When the BBC set up its Disinformation service Verify in May last year the Chief Executive of BBC News, Deborah Turness, claimed it would “show audiences the incredible hard work going on behind the scenes …to check and verify the information we share with our audiences.”

 If only. To judge by the BBC’s reporting of a recent crisis its journalists find it hard to do the most basic fact-checking. Especially when they see a chance to grandstand about the alleged dangers of Islamophobia.

Three weeks ago Verify published an investigation in conjunction with the BBC’s grandly-named Global Disinformation Team into what it claimed was fake news about events in Bangladesh. In the wake of the overthrow of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, social media across the world was ablaze with reports of Muslim violence against the country’s Hindu minority. According to BBC Verify, though, the Far Right were “distorting the truth of Bangladesh’s minority attacks”. 

The investigation’s main target was street agitator Tommy Robinson who the BBC now claimed had amplified fake news spread by sites in India. There’s little doubt Robinson had indeed retweeted claims of attacks that turned out not to be true, including one with a photograph that purported to be of “an Islamist mob” attacking a Hindu temple in Chittagong. The BBC revealed the smoke in the photograph actually came from a torched office of the ruling party, the Awami League. There’s also no doubt Robinson used these fake stories to push his narrative that Islam is a malign force that does not respect the rights of non-Muslims. 

The Disinformation Team did not stop there though. It made a bolder claim: that Robinson was part of a global attempt to tarnish the reputation of Muslims in Bangladesh by misrepresenting the violence against some Hindus as religious when most of it was actually political. “Right-wing Indian accounts are spreading these politically motivated attacks as religious ones,” it quoted an expert claiming.

It’s undeniable that Hindus make up a disproportionate number of the supporters of the Awami League — the ruling party which has just been overthrown. But the reason for this support is as religious as it is political. The League has long been seen as the champion of secularism within Bangladesh and for that it has been loathed by Islamists who have never forgiven it for driving the Independence movement that eventually led to Bangladesh breaking away from Pakistan in 1971.

Of the two million Bengalis massacred during the War of Independence, up to half are thought to have been Hindu. They were targeted by the Pakistan army and local Islamist vigilantes in scenes of extraordinary violence. 

Anthony Mascarenhas wrote in the Sunday Times in June 1971:

I saw Hindus, hunted from village to village and door to door, shot off-hand after a cursory …inspection showed they were uncircumcised. I have heard the screams of men bludgeoned to death … I have seen truckloads of other human targets and those who had the humanity to try to help them hauled off ‘for disposal’ under the cover of darkness and curfew …

To say these horrors have left a legacy of suspicion and fear among Hindus is an understatement

Up to 200,000 women, mostly Hindu, were abducted and held in “harem” camps to service the Pakistan army. No wonder then that eight million Hindus fled across the border into India.

To say these horrors have left a legacy of suspicion and fear among Hindus is an understatement. Hindus continue to face rampant discrimination — and a drumbeat of regular violence. There were significant attacks on Hindu individuals, neighbourhoods, temples and religious festivals in 2012, 2013, 2016 and 2021 alone. Perhaps all this explains why the proportion of the population of Bangladesh that is Hindu has dropped from 28 per cent in 1948 to just 7 per cent now.

The BBC’s failure to acknowledge any of this context was bad enough. Worse still was the fact that it engaged in fake news of its own. BBC Verify tried to downplay the notion that Muslim thugs might be targeting Hindus with the choice of a photograph of young Muslims, it claimed, were protecting a Hindu temple. 

Viral social media posts were trying to “incite conflict between Hindus and Muslims” said one of these smiling Muslims. “But we are not falling for it.” The problem was the BBC was falling for its own wishful thinking. According to the photo caption, the Muslim “protectors” hailed from a nearby Islamic school, the Hathazari Madrasa. And there lies a story for any journalist interested in genuinely checking and verifying.

This madrasa is notorious as perhaps the most toxic source of Islamist agitation and alleged violence in the whole of Bangladesh. A video emerged in 2022, for example, showing one of its teachers leading children in chanting anti-Hindu slogans, including “Beware Hindus!” The madrasa is also where the radical Islamist party Hefazat-e-Islam was founded in 2010 by the school’s firebrand leaders. 

If the BBC  had wanted to learn more about the malevolence of Hefazat-e-Islam and its shadowy role in undermining democratic rights as well its alleged part in street violence and even the murders of bloggers who dare to criticise Islam, it could have consulted the output of a well-known news network. The BBC has covered all this in the last decade.

What BBC Verify would have discovered if they had bothered to look at their own archive is that Hefazat-e-Islam openly argues for Sharia law to be introduced along with compulsory hijab and a ban on women’s education. The party’s members have also been implicated in a series of attacks against Hindus and their temples. In 2021, for example, its members were caught on video attacking a Hindu village. 

The close association between these fanatics and students from the Hathazari Madrasa was underlined when, only a month after its members were filmed ransacking Hindu homes and torching temples in 2021, Hefazat-e-Islam ran a fundraiser for the school.

Pardon me then if I don’t share the BBC’s Global Disinformation Team’s confidence that those madrasa students were necessarily “protecting” a Hindu temple or were motivated by neighbourly feeling. 

In its infantile desperation to get one over on a British Far Right blogger the BBC also blatantly ignored any output from other respected news organisations that contradicted its anodyne version of events; including its own.

Days after Sheikh Hasina fled, the New York Times quoted one of the student leaders of the protests admitting, “Temples are being attacked, vandalized and looted” It also carried a quote from a Hindu student who told how, “Muslims had attacked her family at their home in the southern Bagerhat region, killing her father and leaving her mother with head injuries.”

The same day the BBC itself reported that “Hindus are being targeted again”.

A follow-up BBC article quoted “Debapriya Bhattacharya, a senior economist with the Centre for Policy Dialogue in Dhaka”, who said, “….attacks on the Hindu minority have escalated, posing an immediate challenge to the new authorities.”

As attacks spiralled, Amnesty International called on the new interim government to conduct “a swift, thorough, impartial and independent investigation into the crimes against Hindus, Ahmadis and other minorities”. For good measure it also urged it to “take immediate actions to protect Hindu and other minority communities.”

Why then did the BBC change its tune and get basic facts wrong? One possibility is that Islamists quickly made the atmosphere on the ground distinctly scary for journalists, and therefore difficult for them to gather evidence.

NBC reported that journalists from Bangladesh’s leading English-language newspaper, the Daily Star, were being forced to delete photos and videos. Sam Jahan from Reuters issued a defiant statement, “When you try to stop my rolling camera, resisting the freedom of the press and when you manhandle my colleagues, I will speak up.” Mujib Mashal, from the New York Times, described the situation on Dhaka’s streets as “complete mob rule.”

BBC Verify acknowledged in its disinformation takedown that “working out exactly what has happened in Bangladesh over the last few weeks has proved difficult.” But a casual reader might be forgiven for assuming this meant the situation was just a tad confused. Admitting there was mob rule might have raised questions about how reliable the BBC’s own sources were, and how free its journalists were to report the story.

The result of the BBC so blatantly downplaying Muslim attacks on Hindus is that it has itself been accused of bias. In India and the global Hindu community there has been outrage. It has been accused by a leading UK Hindu organisations of “whitewashing the ongoing genocide”.

The terrible irony is that in trying to attack one type of disinformation the BBC has indulged in another. Dismissing the importance of a big story — the attacks on a vulnerable minority — and trying to distract from it is every bit as much disinformation as fake news.

No one denies that disinformation from the Far Right in this country should be condemned and exposed. What the BBC should never do is mistake its mission to uncover the truth with fighting spats against right-wing local loudmouths. The BBC cannot hope to fight lies if it squanders its priceless reputation with its own falsehoods.