A few days before the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples this year, the Bangladesh Ministry of Information and Broadcasting circulated a message to all television channels across the country instructing that the word ‘Adibashi’ (Indigenous people) be avoided during any coverage of the occasion, even though Adibashis make up two per cent of the population.
It was yet another attempt at erasure of the roughly 45 different non-Bengali Indigenous communities living within Bangladesh’s borders that have long faced violent dispossession at the hands of state authorities.
