inviting the mayor to their Saraswati Puja, while a separate incident in Brahmanbaria saw a pandal destroyed and the murti’s head severed and thrown away after devotees had dispersed.​
• In January 2023 in Netrokona district, 9–10 Muslim men attacked a Basant Panchami pandal when stopped from shooting videos, injuring worshippers and completely dismembering the goddess’s murti; six accused, including one Farooq Mia, were arrested.​

These are not crowd‑control failures at massive rallies, but attacks on small, localized, often youth‑organized or family‑organized pujas—precisely the spaces where a vulnerable community exercises its remaining cultural agency.​

From vandalism to structural intimidation

The violence is not limited to one‑off assaults; it frequently targets the ecosystem that sustains the festival. In January 2022, extremists vandalized around 35 Saraswati murtis at the workshop of sculptor Basudev Paul in Boalkhali, Chattogram, effectively attacking the supply chain of icons for multiple communities at once. In 2021 in Dhunat upazila, Bogura, a temple’s Saraswati murti was beheaded and partially burnt along with the temple fence and clothes, suggesting a deliberate attempt to desecrate and terrorize rather than spontaneous mischief.​

Arson attacks in Gopalganj in February 2020 further reveal this method: a Kali temple saw the clothes and ornaments of four murtis burnt, while a Basant Panchami pandal at a local school‑college campus was attacked separately. The selection of targets—temples, school premises, artisan workshops—indicates a strategy of psychological warfare: sending a message that Hindu religious expression, especially in educational or public institutional spaces, carries risks.​​

Bangladesh: shrinking space for Hindus

Bangladesh’s own census and international reporting confirm that Hindus are now about 7.9–8 percent of the population, roughly 13.1 million out of 165 million people. This is a steep decline from the early decades after Partition, when non‑Muslims in what was then East Pakistan made up over 20 percent of the population. Today Hindus remain the largest minority, but with fragile leverage in a polity that is over 91 percent Muslim.​

The Basant Panchami incidents must be read against a wider backdrop of attacks: the Bharatiya government recently told Parliament that 3,582 incidents targeting Hindus and other minorities were recorded in Bangladesh over a 10‑year period, while 334 such incidents were noted in Pakistan over a similar horizon. One civil society report counted 76 attacks on Hindus in Bangladesh in just two months—between late November 2024 and late January 2025. In such an environment, even when local police arrest a few culprits, deterrence is weak and victims are acutely aware of the asymmetry of power.​​

Pakistan: when the state bans spring

If Bangladesh’s pattern is one of social and semi‑state intimidation, Pakistan presents the other side of the coin: formal state restriction. Since 2007, successive Pakistani governments have maintained a blanket ban on the Basant (kite‑flying) festival, ostensibly for safety reasons, but in practice uprooting the Punjabi Hindu cultural celebration deeply associated with spring, colour and cross‑community participation.​​

In February 2018, the government again refused to relax the ban and threatened action even against police officials who allowed violations, reiterating that the prohibition remained total. Demographically, Hindus in Pakistan constitute only about 1.6 percent of the population—roughly 3.8 million people according to the 2023 census—yet are the largest minority community. In a state that aggressively defines itself in Islamic terms, the criminalization or suffocation of festivals like Basant marks an ideological choice: to purge the public sphere of shared Indic cultural legacies that pre‑date and transcend the Pakistani nation‑state.​​

Why Basant Panchami is targeted

Basant Panchami and Saraswati Puja stand at an uncomfortable intersection for Islamist hardliners: they are explicitly Hindu, strongly associated with women’s participation, and embedded in educational spaces such as schools, colleges and coaching centres. Many of the documented attacks occurred in or near educational institutions—Chatalpar Degree College, school‑college campuses, hostels, and village schools—where the murti of Saraswati symbolizes not just religious devotion but the legitimacy of Hindu presence in the knowledge sphere.​​

The triggers cited—loud music from a sound box in Chapainawabganj, inviting a mayor to a family‑organized puja in Patuakhali, refusing photography at Netrokona—are strikingly trivial. This triviality is the point: it signals that any pretext suffices to discipline Hindus back into invisibility. The repeated beheading or mutilation of murtis—cutting off heads, arms, breaking wrists—adds a performative brutality, aimed at broadcasting dominance and blasphemizing what the minority holds sacred.​​

Law, impunity, and the optics of “secularism”

Official responses are mixed and often cosmetic. In Netrokona, police arrested six accused; in other cases, authorities registered FIRs or promised investigations after media coverage. Yet the recurrence of similar attacks year after year in the same districts suggests that prosecutions are rare, penalties light, and local power structures—party cadres, madrasa networks, student groups—largely insulated.​​

At the same time, both Bangladesh and Pakistan leverage minority‑safety rhetoric for international consumption. Bangladesh’s interim chief adviser explicitly pledged adequate protection for Hindus, but the 2025 Rajshahi attack occurred under that very assurance. Pakistan cites constitutional guarantees for minorities even as it maintains a sweeping ban on a spring festival with deep Hindu‑Sikh‑Muslim roots in Punjab. The gap between text and practice is precisely where Hindus experience a “managed toleration”: tolerated enough to avoid global censure, intimidated enough to prevent visible flourishing.​​

Civilizational stakes for Bharat

For Bharat, these are not merely “foreign internal matters”. Bangladesh and Pakistan sit atop regions that were once vibrant centres of Indic civilisation—from ancient Bengal’s learning traditions to Sindh and Punjab’s bhakti‑sufi continuum. The attacks on Saraswati Puja are symbolically attacks on the continuity of that civilisational memory, carried by communities that refused to migrate even after Partition and 1971.​

Data underline the long arc of attrition: non‑Muslims in (East) Pakistan dropped from over 23 percent in 1947 to under 8 percent today, while Hindus in Pakistan remain around 1–2 percent despite absolute numbers rising slightly. Each desecrated murti, each attacked pandal, is a micro‑step in this demographic‑cultural squeeze. For a Bharatiya audience, the question is no longer whether Hindus across the border face structural hostility, but what proactive, sustained responses—diplomatic, cultural, humanitarian—can be built beyond perfunctory condemnations.​

A call for honest global attention

For international readers, the Basant Panchami dossier should be read as a warning about how religious freedom collapses not only through spectacular pogroms but through low‑intensity, recurring violence concentrated on festivals, symbols and spaces of minority confidence. The cumulative effect of ten such incidents in seven years, layered over thousands of other attacks, is a steady internal displacement of a community’s spiritual life into the private and the clandestine.​​

Basant Panchami was never just about kites and yellow saris; it was about the right of a civilisation to publicly honour knowledge, music and feminine divinity without fear. When that right is systematically contested in Bangladesh and Pakistan, it should ring alarms in New Delhi, Washington, Brussels and Dhaka alike—because a world that cannot guarantee the safety of a Saraswati Puja in a village school has already conceded far too much ground to intolerance.

Source: 10 Incidents: Basant Panchami Under Attack in Bangladesh and Pakistan (2018-2025)