# Tagore graffiti blackened in Khulna; leaflets declare ‘no place for India-worshippers’

- Link: https://globalvoicebd.com/politics/tagore-graffiti-blackened-in-khulna-leaflets-declare-no-place-for-india-worshippers/
- Published: 2026-11-06T13:54:35-05:00
- Author: GV Newsroom

Unknown miscreants defaced a large graffiti portrait of Nobel laureate Rabindranath
Tagore on the wall of Khulna Railway Station on Friday (6 November), covering the
image with black ink. Two handwritten leaflets were pasted beside it.

Among a row of portraits of Bengali literary and historical figures, only Tagore’s
was targeted.

The graffiti was painted by Khulna City Corporation as part of decorations for the
visit of Prime Minister Tarique Rahman. It showed Tagore alongside Lalon Shah, SM
Sultan, Kazi Nazrul Islam, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, and others associated with the
region’s cultural history. Khulna Sadar police station officer-in-charge Lokman 
Hossain said the vandalism was noticed in the afternoon; most shops opposite the
wall were closed that day, and the perpetrators have not yet been identified.

The leaflets carried the headline “Opposition to the Establishment of Dhaka University”
and the slogan: “In Titumir’s Bengal, there is no place for the anti-Muslim and 
anti-East Bengal Rabindranath / No place for the worship of India.” The wording 
explicitly frames Tagore—a Hindu Bengali poet who spent most of his life in what
is now India and whose work forms part of the shared Bengali literary heritage—as
an enemy of Muslims and of “East Bengal.”

Khulna City Corporation administrator Nazrul Islam Manju condemned the act, saying
the portraits were meant to encourage free thinking among children and young people,
and that covering Tagore’s image with ink revealed “narrow-mindedness and sickness
of mind.”

This is not an isolated incident. On 10 October, a Tagore graffiti in Dhaka was 
similarly defaced; police later arrested four people, including Al Nur Mohammad 
Ayash of the State Dialogue Forum.

Selective blackening of Tagore’s image, accompanied by leaflets that treat him as
a symbol of “India worship” and hostility to Muslims, is a straightforward expression
of anti-Hindu and anti-India prejudice. Tagore was not a political activist of the
present day; he was a poet and thinker whose writings on humanism, nature, and Bengali
culture have long been part of the literary inheritance of both Bengals. Targeting
him on communal and anti-Indian grounds while leaving other portraits untouched 
shows the attackers’ motive is not artistic criticism or political disagreement 
but communal exclusion.

Such vandalism, and the ideology that justifies it, undermines Bangladesh’s own 
cultural claims. A society that cannot tolerate the image of one of the most important
modern Bengali writers because of his Hindu background and Indian connections is
not defending “Titumir’s Bengal”; it is shrinking the space for shared history and
free expression. Police and civic authorities should treat the Khulna defacement
with the same seriousness shown in the earlier Dhaka case.