On Saturday, February 24, the prominent Bangladeshi author and Blitz magazine editor Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury took to X (formally Twitter) to call attention to the vile anti-Hindu and anti-Indian propaganda being disseminated by Pinaki Bhattacharya, a Bangladeshi medical practitioner and popular YouTuber who is in exile in France seeking political asylum.
Pinaki Bhattacharya: From fake medicine seller to Islamist lapdog
— Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury (@salah_shoaib) February 23, 2024
Only few years ago, Pinaki Bhattacharya was kicked-out of his family by his parents for leaving Hindu dharma and embracing Islam at the influence of Tablighi Jamaat. His father Shyamal Bhattacharya, a school… pic.twitter.com/0lMgWh3SeY
On Thursday, February 22, Pinaki Bhattacharya, who is based out of France, as he had sought asylum under the false pretence of being a ‘political victim’ of the current ruling Awami League government led by Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, put up a Facebook post telling Bangladeshi directors and actors not to work in West Bengal-based OTT platform Hoichoi or any other Indian platforms.
In the post, Bhattacharya appealed to Bangladeshi actor Mosharraf Karim to not promote his upcoming movie ‘Hubba’ for Hoichoi. The post ends with a veiled threat to Bangladeshi directors and actors. Bhattacharya wrote he hoped he would not have to be tough on them.
This new post, however, is not surprising given that Bhattacharya has been releasing videos condemning India’s interference in Bangladesh’s national elections on January 7, which resulted in Hasina’s return to office.
Pinaki Bhattacharya, through his YouTube channel and other social media accounts, has been running a vile anti-India campaign, where he has been urging his 1.6 million followers to boycott Indian products in Bangladesh.
In fact, a day after PM Narendra Modi performed the Pran Pratishtha of Ram Lalla in Ayodhya, Pinaki Bhattacharya released a video on his YouTube channel in which he castigated the Indian Prime Minister for constructing Ram Mandir in the very place where the Babri Masjid once stood.
In the video which garnered over 793k views since its release, Bhattacharya slandered Modi and his supporters among the Hindu community in Bangladesh and also called for a boycott of Indian businesses including Marico, Emami, Dabur, Asian Paints, Godrej, and others.
Pinaki Bhattacharya has likewise posted several anti-India videos and posts through all his social media handles. In one video he slammed the Indian multinational engineering and construction conglomerate Larsen and Toubro for partaking in the designing and construction of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya.
In fact, if one goes through Pinaki Bhattacharya’s YouTube page, one would see umpteen anti-India videos where he has been inciting his followers against India and exhorting them to boycott Indian products.
Expressing concern about the growing popularity of the ‘Boycott India’ campaign on social media, which would just not only adversely affect Indo-Bangladesh trade relations but also Bangladesh’s economy, Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, provided some background information about Pinaki Bhattacharya, one of the torchbearers of this campaign, to expose his rabid Islamist mindset.
He revealed how only a few years ago, Pinaki Bhattacharya’s parents disowned him as he quit Hinduism and embraced Islam under the influence of Tablighi Jamaat. His father Shyamal Bhattacharya, a dramatist, writer, and school teacher, became very irritated with his son’s religious conversion. As a result, the enraged father severed all ties with Pinaki. Pinaki was born in Bangladesh’s Bogra district. He graduated from the Rajshahi Medical College in 1992. This medical college, according to Salah Uddin, is the epicentre of Jamaat-e-Islami activities.
After learning of Pinaki’s affiliations with Pakistan’s ISI and his friendly relationships with Islamists, jihadists and terrorists, his wife, who is also a doctor, also distanced herself from him.
During his stay in Bangladesh, a ‘neo-Muslim’ Pinaki, under the garb of producing life-saving drugs in his pharmaceutical factory, was in reality, producing illicit sexual drugs, counterfeit medicine and ‘Yaba’ tablets – a dangerous drug containing a mixture of methamphetamine and caffeine and distributing these contraband items through underworld crime rackets in Bangladesh. His illicit activities caught the attention of law enforcement agencies. The Bangladesh government filed a case against him for selling counterfeit drugs and engaging in anti-national activities.
As a result, Pinaki Bhattacharya fled Bangladesh and landed in France, where he sought asylum under the false claim of being a “political victim” of the Awami League government.
While running a business of contraband medicines, Pinaki Bhattacharya was regularly forcing his female staff into sexual relations, Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury alleged in his lengthy post.
He is currently carrying out extremist activities through social media channels. He has become a popular figure among Muslims in Bangladesh for his jihadi books and anti-India; anti-Modi campaign. The majority of the audience of Pinaki’s YouTube channel are half-educated and uneducated people from Bangladesh and West Bengal. He also has substantial viewers who are working as labourers in Bangladeshi and other Islamic countries like Malaysia and the Middle East. In France, he has hired three employees for his activities – one of whom is a Palestinian female member of Hamas.
The Blitz editor further wrote how Pinaki Bhattacharya, an agent of the Pakistani spy agency Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), has been disseminating hate speech and slanderous propaganda on his YouTube channel against the Hindu community, India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), and anti-Islamist and anti-jihadist groups in Bangladesh and India.
In his videos and posts, Pinaki persuades Bangladeshi Muslims to wage jihad against Hindus. His anti-Indian posts are extremely popular in Bangladesh. Time and again, he has held Modi accountable for all the attacks on Bangladeshi Hindus by Muslim extremists.
Here are a few examples of the vile anti-India and anti-Hindu posts of Pinaki Bhattacharya
Here Pinaki Bhattacharya captioned his post in Bengali which roughly translates to, “How was the Gaumata politics of Hindutva formed and how did a part of Hindus of Bangladesh get involved? To know the details you may watch the video.”
During the 2020-2021 so-called farmers’ protest in India, Pinaki Bhattacharya had taken to X, formally Twitter to sympathise with ‘climate activist’ Disha Ravi, who was arrested in connection with the ‘Greta toolkit’ that exposed a global conspiracy to defame India on a global scale. Sharing an article written by the left-propaganda website Scroll, Pinaki wrote, ” I condemn the arrest of #DishaRavi by the Delhi Police, for supporting the #FarmerProtests.”
Notably, during the initial investigation, the police found that Disha Ravi also collaborated with a Khalistani outfit named Poetic Justice Foundation (PJF). The police informed that the objective was to spread ‘disaffection against the Indian State.’ Reportedly, it was Disha who had originally shared the Toolkit document with the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg.
In the post, the Blitz magazine editor Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury also wrote how in one particular video on his YouTube channel, Pinaki Bhattacharya started a vile propaganda against Blitz for exposing notorious conspiracy of these anti-India and Hindu-hating elements with their recently launched “India Out” campaign aimed at jeopardizing existing cordial relations between Dhaka and New Delhi.
“In one of his videos that has garnered 7.1 lakh views within five days, Pinaki Bhattacharya has compared Hindutva to Zionism, expressed concerns over India’s growing influence in the world and named me as both an Indian and Israeli agent in Bangladesh. He also calls me an enemy of the people and asks his supporters to bully me on social media by branding me as “bastard”, Saah Uddin wrote in his lengthy post adding that Pinaki in the same video, promoted a Pakistani YouTube channel named ‘The Blank Page Official’.
The video by this anti-India channel stated, “India has activated powerful assets to counter Bangladesh’s India Out campaign” and made foul attempts of branding Blitz as an “asset” of India and Israel.”
Salah Uddin further revealed how the channel also criticized Blitz for condemning October 7 Hamas pogrom in Israel and for terming Hamas as monsters.
“According to an Indian website, Pinaki Bhattacharya is anti-Hindu and anti-Bharat extremist. He has been regularly publishing contents defaming Hindu dharma. He even goes further by branding every Hindu as “bastards” while he also does the same with Bangladeshi citizens and media outlets that confront “India Out” activities,” the Blitz editor wrote.
The Blitz editor also emphasised how the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which has ties to Al Qaeda, and its ideological allies like Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI) and Bangladesh-based media outlet The Daily Star, endorse and fund the ‘India out’ campaign led by anti-India fake news peddlers like Pinaki Bhattacharya.
“Recently, Dhaka’s leading English newspaper The Daily Star published a lengthy opinion editorial criticizing Blitz and me for branding BNP as an ultra-Islamist and Al Qaeda-connected force. On February 1, 2024, The Daily Star editor Mahfuz Anam gave a huge space in his newspaper to an Islamist propagandist named Qadaruddin Shishir,” Salah Uddin wrote in his post on X.
“Bangladesh Nationalist Party’s hosting Al Qaeda group including Ayman al-Zawahiri was first exposed by eminent journalist and counterterrorism expert Alex Perry, who in a TIME magazine article on April 14, 2002 had exposed Al Qaeda kingpin al-Zawahiri and other members of the terrorist group’s arrival and stay in Bangladesh.
“But Jamaat propagandist Shishir has no shame in hiding these proven facts. Instead, he challenges BNP – a party that is termed as Tier-III terrorist organization by the US courts and a party with direct link to Al Qaeda or being termed as ultra-Islamist party stating: “The original Blitz report was based on a source referred to as “it has been learnt”—meaning no source at all! The wording used when introducing the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) says a lot about what the article was trying to portray. In no way can BNP be identified as an “Islamist” party, let alone be called an “ultra-Islamist” one. The loaded language of the Blitz article, lack of any sources and evidence to support its main claim, and the website’s record of spreading political disinformation against independent journalists and critics of the government are enough to debunk its new assertion that BNP has launched a so-called India Out movement in Bangladesh”, the post read further.
The Blitz editor went on to draw attention to the way that ultra-Islamist media outlets, such as Al Jazeera, unfairly profited from such sinister schemes hatched by ultra-Islamist individuals like Pinaki.
“Taking undue advantage of such evil plots of ultra-Islamist forces, Al Jazeera in its report on February 7, 2024 gave a false description stating – responding to BNP’s “India Out” movement, Bangladeshi consumers have started boycotting Indian products.”
He further wrote how Al Jazeera in its anti-India report termed Jamaat-e-Islami activists Pinaki Bhattacharya as ‘exiled Bangladeshi physician’ and lauded him for carrying out what they termed as a ‘social media movement’.
Al Jazeera report stated “Exiled Bangladeshi physician Pinaki Bhattacharya, who fled alleged government harassment in 2018, has emerged as the key figure in this burgeoning social media movement accusing Bharat of interfering in Bangladesh’s recent elections to keep Hasina in power.”
In the end, Salah Uddin urged the authorities in New Delhi and Dhaka to take appropriate measures against Pakistani ISI asset Pinaki Bhattacharya and bring the matter to appropriate authorities in Paris. At the same time, he stresses that complaints should be pressed with YouTube, Facebook and X against Pinaki’s use of these social media platforms in spreading jihadist and extremist propaganda. France needs to immediately extradite this notorious criminal, he asserted.
Pinaki Bhattacharya sued for spreading misleading information and being involved in anti-Bangladesh activities
Notably, in 2021, the french police have received a complaint against Pinaki Bhattacharya for being involved in anti-Bangladesh activities. All European Awami League President M Nazrul Islam, who had submitted the complaint, told the media, “Pinaki Bhattacharya is involved in anti-Bangladesh activities. This so-called writer is sitting in France trying to confuse people with misleading and false information about Bangladesh, the government of Bangladesh, Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and Bangabandhu family.”
Nazrul said a vicious circle is trying to create chaos in non-communal Bangladesh and Pinaki Bhattacharya is one of the members of this circle led by convicted BNP leader Tarique Rahman.
“Behind them are the defeated forces of 1971 and their allies. They’re pouring huge amount of money for this propaganda. We’ve filed a complaint because such propaganda cannot be allowed to continue. Legally it needs to stop. Propaganda against Bangladesh is being carried out on French soil, which we have brought to the notice of the law of this country,” he said.
Similarly, in November 2022, the Counter Terrorism and Transnational Crime (CTTC) unit of Dhaka Metropolitan Police had sued Pinaki Bhattacharya and two others under the Digital Security Act alleging them of tarnishing country’s image.
Deputy Commissioner (Media) Faruq Hossain had then said, “Pinaki posted on Facebook regarding a police operation in the capital’s Pallabi recently. The two other accused from Dhaka sent fake information to Pinaki. One of them has been arrested already. Interpol’s help will be sought to bring him [Pinaki] back to Bangladesh.”
