Wikipedia and the Hindutva war against Bangladesh
Indian Wikipedians are engaged in a Hindu religious war of censorship
The global online encyclopedia Wikipedia is becoming a hotbed for disinformation against Bangladesh. Many editors are being blocked from editing the open source encyclopedia because of their efforts at expanding content on Bangladesh. Information on Bangladeshi history and politics is being distorted as part of a systematic disinformation campaign. While some Bangladeshis have tried to pushback against these efforts, the overwhelming number of Indian editors on Wikipedia is making it difficult to counter disinformation. The quality of Bangladesh-related articles has been deliberately degraded, downplayed and undermined.
Indian editors are frequently abusing Wikipedia’s sockpuppet investigation system to misreport and permanently block hundreds of editors from Bangladesh. In the most recent case, the editor Ratnahastin misreported AABKChowdhury and JeromeD2024 for sockpuppetry even though both accounts did not violate Wikipedia policy. Both accounts were involved in improving and expanding Bangladesh-related content, including profiles on prominent figures, statesmen and socialites. Ratnahastin also misreported Rose White who was developing content on figures like Begum Rokeya.
Photographs of the 1971 Liberation War are banned on the site due to copyright restrictions, even after the government loosened copyright laws in 2020. According to the Wikipedia editor Mehedi Abedin, photographs from 1971 cannot be used on the site until 2066. This means both global and local readers will be deprived of valuable images of Bangladesh’s liberation movement for decades. The article on the 1971 Bangladesh genocide has been a prime target for disinformation. Originally, the article was a Wikipedia featured page because of its importance and high quality. In the last few years, the quality of the article has deteriorated after controversial content was added. The editor Darkness Shines, who originally developed the page into a featured article, has been blocked.
Until recently, the Bangladesh page on Wikipedia claimed that the 1971 genocide targeted “primarily intellectuals and Hinduism”. This comes on the heels of attempts to paint 1971 as a “Hindu genocide”, when in reality Bengali Muslims bore the brunt of atrocities.
The editor Worldbruce (who is accused of being from West Bengal) has been put in charge of administering Bangladesh-related pages and Bangladeshi editors, despite Worldbruce not being a formal Wikipedia administrator. The Wikipedia community’s reliance on controversial editors to administer Bangladesh-related articles raises questions about the site’s neutrality. In one of his first acts as the Wikipedia czar of Bangladesh, Worldbruce removed the address of the Mujibnagar Government’s historic office in Kolkata, by claiming the reference from the Indian Express newspaper was “low quality” and that the address on 8 Theatre Road was insignificant.
In September 2023, an Indian political party was erroneously listed as the second largest party in the article on the 1954 East Bengal election won by the United Front. When a Bangladeshi editor attempted to fix the anomaly, the editor was blocked by a Wikipedia community consensus mobilized by Worldbruce. This raised serious questions about the integrity of the Wikipedia community. There are hardly any expert Bangladeshi editors left on Wikipedia.
Similarly, Worldbruce has targeted articles related to Chittagong. On 31 August 2024, Worldbruce removed content on the history of the Agrabad central business district in Chittagong which was once home to important British businesses after partition.
As of February 2025, the Bangladesh page continues to have significant grammatical and factual errors. In comparison, most country articles on Wikipedia have a better quality. But the Bangladesh page is deliberately kept at sub-par quality. Indian editors, particularly Bengali Hindu editors, have been active in downplaying Bangladesh.
The history section on the Bangladesh page has been reduced to a few paragraphs with relatively few pictures compared to most other country articles. In comparison, the history sections on the articles of Pakistan, Albania, Malaysia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Indonesia, Turkey and Egypt have more content and pictures.
High quality content is being deleted across Bangladesh history pages, including the Bengal Presidency, Mughal Bengal and the Bengal Sultanate. Reliable maps of Bengal from historical sources are being replaced by inaccurate maps by Saffron nationalist editors like PadFoot2008. Wikipedia governance looks powerless as the site’s oversight mechanism has broken down, and pro-Bangladesh editors are being systematically removed across the Wikipedia community.
Wikipedia has been central to the propaganda surrounding Bangladesh’s image as a poverty-stricken and disaster-prone country with no history, culture and business. Indian Wikipedians, who are the most influential group from South Asia on the site, have a stranglehold over Bangladesh coverage on Wikipedia. Other South Asian countries, including Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and the Maldives, also face similar efforts directed at undermining their history, politics, culture and society. Pakistan briefly blocked Wikipedia in 2023.
Most Indian editors on Wikipedia are supporters of notions like Greater India. The article on Greater India is one of the most well-developed and curated pages from South Asia, reflecting the Hindutva bias on the site. It would be fair to say that Wikipedia is supporting the irredentist aspirations of Hindu nationalists which is a threat to the sovereignty and integrity of India’s neighbors.
A clear example of the Hindutva bias can be seen in the coverage of the recent July-August uprising which led to the fall of Sheikh Hasina. As of 5 February 2024, Wikipedia is still refusing to call the uprising a revolution even though similar events in Egypt, Tunisia and Portugal are dubbed revolutions. As the historian Umran Chowdhury lays out, “There is now a litany of terms to describe the events, including the romantic ‘July Revolution’, the tumultuous ‘Monsoon Revolution’, the savvy ‘Gen Z Revolution’, and a weird Wikipedia name dubbed ‘Student-People’s uprising’ which makes no sense.” Why not just call it the 2024 Bangladeshi Revolution?