Counted In and Kept Out: Bangladesh Leads South Asia on Minority Inclusion — Except in the Military
Religious and ethnic minorities have found space in Bangladesh’s government, academia, and police — a rare
feat in the South Asian region. In the armed forces, however, exclusion remains the rule.
For Bangladesh’s religious minorities, most portals to power stand wide
open.
In bustling offices nationwide, minority officers help shape decisions in the police and civil services. They
litigate cases and deliver justice as lawyers and judges in crowded courtrooms, guide new generations of
students at top universities, and steer public opinion through the media.
Within these civilian institutions, minorities serve in proportions that match — and at times surpass — their
nine percent share of the population, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis by Netra News.
That record challenges “common perceptions in the region, especially India,” says Iftekharuzzaman of
Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB), which last studied
diversity in the civil service 18 years ago and has reviewed the new Netra News findings.
“Although there is much to be desired, especially at higher levels,” he adds, “Bangladesh has been clearly
doing significantly better than its neighbours in terms of inclusivity in the public sector job opportunities.”
But the Muslim-majority nation’s remarkable progress abruptly stalls at the military’s doorstep. Fewer than one percent of Bangladeshi army officers and
just over one percent of navy officers are non-Muslim, according to a separate
analysis of confidential
military records.
Jobs like these hold outsized importance in Bangladesh where, as in much of South Asia, a government
position is a highly coveted badge of social and
economic status, rooted in the legacy of British colonial bureaucracy.
Competition for these posts has historically been fierce, and the political stakes high. Underrepresentation of
Bengalis in elite civilian and military ranks during the East Pakistan era was among the grievances that
fuelled the Liberation War in 1971. More recently, allegations of bias in government hiring sparked mass
demonstrations last July and August, paving the way for the downfall of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s
long-serving authoritarian administration.
Conservative critics long accused the former Awami League government of large-scale bias for Hindu
officers, citing their perceived electoral loyalty. However, the Netra News data suggests these claims are
overstated. If any state institution stands as an outlier, it is the armed forces, where non-Muslims are
strikingly absent.
Netra News reached these conclusions by
sifting through Read full
methodology. a broad spectrum of official and confidential records. In all, the study
inferred the likely
religious identities of nearly 50,000 individuals in Bangladesh and India, pairing traditional research methods
with machine‑learning models.
Minorities hold ground
The Netra News findings offer a hopeful view for Bangladesh’s 15 million ethnic and religious minority
citizens, particularly across the country’s civilian institutions.
Minority groups — led by Hindus, followed by Indigenous, Christian, and Buddhist communities — make up over
one in 10 civil service officials and lower court judges, and nine percent of police officers.
A 2022 list compiled during the Hasina era had placed the civil service figure at a slightly lower 10 percent.
This broad-based representation isn’t limited to government-run institutions.
At Dhaka University — the country’s most prestigious centre of higher education and one of its most well-known
autonomous bodies — minorities make up over 10 percent of the permanent faculty.
In key professional bodies as well, minorities hold proportional ground: they account for over eight percent of
the
Dhaka Reporters Unity, a key media association, and about eight percent of the Supreme Court Bar Association,
reflecting their share in
the
broader population.
That trend is rooted further down the educational pipeline, which feeds into these prestigious professions.
A government merit list of 3,237
high school students across Dhaka division — based on anonymised graduation results that
eliminate potential religious bias — shows that minority students made up 9.60%, closely tracking their national
share.
To easily see how the ethnic and religious makeup of institutions compares to the country as a whole, we have
created a dot chart.
On the left side, you will see dots representing the national proportions of each group. The right side shows the
proportions within a specific institution. For better visual impact, we have multiplied each group’s share by
50.
National share
A regional bright spot
Bangladesh’s overall record on minority inclusion far surpasses that of its
neighbours.
Bangladesh’s military numbers echo India’s when it comes to uniformed minorities. In India, the largest minority
group, Muslims, reportedly makes up only two
percent
of the Indian Army officer corps, even though they
form around 14 percent of the national population.
Thus, the army and navy figures in Bangladesh, for all their stark shortfalls, are not entirely out of step with
regional norms for religious representation in military ranks.
However, Bangladesh far outperforms India in civilian arenas of governance.
In Bangladesh’s civil service, around nine percent of officers are non-indigenous Some indigenous communities
such as Tripura follow Hinduism. They are classified as indigenous, instead of Hindu.
Hindus — 112 percent of their
population share. In India, by contrast, Muslims comprise about four percent of the elite civil service, data
shows. That’s just 28 percent of their national proportion.
Policing follows a similar pattern, with Hindus in Bangladesh reaching about 95 percent of their demographic
share in the force, while Indian Muslims fill barely 30 percent of theirs.
Put differently, adjusted for each country’s religious demographics, Hindus in Bangladesh’s civil service and
police are
three-four times better represented than Muslims in India’s.
Even in institutions prized for their autonomy, India lags behind Bangladesh in minority representation. A
comparison of permanent faculty rosters — excluding lecturers, since tenure in India typically begins at the
assistant professor level — reveals striking disparities.
At Dhaka University, Hindu professors account for 8.8 percent of the permanent faculty. By contrast, Muslims make
up just 3.8 percent of the faculty at Delhi University and 6.4 percent at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), two
of India’s most prominent public academic institutions.
In other words: When it comes to including its largest minority group in university faculty, Dhaka University
outperforms Delhi
University and JNU by factors of 4.3 and 2.75, respectively.
Bangladesh’s northern neighbour Nepal has its own intricacies.
Official data suggests that Hindus, constituting 81 percent of Nepal’s population, occupy more than 90 percent
of
civil service positions.
Nepal’s Muslim minority, conversely, accounts for over four percent of the population but just 0.1 percent of
civil service posts, according to a 2016
study by Tek Bahadur Dong, a Nepalese academic and social scientist.
Bahuns (upper-caste Brahmins)“Bahuns and Chhetris are a caste group and Hindu but they do not belong to ethnic [indigenous]
communities,” Tek Bahadur Dong, the Nepalese academic, told Netra News., 12 percent of the
population, hold more than 70 percent of officer-level posts.
Indigenous Buddhist-majority“The remaining caste groups are predominantly Hindu but not all of them. For example, there are
both Hindu and Buddhist among the Newar community,” Dong added. “Non-Newar Janajatis [...] follow different
religions such as Buddhist, Kirant, Islam and Christian. However, many of the non-Newar Janajatis are Buddhist
primarily [...] Dalits were Hindu but now [many] are converting to Christianity.” groups beyond
the Newar community — who together comprise over 30 percent of
Nepal’s
population — are massively underrepresented at only 1.6 percent of these
coveted roles.
Syeda Lasna Kabir, a Dhaka University professor who has studied women’s representation in South Asian bureaucracies, says
Bangladesh routinely outpaces neighbours such as Bhutan, Pakistan and India — yet seldom receives its due.
“Bangladesh’s achievements,” she notes, “frequently go unrecognized both regionally and internationally.”
Global attention, she adds, tends to linger on South Asia’s political upheavals and rights abuses, leaving little
room for stories of incremental progress. “Positive developments — such as Bangladesh’s efforts to ensure fair
representation of minorities in public service — rarely fit into these storylines,” she said.
Complicating matters is the lens through which minority rights are discussed internationally. While global
debates often centre on race or ethnicity, faith remains the defining line in largely homogenous Bangladesh. “That
mismatch,” Kabir observed, “makes it harder for Bangladesh’s progress to be recognized within global conversations
on minority rights.”
The higher up, the fewer
It’s not, however, all good news across civilian entities in Bangladesh. Gaps do emerge — and widen — at higher
ranks.
Non-Muslim Representation: Overall vs Top Positions
Overall
Top-tier
Source: Public and confidential records obtained by Netra News. For details sourcing, please see full methodology.
Note: For army, brigadier and above; for navy, commodore and above; for administration, secretary and
above; for police, DIG and above; for judiciary, district judges and above; for Dhaka University, professor
positions were considered for top-tier positions.
Across the lower judiciary, nearly 96 percent of senior positions — district and sessions judges and above — are
held by Muslims, compared to 89.9 percent across the judiciary overall.
The disparity intensifies in the civil administration, where only one out of
74
top-tier secretaries identifies
as non-Muslim. Police leadership posts mirror this pattern: just five of the 81
deputy inspector generals or
higher are from minority communities.
In the armed forces, the gap turns into a chasm.
In the 2016While the data may not reflect today’s force composition, the forces have announced no policy
changes that would address the disparity in recruitment and promotion of religious minorities in its ranks.
Read full
methodology to learn more. army roster obtained by Netra News,
the highest-ranked non-Muslim officer — a brigadier general
from
the engineering corps — has
since retired. In the 2017 navy rolls, there was just one non-Muslim
commodore Commodore is the fourth highest rank in
Bangladesh Navy hierarchy, equivalent to Brigadier General in the army. , also no longer
serving.
Beyond these two individuals, the records show 357 Muslim officers at equivalent or higher ranks, indicating
that
for
every non-Muslim at the top, there were over 175 Muslim officers. In contrast, Bangladesh’s national population
counts one non-Muslim among 12 citizens.
Equally telling is the breakdown within this small minority.
According to the data analysed by Netra News, there are no indigenous
personnel in the navy officer
corps, just one Christian officer, and three
Buddhists. In the army, no Christians at all appear in the officer
ranks, while only seven indigenous officers and seven Buddhists were identified.
A quiet disqualification
All branches of Bangladesh’s armed forces recruit through a centralised system overseen by the Inter Services
Selection Board (ISSB), named after — and closely modeled on — the Pakistani military’s selection process.
In Pakistan, the first Sikh army officer was commissioned
only in 2005, nearly six decades after the country’s founding. A Hindu officer followed a year later.
Unlike many other government agencies in Bangladesh, the military does not offer quotas for marginalised
communities or
descendants of freedom fighters. Officially, the ISSB system is based on merit, yet the end result is a near-total
absence of minorities in the senior ranks of the armed forces.
Several features set military recruitment apart from civilian hiring in Bangladesh.
Most civilian jobs are filled through anonymised, structured assessments — typically multiple-choice and written
tests — where answers are clearly defined and marks are objectively assigned. Until the final interview stage,
examiner subjectivity plays little to no role.
The ISSB process, by contrast, is steeped in subjective evaluation. Candidates are judged on psychological
assessments, personality traits, family background and other intangible criteria — including, according to a
former ISSB official, religious affiliation. Personal biases, they said, can seep in at virtually every stage of
the evaluation.
While evidence showing direct discrimination is hard to come by, Iftekharuzzaman of TIB notes that the broader
pattern across militaries in South Asia suggests more than coincidence.
These outcomes may reflect “deliberate policy positions arising from a perception of mistrust of “the other”, a
South Asian majoritarian syndrome,” he said.
The Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), the agency representing all three branches of the military, did not
respond to a request for comment sent via email.
Netra News reached out to twelve retired minority officers from the Navy and Army. Only two agreed to speak on
the record. Even in retirement, officers are bound by the military’s reach, which extends through lifelong
privileges, pensions, and access to an exclusive network of influence. Criticism can invite consequences,
including the loss of these benefits.
Among the few willing to speak was Sachin Karmakar, a former captain and veteran of the Liberation War.
Despite his service, the association of retired officers does not list him
as a freedom fighter, a distinction that carries both symbolic and material weight.
Asked to estimate the share of non-Muslims in the military without being informed of Netra News’ findings,
Karmakar answered almost perfectly: “Negligible — not even one percent.”
Karmakar has spent years advocating for minority rights. Speaking by phone from India, where he is receiving
medical treatment, he recalled the restrictions he faced after his dismissal by President Ziaur Rahman in the
1980s. For years, every attempt to travel abroad required prior government approval. “I felt like a classified
prisoner,” he said.
While his personal story is marked by confrontations, Karmakar insists that the experience of contemporary
minority officers is not so different. “It’s an unwritten state law,” he said, alleging that minority
representation is deliberately kept to a minimum. “They don’t trust the minority community — no doubt about that.”
There are, of course, opposing views.
Among them is Manish Dewan, a former military officer and decorated veteran of Bangladesh’s Liberation War. A
Buddhist and a member of the Chakma community with ties to the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, Dewan declined to
give a detailed interview.
But he offered a brief remark: “I don’t see myself as a minority. I am a proud soldier
who has given his blood and sweat to the Bangladesh Army. My foremost identity is that I am a Bangladeshi.” ●
Netra News obtained and reviewed 2016-17 restricted rosters of army, navy and police records,
detailing
a list of thousands of officers, alongside their ranks, joining dates and other crucial details. While
the
data may not reflect today’s force composition, the forces have announced no policy changes that would
address the disparity in recruitment and promotion of religious minorities in its ranks.
The sources of public data used in the analysis are as follows:
Civil service data from December 2024 was collected from
gems.gov.bd.
The Hasina-era 2022 list is available via the Internet Archive
here.
The list of lower court judges was compiled from individual websites of each local court, totaling
several hundred.
For example, the Noakhali District Court lists its judges
here.
Faculty members of Dhaka University were scraped from respective departmental websites.
For instance, the Department of Anthropology maintains its faculty list
here.
The Supreme Court Bar Association's membership directory is available
here,
and the Dhaka Reporters Unity also maintains a public list of its members
here.
India’s IAS officers’ list was sourced from
easy.nic.in,
and the list of IPS officers from
ips.gov.in.
Members of faculty at Delhi University were scraped from respective departmental websites. For example,
the Department of Law maintains its website
here.
Jawaharlal Nehru University maintains its faculty directory here
here.
We used Google Pinpoint and Tabula to extract entries from scanned PDF files to plain text in
spreadsheets. We then manually fixed spelling errors and other inaccuracies in names and other details.
Some lists contained only English transliterations. We used Open AI’s API and Google Translate API to
convert them to Bengali transliterations, some of which were manually fixed.
We obtained a list of common Bengali Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, and indigenous surnames from five
Wikipedia pages (e.g.,
বাংলা উইকিপিডিয়ায়: বাঙালি হিন্দুদের পদবিসমূহ
), and added the
rest
ourselves.
We then developed a cleaning technique to assign likely religion based on their surname on Google
Spreadsheets:
If A2 contains the name, the formula will divide the names into several pieces. If A2 contains "মৃণাল
কান্তি দাস”, it will first divide it into three parts: “মৃণাল”, “কান্তি” and “দাস” and match each of the
parts with the list of surnames to see if they match with any surname. For matches, it will return the
respective likely religion name(s). Since both কান্তি and দাস are considered traditionally Hindu names,
the formula will return “হিন্দু, হিন্দু”. In the following column, we also return the exact surnames that
are matches. In the above example, it will return “কান্তি” and “দাস”. For such multiple matches, we
considered them to be safer determination. For the rest, we manually checked over to see if any mistake
occurred.
However, some surnames are common among Muslim, Hindus and even indigenous communities, such as Chowdhury
(চৌধুরী) and Dewan (দেওয়ান). In such cases, we considered the first name and, where available, their
parents’ names.
The number of indigenous officers may be undercounted because some communities follow Christian and
Hindu
norms for naming themselves. Our list of Bangladeshi Muslim and non-Muslim surnames and given names can be
found here.
Bangladesh’s 2022 census says the country has 1% indigenous people in its 165 million population. We
estimate 60% of them to follow Buddhist, 20% to follow Hinduism and 15% to follow Christianity.
Accordingly, to find the share of indigenous people irrespective of their religions in population, we
deducted
the similar share from total Hindu, Buddhist and Christian populations to find a national share of all
religions.
To find the share of officers by likely religion among Indian Administrative Service and Indian Police
Service officer corps, we obtained their latest available public list. We employed two
machine-learning-based predictive models:
“It is all in the name”
developed by researchers
at
University
of Illinois Chicago and University of Sussex, and
“pranaam”,
a Python library that uses 4
million unique
records of Indian names and their religions.
Peer-reviewed studies have found that each library delivers a high level of accuracy.
For roughly 97 percent of the names, both models reached the same conclusion, even though their
decision-making methods differ. For the remaining 3 percent, we used OpenAI’s API to infer the most likely
religion. In total, we identified the probable faith of about 10,000 Indian officials and educators.
Our full Python notebook is available at this link.
In the case of the second chart, not just Hindus and Muslims, but various possible religions of civil
service officials in India have been identified using only the Pranaam library, because it cannot be done
with "It is all in the name." As a result, there is some variation in the percentage results in this case.
