Bangladesh: Insecure Minorities – Analysis

Hindu Dhakeshwari Temple in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Photo Credit: Kuruman, Wikipedia Commons

November 10, 2026

SATP

By Shivangi Sharma

Key Takeaways:

A series of October–November 2026 killings, temple vandalisms, looting and shrine attacks targeted Hindus, Sufis and Bauls across multiple Bangladeshi districts.

Human Rights Support Society data show attacks on religious minorities rising sharply in 2026, with 50 incidents in the first half of the year versus 10 in the same period of 2025.

The insecurity stems from overlapping political instability after the 2024 uprising, religious intolerance, disputed classifications of “communal” violence, and weak law-enforcement accountability.

On November 4, 2026, a 50-year-old man, Zahed Bepari, was hacked to death inside a Sufi Shrine in the Charkewar Union of the Munshiganj Sadar Upazila (Sub-District) in Munshiganj District.

On October 27, 2026, a Hindu barber, Rabindra Monirishi (43), was stabbed to death in the Noman Gate area of Jamirdia in the Bhaluka Upazila of Mymensingh District.


On October 26, 2026, three homes belonging to Hindu families were vandalised and looted in the Pirganj Upazila of Rangpur District over a Facebook post that purportedly hurt the religious sentiments of Muslims. The owners of the affected houses are Bishu Chandra Mohanta, 50; his elder brother Jagadish Chandra Mohanta, 60; and their younger brother Dinesh Chandra Mohanta, 46, all residents of Chak Karimpur Village. According to the Police, Bishu’s son, Saurav Chandra Mohanta, 22, who works at a garment factory in Gazipur, shared a video on Facebook several months ago, which allegedly hurt Muslim religious sentiments.

On October 25, 2026, a Hindu school teacher named Monoranjan Roy (55) was beaten to death while trying to resolve a dispute at a friend’s house in the Parbatipur Upazila of Dinajpur District.

On October 21, 2026, a domestic Baul song festival – scheduled for October 22, 2026 – was not allowed to be held, in Hatia Village of the Kulonj Union in the Dirai Upazila of Sunamganj District. Radicals raised objections that ‘obscenity’ could occur in the name of songs.


On October 19, 2026, Police recovered and defused an improvised explosive device (IED) from the premises of the Fakir Lalon Shah Shrine in the Kumarkhali Upazila of Kushtia District.

On October 11, 2026, a theft took place at the Hindu Radhamadhav Akhra Central Temple in the Akhaura Upazila of Brahmanbaria District. Unidentified miscreants broke into the temple, cutting the grill, and stole six idols as well as gold and silver ornaments.

On October 8, 2026, the Hindu Khayerchara Matri Temple in Ward No. 9 of the Kumarkhali Municipality in Kushtia District was vandalised. Artisans found the heads of the Ganesh and Lakshmi idols and some parts of Durga’s vehicle – the lion – broken. Police stated that the incident was being investigated in light of a dispute over the temple committee and a land dispute.

On October 6, 2026, Police recovered the burnt body of a Hindu businessman, Suprabhat Modak, from a turmeric field in Ward No. 6 of the Ahmedpur Union under the Aminpur Police Station in the Bera Upazila of Pabna District, a day after he went missing.


Human Rights Support Society (HRSS) data indicates that attacks and incidents affecting religious minorities increased in 2026, suggesting a deterioration in security. HRSS’ annual reports recorded 12 temples and 16 houses partially or fully destroyed, with 48 minority individuals injured in 28 incidents in 2022. In 2023, HRSS documented 27 attacks on minorities, 43 persons injured, damage to 17 temples and 31 idols, and attacks on 25 houses. Its 2024 report recorded 112 incidents targeting minority communities, with two people killed and 83 injured, alongside damage to 28 temples, 31 idols, 284 homes and 240 shops and business establishments. In 2025, HRSS reported 28 incidents involving religious and ethnic minorities, one death and 16 persons injured, while more than 56 shrines were reportedly attacked, vandalised or looted. The trend worsened in the first half of 2026: HRSS documented 50 attacks on religious minorities, compared with 10 during the corresponding period in 2025; persons injured increased from four to 56. The recent HRSS report covering July to September 2026, documented at least six attacks on minority communities, leaving six people injured, while two temples, five idols and four homes were vandalised.


Attacks on minorities surged during the political transition of 2024, blurring the distinction between communal violence and political retaliation. Following former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s departure, attacks on minority homes, businesses and places of worship generated widespread concern, particularly because Hindus had often been perceived as politically aligned with the Awami League. On August 8, 2024, Meenakshi Ganguly, Deputy Asia Director, Human Rights Watch (HRW), stated,


Rioters burned down historical structures and targeted members of Hasina’s Awami League party. In several districts around the country, members of the Hindu community, which is generally considered to have largely backed the Awami League, were violently attacked, their homes torched, temples vandalised, and shops looted. There were also reports of attacks against the Ahmadiyya Muslim community and ethnic minorities.

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), in its annual report, 2026, noted


Bangladesh was the site of several concerning blasphemy cases in 2025. In February, authorities arrested poet Sohel Hasan Galib for “hurting religious sentiment.” Police arrested a Hindu man the following month for allegedly insulting the Prophet, leading to his conviction and sentencing to an indeterminate length of time in prison. Authorities arrested a university student in October on charges of desecrating a Qur’an; a mob surrounded his home after videos circulated on social media accusing him of the act. In November, police arrested a Baul singer on allegations of blasphemy and hurting religious sentiment during a musical performance. In December, a mob in Dhaka, Bangladesh, lynched a Hindu man, tied his body to a tree, and set it on fire following rumours he made blasphemous comments insulting the Prophet Muhammed.

On January 19, 2026, a Facebook post by the Chief Adviser’s Office stated that investigations identified 645 incidents involving minorities in 2025, but classified only 71 as communal, labelling the remaining 574 as non-communal. However, on January 28, 2026, the Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council (BHBCUC) challenged this classification, reporting 522 incidents of communal violence in 2025. This divergence between the figures published by the BHBCUC and those released by the Interim Government reflects a deeper lack of trust between minority rights organisations and state authorities over the assessment of communal violence. BHBCUC Acting General Secretary Monindra Kumar Nath observed, “The official definition of communal violence appears to exclude killings, rapes, arson attacks on homes, land grabbing and targeted assaults unless they occur inside temple premises.” Nath, however, added, “We still place our hope in the Election Commission and the government… but past experience has repeatedly disappointed us.”


In one of the major incidents this year, on August 22, 2026, a Hindu family of four, including retired Rangpur Zilla School teacher Ganapati Chakraborty, 65; his wife, Pritilata Chakraborty, 50; their daughter, Agami Chakraborty Prarthi, 23; and their son, Priyam Chakraborty, 12, were found murdered in their home in the Daspara area of Rangpur District. Police initially indicated that robbery might have been involved, but on August 26, 2026, Bangladesh National Hindu Mahajot Secretary General Govinda Chandra Pramanik alleged that the high-ranking figures in the administration were trying to cover up the killings in Rangpur by blaming the Hindu community for the incident.

On October 10, 2026, Police detained four persons identified as ANM Ayas (29), President of the Rashtra Sanglap Forum; Mohammad Sakibul Hasan (19); Mohammad Sujon Mia (18); and Marzia Khandaker Rimi (27), while they were attempting to smear black ink on a graffiti portrait of Rabindranath Tagore on a pavement wall in front of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy at Segunbagicha in Dhaka. Rimi asserted, “We have come to protest against Indian aggression.” This incident may not directly constitute an attack on religious minorities. However, according to the case documents, the case was filed under sections 120B, 153A and 295A of the Penal Code, relating to criminal conspiracy, promoting enmity between classes and inciting religious hatred. Further, the Police forwarding report submitted to the court noted,


On October 9, Ayas announced that he would erase the mural on the boundary wall by whitewashing it… The next day, Ayas and the other accused went to the spot. Accused Rimi smeared black ink over the mural depicting Nobel laureate poet Rabindranath. She also attempted to incite religious hatred in connection with the upcoming Durga Puja, thereby creating discord and undermining communal harmony.

On October 15, 2026, the Bangladesh Puja Udjapan Parishad reported 34 incidents of idol vandalism, attacks on temples and related violence ahead of Durga Puja, adding that arrests had been made in 11 of the cases. Santosh Sharma, General Secretary of the Parishad, noted, “Security cannot be a concern for only the five days of Puja. We must ensure security for all 365 days of the year.”

The insecurity faced by religious minorities in Bangladesh cannot be attributed to a single cause, but rather to overlapping dynamics of political instability, religious intolerance, competing narratives of national identity, local disputes and weaknesses in law enforcement, specifically after the July 2024 uprising. The fall of Sheikh Hasina’s government in August 2024 created a period of political uncertainty and a vacuum in which attacks on minority communities became a prominent concern. The uprising complicated the situation of minority communities, as they were linked to Awami League politics, leading to questions of national loyalty. The ambiguity highlighted in the data on attacks on minority communities adds to the insecurity of the minority community. Current trends underscore both the continuing vulnerability of these communities and the need for effective protection and accountability from the administration and law enforcement agencies.

About the author: 

Shivangi Sharma, Research Assistant, Institute for Conflict Management

Source: This article was published by SATP

About SATP
SATP, or the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP) publishes the South Asia Intelligence Review, and is a product of The Institute for Conflict Management, a non-Profit Society set up in 1997 in New Delhi, and which is committed to the continuous evaluation and resolution of problems of internal security in South Asia. The Institute was set up on the initiative of, and is presently headed by, its President, Mr. K.P.S. Gill, IPS (Retd).
View all posts by SATP →

In East India, a Marian shrine draws in Christian, Hindu and Muslim pilgrims

(RNS) — The historic Catholic minor basilica attracts thousands of pilgrims annually — the majority of them Hindu and Muslim — seeking what they call the power of the divine feminine from the Virgin Mary.

Devotees pray at the Basilica of the Holy Rosary, locally known as the Bandel Church, on May 30, 2026, near Kolkata, India. (Photo by Priyadarshini Sen)

Priyadarshini Sen
July 9, 2026   

RNS

BANDEL, India (RNS) — Each week for the last 13 years, 28-year-old Rimpa Chowdhury, who describes herself as a devout Hindu, has visited the Basilica of the Holy Rosary — a historic 16th-century Catholic church on the banks of the Hooghly River in eastern India with a shrine to the Virgin Mary.

For Chowdhury, the Bandel Church, as it is known locally, is more than a place where her prayers have been answered. Its vast riverside grounds, 50 miles north of Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal, are where she has found community and peace.

“There’s something about this place,” said Chowdhury, wearing a loose green tunic. “A shrine becomes something else when a woman has power over it.”

Over decades, thousands of pilgrims — the majority of them Muslims and Hindus — have been visiting the basilica for feast days every year, led by what they call the “power of the divine feminine” — their belief in the power of Mary, the mother of Jesus.

The Basilica of the Holy Rosary in Bandel, India, near Kolkata. It was declared a minor basilica by Pope John Paul II in 1988. (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia/Creative Commons)

Against its grand façade, featuring soaring arches and a vaulted-ceiling nave of ancient murals, a statue of Mary, “Our Lady of Happy Voyage,” stands out as the main attraction. Sailors and travelers visit her shrine frequently, praying for protection from danger. In 1988, Pope John Paul II declared the historic sanctuary a minor basilica, recognizing the church’s spiritual significance.

According to historical records, Catholic Augustinian friars and Portuguese traders settled in this region of Bengal in the late 16th century. Portugal’s monarchy tied Marian devotion to their colonial conquests, placing their outposts under the protection of the Virgin Mary.

An entrance to the Basilica of the Holy Rosary, locally known as the Bandel Church, on the outskirts of Kolkata, India. (Photo by Priyadarshini Sen)

Although the original church, built in 1599, was destroyed during an invasion by Muslim rulers of the Portuguese outpost in 1632 and again by an earthquake, legends say the rescue of Mary’s statue from the depths of the Hooghly River cemented her place as a divine protector.

“In Bengal, the goddess is revered as the ultimate primordial force in the universe,” said Father John Chalil, lead priest of the Bandel Church. “Devotees from all over India come here seeking sanctuary, and the nuns cater to their various needs.”

Since the 1950s, Chalil says, nuns from five congregations have been serving at the shrine and building social harmony in an area dotted with terracotta temples, mosques and churches. Local communities lean on each other, often transcending religious differences.

India’s Christian leaders work to convince Modi government to curb attacks

The shrine community around the church stretches across several villages — each village informally named after Marian apparitions, including Our Lady of Fatima and Our Lady of Vailankanni (Good Health).

People pass through Bandel, India, on May 30, 2026, near Kolkata. 

(Photo by Priyadarshini Sen)

The harmony is historically rooted. Though once a vital Portuguese outpost on the Hooghly River, the town of Bandel has evolved into a shared space where people of all faiths venerate local shrines. The church’s community programs reach non-Christian populations.

“We go to the surrounding villages to educate the masses about women’s rights and tribal welfare,” said Sister Nirmala, a nun involved with spiritual work at Bandel for more than 15 years. “Religious differences have not interfered with people’s faith in Mary.”

The nuns have been offering spiritual nourishment to the devotees and smoothing sectarian differences despite the growing religious polarization in India.

Those with Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity provide vital care and health services in the nearby areas. The Missionary Sisters of Mary Immaculate offer retreats and counseling to pilgrims, and the Auxilium Convent Sisters run a boarding home for young, underprivileged girls, providing them an education and assistance to live independently after graduation.

Nuns pray at the Basilica of the Holy Rosary, locally known as the Bandel Church, on May 30, 2026, near Kolkata, India. (Photo by Priyadarshini Sen)

Sister Philomena Mathew, a nun with the Missionary Sisters of Mary Help of Christians, another Catholic order in the local community, is concerned about the growing attacks on Christians across the country.

“We’re willing to confront anyone who obstructs the peace and harmony in this region,” she said.

Anti-Christian violence spearheaded by Hindu nationalist mobs has escalated across India since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 2014. Vigilante groups have disrupted prayer gatherings, vandalized church properties and assaulted pastors and nuns, accusing them without evidence of forcibly converting Hindus to Christianity.

“Last year there were 831 attacks against Christians in India,” said AC Michael, the national coordinator for United Christian Forum, a New Delhi-based human rights coalition that advocates for the rights of religious minorities. “From isolated localized incidents, the violence has become systemic, operating through a network of persecutions.”

Even though West Bengal has in the past been a safer state for religious minorities compared to the rest of the country, the recent election of a BJP state government has sparked apprehension, with attacks against Christians rising in the region.

Why anti-Christian persecution demands our collective action

Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity, a global Catholic order founded in Kolkata, has been coming under severe scrutiny from Hindu nationalist organizations, which claim its charitable work is aimed at converting vulnerable Hindus to Christianity. In December 2021, India’s Ministry of Home Affairs revoked the organization’s license, but reversed its decision after weeks of pushback.

Mother Teresa shown with an Indian child in 1977. (RNS archive photo)

“If nuns from the Missionaries of Charity were able to fend off attacks from religious extremists, I’m sure nuns at Bandel will also keep the community safe,” Michael said.

Mother Teresa visited Bandel Church in 1995, two years before her death. Her work in the region was centered on maintaining a mutually supportive relationship with the local Salesian order.

The town of Bandel has not been a focal point of targeted minority violence, but the broader region has occasionally witnessed political and festival-related communal clashes. On July 5, a mob barged into a newly constructed church south of Kolkata, threatening the congregants and vandalizing crosses.

“It’s the vision of the great saints that we are carrying forward,” said Sister Jesline Rose, a nun with the Missionary Sisters of Mary Immaculate who serves at the church. “No doubt the political landscape in Bengal is changing, but we’ll keep our pluralistic spirit alive.”

Rose and her fellow nuns regularly visit Hindu and Muslim families in the neighborhood to offer spiritual support and solace to individuals facing personal and medical hardships.

The altar and interior of the Basilica of the Holy Rosary near Kolkata, India. (Photo by Priyadarshini Sen)

The pilgrims, aided by the nuns, write down their prayer intentions on small slips of paper that are dropped into the wish box located near the statue of the Virgin Mary.

During festivals and winter walk pilgrimages, the nuns manage thousands of devotees — mostly Muslims and Christians — who congregate on the grounds to unite in thanksgiving.

The church is the unifying cultural monument for the devotees, and the nuns, its custodians.

They believe the power of the divine feminine in Bengal — from the Virgin Mary to Hindu goddesses Kali and Durga — will help them fight off threats from religious extremists.

“We look to the nuns for hope,” said Chowdhury, who lives in the narrow alleyways behind Bandel Church, a neighborhood of mostly Hindu and Muslim families. She’s anxious about the rising religious intolerance in the country, which she believes could trickle down to Bengal. The nuns “embody the power of Mother Mary, who is the protector of all devotees at our church,” she said.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Hinduism Is Fascism

Bengal After Trinamool: Political Economy of a Collapse

Sandip Chakraborty | 15 Jun 2026

• 
  
• 
  

What replaced the Left Front was not a more progressive alternative. TMC’s populist slogan “Maa, Mati, Manush" delivered nothing solid to the real peasantry, rural & urban poor.

Image Courtesy: PTI

When the results of the West Bengal Assembly election were declared on May 4, 2026, much of the national commentariat reached for a familiar frame: a personality story, the rise and fall of Mamata Banerjee, a morality tale about one leader's hubris. There is truth in that frame, but it is also a convenient one, because it allows the deeper story to go untold — the story of how, for 15 years, West Bengal was governed by a political formation that represented no class interest except that of capital in its most parasitic, rent-extracting forms, dressed in the language of the poor. And and how that formation's collapse has now handed the state to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the most organised vehicle of Hindutva and corporate consolidation that Indian politics has produced.

To understand what just happened in Bengal, it is necessary to go back to what the Trinamool Congress (TMC) actually was — not as a cult of personality, though it was certainly that too, but as a political-economic project. And to understand that, one has to start with what it replaced.

What the Left Front Built, and What Replaced It

For 34 years, the Left Front government in West Bengal carried out the most far-reaching land reform programme: Operation Barga gave sharecroppers recorded rights over the land they tilled, redistribution broke up the largest holdings, and a functioning three-tier panchayat system devolved real power — and real budgets — to elected bodies at the village level. This was not a perfect record, and the Left Front's own missteps, particularly its turn toward forced land acquisition for industry in the mid-2000s, opened the door for everything that followed. But it is important to be clear about what was actually lost when that government fell in 2011, because the TMC's entire subsequent narrative depends on nobody remembering it.

What replaced the Left Front was not a more progressive alternative. It was a coalition assembled, opportunistically, from every force that had a grievance against the Left Front government — some with legitimate grievances rooted in the Singur and Nandigram land acquisitions, others with grievances rooted in something closer to their opposite: landlords and rural elites whose interests Operation Barga had curtailed, real estate and construction capital that found the Left Front's regulatory apparatus inconvenient, and a layer of rural strongmen who saw, in the breakdown of Left Front discipline, an opportunity to build their own local fiefdoms. The TMC's genius — if that is the word — was in holding this coalition together under a single populist banner, "Maa, Mati, Manush," while delivering, in practice, almost nothing to the actual peasantry and rural poor that the slogan invoked.

The Class Character of Trinamool

It has become fashionable to describe the TMC as having "no ideology," and there is a sense in which that is true: it never produced a programme document, never articulated a position on land, industry, or labour that it held consistently for more than an electoral cycle. But "no ideology" is itself a kind of ideology — it is the ideology of capital that does not want to be governed by any rules at all, that prefers a state which can be approached transactionally, deal by deal, rather than one bound by policy.

This is the thread that runs through the TMC's entire history in government, from the appointment of Amit Mitra — formerly Secretary General of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, India's most powerful corporate lobby, and a public advocate for retail FDI and the deregulation of fuel prices — as Finance and Industry Minister, to the systematic dismantling of trade union activity in the state's remaining industrial belts, to the return of factory lockouts with police protection for management rather than workers. None of this required a manifesto. It only required a government willing to let capital operate without the friction of organised labour or regulatory oversight — and willing, in exchange, to extract its own cut through a parallel economy of "syndicates."

That parallel economy deserves to be named for what it was: a mechanism of primitive accumulation, in which party functionaries inserted themselves as gatekeepers — over construction material, over small business licensing, over local infrastructure contracts — and extracted a toll from the petty-bourgeois and working-class people who had to pass through that gate to make a living. This was not a deviation from TMC governance. For millions of people in Bengal's towns and peri-urban areas, the "syndicate" was the most direct daily experience of what TMC rule actually meant.

The Sangh Parivar Link: A History TMC Would Rather Forget

If there is one part of this story that the TMC's current self-presentation — as Bengal's last secular bulwark against Hindutva — depends most heavily on erasing, it is the party's own history of collaboration with the Sangh Parivar. After breaking from Congress in 1998, Banerjee joined the BJP-led NDA, served in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee cabinet, and in September 2003 addressed an RSS (rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) gathering in Delhi, praising the organisation as a body of "true patriots" engaged in a "fight against communists" — language for which RSS leaders reportedly hailed her as "saakshat Durga." Through the late 1990s and early 2000s, TMC alliances with the BJP extended across Lok Sabha, Assembly, panchayat, and municipal contests in Bengal.

This history matters for a reason that goes beyond hypocrisy, though it is certainly that. It matters because it was the TMC, not the BJP acting alone, that did the work of normalising Hindutva politics as a legitimate participant in Bengal's electoral landscape — a state that had, for decades, kept communal politics on the margins. Every subsequent BJP gain in Bengal, including the 2026 sweep, was built on a foundation that the TMC itself helped lay, brick by electoral alliance, two decades earlier, purely in pursuit of ministerial office in Delhi. When TMC leaders now warn voters that a BJP government represents an existential communal threat to Bengal, they are not wrong about the threat — but they are concealing their own role in making that threat electorally viable in the first place.

Singur, Nandigram, and the Forces That Gathered

The Singur and Nandigram agitations of 2006–2008 are remembered, in mainstream accounts, as a popular uprising against forced land acquisition — and there was real, justified anger in both places that deserves to be taken seriously on its own terms. But the political coalition that formed around that anger was not a coalition of the peasantry alone, and it is worth being precise about who else was in the room.

Maoist cadres, operating in the Jangal Mahal districts, found in the TMC a useful ally against a common enemy — and the alliance went well beyond rhetorical convergence. Investigations later attributed 245 deaths of CPI(M) workers and civilians in Jangal Mahal to this TMC-Maoist nexus, and the relationship reached its most extreme point on November 2, 2008, when an assassination attempt on sitting Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya at Salboni was met, from sections of the TMC leadership, not with condemnation but with statements that read, in retrospect, as closer to satisfaction.

Maoist commander Kishenji publicly endorsed Banerjee for the Chief Minister's post in an interview published in October 2009, and again ahead of a Lalgarh rally in August 2010 — open collaboration between a mainstream party holding ministerial office at the Centre and an organisation the same Central government had designated the country's gravest internal security threat.

A parallel pattern unfolded in North Bengal with the Kamtapur Liberation Organisation, whose cadres had killed more than 60 CPI(M) workers, including five shot dead at a party office in Dhupguri in August 2002. When the TMC took power in 2011, KLO chief Tom Adhikari and several senior associates were released from custody, vanishing underground within months, with KLO operatives again under suspicion in a 2013 bombing.

Religious fundamentalist organisations and foreign-funded NGOs — the latter a category that deserves scrutiny rather than the automatic benefit of the doubt that "civil society" branding often receives — also found common cause with the TMC during this period, for the same reason the Maoists did: not because they shared an analysis of land policy, but because they shared an enemy. Once that enemy was removed from power in 2011, every one of these alliances was discarded. The Maoist label was redirected at the TMC's own critics. The KLO leaders went back underground. The NGOs moved on to other causes. What remained was the TMC, now in government, having drawn on every reactionary current available to it on the way up, and having no further use for any of them on the way down.

Saradha, Narada, and Financialisation of Politics

The Saradha chit fund collapse of April 2013 is usually narrated as a corruption scandal — and it was that, on a staggering scale: roughly 1,700 companies under the Saradha umbrella extracted more than ₹2 lakh crore from more than one crore depositors, the overwhelming majority of them working people putting aside small savings. But it should also be read as something more structural: an example of what happens when a state government's relationship to capital is organised entirely around informal, personalised channels rather than regulated ones.

Saradha's promoter, Sudipta Sen, built ties with the TMC from 2009 onward, and a month before Banerjee became Chief Minister in 2011, he purchased paintings attributed to her for roughly ₹1.8 crore — the first of a series of such purchases, by entities later identified as shell companies, totalling more than ₹21 crore, that investigators characterised as a channel for laundering chit fund deposits into the party's finances.

In communications with the CBI, Sen described being required to make large recurring payments to TMC-linked media operations, in the explicit expectation of regulatory protection. That protection was, for years, delivered: the Union Home Ministry's warnings between 2011 and 2012, the RBI's repeated flags, and SEBI's multiple show-cause notices between 2010 and 2013 all went unanswered until the scheme collapsed under its own weight — at which point Banerjee's claim to have "known nothing" was directly contradicted by her own government's sworn court affidavit.

The Narada sting operation, in which hidden cameras recorded TMC leaders and a police official apparently accepting cash, and the later confrontation over CBI access to Kolkata's police commissioner — including the extraordinary 2018 episode in which the CBI's own headquarters were effectively occupied overnight by Delhi Police on instructions from the Central government — extended this story onto the national stage.

But for Bengal's voters, the headline figures were simpler: more than 12 lakh Saradha victims remain uncompensated, a state compensation scheme disbursed barely half of what it promised, and at least a hundred victims are reported to have died by suicide, while implicated party figures returned to public life with their standing largely intact.

This is what "financialisation without regulation, mediated by a single ruling party" looks like in practice — and it is not unique to Bengal, or to the TMC, but Bengal under the TMC offered as clear an illustration of it as any state in the country.

2021: The High-Water Mark That Wasn't

The 2021 Assembly election result — a landslide for the TMC against a BJP campaign that had thrown enormous national resources at the state — was presented, including by significant sections of the liberal commentariat outside Bengal, as a victory for secular politics against Hindutva consolidation. There was something to that framing: the BJP's defeat in 2021, after a campaign built heavily around polarisation, was not nothing.

But the result contained a detail that ought to have tempered the celebration considerably: Banerjee herself lost her own seat of Nandigram, to Suvendu Adhikari, a former TMC heavyweight who had defected to the BJP only months earlier. A landslide for the party, delivered while its leader lost her own constituency, is not the sign of a movement. It is the sign of a patronage machine — one capable of delivering votes through its local networks even as the central brand frays, but one whose loyalty to the Centre is conditional on the Centre continuing to deliver patronage in return. Machines of this kind do not have reserves of ideological loyalty to draw on when the patronage stops. They have only the machine itself, and the machine's interest in its own survival.

Within months of that 2021 result, the next chapter began — and it would be the chapter that, more than any other, exhausted whatever reserve of goodwill the TMC had left among Bengal's middle class and aspirational youth.

Cash for Jobs: The SSC Scandal as Class Betrayal

In July 2022, the Enforcement Directorate arrested Partha Chatterjee, then Commerce and Industries Minister and formerly Education Minister during a 2016 School Service Commission recruitment drive, after recovering roughly ₹28 crore in cash and a large quantity of gold from the residence of his close aide, Arpita Mukherjee. What followed was a slow-motion judicial reckoning with what courts eventually termed a "systemic fraud": tampered answer sheets, manipulated merit lists, and, by the Calcutta High Court's own count, 25,753 appointments from the 2016 cycle declared null and void in April 2024 — a ruling the Supreme Court upheld in full in April 2025, ordering those who had obtained posts fraudulently to return their salaries with interest.

It is worth dwelling on what this scandal actually represents, because it is qualitatively different from Saradha, even if the underlying logic — informal payment in exchange for access to state-mediated opportunity — is the same. Saradha defrauded depositors of their savings. The SSC scandal defrauded an entire generation of educated, unemployed young people of the one credible pathway into stable employment that a state with limited industrial growth still offered: a government teaching post. For a party whose foundational claim was that it represented "Maa, Mati, Manush" against an indifferent establishment, presiding over a scheme in which teaching jobs were allegedly sold to the highest bidder while genuinely qualified candidates from working and lower-middle-class families were shut out was not merely corruption. It was a betrayal of the precise social base the party claimed to speak for.

Sandeshkhali, RG Kar, and the Limits of "Maa, Mati, Manush"

If the SSC scandal exposed the TMC's betrayal of Bengal's aspirational youth, two events in 2024 exposed something more fundamental: the relationship between the party's local power structures and the safety of the women in whose name "Maa" — mother — sat at the head of its own slogan.

In Sandeshkhali, women came forward in early 2024 with allegations of land-grabbing and sexual coercion against a local TMC strongman and his network — a structure of local power that, by multiple accounts, had operated for years before the protests forced any state response. Months later, the rape and murder of a trainee doctor at RG Kar Medical College in Kolkata produced some of the largest protests Bengal has seen in a generation, directed not only at the crime itself but at what protesters experienced as an institutional culture of cover-up. A similar pattern recurred in 2025 with a gang rape at a Kolkata law college, where the accused had prior links to the TMC's student wing and a documented history of complaints that had gone unaddressed.

These were not isolated failures of individual policing. They were the visible surface of a governing model in which local power, exercised through party-linked strongmen, was effectively unaccountable until a crisis became too large for the state to ignore — at which point the response was performative rather than structural. By the time the 2026 campaign began, both Sandeshkhali and RG Kar had become central to the opposition's case, to the point that the mother of the RG Kar victim contested the election on a BJP ticket, citing the state government's handling of her daughter's case as her reason for entering politics. That a victim's family found the BJP — a party whose own record on communal violence and on crimes against women in states it governs is hardly exemplary — more credible on this issue than the incumbent TMC is, in itself, a measure of how completely the TMC had exhausted its claim to represent "Maa, Mati, Manush" by 2026.

The 2026 Verdict and What It Actually Means

The result declared on May 4, 2026 — the BJP crossing the two-hundred-seat mark in a 294-member Assembly, ending 15 years of TMC rule, with Suvendu Adhikari sworn in as Chief Minister — should not be read, as much of the national press has read it, as simply "Bengal turns saffron." It is that, and that alone should be cause for serious concern: the BJP's ascendancy in Bengal represents the consolidation, in one of India's largest states, of the most organised vehicle of Hindutva and corporate power in the country, a force whose record on minority rights, on press freedom, and on the rights of organised labour in the states it already governs gives no reason for optimism.

But the 2026 result is also something else: the collapse, under the weight of its own contradictions, of a 15-year experiment in governing through patronage networks, informal financial channels, and a populist slogan increasingly divorced from any material content. The TMC did not lose because Bengal's voters suddenly discovered, in 2026, facts that had been hidden from them. The Saradha scandal was public knowledge for over a decade. The Maoist alliance was reported on as it happened. The SSC verdicts were delivered by courts, in public, over years. Sandeshkhali and RG Kar played out on national television for months. What changed was not the information. It was that a model of governance built on patronage requires patronage to keep flowing — and a state with West Bengal's fiscal constraints, governing through extraction rather than production, eventually runs out of patronage to distribute, leaving only the extraction itself visible.

Within weeks of the defeat, the TMC's internal contradictions — a long-simmering divide between an older generation of district-level leaders and a more centralised operation built around Mamata Banerjee's nephew, Abhishek Banerjee — broke into open rebellion, with significant numbers of MPs and MLAs publicly challenging the leadership of both. A party held together for nearly three decades almost entirely by the personal authority of one leader, and by that leader's ability to deliver state power to her local networks, discovered in real time how little of that unity had been about anything else.

The Absence That Matters Most

What is most striking about the 2026 result, from the standpoint of anyone concerned with the actual material conditions of Bengal's working people and peasantry, is not the TMC's defeat — which, on the record above, was earned many times over — but the absence of any political force, in this election, organised around the interests of those people as a class, rather than as a vote bank to be assembled through patronage, communal appeal, or some combination of both.

The Left, whose land reform legacy remains the single most consequential redistribution of agrarian power in any major Indian state, has spent 15 years in the electoral wilderness, a casualty in no small part of its own missteps over Singur and Nandigram, but also of a media and political environment in which the only permitted choice was framed as TMC or BJP — two formations that, for all their mutual hostility, share a common commitment to a state that serves capital first and negotiates with the working population only through patronage, charity, or communal mobilisation, never through organised, collective power.

The TMC's fall is not, in itself, a victory for anyone except the BJP. What Bengal's politics needs now — and what its history, going back to Operation Barga and the panchayat reforms of the 1980s, suggests it is capable of producing again — is a political force willing to organise around the actual material interests of tenants, sharecroppers, industrial and informal workers, and the educated unemployed whose hopes the SSC scandal so comprehensively betrayed. Whether such a force re-emerges, or whether Bengal simply settles into a new equilibrium between Hindutva consolidation and whatever remains of the TMC's patronage networks, will determine far more about the state's future than the headline result of May 4, 2026 — significant as that result undeniably is.

(The views are personal.)

ZOONOSIS / SPILLOVER

Single amino acid change may help viruses jump from bat to human

University of California - San Francisco

Most pandemics start when a pathogen spreads from animals to humans. It’s a leading explanation for the COVID-19 pandemic: the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, is a cousin to coronaviruses that live in bats. 

Now, researchers at the UCSF Quantitative Biosciences Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Institut Pasteur, and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, report that a single amino-acid change alters how a coronavirus protein interacts with the human and bat immune systems, shifting the body's response to infection. 

It helps explain how benign animal viruses can adapt to humans and cause severe disease.

The study appeared in Cell Host & Microbe on May 13.

Researchers looked at SARS-CoV-2 and a related coronavirus called RaTG13, which only infects bats, and compared how each virus interacted with immune proteins in bat and human lung cells. The experiments relied on the first laboratory-grown lung cell line from the greater horseshoe bat.

A viral protein called OrfB9 emerged as a key factor. The SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 versions of OrfB9 differ by one amino acid out of roughly 100. In human cells, the SARS-CoV-2 version disabled an immune alarm system, allowing the virus to multiply. In bat cells, the RaTG13 version activated an immune protein that helped suppress the virus.

"The difference between a virus that stays in bats and one that spills over into humans and causes catastrophic disease can come down to remarkably small genetic changes," said Nevan J. Krogan, PhD, director of QBI and senior author of the study. "By mapping these interactions at the protein level — across two viruses and two species — we can read the molecular signatures that predict spillover risk. It's the kind of early warning system the world needs."

Authors: UCSF authors are Jyoti Batra, PhD; Yuan Zhou, MS; Rithika Adavikolanu; Durga Anand; Sooraj Verma; Martin Gordon, MS; Shivali Malpotra, MS; Jack M. Moen, PhD; Ajda Rojc, MS; Atoshi Banerjee, PhD; Sourobh Maji, PhD; Monita Muralidharan, PhD; Helene Foussard, PhD; Irene P. Chen, PhD; CJ San Felipe, PhD; Lorena Zuliani-Alvarez, PhD; Promisree Choudhury, PhD; Kirsten Obernier, PhD; Rahul Suryawanshi, PhD; Taha Y. Taha, PhD, PharmD; Kliment A. Verba, PhD; James S. Fraser, PhD; Robert M. Stroud, PhD, MA; Melanie Ott, MD, PhD; Ben Polacco, PhD; Danielle L. Swaney, PhD; Ignacia Echeverria, PhD; and Manon Eckhardt, PhD. For all authors see the paper.

Funding:  National Institutes of Health (U19AI135990, U19AI135972, U54AI170792, F31AI164671-01, G20AI174733, UL1TR004419, S10OD026880, S10OD030463); Howard Hughes Medical Institute; James B. Pendleton Charitable Trust; Roddenberry Foundation; P. and E. Taft; Gladstone Institutes; Fast Grants; Innovative Genomics Institute; Chan Zuckerberg Biohub – San Francisco; ANR EmerCoV AAP CE35.

 

About UCSF: The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is exclusively focused on the health sciences and is dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. UCSF Health, which serves as UCSF’s primary academic medical center, includes top-ranked specialty hospitals and other clinical programs, and has affiliations throughout the Bay Area. UCSF School of Medicine also has a regional campus in Fresno. Learn more at https://ucsf.edu or see our Fact Sheet.
 

###

Follow UCSF

ucsf.edu | Facebook.com/ucsf | Twitter.com/ucsf | YouTube.com/ucsf

 

---

Journal

Cell Host & Microbe

Joint Sino-Indian Bid To Get UNESCO Recognition For Buddhist Monk Xuanzang – Analysis

A depiction of the Chinese monk Xuanzang on his journey to India.

 Credit: Wikipedia Commons

June 8, 2026 
By P. K. Balachandran


As early as 2016, the Chinese Consul General in Kolkata had mooted the idea of jointly celebrating the work of Xuanzang, who translated Buddhist scriptures into Chinese and helped Buddhism gain wide acceptance in China.

Thanks to the thaw in relations between India and China, a 10-year old project to jointly secure UNESCO recognition for the work of the 7 th. Century Chinese Buddhist monk, Xuanzang, is set to take off.

China had suggested to India that the two countries jointly bid for UNESCO’s recognition of Xuanzang, who translated Buddhist texts from Sanskrit and Pali to Chinese, and gave Buddhism a firm foundation in China and South East Asia. The goal is to put Xuanzang’s work in UNESCO’s “Intangible Cultural Heritage List.”

The Indian side responded favourably, and internal consultations are underway. An Indian representative is expected to visit China in the coming weeks to hold discussions with his counterparts.

The project aims to identify practices, narratives, and sites associated with Xuanzang. The proposed nomination needs delineation of cultural practices linked to the transmission of Buddhist knowledge, pilgrimage routes traversed by Xuanzang and oral traditions preserved in monasteries and local communities.

Need to Establish It As A Living Heritage

The project must demonstrate that Xuanzang is a “living heritage” in accordance with UNESCO’s criteria. UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) framework, under the 2003 Convention, recognises living traditions such as practices, expressions, knowledge systems and rituals that communities “continue to transmit across generations”.

The list excludes physical manifestations like monuments.

The UNESCO list of Intangible Heritages includes material from over 150 countries, with multinational nominations forming a growing share as States collaborate on shared cultural traditions.

India ratified the convention in 2005 and currently has 16 elements inscribed on UNESCO’s Intangible Culture List, including Yoga, the Kumbh Mela and Durga Puja. Inter-State nominations include Nowruz, a transnational cultural practice shared by several countries in West and South Asia.

Inter-State nominations require participating States to agree on documentation, safeguarding measures and community participation. A joint Sino-Indian proposal would require alignment on the narrative and shared ownership of the elements included.

UNESCO nominations are not easy to get. They require extensive documentation, including evidence of community participation, plans for safeguarding, and demonstration of the element’s continued practice.

UNESCO guidelines require that nominations reflect “community consent and participation”. Therefore, local communities will have to be consulted.

Discussions between India and China will focus on mapping existing material on Xuanzang across archives, monasteries and academic institutions. While India will be examining records related to Nalanda and other sites linked to his stay, China will be compiling material from its own historical sources.

Idea Mooted A Decade Ago

Ten years ago, in 2016, the Chinese Consulate General in Kolkata had held a public event to explain the depth of China’s “cooperative relationship” with India over the last 1400 years. A seminar on “Xuan Zang and China-India Friendly Interactions” was held in Kolkata, which traced the monk’s role “in strengthening Indo-China relations.”

The Chinese Consulate was working with the K.P. Jayaswal Institute, a Bihar-based archaeological institution run by the Bihar Government, to study Stupas.

Improved Climate for Sino-Indian Cooperation

The current outreach from China comes at a time when India-China relations have been seeing attempts at a rapprochement after a period of strain following the 2020 standoff along the Line of Actual Control (the de facto border) between the two countries in Ladakh.

Diplomatic and military talks have continued, with both sides maintaining engagement through established mechanisms. India has allowed increased Chinese investments in its industries and the Hindu pilgrimage to Kailash in Tibet has resumed.

Faxian’s Quest

Buddhism travelled from India to China in the “Later Han period” (from 25-220 AD). Initially, the Chinese rejected it as a “foreign” religion. Only later, during a period of turmoil between 220-and 589 AD, Mahayana or “Great Vehicle” Buddhism began winning Chinese adherents.

It was dissatisfaction with existing Chinese translations of Sanskrit Buddhist scriptures that drove the Buddhist monk Faxian (5 th.Century AD) to set out for India at age 65, intent on finding the originals. After studying them for 10 years in India, he brought back to China a great number of copies of Buddhist texts and translated them from Sanskrit into Chinese. Among them, two of the most important were the “Mahaparinirvana-sutra” a text glorifying the eternal, personal, and pure nature of “nirvana”, on which the nirvana school in China then based its doctrines, and the “Vinaya” (rules of discipline for the monks) of the “Mahasanghika” school, which became available for the regulation of the numerous monastic communities in China.

Xuanzang’s Quest

More than two centuries after Faxian came another Chinese Buddhist monk, Xuanzang (602-664 AD ). He set out for India with much the same purpose in mind – to increase his understanding of the Buddha’s teachings by going to the source. He also wanted to get a feel of the places the Buddha trod.

Judson Knight, writing in encyclopedia.com about Xuanzang, says that under the Sui Dynasty (589-618 AD) and the newly founded T’ang Dynasty (618-907 AD ), Xuanzang and other monks faced a hostile environment. Not only did the T’ang dynasty’s first ruler, Kao Tsu (618-626 AD), embrace the rival faith of Taoism, but placed restrictions on travel in the Western parts of China, which was the gateway to Central Asia and India.

Xuanzang’s Search For Theological Clarity

But Xuanzang was determined to go to India. Whereas Faxian was dissatisfied with Chinese translations of the Buddhist scriptures and wanted to see the originals, Xuanzang’s longing arose from his preoccupation with difficult theological questions. He needed to consult the “Yogacarabhumi Sastra” (dated between 4 th., and 5 th., century AD), which could only be found in India. Therefore, he resolved to make the arduous, extremely challenging journey across the mountains.

But the Chinese Emperor had barred travel beyond the Western borders of China. “As I approached China’s extreme outpost at the edge of the Desert of Lop, I was caught by the Chinese army. Not having a travel permit, they wanted to send me to Tun-huang to stay at the monastery there. However, I said ‘If you insist on detaining me I will allow you to take my life, but I will not take a single step backwards in the direction of China.'”

As it turned out, the top-most government official in the region was a devout Buddhist, and he chose to look the other way, allowing Xuanzang to pass the military outposts that separated China from the lands of Central Asia.

Further West, Xuanzang encountered bandits and marauding tribes, as well as admiring rulers and welcoming groups of monks. He visited Tashkent, Samarkand, and Balkh. (The first two are today in Uzbekistan, and the last in Afghanistan). All three were important trading and cultural centres in the premodern era.

Xuanzang reached India in 631 AD and made his way to the monastery at Nalanda, India’s largest Buddhist centre, where the esteemed master, Silabhadra, taught him personally for 15 months. Xuanzang spent five years at Nalanda, during which time he composed three religious treatises in Sanskrit.

He also travelled to various parts of India, including Bengal, the Deccan Plateau in Central India, and both the Coromandel (eastern) and Malabar (western) coasts. In addition, he journeyed through the Indus River Valley.

King Harsha Hosts Xuanzang

However, a king named Kumara invited Xuanzang to visit him in Assam, in northeastern India, an offer he could not refuse. This in turn led King Kumara’s rival King Harsha ( 590-647 AD), India’s greatest ruler of the early medieval era, to make an invitation of his own.

At Harsha’s court in 642 AD, Xuanzang greatly impressed a gathering of several thousand kings and wise men, winning arguments with Hindu and Jain theologians. Pleased, Harsha showered him with gifts, but Xuanzang accepted only a buffalo-skin coat to keep him warm and dry, and an elephant to transport the many books he had brought with him. Finally, in 643 AD, he set off for China.

Given the fact that he had left China illegally, Xuanzang sent a letter to the Emperor, announcing his return. Eight months later, he received a welcoming reply. As it turned out, Emperor Kao Tsu had been ousted by his son T’ai Tsung (626-649 AD ), who was a Buddhist and eager to meet Xuanzang. The latter arrived at his capital in Ch’ang in early in 645, and the crowd that came out to greet him was so large that at first he could not enter the city.

Rousing Reception In China

He met with the Emperor, and briefed him on all the lands he had visited. Emperor T’ai Tsung offered him a position as his personal advisor, but Xuanzang declined. So the Emperor set him up at the nearby Hung-fu Monastery with a fleet of assistants to help him in his translation work. The only stipulation was that Xuanzang should write a record of his travels, “Ta T’ang Hsi-yü-chi”” or “The Great T’ang Record of Travels to the Western Lands,” which he completed in 646 AD.

Xuanzang’s translation work continued under the reign of Emperor Kao Tsung (649-683 AD ). In 19 years, he produced 76 books. When the great monk died in 664 AD, it was said that a million people attended his funeral. In later years he became a legend.

His translations, commentaries, and those of his close followers make up a quarter of Buddhist literature in Chinese. And the contact he had initiated with India led to close ties between the T’ang dynasty and India


About P. K. Balachandran

P. K. Balachandran is a senior Indian journalist working in Sri Lanka for local and international media and has been writing on South Asian issues for the past 21 years.

View all posts by P. K. Balachandran →

AI disinformation turns Nepal polls into ‘digital battleground’


By AFP
March 2, 2026


Around 80 percent of all of Nepal's internet traffic is through social media platforms - Copyright AFP Arun SANKAR

Anup Ojha

Slick AI-generated disinformation has flooded election campaigns in Nepal, which votes Thursday in the first polls since deadly protests triggered by a brief ban on social media overthrew the government.

The September 2025 protests were driven by tech-savvy youth angry at job shortages and flagrant corruption by an ageing political elite.

Now parties across the political divide are tapping social media to push their agendas and woo voters, especially the young, including a surge of people registering to cast their ballot for the first time.

But some of the content is manipulated or outright fake, experts and fact-checkers say.

“In a country where digital literacy is low, people believe what they see,” said Deepak Adhikari, editor of the independent NepalCheck team.

Kathmandu-based technology policy researcher Samik Kharel described a “digital battleground” in the run-up to the landmark vote, warning that Nepal lacked the expertise to monitor the onslaught of machine-generated content.

“It is even hard for experts to figure out what is real and fake,” Kharel told AFP.

Around 80 percent of all of Nepal’s internet traffic is through social media platforms, he said.

Internet analytics site DataReportal estimates more than 56 percent of Nepal’s 30 million people are online, including 14.8 million Facebook users and around 4.3 million on Instagram. About 2.2 million are on TikTok, according to the Internet Service Providers’ Association of Nepal.

“Disinformation remains a top concern that could undermine the integrity of the election process,” said Ammaarah Nilafdeen of the US-based Center for the Study of Organized Hate.

“Nepal… is grappling with the scale of the threat that disinformation poses to society and democracy at large.”



– Threat to democracy –



The protests last year began after the government moved to regulate social media, briefly banning at least 26 platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and X.

At least 77 people were killed in two days of unrest, parliament was set on fire, and the government of four-time prime minister KP Sharma Oli collapsed.

Activists used the group-chat app Discord to put forward their suggestion of interim leader — and days later their choice, 73-year-old former chief justice Sushila Karki, was appointed to lead the country to elections.

Social media is playing a key role again.

Loyalists of the ousted premier’s Marxist party have shared AI-generated images purporting to be drone photographs of a massive gathering — which were then reposted by top leaders, boasting a sea of more than 500,000 supporters.

Analysis by Nepali online fact-check experts TechPana found the images had been created using OpenAI’s ChatGPT, while police said less than 5,000 people were at the real event.

Another AI-generated video that circulated on TikTok purported to show Gagan Thapa, leader of the Nepali Congress party, urging voters to back a rival party. The platform has removed the video.

In neighbouring India, posts calling to restore Nepal’s deposed Hindu monarchy have made the rounds on social media, said researcher Nilafdeen.

Such “ideological pushes” online — in this case “amplified by Hindu far-right supporters in India” — stand in contrast to “domestic demands for strengthening democratic institutions”, she told AFP.



– Misinformation race –



The Election Commission says there is widespread use of hate speech and deepfake content, including videos created with readily available artificial intelligence tools purporting to show candidates insulting opponents or using obscene language.

“It is a concerning issue,” commission information officer Suman Ghimire said.

More than 600 cases have been passed on to the authorities, he added, with around 150 handled by police.

In one case, police detained a pro-royalist supporter, Durga Prasai, for social media posts allegedly meant to intimidate potential voters.

The Election Commission can impose fines or bar candidates from running, but experts say the sheer scale of disinformation and hate speech online outstrips any effective response.

“Candidates and people close to political parties not only compete to win, but also compete to spread misinformation,” said Basanta Basnet, editor-in-chief of news website Onlinekhabar, which has collaborated with Nepal FactCheck to verify posts.

The organisation has warned that “misinformation encourages citizens to take wrong decisions”, which in turn could undermine the “foundation of democracy”.