The mob that descended upon Rabindra Kacharibari on June 12 may not have grasped the bitter irony of their actions. As they smashed windows, destroyed furniture, and ransacked the auditorium of Rabindranath Tagore’s ancestral home in Bangladesh’s Sirajganj district, they were vandalizing the legacy of the very man whose words Amar Sonar Bangla, Ami Tomake Bhalobasi became their nation’s anthem. The poet who sang of his beloved golden Bengal was repaid with violence against his memory.
The incident which began as a petty dispute over motorcycle parking fees—a mundane squabble involving receipts and gate staff—spiraled into an assault on one of world’s most treasured cultural landmarks. The escalation tells us how quickly the sacred can become profane when reason abandons the public square. A Bangladeshi expatriate named Shah Newaz couldn’t produce a parking receipt, staff allegedly beat him for it, and within days, a mob was tearing apart centuries of literary heritage.
🔸 Rabindranath Tagore’s ancestral house was vandalised in Sirajganj district of Bangladesh.
That’s how the Greatest poet of Bengal is respected by Bengali muslims. pic.twitter.com/uOa3UtVEgw
— Joy Das 🇧🇩 (@joydas1844417) June 11, 2025
The vandalism has triggered international outrage. Neighbouring India, which co-shares Tagore’s legacy and also gave the national anthem Jana Gana Mana, was quick to condemn the desecration of their ‘Gurudev’. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) condemned the attack on Rabindranth Tagore’s ancestral home in Bangladesh, alleging the involvement of Bangladesh islamist radical outfits Jamaat-e-Islami and Hefazat-e-Islam. Indian Member of Parliament, Sambit Patra labeled it a ‘preplanned attack’ by radical groups and demanded international condemnation.
Patra also the spokesperson of India’s ruling BJP, condemning the Yunus led government, argued that the international monument could not be protected. “Today’s topic is about Bangladesh. We are not intruding on any international domain. But this is Rabindranath Tagore’s topic, so the BJP takes it very seriously and sensitively. The behaviour of the interim government of Muhammad Yunus is not right. The international monument could not be protected,” he said.
The political fallout in West Bengal was swift, with both ruling and opposition parties condemning the vandalism. The Trinamool Congress issued a measured statement calling Tagore “a symbol of Bengal’s cultural heritage” and urging the Central government to initiate bilateral dialogue, while declaring that “our icons are not collateral damage for mob fury.”
The BJP’s response was characteristically sharper, with state president Sukanta Majumdar asking whether “Tagore is now a ‘criminal’ too in Bangladesh, simply because he was a Hindu?” Leader of Opposition Suvendu Adhikari went further, branding the attackers as “jihadies” and linking them to the BNP and Chhatra Shibir. The competing narratives reveal how quickly cultural tragedy becomes political ammunition.
The condemnation of the Bangladesh’s interim government leader and, oddly a Noble Laureate, Mohammad Yunus was obvious. The attack on Tagore’s ancestral home cannot be viewed in isolation from the broader pattern of institutional breakdown and extremist violence that has characterized Yunus’s tenure as head of Bangladesh’s interim government. These concerns gained significant credibility following the February report by the UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR), which in Chapter 6 documents shocking details of lynchings, targeted assassinations, and brutal violence committed by jihadist groups. The report confirms that extremist factions, operating in close coordination with Yunus, carried out violent campaigns to paralyze the state and stage a political takeover.
What makes Yunus’s failure to protect Tagore’s legacy particularly damning is his administration’s deliberate suppression of the OHCHR report’s most damaging findings. Following the release of the UN report, Yunus’s regime deliberately suppressed the damning Chapter 6 while cherry-picking portions that criticized the previous Awami League government. Backed by enormous financial resources, Yunus launched a coordinated media and public relations blitz—domestically and internationally—framing his administration as a beacon of justice while concealing its own crimes. The vandalism of Rabindra Kacharibari fits into this larger pattern of cultural and institutional destruction under the guise of popular justice.
The attack also exposes the precarious nature of Yunus’s hold on power and his dependence on extremist elements to maintain control. Despite persistent denials, mounting evidence confirms that Yunus’s rise to power is part of a meticulously orchestrated plan involving powerful international backers, most notably the Chinese Deep State and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Their objective appears to be using Yunus as a proxy to destabilize Bangladesh, dismantle democratic institutions, and gain full control over the country’s strategic and geopolitical assets. The targeting of symbols of Bengali cultural unity—like Tagore’s ancestral home—serves this broader agenda of fragmenting Bangladesh’s secular, pluralistic identity.
The political theater was inevitable, as the Yunus-led government in Bangladesh but it misses a more profound truth: this wasn’t merely an attack on Indian heritage or Bengali culture—it was an assault on the very idea that art and literature can transcend the petty boundaries that divide us. Tagore belonged to humanity, not to any single nation’s political narrative.
The symbolism cuts deep. Tagore’s Kacharibari wasn’t just a family estate office; it was where the Nobel laureate crafted portions of his plays, where his universal humanism took shape on paper. Now it stands damaged and shuttered, its temporary closure announced due to “unavoidable circumstances”—a bureaucratic euphemism that barely conceals the shame of what unfolded. The custodian’s measured words cannot mask the reality that Bangladesh has wounded its own cultural soul.
Perhaps most disturbing is how easily a parking fee dispute transformed into cultural vandalism. It reveals something troubling about our times—how quickly the trivial can escalate into the tragic, how readily mobs form around manufactured grievances, and how little it takes to destroy what took generations to preserve.
As Bangladesh’s Department of Archaeology forms its three-member investigative committee and promises a report within five working days, one wonders what inquiry can truly measure the cost of shattering windows in the house where Tagore once wrote of universal brotherhood.
The attack on Tagore’s heritage site thus serves multiple purposes for Yunus’s regime: it placates extremist allies who view secular Bengali culture as a threat to their vision of an Islamic state, it sends a message to India about Bangladesh’s shifting priorities, and it helps create an atmosphere of chaos and fear that justifies authoritarian measures. The targeting of Tagore—a figure who represents the synthesis of Hindu and Muslim Bengali culture—is particularly symbolic, as it signals the regime’s rejection of the pluralistic values that have historically defined Bengali identity.
This calculated destruction of cultural heritage also serves Yunus’s anti-India agenda. By allowing, if not encouraging, attacks on symbols of shared Indo-Bangladeshi culture, his administration signals a deliberate distancing from India and an embrace of forces that view any connection to Indian culture as suspect. The fact that Tagore gave both nations their national anthems makes the symbolism even more pointed—it’s a rejection of the very idea that the two countries share cultural DNA.
