In Bangladesh’s recent general elections, four candidates from minority groups won, including two Hindu candidates. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which is expected to form the government on Tuesday, nominated each of them.
Which two candidates are Hindu?
They are Nitai Roy Chowdhury and Goyeshwar Chandra Roy. They defeated their Jamaat-e-Islami adversaries and won on a BNP ticket from a Dhaka seat and a western Magura constituency, according to news agency PTI.
While Nitai Roy Chowdhury is a well-known vice president of the BNP and a senior counselor and strategist to its top leadership, Goyeshwar Chandra Roy is a member of the party’s highest policy-making standing committee.
Born in January 1949, Nitai Roy Chowdhury is a politician, lawyer, former minister, and member of parliament from Bangladesh, according to tritiyomatra.com.
During the Ershad administration, Chowdhury was the Minister of Youth and Sports. He serves as the Central Committee of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party’s Vice Chairman.
According to reports, Goyeshwar Chandra Roy was born in Dhaka’s Keraniganj. He was the state minister before. In 2008, Roy received his first BNP nomination from the Dhaka-3 seat, however he lost by 6,610 votes to Awami League candidate Nasrul Hamid.
According to the article, he was once more nominated by the BNP from the same seat in the 11th general election in 2018.
The importance to India
Given the attacks on members of the Hindu minority population that caused tensions in relations between India and Bangladesh, the election of two candidates from this group is significant for India.
Following the lynching of Dipu Chandra Das, a Hindu worker at a textile factory, New Delhi had responded violently. According to reports, he was burned after being tethered to a tree.
Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Laureate, led the interim administration, which minimized the violence and blamed many of the incidents on criminal activity.
December of last year also saw a number of attacks following the killing of Sharif Osman Hadi, a well-liked rebel leader and outspoken opponent of India.
The immediate aftermath of the anti-Hasina rebellion also saw attacks on religious minorities’ homes, places of worship, and businesses around the nation, according to Amnesty International.
According to the news agency AFP, the Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council documented around 500 attacks in 2025, including burning and sexual assault.
Who are the other two minority-community MP-elects?
Saching Pru, a prominent BNP leader and Buddhist, is the third minority MP-elect. He was elected to represent the Marma ethnic community in Bandarban’s southeast hill district.
A member of the Chakma ethnic minority group, which is predominantly Buddhist, Dipen Dewan, the fourth minority candidate, became victorious from a constituency in the southeast Rangamati hill district.
His religious identity is unclear, though, as many people refer to him as Hindu.
Pru defeated a nominee of the student-led National Citizen Party, which was founded last year by the Students Against Discrimination, which spearheaded the large-scale demonstrations against ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in August 2024, while Dewan defeated his closest opponent, an independent Chakma candidate.
Election Results in Bangladesh
Ten women from religious minority populations, primarily Hindus, were among the 79 candidates who ran in Thursday’s poll, according to the poll Commission.
Twelve ran as independents, despite the fact that 67 received nominations from 22 major parties.
With 17 minority candidates, the Communist Party of Bangladesh (CPB) fielded the most.
Eight minority candidates from the left-leaning Bangladesh Samyabadi Dal (BSD), eight from the obscure Bangladesh Minority Janata Party (BMJP), and seven from the left-leaning Bangladesh Samajtantrik Dal (BASOD) came next.
The Jatiya Party put out four candidates, while the BNP put forth six.
For the first time in its history, the Jamaat-e-Islami put forward a candidate who was a minority Hindu.
Veteran businessman Krishna Nandi from a southwestern Khulna constituency was nominated by the main Islamist party; he lost, but his involvement as a Jamaat nominee was highly spoken about. He lost to a BNP candidate in the Khulna-1 constituency, finishing as the runner-up.
The majority of the 17 Hindu MPs elected in 2024 were members of Hasina’s Awami League, and the same number of Hindus gained seats in the 2018 election.
BNP prevails
The results of Thursday’s polls, which were announced on Friday, showed that the BNP, led by Tarique Rahman, had won 209 seats and a two-thirds majority with 49.97 percent of the vote.
With 31.76 percent of the vote and 68 seats, the Jamaat-e-Islami, which opposed the nation’s independence from Pakistan in 1971, had its best-ever showing. With six seats and 3.05 percent of the vote, the National Citizen Party (NCP) earned the third-highest number of seats.
