Bangladesh‘s former Chief Advisor Muhammad Yunus had been selected for the top post even before former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina fled Dhaka during violent protests in 2024. This explosive revelation was made by his former press secretary, Shafiqul Alam. Interestingly, Agence France-Presse (AFP) “journalist” Qadaruddin Shishir acted as an intermediary between the alleged student leaders and the Nobel laureate.
The discussions with Yunus had already begun two days before Hasina was undemocratically removed on 5th August 2024, as an operation to bring about regime change was already underway. Shishir had reached out to him as a representative of the “students” to invite him to head the interim government.
The man who facilitated these talks had previously served as AFP’s “Bangladesh fact-check editor” and launched his own website, The Dissent, in 2025. However, he is also an admirer of another purported “fact-checker,” Mohammed Zubair of Alt News, and has a history of providing ideological cover to Islamists, downplaying the persecution of Hindus and labelling India as an intolerant nation under the Modi government.
His concerted effort to shape the narrative became particularly evident after the collapse of the Hasina government, which plunged Bangladesh into a bloody wave of violence against minorities, particularly Hindus.
However, Shishir, instead of condemning the radicals or holding the authorities accountable for failing to protect the citizens, sought to dismiss the deep-rooted hatred that had swiftly translated into rampant aggression against the community, in the name of countering a post that read “500 Hindus were killed in the country,” insisting that there were “no credible reports of any Hindu being killed or raped.”
Although there are media reports about homes of minorities have been torched or vandalised by mob in last 24 hours in BD, no credible reports of any Hindu was killed or raped. ‘killing of over 500 Hindus’ is untrue.
— Qadaruddin Shishir (@Qshishir1) August 6, 2024
However, it was subsequently revealed that between 4th and 20th August, 2,010 instances of communal violence unfolded in 68 out of 76 districts and metropolitan areas nationwide, with nine individuals killed. The Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Oikya Parishad shared this information at a news conference held at Dhaka Reporters Unity (DRU)’s Nasrul Hamid Auditorium in September. Khulna was the worst-affected division, where four women were raped.
A total of 1,705 families were directly affected, of which 157 faced assaults, looting, destruction and the burning of their homes. Their businesses were subjected to similar attacks. Furthermore, 69 places of worship suffered the same fate. The lands belonging to indigenous communities were also forcibly occupied. The victims had to live in dire conditions, living in uncertainty about their present and future.
Within just a few days, thousands of disturbing incidents were documented. However, several others never reached the media or police stations and remained unrecorded. Such underreporting is common during periods of large-scale upheaval, suggesting that the actual tally could be considerably higher than the figures made public.
Minorities clearly became prime targets on the very day Hasina was pushed out of power amid escalating unrest, and their condition grew increasingly precarious with each passing day. As a result, they were hardly in a position to make complaints about the atrocities inflicted upon them by jihadis.
However, Shishir chose to “fact-check” a number in a manner that tried to whitewash the unprecedented spate of brutality on Hindus as mere online propaganda rather than the deadly reality imposed upon the marginalised minorities. His concerted campaign did not end there. He also utilised his pen to advance his objective, claiming that although the community was under attack, its fears were being “turbocharged by false rumours.”
He made this assertion in an article co-authored with Sean Gleeson for AFP. The two entirely sidestepped the ideological motivations behind the onslaught and instead attributed the hostility towards the community to its supposed association with Hasina’s Awami League, as though this could justify the persecution of its members.
The abject failure of the Yunus government to protect minorities, or rather its tacit support for extremists, while consistently blaming India and its media for exposing the truth, was glossed over in the piece, which repeated his hollow rhetoric about not discriminating based on faith and building a “new Bangladesh,” an assurance that stood in stark contrast to his government’s actions.
The “young students” who had toppled an elected leader were described as the ones bearing the brunt and “stepped into the law-and-order vacuum.” Ironically, the tactic of volunteering to protect temples, which is also witnessed in India and abroad during such episodes to distort the facts about the actions of their co-religionists, was celebrated as an example of communal harmony in the country.
This shameless misrepresentation of ground realities played out despite admitting that Hindus were being targeted, their women were being abused, and members of the community were arriving at the Indian border to save their lives.
Twisting the truth to protect Islamists and peddle a wicked agenda
Of course, Shishir’s propaganda promptly found space in the Islamo-leftist media, which is invariably quick to highlight Muslim victimhood at the slightest opportunity while completely ignoring the genuine pain of Hindus.
Qatari-funded, Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas mouthpiece Al Jazeera provided him a platform to shrug off the bloodshed of Hindus, mentioning that out of 119 listed deaths at that time “only two of the victims were Hindus: one policeman and one Awami League activist,” exposing how normalised their killings were for them, as though their deaths should not provoke any reaction, even as Islamists roamed the streets looking for potential prey.
The entire article was a hit job on Indian media and invoked Islamophobia charges for outlining the miserable circumstances of Hindus in Bangladesh. Unsurprisingly, Pakistan’s “WE News” also used Shishir to outright write off the cruelty perpetrated against the Hindu community.
He yet again declared that “some individuals might have used the chaos to loot” and, contrary to the truth, contended that “the majority of the attacks were politically motivated and there was no significant religious conflict between Muslims and Hindus in Bangladesh.”
He also spoke to the BBC, blaming “right-wing Indian accounts” for “spreading these politically motivated attacks as religious ones,” after confirming that “Hindu-owned properties” have been assaulted by Muslim mobs in his country.
Shishir continuously maintained that Hindus who backed Hasina were only singled out owing to their political affiliation and not due to their religious beliefs. The central goal was to showcase their persistent torment as merely collateral damage in a much larger public outcry.
“Immediately after the Awami League party was thrown out of power, angry mobs violently attacked the party’s leaders and supporters, and killed many of them. During these attacks, houses and businesses of all communities, including Hindus, were targeted,” he stressed while talking to The Week. The comment was also carried by outlets like the South China Morning Post to further the same propaganda.
Voice of America also included his views that “some hiding in the mobs might have targeted some households only to loot or steal household materials, as petty criminals do. But most attacks were politically motivated, targeting Muslims as well as Hindus who were linked to the Awami League. They did not stem from any religious reasons,” to trivialise the appeals by American politicians and India to protect Bangladeshi Hindus as unnecessary and misplaced.
New Age BD also quoted Shishir as he criticised the Indian media for calling a spade a spade. He accused the latter of misleading on Bangladesh’s “mass uprising” and argued that it has a track record of “spreading disinformation during important events and crises in Bangladesh for a long time.”
The selective fact-check to undermine the fact
Shishir, before trying to discredit the attacks on Hindus at the hands of his co-religionists, was busy shielding the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which had been quite vocal in its anti-India stance and urged its members and other fundamentalists in Bangladesh to boycott the country’s products, under the pretext of a fact-check.
The party had initiated an “India Out” campaign along the lines of the one in the Maldives. It was endorsed by BNP’s senior joint secretary general Ruhul Kabir Rizvi but was short-lived, as the Hasina government took steps to curb it. “It is mainly being driven by the Bangladeshi diaspora who are either BNP members or closely associated with the party,” Imtiaz Ahmed, a political science professor at Dhaka University, had expressed in a conversation with Frontline magazine.
However, Shishir rejected that any movement was introduced, suggesting that it “was brewing among Bangladeshis on online social platforms like Facebook, X, and YouTube. To the best of my knowledge, the movement was initiated by social media influencers, some of whom are known as critics of the Awami League government.”
Shishir trained guns on the Indian media, specifically naming channels such as “Zee News, India TV, ABP Live, Aaj Tak, News18 India, Republic Bharat, TV9 Bharatvarsh, Oneindia Hindi, Times Now Navbharat, and many others” for covering the issue. He again accused a section of Indian media of alleged disinformation and echoed BNP’s unfounded allegations of interference in Bangladesh’s internal affairs and politics by New Delhi.
The mask slips to unveil a fanboy of Mohammed Zubair, Rana Ayyub and hatred for BJP
The co-founder of Alt News, Mohammed Zubair, was arrested by Delhi Police in 2022 over a derogatory tweet about Lord Hanuman that hurt the religious sentiments of Hindus. However, Shishir, who exhibited complete indifference to Hindu lives, predictably had no respect for their faith as well and took aim at India over the action.
He seemingly wanted Zubair to be above the law of the land and cited dubious reports by the likes of Reporters Without Borders (RSF) to highlight India’s lower ranking on the press freedom index, as though the latter had been apprehended for his “journalism” rather than for his objectionable post.
Shishir then proceeded to hail Rana Ayyub as “one of the most prominent faces of India’s journalism,” and also protested against the cases registered against her despite them being about allegations of money laundering. He further wrote that Zubair was taken into custody for exposing the so-called inflammatory speech and hate against the Muslim community.
He also dragged former Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spokesperson Nupur Sharma, faulting her for insulting Prophet Muhammad while conveniently overlooking the disparaging remarks made by Dr Tasleem Ahmed Rehmani against Lord Shiva, which triggered her response. He also defended Zubair, who incited Islamist mobs against her through his deliberately edited clip.
Shishir praised Rahul Gandhi while terming the “ruling Hindu nationalist” BJP as “divisive.” He also could not hide his aversion to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, decrying that he was “a permanent member of the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh),” as if being connected to a Hindu religious organisation were a crime.
The entire article was an exercise in Islamist propaganda, aimed at maligning a Hindu-majority nation governed by a saffron party while absolving members of his own ideological ecosystem, or maybe it is, in the eyes of Shishir and his coterie. Shishir nearly justified the life-threatening consequences Sharma could have faced for “blasphemy,” as in the cases of late Kanhaiya Lal and others, but wished to have Zubair handed the privilege to insult Hindu deities.
The column functioned as a vehicle for promoting his interests by maligning a Hindu-majority nation governed by a saffron party while absolving members of his own ideological and religious group of their wrongdoings.
Considering Shishir’s background, his appointment to a role in bringing down an elected government and ushering in an installed regime is hardly shocking. Additionally, he oversaw the fact-checking department at Boom Bangladesh in 2020-2021 and co-founded BD FactCheck in 2017. He was employed as a reporter for the Daily New Nation and as a new media researcher for Jamuna Television.
