Abdur RahimUnited States Department of State Spokesperson Matthew Miller has expressed hope India and Bangladesh “resolve their disagreements peacefully.”
Miller’s comment came in response to a question from South Asia Perspectives at the September 10 daily press briefing about the December 2 attack on Bangladesh’s diplomatic post in Agartala, India and the related anti-Bangladesh disinformation campaigns. Miller spoke in the wake of consultations between the Indian and Bangladeshi Foreign Secretaries in Dhaka on the full range of the two neighbors’ bilateral relations.
In the run up to the incident in Agartala there had been a spike in disinformation on social media platform regarding the status of Bangladesh’s Hindu minority. The campaign featured doctored images and videos, mostly coming from India, which were then debunked by credible fact-checkers and international news outlets. The disinformation campaign heightened following the November 25 arrest in Bangladesh of Hindu priest Chinmoy Das Pravu.
During protests against Chinmoy’s arrest November 26, a Muslim lawyer was killed at the court premise in Chittagong, Bangladesh. Bangladesh police later arrested several men from the area identifying them from CCTV footage, according to the law enforcement body’s statement.
